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.
> 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.
> 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.
As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade.
However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math.
I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a lot of the busywork that school presents to you - because I saw little point in it, I knew the material, I'd read the book, I could write about it and often passed tests on it with flying colors.
If I'd been given an opportunity to do more engaging learning, and less information regurgitation style learning, I wonder where I would be. Like an introduction to computer programming class, would have completely changed the trajectory of my life - yes I'm a working engineer today, but it took me a long time to work my way up from a low wage service job.
ADHD is not at all well accommodated in public schools. I could never finish most homework as a child, because it was too boring and repetitive(I got it in 1-2 repetitions, but they made us do 20). My ADHD was severe, but I still got put in G&T classes because of my IQ tests, but that didn’t help much. GT classes were an hour or two in a different classroom doing silly “creative” projects, but then it was right back to normal classes where we were in the same room as students that had to sound out words in their paragraph of the class reading in the same amount of time many of us had read ahead a dozen pages. I never completed most homework and had poor grades putting me almost in the bottom half of my class. Everything changed when I got to AP and other advanced classes. They were more interesting and I easily rose to the top of them while nearly failing the boring standard classes. If it weren’t for AP classes followed by more interesting college classes I’d be a janitor or something. Us neurodivergent smart folks can be absolutely crippled by being stuck in boring regular classes. Having a mental difference/disability makes us hard to understand and accommodate. We can be both special needs and gifted/talented at the same time.
The instructional approaches I mentioned in the parent comment are not based on pointless 'busywork'. In fact, quick feedback to the pupil is considered an essential feature, which helps cope with the all-too-easily distracted "monkey mind" that's typically associated with ADHD.
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.
> 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.
> 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
There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers, no critical thought or deeper understanding of the concepts was expected. That was not engaging. That style of "education" had me failing classes and hating every waking moment of school. It was only the last year of HS that I started to shine after hitting AP classes with more interesting topics that required some deeper understanding and mastery. If I hadn't experienced non-rote classes my last year I might be a janitor now.
> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers
Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it to just get the rote learning part done with in the easiest, quickest and most effective way, by employing the structured approaches that are ignored by most teachers today?
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.
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.
> 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.
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. ..."
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.
> Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the opposite of [tutorial instruction plus mastery methods].
Reference for this statement? From a rather abstract POV, it seems to be the closest thing to "mastery methods and tutorial instruction" that can actually scale to a large class size and engage all students by default.
Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match) has very little bearing on what's most effective for marginalized and disadvantaged students who may have significant challenges with basic skills.
> Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match)
Part of what got my attention and asking you for citations:
> > > As an important point, the merit of this kind of education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students!
For more anecdata: I coach a MS competitive math team as an elective. Anyone can join. It's not selective. Our school is roughly 3% of the middle school students in our chapter, but we routinely take >50% of the top 12 spots. We don't do rote but just explore ideas and compare approaches. Also, students in the program on average pick up about .7 years of math skills beyond what similar control students at our school do during that time.
I came into this job thinking I was going to be all teaching and demonstrating methods, and doing a bunch of drill-and-kill, etc. In practice that's where I've been least effective personally and where the classroom has been a sad place to be.
During COVID, I was a substitute teacher in an 8th grade science classroom and I was teaching physics. We recited definitions and drilled and killed. The students did well in the material, but developed no great love for me or physics, and didn't do better in their next year of science classes than students who had been taught in a more informal, exploratory way. The students that I taught physics still actively avoid my programs.
> Reference for this statement?
In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class." It's about engaging with concepts actively.
On the flip side, Direct Instruction is more structured and teacher-led, focusing on clear, step-by-step teaching with a ton of overlap between sessions and very clear structured measurement of basic tasks.
> In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class."
This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach. You're right that this is not directly "teacher led" in a material sense, but only inasmuch as the equivalent effort happens outside the classroom. The "debate, critique, and defend" approach shares both the "immediately applicable practice" and the "quick feedback" features of DI - there's clearly "a ton of overlap" between studying a lesson on one's own and later debating, critiquing or practically applying the same content in class. Just because it might not be literal "blabbing back" doesn't mean that much of the same underlying dynamics is not involved.
> This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach.
A flipped classroom falls short of tutorial instruction. Often, it's just recorded lessons presented outside school time to leave more time for using the classroom in other ways.
Homework in conventional primary classrooms is not helpful and may be harmful, and as best as I can tell, this includes flipped lessons and textbook readings. We've got a pretty big mountain of data accumulating on this topic.
I'm trying to flip some topics in AP Microeconomics and it's really hard to do in an effective way.
Actually: I find in AP Micro I am doing things much closer to how you describe, because I'm micro-optimizing for (students doing well on the AP Micro exam) instead of (producing students that I feel understand economics in a generally useful way).
> "quick feedback" features of DI
I think pretty much everyone agrees quick feedback and measurement is valuable. Having one clean expected answer that the class says together is one way to get this, and I guess it's perhaps the one that requires the lowest instructor skill and thus is most repeatable.
But I would say, for example, that Khan Academy does it much better-- pacing things to each student, providing individualized feedback, supporting spacing effects through mastery challenges, and allowing questions whose responses would not be said the same by all students. It's trickier, though: you need to stand in the back of class to tamp down on device misuse. And in the end students do work in exchange for recognition from their instructor in a well-functioning classroom, which is hard to get if they're spending most of their time trying to please a computer.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'm surprised that "device misuse" is that big of an issue. I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device. Aside from that, I do in fact agree wrt. on the potential of Khan Academy and similar systems - they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
> I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device.
In our case, schools purchase and bring their own devices past elementary school. But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
> they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
They don't, though. In my experience, there's 3 reasons why a student will devote effort to improvement in a classroom. In order of their efficacy and difficulty to instill:
1. Pressure from grades/the gradebook. In my experience, this is only weakly effective. Even in my environment where families are really achievement focused. There is too much of a delay; even if things are updated in Khan or the gradebook nigh-immediately, the measure doesn't become consequential for a long time.
