[HN Gopher] California's most neglected group of students: the g...
___________________________________________________________________
California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
Author : tafda
Score : 275 points
Date : 2024-11-26 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| dogprez wrote:
| She makes some good points, but my take is that we in the 21st
| century are more bound to the success of our weakest links. Our
| world has become so complicated, one small mistake can have dire
| consequences. So, it's the state's priority to spend its limited
| resources helping those struggling to tread water. Gifted
| children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent
| study or from their family. I know since I gave myself an almost
| complete college education in computer science before I graduated
| from high school. Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them
| socially for life too.
| drawkward wrote:
| What is the purpose of government? Maybe its some sort of
| collective action/game theory thing, i.e., handle problems that
| is in no individual's best interest to solve.
|
| But if that's the case, then government should probably be
| serving the greatest number, instead of a relatively small
| amount.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via
| independent study or from their family.
|
| That's extremely optimistic.
| nostrademons wrote:
| _Well-off_ gifted kids will get the stimulus they need at
| home. Poor gifted kids are out of luck. And thus, the policy
| serves to entrench socioeconomic disadvantage in the name of
| making everybody equal.
| dogprez wrote:
| I don't believe it. Almost every kid in America has access
| to the internet, a public library and a teacher. How many
| don't have access to any of those? That's a different
| problem.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| But they often don't have an easy way to get to the
| library, or a quiet place where they can sit and watch a
| Youtube tutor, or even a trusted authority who tells them
| that all of this is worth their time.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The issue is time, attention and guidance. Well-off kids
| have parents who are usually well educated and who (if
| they arrange their priorities appropriately) can make
| time to spend with their kids. Poor kids do not have such
| parents; their parents usually wouldn't know where to
| begin, and even if they did, they don't have time to
| spend with their kids if they're working multiple jobs
| that they get fired from if they're late.
|
| If you let a random kid loose on the Internet, they will
| probably find propaganda / political / incel / gaming /
| porn / alt-right bullshit, because that is simply what
| the majority of the Internet is. I remember folks doing
| experiments back at Google in the '00s where they set a
| user-agent loose to follow links at random on the web,
| and the result was that you _always_ ended up back at
| porn. Kids need some form of guidance to say "This is
| worth pursuing, this is not worth pursuing", and for a
| gifted kid, it needs to be someone who can personalize
| this guidance to their own interests. An involved parent
| can do that, but a teacher who is literally trying to
| keep their 30 other students from killing each other
| cannot.
| dogprez wrote:
| I appreciate what you are trying say. I'm having a hard
| time believing it because I was one of those kids. The
| only thing my parents gave me was access to books,
| technology, love and free time. They possessed zero
| experience in engineering or technology, gave zero
| guidance. In fact they told me I was wasting my time
| being on the computer so much. I think people like to
| inject themselves as some sort of necessary mentor but
| gifted kids are gifted.
| nostrademons wrote:
| > love and free time
|
| I think that kids who got those tend not to realize both
| how important and how non-universal these are.
|
| I grew up the child of an elementary school teacher and a
| househusband (formerly a nuclear chemist), and didn't
| have a whole lot of money but did have a whole lot of
| curiosity. Taught myself to program and a whole bunch of
| other things. For most of my teens and twenties I was
| very much like "Anyone can do what I did - all it took
| was a public library card, Internet access, and a lot of
| time spent reading and tinkering."
|
| But then as I grew up I met lots of other people who were
| gifted too, sometimes very much so, sometimes with a lot
| more financial resources than my family had. But they
| lacked the "love, attention, and free time" part. What'd
| happen is that their brain wouldn't let them focus on
| anything long enough to really master it or apply it
| effectively. They'd be off chasing the void that the lack
| of love left in them, often in extremely self-destructive
| ways. Many of them are dead now.
|
| We all need the "love and attention" part, but it
| functions at such a subconscious level that people who
| have it just assume that everybody else does too, while
| those who don't keep seeking it, oftentimes in ways that
| won't build anything durable for themselves, to the
| detriment of everything else in their life.
| dogprez wrote:
| You're right, but I don't think giving a dollar to gifted
| programs instead of intervention for struggling kids
| solves that problem. In fact if a kid is gifted but is
| struggling because of household issues, again, the money
| is better spent on struggling kids and they'll benefit
| from it.
|
| There are a lot of reasons a kid may be struggling in
| school and it doesn't mean they are dumb or their future
| is worthless, as your hypothetical kids shows. I live in
| an area with one of the top public schools in America,
| they have a well funded gifted program. I know several
| parents whose dyslexic children are not getting the
| support they need.
| rangestransform wrote:
| > we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our
| weakest links
|
| only because they can vote
|
| > Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via
| independent study or from their family
|
| This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students:
|
| - whose parents may not even know anything about the field that
| the student is interested in
|
| - whose parents may see higher education as a waste of time or
| have other anti-intellectual views like a sizeable chunk of the
| US
|
| - who may have ADHD (pretty likely actually) and need some kind
| of external structure to pursue something to the student's
| maximum potential
|
| > Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life
| too
|
| Gathering gifted kids together, instead of bunching them with
| lowest common denominators, can result in lifelong friendships.
| Out of 5 friends from high school that I'm still close with, 4
| are in big tech and 1 is in a prestigious PhD program, we still
| try to gather a few times a year even though we've been out of
| high school for 10 years.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| > This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students: -
| whose parents may not even know anything about the field that
| the student is interested in - whose parents may see higher
| education as a waste of time or have other anti-intellectual
| views like a sizeable chunk of the US
|
| Why are you assuming that because the parents are poor they
| are automatically ignorant or anti-intellectual?
| rangestransform wrote:
| poorer kids will be more affected by family attitudes
| because they will be less likely to be in a well funded
| school system with sufficient support for gifted kids
| dogprez wrote:
| > This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students:
|
| I don't think that's as big of an issue because kids have
| access to teachers, libraries and the internet.
|
| > Gathering gifted kids together, instead of bunching them
| with lowest common denominators, can result in lifelong
| friendships.
|
| Kid's together creates the opportunity for friendships.
| Focusing too much on academics at a young age will miss key
| milestones for social development. It's particularly acute
| for high functioning autistic kids.
| frmersdog wrote:
| >only because they can vote
|
| Domain specificity of "weak link"-hood, as well as the
| compounding of innocuous, sub-symptomatic "weak links":
|
| Carpenter Tom is a hard-worker, great husband, and community
| leader. And he voted for an autocrat, against his explicit
| interests (benefits from ACA, benefits from undocumented
| immigrant labor, benefits from special-ed resources for his
| kids) because he dislikes keeping abreast of current events
| (poor reading speed) and made his decision based on a
| misunderstanding predicated by, essentially, a game of
| telephone across his personal network that warped facts about
| the candidates.
|
| He's a "weak link" on the subject that counts - the matter of
| the vote - but otherwise an upstanding member of the
| community. You're going to disenfranchise him?
|
| I sympathize with the rest of your comment. I do think it's a
| bit naive to think that these programs help even of a
| fraction of the poor kids they should be reaching. They seem
| to mostly be a way to section off semi-affluent kids in
| "lesser" schools (e.g., parents who can't move for work or
| family reasons).
| ImJamal wrote:
| You can help the weakest links without tearing down the most
| gifted.
| nashashmi wrote:
| it is not a teardown we are talking about. But rather giving
| attention. Give certain students more attention and that
| takes away equal attention from everyone else.
|
| if you gave attention to two kids, one was smart and quick,
| and the other was slow and stiff, who would you help more?
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| > but my take is that we in the 21st century are more bound to
| the success of our weakest links.
|
| Bound in what way? Gated by? Morally obligated to?
| dogprez wrote:
| It's just the truth. Look at the boeing dreamliner failures.
| Hundreds of smart people doing a bang up job. It just took
| one a few missteps to jeopardize the whole production and
| peoples lives.
| anonCoffee wrote:
| Chained to our legs, making every step harder. And you're a
| bigot if you refuse additional chains.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via
| independent study or from their family.
|
| Or by disrupting the rest of the class.
|
| > Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life
| too.
|
| Single streaming gifted kids can also warp them socially.
| Gifted kids in a single stream classroom need to learn to play
| dumb or become a social pariah. My school district had tracked
| 1-6, and semi-tracked 7-12. It was a real adjustment leaving
| the core group where learning and knowledge was appreciated and
| developed, even if most of the kids in the 'honors/advanced'
| sections were people I knew from the tracked grade school
| experience. My child had pullout 'branches' in his current
| school district 2-4, and AFAIK, it seemed pretty useless; my
| spouse had a similar pullout program growing up and also
| reports not getting much out of it, other than a target on
| their back, socially. Not having a core group supportive of
| learning gave my kid a lot of trouble in grade 7; although 7-8
| is generally a hard time for kids; we're having a lot better
| experience in 8 at a small private school where the kids all
| want to learn.
|
| OTOH, I have a cousin who absolutely hated her experience in a
| tracked system, so I get that too.
|
| There's a bunch of different things all clamoring for more
| resources in education, and prioritizing is hard, but I think a
| lot of the conversation in the past few years has been about
| "why do _they_ get this nice thing? they shouldn 't have it" as
| opposed to "why can't we all have this nice thing" or "how do
| we make sure selection criteria is not discriminatory".
|
| But I'm pragmatic. Gifted kids can often work more self-
| directed, so let their class sizes float upwards, and have the
| other classes float downward.
| dogprez wrote:
| > Or by disrupting the rest of the class.
|
| Kids that are struggling in class can be just as disruptive.
|
| > Gifted kids in a single stream classroom need to learn to
| play dumb or become a social pariah.
|
| Aka learn to function in society?
|
| Here's my story from the other side. I have one gifted child
| and one child with dyslexia, but doesn't qualify for special
| education. My school district has a gifted program that is a
| whole separate school, but they have a handful of specialists
| to help kids struggling to read. They are shared across the
| grades and hard to get assigned. One of them has to actually
| be paid for by the PTSA since the district won't pay for it.
| That's messed up.
| rcpt wrote:
| It's not because of BLM. It's because of Prop 13.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Go on...Going to need a little bit more of an explanation here.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Prop 13 limits property taxes which are typically used for
| funding local schools. The comment is implying that it's low
| school funding in Ca that is the culprit.
| BadHumans wrote:
| I understand now thanks. That point doesn't make sense to
| me in the context of the article because the article is
| claiming that black and Latino gifted children were under-
| scouted until the BLM movement. Seems that this and that
| are 2 different issues.
| pfisherman wrote:
| Prop 13 had a huge negative effect on quality of public
| schools in California, which I got to experience first
| hand.
|
| The difference was quite apparent to me during high
| school when I compared my older siblings' yearbooks to my
| experience of the same school a decade later. They had so
| many more classes, clubs, sports, programs, and
| activities available to them than I did.
| itbeho wrote:
| Property prices in California have skyrocketed in the last
| decase, and so have tax revenues. Spending more money
| wastefully won't solve the problem.
| cosinetau wrote:
| Prop 13 prevents new property tax without a direct
| referendum.
|
| Without new revenue streams, gifted programs were affordable
| for school districts until they were not.
| jedberg wrote:
| It could be both. Prop 13 is definitely a huge problem, it cut
| school funding significantly since the 80s.
|
| But also the focus on equality of outcome instead of equality
| of opportunity.
|
| I read a good book a while back that pointed out how much more
| we spend on special ed, which is aimed at the bottom 5%,
| compared to what we spend on gifted education, which is the top
| 5%. It asked why we would spend so much on one and not the
| other, especially since the ROI is so much higher for the top
| 5%. (It obviously skipped the whole "making our society better
| and helping those in need" argument since it hurt their
| argument).
| panzagl wrote:
| Special ed is expensive because it's things like 'this
| student needs a full time aid'. The only way to decrease it
| is to basically abandon those children.
| jedberg wrote:
| Or agree that the top 5% should get the same resources and
| give each one a private tutor at the same cost.
| elzbardico wrote:
| So paying incompetent administrators and teacher even more than
| what they make in California will somehow improve things
| magically? The solution is to always tax more, that's it?
| xbar wrote:
| Specifically, Prop. 13's impact on commercial real estate,
| which was the real reason for it all along.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Spending per student isn't really that related to test
| performance so I don't really understand the link?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "But they're not just fine. Gifted children, more than others,
| tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others, a
| phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third-grader's
| reading skills might be at 11th-grade level while her social
| skills are more like a kindergartner's. They often find it hard
| to connect with other children. They also are in danger of being
| turned off by school because the lessons move slowly."
|
| Huh. I was a gifted kid. I was also an ass. But now that I think
| about it, I was mostly in ass in reading-based classes. I always
| read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-photographic
| memory, and so excelled at recall-based examination, which is
| most of the liberal arts and social studies in school. Meanwhile,
| I never acted out in my math classes, particularly once school
| went multi track, and I didn't consider that it was because I was
| engaged. (My math, economics and engineering teachers
| consequently liked me more. Go figure.)
| rz2k wrote:
| > I always read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-
| photographic memory, and so excelled at recall-based
| examination, which is most of the liberal arts and social
| studies in school.
|
| Then you were definitely under-served by your school. An
| encyclopedia of knowledge is useful, but these subjects are
| almost entirely about critical thinking. At the best schools,
| students are expected to complete about ten pages of writing
| across all their subjects each week by eight grade. That's a
| pretty high workload for teachers though, so I guess it makes
| sense that schools with a lower teacher to student ratio have
| to take shortcuts and use different instruments to assess their
| students. However, it does mean that students without writing
| experience spend a significant portion of their college careers
| catching up with their peers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you were definitely under-served by your school_
|
| Sure. It's why the G&T programmes helped. By the eighth grade
| the writing assignments were there. But at the elementary
| level, a lot of work is put into ensuring reading
| comprehension. If you have that the lessons are terrible.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Are there really no public school gifted options in the bay area?
| elzbardico wrote:
| that would be racist[2]
| resource_waste wrote:
| What is the goal for gifted students?
|
| Skip a grade and teach them stuff ahead of time (No, their social
| skills cant handle it apparently)
|
| Teach them extended topics... aka waste their time on stuff they
| can already do.
|
| I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on
| taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to
| teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell
| me about it and I got it in my head.
|
| I don't really understand pacing of US K12. In Retrospect, its
| basically teaching people math and reading skills. If we are just
| looking for daycare, sure the status quo is fine. Otherwise it
| seems school should be built around those fields rather than
| arbitrary ages.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Teach them more skills and/or use the extra time they do not
| need on their strong sides to boost weak ones with
| extracurricular activities.
|
| Yes, you cannot skip a grade, but nobody is stopping a kid from
| going to a later grade for some classes really. The school
| social atmosphere has to be right for it though.
|
| But nobody wants to pay for it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > nobody is stopping a kid from going to a later grade for
| some classes really
|
| Nobody _should_ be, but many people are.
|
| At a minimum, the college-style model of subject-based
| classes and prerequisites for those classes should start
| much, much earlier, in elementary school.
|
| There are elementary-school students who should be in
| calculus classes, and there are high-school and university
| students who should be in remedial arithmetic classes.
| (Though in some cases the latter would be less true if K-12
| hadn't failed them so badly thus far.)
| bagels wrote:
| My gift for learning ahead in high school was to sit in the
| office for an hour each day, not learning, but instead helping
| with administrative work against my will, lest I get a bad
| grade on "we don't know what to do with you" time.
| influx wrote:
| The factory model of education made sense in the industrial
| era, but it's increasingly anachronistic in an age of
| personalized technology. We have the tools to dynamically
| adjust curriculum difficulty and pacing based on each student's
| capabilities - similar to how modern video games seamlessly
| adapt to player skill levels.
|
| Instead, we're still forcing students into rigid cohorts based
| mainly on age, effectively optimizing for the statistical mean
| while leaving both ends of the ability distribution poorly
| served. This is particularly wasteful with gifted students who
| could be advancing much faster if the system accommodated their
| pace of learning.
|
| The tech to deliver adaptive education at scale exists today.
| The main barriers are institutional inertia and perhaps a
| misguided egalitarian impulse that confuses equality of
| opportunity with enforced uniformity of outcomes. We should
| embrace the natural variation in human capabilities and build
| systems that help each student reach their potential, rather
| than constraining everyone to march in lockstep.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| We have tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty
| _for students who value education_ , whether because they're
| self-motivated or because their parents make them. The
| challenge is what to do about the large number of students -
| at many schools the majority - who don't. When you where
| dynamically adjust to a student who doesn't particularly care
| to study, or doesn't have the support to do it properly, you
| end up with the recurrent scandals where a high school is
| found to be graduating people who can't read.
|
| Extracurricular studies are always possible for the students
| who are furthest ahead of the curve, and good schools usually
| do accommodate that. For the rest, I would argue that a fixed
| number of tracks that insist on pulling students along is the
| only practical solution.
| logicchains wrote:
| >The challenge is what to do about the large number of
| students - at many schools the majority - who don't.
|
| The solution isn't just to keep throwing money at the
| problem, because empirically that's been completely
| ineffective. If a large segment of the population are
| effectively learning nothing in e.g. the last 4 years of
| high school, they shouldn't be forced to attend, wasting
| resources that could be spent educating people who actually
| want to be educated. Instead there should be stronger
| support for people who come back to complete a high school
| diploma at a later age, as many of those students will come
| back with real motivation for study once they find their
| career opportunities without it are limited.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The goal should be to allow them to self-study topics ahead of
| time. For example, if a third grader has already demonstrated
| mastery of third grade material, they should be given textbooks
| from the fourth grade to study on their own. And if they can do
| fourth grade topics, go to fifth grade topics.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Help them learn to the full extent of their ability, at the
| full pace they can learn. There are many different paths that
| could achieve that successfully, but it's well-established that
| "have a uniform class grouped by age and punish anyone who
| stands out" is _not_ a path to success.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on
| taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to
| teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell
| me about it and I got it in my head.
|
| I don't know your circumstances or when you were in school, but
| my son is in high school in Kansas, and he's taking university
| classes with the encouragement of the school. And not easy
| classes, either. One of them is a proof-based Calc III. I'm
| working with a high school student to give them a research
| experience (they obviously can't do much, but they get exposed
| to the research process, which is pretty exciting). The high
| school gives them credit for doing it.
| variadix wrote:
| Ultimately it's appropriately paced education. Some people need
| accelerated education and some need decelerated education, and
| it might vary between subjects for an individual. Not having
| opportunities at either end of the spectrum is bad for the
| student because they're can be left behind or not challenged
| enough.
|
| Very few people take issue with providing resources to someone
| falling behind. On the other hand, enough people take issue
| with letting someone get ahead that it has become a political
| issue, and has lead to regressive educational policy.
| csa wrote:
| It's not just California, but California may be one of the more
| egregious state neglecters.
|
| The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality
| of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for
| the gifted and talented communities.
|
| Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can't
| help but recall Harrison Bergeron.
|
| Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally
| does not afford equality of opportunities is a fool's game that
| ends with Bergeron-esque levels of absurdity.
|
| Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we all
| aren't equal, we don't all have access to the same opportunities,
| but as a country we can implement policies that lessen the
| imbalance.
|
| Head Start is a good example.
|
| Well-run gifted and talented programs in schools are also good
| examples.
|
| Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue
| signaling is a loss for society.
| philipov wrote:
| While I may have sympathy for your more substantive points,
| anytime I hear someone mention virtue signalling, it makes it
| sound like they're virtue signalling. Better to just not bring
| up that dog whistle.
| exe34 wrote:
| it's a perfectly good phrase to describe what it says. if
| that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| In my experience, people who use the term "virtue
| signalling" don't understand the problems that the supposed
| virtue signalers are trying to solve and simply use the
| term as a cheap dismissal of their policies. If the
| policies are bad, explain why they're bad. Don't just say
| that people putting the 10 Commandments in schools are
| virtue signalling.
| exe34 wrote:
| Or indeed, it's possible that neither you nor the virtue
| signallers understand why they're doing it.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Regardless of whether or not either interlocutor
| understands the term, using the term _virtue signaling_
| itself is self-defeating for both parties for different
| reasons.
|
| For the one hearing it, it's a red herring, and for the
| one saying it, it's a dog whistle. For the third party
| person reading the interaction without or with lesser
| context, it's a thought-terminating cliche.
| standardUser wrote:
| > if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
|
| That's even vaguer and less compelling rhetoric than
| "virtue signaling".
