Fascinating article. It is interesting to see how much room there (still) is for applying basic, obvious, common-sense approaches. And of course the best part is seeing the incredible impact he's had on literally thousands of lives as a result.
I did find the final bit sadly ironic. The entire point of Frazer's approach is that he looked at what the best teams were doing, came up with hypotheses about weaknesses in the approach, and experimented/iterated from there. Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built -- rather than looking to instill the same mindset in other teachers.
I suppose it's the circle of life in large, bureaucratic organizations. A decade (or a century) from now, another Frazer will come along and apply the same mindset to this structure -- and all the bureaucrats will be suitably impressed again.
I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly: you need a willingness to abandon most of the students (they have the best maths team and yet the school doesn't rank well on maths) in favour of concentrating all the most promising students into one small(ish) group.
Over half (51%) of the student at this school have below satisfactory maths proficiency, and most of those (70%) are actually rated as Inadequate.
If you are interested in raising the mathematical achievement of the roughly[1] 90% of students at Buchholz that don't get to take part in these ivory tower math classes, there is not much of use here.
I think what it shows that mathematical aptitude is somehow unevenly distributed, but most of all, the motivation to develop it is highly unevenly distributed among students.
Because of that, you can pick a school where most students (70%) can't be bothered to learn the basics, and pick a few who are motivated to climb to the top.
This is completely unsurprising: in every sport, the proportion of those who do not care enough to those highly motivated is even more stark.
> This is completely unsurprising: in every sport, the proportion of those who do not care enough to those highly motivated is even more stark.
I would say it is even more general: there are an overwhelming amount of things to be passionate about, but being passionate about something means you put it before (almost) all else. So for any one specific topic you can expect most kids will actually be more passionate about something else, simply because there is just so much else to go around.
In any case, I think the harsh reality for teachers is that most kids are mainly passionate about being friends with other kids. I suspect this is especially true for kids with less beneficial backgrounds that can't count on as much support from their home.
Reality is you'd need to at least double teacher pay to get a pool of teachers for whom the approach from one of these "amazing teacher does amazing thing" stories might—might—generalize well enough to be useful.
> We have spent the last 40 years reducing teacher autonomy, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's harder to get teachers who care.
I think schools are in a death-spiral where they can't get enough decent teachers with good judgement who can work autonomously, so they keep clamping down with more control over teachers' day-to-day activities, which just drives away more of the good teachers because working like that sucks.
Current high inflation (wage-inflation plus just the regular kind) is going to drive this to a crisis point before long, I think—when fast food joints have signs up begging people to apply at $17/hr with basically no education requirements, a starting salary in the low-$30k range requiring a bachelor's degree starts to look like something only a crazy person would opt to do.
[EDIT] Relatedly, school admin is also totally fucked up. The people doing those jobs are generally terrible for a bunch of reasons, including that they're also under-paid for the kind of person you'd really want doing those jobs, while also being very high-paid relative to teachers. Teachers who may or may not be good at teaching, but who are not good at admin, go into it because it's the only way to make real money in education until you're nearly at retirement age and holding a PhD, on a classroom teacher pay-scale, and people who can't hack it in private sector management go into it because it pays pretty well and you can coast while getting an ego-boost from being the Big (Wo)Man In Charge and bossing people around. The entire field is a cess-pit of incompetence, neglect, and outright idiocy, and it's a huge problem that doesn't get enough attention compared with teacher quality.
Right, absolutely. The conditions are also damn stressful, unless you're lucky enough to be at a school with amazing admin and co-workers and parents. That almost never happens.
Then the ones who are good but getting stressed out eventually start looking around and realize they could match their current comp assistant-managing a gas station, and that some of the extra things they've taken on give them experience that lets them gun for non-education jobs with way higher pay... and it's only a matter of time before they leave.
> The conditions are also damn stressful, unless you're lucky enough to be at a school with amazing admin and co-workers and parents.
As a teacher at a school with pretty amazing admin and co-workers and parents.. they're pretty dang stressful even with those things. And I come from a background of founding startups, so I'm not some complete lightweight.
The thing is, you can endure stress and suck if it feels worthwhile. If you're missing those things, it stops feeling worthwhile.
Teachers also benefit from mentoring, time to visit other classrooms, time to meet with other teachers and talk, paid time outside the classroom to reflect and develop lessons, sufficient provision of classroom materials (that they don’t have to buy themselves), occasional sabbaticals, ....
Reality is, compensation isn't a panacea for drawing talent with enthusiasm.
Indeed, it may even have adverse effects: you draw people who want the money, instead of people drawn to the profession intrinsically.
We do need to build environments (schools, administrations, patterns of educating teachers, social supports for teachers and students, etc) that cultivate enthusiasm and encourage high levels of effort, rather than crushing it.
> Indeed, it may even have adverse effects: you draw people who want the money, instead of people drawn to the profession intrinsically.
This sentiment is a big part of suppressing teacher wages, and needs to stop. No, raising teacher pay will not result in getting worse teachers. We shouldn't be relying on charity and self-sacrifice on the part of teachers.
[EDIT] The general problem here is that we default to "pay more to get better workers" unless the job produces clear social good, then it's suddenly like "well if you don't want to badly under-earn compared to what you could make doing almost anything else, then you must not have your heart in the right place so will be bad at this anyway". It's some weird kind of sour-grapes thinking that we use to avoid paying people doing actually clearly important and socially beneficial jobs what they're worth, while the real money goes to people doing jobs that... aren't so clearly beneficial.
> We shouldn't be relying on charity and self-sacrifice on the part of teachers.
I agree, but we have a whole lot of data that indicates that raising comp often has perverse effects.
A] There's a whole lot wrong with education resulting in bad outcomes. B] And the way we compensate teachers is terrible and unjust. I am not convinced that addressing B will have a huge effect on A.
> I agree, but we have a whole lot of data that indicates that raising comp often has perverse effects.
Better tell waves hands at the entire private sector. They don't seem to have gotten that message. Seems like an opportunity to start a company paying 30% under your competition, so you can out-compete them by getting better workers.