2. Social pressures in the classroom: desire to not look foolish; relationship with an adviser; desire to please the teacher; effects of appropriate praise; desire to do fun things that other students are doing.
3. True interest and independent engagement in the subject.
You could alternatively view this also as a scale of how quick and effective feedback is. By #3, the student starts to measure themselves.
Khan or DI will have a hard time taking a student to #3. Khan's a super-strong, super immediate version of #1; DI is a very weak version of #2 (but possibly the easiest to implement).
Singapore's math program in elementary is actually much less recitation and rote based than we are used to in Western mathematics education.
Indeed, it's very much pictorial and intuition-building in ways that fans of DI tend to look down on. It's concept and problem solving before rote.
I don't know so much about these countries in primary education, but I do have a few Japanese textbooks from secondary school translated into English and published by the AMS. This material also seems less rote-heavy than I am used to.
E.g. I'm looking at an on-level grade 7 mathematics textbook, and it's spending a lot of pages justifying the idea of negative numbers in addition and subtraction and with pictorial representation and has comparably few problems to do.
In a US math textbook, this material would have been done before grade 7, but in less depth. There would be a whole lot of rules, algorithms, and rote practice.
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?
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.
> 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?
> > 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.
China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.
I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can think of many nasty things that Stalin did, but I don't recall anything even remotely similar to "lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities". In fact, teacher was probably one of the most respected occupations throughout the Soviet period.
> 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.
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.
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.
Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.
Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.
Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.
Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Grit is not more important than raw intelligence for making world changing discoveries, that’s nonsense on its face. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition, it takes BOTH incredible intelligence and extreme grit combined to make world changing discoveries. An average IQ person could never accomplish what Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, or Leonard Susskind did with grit alone and our modern world would not exist without them. With a few notable exceptions the giants of history mostly had great financial and social privilege as well, allowing them the time to apply their grit and intelligence to problems that didn’t have any immediate economic payoff.
I will say that math and hard sciences are unnecessarily difficult for outsiders to approach due to overly confusing terminology and not enough thought toward pedagogy. Great contemporaries like Sean Carroll and Leonard Susskind are demonstrating how to make the sciences much more accessible to people like me. But no matter how much more accessible you make it it’s inconceivable that average IQ people will ever contribute to the frontiers of it.
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?
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?
Newton, Euler, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman… Our modern world wouldn’t exist without them. Look up estimates of their IQ. Read some of their work and try to imagine having the same level of insight and producing similar volumes of it if you devoted every waking hour to the task.
Then read up on the ancient Greeks. Even after 12 years of education most modern people wouldn't be able to measure the circumference of the Earth like Eratosthenes did hundreds of years before Christ. The ancient Greeks were pretty darn smart.
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.
Equating achievement to financial success is a big mistake, but a bigly American one. The great scientists, while often somewhat privileged, were rarely in the billionaire class or their time’s equivalent. The average brilliant scientist or mathematician nowadays is making a wage that doesn’t afford them any luxuries whatsoever.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
There is always a massive shortage of gifted students, original thinkers, and neuro-divergents. We need 10x as much, and we need to take care of each one. This society is starving for fresh ideas. We do not lack for effort anymore, we lack for creative and pragmatic thinkers. Without them we will continue to turn on each other, because without them, it truly is a zero sum game.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are literally multiple people in this thread (including myself and the above poster) saying they are talking about (relatively) normal people like themselves. We are outliers (someone taking AP calc BC in high school might be in the 95+ percentile in math aptitude), but not profoundly extreme outliers, and the 95th percentile is still millions of people. You seem to be the only person saying that it's a small group of elite kids under discussion.
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.
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.
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
You're speculating that a US president has a relatively average intelligence - why are you assuming that? The top job in a democracy is generally one of the most competitive positions in the world and US presidents are typically exceptional in multiple different ways. It'd be really surprising to have a US president with an IQ below something like 120 and I'd personally be assuming >140 for the average. As far as I can see a 140 IQ is around the 0.1-1% mark, it isn't that rare compared to presidents (<0.01%).
> You're speculating that a US president has a relatively average intelligence - why are you assuming that
I am not assuming that: any range that has studying nuclear engineering as its floor is above average intelligence. I thought it was self-evident, but apparently not - perhaps not many people know what a "Navy Nuke officer" is. To be more explicit the range is between above average intelligence and "genius". Regardless, I will never be convinced that people with relatively average intelligence are precluded from greatness; so excuse my scepticism when fellow nerds pat themselves on the back for being the engine of the world without pointing at any research that bears this idea out.
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.
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.
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.
I think you'll find human beings learn best in conversation with others. Sometimes thats through books, and articles but for many its at least partially through conversation. Letters, podcasts, salons, coffee haus, banya trees and rostras. Its been shown again and again and again that humans need other humans to learn and that our learning is like the shellacking of a shell. It is inevitably informed by the layer before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> I don't think this invalidates the broad observation
The word you're looking for is stereotype. There's lots of harmful and inaccurate stereotypes about all groups of people out there, and polite society generally frowns on using them as a form of bigotry.
> Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this.
There are tons of opportunities for this sort of thing, in the form of non-school youth groups such as 4H, sports teams, scouts and so on.
In fact, actual in class socialization is frowned on or punished in most schools. It's the in-between time and extracurriculars when that happens most anyway.
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.
Was this a test that a child could be voluntarily signed up for by their parents? In my district in a different state, the students were first selected based on standardized testing to then take the IQ test like exam to get into the program.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else?
Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other. One could argue that the disadvantaged kids should be prioritized because they need more help, and are less likely to succeed without it.
Whereas gifted kids might be bored in school and do worse than if they had dedicated programs, but they still have the chance to find enrichment outside of school or catch up later in life.
Of course, whether those statements are true would need to be an area of research. How would you calculate the overall ROI for society between the two options? Is it more import to "lift up the bottom" or "accelerate the top"?
