You seem to have a particular worry about administrators deciding the fate of children by thinking they wouldn't challenge them by placing them in the correct track, or that the children would be discriminated against based on their race or social status.
Just a quick FYI: this isn't 1850. There are solutions to problems like these. For one, we can provide aptitude tests. This would allow schools to decide which track is right for a student in an objective way. If a parent disagrees with the placement, they could request a certain placement, too. It's not meant to be segregation, it's meant to serve as teaching to students at a level that's challenging to them, but not unfair. Everyone is NOT created equal, and some excel at different things. To package everyone into the same exact track is ignorant at best, but probably just stupid. In fact, it's unlikely you'd have any student wholly within a single track. It makes more sense for some to take much more advanced courses in a subject that they excel at and in lower tracks for other subjects.
And honors/AP separation is approximately correct. But AP has become even simpler since I was in HS (8 years ago). I looked up the AP exams I took to find that they have been simplified. The AP AB CS exam for instance no longer exists because it was deemed too difficult. I got a perfect score on it, and I ended up getting a math degree because I went to a state school and the CS curriculum was trivial for me. Having later taken Stanford courses and taught myself the curriculum used at MIT, they would've both been good fits. The only reason I didn't pursue either was the cost.
Which aptitude tests do you think are effective? And if you buy into the objectivity of aptitude tests, how do you explain phenomenon like the massive racial gap in SAT scores [1]?
I wasn't referring to anything such as the SAT. I don't think any existing standardized test would be sufficient. There's not ONE test that will tell you where to put someone. Instead, they should take multiple tests in different subjects to determine their aptitude in each, including the arts. Then a customized course plan can be made for the student.
This should only be considered for placement and re-placement every year or every few years. It shouldn't be the end-all. If a student feels they aren't challenged but would be better suited in more difficult classes, or feels their current ones are too difficult, they should be able to request a transfer. The same goes for the parents.
The problem with existing tests is that they try to optimize for the wrong thing. Standardized testing tends to try to set a bar for all students at a certain grade level (not at a certain educational level, as some people may well continue learning into their 20s, or may be done with "high school" level subjects at 15, it's different for every person). Because a lot of things are based on the pass/fail rates of these tests, they're constantly adjusted downward to reach a certain pass percentage, which is horrendous and doesn't actually say anything about any of the students that take them. They also result in people being taught specifically how to pass the tests without necessarily being permitted to learn what they want to learn. I'm also not a big fan of how "top" schools currently filter out people based on tests like these and how everyone's expected to be college ready at 18.
Sometimes parents don't care. You realize that right? Sometimes parents fall into the same traps and don't help in opening up doors for their children. This is extremely common by the way. It's not that I think it is 1850; this happens every day. You may think it sounds crazy but there are plenty of kids that think that vocational jobs are their only options, very early on in life and I think these decisions are made for a number of reasons that may be faulty, especially so-called "aptitude" tests that young people take. People are not always who they were at 11, 12, or 13.
As for the business of the honors/AP separation. It's just silly. There are plenty of different combinations of non-honors-non-AP/honors/AP students in no-college/"state college"/top-tier permutations. Your story, I guess is fine, but not to be flippant, is not really signifying of anything as far as this is concerned. I don't think the proposed formula is a real thing.
You seem to be exclusively concerned with those "late bloomers" who have both their parents and the system against them. Now:
1) Like the parent's comment said, nobody's trying to prevent these kids from succeeding. It's the role of the education system to detect these kids, and have them transfer if necessary to the most appropriate section.
2) You don't seem to care about the brightest students whose potential is dampened by being bored in class, and who end up not going to the best colleges because they didn't push themselves as a result. Nor do you seem to care about those who don't want, or don't have the abilities to go to college and who have to spend years being miserable, lagging behind the rest of the group.
Also what about the kids that would bebefit from vocational training, but because they receive none are forced to take minimum wage jobs after high school, or after dropping out of college.
Also i graduated with honors from a state university, and only wish i could earn the type of income those in vocational jobs do.
I think this is very misleading, If you want to go into one of those vocational positions are receive training in them, what barriers do you really have? Whatever they are, I assure, the barriers are much more for the reverse. If you have graduated with honors from a university, I think becoming a welder is well within your spectrum of opportunities. Also, while you may like propping up this argument or bring up some rich plumber that owns his own business, I think this dismisses people in these positions that barely earn a living enough to support their families.
