Reading the US 8-12 year olds' stats made me flinch, because as someone grow up in the middle east this is inconceivable. I guess I'll dive into rabbit hole about modern-day stats of Europe and other places to compare.
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Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.
I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?
i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.
when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.
You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?
That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.
a better school lets you choose a more or less academic focus if that is what the kids want.
the best system btw is montesori where kids really can learn at their own pace. it is designed in such a way that even within a class different kids work on different projects. they even mix ages so that younger ambitious kids can work with older ones.
merging school types is not about treating everyone the same, but it is about acknowledging that kids develop and you can't evaluate the ability of a child based on their performance at age 9.
as i said, i would not have made it in a tiered system because i would have been stuck in the lowest tier. my parents were to busy to argue with each other to even care and my performance suffered because of them.
those are circumstances a tiered system can't handle. a merged system that can deal with children at all levels however can, and that made the difference for me. that has nothing to do with treating all kids the same. on the contrary, it has everything to do with treating kids individually and not stuffing them in boxes like a tiered system does.
as for a perfect system, montessori gets pretty close. three years of age are grouped together in one class. that alone require that the kids in that class are not all treated the same. it allows all kids to learn at their own pace, so younger, faster kids can easily catch up to older kids and work with them or be given extra activities without disturbing other kids in the same class learning something else
> the best system btw is montesori
I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002
tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.
tl;dr: montessori really does work for almost all kids, not just for some. the cases in the discussion where montessori didn't work don't provide any evidence that they actually received real montessori education as the name "montessori" is not protected.
Which is to say that tracking of any kind is going to end up with this, whether they are separate physical schools or separate curricula within one school.
separate physical schools however may mean that i may never see some of these friends ever again. different school routes (even if we live in the same neighborhood). no chance to meet in breaks, etc. that's a whole different world.