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?
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.
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.
They definitely still exist: https://magnet.edu/
I don’t have much firsthand experience with them but there’s a known stereotype that, if an influential person wants their kid in one, they can find a way, even though it’s supposed to be strictly merit based. I believe most of them accept a certain percentage of poor kids, whether because there are some people in the school system who believe in what they’re doing, or merely to maintain the illusion of fair play, I couldn’t speculate. I’ve known some people who went to one and they didn’t seem to have benefited immensely from the privilege, though they generally seemed positive about them, the few times we discussed it.
My girlfriend’s girlfriend says that link is rich neoliberal propaganda, and 100% of the spots go to rich kids. She actually said there’s overwhelming evidence against the idea that a poor person could go to a magnet school through smarts alone, and that the only reason I was continuing to disagree with Her is to save face for earlier having been wrong about Spider-Man Homecoming’s plausibility.
Well, I won’t deny that that site is 100% propaganda, I was just checking that they were still around. I don’t know how evidence that a poor person couldn’t go to a magnet school would be validated, but that doesn’t comport with my limited experience. I have been aware of children being at magnet schools whose parents didn’t strike me as particularly wealthy or influential. Mostly fringey-artsy types whose kids wanted to go to the artsy school, or perhaps whose parents wanted that. We weren’t close enough friends that if they’d been secretly wealthy I’d have known about it, necessarily, but they really don’t strike me as the type to be able to arrange a backdoor deal to get their kid into a magnet school.
IDRK, but my observations lead me to believe that it’s more similar to what elite colleges do, i.e. bring in enough rich kids to keep the gravy train running but also just enough poor kids to prove their equality bona fides, rather than being 100% a paper mill.
I was a gifted kid schooled in NSW. My kid was schooled in QLD. I’ve never heard of these gifted schools.
I’m not gonna doxx Myself so I did some research on NSW instead
There are 17 fully selective high schools in NSW. Only high potential and gifted students can be enrolled in these schools through the selective high school application processes.
There are 27 partially selective high schools in NSW for entry in Year 7.
These schools have a mix of local area high school students who attend non-selective classes, and students placed through the selective high school placement processes who attend selective classes together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selective_high_schools_in_New_South_Wales
I guess they just didn’t test those of us in country towns too far from a selective school!
I know they exist but I have feeling it’s less than 50. There’s way for for profit private schools than anything else.
Haha, My girlfriend is a rich American. She says she went to a private school full of vapid jocks and instagram models. She would have preferred to go to a magnet school like in Spider-Man, but that’s not the kind of achievement her parents value, so she didn’t get much education during her education.
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.
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 .
You don’t seem to be very educated on the topic.
They’re not for geniuses. They do exist. They’re called magnet schools.
Basically it’s for people who actually want to learn
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.
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.
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.
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.
We don’t only learn in school. Fuck, I didn’t even go to school. Brilliant people are not brilliant because a school made them that way, they did it for themselves. Children’s lives are entirely different than they were when I was a child, it’s a holistic issue. They aren’t being exposed to the things they need to see. Like self-sufficient adults who aren’t consumers first, parents eventually.
Yeah, you’re right, kids should have educational experiences outside of school. But the problems of capitalism, which are very pronounced in America, are ruining that. Households now need to work 80 hours a week instead of 40, so children aren’t being looked after by their house-working parent. There is no house-working parent anymore. Children used to go outside to play, but the dangers of car pollution and car crashes have made outside inhospitable. So children are now more dependent than ever on school to teach them.
But that’s never what school was for. Genuinely. We’re gradually trying to retcon it into that, but a classroom is simply not how you take a chaotic toddler and produce a teenager who’s engaged in the world and desires to learn about it. It’s how you produce more consumers and workers. The desired end and the attempted means are totally disconnected.
I’d rather do a bad job of retconning a classroom into a place to teach political and media literacy, than have no such place in these children’s lives.
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.
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.
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.
Magnet schools able to admit, deny admission, and expel with greater ease, siphon off the best and the brightest from normal public schools, pulling down grades at those schools, which makes them easier to defund, or close, and leaves more students who are more expensive to educate.
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.
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.
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.
