alt Hacker NewsAgain, this is 100% armchair "specialist". If you want to know real expertise, you should _never_ listen to someone who said "I know, I've lived it". Living it does not make you an expert, it make you a biased person who think their particular limited experience can be generalised.
As a proof, you were coming with your genius idea "let's create per-level classroom". Did you even googled it? People have tried, with a scientific methodology, blind study and all, with absolutely no reason to lie and with different concurrent teams re-trying, hoping to gain from proving their competitors wrong, and yet reaching the same results. And their conclusion is that "per-level classroom" drags kids to the bottom and "mixed classroom" is just better for the kids.
You are telling me you have sooooo much expertise on the subject, but at the same time you felt head first in the first naive trap on the book.
The "I talk to parents", the "I've checked on the internet", the "I've asked ChatGPT", the "I've read a book", ... This is not expertise.
I pity the teachers who have to see you giving them lessons on things that they obviously know 100x better than you. Do you realise that when you were teaching 1-2 kids and talking to 5-10 parents, they taught HUNDREDS of gifted kids (you said yourself that in this school they have tens of those per year) and talked to HUNDREDS of parents. If what you went through gave you some expertise, then the teachers you have in front of you have 100x your expertise: they've done exactly what you've done, but 100x more than you.
As for the ending, it's so ridiculous. Why would I want to do something bad to your kid? We want the SAME thing: for the kids to get the best. You came and said "per-level classrooms are obviously the best answer". I quickly check and see "per-level classrooms is a stupid and naive idea, don't do that". Because I want to HELP your kid, I just say that maybe you should not assume you know all the answers (initially quite friendly, but the arrogance and the insults have slowly eroded that), when you apparently haven't read a book on the subject, assumed by default that the teachers are all stupid, and concluded that if anyone does not do as you say they are trying to hurt the children for no reason at all.
And this whole conversation has nothing to do with "discrimination". I SUPPORT organising classroom with the primary objective to be more useful for the students. I don't consider this being discrimination. The reason I don't think you are right is not because there would be "discrimination". I haven't said that anywhere. The reason I don't think you are right is because you are a parent with very limited expertise (a couple of children and some social network, that is all anecdotic data points) and you are proposing solutions that are naive and known to be stupid. But you are unable to even conceive that I'm not motivated by some kind of ideology. It tells so much about your capacity to analyse the reality.
Like these?
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739
> While the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150484
> Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants.
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/15528/patterns-determina...
Here's the real problem:
> we find positive effects on high-achieving students with no negative effects on low-achieving students, suggesting that tracking may increase inequality by raising the ceiling.
And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently. This is also a known thing: homeschooled students (i.e. students taught by "non-experts") tend to do better than public schooled students even with very little time investment. They are, charitably, acting like "expert beginners." Less charitably, they refuse to do the correct thing, and fall into weird memes like when they explicitly told kids not to use phonics-based reading strategies for 20 years.
And when talking about science, you need to take a step back and think about whether what you're saying is even plausible. Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her. That she would actually be pulled down by being in a group of peers that's at her level. What kind of mechanism would possibly produce that result? I can easily list mechanisms for the reverse. And just with some basic logic here, why do we let some kids take AP calculus and not keep them in algebra 1 over and over for years for their benefit?