I know you get this, but I always get nervous when certain people talk about going towards sex-separated education, because an all-boys school would be a total nightmare for boys who have more "feminine" tendencies and don't fit in with the majority of boys.
Ideally what you'd do is come up with your "boys" schools and your "girls" schools but describe them in more gender neutral terms and let everyone choose which one they want to go to. I mostly liked my public school experience but it definitely would have been even better if there would have been an alternative for the 50% of boys and 10% of girls who needed a different environment.
I feel like this is an absolute minefield of bad possibilities shutting off potential. In any given cohort there's a broad population of bubble kids. It's much larger than the persistently low or persistently high sets. Any system which pushes some kids out is going to risk really hitting these margins. There's a lot of things I think we could do that would be better for marginally productive boys that would be better long term than letting them quit school sooner. More serious discipline, better approaches to reading, red shirting kindergarten and stretching out the ramp. More consistent consequences for failure and being willing to retain and invest in interventions...and we could go on and on and a lot of these aren't we should spend wild amounts of money.
We really also shouldn't give up before we do something about students who have really bad luck. I worked at a subpar charter school for a time where there was a cohort of kids whose first grade teachers stopped taking work seriously by November. The 2nd grade teachers had a series of quits and in 3rd grade one of the teachers had a health issue and left by February and there were like 5 kids who didn't have a serious full time teacher through all 3 years of 1st-2nd-3rd. I'm sure some of them came out okay just because genetics are powerful and parents do good work but then if you're hitting middle school and starting to push them out of using their minds isn't a great look.
It's also really likely to hurt neurodivergent late bloomers especially. Fortunately for me I'm the kind of autistic person that teachers can tell pretty quickly isn't dumb. That my special interests turned out to be history and science topics meant I never got anyone to call me dumb just dysfunctional. What's far worse and far less safe for this kind of boy is blue collar workplaces.
I'm not opposed to more serious discipline, better approaches to reading, or red shirting kindergarten. What is stretching out the ramp? More consistent consequences for failure also seems good. I'm not sure about investing in interventions. Most of them seem like expensive failures to me, but I'm not very deep in this world at all.
Europe tracks much more than we do and seems to get better results. I agree every kid should have every opportunity to live up to their potential. We also have to acknowledge that costs are real and not everyone's potential is the same.
Stretching the ramp is kind of a term I've heard people use colloquially, I don't know if it is' an actual name for anything. Kindergarten teachers often say the standards for them aren't really developmentally appropriate for a significant number of their students. Push reading back about one year and adopt a more conventional play based kindergarten and seeing the kids reach the same point by late elementary. Finland and Korea don't start teaching students till they're quite a bit older and do very well.
I'm not opposed to tracking per se. Like the charter I'm at now tracks and it's got its ups and downs. I've got so many thoughts about interventions and curriculum and how our decentralized system fucks us and we're buying things piece meal and some of them are broken and some of them are here's 6 hours of content to fit into 4 :30 figure out what to cut. So many interventions are broken messes, but they're also literally sold piece meal apart from the reading curriculum which is developed apart from the reading test.
Paradoxically though the thing that frustrates me the most here is the workplace is going to be less supportive of a lot of bullshit.
When you say we can't change cohort performance, are you talking about overall? It seems that individual students have problems that, once solved, may change their performance. (For example, fixing a bad home situation, the addressing of a learning disability, discovery of a subject they love, etc.) I understood these things not to be reflected in your cohort performance statement because they are highly individualized and you're making a systemic point.
I have no idea! That's a good question. I'd assume it's better because parents would be more aware of the fact that their boys aren't learning and more realistic about their boys' actual academic potential and would direct low-potential boys toward non-academic skills-based learning. But then again, many parents are actually not very realistic at all.
I know you get this, but I always get nervous when certain people talk about going towards sex-separated education, because an all-boys school would be a total nightmare for boys who have more "feminine" tendencies and don't fit in with the majority of boys.