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I have to agree. It's distracting because it's a low signal
| quip that asserts that your opponents have no substance
| behind their views beyond looking good. Just make your
| argument.
|
| Even if this were the rare valid application of it, it's so
| overused as a low effort attack that the comment is no better
| off for using it.
|
| Finally, we have to contend with the fact that people
| earnestly believe in the things they say and do. If it were
| just for optics and they didn't actually hold their
| positions, these issues would be far easier to deal with.
| Jensson wrote:
| > If it were just for optics and they didn't actually hold
| their positions, these issues would be far easier to deal
| with.
|
| No, then it would have been easier. Virtue signaling is so
| hard to deal with since people don't want to lose their
| virtue, they have to stay the course and continue to upheld
| that what they did was virtuous or they lose all their hard
| work.
|
| A good sign is if you call your opponents names rather than
| try to win them over, then you are just virtue signaling
| instead of trying to fix anything, insults doesn't improve
| anything except act as signaling. This is how most
| politicians acts, it tend to make you very popular and make
| your tribe view you as very virtuous, virtue signaling
| works.
| cloverich wrote:
| > It's distracting because it's a low signal quip that
| asserts that your opponents have no substance behind their
| views beyond looking good. Just make your argument.
|
| That is the argument.
|
| > Finally, we have to contend with the fact that people
| earnestly believe in the things they say and do. If it were
| just for optics and they didn't actually hold their
| positions, these issues would be far easier to deal with.
|
| The point of the argument isn't that people don't genuinely
| believe these issues. Its that they participate in these
| views in earnest because of social conformity as opposed to
| a genuine understanding of, and commonly without any
| intention of helping resolve them. The symptom then is
| blindly electing leaders with no real plan (or worse) and
| the result is predictably poor outcomes. Its used as a
| battering ram in discussions; I thought it was a dog
| whistle too before moving out to the West coast by my god
| it really is everywhere here, and it really does stifle
| discussion. Its a real issue.
| philipov wrote:
| Accusations of virtue signalling are accusations people
| acting in bad faith by another name - and doing that
| without evidence of bad faith is corrosive and fallacious
| to the competition of ideas.
| phil21 wrote:
| > Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue
| signaling is a loss for society
|
| It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing.
|
| Taking resources away from those who move society forward and
| spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a
| way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this
| strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a
| ridiculous self-own.
|
| This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill
| for.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Taking resources away from those who move society forward
| and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back"
| is a way your culture dies.
|
| What does this even mean?
|
| To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society
| treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most
| unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable
| refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the
| culture/society of the 1900s US particularly healthy. Yet
| that was probably the peak of the US keeping resources in the
| hands of "those who move society forward" the robber barons
| and monopolists. We didn't think anything of working to death
| unwanted 5 year olds that were unlikely to make a positive
| impact on society.
|
| As for "dying culture" that to me is a very different thing
| from society. Societies can have multiple cultures present
| and healthy societies tolerate multiple cultures.
|
| > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive
| empires for themselves.
|
| Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where
| a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their
| needy so they could conquer.
|
| > This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a
| hill for.
|
| I'm really interested in the foundation of these beliefs.
| What are the specific historical examples you are thinking of
| when you make these statements? Or is it mostly current
| events that you consider?
| gowld wrote:
| You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its
| clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers
| helps everyone in society?
|
| The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture
| doesn't hoard the invention for themself.
|
| Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that
| persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great
| societies.
| andrepd wrote:
| You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting
| those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake,
| especially considering that those kids could become
| """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try.
| Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged
| households will ironically probably do more towards
| improving the number of high achievers than allocating
| too many resources to the children of the rich, which is
| what we're doing now.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| In other words:
|
| Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.
| dahfizz wrote:
| How does removing gifted and talented programs support
| "those from low-opportunity backgrounds"?
|
| "persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture
| doesn't hoard the invention for themself
|
| The built-in assumption is that those outlier high
| achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any
| evidence for this prior?
|
| As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was
| more important than raw intelligence, if so, should
| society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?
|
| A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview
| about the physician who developed roughly half the
| vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He
| seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence
| seems to have been the key quality that led to his
| successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Yes, there is a high correlation between intelligence (no
| matter how you measure it throughout childhood) and
| achievement in adulthood. A huge, massive difference.
| Obviously there are exceptions. Somebody seeming like a
| bad student is not one. Do you really need a citation for
| that?
| sangnoir wrote:
| My question was specifically about the outliers: has any
| research been done if outlying achievements go hand in
| hand with outlier IQs? Without any research or evidence,
| it's an area prone to a Just World fallacy where
| extraordinary achievements "ought" to be achieved by
| extraordinary talent.
|
| Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner:
| given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to
| expect the top 100 wealthiest individuals (outliers) to
| also be 100 most intelligent people on earth?
| chowchowchow wrote:
| No, not to a person. There can be some stupendously dumb
| billionaires, especially since inheritance is a thing. I
| would however expect the average intelligence however-
| measured of the 100 richest "self-made" (lets just say
| who didn't themself inherit a generational amount of
| wealth) individuals in the US to be higher than a
| 100-person random sample of the population.
| philwelch wrote:
| When you're talking about outliers, it's not an even-or
| situation. It's not that being diligent is more valuable
| than being smart. Lots of people are smart, but the ones
| who are exceptionally smart _and_ exceptionally diligent
| --outliers on two dimensions--are usually the most
| successful.
|
| It's also worth pointing out that people who e.g. study
| algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school
| aren't actually outliers; they're maybe the top 1/3 or so
| of the class in terms of mathematics ability.
| cogman10 wrote:
| No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the
| parent comment said or the framing that they used.
|
| > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China,
| that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their
| previously great societies.
|
| I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China
| have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion
| cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and
| formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple
| levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and
| cultivate the genius class.
|
| The problem with both is that your level of academic
| achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with
| little wiggle room.
|
| Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that
| there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say
| that later forms of the USSR and China have the education
| systems that prioritize funding genius.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| It seems like you're choosing to selectively interpret
| things to fit your own argument.
|
| > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China,
| that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their
| previously great societies.
|
| They did indeed kill off most of their intelligentsia in
| the last century. This is clearly what the OP is
| referencing and is a historical fact. I'm not sure why
| you decided to take it in a different direction.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Because for neither China nor the USSR was that the main
| contributor to their national problems. Further, the
| education system of both are definitely implementations
| of "let's spend the most money on the smartest people".
|
| In a discussion about the collapse of societies, it
| doesn't apply. In a discussion about education reform, it
| does not apply. It is also not an example of the original
| commentors statement that conquerors have used social
| spending to collapse their targets.
|
| I would further point out in both the case of the USSR
| and China's purge of the intelligentsia; it was FAR more
| about consolidating power in a dictator and far less
| about trying to set good national policy. In Mao's case
| in particular, he was frankly just a bit insane.
| philwelch wrote:
| There's a selection bias in that the USSR and China both
| actually turned into barely functioning societies
| afterwards, often because they implemented their ideals
| in inconsistent or hypocritical ways. If you take the
| same ideology and actually apply it consistently you're
| the Khmer Rouge.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The cultural revolution began by lynching all the
| teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities.
| Stalin did much of the same. It was a horrible strategy
| which is why they came up with the new ones.
| r00fus wrote:
| > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China,
| that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their
| previously great societies.
|
| China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to
| eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.
|
| USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and
| consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Mao's policies including the persecution of intellectuals
| during the Cultural Revolution killed millions and set
| China back by decades.
| r00fus wrote:
| Yes, that happened. It's also undeniable that since then,
| they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people.
|
| I'm not sure if they get to where they are today -
| without going through the Maoist stage.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B
| people.
|
| Because they gave up on the command economy idea and
| embraced markets and education. When they persecuted the
| geniuses everything went to shit and when they stopped
| things quickly improved. Really makes you think.
| iwontberude wrote:
| These inventions are inevitable and don't take talented
| and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by
| poverty and suffering.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| Completely incorrect.
|
| We have made incredible improvements in alleviating
| poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet
| innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a
| crawl.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >We have made incredible improvements in alleviating
| poverty and suffering over the past 50 years
|
| We have also made incredible strides at capturing the
| productivity and free time that would have fed innovation
| and effectively transferred it to the financial services
| industry.
|
| Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of
| color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal
| approach to education. Rather than funding higher
| education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now
| that everyone could, those in power chose to
| systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and
| replace it with a degree-for-debt model.
|
| State universities that used to provide low/free tuition
| to white men, now offer their services to all, for an
| ever-increasing price.
|
| This has created a society where smart people get on the
| edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to
| then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing
| entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of
| their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-
| down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted
| and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.
| pineaux wrote:
| @WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW
|
| You are correct but I think it has mostly to do with the
| way academia is organized. Scientific study is only
| really funded or respected if it quotes enough other
| works. However this is a dead-end way of working, bad
| research that quotes bad research will become the norm.
| Real talent feels this, leaves academia, the problem gets
| worse.
| lykahb wrote:
| Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs
| for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even
| dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap
| entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the
| students who don't pass the tests.
|
| However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low
| salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.
|
| The equality of outcome can take many forms.
| revert_to_test wrote:
| Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds
| like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and
| freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.
| K0balt wrote:
| What is good for a society and what feels just are often
| disparate things.
|
| But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are
| born with lower potential than others. It's just an
| unfortunate fact of life.
|
| What is just then?
|
| To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person
| that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to
| society?
|
| To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are
| particularly likely to bring benefits to society?
|
| We know that the vast majority of significant advances in
| engineering and science are brought to life by people that
| are significantly above average capability in their
| fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even
| before they entered school.
|
| We know that significant advances are unlikely to be
| contributed by people for whom day to day life is a
| significant cognitive challenge.
|
| This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the
| effort into one person.
|
| The best likely case scenario for the bright student is
| that they go on to create something remarkable and useful.
| Advancements in technology and science are responsible for
| millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives
| saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in
| tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher
| investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of
| benefit.
|
| The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different
| than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better
| quality of life. The best argument is probably that it
| might make a difference in how he approaches parental
| responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of
| slightly better character.
|
| I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your
| resources on the least productive in society, unless the
| reason for their lower potentiality is something that is
| inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem
| is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little
| difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in
| their education.
|
| OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at
| double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast
| track them to a level of education that they can produce
| benefits to their society. To let them languish in a
| classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the
| often know more than, only creates habits and
| preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting
| activities and away from the paths that might lead them to
| greatly benefit society at large.
|
| Either way it's kind of a shit sandwich though, so who
| knows.
|
| Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual
| development, and probably moved me farther away from a life
| of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a
| worthwhile goal when I was 9.
|
| Showing me that other people understood and valued my
| intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do
| something admirable with my life.
|
| It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to
| launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding
| rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate
| was not great.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| > invest 2x the resources into a person that will never
| likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
|
| So you would rather have the cleaning lady, the garbage
| collector, the truck driver,... not got proper
| read/write/calculate/economics... education and increase
| their chances of ending on the side where they fall for
| addiction instead?
| imron wrote:
| I expect better from someone whose user name is _nuance_
| bydefault
| LargeWu wrote:
| I don't think that's what they're saying.
|
| Anacostia High School in Washington DC has _zero_ percent
| of students meeting expectations in Math, yet its funding
| per student is twice that of nearby districts that
| perform much better. Lebron James ' I Promise Academy is
| similarly very well-funded both for in-classroom and
| wraparound services, and it's one of the worst schools in
| the state of Ohio. It is increasingly evident that we
| cannot improve student outcomes in failing schools simply
| by funneling more resources to those schools. Students
| who come from households who do not value education not
| only will not learn, but will also likely sabotage the
| education of the others in their schools. It is probably
| more effective to give direct cash payments to struggling
| families than to struggling schools.
|
| https://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Anacostia+High+School
| ryandrake wrote:
| The reality, which politicians will never admit out loud,
| is there is a population of K-12 students who 1. will
| never become educated to any measurable standard, and 2.
| disrupt the education of everyone around them. You could
| give unlimited funding to a school, and these kids will
| not learn. You could assign a huge staff of dedicated
| top-educators to each class, and it won't make a
| difference. You could isolate them from everyone else,
| each individual into a dedicated classroom with that
| staff of education PhDs all to themselves, and they will
| not learn. They will either graduate high school not
| meeting the standard, or they will drop out before they
| graduate. You can't force education on someone whose
| parents, peers, and surrounding environment don't value
| it.
| v0idzer0 wrote:
| Yes, this has been my experience in my stint running an
| after school program. It's an unfortunate reality that
| must be accepted in order to have sane policy.
| bawolff wrote:
| > > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win
| massive empires for themselves.
|
| > Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example
| where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care
| of their needy so they could conquer.
|
| I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest
| economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for
| the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries
| which build local wealth over ones that are more
| extractive.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Not exactly the same, but Basil II of eastern Rome had
| his enemy soldiers blinded after a decisive victory and
| sent back to Bulgaria to be a burden.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion
| jvanderbot wrote:
| There's a lot of strong words thrown around regarding this
| topic. You need a little of both. Consider a re-framing:
|
| Rather than trying to focus on the less-achieving third
| (half, tenth, etc) with the goal of bootstrapping entire
| _groups_ (for your definition) via equality of outcome, it
| would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted
| students and high achievers without regard for where they
| live or come from.
|
| It would also make sense to put aside some extra resources
| for those we know can achieve but are held back by
| _specifically addressable_ hurdles like money or parents or
| etc.
|
| If you only focus on churning out the most A-students
| possible without attempting to help those up to the level
| they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism /
| generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by
| a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy
| admissions, etc.
|
| There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I
| think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of
| opportunity.
| phil21 wrote:
| > it would make sense to put into place opportunities for
| gifted students and high achievers without regard for where
| they live or come from.
|
| Quite obviously. That's what's being strip-mined at the
| moment.
|
| I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero
| chances in life without these programs. We were not well
| off, and my peers did not come from families that had
| anything more than strong parenting - almost none had
| parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into
| gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school
| system that identified their highly capable students and
| resources were given to remove them from the "regular"
| track.
|
| These programs have been removed since. It's holding those
| that need the most help back, while in no way hurting the
| people intended. The kids who have the ultra-parents with
| unlimited resources are going to private schools to begin
| with.
|
| > If you only focus on churning out the most A-students
| possible without attempting to help those up to the level
| they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism /
| generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded
| by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy
| admissions, etc.
|
| Short of extremely well-off suburbs (and neighborhoods in a
| handful of cities I suppose) this was never a thing in the
| public school system. Those generational wealth students
| don't touch the public school system at all. They are not
| relevant to the discussion and never have been.
|
| > equality of opportunity
|
| Correct. Equality of opportunity is what matters. The folks
| removing any gifted and talented programs, advocating for
| killing off magnet schools, etc. are the ones removing said
| opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. It's dragging
| everyone down to an extremely low bar and pretending they
| did something good.
|
| Without inner city public school programs oriented towards
| the G&T crowd I would not be where I am today because my
| parents were working class at best. They were good parents,
| but they simply did not have resources to keep up with the
| "legacy" crowd. All they could do was try to get me into
| the "right" public schools and hope I'd be given a chance.
| This worked. Those programs are now gone - and anyone who
| grew up where I did in the same circumstances is more or
| less shit out of luck.
|
| This is outright evil. Strong language and emotion be
| damned. It's deserved in this case.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| > I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had
| zero chances in life without these programs. We were not
| well off, and my peers did not come from families that
| had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had
| parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into
| gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school
| system that identified their highly capable students and
| resources were given to remove them from the "regular"
| track.
|
| You know by the way people (Gary Tan, etc) talk about it
| the only students that matter are the first generation
| Asian kids who didn't grow up rich. As another first
| generation Asian kid that didn't grow up rich but had the
| privilege of educated parents but didn't achieve anything
| that you'd consider "moving society forward" what should
| happen to everyone else?
| phil21 wrote:
| > first generation Asian kids who didn't grow up rich
|
| If those are the kids in a specific school/school system
| that happen to be the most academically gifted, then they
| should be the ones attending the gifted and talented
| programs. I don't see how them attending precludes anyone
| else from also qualifying though? That the demographics
| happen to skew this way in some number of school
| districts is interesting at best. Rewarding strong
| parenting sounds like a win for society to me. Second
| generation immigrant children doing better than their
| first generation parents sounds like the American Dream
| working as-intended to me!
|
| > you'd consider "moving society forward"
|
| I likely have a much looser definition than you do,
| perhaps. This can simply mean being a functional member
| of society that participates within their community.
| Making the jump from poor to middle class is a huge
| generational achievement on it's own. If I was tossed
| into the "general classes" in middle school I likely
| would have simply been working in a factory or retail
| like most of my peers who stayed within that track ended
| up doing. The folks in the accelerated programs
| statistically have gone into more lucrative careers -
| even those who did not attend college.
|
| It all comes down to helping those who want to help
| themselves, and recognizing you can't help those that
| don't want it. Spend the resources on the former, and
| give the latter the opportunity to change their ways -
| but don't tear down those trying to better themselves in
| the name of equity.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| > Second generation immigrant children from first
| generation parents sounds like the American Dream working
| as-intended to me!
|
| If your definition of the American dream is the tiny
| fraction of poor Asian kids that get into Stanford you
| have a screwed up definition of the American dream, which
| is built on people that go to Cal State LA and never had
| G&T programs.
|
| > This can simply mean being a functional member of
| society that participates within their community.
|
| People that work in factories and retail are also
| functional members of society and your sentence does not
| seem to imply that when you drew a contrast there.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I'm not following your hyper focus on first gen Asian
| kids or the implication that gifted programs are only for
| Stanford-bound students. My ancestors have been in North
| America since the 16-1800s, I went to public K12 and
| university, and I've benefited quite a bit from having
| parts of my education that weren't a complete joke (I've
| done much better economically than my parents, for
| example).
|
| Teaching high-aptitude kids at their level also does not
| require taking away from the other kids assuming you have
| enough of them to fill a classroom.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| The thread is discussing the people in G&T programs as
| the people that "move society forward" and the rest as
| people that hold society back. While OP seems to think
| that there's an expansive group that "move society
| forward", I'm skeptical that this is actually what they
| mean, because the people that are used as positive
| examples for these conversations are exclusively poor
| Asian kids that get into top schools, not ordinary people
| like me that are considered failures by this class of
| people.
| pempem wrote:
| Generally I agree with you.
|
| The part where I disagree is the 'why' and the 'who'.
| There are a number of very strong forces (aka lobbying
| groups, aka decisions like 'no child left behind') doing
| their best to destroy the public school system. By making
| this conversation about gifted vs not gifted, we are
| again distracted and pitted against ourselves.
|
| Public schools should be well funded and funded in an
| egalitarian manner that doesn't replicate residential
| aggregation of race or money. It should be funded for
| kids who need remedial help, help appropriate for their
| age, and help because they're advanced. It should be
| funded so that people who move from one group to the
| next, _and you can and do move from one group to another_
| , are supported
|
| IMO the goal of the lobbying and shit policy is to make
| private school the default option for those who can
| afford it and those who can barely afford it. Public
| school will be left to the masses, and will be defunded
| leaving a populous more easily controlled, with less
| social mobility.
| iwontberude wrote:
| You are totally over romanticizing institutional learning.
| It's worth abolishing and starting over.
| pempem wrote:
| A bold stance given your username.
|
| Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide
| variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your
| opinion
| iwontberude wrote:
| The romantic notion that geniuses need an institution to
| coddle them and that by the grace of some government or
| non-profit organization then are humans capable of higher
| order thinking. The institutions are the tools for
| getting larger investments to allow for smart people to
| do their great work, not to create the people through
| education. Education systems today are fundamentally
| broken and reinforce feedback loops of poverty and
| dependency. It's a prisoners dilemma. Case in point TAG
| programs are gamed often by wealthier families which
| makes the selection process incredibly unscientific and
| useless.
