So I’m Australian, and here in Australia we have schools for gifted children, where admissions are based purely on standardised test results. Near the end of primary school you go to a special place to take a test, and the test is designed to measure logical thinking and mental flexibility rather than academic experience. And if you score highly, you go to a special school with smart students of all different backgrounds.
And I liked Spider-Man Homecoming in large part because Peter Parker goes to a “magnet school”, which I’m told is the American equivalent. And it doesn’t have any dumb jock types; the school bully is a little Indian brat with rich parents. It felt like a more modern take on high school tropes than all the high school movies where nerds wear bow ties that feel like the writer grew up in the 50s.
Anyway, half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy from queens could make it into a gifted school in our world, based purely on academic achievement. I’m aware that the American system is less fair and money plays a much bigger role, but I thought there was at least a chance that a genius kid could beat the system and get into a good school with good grades.
Do magnet schools exist? Is it all just lies by the rich?
Locally my school system had what they called accelerated courses which were called AP at the senior level where you took an AP exam to get college credit. There were also L classes that were the opposite. So based on your grades and test scoring you had the choice of 3 classes but one was the simple class, one was the typical, and one was advanced. In some cases like math it would go further as you could have an senior in the freshman L class lets say. Our state had a special math and science academy that did not do grade level 9 and to get into it you had to be recommended by a teacher and apply. It was a boarding school downstate. I know it because I was recommended but did not get in. I may have never finished the application. They did not give you all that much time.
half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake
US magnet schools are real, although controlled by the local school district rather than the federal govt. They tend to be organized around subject (STEM, performing arts, etc) rather than cognitive gift per se . One might argue that a pre-law/pre-med magnet could have substantial overlap with cognitive ability.
Services for the cognitively “gifted”, to the degree they exist, tend to be located within a given school. They have a special curriculum, the flipside of one might have for kids who are cognitively challenged.
and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy
I assure you that isn’t true, both from direct experience and from working in magnets. Rich folks can likely influence any situation but magnet != private school for rich kids.
it doesn’t have any dumb jock types
They typically don’t have competitive sports teams so any jock-ness is individual rather than collective. Kids geographically local to a magnet can often attend automatically so there is a subset of Normals at a magnet, including jocks.
Yes. I went to a magnet school.
This school had both normal classes and magnet classes.
I was very intimidated by the magnet classes, so I never applied until my last year. When I did get into the smart classes, I realized they weren’t necessarily more difficult. The biggest difference was that the kids who didn’t want to be there and constantly distracted the class were absent, so we were able to get more done every day.
Also, the teachers are generally better (less likely to get a Football coach who teaches on the side). But the curriculum is the same.
I was pissed that I wasn’t in those classes sooner.
Damn, this just led me down a rabbit hole that made me discover that 48% of Australian high school kids go to private schools … What’s going on over there? It’s like 5-9% in the US and Canada.
are you sure that means the same thing? i’m pretty sure in britain “private school” actually means a school run by the state, which americans would much more sensibly call a public school.
This was from world bank data:
As a low income white boy from Queens myself, I can say with confidence yes they totally exist. I can’t speak for the rest of the country but in NYC there are a bunch of public/free magnet schools, that you get into on merit alone. Many years ago I tried to get into Bronx science high school but my grades weren’t good enough, so I ended up having to go to a standard NYC public high school.
Yeah, the NYC specialized high schools require middle school students to get a certain score on a standardized test, the SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test), for admission. These specialized high schools get prioirty funding from the city, on account of their high college admissions rate, but I can tell you as someone who went to Stuyvesant that it being a better school is a crock of bullshit.
Most of what I learned at Stuy was how to take tests really well. It is true that Stuyvesant students have a better acceptance rate to colleges and such, but that is not on account of the higher quality education, but instead because of the brand name of Stuy and specialized high schools like it. It’s a nonsensical ouroboros. Colleges accept specialized high school alumni because they are better than average. These alumni are better than average because colleges accept them at higher rates.
The way Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech accomplish this is by teaching students how to take tests really well. Tests every week for every subject. Test taking strategies discussed in every class. Test answer analysis based on previous tests in all the AP classes. When I was in high school, it was common sentiment that an SAT score under 2000/2400 was worthless. Nobody cared what you were learning, only what the results were because those results got you into college. High school was seen just as a path to college, which was a path to financial enrichment.
And again, the way you got into these schools was theough a test. Well to do families like mine paid for after school programs that drilled test taking strategies and practice relentlessly. My university educated parents spent all their free time and money teaching me how to test well. As a middle school student, I spent 4 hours a day after school with test prep. This time only increased as a high school student. Again, not really learning the subject matter, but simply test preperation. My background gave me an unbelievable advantage in getting accepted to one of these schools, of which Stuyvesant has the highest score requirement. So yes, one can get into these schools based on merit alone, but background plays an much larger role in the acceptance rates. It is an extension of how the elite private colleges work in the USA.
Aw man I’m gonna rub you in My girlfriend’s girlfriend’s face
My girlfriend has a fictive Petra Parker headmate who’s from a parallel universe and they tried to use her experiences at a shitty public school with cockroaches and asbestos as evidence that poor people can’t go to magnet schools. But I’m gonna tell them Petra Parker’s memories from a parallel universe don’t mean shit against a low income white boy from this universe’s Queens!
Keep in mind NYC is a different world than the rest of the country, but yeah I totally knew a bunch of people who were lower income who got accepted to magnet schools. In NYC at least, magnet schools are filled with TONS of lower income smart/gifted students. That part of Spider-Man was totally based on reality.
If you start to bring up parallel universes, there may be a parallel universe where Petra Parker goes to shitty school.