I know this'll sound daft... Can you share some of this data?
I know there's related studies, like the famous "pick up your kids from daycare on time" study -- and of course plenty of examples about incentive structures gone wrong. However, I think those are different in subtle but important ways.
The point being made here, AFAICT, is that paying more would increase the available pool of candidates. All the people who are currently interested in teaching would surely stick around -- and a lot more people would be interested, too. Given the current issues with hiring and retention, it's difficult to see how that would be a bad thing.
Extrinsic incentives are correlated only very slightly with performance, job satisfaction and self-reported measures of motivation. The correlations that exist are confounded because causation is likely reversed (people with higher satisfaction, performance, and motivation are paid more). When we study, in isolation, extrinsic incentives on tasks that are intrinsically rewarding, they appear demotivating.
Anecdotally, I see the effect in the classroom itself: rewarding students for things that they otherwise would do for the challenge and their own reward sucks the fun out of it really fast. The absolute last thing in the world you want to do is pivot someone from evaluating a task based on its intrinsic rewards to thinking about it in terms of extrinsic factors.
I'm actually taking over a competitive math program next year that has had a pretty big "candy bribe" component of it that I need to figure out how to unwind. It's one thing to unexpectedly give out stickers, candy, etc, and let students know you're celebrating awesome performance... it's another still to condition students to think that doing math is only worthwhile because Jolly Ranchers will be dispensed.
> The point being made here, AFAICT, is that paying more would increase the available pool of candidates.
I think in the very long run that's true: there are people who would like to teach that are steered away from it during college because they figure out they just can't make the numbers work.
But given that a teaching credential is a pretty substantial structural bar, I don't think it changes things much in the medium run.
> The data on whether this works in general is very, very muddy.
My spouse, with about a decade of teaching experience at the time, once had a former student drop out of high school and start working at as a gas station clerk at a major chain.
The student was making almost as much as my spouse, and if she stuck with it she'd be out-earning my spouse in a year or two. Total comp, benefits included, not talking just wages (school worker benefits are not and have not for some time been that good, really, and at least in my area are now pretty poor compared to offerings in the private sector). Clerking at a gas station. As a high-school dropout.
I'm pretty confident teacher pay is so bad that this "raising pay will draw worse candidates" (where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?) thing is not a real effect worth worrying about, if we're talking pay increases for teachers that are anywhere in a remotely plausible range.
> Really, any job that lots of people are drawn to by the love of it gets crap compensation by default. It affects the supply curve too much.
Sure, and as is typical you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career or have a much higher-earning spouse, who don't really need the salary at all. You don't get the trust-fund kids as much, as in other careers that are similarly pro-social or artistic, since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor, but otherwise it's similar.
But that's not enough, and I don't think paying teachers 50-75% of what any decent teacher could make doing something else with a teaching degree—not even assuming some entirely different life-path—is a great way to get a good candidate pool. Enough bodies, based solely on some idealistic drive (check in again in 5 years, let alone 10, on how well that's doing sustaining them, and for the ones who do need the money, which is most of them, on how their financial situation is adding to the stress that's driving them out of teaching) sure, but not enough good candidates. And it's not enough to keep the good ones around.
> My spouse, with about a decade of teaching experience at the time, once had a former student drop out of high school and start working at as a gas station clerk at a major chain.
OK, I've already said I think this is unjust. Please read my comments and understand context. I just do not think this is a path to increase educational performance, particularly in the short to intermediate run.
> where the fuck is that hand-wringing when CEO pay comes up at board meetings? Any pro sports teams worrying they might pay too much to attract good players?
I feel like you're not understanding the distinction between:
A) paying a premium within a profession to get the top candidate
and
B) increasing pay broadly to get a higher level of performance from existing practitioners
and
C) to get more able candidates into a profession or retain them.
> you get some good people who are semi-retired from a better-earning career
[raises hand]
> since teacher social status is somewhere under the floor
IMO this is the biggest problem. And, indeed, teachers will take even lower pay to be in a private school situation with a parent community and student community that values education.
> IMO this is the biggest problem. And, indeed, teachers will take even lower pay to be in a private school situation with a parent community and student community that values education.
Lots of private schools pay worse than public schools, true, and do indeed draw teachers who are decent-to-good but sick of putting up with public school admin and parent bullshit—for reasons that are obvious if you think about it, but perhaps not intuitively obvious, private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are, and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"—but once you start to get into actually-good private school territory[0] pay and appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle) match or beat area public schools, typically.
[0] A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though—"how can that be? How do they keep getting enough students to stay open, in a competitive market that includes 'free' as an option?"—politics and religion, is the answer, and they can under-perform on academics year after year as long as they're delivering the message the parents want on those fronts. Incidentally, the teachers these schools draw with their lower pay aren't always leaving public education over legitimate bullshit, but often over perceived bullshit like "they wouldn't let me talk about Jesus as much as I'd like", and these are usually not good ones that the public schools are losing to private schools, but ones who we'd want to leave public education.
> but once you start to get into actually-good private school territory
This just isn't true of the SF Bay Area. When you look at the very top, like Harker, Nueva, etc-- salary may slightly edge above public school pay for some portions of the scale, but is still behind when you consider total comp.
> appreciation (and to a some extent social status, at least within a certain circle)
I feel appreciated and valued by our parent community, and I do not feel like there are many that look down their nose at me. (And, given my background, I'm just kinda amused by the group that do).
I also have total "easy mode" when it comes to behavior management. Students that don't even know me come into the room predisposed to think I have important things to say and to work hard.
> A very high percentage of private schools are not good, though
Oh, believe me, I know about the crummy sectarian schools, and the crummy for-profit "highly academic" academies. I am not talking about that. (I don't think many of these are very good teaching environments, either...)
> private schools are less beholden to any one parent than public schools are
This is very complicated and probably out of scope for this discussion.