And of course ideally we would do both.
I'm just saying it's not surprising that most (liberal / social democrat type) people will default to supporting the "more needy" first.
> 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?
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.
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?
Certainly there are those who say the IQ tests themselves are discriminatory. I'm not qualified to say how much truth there is in that. But that is the likely reason they went away.
In my case I changed schools in the middle of second grade. A month later teachers submitted their list of students who should be admitted the the G+T program. Obviously I didn't make the cut since my teacher barely knew me. My parents tried for years to get me into the program but the district held firm that I had missed the window. Ultimately, I ended up third in my graduating class and attended a top university. The outcomes from the G+T kids were mostly disappointing. One teaches at a university, another works at Walmart. The rest are somewhere in between but mostly closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
As you have just described, accusations of virtue signalling are really accusations of people acting in bad faith by another name - and doing that without evidence of bad faith is corrosive and fallacious. Hacker News even has rules against it because it is not accepted as a valid form of argument. Just because the accusations aren't being levied against someone you're directly replying to here doesn't make it any better.
If you have reason to believe these people are bad faith actors, present the evidence directly rather than trying to sneak it in with weasel words.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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:
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, I'm totally for this. I can see a push-back from some people, though: a talented kid may have access to more scarce resources, say a professor in a prestigious university, or a highly-selective camp like SAMS. For that those people will cry unfair.
Ya, there's push back from some people on either side.
I think one side doesn't want to "pay" to help others. Sometimes the idea of like everyone getting 500$ a month in social security is more alluring than giving it only to those who need it. So some people do prefer equality over equity. Similarly, in education, they don't see why they should "pay" for students that are not "smart", or for the fault of their parents, etc. Or they think, well if they get an extra hour of math tutoring, everyone should, or no one should. Which is the idea of equality, and not equity.
While the other side can get jealous of those that got lucky and started with money or privilege. So when the kid with money goes to a prestigious university, even though they also had to show they were smart enough for it, people start calling it unfair. Or if one person managed to bust their ass and make it from nothing, they pretend like probably they had more luck or privilege.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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 probably 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.
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.
> 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.
> “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."
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I currently live in a rural environment with tiny schools and wonder how I would’ve turned out if that’s where I did high school. I think you need a critical mass of other gifted kids to really set the bar and drive some aspirational goals. If your class has a single gifted kid, they’ll just see that they exceed their peers and coast; if there’s a whole group they’ll push each other once they know more about where the ceiling is.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
On the other hand, I skipped three grade levels and feel that it was absolutely the best option for me. I don’t think there’s any one answer here about the best thing to do — it depends entirely on the student, the school, and the grades to be skipped.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, California does indeed allow children to skip grades. I also live in California and can think of 2 kids in my son's school who have skipped a grade. It is totally permitted - we've even discussed skipping our son one grade because he too is bored and capable of more, not only in maths but in every subject. We decided against it for social reasons.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. I lean towards thinking I would've wound up further behind if I skipped one or more grades, due to the social aspect. Especially given how often I moved.
Keeping the regular pace also allowed me to do a lot more extracurriculars. I started helping with quantum computing research in my freshman year of college and joined a bunch of clubs.
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.
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.
This isn’t about it being a rush. For kids like mine, they NEED it. My son wanted to learn calculus when he was 9 but I refused and instead sent him to outdoor summer camps, sports camps etc. He still doesn’t know calculus because I told him not to rush it and he is resentful but instead he took geometry, number theory etc. He wants to learn at an accelerated pace, it’s not about anyone except for him pushing himself because he needs it.
> 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.
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.
Thank you for your story. It’s something I’m hoping to avoid for my son and I’m glad you were able to find a path theiugh programming. Interestingly my son isn’t very interested in programming but he loves math.
He goes to a gifted school with many kids like him so it has been working out well, but the tuition is extremely expensive. We have been making sure he focuses on hard work as opposed to high marks so that he doesn’t learn bad habits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
I don't know --- it was in the late '70s, early '80s, and I just heard about it from letters my parents received about it from folks who were still living there.
It’s the modern hatred of hierarchy at work. People today so desperately want to believe in equality that they deny the plain and simple truth of intellectual hierarchy.
The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
For 2023-2024, among SFUSD students who are 'Economically Disadvantaged':
70% of Asian 3rd graders met or exceeded state standards for math.
18% of Black or African American 3rd graders met or exceeded state standards for math.
The difference is similar for all grade levels (3 to 11) and for all years for which I've seen the data.
California provides lunch for all children who attend public schools. SFUSD gives first choice of school to those who live in the very poorest areas of the city.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Ditto. I skipped most of high school through an accelerated program and wound up in university before I was 15.
At the time I was happy. It was the first time I was surrounded by peers as smart or smarter than me. First time I wasn't bored in school.
It absolutely destroyed my social abilities and I spent the next 5 years miserable and depressed. I barely graduated and took another few years before I felt like I had caught up enough on everything I missed out on and I was able to start a career in my mid-20's at a comparable time to everyone else.
I'm no longer "exceptional" relative to my age peers, and Im just fine with that.
I have a son now and I genuinely don't know what I would do if he has the same challenges and opportunities as me.
On the one hand I would never wish what I went through on anyone. On the other, noone forced me to go. I wanted to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn't that also be on a different curve though?
Like they might have accelerated improvement right now, but will reverse in their late teens for example, thus still ending up in the same place in the end?
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...
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.
IMO students should be take the class that maximizes the probability of getting a c * the probability of engagement. Note that this isn't "at least a c" but a just a c. There should also be weekly surveys the directly question the students engagement. No matter how important the topic, if the student isn't engaged then they aren't learning it and are better served learning literally anything else. Even if that means not learning to read past a 1st grade level for 5 or 10 years. Transferring classes should become the norm, once you lose engagement it is too difficult to get it back (and if half the class leaves then that teacher now knows what NOT to do)
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).
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.
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?