Ideally what you'd do is come up with your "boys" schools and your "girls" schools but describe them in more gender neutral terms and let everyone choose which one they want to go to. I mostly liked my public school experience but it definitely would have been even better if there would have been an alternative for the 50% of boys and 10% of girls who needed a different environment.
I agree. Separating boys from girls demonstrably does not help the boys.
I feel like this is an absolute minefield of bad possibilities shutting off potential. In any given cohort there's a broad population of bubble kids. It's much larger than the persistently low or persistently high sets. Any system which pushes some kids out is going to risk really hitting these margins. There's a lot of things I think we could do that would be better for marginally productive boys that would be better long term than letting them quit school sooner. More serious discipline, better approaches to reading, red shirting kindergarten and stretching out the ramp. More consistent consequences for failure and being willing to retain and invest in interventions...and we could go on and on and a lot of these aren't we should spend wild amounts of money.
We really also shouldn't give up before we do something about students who have really bad luck. I worked at a subpar charter school for a time where there was a cohort of kids whose first grade teachers stopped taking work seriously by November. The 2nd grade teachers had a series of quits and in 3rd grade one of the teachers had a health issue and left by February and there were like 5 kids who didn't have a serious full time teacher through all 3 years of 1st-2nd-3rd. I'm sure some of them came out okay just because genetics are powerful and parents do good work but then if you're hitting middle school and starting to push them out of using their minds isn't a great look.
It's also really likely to hurt neurodivergent late bloomers especially. Fortunately for me I'm the kind of autistic person that teachers can tell pretty quickly isn't dumb. That my special interests turned out to be history and science topics meant I never got anyone to call me dumb just dysfunctional. What's far worse and far less safe for this kind of boy is blue collar workplaces.
I'm not opposed to more serious discipline, better approaches to reading, or red shirting kindergarten. What is stretching out the ramp? More consistent consequences for failure also seems good. I'm not sure about investing in interventions. Most of them seem like expensive failures to me, but I'm not very deep in this world at all.
Europe tracks much more than we do and seems to get better results. I agree every kid should have every opportunity to live up to their potential. We also have to acknowledge that costs are real and not everyone's potential is the same.
Stretching the ramp is kind of a term I've heard people use colloquially, I don't know if it is' an actual name for anything. Kindergarten teachers often say the standards for them aren't really developmentally appropriate for a significant number of their students. Push reading back about one year and adopt a more conventional play based kindergarten and seeing the kids reach the same point by late elementary. Finland and Korea don't start teaching students till they're quite a bit older and do very well.
I'm not opposed to tracking per se. Like the charter I'm at now tracks and it's got its ups and downs. I've got so many thoughts about interventions and curriculum and how our decentralized system fucks us and we're buying things piece meal and some of them are broken and some of them are here's 6 hours of content to fit into 4 :30 figure out what to cut. So many interventions are broken messes, but they're also literally sold piece meal apart from the reading curriculum which is developed apart from the reading test.
Paradoxically though the thing that frustrates me the most here is the workplace is going to be less supportive of a lot of bullshit.
I'm also much more biased towards improving/changing schools/education rather than having more dropouts.
My example - if it takes a lot longer for someone to learn to tie a shoe, I'd still wanna teach it to them.
"They need apprenticeships, shop classes, internships, trade schools, and certification programs."
I didn't see shoe tying on that list
When you say we can't change cohort performance, are you talking about overall? It seems that individual students have problems that, once solved, may change their performance. (For example, fixing a bad home situation, the addressing of a learning disability, discovery of a subject they love, etc.) I understood these things not to be reflected in your cohort performance statement because they are highly individualized and you're making a systemic point.
Freddie is the expert on this, but what I read him as saying is that what works to change one student's cohort performance doesn't reliably scale.
What about homeschooled boys vs homeschooled girls?
I have no idea! That's a good question. I'd assume it's better because parents would be more aware of the fact that their boys aren't learning and more realistic about their boys' actual academic potential and would direct low-potential boys toward non-academic skills-based learning. But then again, many parents are actually not very realistic at all.