| foogazi wrote:
| > Taking resources away from those who move society forward
|
| Do gifted students move society forward ?
|
| Where is society moving to ?
| polski-g wrote:
| Generally yes.
|
| Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his
| lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.
| sangnoir wrote:
| There are so many confounding factors are at play that
| you're ignoring and attributing the achievement to high
| IQ (and that only).
|
| The Guinea Worm is on the verge if eradication, mostly on
| the back of the multi-decade efforts of Jimmy Carter. I
| don't what his IQ is, but I'll assume it's below 140 and
| above whatever is the ballpark minimum required to enroll
| as a Navy Nuke.
|
| I posit that you don't need to be a genius to eradicate a
| disease, just drive, a platform and the right resources
| and/or connections
| ctoth wrote:
| I was curious and so I looked.
|
| Jimmy Carter: 145.
|
| Not sure how credible that is but it sure did make me
| chuckle.
| mongol wrote:
| I believe most successful people have high IQ. Perhaps
| not as high as 140, but probably more than people in
| general realize. That Gates have 140 does not surprise me
| at all.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| If you looked at my resume you wouldn't think I'm "moving
| society forward" - I went to a public undergrad with a 50%
| accept rate.
|
| What do you think should happen to people like me?
| phil21 wrote:
| The fact you have a professional resume to point to likely
| means you are moving society forward. HN seems to have a
| weirdly high bar for this, and perhaps a very low
| understanding of just _how bad_ "general" classes at inner
| city schools are.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| This would imply a greater focus must be made to ensure
| they have a chance at success yes?
|
| I'm exceedingly skeptical that there's a low bar for
| "moving society forward" if the bar is "being in a gifted
| and talented program or equivalent". But if society is
| made up of a small set of overmen burdened by pulling the
| undermen across the finish line I absolutely would be an
| underman.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| You don't seem to have the right perspective to talk about
| things at scale like this. Taking that personally is
| unfathomable.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Why is it unfathomable?
| hintymad wrote:
| > Taking resources away from those who move society forward
|
| And those people do not even have to be geniuses or top
| students. Our society moves forward on the back of millions
| of ordinary people, yet those ordinary people, me included,
| would benefit most from a rigorous education system.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| lol, when people talk about these things they're talking
| about the Lowell High kids that want to go to Yale, not
| normal people like me. Let's be real here.
| phil21 wrote:
| No, I'm talking about regular kids who grow up in hard
| circumstances that just need an opportunity for a better
| life.
|
| This can mean a jump from working class to middle class
| and nothing more. That is absolutely driving society
| forward.
|
| Not offering a means out of "the shit" for these kids is
| a way to hold them down into the circumstances they were
| born into and nothing more.
|
| Zero kids I'm thinking of who went through these programs
| went to Yale or any other ivy. Most have great lives 20
| years later, off the backs of that early opportunity for
| achievement.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I really do not think the modal case of social mobility
| is people in G&T programs, which definitionally only
| target the top N% of students
| hintymad wrote:
| I'm not. All I want is that students get trained
| rigorously. The last thing I want is as what NYT used to
| report: a straight-A student who dreamed to be a
| scientist couldn't even pass the placement test of a city
| college. That shows how irresponsible our school systems
| became.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| You said a few weeks ago that
|
| > As many countries demonstrated, wealth does not buy
| good genes. Talented kids stand out, as long as we have a
| decent public school system, which places a high academic
| standard and holds teachers accountable. That's how East-
| European countries and Asian countries produce high-
| quality students.
|
| What implications does this have for all students getting
| trained rigorously in the public school system? People
| that also speak of genes like Charles Murray say this is
| a fool's errand and that we should effectively just throw
| them off the ship.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118967
| hintymad wrote:
| I'm not sure where the contradiction is. The key to me is
| "which places a high academic standard and holds teachers
| accountable", which I equate to "rigorous training". I
| guess the difference is on how we define "talented". To
| me most kids are just educable, which means they don't
| constantly push themselves, they don't take initiatives
| to dig deeper, nor do they proactively find resources to
| do more. Or they struggle without careful guidance. Yet
| they can make leap and bounds when they experience a
| rigorous program. These kids need nurturing from the
| teachers. At least that's my personal experience: I was
| content with my performance, until the problem sets
| showed that I was not really as good as imagined. Also, I
| believe that training makes a big difference to people of
| similar level of talent. That is, wealth can't push a kid
| who struggles with Algebra II to understand calculus, but
| may well help a student with sufficient talent to stand
| out. My personal experience: I went to college, didn't
| have the drive to push through the tomb of Demidovich.
| And then my friend got me a much shorter book for
| challenging problem sets in Analysis. With his help I
| finished the book, and man, what a difference it made. I
| stayed top of my class and became a TA on calculus in my
| sophomore year.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| > I guess the difference is on how we define "talented"
|
| Yes, and how we define "bad genes". I'm someone that you
| definitely wouldn't consider "talented" (since I've never
| worked at Google etc) and probably have "bad genes", what
| should be done with people like me?
| pnutjam wrote:
| citation needed
| hintymad wrote:
| I wish I could find it, but unfortunately it was likely
| ten years ago. The article left a lasting impression on
| me, though, so I repeated it once in a while in different
| context, at the risk of totally rewriting what actually
| happened.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive
| empires for themselves
|
| Can you list which conquerers? I'm curious as to what you're
| referring to here
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back"
|
| If only. The school system is actually _terrible_ at helping
| the most disadvantaged and marginalized students. These
| students would benefit the most from highly structured and
| directed instructional approaches that often have the pupils
| memorizing their "lesson" essentially word-for-word and
| getting prompt, immediate feedback on every question they
| answer[0] - but teachers who have come out from a proper
| Education department hate these approaches simply because
| they're regarded as "demeaning" for the job and unbecoming of
| a "professional" educator.
|
| Mind you, these approaches are still quite valued in
| "Special" education, which is sort of regarded as a universe
| of its own. But obviously we would rather not have to label
| every student who happens to be merely disadvantaged or
| marginalized as "Special" as a _requirement_ for them to get
| an education that fully engages them, especially when
| addressing their weakest points!
|
| Modern "Progressive" education hurts _both_ gifted and
| disadvantaged students for very similar reasons - but it
| actually hurts the latter a lot more.
|
| [0] As an important point, the merit of this kind of
| education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students!
| In fact, even Abraham Lincoln was famously educated at a
| "blab school" (called that because the pupils would loudly
| "blab" their lesson back at the teacher) that was based on
| exactly that approach.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Respectfully I'm not seeing how your point is surprising at
| all. Are you just saying that when we do spend money on
| disadvantaged (whatever word is correct for "opposite of
| gifted") it isn't effective?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I'm just saying that when the institutional schooling
| system seems to "spend money on the disadvantaged" it's
| merely _pretending_ to help the disadvantaged and
| marginalized, while actively rejecting the approaches
| that, at least as judged by readily available evidence,
| would likely help these students the most, and probably
| close at least some of the gap in outcomes.
| pineaux wrote:
| This is very true
| RealityVoid wrote:
| This sounds thoroughly unappealing to gifted students
| though? I mean, repetition is _a_ tool in the toolset.
| mlyle wrote:
| Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of
| scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial
| compared to other approaches?
|
| I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence
| for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students
| in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore
| pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to
| the general student population, when studies have found
| that students entered into charter lotteries who are _not_
| selected do about as well as those who get to go to the
| charter school).
|
| I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a
| body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for
| situations where it's clear that there's less need for
| deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
|
| As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value
| in having a broad body of knowledge and much more
| usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in
| comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools
| were really pretty demanding of attention span and
| cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal
| punishment to make them work.
|
| I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to
| put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general
| desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective
| mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated
| group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster
| in the classroom to encourage students to value
| performance.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
|
| These things come _after_ one has the basics down pat.
| Modern "Progressive" education rejects this point
| altogether. It's whole approach is entirely founded on
| putting the cart before the horse.
|
| > Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of
| attention span
|
| Attention span is a function of engagement. As it turns
| out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one
| has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even
| "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most
| marginalized and disadvantaged students for whom other
| drivers of high effort mighy be not nearly as effective,
| as you hint at.
| mlyle wrote:
| I asked for sources, not a quibble on a sub-point.
|
| I disagree. I like rote and rigor, but I think it's a
| mistake to ignore developing problem solving and
| intuition early. A lot of programs overshoot, but
| figuring out how to make decent guesses and test them is
| important (as is getting lots of practice on well-defined
| problems).
|
| edit: it looks like you're editing your comment. You
| added:
|
| > As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it
| back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty
| engaging and even "gamified" activity
|
| I disagree here, too. ;) I mean, yes, it _can_ be, but we
| have other tools in our toolbox. The hammer is useful but
| has diminishing returns as we try and apply it more and
| more.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > developing problem solving and intuition early.
|
| There's no reason why these things couldn't be developed
| in a more "structured" approach than the default
| (avoiding the overshooting you mention). The quick
| feedback cycle for every answer is really the most
| critical point.
| mlyle wrote:
| > There's no reason why these things couldn't be
| developed in a more "structured" approach than the
| default (avoiding the overshooting you mention). The
| quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most
| critical point.
|
| Again, citations for the efficacy of scripting and
| recitation would be appreciated.
|
| > The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the
| most critical point.
|
| I agree that quick feedback improves performance and
| morale. We close that loop pretty quickly in my classroom
| most of the time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project)
| for starters, one of the largest educational studies ever
| conducted: "The results of Follow Through did not show
| how models that showed little or no effects could be
| improved. But they did show which models--as suggested by
| the less than ideal conditions of the experiment--had
| some indications of success. Of these models, Siegfried
| Engelmann's Direct Instruction method demonstrated the
| highest gains in the comparative study. [T]he models
| which showed positive effects were largely basic skills
| models. ..."
| mlyle wrote:
| Ugh. I was wondering whether it was going to be Follow
| Through. You understand it was a terribly conducted
| study, and analyses of the data by other parties have
| drawn the exact opposite conclusion?
|
| There's a reason why I'm particularly skeptical to what
| you're saying, btw: we know from pretty high quality
| research lasting decades that the combination of tutorial
| instruction plus mastery methods are supremely effective.
| The big problem is, these approaches don't scale.
|
| Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the
| opposite of this approach.
|
| On the other hand: Direct Instruction could be a way to
| hit a minimum quality level in schools which have
| suffered from instructional quality problems. It's also
| worth noting that modern Direct Instruction is much, much
| less recitation-based than you imply.
|
| Just one piece of anecdata: the private school I'm at was
| much more scripted and regimented around this type of
| philosophy 15 years ago. The private school down the road
| is still there. We've really pulled away in performance
| since broadening methods and doing a lot more of the
| open-ended inquiry that you look down your nose at.
| Indeed, the engineering programs that I teach share very
| few features with DI, and have gotten nationally
| recognized results.
| gyomu wrote:
| > Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of
| scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial
| compared to other approaches?
|
| Singapore/Hong Kong/Japan/Taiwan/Macau dominating the
| PISA
| andai wrote:
| >Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive
| empires for themselves.
|
| I didn't have history in school, could you expand on this
| part? This sounds very interesting.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I have been deeply amused that some recent studies found the
| signal that best correlated with innovation in a society
| wasn't upward mobility, but rather _downward_ mobility.
|
| The less rich people are allowed to buy success for their
| mediocre offspring, the better off society is.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > the gifted and talented communities.
|
| As in gifted and talented individuals who form a community, or
| all these folks from this ethnic background you think are
| talented? Because if it's the former then I'm surprised they've
| got a community going, and if it's the latter you would be
| better served getting the calipers out and go measure some
| skulls instead to promote that nonsense.
| ctoth wrote:
| > As in gifted and talented individuals who form a community,
| or all these folks from this ethnic background you think are
| talented? Because if it's the former then I'm surprised
| they've got a community going
|
| "A recent analysis in Nature caused a stir by pointing out
| that the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners belong to the
| same academic family. Of 736 researchers who have won the Big
| Recognition, 702 group together into one huge connected
| academic lineage (with lineage broadly defined as when one
| scientist "mentors" another, usually in the form of being
| their PhD advisor)."
|
| > getting the calipers out and go measure some skulls
|
| Please, just stop.
|
| [0]: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand
| people https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/yes-
| scientific-pro...
|
| [1]: How to win a Nobel prize https://www.nature.com/immersiv
| e/d41586-024-02897-2/index.ht...
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| > [0]: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand
| people https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/yes-
| scientific-pro...
|
| I agree with your overall message but it's those thousand
| people and the hundreds of thousands ( maybe millions ) of
| people who make the scientific progress possible. It takes
| a community and an infrastructure to turn a scientific
| discovery into scientific progress.
|
| Like it took thousands or millions of people to take the
| discoveries of von Neumann, Church, Turing, etc into
| something worthwhile.
| wyldberry wrote:
| Gifted and talented communities are all the persons who meet
| a criteria to join said community. In children this is often
| scoring beyond grade-level in tests.
| ivalm wrote:
| If you do merit based acceptance into programs then obviously
| it will have a different demographic makeup than population
| at large. We can discuss the causes of this elsewhere, but
| obviously test/school performance varies significantly by
| ethnicity today in the US.
| soco wrote:
| If it was that simple I'm sure we would have seen it already. I
| imagine any gifted program, and you can imagine it in any way
| you like, will inevitably promote a majority from a certain
| group, thus by definition will be a target for every
| discrimination complaint - because basically it will be
| supporting and pumping more money to an already privileged
| group. So somebody has to decide: either targeted to constant
| fussing and worse, or no program at all and wait for the
| somewhat fewer gifted from the group with possibilities to
| still bubble up. Of course this can change every few years, and
| given a ideal situation when you had addressed the challenges
| of poverty, you can draft now a challenge-free gifted program.
| Note: From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more
| from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they
| seem to be simply treated the same.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Note: From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more
| from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they
| seem to be simply treated the same.
|
| Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school
| than anyone else? The point is that different kids has
| different needs, the general classroom is designed for the
| average student and doesn't fit those who are very different
| regardless in what way they are different.
| vitehozonage wrote:
| > From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from
| public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem
| to be simply treated the same.
|
| If you have a group of animals where most of them are dogs
| but a few are cats, then use statistics to justify treating
| them all like dogs, that is not fair to the cats, is it?
| scarmig wrote:
| The issue is deeper than that: it's that we take some
| singular conception of what a dog is, and ruthlessly beat
| any deviation from that idealized dog out of all the
| individual dogs. Which ends up being every dog.
| vitehozonage wrote:
| Well said. The unusual dogs are just beaten more
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| In the past, in many states entry into gifted education
| classes required a professionally administered IQ test. Many
| locations needed 130+. Those requirements have gone away but
| I feel it wasn't discriminatory. Can it really be criticized
| as such?
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| What we oughta do is make a system where state education
| funding is equally distributed (per student capita) to all the
| schools in a state. Local funding by property taxes, while not
| most of the funding for schools, also needs to go. We also
| oughta try and tackle the administrative bloat on a federal
| level to get more of that money going to things that directly
| help students. I agree equality of outcome is a hopeless
| endeavor when schools are so dramatically unequal in the
| states, but I also think we could address that inequality of
| opportunity with better funding policy.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Why?
|
| It costs a lot more to build a new school or maintain an
| existing one in The Bay than in Fresno.
|
| It also costs more for teachers since the cost of living is
| so much higher.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Yeah that's fair, you might need to make the formula more
| complicated. The goal though would be to alter what we have
| now, which is extreme differences in quality between
| schools in rich areas and schools in poor ones, to a model
| where everyone can access a similarly decent quality of
| public schooling. Maybe the formula would need to look
| something like
|
| (the money required to maintain the school building) + (a
| wage thats similar to the wages for other teachers in the
| state, with cost of living factored in) * (the best teacher
| to student ratio achievable across the state) * (student
| count at the school)
| gowld wrote:
| You might be surprised to learn that this is how
| education funding already works. Government isn't
| completely idiotic.
|
| What you are ignoring is that educational spending
| imbalance comes from _private_ voluntary educational
| spending (enrichment programs, camps, PTA), not public
| mandatory spending.
| toast0 wrote:
| In California, there are only a handful of "Basic Aid" school
| districts where property tax funds exceed the minimum
| "revenue limit" per pupil that state government will provide
| funding to reach otherwise.
|
| That does include several of the school districts in the SF
| Bay Area, but the vast majority of the state is already under
| a state funding formula based on attendance and additions for
| certain types of needs.
|
| Other states have different situations. Washington state is
| largely funded locally, with unfunded mandates set by the
| state; and many of the districts have issues with unbalanced
| budgets in recent years.
| vundercind wrote:
| Funding's not the main reason for different outcomes in US
| schools, and probably not even a _major_ reason. Considering
| all sources of funding, in some cities the struggling inner
| city schools have _more_ money than a lot of the better-
| performing suburban schools (rural almost-always-poorly-
| performing schools, not so much)
|
| Funding's an easy target because it's straightforward to fix,
| but we could even all that out (though, careful, or some
| struggling schools will _lose_ funding if you simply level
| out who gets what) and the effect would be minimal.
|
| Unfortunately, effective approaches to making real progress
| on that have little to do with schools at all. Stronger
| social safety nets and support, stronger worker protections,
| justice system reform, that kind of stuff. Hard stuff, where
| we lag behind much of the rest of the OECD and closing that
| gap at all is controversial. And many of the measures might
| take years and years to show up in improved test scores or
| what have you.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It has more to do with the income level of the families
| sending their kids to a school rather than the funds that the
| school has available.
|
| This is why the only way to successfully reduce inequality in
| the education system is to reduce inequality in society at
| large.
| roguecoder wrote:
| That doesn't even make sense. We've seen lots of positive
| outcomes from increasing funding directly to less-well-
| resourced schools.
|
| We have to defy rich people's preferences to do that, but
| that is entirely possible.
| chasd00 wrote:
| my wife has been teaching for about 15 years and i have one
| kid in HS and one in middle school. Adding money to a bad
| school makes it worse, we've seen it time and time again. The
| only time we've ever seen a school stop the downward spiral
| and turn around is when the neighborhood gentrifies or
| becomes hip and new people move there, have kids, and get
| involved and start holding feet to fire via school board and
| district elections. Even then, it takes a 5-10 years. It's
| not a question of funding it's a question of administrative
| competence.
| pnutjam wrote:
| It's not a question of funding it's a question of
| administrative competence.
|
| This is also funding related. Yes, it takes time to turn
| things around and there needs to be oversight. No,
| withholding funds from failing schools wont' work. It's
| like beating people until they are happy.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Functionally talented and gifted students autodidact to their
| interests which is a much better outcome than institutionalized
| bullshit schooling. I deeply disagree with your assessment that
| institutional learning is some universal booster for smart
| people and shows your own personal bias. So in balance of your
| position: I think it grinds down a students willpower and
| spirit to be placed on a pedestal to be given more resources
| than other kids. I'm willing to meet in the middle and say
| either system is equally depressive of students for learning in
| a way that leads to benefits for society.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Learning from teachers is a skill that can be learned, and
| taught.
|
| Being unable to learn from others or collaborate with others
| will vastly limit what gifted children can accomplish in
| life. Not teaching those skills as skills sets gifted
| children up for failure in college and the workplace.
|
| There's also other skills that are very often difficult for
| "gifted" kids to learn: rejection sensitivity disorder, for
| example, is often comorbid. Somatic exercises, learning to
| pay attention to our bodies and not just our intellect. Note
| taking. Slicing problems into small pieces it is okay to
| fail. All of these are things conventional education assumes
| kids will pick up on their own.
|
| We have actual studies on the results of unschooling gifted
| kids, and the outcomes are not good. It is much better if
| they can be coached on skills they don't have, even when
| those are skills other people acquire passively without
| having to be taught.
|
| It doesn't necessarily take "more" resources to educate
| gifted children: it takes differentiated resources. "Your
| brain works differently, so this classroom works better for
| you" is just as true for learning disabilities as it is for
| "gifted" students.
| couchdb_ouchdb wrote:
| We just ejected from Seattle Public Schools for this reason. My
| daughter, as a gifted student, was basically ignored by her
| teachers for the last 3 years because she was smart, and
| therefore they didn't have to worry about her. But, by ignoring
| her, she atrophied. Her standardized testing scores dropped
| every year. She no longer cared about learning. It truly is a
| regression to the mean.
| frmersdog wrote:
| In what way are you certain that she's gifted?
| threatofrain wrote:
| IMO any student that is 1-2 years ahead can be considered
| gifted for the purposes of parents who are thinking about
| how to optimize public or private education for their kids.
|
| Based on how a lot of education systems work in the US
| (recognizing only discrete progress in a student), if your
| child is 1-2 years ahead then that's worth recognizing and
| start nurturing. That's about when public schools also
| recognize the giftedness of a student.
|
| You don't need brilliant children to achieve this kind of
| advantage, just a careful eye and consistent nurturing.
| gowld wrote:
| The OP strongly tries to claim (before contradicting
| herself in the concluding pargraph) that gifted is a
| major psychological difference, not merely being smart
| and a fast learner.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Can you quote where you are seeing that I didn't get that
| reading at all from GP.
| couchdb_ouchdb wrote:
| In Seattle, there's actually a test you can take to get you
| into the "HCC" program which is the gifted program in
| Seattle Public Schools. Seattle, however, has been trying
| (successfully) for years to dismantle it. So even if you
| pass the test, there's not very many places that you can go
| to get these services.
| treis wrote:
| Unrelated but I'd love to hear the story behind your user
| name.
| frmersdog wrote:
| I'm not so certain that a test like that is proof of
| anything other than that someone has the resources to
| study for that test. Seattle's system seems to have been
| a magnet program (where such tests are maybe appropriate)
| masquerading as a gifted program. One has to wonder how
| many gifted students went underserved so that such a
| magnet program could be maintained. Sunsetting it for a
| neighborhood program seems fairer and more effective.
|
| In any case, it's good that you've observed your
| daughter's failure to achieve without an extrinsic
| impetus. It's probably a good time to sit down with her
| and determine what excites her intellectually so that she
| can be empowered to pursue that subject independently. I
| can tell you first-hand that relying on a school or
| school system - even one that routinely sends graduates
| (minority and white, working and middle class) to highly-
| selective colleges and universities - to shepherd
| students into stable and lucrative careers is currently a
| fool's gambit. Academic achievement is often necessary
| but not sufficient (and also more expensive and time-
| consuming than incorporating a measure of
| autodidacticism.)