Funny how HN never assumes that paying software developers more money is pointless. It's just those greedy teachers trying to make enough money to buy a home!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing.
Is that true? Without having a deep insight into the subject, homelessness seems to often be a symptom of mental illness and substance abuse. I don’t think having cheaper housing would really fix the issue of homelessness.
This is a major misconception. The people you see homeless on the streets are very disproportionately those with mental illness(es) and addiction problems. But studies show a huge percent of the homeless have jobs; the link below says 40% to 50%.
But we don't see people workings and living in their car or in a shelter "being homeless," so we tend to think of the visibly homeless as representative of all homeless folks.
And for those who do have mental illness or addiction problems, well, those problems are severely exacerbated by being homeless. They'd be more likely to get treatment and improve with housing.
Here's the best description I've heard of homelessness. It goes in stages:
1. You are evicted or priced out of your apartment or house. You are still working but you are now housing insecure. You might couchsurf, stay temporarily with friends or relatives or otherwise hop around until those options run out;
2. You are now living in your car. You likely still maintain a job. There's a constant cat-and-mouse with local authorities who will seek to tow your car or detain you if they find you living in your car. You might move around, sleep in Walmart parking lots and so on. At some point your car might break down and you can't afford to fix it, or it gets impounded and you can't recover it;
3. You are now living on the street. This is the first stage of homelessness that people generally see. Unfortunately visible homeless on the streets is largely viewed as an eyesore and people push local authorities to sweep them into a neighbouring town, city or county. Also, visible homeless is what drives people's perceptions of crime [1]. The same is true for the "migrant crisis" and visible (unhoused) migrants in places like NYC. Having no transportation, you will often lose your job (if you haven't already); finally leading to
4. You are longterm homeless. Because of this you likely have addiction and/or mental health issues as you self-medicate to cope.
Some (wrongly) believe that drug addiction leads to hojmeless. It's the opposite.
As for the cost of housing and homelessness rates, the link is well-established [2].
The argument against these programs is that they directed scarce resources toward the students who least need it. The mandate of public schools is to get as many people to a baseline of education.
There are many jurisdictions that can afford to do both, but most are not in that position.
There is far more wasted potential in the case of the hundreds of thousands of kids who fall through the cracks because of a crummy education system. Many states already create an uneven playing field by funding each school system based on the quantum of local taxes collected in their particular communities. Poor kids shouldn't have to further compete for resources within their own, poorly funded institution.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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
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.
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%?
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.
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.
Massachusetts is the state rated #1 in pre-K to 12 education, and they have about 100% of teachers in unions. This seems to destroy your argument that teachers unions need to be "abolished" in the name of helping students.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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).
Agreed, but interpreting the results of tests without considering the effect that policies like redlining have on such results furthers the lie that the the variation in test results between groups represents innate differences in abilities of those groups instead of the effects of systemic and multigenerational discrimination.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You're making a generalization about all of Europe vs just Norway, the country OP mentioned.
Check out the link below to be educated on how incorrect your assumption is. No offense intended -- I didn't realize how much better the life of an average Norwegian is compared to that of the average American!
What really stood out to me is that, by comparison, an American is > 10X more likely to die in childbirth, and 24% more likely to be poor. It seems like the Norwegians must be doing something right!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
> 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?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade.
However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math.
I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a lot of the busywork that school presents to you - because I saw little point in it, I knew the material, I'd read the book, I could write about it and often passed tests on it with flying colors.
If I'd been given an opportunity to do more engaging learning, and less information regurgitation style learning, I wonder where I would be. Like an introduction to computer programming class, would have completely changed the trajectory of my life - yes I'm a working engineer today, but it took me a long time to work my way up from a low wage service job.
ADHD is not at all well accommodated in public schools. I could never finish most homework as a child, because it was too boring and repetitive(I got it in 1-2 repetitions, but they made us do 20). My ADHD was severe, but I still got put in G&T classes because of my IQ tests, but that didn’t help much. GT classes were an hour or two in a different classroom doing silly “creative” projects, but then it was right back to normal classes where we were in the same room as students that had to sound out words in their paragraph of the class reading in the same amount of time many of us had read ahead a dozen pages. I never completed most homework and had poor grades putting me almost in the bottom half of my class. Everything changed when I got to AP and other advanced classes. They were more interesting and I easily rose to the top of them while nearly failing the boring standard classes. If it weren’t for AP classes followed by more interesting college classes I’d be a janitor or something. Us neurodivergent smart folks can be absolutely crippled by being stuck in boring regular classes. Having a mental difference/disability makes us hard to understand and accommodate. We can be both special needs and gifted/talented at the same time.
The instructional approaches I mentioned in the parent comment are not based on pointless 'busywork'. In fact, quick feedback to the pupil is considered an essential feature, which helps cope with the all-too-easily distracted "monkey mind" that's typically associated with ADHD.
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.
> 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.
> 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
There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers, no critical thought or deeper understanding of the concepts was expected. That was not engaging. That style of "education" had me failing classes and hating every waking moment of school. It was only the last year of HS that I started to shine after hitting AP classes with more interesting topics that required some deeper understanding and mastery. If I hadn't experienced non-rote classes my last year I might be a janitor now.
> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers
Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it to just get the rote learning part done with in the easiest, quickest and most effective way, by employing the structured approaches that are ignored by most teachers today?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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. ..."
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.
> Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the opposite of [tutorial instruction plus mastery methods].
Reference for this statement? From a rather abstract POV, it seems to be the closest thing to "mastery methods and tutorial instruction" that can actually scale to a large class size and engage all students by default.
Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match) has very little bearing on what's most effective for marginalized and disadvantaged students who may have significant challenges with basic skills.
> Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match)
Part of what got my attention and asking you for citations:
> > > As an important point, the merit of this kind of education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students!