> and are much better positioned to firmly tell them "no"
Sorry, by the way, if I've misunderstood or misread some of your posts. I'm truly not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, and expect we agree much more than we disagree, overall. Also: yes, I'm sure you're right about your local market, and part of the problem discussing these things is that the situation in schools varies greatly state-by-state and region-by-region, so it's easy to get wrong ideas about things—teachers unions might be so powerful they're part of the problem, in some places, but in others they barely have any power at all so those very-common "teacher's unions are out of control and that's the main problem with education!" takes come off as something from another universe, or teacher comp might be borderline-OK in some places, but really, really isn't in others. Some places, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive that charge $40+k/yr and are all pretty good or even excellent—others, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive and they all charge $12k/yr or less and are all terrible (but do cater to religious and/or political preferences). It's a highly heterogenous field.
Likewise --- I understand you're passionate about the issue and feel your spouse has been ripped off. I think we should pay teachers much more. I just don't think it is likely to improve education much, and most of the benefit will be in the far future. [I do think improving working conditions will have an immediate benefit, though].
> Some places, there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive that charge $40+k/yr and are all pretty good or even excellent
Far, far in excess of that here.
> there are five private schools in a 30-minute drive and they all charge $12k/yr or less and are all terrible (but do cater to religious and/or political preferences)
And we have a bunch of those, too.
There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.
I'm reminded of research that shows that students at lottery charter schools outperform students at neighboring public schools... but then the students who enter but lose the lottery also outperform the general student population at those schools.
I believe we have very good educators and we have a whole lot of things we're doing right. But we also have a whole lot of things that are just fundamentally easier or better in our environment. Almost entirely, the behavior problems I confront are students getting a little excessively exuberant or otherwise out of hand, not wanting to misbehave.
> I understand you're passionate about the issue and feel your spouse has been ripped off.
It's not just that we're personally harmed by the current system—we're in the "has a high-earning spouse" group so we don't need to both be adequately paid, though of course it'd be nice—but I've watched one good, experienced teacher after another bail on the profession over the years, because they do not get paid enough to put up with the shit they're subjected to, and at some point they see an opportunity outside education, realize just how badly they're under paid, and decide they're done with it. It seems to be getting worse, too, even before recent inflation started screwing with everything (I suspect the rest of this decade is going to be a slow-motion disaster for education hiring and retention, in excess of how bad it already was). I have kids, too, and they're in school, and I hate knowing that a bunch of the best teachers they might have will leave before they get them, because the work-conditions/comp ratio is so badly messed up that it's not only asking some sacrifice of teachers, but is practically abusive.
> There's a huge selection effect: when you choose the students A) who can earn a scholarship, or B) whose parents will sacrifice to pay tuition at a non-sectarian school, you're basically selecting for the families who value education.
Yeah, agree that the factors that make a "good school" versus a "bad school" are complex and that you can't just look at student outcomes to decide whether the quality of a school's instruction is actually above-average—especially with private schools, but also with public schools. Solutions to those problems that aren't actually related to school quality per se are hard to come by, without deliberately leaving some kids behind and/or increasing staffing levels dramatically (so, also significantly increasing district spending/budget). Lots of the problems, effective solutions start to look like "solve poverty", so... good luck. :-(
Didn't mean to be flippant with the good vs. bad school distinction—looking at various measures of student outcomes definitely doesn't give a full picture of how good a job a school, or a teacher, is doing, and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.
> because they do not get paid enough to put up with the shit they're subjected to
Yah. And the crap is a primary concern, too. We need to figure out how to make things better. Especially on the things that teachers complain about that are demoralizing because they can be expected to negatively affect student outcomes.
I think improving comp has a distant and uncertain effect, but fixing a lot of the crap could be more impactful. Right now we incent administrators not to hold students accountable; how can we do the opposite?
Also, how can we systemically study interventions in a way that we can draw meaningful conclusions-- instead of leaping from educational trend to educational trend because they seem like they sound like they'll do something.
> and selection bias is a major confounder in attempts to do that.
It's got a huge indirect impact that is difficult to control for, too. If I have a student who wants to be disruptive, other students will call him or her out, and they won't find much social validation from it. So, it's not just the attitudes of individual students affecting their own outcomes, but everyone else around them.
And even second order things. I would probably be a below average educator in a difficult public school classroom. And instead, I'm an extraordinary one in the environment I'm in. Horses for courses.
To be fair, I don't think your posts are making the distinction between A B and C.
I would say A and C are both reasonable. To get higher performance out of existing candidates, you would need a metric for performance... I am unfortunately not aware of one that is robust enough to be used.
To do A you need a good metric, which as you point out we don't have. Of course, it's also zero-sum.
You might be able to do B with pay for performance if you had a good metric.
C might make things significantly better 10 years from now-- increasing the size of the candidate pool. Of course, this requires you be able to adequately measure candidates, too.
I think we should increase teacher pay. I don't think it changes much soon in the quality of education. I do think improving teacher working conditions--- especially the ones that infuriate teachers because they have well articulated justifications of worsening student outcomes--- can improve all of the above.
Also -- I'm willing to believe that the regular "boring honors stuff," as they put it, which they've apparently de-prioritized is not the best possible curriculum. But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either.
Competitions are always artificial. This school is apparently pulling some really bright students now. Are they teaching them skills that will allow them to excel academically later in life, or are they teaching them how to execute the competitive meta strategy quickly?
As someone who was on the team, the skills that allow you to excel academically in life are the competitive math skills.
And to be honest, not only is the "honors stuff" and "common core" material deprioritized, it's not even taught explicitly. You just get to such a high level understanding of the subjects Frazer teaches that it becomes trivial.
> But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either.
I disagree. I think that having a strong sense of mathematical properties and numbers is more useful than any specific rote drilled into students.
I see a lot of students up in precalc doing rote and not understanding at all why things work and that have no chance when you throw a curveball. On the other hand, the competitive math students are asking questions like:
* What's the graph of this function look like?
* What's it for the trivial case n=4 before I think about n=100?
* Does symmetry or any other pattern collapse this down?
* What properties do I expect the answer to have? Why does this direction "feel right"?
The kids who excel in math competition and on the normal math academic track get there by playing with it and understanding it.