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| You can also learn outside of school, too. Expecting the
| school to cater to every student just isn't going to happen.
| Even at the swanky private ones.
|
| I was certainly capable of teaching myself in high school and
| skipping multiple years in certain subjects; why not just do
| that? Or find some other topic to learn about that isn't
| taught in school, like programming.
|
| As a former "gifted" child--which I thought was code for
| "autistic" and not actually a compliment at the time, so it
| surprises me people willingly refer to their child as such--
| public school never catered to me, but I wouldn't have traded
| that environment for private school or homeschooling if you
| paid me. In my experience all that people talk about how
| private and homeschooling affects your ability to socialize
| with normal people is true.
| snerbles wrote:
| > You can also learn outside of school, too.
|
| As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my
| academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure,
| "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't
| regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.
|
| > In my experience all that people talk about how private
| and homeschooling affects your ability to socialize with
| normal people is true.
|
| In my experience, people are surprised that I spent 2/3 of
| my pre-college education in various forms of homeschooling.
| "You're so well-adjusted", is a frequent refrain.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in
| public school
|
| No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal
| people. That's a lifelong skill.
|
| > "You're so well-adjusted", is a frequent refrain.
|
| Sure, some people make it work. I don't think this
| invalidates the broad observation that private and
| homeschooled people are frequently socially... off. I
| myself had a homeschooled kid in our town who
| transitioned to public school for high school and made a
| very gregarious time of it. Then again, his parents also
| had him integrate tightly with athletics for the decade
| before this over precisely the concern about
| socialization we're discussing. Perhaps there's a
| critical time in development when socialization is
| necessary and there are other venues than public school
| to remediate this. I'm just saying you can't expect to
| completely avoid normal people and then slot into them
| later in life.
| snerbles wrote:
| > No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal
| people. That's a lifelong skill.
|
| It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as
| my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider
| that _normal_ , then let it be known that I'm perfectly
| fine sticking with _abnormal people_ thank you very much.
| I am perfectly content learning the lessons of _Lord of
| the Flies_ by reading, and not by getting thrown into a
| small re-enactment of it.
|
| Though I suppose public middle school psychology was
| useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern
| Iraq. I'll grant you that.
|
| > Then again, his parents also had him integrate tightly
| with athletics for the decade before this over precisely
| the concern about socialization we're discussing. Perhaps
| there's a critical time in development when socialization
| is necessary and there are other venues than public
| school to remediate this.
|
| I'll add to your anecdata - most homeschoolers I knew did
| sports and other extracurricular clubs, outside of the
| co-ops they may be participating in.
| foobarian wrote:
| I'm considering something similar but I find it hard to
| figure out a good alternative, because they all seem "nice,"
| have smart words on the website, cost about the same (which
| is not little), but when you look at matriculation stats it's
| not that impressive or visibly better than public schools.
| And then a bunch of them are weird religious schools which
| gives me the heebie jeebies. I guess you really have to be
| part of the "in" group and get recommendations from the other
| parents/grandparents/families and that's where the class
| divide is.
| couchdb_ouchdb wrote:
| 100% agree with you. We went with a religious option
| because of cost, and, despite the religious aspect, are
| finding it much better.
|
| We couldn't afford the private schools that are ~$50K, but,
| like you say, higher cost doesn't necessarily mean better
| education.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My oldest son managed to get into one of the actually
| functioning, albeit barely, magnet public High Schools in
| Dallas TX ISD ( Townview SEM). His little brother is in a
| magnet middle school and will probably follow to either SEM
| or the TAG (talented and gifted) magnet which is in the same
| physical building.
|
| Both my wife and I agree, if we had to do it over again we
| would move to the exurbs and home school. TAG and SEM rank in
| the top 20-30 nationwide and it's still not that great.
| Homeschoolers can cover the same level of material and
| learning in about 3-4hrs where the public school alternative
| is all day sitting in desks and bored out of their minds.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I don't have much experience with how education works in
| California, or in the US in general. But there is one universal
| issue with special programs for gifted kids: parents. It's hard
| to distinguish gifted kids from average kids with ambitious
| parents. If you let ambitious parents push their kids to
| programs they are not qualified for, they can easily ruin the
| programs for the actual gifted kids.
|
| Gifted programs work best when people don't consider them
| prestigious or think that they will improve the life outcomes
| for the participants. When they are more about individual
| interests than status and objective gains.
| scarmig wrote:
| Naming the programs gifted and creating a gifted identity is
| the core issue. Instead, call it something like asynchronous
| development, and place kids in classes appropriate to their
| pace of development.
|
| I'm hopeful that AI can offer highly individualized education
| to each kid, and get around this issue entirely.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Instead, call it something like asynchronous development
|
| "Differently abled" works just fine both ways, that there
| is stigma attached to the title helps since it means
| parents wont push for it for no reason.
| xeromal wrote:
| The problem with changing the terminology is that
| people/kids are clever enough to turn it to a diss
| regardless. It's only a matter of time.
|
| Anyways, I don't see the big deal. I was too dumb to make
| it into gifted classes in school but it's not like that
| stopped me from going to college. I just went to a lesser
| college. Still make good money
| Spoom wrote:
| In Ontario, access to these programs was gated by an IQ test
| given to all students based on the outcome of a standardized
| test (this was ~30 years ago, no idea what they do today).
| I'm not saying it was perfectly objective or equitable but it
| was a start at trying to make it objective. Are programs
| _not_ doing something similar in California or elsewhere in
| the US?
| krooj wrote:
| Yep - I remember the CCAT from 4th grade that resulted in
| my being placed into a different class for 5th. AFAIK, we
| were given this test "cold" (no prep) and I remember it
| being timed.
| axus wrote:
| Is it the kids who are chosen that make a program "work
| best", or the teachers and curriculum? Why not let anybody
| who wants to try it, try it?
| okdood64 wrote:
| I don't know; the overly-ambitious parents push has been
| working out pretty well as evidenced by the Asian community
| in the US.
| hintymad wrote:
| The solution is to make gift classes fluid. That is, the
| worst performing kids leave the program every year, while the
| best kids outside the program move in. Parents can only push
| so much, but they can't change talent distribution.
|
| What about the kids who thrive when their parents push hard
| enough? Well, in that case the kids are indeed talented, no?
| If the US people are inspired by seeing the street of LA at
| 4:00am or by some NBA dude practices free throw 4000 times a
| day, then we've got to admit that toiling also works and
| should be admired in academic training.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue
| signaling is a loss for society
|
| I wonder if the progressives ever wondered why so many Chinese
| students or Indian students could excel in the STEM programs of
| those top universities? Like we grew up with our parents making
| less than $500 a month in the early 2000s if we were lucky.
| Heck, a family from countryside or a small town probably made
| $200 a month or less. Like we studied English with a couple of
| cassettes and our English was so broken that we couldn't even
| clear custom when entering the US. Like our schools lost power
| every few days, and our teachers printed our exams and handouts
| using a manual mimeograph machine. Like I didn't even know
| touch typing before I got into college. Like I thought only
| experts could use a personal computer and typing "DIR" under
| DOS was so fascinating. Yeah, we were that poor.
|
| Yet, our teachers did one thing right: they did their job. They
| pushed us. They did't give up on us. They tried every way to
| make sure their explanation is clear, intuitive, and inspiring.
| They designed amazing problem sets to make sure we truly
| understand the fundamentals of math, physics, and chemistry.
| They didn't shy away from telling us that we didn't do a good
| job. They forced us to write essays every day, to solve
| problems every day, and in general to learn deeply every day. I
| still remembered the sly smile when my chemistry teacher made
| sure we could solve the ICO-style multi-step synthesis in
| organic chemistry.
|
| So, yeah, many of us wouldn't be where we are today if our
| teachers hadn't pushed hard on us. Equity my ass.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| It's really strange that you have such emotional reactions to
| the concept of equity while my Indian middle class IIT
| educated dad who experienced Indian institutional failure in
| the 70s and 80s never really cared about if me or my sibling
| were in the G&T program.
|
| What separates you from the people that didn't make it out?
| hintymad wrote:
| I don't care about G&T program per se, either. Nor did my
| country have it when I grew up. I do care about education.
| I guess my fundamental assumption is that when everyone
| maximizes their full potential, the outcome will naturally
| be different. So, pushing students to realize their
| potential will be against equity, but will be the best way
| to minimize the equity gap.
|
| Now the nuances for us in the US specifically: the US
| system is really good for the most and the least talented.
| The most talented get access to all kinds of free yet
| prestigious programs and camps, excellent books in local
| libraries, and professors in colleges. The least talented
| are carefully looked after, and they don't necessarily have
| much pressure to get into a college, and rightly so. It is,
| unfortunately, the vast middle who get hurt because they
| squander their time in school. They think they have
| learned, but they barely scratch the surface. NYT used to
| report that a straight-A student dreamed to become a
| scientist, yet couldn't even pass placement test of her
| college. Malcom mentioned in his book David and Goliath
| that a straight-A student failed her organic chemistry
| class in Brown University. Similarly in my personal
| experience, if it weren't for my teacher, I wouldn't know
| how deep I could go. If a student like me, who managed to
| stay top of the classes in elite universities, still needed
| intense nurturing from my teachers, I'd imagine many more
| do as well.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > a straight-A student failed her organic chemistry class
| in Brown University
|
| OChem is a weed-out class for pre-med students in every
| university.
|
| CHEM 0350/0360 are notorious weed-outs at Brown.
|
| > I guess my fundamental assumption is that when everyone
| maximizes their full potential, the outcome will
| naturally be different
|
| At some point, it comes down to individuals. I've studied
| at Community Colleges, State Schools, and Ivies/Ivy
| Adjacent programs, and the curriculum is largely
| comparable.
|
| Sure heads of state do occasionally come on campus at
| Harvard, but undergrads almost never attend those talks
| or opportunities - just like in any other university.
|
| You can succeed or fail in any program, it just comes
| down to individual motivation.
|
| > the vast middle who get hurt because they squander
| their time in school
|
| The un-PC truth is this comes down to parenting. If
| parents don't help guide or motivate their kids, most
| kids will stagnate.
|
| Teachers can only do so much.
|
| If Farangi/Ang Mo parents cannot parent, that's on them.
|
| Back in my Bay Area high school, it was the "American"
| parents that lobbied against APs and Honors classes, but
| Asian, Hispanic, and Eastern European students tended to
| be overrepresented in those classes.
|
| --------
|
| There's no point truly optimizing for "gifted" students -
| the truly gifted will be able to succeed in any
| environment.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > There's no point truly optimizing for "gifted" students
| - the truly gifted will be able to succeed in any
| environment.
|
| I mostly agree, so long as the truly gifted have access
| to resources which allow them to leverage their gifts.
| They don't need a teacher who is focused on them. But
| they at least need access to books, internet resources,
| etc., to learn on their own, ideally with some guidance
| from others but not essential.
| hintymad wrote:
| > I've studied at Community Colleges, State Schools, and
| Ivies/Ivy Adjacent programs, and the curriculum is
| largely comparable.
|
| I'm very happy with the education system of the US
| colleges too. I was specifically talking about trainings
| in high school.
|
| > The un-PC truth is this comes down to parenting. If
| parents don't help guide or motivate their kids, most
| kids will stagnate.
|
| At least this was not true in my personal experience. My
| parents gave me love and support, but they gave me zero
| relevant guidance on how to study. Funny that my parents
| told me that "just make sure you understand your textbook
| and can solve all the problems on it, and you will excel"
| because that was their experience in college. Yet they
| had no idea that we had no problem understanding
| textbooks, and questions we got from our teachers were
| miles deeper than our textbook. Merely following textbook
| will guarantee failure, except for the truly talented
| (this is very different from the US textbooks. Books like
| CLRS and Jackson's Electrodynamics are famous for tough
| exercises and deep discussions, but high-school
| textbooks, at least in my country, cover only the
| basics).
|
| > There's no point truly optimizing for "gifted" students
| - the truly gifted will be able to succeed in any
| environment.
|
| I guess it depends on what we mean by "gifted". If you
| are talking about gifted as in those who push themselves,
| who took initiative to find resources, who are so
| competitive or passionate that constantly seek
| challenges, then yeah, I are truly gifted and will stand
| out.
|
| On the other hand, if you are talking about those who are
| like me, then I doubt we don't need to push them in high
| school. I got multiple wakeup calls because my teachers
| gave us challenging problem sets, so I realized that I
| didn't really learn as well as I thought.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > The most talented get access to all kinds of free yet
| prestigious programs and camps, excellent books in local
| libraries, and professors in colleges.
|
| I agree with this part
|
| > The least talented are carefully looked after, and they
| don't necessarily have much pressure to get into a
| college, and rightly so.
|
| This has nothing to do with talent. The poorest in
| society do receive subsidies (medicaid, food stamps) that
| the middle class do not qualify for. But that has nothing
| to do with talent. It's also not "carefully looked after"
| -- they're just not starving.
| hintymad wrote:
| I meant programs like No Kids Left Behind, so we are
| careful to make sure the least talented won't feel
| singled out in school, or to make sure that their egos
| get as little bruised as possible. We also tailor the
| difficulties to them so they at least learn something.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Do you make a distinction between a "bad student" and a
| "disadvantaged student"? Is it ever fair to describe a
| student as "less talented" than another, in your view?
| pnutjam wrote:
| counterpoint: https://ctmirror.org/2024/09/29/cant-read-
| high-school-ct-har...
|
| America has some of the best schools, but also some of
| the worst. Engaging kids doesn't mean pushing them to
| academic heights. We should be working on engaging kids
| in all the facets of life instead of pushing sports and
| STEM.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Engaging kids doesn't mean pushing them to academic
| heights
|
| Agreed. I guess the previous discussions were conditioned
| on the assumption that some kids want to perform well
| enough academically.
| didibus wrote:
| > So, pushing students to realize their potential will be
| against equity, but will be the best way to minimize the
| equity gap.
|
| That's not what equity is, but it's a common messaging by
| those trying to move the popular opinion against it, so I
| understand why you wrongly thought so.
|
| Equity isn't about holding back high-achieving students
| or bringing everyone to the same level. Instead, it's
| about ensuring everyone has access to the resources and
| opportunities they need to reach their full potential,
| while recognizing that different people might need
| different levels or types of support to get there.
|
| A true equity approach in education would mean:
| Supporting gifted students to reach their full potential
| AND providing additional support to students who face
| systemic barriers or need extra help AND ensuring
| all students have access to quality education and
| resources
|
| The goal is to lift everyone up, not to hold anyone back.
| The idea that equity means lowering standards or limiting
| achievement is a misrepresentation often used to argue
| against equity initiatives as a straw man.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Equity isn't about holding back high-achieving students
| or bringing everyone to the same level. Instead, it's
| about ensuring everyone has access to the resources and
| opportunities they need to reach their full potential,
| while recognizing that different people might need
| different levels or types of support to get there.
|
| Isn't this equal opportunity, which means equality, which
| I also support?
|
| > The goal is to lift everyone up, not to hold anyone
| back.
|
| I thought California, or at least SFUSD, did exactly the
| opposite. For instance, they pushed the algebra to Grade
| 8 (or grade 9?) and geometry to grade 9, in the name of
| equity. That is, they try to restrict the access from
| even the ordinary kids (many kids have no problems
| studying algebra before grade 8) in the name of helping
| the challenged.
| didibus wrote:
| > Isn't this equal opportunity, which means equality,
| which also support?
|
| Sorry, I forked the convo in two different replies. I
| explain the difference with equal opportunity in my other
| response. But basically, the introduction of the idea of
| equity was because the prior idea of equal opportunity
| assumed everyone starts from the same place, or has the
| same potential.
|
| With equal opportunity, you give everyone the exact same
| education.
|
| With equity, you give everyone the education they
| deserve.
|
| > I thought California, or at least SFUSD, did exactly
| opposite. For instance, they pushed the algebra to Grade
| 8 (or grade 9?) and geometry to grade 9, in the name of
| equity. That is, they try to restrict the access from
| even the ordinary kids (many kids have no problems
| studying algebra before grade 8) in the name of helping
| the challenged.
|
| Ya, instead of providing additional support to help
| struggling students access advanced math earlier, they
| essentially "leveled down" by restricting access for
| everyone. That case is often cited as an example of how
| misunderstanding equity (or using equity as a cover for
| other goals, let's be honest) can lead to policies that
| actually increase educational disparities rather than
| reducing them.
|
| I can't explain it, and I don't support it. But it's not
| an example of equity, even if it pretends to be.
|
| I think sometimes the political deadlock results in
| stupid things like this. Like, they wanted funding to
| help struggling students, got opposition to it, so
| resorted to this "cost-free" but harmful alternative, and
| labeled it as "equity" to try to make it more palatable
| and fool the people who wanted them to implement equity
| polices to believe they did.
| didibus wrote:
| And adding a bit more info, because I hate seeing people
| get misled about what equity is arguing for.
|
| The key difference of equity with equal opportunity is
| that equal opportunity provides the same
| resources/treatment to everyone, while equity recognizes
| that people start from different positions and may need
| different levels or types of support to reach the same
| opportunities.
|
| Equity is about ensuring everyone has a fair chance to
| succeed according to their own potential and efforts, not
| about guaranteeing identical outcomes.
| didibus wrote:
| > Equity my ass
|
| I don't understand this statement. You say you were offered
| access to good teachers, that didn't give up on you because
| you were poor, or because you had broken English, that's a
| great example of equity, so like why do you dismiss it at the
| end?
| hintymad wrote:
| All those are about equality, namely equal access. I'm
| totally for that. What I'm not for is manufactured equity,
| namely equal outcome by force.
|
| You must know a typical situation in many families: one kid
| is years ahead of math program without even trying, and
| another struggles with math no matter hard the parents try
| but is good at reading and writing. According to the
| progressive government, the parents should mandate the
| former kid to learn less math and the latter to do less
| reading, so they can achieve the same degree of learning.
| That's just insane.
| Animats wrote:
| > I can't help but recall Harrison Bergeron.
|
| That old SF story seems to come up rather often today. I read
| it decades ago, and never saw the 1995 made-for-TV movie.[1]
| For decades it was forgotten.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film)
| alephnerd wrote:
| It was taught in my middle school English class in the Bay
| Area in the 2000s, but they also utilized tracking.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > Focusing on equality of outcomes
|
| Is this a thing? I hear conservative people complain about it a
| lot, but I have no clue what this looks like.
| polski-g wrote:
| It looks like this:
|
| https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-
| scandal-...