For more anecdata: I coach a MS competitive math team as an elective. Anyone can join. It's not selective. Our school is roughly 3% of the middle school students in our chapter, but we routinely take >50% of the top 12 spots. We don't do rote but just explore ideas and compare approaches. Also, students in the program on average pick up about .7 years of math skills beyond what similar control students at our school do during that time.
I came into this job thinking I was going to be all teaching and demonstrating methods, and doing a bunch of drill-and-kill, etc. In practice that's where I've been least effective personally and where the classroom has been a sad place to be.
During COVID, I was a substitute teacher in an 8th grade science classroom and I was teaching physics. We recited definitions and drilled and killed. The students did well in the material, but developed no great love for me or physics, and didn't do better in their next year of science classes than students who had been taught in a more informal, exploratory way. The students that I taught physics still actively avoid my programs.
> Reference for this statement?
In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class." It's about engaging with concepts actively.
On the flip side, Direct Instruction is more structured and teacher-led, focusing on clear, step-by-step teaching with a ton of overlap between sessions and very clear structured measurement of basic tasks.
> In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class."
This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach. You're right that this is not directly "teacher led" in a material sense, but only inasmuch as the equivalent effort happens outside the classroom. The "debate, critique, and defend" approach shares both the "immediately applicable practice" and the "quick feedback" features of DI - there's clearly "a ton of overlap" between studying a lesson on one's own and later debating, critiquing or practically applying the same content in class. Just because it might not be literal "blabbing back" doesn't mean that much of the same underlying dynamics is not involved.
> This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach.
A flipped classroom falls short of tutorial instruction. Often, it's just recorded lessons presented outside school time to leave more time for using the classroom in other ways.
Homework in conventional primary classrooms is not helpful and may be harmful, and as best as I can tell, this includes flipped lessons and textbook readings. We've got a pretty big mountain of data accumulating on this topic.
I'm trying to flip some topics in AP Microeconomics and it's really hard to do in an effective way.
Actually: I find in AP Micro I am doing things much closer to how you describe, because I'm micro-optimizing for (students doing well on the AP Micro exam) instead of (producing students that I feel understand economics in a generally useful way).
> "quick feedback" features of DI
I think pretty much everyone agrees quick feedback and measurement is valuable. Having one clean expected answer that the class says together is one way to get this, and I guess it's perhaps the one that requires the lowest instructor skill and thus is most repeatable.
But I would say, for example, that Khan Academy does it much better-- pacing things to each student, providing individualized feedback, supporting spacing effects through mastery challenges, and allowing questions whose responses would not be said the same by all students. It's trickier, though: you need to stand in the back of class to tamp down on device misuse. And in the end students do work in exchange for recognition from their instructor in a well-functioning classroom, which is hard to get if they're spending most of their time trying to please a computer.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'm surprised that "device misuse" is that big of an issue. I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device. Aside from that, I do in fact agree wrt. on the potential of Khan Academy and similar systems - they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
> I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device.
In our case, schools purchase and bring their own devices past elementary school. But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
> they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
They don't, though. In my experience, there's 3 reasons why a student will devote effort to improvement in a classroom. In order of their efficacy and difficulty to instill:
1. Pressure from grades/the gradebook. In my experience, this is only weakly effective. Even in my environment where families are really achievement focused. There is too much of a delay; even if things are updated in Khan or the gradebook nigh-immediately, the measure doesn't become consequential for a long time.
2. Social pressures in the classroom: desire to not look foolish; relationship with an adviser; desire to please the teacher; effects of appropriate praise; desire to do fun things that other students are doing.
3. True interest and independent engagement in the subject.
You could alternatively view this also as a scale of how quick and effective feedback is. By #3, the student starts to measure themselves.
Khan or DI will have a hard time taking a student to #3. Khan's a super-strong, super immediate version of #1; DI is a very weak version of #2 (but possibly the easiest to implement).
> 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
Singapore's math program in elementary is actually much less recitation and rote based than we are used to in Western mathematics education.
Indeed, it's very much pictorial and intuition-building in ways that fans of DI tend to look down on. It's concept and problem solving before rote.
I don't know so much about these countries in primary education, but I do have a few Japanese textbooks from secondary school translated into English and published by the AMS. This material also seems less rote-heavy than I am used to.
E.g. I'm looking at an on-level grade 7 mathematics textbook, and it's spending a lot of pages justifying the idea of negative numbers in addition and subtraction and with pictorial representation and has comparably few problems to do.
In a US math textbook, this material would have been done before grade 7, but in less depth. There would be a whole lot of rules, algorithms, and rote practice.
This sounds thoroughly unappealing to gifted students though? I mean, repetition is _a_ tool in the toolset.
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?
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.
This is very true
> 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?
> > 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.
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
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
I expect better from someone whose user name is nuancebydefault
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.
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.
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.
Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.
China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.
I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can think of many nasty things that Stalin did, but I don't recall anything even remotely similar to "lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities". In fact, teacher was probably one of the most respected occupations throughout the Soviet period.
> 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.
Mao's policies including the persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution killed millions and set China back by decades.
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.
> 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.
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.
How does removing gifted and talented programs support "those from low-opportunity backgrounds"?
"persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.
In other words:
Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.
These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
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.
Which fields?
Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.
Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.
Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.
Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.
>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.
That is not true either.
There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost.
They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt.
It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population.
Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.
@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.
> 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.
Grit is not more important than raw intelligence for making world changing discoveries, that’s nonsense on its face. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition, it takes BOTH incredible intelligence and extreme grit combined to make world changing discoveries. An average IQ person could never accomplish what Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, or Leonard Susskind did with grit alone and our modern world would not exist without them. With a few notable exceptions the giants of history mostly had great financial and social privilege as well, allowing them the time to apply their grit and intelligence to problems that didn’t have any immediate economic payoff.
I will say that math and hard sciences are unnecessarily difficult for outsiders to approach due to overly confusing terminology and not enough thought toward pedagogy. Great contemporaries like Sean Carroll and Leonard Susskind are demonstrating how to make the sciences much more accessible to people like me. But no matter how much more accessible you make it it’s inconceivable that average IQ people will ever contribute to the frontiers of it.
