Genuine question - why do some people have a problem with the grammar school system

[englishteacher78]

I went to one - my choice in part, parents would have preferred me to go to the Catholic secondary. As a teacher I have worked in two.
I know if I had gone to the Catholic school I would have coasted (even more than I did).
Some people seem to he very against the grammar school system and I'm not sure why. It was the making of my dad (miner's son from council estate in Scotland)and I think that all counties should have that provision. Surely it's just split site streaming in a way.

I think their existence is part of the problem both because they siphon off motivated students, rendering non-private schools selective in the opposite direction in many areas, and because they encourage the perception of not being wealthy enough/good enough among those who can't afford to go.

Catchments are pure Communism. It makes me shake my head to see Conservative governments and conservative ones too keeping them up. In the US they serve to undermine the fundamental concept of the public school system (because some areas can afford better schools, facilities, teachers, abundant resources, etc., and have better off or more motivated students, so in effect what you end up with is taxpayer funded selective schools) and they do the same in the UK. They deny parents choice a lot of the time.

There has to be a better way to do this than condemn students to the postcode lottery. It wastes so much potential.

zzzzz get off your high horse.
The largest number of selective taxpayer funded schools by a long way are catholic schools FFS
next are the grammar schools
next are the minority religion schools

only then (by pupil numbers) come the specific educational need schools and only a twit resents them - as the alternative would be to have those kids back in mainstream schools to the detriment of every pupil

I think it's unrealistic to expect parents who are given a choice between one of the top schools in the country and a next to sink 'comprehensive' (or busing their children out-of-county), not to try their damndest to get their children into the grammar, despite being anti-selection.

I'm not saying that there are not bright children at the comp. Obviously there are. And there are some children at the comp. who will undoubtedly do better than some at the grammar. However parents, unsurprisingly, make full use of the available statistics to conclude that the chances of a good outcome at one school are hugely greater than at the other, and act accordingly.

You'd have to be made of sterner stuff than I am to risk sacrificing your child's future on the altar of altruistic egalitarianism.

It really is obtuse when people refuse to acknowledge that what happens in a high school in a grammar area might be in some way related to the fact that it's a grammar area and the existence of grammar schools.

Children are proud creatures, and not always in a helpful way. Anyone see Georgia in Educating Yorkshire, after she was told she couldn't go to prom? 'I aren't bothered anyway to be honest, I can't be arsed with it'. By the same token, you tell a child at 11 that he or she isn't clever enough for the grammar, the response is going to be 'I don't even give a shit, I'm not clever and I don't even fucking care'.

You're sending these children to schools whose raison d'être, whose primary point is, that's where you go if you fail. How the hell is that not going to have an impact on an eleven year old? And let's remember that many fail by a not very big margin at all... That could be your child.

However you dress it up and argue they should be excited to do vocational things etc etc... The entrance criteria in a grammar system to a non grammar school is: did you fail? How's that going to bloody work?

mathanxiety
be very wary of comparing UK and US 'catchments'
in the UK we have centralised school funding : the national government allocates an amount per pupil per school
in the USA schools are funded out of local property taxes - expensive houses = rish schools and vice versa
NOT comparable

flatiron
the non grammar school in a grammar area is NOT a comp.
Kings Winchester, Bohunt, Ringwood, Thornden are Comps.
THe Marsh Academy is NOT a comp.

Talking That's why I put it in inverted commas. What would you call it?

a Secondary Modern

as are all the non grammars more than ten miles from the Kent county boundary
(the ones nearer are diluted by cross boundary traffic)

and BTW flatiron my DCs school is lower down the rankings than those fab four but is still better than Dover Grammar !

I can see i am not much liked, for being honest about my views on selective education.

It is obvious 90% of people on here believe everybody should live and work together in perfect harmony.... "JOHN LENNON"

My family and i have made our living from "The Great Unwashed". I have
more empathy and understanding for under educated or those from socially
deprived backgrounds than most on here. Unlike most people on here i have not been educated to Degree level or even A level, therefore i am not
in a ivory tower or an idealist like most on here.