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| That doesn't seem to be a problem in practice as
| discriminatory hiring around protected classes is illegal.
|
| Regardless--point taken.
| csa wrote:
| > but I have no clue what this looks like
|
| An earlier version of the CA academic framework (2022?)
| wanted _all_ students to take algebra in 9th grade, rather
| than letting some folks start in 8th grade.
|
| Why this matters:
|
| - algebra in 8th grade allows for calculus to be reached by
| 12th grade by taking just one math class per year.
|
| - conversely, 9th grade algebra means that a student would
| need to double up in math one year, which means that they
| have to give up a slot in another HS class in order to make
| room for the extra math class.
|
| - calculus in high school is one key to get into competitive
| schools and programs, so this is seen as a desirable goal for
| academically inclined folks.
|
| The reason this policy was proposed was that the folks in the
| faster track were not of a similar racial proportion as the
| entire student population, so it was deemed discriminatory.
|
| The policy solution was to make it much more difficult for
| folks who aimed to end up in 12th grade calculus to do so.
|
| Note that there was no broad support of this parents of the
| kids in the accelerated math program _or by parents of those
| who weren't_.
|
| This was a policy that was created by a group of so-called
| progressives who were happy to lower the overall group
| achievement level by limiting access in order to manufacture
| "equality" in the enrollment numbers (the outcome).
|
| There was basically a revolt, and this become a policy
| suggestion rather than a requirement, but California made
| that change under duress rather than agreeing with the
| dissenters.
|
| Note that this type of thinking is very common and very
| popular in the education academic/"intellectual" circles.
| They assume that people will eventually come around to their
| way of thinking. Imho, they are completely out of touch with
| (and largely have disdain for) "normal" people.
|
| Is this a clear example without any conservative baggage?
|
| Edit - here is an article that discusses this topic:
|
| https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/california-
| adopts-c...
| tokinonagare wrote:
| Just go in France and have a look. Also have a look at the
| evolution of the country PISA's score in the last decade, it
| is very telling.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we
| all aren't equal
|
| How do you do that though? How do you knock down an idea that:
|
| - has at least hundreds of millions of subscribers, for many of
| whom the idea is an unassailable religious tenet
|
| - has survived and endured for centuries (Lindy)
|
| - manifests itself in the form of laws, businesses, and NGOs,
| and is propped up by violence, and also by the hundreds of
| billions of dollars behind those organizations
|
| Even if the idea is wrong, with all this momentum behind it,
| with all this skin people have in the game, all they've
| invested into it, how do you get people to abandon the idea?
| eitally wrote:
| For better or for worse, when I was in school in the 80s and
| early 90s, tracking started in about 4th grade (not counting
| kids who skipped earlier grades entirely). I essentially had
| about 90% the same kids in all my classes from 4th grade
| through high school graduation (not counting the influx from
| other feeder schools that joined in 6th & 9th). The result was
| less distraction in the classroom because everyone wanted to be
| there and was focused on learning, and much tighter rapport
| among the classmates. A lot of people make their best friends
| in college, but in my case, the friend groups that sustained
| frequently began in elementary and middle school!
|
| The downside to early tracking is that it becomes increasingly
| difficult for kids on remedial and standard tracks to break
| into G&T/advanced classes with each successive year, but it's
| pretty easy to create an exception-based assessment process to
| facilitate these moves.
|
| Fast forward to today, where I have three kids in three public
| neighborhood schools in San Jose. Math tracking starts in
| middle school and is based exclusively on students' NWEA
| (https://www.nwea.org/) scores, which determine whether you're
| placed in accelerated math, standard math or remedial math in
| 6th grade. Some schools let kids move into the accelerated
| track in 7th grade based on their 6th grade achievement, but
| many don't [because the 6th grade accelerated curriculum
| includes the entirety of 6th-8th grade "standard math"
| curricula, and expecting a kid who only received 1/3rd of that
| as a 6th grader to miraculously know the other 2/3rds as they
| start 7th grade isn't reasonable]. The result, from what I can
| tell, is that you have all kinds of mixed grade classes in high
| school now, since kids of essentially any grade could be taking
| the same classes (whether AP classes or core curriculum, or
| even electives). It's frankly a mess, and the level of
| distraction is off the charts. Overall, achievement of G&T
| students is lower and the kids at the lower end are suffering,
| too, because they're also not receiving differentiated
| instruction at the level they often need.
|
| In my opinion, it's a great illustration of how DEI policies
| applied to public education can fail all student demographics.
| On the plus side, ironically, the social/emotional maturity of
| kids these days far exceeds generations past.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >the social/emotional maturity of kids these days far exceeds
| generations past.
|
| I thought they were plagued by anxiety?
| eitally wrote:
| Nah, that was the aughts. These days the only anxiety is
| about cost of living, but it doesn't hit until college age.
| Speaking completely truthfully, my perception is that the
| teens of today are better adjusted psychologically than any
| generation before them.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Huh, why is that?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we
| all aren't equal, we don't all have access to the same
| opportunities, but as a country we can implement policies that
| lessen the imbalance.
|
| that's exactly what these school policies in CA and elsewhere
| are attempting to do; we can argue about which method might be
| the most effective, but no matter what you will find anecdotal
| examples about why X method "doesn't work".
|
| The problem, or a problem, is that the problems the schools are
| trying to fix are deeply rooted in social inequality and much
| of that takes place outside the school. Striving for less
| inequality in general will also help solve the inequality in
| education problem.
|
| Finland's approach is based on equality and has been very
| effective.
| csa wrote:
| > that's exactly what these school policies in CA and
| elsewhere are attempting to do
|
| Hmm... either I wasn't clear, or we are talking about
| different things.
|
| Maybe I should have added "lessen the imbalance of access to
| opportunities" to be extra clear.
|
| California is creating equality of academic outcomes by
| _reducing_ the access to academic opportunities -- certain
| races can't stand out if they simply aren't given the chance
| to do so.
|
| The examples I gave of Head Start and well-run gifted and
| talented programs focus on _increasing_ academic
| opportunities.
|
| One of these is inherently regressive, and the other is
| inherently progressive.
|
| > Striving for less inequality in general will also help
| solve the inequality in education problem.
|
| I think we are advocating for the same goal.
|
| To be clear about the how, I strongly advocate for increasing
| access to academic opportunities rather than limiting access
| to academic opportunities in order to generate an equality of
| outcomes at an overall lower level.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > To be clear about the how, I strongly advocate for
| increasing access to academic opportunities rather than
| limiting access to academic opportunities in order to
| generate an equality of outcomes at an overall lower level.
|
| I agree. We may quibble about the details of how best go
| about achieving that, but yes, this is the goal.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Had never read this before.
|
| https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
|
| Edit: I've heard of it before, especially on HN and Slashdot,
| but forgot entirely about it.
| sunshowers wrote:
| While I think each student should be challenged in ways that
| cause their skills to develop, unequal opportunities lead to
| unequal outcomes which in turn lead to unequal opportunities
| and so on. There isn't really a separation between
| opportunities and outcomes that way.
|
| But you also have to balance this with people in such programs
| not thinking of themselves as superior to others. This seems
| really hard -- I think it needs to be made clear that the goal
| is equalizing academic difficulty, not special treatment.
| kelnos wrote:
| I didn't think the GP was arguing that. School systems are
| focusing on equality of outcomes, when they should be
| focusing on equality of opportunities.
|
| Gifted kids will be able to take better advantage of those
| opportunities and experience better outcomes. But that's ok;
| that should be how things work.
|
| When you focus only on equal outcomes, you end up with the
| lowest common denominator, and gifted kids get bored and
| don't excel.
|
| When I was growing up (80s), I was in a program for gifted
| kids. I do expect that I got opportunities that other kids
| didn't get, which is a problem. But ultimately I thrived and
| have become successful, and I'm sure programs like that
| helped. In middle school and high school I was always placed
| in the highest-level classes (there were 4 levels), and I am
| certain I wouldn't be as successful had I been given the same
| instruction as kids in the bottom level or two.
|
| My outcomes were certainly better, but as long as everyone
| has the opportunity for advanced instruction -- if they have
| an aptitude and can qualify for it -- I think that's fine.
|
| I'm sure there was some inequality of opportunity when I was
| in grade school, and that sort of thing does need to be
| fixed. But we can't do so in a way that assumes all kids are
| equally gifted and talented. That's just not how people work.
| sunshowers wrote:
| To be clear I think the goal should not be to equalize
| opportunities or outcomes. I think the goal should be to
| equalize the amount of challenge each student experiences,
| wherever they are. (It's like strength training.)
| jdougan wrote:
| > "In my early days it was an article of faith among a
| selfstyled 'intellectual elite' that they could teach calculus
| to a horse . . if they started early enough, spent enough
| money, supplied special tutoring, and were endlessly patient
| and always careful not to bruise his equine ego. They were so
| sincere that it seems downright ungrateful that the horse
| always persisted in being a horse. Especially as they were
| right . . if 'starting early enough' is defined as a million
| years or more."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we
| all aren't equal, we don't all have access to the same
| opportunities, but as a country we can implement policies that
| lessen the imbalance.
|
| But lessening the imbalance is the opposite of what you want.
|
| Say you have $300 to invest in educating one student.
|
| If you invest it in the stupid student, that student will
| develop $100 of learning, and the imbalance will shrink by a
| small amount.
|
| If you invest it in the smart student, that student will
| develop $300 of learning, and the imbalance will grow by a
| large amount.
|
| Which is better?
| bilbo0s wrote:
| My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the government,
| would take gifted options more seriously if there weren't so many
| kids who did nothing more than learn the multiplication table
| early being classified as gifted. You limit enrollment to only
| the extreme outliers and at that point there would be national
| security benefits to identifying these children. (Heck, I'd bet
| the federal government might even try to step in and take over
| the education of gifted children for its own benefit.)
|
| As it stands, it's just a bunch of kids who mostly land on
| boringly normal tracks to public flagships. There's not much
| upside in even identifying them, because "gifted" has been
| reduced to mean, well, pretty much anyone who can get a good
| grade.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Perhaps you need several program levels? remedial, normal,
| advanced and gifted.
|
| My naive take is that there is a need for each. remedial helps
| kids to catch up. Normal is where you have perhaps 70% of the
| students, advanced where you have kids with more natural
| ambition in some subjects and gifted is where you send the top
| 5%?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the
| government, would take gifted options more seriously if there
| weren't so many kids who did nothing more than learn the
| multiplication table early being classified as gifted.
|
| It isn't that unreasonable to ask for an education system that
| pushes kids as fast as the kid keeps up with and eases them
| back if they regress to the mean at some point
|
| Learning the multiplication table early isn't necessarily a
| sign that someone is a genius, but it does mean they are ahead
| of their class. There is no benefit to holding them back to the
| level of other kids their age "just in case they might not
| actually be gifted" or whatever it is you are proposing
|
| If they wind up graduating high school early but then not
| really doing anything exceptional in their lives that's
| actually fine
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _It isn 't that unreasonable to ask for an education system
| that pushes kids as fast as the kid keeps up with and eases
| them back if they regress_
|
| Surely you can see the damage this would do to the majority
| of children currently being told they are "gifted"?
|
| Being "gifted" until the 6th, 7th, or 8th grade would
| psychologically cripple a lot of these kids through high
| school. It's better to not allow that "advanced but not
| gifted" demographic in from the outset, than it is to
| unceremoniously boot them at some arbitrary time in the
| future if they fail to keep up with those at the extremes.
|
| The better ideas are the remediation, normal, advanced and
| then gifted classifications. And you don't get the gifted
| label unless you are on the extreme of exceptional.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Surely you can see the damage this would do to the
| majority of children currently being told they are
| "gifted"?
|
| We don't have to call it "gifted", we can call it
| "accelerated" or "ahead of their age" or whatever else you
| want
|
| The point is that while they may not become exceptional
| adults, if they are exceptional for an 8 year old it is
| doing them a disservice to keep them at the same level as
| all of the other kids their age
|
| > Being "gifted" until the 6th, 7th, or 8th grade would
| psychologically cripple a lot of these kids through high
| school
|
| I don't think you can claim this without evidence.
|
| And no, people whine-blogging online about being a former
| gifted kid and now a depressed and anxious failure is not
| evidence
| jessepasley wrote:
| Is that how gifted students are identified these days? When I
| went through the gifted program as a kid/teen, we had to take
| what was considered to be an IQ test at the time. Being far
| ahead in some skills in schools might be have been indicator
| but not sufficient to being admitted.
| spamizbad wrote:
| This is my view as well. You can see the effects of this policy
| from the 80s and 90s with the sheer number of "former gifted
| kid" adults who feel like they were destined for greatness but
| ended up with pretty standard knowledge worker jobs. There's a
| difference between being a bright, contentious hard-working
| student and being genuinely intellectually gifted - today we
| lump these kids together, which not only balloons the cost of
| the program but gives both students and parents a false sense
| of what it actually means.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| "GATE" as a CIA/FBI Psyop is already a common schizo opinion on
| 4chan. Don't make it reality please.
|
| (for those who don't know: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrange
| ness/comments/1fdg8io/wh...)
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| > There's little doubt that racism played a role in identifying
| children as gifted even though the label was based on supposedly
| objective criteria.
|
| Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only
| reason for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren't
| teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists?
|
| I'm constantly surprised how often accusations like this are
| thrown around and how little pushback there is by those accused
| of it.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Honest question, you're a first grade teacher in LA. How do you
| "push back"? Write a tweet?
| recursive wrote:
| Cancel your subscription I guess. How are the subscription
| numbers?
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Have each of your students write a letter to the editors of
| the LA Times saying it is not nice to imply that you are a
| bigot.
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| My first thought is using your union representative to
| amplify your voice. Presumably the union doesn't want to be
| associated with, or known to be representing, racists so it's
| in their best interests to denounce these types of
| statements.
| User23 wrote:
| Because the alternative hypothesis to racist teachers is
| literally unspeakable.
| vundercind wrote:
| ... centuries of disadvantage compounding over generations?
| The predictable outcomes of poverty?
|
| People talk about those all the time.
| casey2 wrote:
| What? That Negros are dumber than Whites? I'm sure this has
| been debunked multiple times, so people generally don't say
| it for fear of sounding stupid, not of enraging some higher
| up cabal of leftists that either secretly or openly control
| everything.
| ironlake wrote:
| > settled on racist teachers
|
| If the population of gifted kids is statistically over-
| represented by white kids, then one of these must be true:
|
| * The test doesn't measure giftedness, but rather level of
| education. So we would expect kids from worse schools to
| perform worse. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is
| not equal. * Gifted kids from minority communities don't have
| equal access to the test or the classes. This is institutional
| racism. The opportunity is not equal. * White kids are smarter.
| They all took the same test, white kids came out on top. This
| is a racist belief with a millennia of discredited science to
| back it up.
|
| No racist teacher required.
| scarmig wrote:
| > This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal.
|
| The test is not a form of racism, institutional or otherwise.
| It's doubling as a proxy measure for the socioeconomic
| disadvantage the students have experienced up to that point.
|
| You can't get rid of socioeconomic disadvantage by refusing
| to measure it, no more than you can cure COVID by refusing to
| test for it.
| danans wrote:
| > It's doubling as a proxy measure for the socioeconomic
| disadvantage the students have experienced up to that
| point.
|
| A socioeconomic disadvantage which in the case of
| California - and almost certainly elsewhere - is caused in
| significant part by historical racist policies (i.e.
| redlining).
| scarmig wrote:
| Getting rid of a test that measures effects from
| redlining does nothing to eliminate the effects of
| redlining.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > They all took the same test, white kids came out on top.
| This is a racist belief
|
| I am not even white, but something there in your rationale
| does not make sense. If they all took the same test and white
| kids were on top, how is this a belief?
|
| Is there a word missing somewhere? Is the implication that
| the test was rigged? It is an honest question, I couldn't
| follow the rationale there.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| you missed this relevant (albeit, unspecific) fragment when
| you extracted the quote:
|
| > with a millennia of discredited science to back it up
| scarmig wrote:
| The third prong is a bit badly posed: descriptively,
| white kids test better than black kids, and each of the
| three prongs offers an explanation. The third prong
| points to a discredited belief of genetic inferiority; by
| positioning the three prongs as exhaustive, the author
| structures the argument such that if you don't accept
| either of the first two prongs, then you must be a
| racist.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Perhaps. I didn't really read that much into GGP's
| comment. I just wanted to point out that the comment does
| (minimally) rebut scientific racism. And by selectively
| omitting that rebuttal in the quote, GP makes it appear
| as if the denial of scientific racism is just a claim of
| faith.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| But you mentioned that a test was taken. Is the test
| somehow unscientific? Is it rigged to favor white kids?
| Are you speaking of a hypothetical test that doesn't
| exist and was never applied?
|
| If a test was actually taken, and it is not rigged, how
| can it not be a sort of scientific evidence?
| chimpanzee wrote:
| I did not.
| ivalm wrote:
| These are not the only three alternatives.
|
| And looking at actual outcomes in the US it's easy to see
| that the truth is different. It's not even white kids that
| come up on top, it's mostly Asian kids (and before that
| Ashkinazi kids). It's not because they have some
| institutional privilege. It's because culture matters and
| valuing smarts and education is important not just for test
| taking but also for benefiting the society long term.
| Spivak wrote:
| You don't understand the non-pushback because you're someone
| who thinks of racism as a personal matter and something a
| person either is or isn't. Everyone is racist, I'm racist.
| Those ideas have been deeply ingrained into me from when I was
| a little girl all the way through now and they're never going
| away. What I can do is learn to recognize when my "first
| thought" is likely a racist one, push it to the frontal cortex
| for rational analysis, and adjust my response if necessary.
|
| Racist as a pejorative is one who is doing it on purpose or
| with indifference, context matters. We perceive white children
| as smarter is an everyone problem, not an individual teacher
| problem.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not that the teacher were racist. It's that the tests or
| indicators used to identify individuals as gifted were not
| evaluated well enough for bias. It's not overt racism. It's
| stuff like rich parents hiring tutors and the rich parents
| being more likely to be white (I would argue that implicit
| racism isn't racism as it lacks intent, but is still a harmful
| bias to be eliminated). This goes back to their comment on high
| achievers getting into the program vs the inherently gifted.
| Another example is IQ tests administered in English to students
| who have English as a second language. Even stuff like parents
| training their kids for the format of the IQ test questions
| provides and advantage.
|
| The problem I have with a lot of the stuff related to gifted
| learning is how it's structured and gate kept. In a public
| school, there should not be a limited number of seats for an
| academic program. Any student who can perform in that program
| should be allowed to participate, not just the top 10% or
| whatever. I think it should be measured on their current
| academic performance, not some IQ test or teacher
| recommendations. If you're consistently getting As in the
| regular course, you should be eligible to try the accelerated
| program. You may get more out of the accelerated program even
| if your grade drops from As to Bs. It also seems that many
| programs are all or nothing - either you're in the gifted
| program for all subjects or none at all. Being advanced in one
| or two subjects and in the regular classes for the others
| should be fine. It seems this is at least picking up more
| popularity in the past decade or two.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| >> There's little doubt that _racism_ played _a role_ in
| identifying children as gifted even though the label was based
| on supposedly objective criteria
|
| > Why has the LA Times settled on racist _teachers_ as the
| _only_ reason...