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?
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?
Newton, Euler, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman… Our modern world wouldn’t exist without them. Look up estimates of their IQ. Read some of their work and try to imagine having the same level of insight and producing similar volumes of it if you devoted every waking hour to the task.
Then read up on the ancient Greeks. Even after 12 years of education most modern people wouldn't be able to measure the circumference of the Earth like Eratosthenes did hundreds of years before Christ. The ancient Greeks were pretty darn smart.
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.
Equating achievement to financial success is a big mistake, but a bigly American one. The great scientists, while often somewhat privileged, were rarely in the billionaire class or their time’s equivalent. The average brilliant scientist or mathematician nowadays is making a wage that doesn’t afford them any luxuries whatsoever.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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?
* Train you to the best of your ability
* giving you a no-shame route up and down so that you can choose your own level of challenge, which entails
* giving you opportunities to try the more gifted programs to see if you'd do well and enjoy them
and also
* giving you the opportunity to choose a less demanding program in which you can find and adequate level of challenge (if you need to)
BUT
* treating disruptive behaviour as a choice to go to a less demanding program
citation needed
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.
There is always a massive shortage of gifted students, original thinkers, and neuro-divergents. We need 10x as much, and we need to take care of each one. This society is starving for fresh ideas. We do not lack for effort anymore, we lack for creative and pragmatic thinkers. Without them we will continue to turn on each other, because without them, it truly is a zero sum game.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are literally multiple people in this thread (including myself and the above poster) saying they are talking about (relatively) normal people like themselves. We are outliers (someone taking AP calc BC in high school might be in the 95+ percentile in math aptitude), but not profoundly extreme outliers, and the 95th percentile is still millions of people. You seem to be the only person saying that it's a small group of elite kids under discussion.
>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.
> 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
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.
Is that why Elon Musk's mom went on TV to explain just how much of a genius he is? It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward
Do gifted students move society forward ?
Where is society moving to ?
Generally yes.
Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.
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.
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
You're speculating that a US president has a relatively average intelligence - why are you assuming that? The top job in a democracy is generally one of the most competitive positions in the world and US presidents are typically exceptional in multiple different ways. It'd be really surprising to have a US president with an IQ below something like 120 and I'd personally be assuming >140 for the average. As far as I can see a 140 IQ is around the 0.1-1% mark, it isn't that rare compared to presidents (<0.01%).
> You're speculating that a US president has a relatively average intelligence - why are you assuming that
I am not assuming that: any range that has studying nuclear engineering as its floor is above average intelligence. I thought it was self-evident, but apparently not - perhaps not many people know what a "Navy Nuke officer" is. To be more explicit the range is between above average intelligence and "genius". Regardless, I will never be convinced that people with relatively average intelligence are precluded from greatness; so excuse my scepticism when fellow nerds pat themselves on the back for being the engine of the world without pointing at any research that bears this idea out.
I was curious and so I looked.
Jimmy Carter: 145.
Not sure how credible that is but it sure did make me chuckle.
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?
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.
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.
You don't seem to have the right perspective to talk about things at scale like this. Taking that personally is unfathomable.
Why is it unfathomable?
You are totally over romanticizing institutional learning. It’s worth abolishing and starting over.
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
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.
I think you'll find human beings learn best in conversation with others. Sometimes thats through books, and articles but for many its at least partially through conversation. Letters, podcasts, salons, coffee haus, banya trees and rostras. Its been shown again and again and again that humans need other humans to learn and that our learning is like the shellacking of a shell. It is inevitably informed by the layer before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> I don't think this invalidates the broad observation
The word you're looking for is stereotype. There's lots of harmful and inaccurate stereotypes about all groups of people out there, and polite society generally frowns on using them as a form of bigotry.
> Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this.
There are tons of opportunities for this sort of thing, in the form of non-school youth groups such as 4H, sports teams, scouts and so on.
In fact, actual in class socialization is frowned on or punished in most schools. It's the in-between time and extracurriculars when that happens most anyway.
> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
If that's the main thing you learn, it's only worth an hour or two of the school day. So it's not all wasted but it's mostly wasted.
In what way are you certain that she's gifted?
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.
Was this a test that a child could be voluntarily signed up for by their parents? In my district in a different state, the students were first selected based on standardized testing to then take the IQ test like exam to get into the program.
Unrelated but I'd love to hear the story behind your user name.
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.)
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.
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.
Can you quote where you are seeing that I didn't get that reading at all from GP.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
Stack ranking kids sounds terrible.
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?
It’s literally illegal to give students IQ tests in California.
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.
I don't know; the overly-ambitious parents push has been working out pretty well as evidenced by the Asian community in the US.
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?
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.
> 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.
>Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else?
Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other. One could argue that the disadvantaged kids should be prioritized because they need more help, and are less likely to succeed without it.
Whereas gifted kids might be bored in school and do worse than if they had dedicated programs, but they still have the chance to find enrichment outside of school or catch up later in life.
Of course, whether those statements are true would need to be an area of research. How would you calculate the overall ROI for society between the two options? Is it more import to "lift up the bottom" or "accelerate the top"?
And of course ideally we would do both.
I'm just saying it's not surprising that most (liberal / social democrat type) people will default to supporting the "more needy" first.
> 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?
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.
Well said. The unusual dogs are just beaten more
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?
Certainly there are those who say the IQ tests themselves are discriminatory. I'm not qualified to say how much truth there is in that. But that is the likely reason they went away.
In my case I changed schools in the middle of second grade. A month later teachers submitted their list of students who should be admitted the the G+T program. Obviously I didn't make the cut since my teacher barely knew me. My parents tried for years to get me into the program but the district held firm that I had missed the window. Ultimately, I ended up third in my graduating class and attended a top university. The outcomes from the G+T kids were mostly disappointing. One teaches at a university, another works at Walmart. The rest are somewhere in between but mostly closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.
