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Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a world of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I

• spurgu 7y ago
  Reading this and the parent post makes me think that prisons are actually kind of like elementary school except for adults. Same kind of bullying, establishing pecking order, repercussions of snitching etc. Although a lot more dangerous/scary.
• thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked Can't we fix bullying in the first place ?
  • eloff 7y ago
    I wonder if it's better in old style schools not segmented by age. Then faster physical development gives much less of an advantage, and the immature younger students can have their behavior moderated by the older, hopefully more mature students. And older siblings can watch out for younger ones.
    • Filligree 7y ago
      Every study I've ever read says this is much better.
  • onion2k 7y ago
    Lots of child psychologists and teachers believe that parental involvement is key to stopping a child becoming a bully (eg parents actively engaging with their kids welfare) and the most common thing that stops parents being involved in bringing up their kids is poverty. Trying to fix poverty is weirdly controversial.
    • jcims 7y ago
      Is there some kind of consensus that bullies are predominately poor? Even if thats true on a quantitative basis, the bullies that count are the ones with social standing.
      • hutzlibu 7y ago
        Some even make it to president. Some even think, being a bully is mandatory for any higher position in politics ..
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • hcurtiss 7y ago
    I think we have several millennia of proof we cannot.
  • 7y ago
• 762236 7y ago
  I had a similar experience. It was wonderful to be put into a magnet school filled with kids that were smart and generally wanted to learn (every one of them went to a college/university), and to be separated from the kids that hated school. That is the sad thing: so many of the kids causing problems in the normal schools wouldn't cause problems if they attended schools that focused on their vitalities in the way that the magnet schools focused on ours.
  • dcbadacd 7y ago
    I have exactly the same experience as the previous commenters, I was also basically rescued into a (learning-)conducive environment and I'm seriously thankful for that. The alternative would've very likely been awful because I've seen on a good friend of mine what happens when there isn't an opportunity to get into a "magnet school". It basically caused clinical depression and such a strong distaste for school that it made completing even high school basically impossible.
    • LaLaLand122 7y ago
      Having been educated in probably a different country, with a different school system, I am surprised to read all these comments. Not saying my country school system is perfect, it isn't. And there are cases of abuse, bullying does exist. But 30 years ago I was the good, shy, student in a poor neighbourhood of a big city and never suffered or witnessed anything too bad (and from 4 to 12 year old we had a kid with Down syndrome in our class). And nobody would even think about splitting kids by ability, we don't have "advanced"/"honours" classes.
      • sokoloff 7y ago
        At some point, every fully developed education system splits kids by ability. Not everyone goes on to advanced studies, engineering school, law, or medicine. Not everyone learns a trade. That split might not happen until age 18, but my wager is that it does happen everywhere. The question is when is the optimal time? I tend to think earlier rather than later.
• koolba 7y ago
  The solution is not to pull out a handful of high performers, it’s to kick out the even smaller number of disrupters.
  • solveit 7y ago
    Yes, but how would that work in practice? Special schools for high performers is much more palatable than special schools for quarantining children who aren't going to amount to anything (no matter what you call it and how you design it, this is how it will be perceived).
    • empthought 7y ago
      If mandatory school attendance were repealed, it would work itself quite quickly.
      • eloff 7y ago
        But would bring other problems. The cure is likely worse than the disease.
        • yters 7y ago
          Most of history? I'd argue three Rs is the basics everyone needs, and then they can find their own way.
          • eloff 7y ago
            If you look at the opportunities and statistics for high school dropouts, it makes a compelling case to the contrary. And I argue this as an education system skeptic and college dropout myself.
            • empthought 7y ago
              Presumably most people who “find their own way” would not drop out of high school, and their experience would be better — because there would be no one present who was only attending because the law mandates that they do so.