Math is not debate or a spelling B. Math problem solving is absolutely applicable, in that form, in a number of fields like engineering, finance, video games, etc. etc.
> I mean, this all sounds like an red herring anyway if what you want is to improve maths education broadly
That's the tricky bit here, right? Math competition gamifies math, and encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver.
But if you don't feel like you have some basic level of competence, being measured in this way is demotivating.
We need to figure out ways to make it interesting and involve exploration and that game-like feel for a broad slice of students.
I would rather a given student end their HS math journey in algebra I and have finished it with A) wonder, and B) a broad and solid understanding of the material that they can take into their adult lives... than to have ended it being able to do a big slice of AP Calc BC problems well, but without any kind of underlying fluency in math.
True mastery is one thing missing from all these discussions of math levels, tracks, etc.
> encourages a level of play and understanding that normal math classes don't deliver
Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame.
As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged.
It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
> Yes, but this is largely by convention for much of it. With some effort you can incorporate more playful and open exercises in a normal class. However few teachers have the spare time to spend this effort. It is also risky because you're likely to have some students that cannot cope with the challenge and if they do poorly the new thing you tried is likely to attract blame.
That's the big thing that has to be figured out. It needs to be fun. You need some randomness and handicapping. Effort and ability needs to affect outcome in gamified lessons but you need to feel like you have a fighting chance even if you're at the bottom.
I feel like good PE teachers know better how to do this than most in education. Their curriculum is intrinsically gamified and they need to manage to get effort and development from those with obviously different levels of ability.
> As an aside, a fundamental problem in any discussion about education is that it tends to happen with the various parties speaking about interventions aimed as only a section of the student population, but without this segmentation being explicitly acknowledged.
A bigger fundamental problem is that we don't get rigorous data on anything. We flit from trend to trend to trend, without measuring any of them well.
I'm data driven, and I read all the educational research, and I have very little rigorous guidance that I can believe. It falls to personal judgment, then, which is notoriously easy to fool.
> It is always important to remember there is a huge range of abilities and home circumstances in the student population the schools have to educate, so in a very real sense there is not just one, but rather a whole society of underlying problems that lead the the educational outcomes that then get summarised as a unitary PISA ranking or similar.
Yes, but it's similarly a mistake to think we're at some kind of global optimum and that there's not a set of different practices and curriculum that would result in a drastically better distribution of outcomes. In particular, I feel like we really, really screw up how math is taught.
I did recovery with a couple of students up in precalc levels that were struggling. They were missing some fundamental things. When they fell behind, it's everyone's (parents, teachers, tutors, etc) immediate intervention to help them with the problems they're struggling with, and drill them with rote. But if the real problem is that you don't have a good understanding of the associative property of multiplication, you end up memorizing a million special cases and getting yourself confused.
So when can you rearrange terms, and when can you not? It's time to play with it and find out...
Plus I suspect that there are at least some kids with a math talent who were explicitly sent to this specific school - so if you had programs like this in every school, you would probably have significantly fewer eligible candidates.
That's a contributor to how the math team continues to be successful today, but the more interesting question is how they initially became world-class ~15 years ago. Frazer is clearly responsible for the latter.
"""
Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus.
As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.
"""
Notice how the first step is collecting kids that are already good. The recipe is then broadly: collect the best kids you can get your hands on, train and coach them for years, watch them win. There might be some details of wider interest, but essentially this is a good old elitist project.
> Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built
Entirely typical of school reform efforts. Study or (more often) a book built around a study or two comes out, hype builds, consultants latch on, dumb-shit school admins get ahold of it (and use it as an excuse for a free trip or two to some BS conferences, for them and maybe a favored teacher or two), and then try to implement it without understanding it. They usually make two major mistakes:
1) Assuming the study's results will generalize to any school, disregarding even caveats or limitations called out in the very reference work that's the foundation of the reform.
2) Ditching parts they're uncomfortable with, failing to appreciate that implementing 80% of something may not even achieve 20% of the desired effect. They do this even when it's super fucking obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that the parts they're ignoring are key. They're especially bad about this with discipline systems, but it also frequently happens with other kinds of programs.
Then they do this again every 2-4 years. For a given kind of system (English instruction, math instruction, discipline, all kinds of things). Result: schools are constantly flailing around, with shit changing for no good reason almost every single year.
> I suppose it's the circle of life in large, bureaucratic organizations. A decade (or a century) from now, another Frazer will come along and apply the same mindset to this structure -- and all the bureaucrats will be suitably impressed again.
Honestly, you don't want everyone to be constantly iterating and trying to drastically upend things to find a new global optimum. Beyond the fact that many people are not cut out to do it (most people aren't above average ;), there's a survivorship bias in these stories. You don't hear all the times that radical new approaches had terrible outcomes.
If you want to build an extraordinary competitive program doing A, you should absolutely be doing lots different from what everyone else does. But the typical program that eschews hard-gained wisdom will do worse. Basically, you're buying volatility in outcomes for a lower expected value.
By showing them the approach, teaching them the benefits and showing them the results? By giving them more information, so they can want to adopt the same mindset themselves? Because not all teaching, showing and informing is "brainwashing"?
But this guy is not a teacher; he's a coach. This is math-sport. Teachers can't just abandon the part of the class that doesn't already show demonstrated aptitude and/or commitment.
The football team is to the gym class as the math-sport team is to the math class.
All the more argument why adopting the mindset is better than adopting the specific approach or program. The approach might be good for competitive-level math, but bad for the classroom. The mindset will allow teachers to adapt those ideas so they can be appropriate for the classroom.
There was a similar example in Nebraska with Leona Penner. [1] Her classes were absolutely dominant at every state level competition. One key seems to be an intensely motivated teacher devoting their own life to this and motivating their students. Another key is school district administration willing to arrange things to let greatness happen.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/journalstar.com/news/local/educ...
I used to teach competitive math problems. An observation: These math challenges resemble real-world problems much more than routine textbook stuff.
You need to apply knowledge from disparate areas, combine them creatively, prod it and often fail several times before you get it right.
