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?
They exist. I was quite poor while my first 2 kids were in high school. Oldest got a scholarship to a private school, second went to a magnet ‘school within a school’ and both were admitted based on test scores and essays. Second 2 kids, one went to the school within a school academic magnet and the other to a performing arts magnet school. Academic was just grades and test scores they no longer required an essay; arts required an audition.
So not “gifted” per se - that’s the testing you have to put them through to get them in good public school classes in regular schools in grade 1-8, testing for potential, basically. Magnet school for those grades is allegedly random choice but you are correct it’s not all that random, it’s weighted. For high school it’s by achievement not potential.
I went to a magnet school in Florida. It was a “school within a school” in a public school. They’d bus you in from where ever in the county, instead of forcing you to go to your assigned school - except they stopped that a couple years in which made it a lot less accessible for many people. But it was free and admission was based on writing an essay.
Beyond magnet schools, there are private schools that students need to apply for and/or test into. Like magnet schools, there are a wide variety of them and some are crappy and religious, but a lot of others are essentially schools for smart kids that focus on getting them into good colleges (usually called prep schools when this is the main goal).
Some can be very expensive and cost more than many colleges, but because of that you can find ones with a ton of money (sometimes into the billions) that accept students based on their testing and application alone without considering their financial status, called need-blind acceptance (that article only mentions colleges but it applies to these private schools as well). If a student is accepted need-blind and can’t afford tuition the school covers the entire cost. Other schools that aren’t need-blind offer varying levels of financial assistance for students who are accepted.
In terms of sports, prep schools (especially the wealthier ones) tend to have a lot of different ones, even sports that aren’t usually offered in public schools (crew aka rowing is an example). Check out this list of sports from Phillips Academy, for example. College admissions in the US includes looking at “well-rounded” students, so competing in (time-consuming) sports while maintaining academic performance is one way to show your ability to handle time-management, etc. This means you might get kind of jocky type students, but they aren’t really the dumb variety you see portrayed in movies.
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.
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.
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!
What
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.
Seconding this explanation. It’s exactly right.
Rich folks can likely influence any situation but magnet != private school for rich kids.
That’s not to say there aren’t private schools for rich kids. There definitely are. But that’s not magnet schools, and it’s not where Spider-Man goes.
There was a whole scandal a few years ago where a bunch of people, including Aunt Becky from Full House, was caught paying to get her kid into Stanford. That’s university, not secondary; and maybe someone who wasn’t so splashy about everything might’ve done better. But it illustrates the point: we at least try to maintain the illusion of being meritocratic.
Depends on the state. The US is a very big place, and some states give pretty much no shits about education.
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*
It’s pretty easy to make a 5 second google search rather than assume anything you don’t want to hear is fake and declare to everyone that you have zero critical thinking skills.
The bottom line is schools can’t get the average student to even the most basic standards with the current situation. Spending more money on a hand full of kids that aren’t tanking their metrics isn’t worth it when no amount of funding can get the rest of the students over the intended finish line. That’s all before you get pushback from groups complaining about the equity aspect of performance based advanced education.
Gifted education programs and schools are a meritorious system that promotes individual exceptionalism. There is little support for it in a lot of the country.
Not so much “gifted” schools but “prestige” schools like Harvard or Yale where money speaks loudly.
I think those are universities. We’re talking about high school, like in Spider-Man Homecoming
Oh. My own experience is that there are “special” classes for the learning impaired. Never heard of any “genius” schools unless it’s fiction. I’m interested in the feedback to see what exists out there for the bright bulbs who don’t really travel the beaten path.
You don’t seem to be very educated on the topic.
Well, one thing is for sure, I’m no genius.
My own experience is that there are “special” classes for the learning impaired. Never heard of any “genius” schools unless it’s fiction
Special classes for “gifted” students within a school is/was common in larger districts. FWIW I never heard anyone in the programs, student or teacher, describe the students as geniuses .
They’re not for geniuses. They do exist. They’re called magnet schools.
Basically it’s for people who actually want to learn
What would be the point of gifted US schools.
Sick burn but decades of teaching the entire class at the worst-performing student’s level has produced a generation of illiterate young adults and is probably partially responsible for the rise of Trump. Different students need different levels of learning. If you take a kid with a mind for rocket science and force them to learn the basics of algebra three years in a row because their classmate doesn’t care about learning, that smart kid is gonna die inside and you get one less rocket scientist in the world. And then that kid is gonna become an Elon Musk fan and use Grok to AI generate child porn or something. That’s the current state of America.
I sure hope magnet schools exist.
The base principle you outline is applicable to most of life, even when washing your knickers most people know to separate the whites from the coloureds. That sounds a bit racist, maybe a better metaphor is when you make cheese you must remove the pure curd from the inferior whey to prevent contamination of the master substance. It went a bit Nazi that time, maybe stratification based on imposed intellectual criteria always goes a bit to the right.
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?
A lot of larger cities like New York and Chicago have magnet schools. They usually take a mix of merit students and endowment students, making it easy for rich people to buy their kids into them. Smaller cities and most towns have gifted and talented programs connected to public schools instead of their own schools. Your polycule is correct that they’re usually just resume builders for rich kids, but it is totally possible for a poor white kid from Queens to get accepted through the merit track.
Stuff in NYC is frequently an outlier and only exists that way there and it doesn’t really mean anything. Most places it’s a different class not an entire school.
