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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (64724)	12/3/1999 2:23:00 AM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

Lizzie, Lowell High School is the only public school in San Francisco where admission is based on a combination of very high grades and very high test scores. While conceivably a child from a not-very-good junior high school could get into Lowell with all A's, he or she would also have to have very good test scores, so it's not really very egalitarian, and it was not designed to be. While I think all public high schools should be of high quality, I also think the needs of gifted high achievers should be addressed, so I don't really have a philosophical problem with schools like Lowell existing, except that the school district should open more schools like it so most college prep children do not have to attend private high schools. A lot of the parents are really sacrificing to send them there because there are simply no good public alternatives. In reality, when you have a heterogeneous student body it sounds good, but in reality all the high achieving children are tracked in totally different courses than the low achievers, and the groups don't mix at all. I don't really think this benefits the low achievers. I do think that massive efforts should be made in the first few years of school to identify learning problems, but as children grow up more it is of almost no use to have heterogeneous schools, because the slow children already feel like failures. I do think that it would be useful to tailor American schools more like European ones, where the college bound children stay in school longer and go to academic schools, and the children who are not interested in college, or are not suited for it, have the opportunity to learn useful trades and skills and join apprenticeship programs. Practical training for anything is almost nonexistent in American secondary schools, and this is really too bad, in my opinion.