It's a good way to prepare one's kids (or oneself) to solve hard problems in real life.
I’d also argue such problems ought to be part of the curriculum for “normal” kids too. They might just more time and hints along the way than gifted kids. Once they get the taste of solving interesting problems from a young age, they might enjoy math more as well.
Note how many kids are attracted to games—-some of which are objectively more challenging than routine school math problems.
I used to do that too. First as a competitor, then for my national organization, and now I'm back at my former high school as a coach.
There's a very large variety of difficulty levels in math competitions. You go from almost trivial to olympiad level (= almost impossible even for most professional mathematicians).
That level also steadily increases as time goes on. Problems from the same competitions are already vastly more difficult than ten years ago, when I used to compete. Might be that I'm growing white hair, but it's almost unbelievable what the very top kids can do. They're very, very, very good.
> I’d also argue such problems ought to be part of the curriculum for “normal” kids too.
I wish there was a way to do it. I agree that the educational value is simply off the charts, but even low-level competitions are way too hard if you won't train, and most kids understandably won't.
> I wish there was a way to do it. I agree that the educational value is simply off the charts, but even low-level competitions are way too hard if you won't train, and most kids understandably won't.
It does require a different approach for most kids. An effective approach would involve some or all of the following components:
- interactivity
- visual imagery
- gamification
- social problem solving
- customized problem set
Technology will probably need to play a major role since teachers cannot do all of these for a large group of students.
Have you got resources to recommend? That's exactly the kind of thing I want for my kids, but apart from a blob of questions from my old math teacher, I don't have any.
There are also online gifted programs, incl at John Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth. The center is quite well-known in the gifted education community, with many famous alumni.
(not parent, but I used to do that thing as well and you might find this helpful)
It depends on their age and skill level. It goes without saying that younger kids need more guidance if they aren't extremely motivated.
This is worth looking into: https://artofproblemsolving.com, it's kind of the go-to website for the competitive math community. There are a lot of free high-quality resources on the wiki, and they sell courses and books.
And obviously, competition problems! For example, this is the AMC: https://amc-reg.maa.org/default.aspx; competition websites usually have an archive of past editions freely available. Studying past problems is the meat and potatoes of actual competition training. Make sure they are age appropriate, because the difficulty level ramps up VERY fast.
Aside from the Art of Problem Solving books mentioned by others, you may find https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-contest.html worth reading. I learnt a lot about math (contests (strategy, experience), undergraduate material, etc.) and more by deep-diving into Evan's site.
Seeing by myself how the Korean kids hack out gold medals in international math/physics olympiads by drilling the hell out in cram schools (and then most of them going to medical school with these credentials anyway), I really don’t have a good impression for these contests. Often the problems seem incredibly contrived and its connection to the real world (or at least higher-level academia) seems dubious. These contests might seem to test creativity in a superficial glance, but these cram schools have a database of past/potential problems in their “problem bank” and once high schoolers grind away thousands of these questions for a long period of time they can solve these like robots. (Obviously you still need to be smart enough to do this, but I really don’t believe it is a good nurturer of creativity.) I’ve seen lots of friends passionate and skilled in math and science but either fail to do well in these contests, or
don’t give a single fuck about it due to the problems I’ve described.
>the pipeline for the high school’s math team must begin long before students reach high school, so Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school.
>“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”
Interesting - someone laser focused on education. When school went virtual he quit as a teacher, rented a space, and told 145 students he’d be teaching there. 140 showed up and they crushed competitors.
So he immediately felt virtual learning would not be as good as in person, school wouldn’t let him teach in person (he is in his 60s) so he quits.
I’d trust this guy more then the Ed unions saying virtual is just as good as in person
I think virtual learning could be at least as good as in-person for a lot of subjects but the world, and the US especially, didn't prepare anyone for it and didn't provide any resources to do it during the pandemic so I'm not surprised that the outcomes were terrible. They basically needed teachers who had never even done remote learning before to pivot on a dime, with no additional money, training, or resources, and then teach kids who had also never done the same and with no resources or training.
We, in the US, did nothing to try and prepare people for a situation like that. On top of that, you have a whole segment of parents who don't care about whether or not kids were actually learning but just whether or not schools were open. The number of stats that I've seen that compare days that schools were opened (especially in red states compared to blue states) is horrifying. If the metric we're using to determine whether education was successful is whether the doors were open, then we're focusing on the wrong things. On top of that, they act like the schools open in person had better outcomes simply because they were in-person while ignoring the lack of preparation and any other factors.
What happened to the $190 billion schools got in COVID aid? Are both the paragraphs you wrote completely unsubstantiated and just based on your own gut feelings?
>What happened to the $190 billion schools got in COVID aid?
Why don't you look that up first before you write nonsense. Also, if you're not going to contribute anything to the conversation, why bother responding?
I don’t think virtual is anywhere as good as in person. I didn’t believe Ed unions when they said that. Anyone who has done virtual classes or conferences knows this (which is a LOT of folks at this point should know if you’ve ever done any learning online). Given that it may have been a reasonable option until covid was better manageable. I think some districts went too far. My school district thankfully was one where they did a hybrid in-person/remote. Parents could choose for the 2020-2021 school year. It was all in-person (no remote) 2021-2022.
College teacher CS here. You are right. Virtual teaching sucks. But that's not the whole story. Remote teaching can work for highly motivated people with lots of discipline.
And the younger they get, the less often they'll have these characteristics.
So in my opinion, never teach children remotely. Or students. Adults? Depends.
Yes but it's also important that you educate as many students as you can to some baseline level of competence so we don't devolve into Idiocracy.
Finding the balance of lifting the tide for everyone while giving the most highly motivated/talented the support they need is the tricky part. This guy figured out the latter but the article doesn't say anything about if he knows anything about the former.
As someone who grew up in public schools that were able to put students in accelerated cohorts, I appreciate that people are finding ways to do that against the current of news suggesting that such systems are being phased out.