Maybe I actually dodged a bullet.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
As you have just described, accusations of virtue signalling are really accusations of people acting in bad faith by another name - and doing that without evidence of bad faith is corrosive and fallacious. Hacker News even has rules against it because it is not accepted as a valid form of argument. Just because the accusations aren't being levied against someone you're directly replying to here doesn't make it any better.
If you have reason to believe these people are bad faith actors, present the evidence directly rather than trying to sneak it in with weasel words.
it's a perfectly good phrase to describe what it says. if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
> if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
That's even vaguer and less compelling rhetoric than "virtue signaling".
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.
Or indeed, it's possible that neither you nor the virtue signallers understand why they're doing it.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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/immersive/d41586-024-02897-2/index.ht...
> [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.
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.
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.
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.
>the social/emotional maturity of kids these days far exceeds generations past.
I thought they were plagued by anxiety?
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.
Huh, why is that?
Everyone who grows up today has to get used to getting attacked online, it happens to everyone until they find their own filter bubble.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
> 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...
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.
It looks like this:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
That doesn't seem to be a problem in practice as discriminatory hiring around protected classes is illegal.
Regardless—point taken.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, I'm totally for this. I can see a push-back from some people, though: a talented kid may have access to more scarce resources, say a professor in a prestigious university, or a highly-selective camp like SAMS. For that those people will cry unfair.
Ya, there's push back from some people on either side.
I think one side doesn't want to "pay" to help others. Sometimes the idea of like everyone getting 500$ a month in social security is more alluring than giving it only to those who need it. So some people do prefer equality over equity. Similarly, in education, they don't see why they should "pay" for students that are not "smart", or for the fault of their parents, etc. Or they think, well if they get an extra hour of math tutoring, everyone should, or no one should. Which is the idea of equality, and not equity.
While the other side can get jealous of those that got lucky and started with money or privilege. So when the kid with money goes to a prestigious university, even though they also had to show they were smart enough for it, people start calling it unfair. Or if one person managed to bust their ass and make it from nothing, they pretend like probably they had more luck or privilege.
> 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:
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.> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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 probably 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.
That's not the definition of equity. Equality and equity are close but different, and both are positive concepts.
> 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)
It was taught in my middle school English class in the Bay Area in the 2000s, but they also utilized tracking.
> 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?
> “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."
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The right peer group makes all the difference.
I currently live in a rural environment with tiny schools and wonder how I would’ve turned out if that’s where I did high school. I think you need a critical mass of other gifted kids to really set the bar and drive some aspirational goals. If your class has a single gifted kid, they’ll just see that they exceed their peers and coast; if there’s a whole group they’ll push each other once they know more about where the ceiling is.
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?
"almost everybody has a story (from previously) of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is not true based on research done on kids who were accelerated as far as they needed to.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.4219/jeg-2006-247
On the other hand, I skipped three grade levels and feel that it was absolutely the best option for me. I don’t think there’s any one answer here about the best thing to do — it depends entirely on the student, the school, and the grades to be skipped.
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.
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 $$$.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, California does indeed allow children to skip grades. I also live in California and can think of 2 kids in my son's school who have skipped a grade. It is totally permitted - we've even discussed skipping our son one grade because he too is bored and capable of more, not only in maths but in every subject. We decided against it for social reasons.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. I lean towards thinking I would've wound up further behind if I skipped one or more grades, due to the social aspect. Especially given how often I moved.
Keeping the regular pace also allowed me to do a lot more extracurriculars. I started helping with quantum computing research in my freshman year of college and joined a bunch of clubs.
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.
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.
Really? I often hear the opposite, kids I knew who got a bachelors degree at 17 say well now what? What is the rush!
This isn’t about it being a rush. For kids like mine, they NEED it. My son wanted to learn calculus when he was 9 but I refused and instead sent him to outdoor summer camps, sports camps etc. He still doesn’t know calculus because I told him not to rush it and he is resentful but instead he took geometry, number theory etc. He wants to learn at an accelerated pace, it’s not about anyone except for him pushing himself because he needs it.
Yes he needs intellectual stimulation.
But is that going to come from being in 6th grade instead of 3rd grade?
> 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.
What U.S. state has the best resources for kids at the gifted end of the spectrum?
> 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.
Nevada? https://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/
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.
Thank you for your story. It’s something I’m hoping to avoid for my son and I’m glad you were able to find a path theiugh programming. Interestingly my son isn’t very interested in programming but he loves math.
He goes to a gifted school with many kids like him so it has been working out well, but the tuition is extremely expensive. We have been making sure he focuses on hard work as opposed to high marks so that he doesn’t learn bad habits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 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.
> 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.
username checks out
Truly a rebuttal for the ages.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The thing is, Title IX addressed this by requiring some level of equity in funding, at least in theory.
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.)
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.
What case might that be?
I don't know --- it was in the late '70s, early '80s, and I just heard about it from letters my parents received about it from folks who were still living there.
It’s the modern hatred of hierarchy at work. People today so desperately want to believe in equality that they deny the plain and simple truth of intellectual hierarchy.
The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
For 2023-2024, among SFUSD students who are 'Economically Disadvantaged':
70% of Asian 3rd graders met or exceeded state standards for math.
18% of Black or African American 3rd graders met or exceeded state standards for math.
The difference is similar for all grade levels (3 to 11) and for all years for which I've seen the data.
California provides lunch for all children who attend public schools. SFUSD gives first choice of school to those who live in the very poorest areas of the city.
https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/ViewReportSB?ps=true&lst...
You are not supposed to talk about this.
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.
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.
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.
Says who? Race is an arbitrary social concept and IQ tests have biases that explain the differences.
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.
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.
IQ isn't relevant as it's not used to qualify students for gifted programs.
Recognizing gifted students should not be just measuring IQ (which is known to be a flawed metric)
Good luck finding a metric that isn't highly correlated with IQ.