The animated Spider-Man movies has Miles go through an internal crisis where he tries to flunk out of one of these schools. Maybe Petra does the same or maybe chooses/doesn’t take the test to get in.
You can also have an alternate world where Petra gets excluded for some reason. Maybe the NYC bankruptcy goes worse and these schools vanish or a mayor puts a fee to them which Petra can’t pay for.
A magnet school is just a school that will take students from anywhere in the district instead of only students that live nearby. Some require tests to attend, but others do not.
But yes, there are public schools for gifted students that admit purely based on academic merit and exam scores. In theory, a rich student would not be able to buy their way in. In practice, having a tutor who can coach a child on exam specifics is a very large advantage.
Depends on the state. The US is a very big place, and some states give pretty much no shits about education.
The Boston area definitely has some exam schools. Boston Latin is the oldest.
I went to a magnet school in FL. Magnet schools exists but I don’t believe it has much to do with being gifted or money.
When I went, as long as you had 2 / 3 gpa ( B / C avg) you got to sign up and stay in the program (2 gpa per year to stay). Didn’t have to do anything else to sign up or stay in the program, as long as you had a pretty mid grade average and there were spots to be in it, bar was set low but could have just been a FL thing.
Looking back at how many people I was in those classes with, I only recall about 5 people actually go into the specific field the magnet was for personally.
There are occasionally private schools that cater specifically to gifted children but they area somewhat rare.
Many public schools have gifted programs to identify and foster the education of gifted students but they are generally being cut in most places and outright banned in some areas.
The overall trend in the US is to pass students who can’t read, write or do basic math. There is no real push to care about high achievers.
generally being cut in most places
*citation needed*
Yes the US does.
There are public schools that kids have to apply for and there are a number of private schools that kids have to apply for.
Magnet schools are not fake nor are they only for the rich. A buddy of mine who is an electrician, his daughter applied and is starter her freshmen year at one this year.
One thing you need to understand it that under the American Federal system, each state is responsible for its schools and each local county runs its own Board of Education. So, you can have two high schools a few miles apart where one spends $5 million on a football stadium and the other spends $5 million on a science lab.
New York City has Bronx Science and Stuyversant High Schools that require special tests to get accepted. There’s also Music and Art, Art and Design, and other elite schools.
One of my kids went to a magnet school for performing arts. They’re public schools, and they don’t cost extra, but you do have to apply for them if you don’t live in the immediate area and there’s an element of competition to get in.
The idea behind magnet schools is that you can improve the overall academic performance of a school if you increase the diversity of the economic and academic backgrounds of the students. Schools in the US are tied to a geographic area, which in turn is generally correlated with income - poor areas tend to have bad schools with low funding; richer areas have much better schools with better funding. With magnet schools the state/school district/whatever will take a struggling school, pump a bunch of extra funding into it, and give it some sort of academic theme (e.g. visual arts, performing arts, STEM, etc.) with the goal of attracting gifted students from outside to come to the school.
The idea behind magnet schools is that you can improve the overall academic performance of a school if you increase the diversity of the economic and academic backgrounds of the students.
If you want to talk about the underlying idea behind almost every major educational reform in the United States in the last forty years, it is this: to destroy public education. If it is not the formal intent, it becomes the practical effect as the only way to get political support is to get support from Republicans, and Republicans hate public education on every level it is possible to hate something and will support it only on the conditions that it deteriorates public education.
The conservative project is to trigger a doom cycle where high performing students leave a school, that school performs more poorly, more parents are motivated to have their children leave poorer performing school, so more students leave; eventually you have two schools: one with high performing students, one with low performing students; and the low performing schools probalby cost more to operate, because they are going to have a higher percentage of special education students requiring more support. Now, having pulled high performing students out, those schools have less political support in their communities are and easier to defund.
Also see: “school choice” as a conservative talking point. Also see: divide and conquer.
The magnet schools in New York City were founded well before school rankings were published, with most of them founded before 1950.
I’ve met several students from these schools and they’ve mostly spoke about these high schools with praise. They got to go to a school with intellectual peers instead of being an outlier.
Yes.
I’m not saying magnet schools are bad in theory, just in the political climate we are in they are politically advantageous to people who want to destroy public education.
Oh, that’s really informative! So if someone lived in the rural USA and got a really high score for the aptitude test, they could go to a magnet school, but only if their parents knew about it and applied and could afford transport?
Public Schools in the US are generally funded and organized at the State level. US schools in different states (or even schools between US cities and rural areas in the same state) are a totally different experience.
A large district like NYC (the largest in the country by enrollment) is big enough to offer several of these magnet High Schools, which you need to take a test to get into, and are highly competitive. Small rural and suburban districts don’t have the same resources, but often have advanced science and math tracks that can get those kids ready for STEM majors in college. Many US districts also have partnerships with the local Community College, where high school kids who take college-level classes while in high school can get College credit for them. A smart kid who takes advantage of these can knock a semester’s worth of credits out while in High School.
The USA doesn’t have a system of magnet schools. Some parts of the country, including New York City, do.
New York City’s school district has several high schools that you have to a test to get into that high school or have an artistic portfolio. These tests are very competitive and the high schools are geared to help funnel the brightest of New York City’s youth into college. There is no tuition to get in and these high schools are seen as a gateway to the best colleges in the world.
Most school districts in the USA don’t have these public magnet schools.
I believe most of the most populous school districts do have them.
And there’s a wide range of approaches to gifted ed.
I think it depends. Education is handled at a local level for the most part. That’s why school quality varies so much based on the income level of the area. I know NYC has such a system, but I don’t think my school district in the suburbs did. My parents did take me to go look at some special school when I was young, but it was nowhere close to us and I assume private. I didn’t like the place so I didn’t end up going and stayed in our local public schools.