One thing that is clear, is that most of the "Anti Selective" people have
benefited from either grammar schools/or private education.

Most under educated or socially deprived people i meet , would give anything for their DCs to have a chance of a school away from the problems they encounter every day, these problems are not just academic but also the ambitions they have.

Its ok for people on this site to say my Dc going to get 10 As at his or her middle class comprehensive in the home counties. What about the
Potentially able children from places like Salford who are forced to go to terrible schools offering very little in terms of future development.

So what if I didn't go to a grammar or a private school and don't live in a middle class area in the home counties?

Of course, if my alternatives were a GS or a dreadful, failing SM, I'd go all out to get my DC into the GS- but that really isn't the point. I don't think anyone is denigrating a parent in that situation- what is being challenged is the idea that Grammar Schools Are Great and Must Be Retained.

What we want is a situation where you don't have to look at your alternatives and go 'God!'- where your well-behaved high or average-attaining (or low-academic but high vocationally attaining! Or any mix!) DC will receive an appropriate education. And imho, in an institution which doesn't need to socially segregate DC according to whether they're good at maths or wood tech.

Sure, I'd walk over hot coals to get my DC a good education, nay, I'd go further, I'd walk over hot coals to get a better education than 'your' DC cos I'm mummy bear- in the same way as I'd happily kill someone who bullied my DC at school- but I am thankfully in a society that makes me curb my baser impulses and behave like a grown-up, making me consider, then think, then become mindful that this isn't all about me and mine; we are part of a society and if my Advantage craps on someone else's chances, it shouldn't be allowable for me to exercise that advantage to any degree. I am left with way less wriggle room (because I can't afford private, a different but related discussion) which is as it should be.

zzzzz SEN kids who cannot fit into mainstream schools should always be offered appropriate rsources.
Which is an entirely separate issue from segregation by faith or spatial reasoning which is wrong.
So, please, none of us are arguing about SEN provision, we are worrying about decent provision for the 74% written off by the 11+

"What about the Potentially able children from places like Salford who are forced to go to terrible schools offering very little in terms of future development."

If there was A GS they could go to, it'd be stacked to the rafters with the MC DC of parents like me who'd walk over hot-coals to advantage my child over theirs. Prep school, tutors, Bond papers ++. People like me would be there. The DC from Salford wouldn't stand a chance.

Just like now in many GS areas, in fact.

Not all school districts are exclusively made up of big houses though. The city of Chicago for instance has one humongous school district but within it street boundaries are enforced rigidly, with the sop of excellent magnet schools for those who are more able and would sink without trace in many neighbourhood schools. Even in the case of suburbs, there are many with very mixed housing and a huge income range. Not all are cookie cutter the way you see on TV. While there are definitely pockets of privilege, most places are not 90210 or 60043 or 64113 or 66208, etc.

Students from primary schools in better off areas of the city dominate the student body of the Chicago magnet schools however, and also students whose parents are able to afford to send them to private, often Catholic elementary schools either in the city or in close in suburbs.

The Catholic school system offers subsidised education (paid for by Catholic benefactors and parents with not a penny coming from any tax sources), with the archdiocese scraping together funds from all over the archdiocese (which includes the city and a big portion of the suburbs) to make a decent education possible in inner city RC schools and also in suburban RC schools for students who need a subsidy. Most parents pay the full whack.

State (= public) schools are partially funded from state funds and partially from federal funds. (The No Child Left Behind Act means federal funds can be withheld for non performance). A good chunk comes from local/municipal property taxes however.

Educationally speaking, primary schools can make all the difference in both the UK and the US, but in both places catchment areas often determine the quality of primary education a child will receive and that often seals a child's fate.

"seal a childs fate"
hmmm
I am not as pessimistic - and I live in one of those shitty catchments
because in the UK we can choose to move to the next one along
and kids moving even in year 6 can be picked up and surfed by the right comp

Talking They might be called Secondary Moderns Where you are. If I tried to describe them thus in my neck of the woods, people wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about!

