| regions with no magnet/exam schools Most regions of the United States (and perhaps of some other English-speaking countries) are regions without magnet or exam schools to concentrate able students for challenging programs. I had a lot of praise for my state's practice of allowing public school open enrollment in a recent HN comment, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064665 but even at that there is NO middle school (as contrasted with an elementary school) in my state actively selects students for their demonstrated readiness to take on a challenging academic program. Meanwhile, the expectations for AVERAGE learners in several countries are higher than they are for gifted learners in most parts of the United States. http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf (See Exhibit 1.1 on pages 34 and 35 for an excellent data chart on academic achievement in different countries.) I'm glad to hear that there are places where parents can find a suitable school just by moving their residence, but not everyone can move their residence, and those schools are nonexistent in whole states of the United States. And even at that, it's debatable whether those schools are really up to a world standard of academic performance. After edit: Another comment under the submitted article here is quite correct that the core idiocy here is the idiocy of dividing up students into grades by age, which is actually a rather recent practice historically, and a practice that never had a favorable research base showing that it was effective for learning. http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html But my FAQ on this subject immediately above cites sources from a CENTURY ago, which are still widely ignored, about how idiotic it is to divide up students by age into school grades, and I'm still learning about sources from various eras that agree with that conclusion, all ignored by educational planners. |