Note that I am a fan of gifted classes, but to answer your question:

1. If you pull out gifted kids from classes with simply “above average” kids, you lower the ceiling of what it means to be “the best”. As a result, the above average kids may not push themselves as hard/far. This concept is common in sports as well — the competition yields higher results.

2. The class that is left, usually an honors class, ends up moving much more slowly. A dirty little secret of teaching is that the pace of a class is limited to roughly the ability level of the bottom third of the class. Any faster, and you have lost so many people that the class can’t self-correct via peer interaction. Any slower, and you cause so many of the high performers to lose interest that motivation becomes an issue. When you pull the gifted kids out of, for example, an honors class, the level of the bottom third of that class often drops precipitously.

I personally don’t think that these are good reasons to eliminate gifted classes. I think it points to the need for more effective/efficient differentiated instruction. But that would require good teachers and good administration, and imho those things are extremely difficult to have at scale.

What usually happens, due to student teacher ratios being a thing, is that the honors class is replenished with lower ability students from the “regular” (i.e., non-honors) class, so the average is brought down fairly substantially.

Note that all of this is a non-issue if you are only pulling a few kids out of a school to go to a magnet high school or something similar.

An example of this can be seen in Japan where the gifted and motivated students are moved into magnet schools for high school, but there is relatively little negative impact on the regular high school, while the magnet high school students get an eduction that pushes their intellectual boundaries.

The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers. Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.

You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job - somehow, it is a given that both students and teachers should always be left to "discover things by themselves".

I think you’re talking in theory and not practice.

In reality, one of two things (or both) happens.

1. They pull from the “slow” class. Different places call it different things, and it’s not special ed, but it’s distinctly low levels of education. The “slow” class doesn’t benefit due to it basically serving the role of child care rather than education.

2. The “regular” class is effectively a slow class, so same as above, there is very little educating happening, just child care.

Ah, but the people getting moved into the slowest actual education benefit because they go from no education to some education, right?

No again. The modal outcome is that these threshold folks are given passing grades while learning very little, all while making the experience frustrating for the student and the teacher.

> You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job

I have seen these teachers and its potential effectiveness, but only in special ed. The biggest pay offs seem to be in elementary school with basic/fundamental literacy and numeracy.

As grade level increases, the impact of this instruction decreases substantially in terms of impressiveness largely due to limited scope.

> The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers.

I agree with this, but not for the reasons you give.

> Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.

First, classes with highly skilled students are not necessarily easier. They are only easier if the teacher makes few changes to the curriculum to adjust to the class (basically lack of time or teacher laziness). Gifted classes in particular can be challenging for teachers who think that they want to teach the smartest kids because often some of the students will know more (sometimes a lot more) than the teacher about the subject. This can create very awkward moments (note that this phenomenon can also be seen at universities with students and adjuncts, sometimes even at elite schools).

Second — this is another “secret” that I think covid made less of a secret — the main function of most lower level classes beyond basic literacy and numeracy in elementary school is state-supported child care.

In reality, especially in high school, there is very little learning going on in the lower end classes. The students don’t care about the content, the students’ parents don’t care about it, and their peer groups don’t care about it. The only people who care are the teachers and admins due to standards states have set and funding tied to testing to those standards. There is essentially no product-market fit to use terms that most HNers might understand. The important thing is that the kids have a place to go while the parents work. These are terrible classes to teach.

The actual way to fix this, imho, is to meet the students and their families where they are at. Specifically, introduce them to skill sets that they may actually find useful and/or interesting. It would be ideal to pair this up with co-op working opportunities. Note that this system largely exists in Japan (where they do tracking), so this is not all just theoretical conjecture.

There are a few problems with this system.

One issue is that this type of education can be difficult to create and maintain, because the content could vary widely from school to school — a school in rural Iowa would probably focus on different skills than a school in Brooklyn. This also would make it difficult to measure, so only the local community would really know if it was working (that’s ok, imho).

Another issue is that this type of education done properly is rife with socioeconomic and race issues. For example, if you are teaching a student sales in a coop environment where they actually do sales, it’s probably prudent to teach them something like register shifting so that they can adjust their language to their audience. I will leave it to the reader to figure out why that is a minefield in the US (but probably shouldn’t be).

Apologies for the wall of text, but I think that this is an interesting topic that is poorly understood by many/most highly educated Americans. This is especially true of a lot of HNers who seem to have largely experienced schooling from a middle/upper-middle class perspective (specifically, a largely college-bound school/community).

I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with. So the incentives I pointed to in my previous comment are fully at work, and all the more so if you make the tracking more fine grained. Special ed actually helps by bringing better-trained (and more highly-paid) teachers into the picture in a way that's institutionally provided for.

You're right that a more vocational curriculum would also help some students, but that's hard to implement for the reasons you point out, and still doesn't address the underlying issues wrt. more "academic" subjects, which tend to suffer.

I guess this is a chicken-and-egg problem. The best teachers don’t want to be there because there are few opportunities to teach, again mostly due to student and community ambivalence. There are positive examples like those seen in the movie Stand and Deliver, but those kinds of teachers are super rare, and often the powers-that-be stack the deck against them (administrators, community, peers, etc.).

Fwiw, one can see expert teaching in low-level non-special ed classes by looking at folks researching low SES education. Most of the outcomes are basically one level of classroom failure improving to a slightly different level of classroom failure (mostly due to relatively low time on task and general ambivalence in the student and community populations).

In general, the scope of what a good teacher can do is relatively limited unless a few conditions exist:

1. Students are relatively similar in terms of ability level — that is, no wide outliers. This is not an issue if each teacher has only 3-4 students, so basically each student will get tailored instruction.

2. The students and their communities value education.

3. Relatively low student-teacher ratios. Note that good teachers get better outcomes than bad teachers even when the student-teacher ratio is bad, but the overall impact is often significantly less.

Anyway, thanks for the comments. I haven’t stretched my mental legs on this topic in a while.

Fairness (in the sense of trying to create a level playing field and make sure nobody has unfair advantages) is important to the extent that something is a competition.

This means people who see education as competition will care about fairness - either they will want things to be truly fair or they will want any unfairness to be in their favor.

So from this point of view, special classes for kids who are already doing better can be seen as an unfair advantage (especially because there's plenty of real bias involved in determining which kids actually end up on those classes).

I think we need to fix the biased selection process and make it more possible for more kids to benefit from advanced learning opportunities, especially kids whose parents don't have the resources to take them out of public school to do something more individualized.

Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.

Of course the idea that this is a bad thing (as opposed to being exactly how a merit-based system is supposed to work) is based on presupposing that higher performance was the result of unfair discrimination in the first place.

It's clear that diversity programs lead to the intake of those who are worse test takers. Yet companies who hire more diverse people correlate to companies which have better financial outcomes for investors. Yet school systems systemically put certain students who cover lots of material and do well on tests into special classes, put them in the best schools, put them into the best jobs, in spite of this observation. These students, so the idea of merit goes, will be more productive and the benefits they have to society will trickle down to the rest, yet in practice what we see in society is a society stratified where those who are part of communities where there are fewer good test takers are disadvantaged.

My contention is more fundamental, it's an attack on the very validity of the testing itself, and testing determines who gets into programs like gifted classes. Testing in practice has the purpose of discrimination in favour of an elite few, is inherently contentious and ripe for political assault.