You're very lucky that you have such a good choice of schools in your area. If we were in the same position, maybe there wouldn't be such a panic over the 11+ here. I'm not particularly pro-selection, but I'm sure as hell going to try and make sure my dc benefit from it, if they can, when the alternatives are second-rate, not just in the rankings but in cold, harsh reality.

Sorry, I meant Talkin, or maybe Talk?

I like TiP it having been the shortened form of my name since before MN was invented!

We only have comps here in Hampshire
I know Kent very well so am sadly aware of the poison of SecMods

anybody who says that Grammars are good should be willling to put their kid who passes into Dover Grammar and their kid who fails into the Marsh Academy

Kent does not get better results overall than other similar counties - so grammars do not increase overall results
implying that all ofthat stress and tutoring is not worth it in the long run

Talkinpeace, yes, there is always the element of luck.

However, I have experience of my own DCs having to put up with a truly terrible maths teacher for the last three years of their elementary education, which meant for DD1 and DD2 and DS doing summer school maths the year before they entered HS, and for DD3 doing summer school maths for two summers in order to get where her intelligence and ability warranted. The teacher was only a few years from retirement by the time DD3 got her and she was phoning it in far worse than she had been for the older DCs.

There were other children in her class whose parents did not understand how bad this teacher was and who could have benefited from doing the summer school programme but they didn't because the parents didn't know how the system works. As an immigrant I made it my business to learn everything I could about the ins and outs of how to get into really good universities in the US and so the importance of doing the highest possible level of maths was clear to me. Others, immigrants and natives alike, either went on their own experience in a completely different time period or simply didn't do the homework the way I did.

I think there are lots of British parents who do not understand how to get their children ahead. Leaving it to chance that some teacher or administrator will spot your child's potential and that they will eventually get to the level where they belong and where opportunities will open up for them is taking a huge risk. The children themselves, frequently in the same boat as the Yorks girl who couldn't go to prom, cannot be left to make their own way.

"I don't agree that those 74% are written off"

How many 11+ failures have you spoken to? I know for a fact that just about all of the people I know who failed the 11+ felt 'written off' at 11. I took my 11+, so was among a whole bunch of children and sibling who also did, so I know these people.

We, in the UK, live in a society that valued academic attainment over just about everything else. On MN, we use the word 'good' as in 'good school' to mean one with great exam results. We are not interested in our engineers, our makers, our manufacturers, We are in awe of good academic results (which is one reason why we allowed so many high academically attaining twats in red braces to destroy our economy- I mean hell, they had firsts, didn't they? Who cares what in? The banks swept them up! We believed them!)- so, no, we don't value vocational. So if you fail an exam allegedly designed to literally sift the clever sheep from the dumb goats, if you fail, you're a goat.

You can cite 'focused selective education' all you like, but here in the UK, in selective areas, we only provide that for the academic.

If we did things to redress that: How would you feel if SM teachers were suddenly going to be paid 25% more than GS teachers in that they have a harder job, having to differentiate between Child 73 and child 20? (Using the '1-23%' in GS model)? How would you feel if all incoming funds were diverted to fantastic tech facilities at the SM? To endless research into getting the best out of a less academically able, diverse cohort? To glittering prize-givings? And graduating DC getting jobs earning at least as much as your DC?

I'd guess you'd not be happy.

"I don't agree that those 74% are written off. I fail to see how providing more focused selective education hurts those in any strata of the system."

Don't you? Have you no idea what it must feel like to be told at the age of 10 you are taking a test that will determine the rest of your education? To see your friends being congratulated, taken out to dinner and given X boxes because they have passed? It's obviously something really important because the people who pass make such a big fuss about it- and you've failed. You're going to the school that people say "oh well" about, not the school people say "well done!" about. What's that going to do to your self esteem?

Math
its a fact of life that the children of the sharp elbowed and eloquent will always push ahead
BUT
if they have to do so within the context of comprehensive schools they are a force for good rather than a force for division

why do I say this - because I see it : the millionaires kids play rugby with the brick outhouse tractor driver kids and have mutual respect.
Because of the bright kids, the schools attract good teachers
from whom all of the pupils benefit