To say that wealthy people can achieve systems is less exciting; if they couldn't, that would be a terrible leading indicator of bigger problems. I'm interested in stories of people making good use of scarce public resources, because that's what all local governments should be attempting, and I read too much about districts making pushes orthogonal or downright antithetical to goals of effective education.
This comment is recklessly dismissive of subsidiarity. Public libraries would have been set back decades, at least, without 'bored rich guys' making huge strides to spread the concept and build many libraries. Hospitals and universities are likewise benefeciaries of 'bored rich guys'.
There is a large public resource in question, the public school. All US Americans should be more or less familiar with public schools that make very poor use of those resources as suggested by our top-in-class spending per pupil and middling achievement levels. In this case a school had a great resource, a 'bored rich guy' with the requisite background and focus, and they recognized and took advantage of this fact.
In plenty of other circumstances in life, power struggles or many other flavors of bureaucracy would have prevented this outcome. In the linked story, this effort was allowed to flourish and supported, which is to the great credit of the school and probably the wider community. Consequently, a significant group of students are receiving phenomenal educations that extend far beyond the narrow scope of high school math curricula, and they are doing it seemingly all under the tutelage of a single teacher.
I do an occasional pilgrimage to my old high school math teacher. He's in his 80s now, but in his last year before retiring, we won a math contest for European International schools. He was very happy about that.
The guy still gets visits from people in their 60s that he taught decades before me. He really made the subject come to life, had a sense of humor, and was generally a good guy.
He also ran the school math teams. Several kids in the years above me did quite well on those, all down to him giving us accelerated content and questions that were "actually interesting" rather than dozens of the same thing over and over. Of course it varies what that means depending on where you are in your journey, but at each step there tends to be an aha! moment where things come together.
I caught up with him a few weeks ago, and he told me he actually didn't enjoy the university level of mathematics. Somehow things got very dry and boring, and that's part of why he ended up teaching high school.
A teacher at a public school in Florida built the team.
I was really lucky to have a high school math teacher that made calculus interesting enough for me to want to learn it. I'm not sure I would have made it through the Comp Sci program at college without it, as we were required to take an advanced math class every semester, and having an understanding of calculus was critical to both getting through those math classes, as well as the physics classes that were also required for the degree.
Impressive considering the demographics of Gainsville. They used standardized test scores to identify talented grade school kids and put them all in the same room. Can we still do that in diverse school districts in CA and MA? I think we'd have a major uproar.
>Can we still do that in diverse school districts in CA and MA?
You would be able to do that for one year, and then people would start noticing a pattern in the teams' composition, and yes you'd get your uproar and the whole thing would be canceled.
TJ was humming along fine for decades under republicans and conservatives democrats. Liberal democrats won the governorship just in 2018 and within two years folks are declaring standardized tests to be “racist.”
I blame my parents. They immigrated to a red/purple state for the low taxes and good schools and turned it into a solid blue state by voting straight ticket democrat. And then they’re all surprised at how this could happen.
TJ is literally a “Governor’s school.” Liberal democrats put themselves in a position where they are forced to go along with whatever activists decide is “racist” regardless of the merits. They’re the ones who weaponized accusations of “isms” and handed a club for the activists to beat them with.
Your second paragraph: what is the alternative to voting a straight Dem ticket if you support science and want to see women, Jews and brown people get a fair shake in life?
> Your second paragraph: what is the alternative to voting a straight Dem ticket if you support science and want to see women, Jews and brown people get a fair shake in life?
I'm a "brown" immigrant and grew up in Virginia when it was a red state. I got way more than a "fair shake," including the opportunity to attend TJ. Indeed, Democrats are the ones who are advocating to legalize discrimination against people like me (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/12/9/biden-admin-bac...) and eliminate objective standards that enable immigrants to break into elite jobs in favor of subjective standards that require social connections and cultural capital to navigate.
You might be surprised at the skin colour of the poster you are replying to. Your question is also utterly flawed - there is no "heroic political party fighting for the rights of the X", and even if such a unicorn existed, it's definitely not the modern Democrat party.
Politicians are like strippers, you fall in love with them at your own risk.
Did. Officially, some still do. But it's now become a very much fake elitism, with a major push for inclusion and the mixing of ages and backgrounds in the same classrooms. The average level is in freefall too.
You're right. I'm in the EU, my family is mostly teachers and all too often I find myself outraged at the lack of vision, the incompetence, the ineptitude of my countries' officials to address the decline. Instead they opt for implementing the fad of the day(so-called '21st-century skills', 'critical thinking', 'social skills'). 25% of 15yo can not functionally read and/or do math well enough to properly function in society. This has been growing since the 70s and it still continues.
This story reminds me of the man behind the movie "Stand and Deliver" (1988), Jaime Escalante, who in the 80's made his school famous for generating students that passed the Advanced Placement Calculus exams.
1982 - 18 students passed, but by 1991 "the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570".
I like it when teachers teach far and beyond the boring old curriculum and inspire kids far beyond what they thought capable of themselves.
The union and administrators must have really hated his guts. The union is easily explained; he made other teachers and schools look bad. I wonder why the administrators didn’t want the students succeeding though.
> In his final years at Garfield, Escalante received threats and hate mail.[14] By 1990, he had lost the math department chairmanship. Escalante's math enrichment program had grown to more than 400 students. His class sizes had increased to over 50 students in some cases. That was far beyond the 35 student limit set by the teachers' union, which increased its criticism of Escalante's work.[14] In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570. The same year, citing faculty politics and petty jealousies, Escalante and Jiménez left Garfield.[14] Escalante found new employment at Hiram W. Johnson High School in Sacramento, California. At the height of Escalante's success, Garfield graduates were entering the University of Southern California in such great numbers that they outnumbered all the other high schools in the working-class East Los Angeles region combined.[15] Even students who failed the AP exam often went on to study at California State University, Los Angeles.[14]
> Angelo Villavicencio, one of Escalante's handpicked instructors, took over the program after Escalante's departure, teaching the remaining 107 AP students in two classes over the following year. Sixty-seven of Villavicencio's students went on to take the AP exam and forty-seven passed. The math program's decline at Garfield became apparent following the departure of Escalante, Villavicencio, and other teachers associated with its inception and development. In just a few years, the number of AP calculus students at Garfield who passed their exams dropped by more than 80%. In 1996, Villavicencio contacted Garfield's new principal, Tony Garcia, and offered to come back to help revive the dying calculus program. His offer was rejected.[14]
This is what happens when you encourage high achievement and select for it. It's not a model that's going to work everywhere.
