NYC “Ed-Opt” schools reserve spots for students along academic ability bell curve

[GMTplus7]

Would you enroll your kids in a school that deliberately enrolls kids of diverse academic ability?
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/failure-ed-opt-schools/424398/

Using an admissions model that experts have called a “triumph of educational engineering,” these high schools are set up to enroll students along a neat academic bell curve, reserving spots for applicants at different academic rungs…

The approach, which is called educational option, or “ed opt,” dates back to the 1970s, but it has been held up recently as a tool for integrating schools. Last month, the education department said it was expanding the number of ed-opt schools as one step to make its high schools more diverse.

…the city settled on its current goal that 16 percent of incoming students should be low-performing, 68 percent average, and 16 percent top-performing

[Consolation]

Essentially that is what one does when one chooses any decent local public school.

As long as they actually serve ALL kids’ needs, including the 16%, it sounds reasonable.

[GMTplus7]

Conventional public schools don’t RESERVE SLOTS for kids of particular academic ability.

[ucbalumnus]

However, conventional public schools often end up that way, because students of all academic abilities reside in their attendance zones.

For schools with such a distribution, it is preferable for them to be large, so that the tail ends of the distribution will be sufficiently numerous for the school to have suitable academic offerings for them.

[Consolation]

No, they don’t reserve them, but that’s usually the way it ends up.

And they MAY reserve them at the class level. The official placement policy of our local public elementary schools was to create balanced classes using cards that identified students only by certain characteristics: current teacher (they didn’t want large clumps of kids moving forward together each year), male/female, G/T, special needs of various kinds, and several of academic strata in the middle. Then they’d turn the cards over, and find out what they had.Some adjustments were made based on personal issues/needs.

Did this work well? Generally, I guess. It mostly kept parents from lobbying for specific teachers, for good or for ill.

Part of the G/T pull-out program was supposedly to cluster G/T kids, but often the “cluster” consisted of two kids, which didn’t do much good.

[musicprnt]

The real question is what do they do for those in the top and bottom 16%? One of the reasons they are doing this is obvious, especially in city areas you often end up with schools in some parts of the city that are full of the really bright to good learner levels, and the rest of the public schools seem to be the dumping grounds for the problem kids, the ones with learning disabilities, the ones from troubled backgrounds, the very poor and so forth, and in many cities, including NYC, you often have where the best schools have limited diversity. In a city like NYC, where so many of the kids at the bottom tend to come from poor, minority backgrounds with a number of issues facing them, such a distribution is probably thought to prevent the situation they often face, where an inner city school basically is all kids with problems, and the distribution might be 20% in the middle and 80% struggling.

The problem with programs like this (which was one of the arguments against tracking students,about the need for diversity), is that it assumes that a mix of students like this will automatically make the school better simply for their being a mix. The problem is that like in most schools, the top and bottom 16% are left to fend for themselves, while the school teaches to the middle. Pull out programs that consolation mentioned don’t work, they usually don’t really do much for the top kids while the school can say they are doing something and often schools don’t have the resources to handle the bottom 16%. j