• throwaway3833 7y ago
  > Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked. I want to echo this. I too was bullied like crazy (I was ridiculed/outcast for being "gay", in the homosexual sense, except I was completely straight. But that doesn't particularly matter to middle-schoolers. I was ridiculed for the clothing I wore (it fit funny as I grew in spurts) and was physically beat, too.) Our local schools had some advanced schools ("tracked", as the article calls it); I applied. In my system, if you met the entrance requirements, your fate was tossed into a lottery. For one particular school, ~100 students were accepted from ~600 applicants. I was 500th on the waitlist for that school. (It was the worst of several.) I spent an extra year in my assigned school because of that, and it was hell. It was a gift from God when I got out of there the next year. (I got off one of the wait lists!) It took ten years to really work through most of the resulting depression and confidence issues my time at my assigned school left me with. I have no idea if I would have succeeded if not for "tracked" education. The author is wrong on several points: > Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers. Perhaps it was the professional development, and not the de-tracking that led to better results? The link doesn't seem to support the author's conclusion, either, and largely seems to credit the professional development. > [other remarked about "fixed-ability"] We are at a point where the negative impacts of fixed-ability thinking are undeniable. I have never heard of "fixed-ability", and at least where I was, it was never the argument for separating out achieving students. The arguments was not that the lower-performing students weren't capable¹ of performing, it just simply that if you taught at their level, you were wasting the potential and the time of the students who were outperforming their peers, as you would have to teach significantly below their ability, which is inevitable when you cater to the lowest common denominator. > When students, instead, embrace the knowledge that there are no limits to their learning, outcomes improve. When students develop a “limitless perspective” positive changes go through their lives, And the bullies I was schooled along side with joined hands with the bullied and sang kumbaya. (/s) This is absurd. > International studies show that the United States is one of the most tracked education systems in the world, but tracking hasn’t led to high achievement for the country. Tracking is a symptom of people trying to escape the poor baseline education; it is not the cause of the poor baseline education, and eliminating it will not improve that. > Instead, it has brought about stark racial divisions in opportunity and achievement. Ah, now it's racist to want to receive an at level education? This argument was bantered around in my school system, and it never made any sense. Some combination of socio-economic standing and what generation you were mattered a whole lot more. (Those with good socioeconomic standing either moved out of system, or enrolled in private schools. First-generation kids — with the exception of the Hispanic community for whatever reasons — seemed to do considerably for whatever reasons. Our "tracked" schools were overrepresented in Asian and (I believe, but these demographics aren't measured) first-generation African-Americans, and under-represented in Hispanic and all other African Americans … and it only ever seemed to me that it was that last one that bothered people. > Now is the time to invest in the teacher professional development that allows this to happen. Sure, but this is orthogonal to eliminating tracked education. Add in that every government I've seen seems awfully reluctant to pay the teachers. (And you are paying them for the time they'll need to do this, right?) > For when we tell students they can reach the sky, and provide them with opportunities to do so, amazing things happen. This was as patronizing then as it is now. I can't understand why someone is so eager to shut down the only thing that gave me a future. ¹many of them lacked discipline. They were poorly behaved children, and it's a miracle the teachers wanted to continue to be there at all, IMO. Many of them were clearly not getting discipline taught at home … and teachers are forbidden nowadays from imposing any meaningful discipline themselves. > The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb. On one of my final days prior to transferring out, I almost lost it on another kid. I think my body language threatened violence, and I think it scared him a bit because I'd never done that. We both still ended up getting dragged to the principal's office, though as I remember I wasn't punished. Today, I regret not actually exacting violence on him. Which runs incredibly contrary to most of what I think my own morals are. But do you just keep trying to fend off the incoming violence forever, or at some point take a stand that might actually make a difference? (It wouldn't be until much later that I read Ender's Game, which argues this very point.) (Or who knows, his friends might have come rushing to his aid, and it would not have been a fair fight at that point.) It was dumb.
• polotics 7y ago
  This! Martial arts, in my case Judo where the first hour was just muscling up, made all the difference: being able to flip and never hit, let aggressors accidentally hit corners of things instead... In the US I don't know how this would have worked, depending on how high escalation can go. Still learning to fight is good advice for bullied kids.