I think this group potentially represents a very large percentage of kids. I think this group represents a large amount of adults currently "stuck" in their situations, now.
For #1, I think the education system has failed these kids in a very significant manner. Again, I think a large amount of people that feel there is no way out of labor jobs (and no this is not a slight against labor or a propping up of similar dead end jobs in offices but if you think everyone vocation jobs are content with what options their educational circumstances have given them, I think you may be delusional).
As for #2.1, I never claimed that at all. I do not claim that students should not be able to have separate sections to allow more advanced students to move at a brisk pace. I simply claim we should not throw the other kids out of the academic track and into a vocational track; this is a completely different issue. One point is about pace and the other is about not being on the track at all.
As for the last point, we're not talking about deep analyses of Kant and Hegel or quantum physics here. We are talking about high school, if I remember correctly. Many kids are miserable in high schools because of factors much different from being forced to read Animal Farm or having to factor quadratic equations. Further, if you don't think there are clear skews toward vocational tracks from particular socioeconomic classes or you think that is just so happens that those kids from those classes are exactly those that should be in vocational tracks then I don't think you really understand the matter at all.
I think it is interesting on HN when we see views about how "everyone should learn to program" or things like "we need to prepare for knowledge based economy and citizenry" or "labor jobs will be replaced by robots" we get one common theme of views but when this issue of splitting tweens and teens into educational tracks that will affect the rest of their lives we get this popular divergent view as the norm; seems like a very interesting "contradiction."
So why can't it be an ongoing thing? Counselors are a thing, and should help a student through the process and decide for themselves whether their placement is right for them. It should never be a "this is what you're taking, period!" If a student feels like school is too easy, they should be encouraged to make it known and be moved to something more appropriate for them. If it's too hard, the same applies. And if the parent does want to get involved, then it should be at the discretion of the counselor whether or not the student or parent's request should be met. This way we have a filter against parents who would otherwise impede their children for any given reason.
I don't think the honors/AP thing is silly. I think it's a system that tries very much to do (without too much success) what I am suggesting here. You have a swath of classes that are honors-level, and a swath that are AP-level above that, and then the normal classes. I wasn't AP-level in everything, nor was I honors-level in everything. It was a clear mix. But it's very much non-standard and very awkwardly done right now.
Now, no one is claiming there should be a stigma on a lower level at all. Just because someone is at AP-level (for lack of a better name at the moment) in a subject and would do well at a higher end university studying that subject doesn't mean someone who's not even at the honors level wouldn't also be able to go to the same school for the same subject a few years later when they're actually ready for it.
I feel awkward about the whole highschool -> college thing. It's just about continued education. College isn't necessarily "higher" education, as it could very much be an extension of high school for later bloomers. As a society, I believe we think about these things all wrong, and we put stigmas where there should be none.
But I do agree that there should be some way for students to be protected from indifferent, apathetic, or malicious parents.
You seem to have a particular worry about administrators deciding the fate of children by thinking they wouldn't challenge them by placing them in the correct track, or that the children would be discriminated against based on their race or social status.
Just a quick FYI: this isn't 1850. There are solutions to problems like these. For one, we can provide aptitude tests. This would allow schools to decide which track is right for a student in an objective way. If a parent disagrees with the placement, they could request a certain placement, too. It's not meant to be segregation, it's meant to serve as teaching to students at a level that's challenging to them, but not unfair. Everyone is NOT created equal, and some excel at different things. To package everyone into the same exact track is ignorant at best, but probably just stupid. In fact, it's unlikely you'd have any student wholly within a single track. It makes more sense for some to take much more advanced courses in a subject that they excel at and in lower tracks for other subjects.
And honors/AP separation is approximately correct. But AP has become even simpler since I was in HS (8 years ago). I looked up the AP exams I took to find that they have been simplified. The AP AB CS exam for instance no longer exists because it was deemed too difficult. I got a perfect score on it, and I ended up getting a math degree because I went to a state school and the CS curriculum was trivial for me. Having later taken Stanford courses and taught myself the curriculum used at MIT, they would've both been good fits. The only reason I didn't pursue either was the cost.