It certainly helps that he develops an accelerated program but the effect of that program versus the selection process is the most important question of all.
While congratulations are in order for the team I don't know by what standards the writer judges them to be the "greatest". I have not heard of "Mu Alpha Theta" until reading this article. The standard (as in "most participated") math competition sequence is AMC 10/12, AIME, USA(J)MO, IMO. For teams Math Count (for middle schoolers) and ARML are also popular. The winners at these events are so exceptional it is hard to see a formula to their success other than extraordinary talents and efforts. That being said I did observe that in my son's public high school the math team members very much teach and inspire each other.
Sure the WINNERS are exceptional. They would be in any competition. The great part is that just preparing (practicing) makes people stronger problem solvers. Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork.
To echo the parent, though: the school is NOT bragging about success on AMC contests. Probably because they do not have it.
Similar prep with a strong group of incoming students does work to produce successful AMC and AIME results, I can attest.
> Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork.
Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning.
I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal.
And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.
I think we're much better off now, thanks to Art of Problem Solving's Alcumus, Richard Rusczyk, all the top-tier video lessons out there, etc-- along with just things like being able to hand out Khan practice for general math topics. We're getting much better at teaching top students how to solve hard problems (and, as a result, the AMC8/10/12, AIME, Olympiads, MathCounts, et al... are getting much harder-- these days if you want to prepare for the AMC8 you should be studying old AMC10 problems).
The same can't be said about overall societal performance in teaching the entire population.
If I'm reading the standings correctly, they are competing as a team from a single HS while most of the others are all-star teams composed of students from multiple different HSes in a state or area? And they finished higher than noted supermagnet TJHSST?
That is impressive, even if it looks like Lexington HS (MA) finished ahead of them. Are there any other similar school-based team math competitions (I know there are lots of individual ones)?
If you read the article he recruits kids when they are still in middle school, basically poaching the best students from various other schools to join his high school.
So it's essentially the same as an all-star team, but putting them all together in the same class and recruiting some university-level talent to help teach them.
The article tries to present it as an 'average school', but it's not an average class of kids. That said, it could definitely still help kids who wouldn't have that opportunity at their own schools.
I mean, these are still kids in Gainesville, and about 80-90% of them come from one middle school called Lincoln, the best magnet program in Gainesville. He doesn't really "poach" kids as much as develop the willing ones with his teaching methods while in middle school so they hit the ground running when they hit high school. But the regular Lincoln kids and many other middle schools in Gainesville would feed into Buchholz high school regardless.
The recruiting part actually starts in elementary (there's about 7 different schools in the area):
> Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and
steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school.
> Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus.
Sounds about right that he'd push them to the same magnet school if it's the only good one in the area.
> basically poaching the best students from various other schools to join his high school.
I wonder what carrots he dangled in front of the parents to get them to switch schools. Doing this for football is a big no-no and has resulted in a few scandals over the years in Texas.
Probably just the college placements are enough. The other 2 high schools in Gainesville sent 2 kids each to Harvard, Princeton, or MIT during 2018-2020, while Buchholz has sent 8 according to Polaris List. The math team has posted where their students have gone to college and there are a lot of Ivy League and other elite schools represented every year (MIT, Stanford, U Chicago). https://www.buchholzmathteam.com/college-placement
This sounds fun. I wish I had access to teachers/mentors like this in high school instead of teachers who simply wanted to maximize the average score on AP Calc exams; for those in Europe, it's quite easy to get maximum marks on AP Calc 1 and 2 if you are competent at math. You certainly don't need to be gifted.
I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time.
And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...
> In other words, it seems like a bad investment of time.
It's only a bad investment of time because of ineffective teaching methods. What these students need is rigorous yet effective instruction that doesn't simply expect them to "learn all the math by themselves" and actively helps them master the subject, in a step by step fashion. Unfortunately, this is very unpopular with current teachers because it's seen as "demeaning" the profession.
The article cites '66th in FL and outside top 1000' (from which I infer they are near 1000) as a demonstration of how ordinary they are.
There are about 27k high schools in the US, and 774 FL high schools. Bucholz high school has 2254 student and is the largest in Gainesville, per Wikipedia. All that to say that the article understates the starting point for this impressive endeavor.
I went to Eastside High School (also in Gainesville, FL, and bitter rivals) and was on the MAO team there. It was always so satisfying when you managed to beat the Buchholz team at competitions (even if it was their underclassmen), just because they were so dominant even a decade ago.
Weird to see Frazer still kicking, all the Eastside math teachers seem to move on pretty quickly.
Inspiring story, but the absence of statistical rigor bothers me. This little fact, in particular, begs more questions:
> Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar.
Is there any data comparing how these kids perform compared to other kids whose parents also work for a top-100-ranked university? (US News ranks University of Florida as #38 nationwide.) Do these kids do better or worse than their comparable peers nationwide?
Surely the students identified for the team have other talents as well, and being on the team makes pursuing them more difficult. How did being on the team shape who you became, where you went to college, what you studied, etc.? Any regrets?
This question asks exactly what I wanted to talk about regarding the team, and what people may not realize reading this article.
This may sound like a stretch, but the Buchholz math team and Mr Frazer are probably the single biggest life-changing factor in my life so far, and in a lot of my teammates' as well. The effect that Frazer's culture puts on his students over their (potentially) 7-year career with him through middle and high school just dominos throughout college and your career. The team shaped who I am, where I went to school, and what I studied greatly, which I am so unbelievably thankful for (which I will get into at the end).