|
| Notice how the extracted quote (and the article itself) never
| actually accuses teachers of racism? The accusation only
| appears in your complaint.
|
| Systemic racism can exist without overt individual racism.
|
| Likewise, the article explicitly leaves open the possibility of
| other causes by simply assigning racism to "a role in" rather
| than to, as you claim, "the only reason".
|
| Your complaint (with false accusations) is, without further
| explanation, simply manufactured outrage.
| ivalm wrote:
| But why assign any specific value to systemic racism vs some
| groups value family + education more than others. Poor Asian
| families suffered a lot of discrimination (and still do) but
| their kids do well in these tests. Ashkenazi suffered a ton
| of discrimination especially early/mid 20th century but still
| did extremely well academically. I am not even saying they
| are inherently smarter, I'm just saying that their value
| system is demonstrably different, they suffered obvious
| discrimination, and yet had significantly above average
| educational outcomes.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Why are you replying to my comment with this? It has no
| relevance to anything I wrote.
|
| But since you did, I'd suggest you consider not only the
| value system of the victims but also that of the
| perpetrators and the system itself.
|
| And also consider the history.
|
| And consider the financial differences that often exist.
|
| Consider the communities and their plights.
|
| Consider destruction of cultures.
|
| Consider the dietary and health issues that are faced.
|
| Consider the overwhelming economic and media environments
| that 7 years olds grow up within and how that environment
| is often more impactful than parents could ever hope to be.
|
| And, if we want to focus on biology, consider the role that
| vision, in particular color of skin, plays in our emotions,
| decision and behavior. Consider how we use color of skin to
| read health and emotions and intentions and how it might be
| harder to read those when the skin is imbued with
| unfamiliar tones and how on a population level, such
| misreads can build into mistrust and conflict.
| ivalm wrote:
| > Why are you replying to my comment with this? It has no
| relevance to anything I wrote.
|
| You emphasized systemic racism as being a major cause,
| but group differences can be both non-biologic and NOT
| related to systemic racism
|
| > not only the value system of the victims but also that
| of the perpetrators and the system itself.
|
| This assumes the answer (systemic racism) in the premise.
| The values of the system can be good (agency, hard work,
| academic pursuit, etc) and misaligned with some group.
| That group would then do poorly, but not because the
| system or its values are racist.
|
| > And also consider the history.
|
| I did, this is why I compared to early/mid 20th century
| Ashkenazi and mid/late 20th century Asians. Both were
| very persecuted.
|
| > And consider the financial differences that often exist
|
| Most asians fleeing to the US in mid 20th century were
| much poorer than both current as well as at that time
| median underperforming groups in the US.
|
| > Consider destruction of cultures.
|
| If anything, current underperforming groups (eg african
| americans) are famous for having a lot of cultural
| products. This is where they thrive.
|
| > Consider the dietary and health issues that are faced.
|
| Again, both ashkinazi and asian groups suffered famines +
| serious malnutrition. Very few in american disadvantaged
| groups are in danger of starvation or serious
| malnutrition.
|
| > Consider the overwhelming economic and media
| environments that 7 years olds grow up within and how
| that environment is often more impactful than parents
| could ever hope to be.
|
| Everyone has access to all the same media. There is a
| significant effort (which I agree with) to over-represent
| underprivileged groups as successful heroes in modern
| TV/etc. Parents have significant influence on which media
| mix is consumed and what counts as "success." Both asians
| and ashkinazi were represented very negatively in the
| media mix of mid 20th century, yet they thrived. Nigerian
| american diaspora today thrives as well (unlike most
| other african american groups).
|
| > And, if we want to focus on biology, consider the role
| that vision, in particular color of skin, plays in our
| emotions, decision and behavior. Consider how we use
| color of skin to read health and emotions and intentions
| and how it might be harder to read those when the skin is
| imbued with unfamiliar tones and how on a population
| level, such misreads can build into mistrust and
| conflict.
|
| I specifically didn't focus on biology, but Ashkenazi
| were clearly targeted based on how they looked.
| Caricatures of "the Jew" were popular and everywhere in
| early to mid 20th century Europe. People perceived them
| especially as untrustworthy. Asians are also obviously
| and easily identified by a quick look at their face.
| South asians also have "brown" skin color, that is _very_
| similar to that of disadvantaged groups in the US, yet
| they do well academically /financially/etc. Most people
| can't tell apart nigerian americans from other african
| americans, yet nigerian americans tend to do well.
|
| ---
|
| In all of this i'm not saying hardship doesn't exist, or
| that racism doesn't exist, or that differences are
| biological. I am saying that there is a confounding
| factor that is essentially bigger then all of this. I
| think this confounder is "culture/value system" of the
| group. Not all cultures/value systems are equal, not all
| of them lead to the same outcomes, these differences are
| not racist.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| > You emphasized systemic racism as being a major cause,
| but group differences can be both non-biologic and NOT
| related to systemic racism
|
| Firstly, I did not. I simply pointed out that racism can
| be systemic without individual contribution.
|
| Secondly, the fact that racism can arise from a third
| option (neither non systemic and non biologic) does not
| change the fact that the article did not accuse teachers
| of racism.
|
| And that's where my initial comment stopped.
|
| As for the rest, I had hoped it would have made it clear
| that the issue is too complex to unravel and try to
| assign blame or cause. The factors are too nuanced, the
| history too complex, the societies and neighborhoods too
| diverse.
|
| But for some reason, you seem to have a need to find a
| cultural- or values- based factor for differing outcomes.
| You can do that if you wish. I won't partake though.
| (Still not sure why you even chose my comment to initiate
| such an attempt)
|
| Edit: I should state that the experience of non-immigrant
| blacks, in the US, is entirely incomparable to that of
| either Asians or Ashkenazi or even Nigerians.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| It's really surprising they can't make the logical conclusion
| from what they wrote that they just point blank accused
| teachers as being racist.
|
| So are we saying that teachers purposely disproportionately
| identified asian and white students as gifted? Can we not just
| admit that asian and white students usually have more learning
| resources provided to them during their younger years (both due
| to cultural and economic reasons) and thus in a typical
| classroom they will be the more likely to stand out
| academically before jumping to the race card. They've decided
| to skip straight past logic and straight to identity issues
| this time.
|
| I am a "white-passing" latino (i.e. nobody assumes I'm latino
| until they hear my last name) and I was in the gifted program
| in California growing up. Plenty of the people also part of
| that program were black or latino themselves.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I see you have not talked to many public school parents.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| This is what happens when you push equality of outcome instead of
| equality of opportunity.
|
| Everyone gets the same crappy outcome.
|
| Freedom is inherently unequal.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Equality of outcome could even eventually lead to an
| objectively worse outcome for society as a whole when on a
| larger time scale due to holding back brilliant minds.
|
| Those who were clearly brilliant and may have been entirely
| capable of pushing societal, technological, medical etc.
| advances forward in a larger time scale are held back, stifled,
| or even in cases of things like affirmative action (which I
| believe should exist, but only on the economic level, not on
| the basis of race or identity) have been denied of opportunity
| to go on and do great things.
| foogazi wrote:
| > have been denied of opportunity to go on and do great
| things.
|
| Well, if they're so brilliant...
| norir wrote:
| I think fundamentally the problem is we are trying to fit
| everything into an industrial, and authoritarian, model of
| schooling. Students can't be trusted to self learn so we put them
| into a room, atomize them, strip away almost all of their freedom
| and force them to learn at the pace of the slowest learner in the
| group. It's little wonder that acting out is a constant problem.
|
| Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping away at some of the
| problem don't generally do much about the structural problems in
| schools and clearly amplify some of their existing biases.
|
| I do not have children but I have given a lot of thought to how
| terrible our schooling is. I would never want to subject my
| children to 20 years of what I went through. But the presence or
| absence of traditional gifted programs is nowhere near the top of
| my concerns.
| gaoshan wrote:
| I was a gifted program kid who was part of a new style of
| unstructured, learn at your own pace, self-learn program called
| the "informal" program. This was back in the early 1980s (the
| program itself had started in the 1970s).
|
| The net result was that the highest achieving gifted kids did
| really well and the slacker gifted kids (myself included) did
| abysmally. Turns out some of us needed a level of structure and
| rigor enforced on us to nurture whatever gifted talents we had.
| Some kids learned it at home, for some it seemed to be innate
| and for others we did not have it anywhere in our lives and
| needed to be instructed in how to study, what to do, when to do
| it and at what pace.
| logicchains wrote:
| Within a couple years it'll be possible to provide kids with AI
| personal tutors that are better than the vast majority of
| public school teachers. Parents smart enough to capitalise on
| this are going to reap huge benefits, while kids trapped in the
| public school system will fall further and further behind.
| glimshe wrote:
| I had to leave California so my gifted child could get a proper
| education. Now he's getting it, while I'm paying roughly half in
| property taxes.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Can you share more details? Where have you moved to? What
| alternatives did you consider?
| glimshe wrote:
| I moved to Forsyth County, GA, where my child has access to
| excellent computer science and musical education (not to
| mention AP classes and 3 tiers bases on student achievement).
| In fact, he didn't make it to the top tier in everything
| because they were just too strong. This is a good thing!
|
| In his supposedly "10" California school, music had been
| defunded to spread equality to other school systems; also, no
| career emphasis programs or special tracks were available.
|
| I considered moving to one of the Dallas suburbs, but I like
| the Southeast weather and setting better.
|
| Note: I'm "Latino", whatever that means, and my son is mixed
| (my wife is a snow white American) with a "Latino" last name.
| goodhombre wrote:
| Latino is widely understood to refer to people descended
| from the population of Latin America.
| jmyeet wrote:
| With most problems in society there is a huge stumbling block
| that people aren't actually interested in resolving because it
| conflicts with their other interests.
|
| For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution
| to homelessness is... housing. Housing is too expensive. Housing
| needs to be cheaper. But too many people have a vested financial
| interest in maintaining and growing high prices.
|
| Interestingly, high property prices are a big contributing factor
| here too. Schools are funded by a mix of Federal, state and local
| taxes and a big part of local taxes come from property taxes. So
| the wealthier areas get better-funded schools. It's economic
| segregation in the same vein as redlining.
|
| California in particular has created a massive funding hole
| through Prop 13, which is essentially a massive tax break for the
| state's wealthiest residents.
|
| I would add another dimension to this: _how gifted?_ 99th
| percentile students will largely be fine. There are scholarships
| and progrrams to find and nurture these people. You start to see
| more disparities when you look at the 90-98th percentiles. If you
| 're from an affluent background, you're going to be fine. If
| you're from a poorer background, it's way more likely that things
| go wrong for you. Your quality of school matters. You may catch a
| criminal charge of some kind, which can entirely derail your
| life.
|
| While all this is going on there are significant and organized
| efforts to dismantle the public education system (ie "school
| choice" or "vouchers"), which are nothing more than a wealth
| transfer from the government to the providers of private
| education at the expense of everybody else.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I was in California GATE programs in the 80s and 90s. I was also
| (and still am, I guess) Latino, so it's not like there was
| universal exclusion if you weren't white. As far as I remember,
| being placed in these programs was entirely a matter of scoring
| high on some IQ test you were given in 1st grade. It's hard to
| say the program made any difference. We took some extra classes I
| barely remember. We had special summer schools I actually do
| remember, and got some early exposure to computers before there
| were regular classes for them, but things I remember from these
| summer schools were learning how to make donuts and conducting a
| mock trial for Lex from Jurassic Park for getting Gennaro killed,
| not exactly tremendous intellecual challenges.
|
| Frankly, I don't say this to be a dick, but teachers don't exist
| who can handle kids like me. I spent 16 hours a day at the public
| library sometimes devouring 1000-page books about how lasers
| worked. I got a perfect SAT score. I also won a district-wide art
| show three out of four years in high school. I made varsity in
| four sports and won two state championships. I got second place
| in the state spelling bee. I was on a television quiz show when I
| was 12. I could run a 5-minute mile when I was 12 and slam dunk a
| basketball by the time I was 14. I was good at everything I ever
| tried to do. I was smarter than the teachers and I was a rotten
| little immature kid who let them know it.
|
| Some kids just aren't going to be served well by school no matter
| what you do, but what else was I going to be served well by? I
| took some college classes in high school and they weren't any
| more interesting. I had no interest in starting or running a
| business. I wasn't mature enough to hold a regular job. I can't
| think of anything the school system could have done that would
| have been better than just regular school.
|
| Much like this writer, I ended up okay anyway.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I went through California GATE at the same time. I was given an
| IQ test in either 1st or 2nd grade, then I had a second one-on-
| one test that was given verbally.
|
| IIRC, GATE was where I had my first exposure to programming
| (Logo).
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >Much like this writer, I ended up okay anyway.
|
| Don't leave us hanging! What happened?
|
| I too was a (white) latino kid in GATE in the early 90s. I
| definitely didn't succeed at everything - i'm more athletic
| than a lot of nerds, but not compared to actual athletes, but
| school was easy enough that by the time high school came
| around, I completely stopped caring and just read a lot of
| books.
|
| My study habits were bad though, so by the time I stared
| tackling harder subjects on my own, I lost a lot of confidence
| and had a pretty unimpressive career as a middling software
| engineer all through my 20s.
|
| Eventually I learned some things were hard regardless of how
| smart you are, I learned to self study harder things, and now
| i'm doing well with lots of really smart coworkers at a FAANG.
| r0p3 wrote:
| The author links to a Teach For America article as evidence of
| the "removing gifted programs in the name of equity" trend. That
| article in turn references 2 gifted programs potentially being
| suspended in Boston and Anchorage, one temporarily for a year due
| to administrative constraints and one due to budget cuts.
|
| Why does the author claim this is a broad trend with social
| justice and equity goals at its heart when that isn't what the
| evidence provided suggests? (Imo: clickbait.)
| frmersdog wrote:
| This comment section is going to be a sh*tshow, but I think I
| agree with the author's central contention that the issue is one
| of lax definition, and a failure to prevent dilution of that
| definition by pushy parents. The racism aspect is a chicken-or-
| egg situation; whether such programs started as a way to allow
| engaged, mostly white parents to track and separate their kids
| from students of color, or merely became that, is probably a
| matter that varies by location, but the tensions that such a
| state conjures are clearly a major component of the initiative's
| undoing.
|
| It once again comes down to us not being able to have nice things
| until that racial hysteria is resolved - minority parents assured
| that their children aren't being mistreated because of conscious
| and unconscious perceptions on the part of the school, white and
| affluent Asian parents assured that their children aren't going
| to receive a subpar education just because their child's class is
| double-digits percentage black/brown - and, perhaps more broadly,
| there is a decoupling of elite educational attainment and basic
| economic stability. Suffice it to say that anyone telling you
| that the only problem is that schools are Harrison Bergeroning
| their little prodigies either aren't acknowledging the whole
| story or are hoping that you don't know it yourself.
| gowld wrote:
| As soon as we undo 3 centuries of systemic oppression and get
| the races roughly on par with each other, we'll have an easier
| time managing G&T programs.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Did people read the article? There's actually some interesting
| points about how gifted/advanced curriculum isn't always the
| solution. I'd have to agree. I went to a magnet school, so
| already presumably for "gifted" students, that in turn had
| advanced courses like honors or AP. And while there were students
| who genuinely benefited, myself included, it also became a game
| of getting into the most advanced course so you could have it on
| your college applications.
|
| Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's
| not like they were all brilliant. They basically passed a
| standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to
| pass. What this measured was whether your parents were tapped
| into particular social circles and knew to put you in prep. Once
| you were in the school, if you wanted good teachers, you had to
| take honors. I had a fantastic history teacher who talked about
| how he loved teaching regular history, but he was constantly
| pressured by administration to only teach AP. So for a lot of
| students who didn't have the grades to do honors, they got stuck
| with the mediocre teachers. Not to mention, psychologically, it
| sucks being in the bottom 50%. There were so many kids who
| thought they were dumb or underachievers, but were really just in
| the wrong environment. When they went to college, they blossomed
| from not being in such a rat race.
|
| I'm not saying the solution is to eliminate gifted programs, but
| let's not pretend that they're universally great for kids.
| They're often much more status games than actual educational
| fulfillment.
| mturmon wrote:
| I agree with you, and wish this perspective had informed many
| of the comments nearby.
|
| I'm commenting because my own kid went through the LAUSD highly
| gifted (HG) magnet program -- which is a subset of the "gifted"
| program -- his high school was:
| https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org.
|
| (Without belaboring the point, it's a very high-achieving
| bunch. Multiple Harvard, MIT, and Stanford admissions in his
| rather small graduating class of ~70.)
|
| There are good things and bad things about the LAUSD HG
| program. One good thing is that most admissions are done just
| by testing. There are 2 layers of tests, one for gifted and one
| (later) for highly gifted. If you test 99.5%+, you can be
| admitted to the HG program. The tests are done relatively early
| (4th grade for my kid) so they aren't as easy to game, although
| I'm sure it is done.
|
| Every LAUSD student gets the first test, so that's pretty
| egalitarian. You have to ask for the second test. That's the
| good part.
|
| One thing the article discusses is the other paths to admission
| at some schools -- paths that are much more subject to gaming,
| esp. by parents. Things like outside evaluations and private
| testing to substitute for the LAUSD-administered test. That has
| been a source of controversy, rightfully IMHO, because these
| parents can be bulldogs. The possibility of gaming the system
| is the bad part.
|
| One other thing to re-inforce in the above comment. The HG
| program did tend to favor "high-achieving" rather than "gifted"
| students. So there was a high proportion of boring grindset
| students, weighted towards STEM, and the result was that the
| _actually creative types_ were in a minority.
|
| My conclusion is that these programs can benefit the special
| needs of HG kids, but the devil is in the implementation
| details and the parents and status game will tend to mess it
| up. Also, we should have no illusions that their existence is
| in part a reaction to racial/social inequities, and that they
| tend to reproduce the problems of the outside society.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It
| 's not like they were all brilliant._
|
| I'm not brilliant, but I absolutely did benefit. The magnet
| school I went to, and the gifted-students programs I attended
| _pushed_ me, and I 'd never really been pushed before; I was
| just on cruise-control, academically. There was room for
| potential, and it was not being filled by the educational
| system until magnets/gifted-programs.
|
| Moreover, I benefited simply because the magnet school system
| removed me from my zoned school, but the circumstances here are
| probably unique to my situation. The short of it is that
| leaving the zoned school was life-altering. The educational
| pressure I describe above is probably more globally applicable.
|
| College was a huge wake up call of "oh my, the workload is
| _real_. " If I _hadn 't_ had the push I got in the magnet
| school system to work harder, I would have floundered and
| likely failed in college.
|
| That's if I had made it to college at all. The trajectory of my
| life, the path where I didn't get into the magnet system ... I
| can't imagine that path going well.
|
| > _They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a
| few years in prep classes to pass._
|
| Yes, there's a standardized test that you must pass. But no, I
| spent exactly 0 time in prep classes. It's not needed: the bar
| is not that high.
|
| > _What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into
| particular social circles_
|
| Not really ... my mother tapped into her "social circles" --
| _other mothers_ she met at my preschool -- to try and learn
| what she needed to know about the schools, the school system,
| and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in
| order to effect better outcomes for her children.
|
| I.e., what any good parent would do. The article misses the
| mark here too:
|
| > _Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted
| programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and
| advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the
| gifted label was coveted by parents._
|
| Yes, the "gifted label was coveted by parents", but not for
| "parental competition for prestige", but because it was key to
| me having a future. There were just certain, simple, _logical_
| steps in my education that were not possible to take without
| first getting the "gifted" label, since that's the
| bureaucratic grease that makes the whole system move for you.
| _The law_ essentially results in a system that says "is kid
| gifted? if yes, then provide resources, else tell them to go
| away". Parents play within the rules of that system when they
| must.
|
| ... five minutes of listening to the parents talk about their
| children would tell you it's a conversation about "my kid is
| struggling with X, what can I do?" and not "hey, _my_ kid is
| gifted, what about yours? " -- the notion is preposterous, to
| me, having lived through it.
|
| The magnet school system in my area suffered similar problems
| to the one you describe, but IMO that was mostly due to a lack
| of resources. I mentioned earlier the bar was low: one of the
| magnet schools that I didn't attend was because it had no
| seats: it was ~5:1 oversubscribed: for every child attending,
| there were 5 meeting the criteria, but SOL. I was one of the 5.
| I had to waitlist, and it took a year before a spot at one of
| my less preferred options opened up. (But even then, it was a
| _vastly_ better school than my zoned school.)
