"Schools that offer students more choice—more elective courses, more ways to complete requirements, a bigger range of potential friends, more freedom to select seats in a classroom—are more likely to be rank-ordered, cliquish, and segregated by race, age, gender and social status.
Smaller schools inherently offer a smaller choice of potential friends, so the “cost” of excluding people from a social group is higher. In addition, structured classrooms guide student interactions in prescribed routes and encourage students to interact on the basis of schoolwork rather than on the basis of their external social lives...
In schools with a strong focus on academics, where teachers have a hand in setting the pace and controlling classroom interactions, teenagers are less likely to form friendships based on social attitudes imported from outside the school. Instead, friendships are more likely to develop out of shared school activities and similar intellectual interests.
As the researchers put it, a positive educational climate strengthens the school’s “system membrane” and makes it more impervious to external criteria for friendship such as race or social status. In other words, a more rigid school setting can sometimes promote more open-mindedness in making friends—a potentially valuable quality in adulthood."
Interesting.
I want to a high school with "tracks" in almost every subject... and, now that I think about it, there was even kind of a track in PE because athletes could take be in a special one. And people in the upper lanes were really separated from people in the lower lanes; there were around 425 people in my graduating class and I remember thinking that I only really knew 200 of them. At graduation, there were a lot of people I didn't think I'd ever even seen; there were people who completely disappeared from my radar between elementary school and high school (I had a weirdly close elementary school class, 50/60 of us showed up for a reunion when we graduated from high school and like half of the 10 no-shows didn't live in the state anymore, so this means something).
And we were also super race segregated. I was one of like, literally, 2 black people in those upper lanes in my year. Now that I'm pushing at my memory I can say that there were 3 of us, although the other 2 were not in upper level STEM that I recall... We also had this very real split in the Asian community, with a large and invisibilized Pacific Islander population. Class segregation was probably also a thing, and I need to reflect on that more; I was barely aware of my economic privilege then, or the diversity in economic-class that was present in my hometown.
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