The results cited in the article suggest that either the answer is yes, or in fact "marginal students" are perfectly capable students who were being passed over.
The text of the article further suggests that many of the students who scored well on qualifying exams weren't taking the classes because they didn't have the parental involvement or default assumption that they would take it.
(Note that the opt-out group was selected from the general population based on the results of an exam; it wasn't a population-wide opt out. I suspect from your comment you didn't see that?)
students definitely are not all equally capable in one aspect for sure: their ability to hire or provide private tutoring outside of school hours. Cutting access to state-funded programs (such as algebra classes in middle school) just means the rich children get even more of a leg up on college admissions and life in general.
This isn’t what they did. What they did was automatically enroll kids with higher test scores into advanced classes, making it opt-out instead of opt-in.
Judging by the lack of hard numbers and some statistical fuckery they’re doing - no.
> Within two years of this policy, 94% of eligible students are taking these classes.
Preselection.
Additionally, about half of the entire student body took the advanced class.
Considering the fact that the advanced class is Algebra I, I’d wager that just being on the right half of the bell curve would be sufficient to pass. Half of the student population = the right half of the bell curve.
Additionally, I didn’t see whether they were doing individual tutoring, which would have an impact on the results.
Yes because I refuse to believe “stand and deliver” could not happen in real life!
Seriously tho I think it will. I’m sure a foundation is important in many fields but one can get pretty far by jumping in. I remember my high school physics teacher take us on a wild ride of quantum mechanics for three weeks. If nothing it opened up a lot of future reading