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I have to wonder, how much of these issues are because
| education is generally underfunded and not given enough
| respect?
|
| > There were just certain, simple, logical steps in my
| education that were not possible to take without first
| getting the "gifted" label, since that's the bureaucratic
| grease that makes the whole system move for you.
|
| That sounds like an extremely dysfunctional system that
| rewards people who know this trick, but hurts people who may
| not know it. Now, I don't hate the player, so I'm very glad
| it worked out for you and many others. It benefited me too.
| But at an administrative level, I'm not sure that's a good
| thing.
|
| > Not really ... my mother tapped into her "social circles"
| -- other mothers she met at my preschool -- to try and learn
| what she needed to know about the schools, the school system,
| and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in
| order to effect better outcomes for her children. I.e., what
| any good parent would do. The article misses the mark here
| too:
|
| There's a lot of reasons a parent might not be able to figure
| this out, ranging from lack of proficiency in the English
| language, to housing instability, to lack of trust in school
| as an institution. Remember, we're 75 years removed from
| legal segregation. There's still a lot of distrust in
| programs actually being fair. I don't think we can assume
| that every child has a parent who can take the time to learn
| the bureaucracy.
| dessimus wrote:
| > a magnet school, so already presumably for "gifted" students,
| that in turn had advanced courses like honors or AP.
|
| I too attended a magnet school, but the point of magnet schools
| were not actually for 'gifted' students. While many did offer
| advanced classes or programs, the goal was to influence racial
| desegregation by offering programs to encourage white students
| to attend black majority schools.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I used magnet because that's the most commonly known term,
| but my high school definitely was not an attempt to
| desegregate schools. If anything it increased segregation by
| a lot.
| pathrowaway wrote:
| I had a very different (and much more positive) experience with
| G&T. I went to my local public school in rural Pennsylvania. In
| PA schools are required to write an IEP for "gifted" students.
| There are a couple of metrics, but the main one is anyone who
| tests > 130 on an IQ test. I remember taking a test in 2nd or
| 3rd grade (I was terrified of authority figures as a kid, so I
| have no idea how they accurately give these assessments, but at
| least in my case it was).
|
| Having an IEP meant I got special attention in elementary
| school, which really boiled down to a) some extra math
| worksheets and b) getting pulled out of class once a week to go
| with the other IEP kids to a special "gifted" class. The
| content of that class was probably less important than getting
| us out of the regular classrooms. This gave the teachers the
| chance to repeat material without boring us (and the behavior
| problems that come from that).
|
| Now I'm the dad of a talented 10 year old boy who doesn't have
| this experience and is bored constantly. He is basically
| forgotten about as he's never going to test below grade level
| even if he's completely ignored, and there's no incentive or
| requirement that he stays engaged.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| I'm glad that you had a good experience! I also benefited
| immensely from my school's setup. I just think it's worth
| analyzing these programs from a critical perspective instead
| of an all or nothing lens. Programs can be worthwhile but
| still not good enough.
| bobfromsf wrote:
| As a father with a son with IQ over 160, I can tell you
| unequivocally that California thinks gifted kids are the enemy.
|
| Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are
| special needs. He can't function in a regular class because he
| would become bored and would act out and constantly get in
| trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely
| rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we were utterly
| ignored. We have had to go to private school because California
| does not skip grades even though it's obvious the child doesn't
| belong in the grade level for his age. My kid is 6 grades ahead
| in math, scored over 175 in his VCI and they refused to even
| entertain the idea of skipping even a single grade.
|
| California is doing whatever it takes to drive away any family
| that cares even a modicum for their children's education and had
| the means or is willing to sacrifice to ensure their children are
| adequately educated. Meanwhile they are dropping the requirements
| at the same time, so the gap between private school and public
| school educated kids keeps growing more and more.
|
| It's pretty telling that in SFUSD, 50% of the black and brown
| kids graduate high school without being able to read properly.
| The real racism isn't gifted kids, it's dropping the educational
| standard for those that can't afford private school so that they
| graduate and can't compete when they get into the workforce
| because they have been undereducated their entire lives.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I'm happy that you were able to work around the state's
| horrible treatment of your gifted child, by throwing money at
| the problem. I'll probably have to do the same with my children
| in my Seattle suburb.
|
| The real victims are the kids whose parents can't afford to do
| this. It tends to be disproportionately the kids in the very
| demographics that the left professes to care about. So it's
| weird to me that they would choose to do things that make it
| harder for these groups to have economic mobility.
| euroderf wrote:
| > We have had to go to private school because California does
| not skip grades even though it's obvious the child doesn't
| belong in the grade level for his age.
|
| Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to
| bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th.
|
| I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in
| select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.
| theamk wrote:
| I suspect that won't be an issue anymore, as it is no longer
| possible to skip grades in public schools in many states.
|
| And hopefully private schools would prevent "bullying hell"
| if they want all those tuition $$$.
| tims33 wrote:
| Agree. Social and emotional development is a real thing. I
| think most students (especially boys) are better off being
| more challenged in their age-appropriate grade-level than
| skipping.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| When I was going through school the gifted program allowed
| for kids to skip 1 grade in math and 1 grade in science. I
| think this was reasonable and didn't lead to much bullying.
| Also helped that we had a large gifted program. A math class
| might've been 20-30% gifted kids at any given time.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| What U.S. state has the best resources for kids at the gifted
| end of the spectrum?
| csa wrote:
| > What U.S. state has the best resources for kids at the
| gifted end of the spectrum?
|
| Pretty much no state at this point.
|
| That said, specific school districts can be responsive.
| Usually this is in expensive neighborhoods with relatively
| well-off residents. These schools serve as de facto private
| schools even through they are technically public.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Nevada? https://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| In Seattle there is a strong movement to ban gifted education.
| The prospect of that becoming fully implemented has caused many
| _politically progressive_ parents I know to move out to suburbs
| in some cases and red states in others. Even without bans there
| has been a tangible dumbing down of the rigor of schooling. And
| the forced introduction of weird political curriculums like
| ethnic studies in math
| (https://www.king5.com/article/news/education/seattle-
| schools...).
|
| The exodus away from Seattle public schools surprise no one.
| After all who wants to take such risks with their own child's
| education, that they only get try on? Unfortunately I don't
| think it will be easily fixed. The school board is full of
| career activists, much like city and state leadership, and it
| is reflected in the culture of K-12 schooling. The DEI movement
| legitimized all of this and gave it cover. Equity made merit a
| taboo. And reversing those damaging movements will take
| decades.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| As someone who lives in the metro area, Seattle proper is
| honestly 142 square miles surrounded by reality, and
| terrified of the idea that somehow, somewhere, San Francisco
| or Portland might be doing a better job of saying and doing
| all the fashionable progressive things.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Even Bellevue doesn't seem to be doing the optimal thing.
| They're losing students and having to close schools as well.
| Meanwhile, their Chinese immersion school has a huge
| waitlist. Every Chinese parent and many others wants to send
| their kids there. It's free, their kids will learn Chinese,
| and they'll be surrounded by other well-behaved kids with
| academically-focused parents.
|
| I'm going to try to get my kids into that school, but if they
| don't get in, it may be private school for us as well.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > He can't function in a regular class because he would become
| bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble.
|
| No student has ever found all their courses interesting. You'd
| have a behavior problem no matter what level of material is
| taught.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| username checks out
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Truly a rebuttal for the ages.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| That's interesting. My parents were told, in SC and FL, to have
| me skip a grade or two (not six!), but refused due to the
| social burden they expected it to put on me.
|
| I'm not entirely happy with where I am at 26. I wonder if I'd
| be further ahead - or behind - if I had skipped forward.
| bobfromsf wrote:
| There was a study done in Australia that showed that radical
| acceleration for gifted kids resulted in the highest overall
| satisfaction in life. It sounds like you probably needed
| further acceleration.
| liontwist wrote:
| Really? I often hear the opposite, kids I knew who got a
| bachelors degree at 17 say well now what? What is the rush!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I guess the key is to not just accelerate the kid into a
| higher grade full of "general population" students. He'd
| just be surrounded by a different group of mediocre (just
| older) kids. I think really smart kids need to be
| surrounded by other really smart kids or their social
| circle will constantly drag them back to the mean.
| robocat wrote:
| I skipped forward a year at Uni. Being academically
| proficient ([?]IQ) and socially proficient ([?]EQ) are very
| different things and I was not wise enough to make good
| decisions.
|
| I am regularly blown away by the deep social capabilities of
| some of my smarter friends. For a few years I have been
| dedicating a lot of thought to social interactions. I waste
| virtually zero time on past academic interests.
|
| Too many people equate IQ with STEM skills (especially
| Maths). Hard sciences are much easier to learn than soft
| skills.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Don't sweat schooling. It's good for him to be with people his
| age, and he will be fine long term. Let him do extra curricular
| that fill his curiosity.
|
| When he gets to college he can really excel, until then just
| let him go to school and make friends with kids his age.
| liontwist wrote:
| I understand the sentiment, but you also can't write off 18
| years of development.
|
| The mistake would be assuming public school will be both
| socially and intellectually fruitful. No man can server two
| masters. Budget time accordingly.
| liontwist wrote:
| Any school system is not going to provide any education for
| him. Just write it off, and take things into your circle of
| influence. He needs someone to teach him material at his level.
| Whether it's a family member, or 2 dedicated hours a day with a
| tutor.
|
| Now as others have pointed out here intellectual development is
| only one kind. You may see your son as exempt from certain
| requirements and activities, when he is really not. If you have
| dedicated time where his intellectual needs are met you will
| less tempted to step in and save your son from important life
| lessons.
|
| It's difficult to express exactly my experience. I know you are
| proud and excited for your son. But remember he is only with
| you for a short time, and being smart and getting degrees and
| jobs etc is such a small part of having a good life. If you
| only focus on that part he may have a very hard time and not be
| able to take advantage of his gifts.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| As one of these kids, in Massachusetts, I had my math classes
| at a desk in the hallway by myself starting in 3rd grade, where
| I was just given an algebra textbook to read. I reviled the
| process of math lessons where the teachers just asked me to
| show the other 3 kids in my quad of desks how to do the
| lessons... I couldn't understand why they could not just grasp
| the concepts. It was frustrating for everyone involved, and the
| solution was worse. By the time I made it to high school I'd
| learned that: I could read the book and nail the tests, so I
| never did homework. why bother? Unfortunately they grade
| homework, I used to skip class because I already knew the
| material and I didn't want to answer for not doing the
| homework. I never used the muscles I needed to use for
| learning, and I was so over it I had trouble participating in
| the classes that were actually great and I enjoyed. There were
| AP classes in high school that I never qualified for, and I
| barely graduated, had to go to summer school every year, so I
| joined the marines which is probably the only reason the school
| moved things around so I could graduate.
|
| This was a failure at every level of the education system for
| me, at a school system with 9/10 ratings. I needed engagement
| as a young student, I needed to learn and be challenged so I
| _had_ to study for things, I _had_ to do homework to learn...
| and by the time the structures where there that supported that
| I was lost already. There were allusions to a better future, I
| tested in the 98-99 percentile on the Iowa tests (except in
| English and spelling, I'm just middle of the bell curve there)
| so I was fed in Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth in 6th
| grade, but that never was anything more than a weekend at MIT
| learning about some truly amazing science, but it didn't seem
| to go anywhere. I'm sure my own discipline problems, apparent
| from a very young age, didn't help. It was just too easy to
| understand that the authorities around me where full of it,
| poke holes in their logic, see what I could get away with,
| etc... all because I was bored.
|
| You've got quite a task in front of you, raising your son. I
| didn't find an outlet for this "gift" until I was in college
| and started writing code for real... self learning is
| everywhere in computer science and the problems are vast and
| difficult, there is always something new to learn and I do it
| voraciously. The other thing that helped immensely was learning
| to race motorcycles, it's a task that mandates preparation and
| planning, diligent practice, getting up when you're knocked
| down, and the amount of brain power you need to devote to it
| quiets down the inner loop I have that is always going. When
| I'm on track everything is quiet.
|
| I hope you've got the resources to send your child to private
| school, I always imagined that path would have had a different
| outcome for me. My kids are in private (I'm also in CA) now and
| I've heard parents with older kids (even in school systems like
| Kentfield) saying the same thing you're saying about treatment
| of gifted kids.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I think this is increasingly the case everywhere for people who
| just don't fall into any of the predetermined buckets that
| whoever designed a particular system has anticipated. People
| used to be much more flexible and driven by "common sense"
| (whatever that means to you) in past generations.
|
| Nowadays the most you get back is a -\\_(tsu)_/- and are then
| left on your own. I can totally see a modern bureaucrat letting
| someone die, in a conscious way, because "my job description
| says that this machine has to be turned off at 7:00pm".
|
| Unless you're mega-wealthy, ofc., in which case society bends
| to your will with an unprecedented sense of obedience. Whether
| both effects are independent or related is left for the reader
| to think about.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| > He can't function in a regular class because he would become
| bored
|
| My solution was to read books and draw comics in class. I had
| some teachers that understood, some that didn't.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm not this super smart or anything, but I was allowed to skip
| a grade and the result was hell for me - I was a scrawny kid
| even in my age group and a year of physical development means a
| lot at young ages. I was taken out from the environnment of my
| peers and placed with total strangers who were all told that 'I
| was special', which didn't put me in a favorable light. I
| basically had no friends and quite a few enemies for a year
| before my parents wizened up and took me to a different school.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The article goes over that.
|
| specifically how it wasn't the grade that was the issue, it was
| the speed of the course material. so once your son catches up,
| the problems will resurface because of the slow people. just
| now compounded by the social isolation and lack of physical
| development in comparison to peers.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Speaking as someone who attended a public high school with
| competitive admissions, the students are much more important than
| the teachers or the education itself. Being around a group of
| talented and driven people motivates you to do well.
|
| I also previously attended special education when my academic
| abilities were questionable, at best. I benefitted from intensive
| education on phonics and basic literacy skills, rather than being
| shoved through the pipeline without comprehending the curriculum.
|
| The contrast was evident when I spent my lunch times in Grade 11
| tutoring a "hopeless" student in Grade 9. Over the course of a
| few weeks, it became abundantly clear to me that this student did
| not understand _any_ of the math he had allegedly learned before.
| He more or less pattern-matched his way to eventually getting the
| right answer and blundered his way through converting a fraction
| to a ratio without realizing they are fundamentally the same
| concept. That was good enough to keep pushing him through grades,
| I suppose.
|
| I was just getting into formal logic as a hobby, so I focused on
| teaching basic reasoning. As an example, I spent a lot of time
| explaining that the "equals" sign is a statement that two things
| are the same. I proceeded to focus on logical implications---that
| some statements can follow from other statements.
|
| It became much easier to teach everything else once we had those
| fundamentals. His ability to solve problems was much better when
| he understood the logical sequence of steps he should take to
| reach an answer. His math teacher later thanked me in Grade 12,
| because he started getting good marks and switched to university-
| track mathematics. That probably wouldn't have happened if he
| didn't get attention specific to him.
|
| There should be a reframing of the problem space.
|
| Sorting students into gifted or special education based on an
| accurate assessment of their abilities isn't a case of giving
| more resources to smarter people and less to dumber. A class of
| gifted students should require _less_ resources because the
| students can self-motivate and aren 't limited by their peers.
| This frees up resources for those who need them.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > Speaking as someone who attended a public high school with
| competitive admissions, the students are much more important
| than the teachers or the education itself. Being around a group
| of talented and driven people motivates you to do well.
|
| Which ultimately means it's up to the parents more than
| anything. I suspect that's why magnet schools perform well. The
| parents interested and capable of going out of their way to put
| their child into a good school district are more likely to also
| be invested in their child's educational outcomes which can
| make all the difference.
| cljacoby wrote:
| Seems there's a lot of comments in here expressing discontent
| with the dismantling of GT programs. I won't speak as to
| where/how GT programs should be implemented, I have no idea.
|
| However, I did attend a GT program during elementary school. This
| school was a "regular" public elementary school in the sense it
| had a local geographic boundary, and kids in the area attended
| this as their default public school. However, then kids who
| qualified for GT would be bussed in from around the county to go
| to this school.
|
| Within the school, past the 3rd grade classes were segmented into
| GT and "base" classes (i.e. non-GT). The "base" classes were
| local kids who did not qualify for the GT program. GT
| qualification was based off a single test score, taken in the
| second grade. Kids in the GT and base classes were often
| respectively referred to as GT or base kids.
|
| In retrospect, it's always appeared super detrimental to me that
| those kids were called "base" as if they were a somehow more
| basic version of the GT kids. The name "base" in itself was
| probably intended as a kind euphemism, to not otherwise default
| to calling them non-GT kids, i.e. non Gifted nor Talented.
|
| Anyway, all of this to say GT programs probably have a place, but
| in my own anecdotal experience they were not always executed
| flawlessly.
| gowld wrote:
| Even base kids aren't all stupid. No matter what you call the
| program, the kids will know that's where the smart kids went.
| afthonos wrote:
| My take that seems to never get cold: _let kids skip grades_.
| Anything I hear against this runs into the wall of the lived
| experience of several people I know _including mine_. It's fine!
| And it doesn't have to be permanent: if a kid doesn't thrive in
| the next grade, put them back! Then everyone at grade level gets
| grade level resources and teachers get students at the right
| level of knowledge. Having to homeschool or pay for private
| school to get this simple experience is wild to me.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| As an alum of gifted programs with many friends who were also
| alums, I think most of us would say, "good riddance". In fact,
| I'm pretty sure the strongest haters of gifted programs I know
| are people who used to be in them.
|
| For most of us, the reality was that our status as relatively
| studious kids created a situation where our area of greatest need
| was social-emotional development, not intellectual development.
| Gifted programs mostly served as easy, almost dismissive solution
| for our parents, who would rather see our very real social-
| emotional challenges as further evidence of our intellectual
| excellence and the importance of separating us from our peers so
| they won't "hold us back."
|
| Quite the opposite. Being in class with my friends is what kept
| me emotionally grounded, and being separated from them, in a way
| that sends a clear message to everyone involved (including me)
| that it needed to happen because I was somehow too good to be in
| the same classes as them, did lasting harm. Even now my lifelong
| best friend is obnoxiously deferential to me on all sorts of
| subjects because he sees me as "the smart one" instead of a more
| sensible perspective like "the one who happens to enjoy math."
|
| But I did move around as a kid enough times to see a few
| different ways of doing this sort of thing, so I can say with
| certainty what _does_ work, and it works well for everyone
| involved: flipped classrooms. It 's magical. In a group where
| kids who have mixed skill levels on a particular subject are
| asked to support each other instead of competing with each other,
| they do just that. And I can say from experience that it's a much
| better way to make a classroom more challenging for kids who do
| better in that subject. Helping your peers understand a tricky
| subject is a much more interesting intellectual challenge - and
| builds more useful life skills - than an artificially
| "accelerated" learning program ever will be. And it's better for
| long-term learning, too, because it helps build even stronger
| foundations of understanding.
|
| And I am also seeing, now that my kids are in a school that uses
| flipped classroom teaching, that it's better for everyone else,
| too. My younger child, who has been having trouble with reading,
| gets an immense amount of value from being able to pair with
| friends who are stronger readers.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > a situation where our area of greatest need was social-
| emotional development, not intellectual development
|
| Not an educator, but it seems like "supporting gifted kids" is
| one of those phrases where everyone acts as if its meaning were
| clearly defined and agreed-upon, while avoiding looking too
| hard at how it is neither.
|
| What _should_ the goal be for institutions or parents? For
| example, to accelerate these kids to the end of the curriculum
| ASAP? To quickly get them into the workforce? To whisk them
| through a carousel of possible specializations in the hopes of
| matching genius to a tough problem?
|
| The above options intend to direct their strengths, rather than
| support their weaknesses and trusting that the rest will
| follow.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| For me, the more troubling thing about those sorts of goals
| are that they treat the fact that a kid is good at academics
| as an excuse to lose track of the fact that they're still
| just a kid in one's haste to project adults' ideas around
| economic success onto them.
| throwawayofcour wrote:
| I think these are good points, but I don't buy that these are
| true of a majority of gifted programs. Enough of my friends
| were also gifted (or we became friends because we were in the
| same problem) that I didn't feel the separation you describe.
| In fact, it was a relief to get out of classroom settings where
| peers valued social performance over intellectual performance.
| Gifted gave us a space where I could be comfortably awkward.
|
| I also had experiences with mixed skill level classrooms and
| frequently found myself paired with students who didn't want
| support -- either from myself, other students, or the teacher.
| They didn't want to be in a classroom of any kind. I can
| imagine environments where this does work, but it freaks me out
| a little bit that you say you're certain this works.
|
| As an additional anecdote, my son loves his gifted classes. But
| similar to myself, that's where his friends are.
|
| I wonder if we'd both agree that kids' social environment is
| more important than the structure of any particular learning
| program?
| beej71 wrote:
| This resonates for me. I really, really did not like being in
| GATE in the 1980s for the same reasons.
|
| Also, now as a college instructor, I really like flipped
| classrooms.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I know at least one person - a very, very smart person - who
| _really_ struggles in flipped classrooms. I think there are
| people who thrive in them and people who don 't, and that axis
| is orthogonal to the gifted/not gifted axis.
|
| Flipped classrooms _look_ wonderful - here 's a group of people
| who were struggling before, and look, they're thriving! But you
| can miss that here's another group who were thriving before,
| and now they're struggling.
| hintymad wrote:
| Did anyone check the course material of the gifted programs? My
| honest assessment is that even students in a gifted class are not
| necessarily challenged. For instance, the math problems of 6th-
| grade gifted class on negative integers are something like
| "calculate -1 - (-2)". In contrast, an easiest problem when I was
| in the same grade would be something like "N is a negative even
| number, and K is a non-negative odd number. What is the smallest
| value of K - N". My point is not to brag how challenging my
| school work can be, but that most kids need careful nurturing to
| maximize their potential. It really pains me to see that so many
| kids squander their time just because the schools do not do their
| jobs.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I think we should stop focusing on the cognitive elite at the
| expense of everyone else, actually.
|
| Why should people that think folks like me are failures deserve
| the bulk of our attention?
