alt Hacker NewsBut you were saying "there are too many high performing kids in my daughter's cohort and they don't have enough resources for her to get any support". If HP needs less resource, then I would think that the more there is HP kids, the more your daughter will get resource.
I'm still not sure of your argument. You are asking to split into two classes: one with 25-30 kids (the "smart" group), which includes your daughter, and one with 15 kids (the "dumb" group). But you choose the threshold so that your daughter makes it into the "smart" group. Would you also be happy if they decide to do one class with 25 kids and one class with 25 kids, and your daughter is in the "dumb" group? And if you had to choose between only two choices: either the status quo or your kid in the "dumb" group, will you prefer the second one for the benefice of kids in the "smart" group? It feels like you are asking to redistribute for the benefit of some kids only (and in particular, yours), even if it has bad consequences on other kids. I would not use the term "discrimination" in this situation, but I think it is a terrible state of mind. You need to understand that you are not special: if the school was applying your idea, other parents whose kids are hurt by this idea will come to them and complain like you've done, and if they accepted to change things for you, they have no reason to not accept to change things for them.
I also hear your explanation about how your kid progressed well when homeschooled and all that. But you seem to jump to the conclusion that the difference is due to failure of the school or the presence of lower performing kids. That does not seem obvious to me, especially when you explain that you were not giving her more than half hour of instruction in a day and that she is years ahead (not that it is bad, but that's probably a better explanation why she is not flourishing at school).
In short, I really don't think it is a good example that shows that people who tend toward NIMBY or pro-vouchers are reasonable people.
I didn't say that; they said that to me. The fact that HP needs fewer resources is precisely why it's insane. It's exactly my complaint.
And yeah even e.g. 28-22-18-16-16 would be better. I'm not claiming I'm special; I'm taking at face value what they told me that my kid is bottom of the pack of the smart kids (I'm actually skeptical of that claim, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to my point). You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? Like, if we take at face value that there's an entire classroom worth of kids who are multiple years ahead of curriculum, why aren't we teaching them at their level? Even if my kid isn't in that classroom. The school is well aware that they have multimodal distribution in ability, so why aren't they designing the class composition around that? They know the statistics better than I do, so I'm sure that they could fit it much better than these numbers I'm throwing out, but even the numbers I'm saying would be a dramatic improvement, and again, I'm asking for fewer resources allocated to my child and more for the lower performing children.
You've done a fantastic job illustrating the type of person who thinks this is an unfair proposal (poor baseball field box analogy and all), and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom 10th percentile pace, which is what the current system actually does.