Most of the smartest people I know are friends I made on the team. To put it simply, these kids are so driven that being able to pursue a talent outside of the math team is certainly feasible. Now, almost everyone on the math team is taking the hardest classes they can at the school, a lot of which doing so with almost perfect GPAs. But the math team is very time consuming, and I think a lot of the team members share the ideology that there isn't a more valuable talent to expand upon in high school than math.
I was unfortunately only on the team for 2 short years, because I moved to a different state (and the year we lost both state and nationals is the year I went to both competitions, unfortunate correlation). As smart as the kids are on the team, Frazer's game plan is so well made at this point, it teaches you how to win. This means success is more correlated to hard work than intelligence in most cases.
My biggest regret about being the team is not working harder. I really feel like I was lazy and didn't take it as seriously as I should have, but looking back I don't think it affected my trajectory much. Fortunately, after I moved I tried to keep the Frazer culture with me, made friends with the smartest people at my new school, and I matured and worked harder. Absolutely none of which would have happened without the math team.
I am now doing computer science at a top 10 school and interning at a large tech company this summer. I am extremely thankful for where I am, much of which I attribute to Mr. Frazer. Plenty other students have far more inspiring stories than I have, come from lower socioeconomic statuses than I come from, or ended up in a better school than where I ended up. Thanks for letting me write that.
For some, it's because Buchholz uses actual class time as team prep time, I think some schools can't get past the bureaucracy to allow that. For a month over the summer, we learned about 4 hours a day from the class above us / Frazer, then for another 4 hours taught the class below us.
I think the state/national runner ups, American Heritage has copied this in class teaching method, among other Frazer tactics.
We did take those, but the main focus of the math team is Mu Alpha Theta. I'm guessing it's a bit of a positive feedback loop of "we have the best material for MAO tests, and we place the highest in MAO competitions". Also, Frazer even writes tests for some regional MAO competitions that Buchholz competes in.
Probably one of the best things the math team has taught me after I left was to surround myself with people of the same desires, in this case, learning. I think that ideology truly paid off in spades throughout my life since then. I'd always worried about being "cool" in school, and I'd say I still try to find that work hard / play hard balance, as cliche as it sounds. The math team introduced me to people who weren't necessarily "cool", but wanted what I wanted: good grades, a good career, etc. Now, later on in my life, surrounding myself with the smartest people has made a massive positive impact on my life.
The content that Frazer teaches should be standard, flat out. The competition style of math has so many more practical applications than the shit they call common core in the state of Florida.
Now, we did all of Geometry and Algebra II (Frazer's competition courses, not just regular courses) in a year. When students are excited about learning, and you make it fun, you can really throw a lot of material at them.
But any part of Frazer's "system" outside of the content I think pretty irrelevant for regular teaching, like him using class time to teach competition material. That's just how math class is for every other kid. 8 hours a day for a month over the summer learning and teaching math? Hard to organize that without having a team, among other things.
I was in middle school, I did a math summer camp run by the team where they scout talent, then took a placement test at the end of the summer and scored pretty well on it. Was on the team starting 8th grade, would take classes at the high school.
Honestly, as early as I can remember learning math. I always did "math club" in school. My parents always stressed it and it always interested me. I would say I started loving math once I joined the Buchholz team though.
Not sure if there is really an "outside of the team" lol, but for a month over the summer, we learned about 4 hours a day from the class above us / Frazer, then for another 4 hours taught the class below us.
Reminds me of the math education system in my country when I was a kid, but it was all about the Math Olympiad. They found the most promising kids and invited them to form a club where they got instructed above and beyond the curriculum. Kids got to know each other and form friendships, got motivated by cooperation and competition. This is all besides regular school.
Great article, and raises the bar for what can be achieved at a young age. But it’s about building a winning team and not so much about broadly improving math education.
I believe his father and father-in-law were math professors (I did a little digging, because I live in the area and did Mu Alpha Theta to little success in high school).
I mean, the article explicitly talks about how they start by collecting pre-exiting individual excellence, there is never any pretence of this program creating excellence from average students.
There's definitely nothing telling about public education in a city with 20% black and 50% hispanic population being completely unrepresented on a team of dozens of kids. I'm sure that the "identifying talent" that's happening here is completely equitable and inclusive. I'm sure all the brown kids sitting in overcrowded classes are having a great time watching the white and asian kids go off to their special treatment with dedicated tutoring. This is exactly how our system of class based privilege perpetuates itself.
I have two kids. One of them was an "honor" student from 6th grade on.
The difference was one teacher. My younger one was tapped by their teacher for a special program in 5th grade that put her in a class with other "smart" kids for a day each week in 6th grade. From there, those kids blossomed to honors classes later.
For my other kid, the distractions in classrooms full of kids who didn't care about learning proved to be too much at times. The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting. It matters how much the kids in the class want to learn, as opposed to make fun of each other and the teacher, or be disruptive in other ways. The older one still did fine, has a degree and a job, but it was a struggle.
So, I get your point. I have strongly felt for a long time now that even average students should have received the experience my honor student did in 6th grade. It was a great break from the average day of going from class to class, broke up the monotony of standard curriculum, and provided those kids with a good foundation for thinking out of the box and learning to learn in a focused environment. It provided a clear pathway through honors curriculum in classrooms full of students and teachers who cared.
I want that for every kid, but with Republicans doing their damnedest destroy public education and the impact it's having on teachers' mental well-being (for those who can even be bothered to become teachers anymore, given the low pay and guaranteed bullshit from not just students but parents and the government itself), it's hard to imagine it becoming a reality in the short term.
> The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting.
I was consistently the teacher's pet in my English classes because I chose those to be my "normal" classes in high school because I thought they were boring. Even without putting in much effort, being quiet and actually able to answer the questions endeared me to my teachers.
The ancestor commenter is cynically pointing out that support systems are major factors in why the other students are more disproportionately not signaling potential to begin with
It is great that individuals picked are applying themselves and doing the work, it is noticeable this has some selective evolution towards some ethnicities pretty reliably, it is not recognizing how a deeper holistic solution can address the disparity in how other students can be motivated and presented with opportunities or how their home circumstance and support systems can be addressed