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Because somebody needs to keep things running for the rest of
| us?
|
| Seriously, we need all the bright people we can get, working on
| the tough problems and solving them. And we need even more
| basically competent people educated to keep what we have got
| figured out running smoothly. Life isn't some role playing game
| where everyone who wants to should get a turn being a surgeon
| or flying the jumbo jet. Competence actually matters.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| The people that designed jumbo jets were people that went to
| Washington State University and UDub in the 60s. John Aaron
| saved Apollo 12 and 13 with a degree from Southwestern
| Oklahoma State. These are not people that were in "gifted
| programs" and they don't fit what you perceive to be "gifted"
| (aka - able to get into one of 10 elite undergrad schools).
| elzbardico wrote:
| Man. I understand you are not in a good moment (given your
| handle). But a lot of those people who think you're a failure
| are not the smart ones, but the powerful ones.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I haven't worked at Amazon for several years now, but people
| that make up G&T Programs in California suburbs definitely
| would consider someone like me to be a failure due to where I
| went to school and where I work/worked. I hesitate to say
| they're not smart, they are, but they're also powerful.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Some countries, like the Nordics, have few (to no) options for
| gifted students.
|
| The mentality there is that it is better to raise the average,
| than to focus resources on a small % of the population. Seems to
| have worked pretty well for them, all things considered.
| tomr75 wrote:
| How has it worked well? Europe is having issues with
| productivity -- too expensive to live there AND higher paying
| jobs in the US. Eg People have to leave Norway to start
| businesses due to the tax system
| 1024core wrote:
| Forget catering to "gifted students". San Francisco's school
| district (SFUSD) wanted to take algebra out of 8th grade, simply
| because poor kids and POCs were failing it at disproportionate
| levels. Here's a relevant article:
| https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-...
|
| So the solution to bad grades in some communities was to take
| away the opportunity for ALL communities.
|
| Thankfully, a vocal group of people raised a stink about it and
| even put it on the ballot. The uproar caused the school to
| backtrack and bring Algebra back in 8th grade starting this year.
|
| This kind of idiotic "social engineering" that the SFUSD is doing
| is killing the public schools. Parents who can afford to spend
| the $50K/year on private schooling are taking their kids out of
| SFUSD and the district is losing funding.
|
| Democrats often say that the Republicans would like to kill
| public education. But the Democrats are doing a great job of it
| themselves! Case in point: my friend's kid goes to an SFUSD
| Middle School. Their 5thgrade class has no math teacher! Math is
| taught via Zoom and "self-paced learning". SMFH...
| EarthBlues wrote:
| I really think most of the education debate in elides the central
| issue, which is that there is no coherent vision of what
| education is for. We're going to keep changing things with no
| progress until that's settled.
|
| To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest
| proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of
| ends.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The best school I ever attended divided classes between academic
| (attended at one's grade level) and social (attended at one's age
| level) --- some teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby
| college, and once one had finished a subject through 12th grade,
| one could begin taking college courses --- many students were
| awarded 4-year college degrees along with their high school
| diploma when graduating.
|
| The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since it
| conferred an advantage on students who were able to work and
| study well enough to move ahead, but failed to make arrangements
| for students who couldn't to get free college after graduating
| from high school.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since
| ...
|
| I'm thinking the same legal rationalizations could be used to
| rule that high school football programs are illegal. No
| advantage conferred on the students who fail to make the team,
| and no free college for those who don't end up with an athletic
| scholarship.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The thing is, Title IX addressed this by requiring some level
| of equity in funding, at least in theory.
| bell-cot wrote:
| At _most_ , Title IX addressed the "girl's can't make the
| team" issue here. Where's the equal funding for slow, out-
| of-shape klutzes?
|
| (Actually, I don't know if Title IX addresses co-ed sports.
| And no matter how co-ed on paper, the rough nature nature
| of standard football will still result in anything-but-
| equal gender representation - both on the team, and in
| those scholarships.)
| WillAdams wrote:
| At that point we are close to Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison
| Bergeron".
|
| We need something a bit more equitable, which
| acknowledges the uniqueness of each student.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| What case might that be?
| Animats wrote:
| > But others said the admissions exam and additional application
| requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face
| socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is
| enrolled in Reed's IHP, said the test is "elitist and
| exclusionary," and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity
| of the program.
|
| Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because
| these are the numbers:
|
| Average IQ [1]
|
| - Ashkenazi Jews - 107-115
|
| - East Asians - 110
|
| - White Americans - 102
|
| - Black Americans - 90
|
| There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in
| that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are
| more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report
| the results.
|
| (Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades,
| but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be
| a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people,
| causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be
| interesting. Does anyone collect that?)
|
| Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into
| this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming
| majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is
| majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]
|
| Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter
| and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring
| criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored
| physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until
| technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was
| lower than their prevalence in the population.
|
| We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash,
| Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry
| out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.
|
| [1] https://iqinternational.org/insights/understanding-
| average-i...
|
| [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-
| scor...
|
| [3] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You are not supposed to talk about this.
| Animats wrote:
| Exactly. Which is why it is a problem.
|
| In the 1950s, gifted education was pushed hard, because the
| US seemed to be losing against Russia. Sputnik was a big
| wake-up call for the US.
|
| Today, the US seems to be losing against China. Maybe it's
| time for a wake-up call again.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| The US is a _very_ different country now from how it was in
| the 1950s. Things that were possible then may not be
| possible now.
| thrance wrote:
| In the 50s minorities and women were refused accessed to
| higher education. How many gifted kids were left on the
| sidewalk back then? Also not to speak of the disastrous
| understanding (or lack thereof) of neurodiversity.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're not supposed to talk about it because the people who
| talk about it don't want to talk about slavery and Jim Crow.
| There were laws prescribing the death penalty for _white
| people_ caught teaching black people how to read. Slaves were
| released into debt peonage while their owners were paid
| reparations. Control things for wealth, and the wealth of
| relatives, and all of the statistics start to favor the
| descendants of slaves.
|
| Slaves never discovered the philosopher's stone, so they
| never managed to turn lead into gold, but since nobody cared
| about entertaining us, we had to entertain ourselves. How did
| that turn out?
|
| IQ is an obsession of low-IQ people. Smart people understand
| that you can become smarter by learning rules that allow you
| to process the information you receive in a better way, and
| that this process is endless. Dumb people think that smart
| people are magical, and were born with special powers that
| you can measure by looking at them really hard.
|
| If the race IQ people were serious, they'd be making
| arguments that the low-IQ races should have disproportionate
| interventions. Instead, they're just trying to retroactively
| justify the selfish brutality of their disgusting ancestors.
|
| _worthless addition:_ I have to mention that I got into
| Mensa, or else people think comments like this are sour
| grapes. They love speculating about people 's internal states
| over a good argument, as much as they love a simple scalar
| over a complex nonlinear process.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| There are ways to talk about it without dividing human beings
| into tranches by race. Once you do that, you give ignorant
| people fodder to see out-groups as inferior and even
| subhuman, which opens the door to all kinds of horrible
| outcomes. See: history.
| r00fus wrote:
| IQ is a horribly biased way to measure "gifted". EQ is far more
| predictive of success and, honestly, more valuable to society.
| I have known a few very high IQ people and those with high IQ
| and low EQ can be difficult to collaborate with.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Recognizing gifted students should not be just measuring IQ
| (which is known to be a flawed metric)
| searealist wrote:
| Good luck finding a metric that isn't highly correlated with
| IQ.
| atmavatar wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that childhood malnutrition has a
| _significant_ negative impact on IQ that persists into
| adulthood.
|
| See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3796166/
|
| Black children are far more likely to live in poverty than the
| other three groups presented in the parent comment. I'm really
| curious what the numbers would be were that not the case. I
| also wonder how much the rise in black IQ over the decades can
| be attributed to school lunch programs.
| thrance wrote:
| I'd argue the parent's socioeconomic status is a much better
| predictor of IQ than "race".
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| But that never shows up in the data? Seriously, people always
| like to bring this idea up like it's not been studied to hell
| and back. Socioeconomic is not a stronger factor.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The main predictor is early childhood reading for pleasure. A
| suspicion is that the early start gives a lead that is almost
| impossible to make up, as life gets more busy, not less, when
| people get older.
|
| Early childhood pleasure reading requires parents that have
| enough reading skill themselves and the free time to teach
| you how to read, and childhood access to a wide variety of
| interesting books at a range of levels. Those are things that
| are going to be correlated with your parents' wealth. And
| your grandparents' wealth. As a slave descendant, my parents
| were the first people in the history of my family who were
| able to read easily. One still had to pick cotton as a child
| to get spending money.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Written by the author of "Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving
| Without a Degree." A book of which I know nothing (yet).
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Not from CA but had this experience growing up. I was bored in
| school so I hummed, read books from home, took naps and so on
| during lessons. Evidently that led to a discussion between my
| first grade teacher and my parents where they wanted to shunt me
| off into the developmental disabilities program. Thank God my
| mother was as involved as she was because what my teacher was
| reading as disability was merely the disinterest of someone
| hearing for the tenth time something they understood before they
| were told about it the first time. Had they put me in special ed
| in the first grade I'm sure that by the time anyone realized the
| mistake (assuming they did) I would have been so far behind that
| there would have been no fixing it. Instead my mom objected in
| the most vehement terms and they actually gave me some one on one
| time to assess my ability to learn material that was new to me
| and I ended up in the gifted program instead. My brother in law
| is similarly intelligent but has emotional processing issues
| among other things. He was put into the same program they wanted
| me to put into. He said he basically had to educate himself while
| the "teachers" just let them watch movies all day, and it was
| clear that the special ed program was nothing more than a sink
| into which they could dump problematic kids to ensure they don't
| disrupt the kids that the school hasn't technically given up on
| yet.
| briandear wrote:
| This is why school choice matters. Parents can send their kids to
| whatever school is best for the kid, not whatever school is best
| for the teachers unions.
| fmitchell0 wrote:
| For those who may not be aware, this was precisely the spirit of
| why affirmative action existed and why I personally supported it.
| These are the type of things that happen when our society
| misunderstands an executive action (because it was never a law)
| and debates in bad faith the intent of the premise for political
| purposes.
|
| I agree that focusing on 'equality of outcomes' is not a good fit
| for our American culture and it should be about 'equality of
| opportunity'.
|
| From wikipedia (which quoted Harvard): "Affirmative action is
| intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the
| opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give
| them equal access to that of the majority population."
|
| If focus is illiberally applied to the outcomes, then those at
| the edge of the bell curve are denied opportunities that likely
| work for them, i.e. the slashing of gifted programs as a gifted
| student.
| smurda wrote:
| I was in GATE in a California school district in the 90's. In our
| town of 100k people, 30 of us were put in a GATE classroom for
| grades 3-6.
|
| The best part about the program was being around other precocious
| peers. I think many of us would have been described as misfits -
| clever enough to sit at the adults table but clearly not a fit
| there.
|
| 30 years later, I have deeper relationships with those 30 people
| than my high school or college friends.
| kepp wrote:
| I was in gifted, and transferred through a number of public
| schools too. Unfortunately I don't remember much from those years
| except for them being very disorganized and being made very aware
| by teachers and others that we were supposed to be "different".
| Whatever that meant.
|
| One thing I do know is that the outcome of kids that were part of
| the gifted program was very normally distributed. Some people
| made out just fine when they got to adulthood, and some of them
| absolutely ruined their lives.
|
| I still think the whole thing was ridiculous and instilled the
| wrong ideas and lessons to us.
| roguecoder wrote:
| The whole point of "gifted" was that these are kids who are
| disproportionally likely to drop out of school, engage in risky
| behavior, get pregnant, get bad grades, etc.
|
| The problem is that A. they called it "gifted" so people thought
| it was something you _wanted_ your kids to be and B. the
| screening test they used was the IQ test, which you can massively
| improve your score on by studying for it. So parents were
| determined to get their kids into "gifted" education, and coached
| their kids on the tests to get in, and in the meantime kids from
| less-privileged backgrounds with the same characteristics were
| being labeled as behavioral problems and shunted into remedial
| programs.
|
| Now that we have the label of "neurodivergent", it seems to me it
| would be productive to reframe "gifted" education as
| "neurodivergent" education: rich parents would stop trying to get
| their kids into it, and it would be able to serve the kids it was
| intended to serve.
| mattnewton wrote:
| where did you get the impression the genesis for "gifted"
| programs was to solve high iq problem kids? this is the first
| I'm hearing of that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| TFA could be your second time hearing about it:
|
| > These programs were originally meant to meet the needs of
| students with intense, often irregular learning patterns.
| They used to be seen as not needing special attention because
| they often excelled. As standardized testing required schools
| to aim for student proficiency, all the focus went to those
| who hadn't met that mark. Those who exceeded it were deemed
| to be just fine.
|
| > But they're not just fine. Gifted children, more than
| others, tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others,
| a phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third-
| grader's reading skills might be at 11th-grade level while
| her social skills are more like a kindergartner's. They often
| find it hard to connect with other children. They also are in
| danger of being turned off by school because the lessons move
| slowly.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Thanks! I did not read that as being to prevent them from
| dropping out or getting pregnant, or other "problem kid"
| behavior, just at risk for academic problems in the future.
| When I was in school educators framed it entirely as
| "living up to your potential". I see what you mean though.
| roguecoder wrote:
| There were two strains, to be fair: there were eugenicist
| arguments as well, and some authors from the turn of the
| twentieth century go on at length about how the problem
| children probably aren't _actually_ gifted because truly
| superior people wouldn't misbehave. But for example, from
| "Classroom Problems in the Education of Gifted Children"
| (1917):
|
| "It is just as important for the bright child to acquire
| correct habits of work as it is for the dull or average child
| to do so, whereas in the ordinary class the brightest
| children are likely to have from a fourth to a half of their
| time in which to loaf, and never or rarely have the
| opportunity of knowing what it means to work up to the limit
| of their powers. The consequent habits of indolence,
| carelessness and inattention, which are so likely to be
| formed under such conditions, might be avoided by the
| provision, for such children, of special courses of such a
| nature as to fit their peculiar characteristics."
| moralestapia wrote:
| I ... I don't think that's true at all.
|
| >it seems to me it would be productive to reframe "gifted"
| education as "neurodivergent" education
|
| This I could get behind, because that's the definition of
| neurodivergent.
| newsclues wrote:
| I was in the gifted program in Canada and while that may have
| been an aim, it was also to identify the best and given them
| opportunities to excel, to allow them to grow and go on to be
| extraordinary citizens.
| roguecoder wrote:
| That kind of moral value being given to what is just
| neurodiversity is a huge part of the problem. By implication,
| you've just called people with learning disabilities "the
| worst".
|
| Neither group of children benefits from morality being
| attributed to their neurodivergence. Least of all the kids
| who overperform and have learning disabilities at the same
| time.
|
| It is good that people are different. It doesn't make gifted
| kids better.
| niemandhier wrote:
| My personal observation: It's not gifted programs, it's the
| environment. I work on a pretty good science campus in a smallish
| university town, lots of smart people and so on. There are a few
| products of gifted programs, but most people just meandered in.
|
| What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of
| slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess
| club, post soviet backyard hacker pad, Berlin maker space ... I
| think what would help much more than school run gifted programs,
| would be more opportunities for interested kids to mingle an push
| each other forward.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| This surely has a good amount of truth. Students won't engage
| with striving for excellence if they are
| socially/environmentally discouraged from it. How do
| parents/teachers/peers/school react to a student being very
| good at something?
| thimkerbell wrote:
| "almost everybody has a story (from previously) of slipping
| into a subculture where being smart was cool"
| mesh wrote:
| I grew up going through a gifted program (in the 80s) and it
| was the gifted program that was the subculture i fell into that
| really pushed me.
|
| Before that I was isolated and flunking out. Maybe I would
| eventually have found my people, but at least for me the gifted
| program found me, and got me on the right path at an early
| enough age to matter.
|
| Btw, this was in a region where intellectual capability and
| success was not as celebrated as it is in the Bay area.
| Eumenes wrote:
| In addition to many wise things stated, such as school choice and
| accepting some kids aren't as smart as others, teachers unions
| (and any public worker union, esp police) need to be abolished
| asap.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| How are other countries handling the availability of ChatGPT for
| use by pre-college students?
| aorona wrote:
| I was a gifted student in CA public school. Now I code for food
| :(
| chinabot wrote:
| homeschooling is a pretty amazing solution if done right
| didibus wrote:
| Wasn't there something about gifted students not necessarily
| translating into gifted adults? And that it's just that they are
| faster to reach a level of development, but doesn't mean they
| will go beyond the normal limit.
|
| Like the rate of development and learning just follows a
| different curve, but ends up near the same point once an adult.
|
| I think it was only some gifted student retain an advantage in
| adulthood, and it is normally when they are gifted in a specific
| discipline for which they maintain a consistent and continued
| practice through to their adulthood.
| roguecoder wrote:
| That's kind of what we would expect to happen in the case where
| other kids get actual support & "gifted" kids are left to fend
| for themselves, or even sent to the library to keep them from
| disrupting everyone else.
| didibus wrote:
| That would mean that throughout the last 30 years in many
| places around the world, gifted kids have never been given
| what they need to capitalize on their gift? Which maybe...
|
| I can't remember where I saw that in the first place, but I'd
| assume it would have gone off historical data, and hopefully
| looked across a few different places. So it might be that we
| never really supported gifted kids, or it could mean that
| it's a temporary gift.
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