I'd argue the parent's socioeconomic status is a much better predictor of IQ than "race".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Ditto. I skipped most of high school through an accelerated program and wound up in university before I was 15.
At the time I was happy. It was the first time I was surrounded by peers as smart or smarter than me. First time I wasn't bored in school.
It absolutely destroyed my social abilities and I spent the next 5 years miserable and depressed. I barely graduated and took another few years before I felt like I had caught up enough on everything I missed out on and I was able to start a career in my mid-20's at a comparable time to everyone else.
I'm no longer "exceptional" relative to my age peers, and Im just fine with that.
I have a son now and I genuinely don't know what I would do if he has the same challenges and opportunities as me.
On the one hand I would never wish what I went through on anyone. On the other, noone forced me to go. I wanted to.
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.
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.
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.
Can you share more details? Where have you moved to? What alternatives did you consider?
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.
Latino is widely understood to refer to people descended from the population of Latin America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can just as easily measure the second derivative, i.e. see how fast they are improving at improving.
Couldn't that also be on a different curve though?
Like they might have accelerated improvement right now, but will reverse in their late teens for example, thus still ending up in the same place in the end?
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...
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.
IMO students should be take the class that maximizes the probability of getting a c * the probability of engagement. Note that this isn't "at least a c" but a just a c. There should also be weekly surveys the directly question the students engagement. No matter how important the topic, if the student isn't engaged then they aren't learning it and are better served learning literally anything else. Even if that means not learning to read past a 1st grade level for 5 or 10 years. Transferring classes should become the norm, once you lose engagement it is too difficult to get it back (and if half the class leaves then that teacher now knows what NOT to do)
Written by the author of "Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree." A book of which I know nothing (yet).
I was a gifted student in CA public school. Now I code for food :(
How are other countries handling the availability of ChatGPT for use by pre-college students?
Are there really no public school gifted options in the bay area?
that would be racist[2]
It's not because of BLM. It's because of Prop 13.
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).
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.
Or agree that the top 5% should get the same resources and give each one a private tutor at the same cost.
Spending per student isn't really that related to test performance so I don't really understand the link?
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?
Funny how HN never assumes that paying software developers more money is pointless. It's just those greedy teachers trying to make enough money to buy a home!
Go on...Going to need a little bit more of an explanation here.
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.
Property prices in California have skyrocketed in the last decase, and so have tax revenues. Spending more money wastefully won't solve the problem.
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.
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.
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.
Specifically, Prop. 13's impact on commercial real estate, which was the real reason for it all along.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
> For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing.
Is that true? Without having a deep insight into the subject, homelessness seems to often be a symptom of mental illness and substance abuse. I don’t think having cheaper housing would really fix the issue of homelessness.
This is a major misconception. The people you see homeless on the streets are very disproportionately those with mental illness(es) and addiction problems. But studies show a huge percent of the homeless have jobs; the link below says 40% to 50%.
But we don't see people workings and living in their car or in a shelter "being homeless," so we tend to think of the visibly homeless as representative of all homeless folks.
And for those who do have mental illness or addiction problems, well, those problems are severely exacerbated by being homeless. They'd be more likely to get treatment and improve with housing.
https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends
Here's the best description I've heard of homelessness. It goes in stages:
1. You are evicted or priced out of your apartment or house. You are still working but you are now housing insecure. You might couchsurf, stay temporarily with friends or relatives or otherwise hop around until those options run out;
2. You are now living in your car. You likely still maintain a job. There's a constant cat-and-mouse with local authorities who will seek to tow your car or detain you if they find you living in your car. You might move around, sleep in Walmart parking lots and so on. At some point your car might break down and you can't afford to fix it, or it gets impounded and you can't recover it;
3. You are now living on the street. This is the first stage of homelessness that people generally see. Unfortunately visible homeless on the streets is largely viewed as an eyesore and people push local authorities to sweep them into a neighbouring town, city or county. Also, visible homeless is what drives people's perceptions of crime [1]. The same is true for the "migrant crisis" and visible (unhoused) migrants in places like NYC. Having no transportation, you will often lose your job (if you haven't already); finally leading to
4. You are longterm homeless. Because of this you likely have addiction and/or mental health issues as you self-medicate to cope.
Some (wrongly) believe that drug addiction leads to hojmeless. It's the opposite.
As for the cost of housing and homelessness rates, the link is well-established [2].
[1]: https://www.columnblog.com/p/people-feel-unsafe-because-visi...
[2]: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
homeschooling is a pretty amazing solution if done right
The argument against these programs is that they directed scarce resources toward the students who least need it. The mandate of public schools is to get as many people to a baseline of education.
There are many jurisdictions that can afford to do both, but most are not in that position.
There is far more wasted potential in the case of the hundreds of thousands of kids who fall through the cracks because of a crummy education system. Many states already create an uneven playing field by funding each school system based on the quantum of local taxes collected in their particular communities. Poor kids shouldn't have to further compete for resources within their own, poorly funded institution.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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
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.
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%?
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.
"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/HighStrangeness/comments/1fdg8io/wh...)
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.
Massachusetts is the state rated #1 in pre-K to 12 education, and they have about 100% of teachers in unions. This seems to destroy your argument that teachers unions need to be "abolished" in the name of helping students.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/massachusetts
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Honest question, you're a first grade teacher in LA. How do you "push back"? Write a tweet?
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.
Cancel your subscription I guess. How are the subscription numbers?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
you missed this relevant (albeit, unspecific) fragment when you extracted the quote:
> with a millennia of discredited science to back it up
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.
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.
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?
I did not.
> 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.
> 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).
Getting rid of a test that measures effects from redlining does nothing to eliminate the effects of redlining.
Agreed, but interpreting the results of tests without considering the effect that policies like redlining have on such results furthers the lie that the the variation in test results between groups represents innate differences in abilities of those groups instead of the effects of systemic and multigenerational discrimination.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I see you have not talked to many public school parents.
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.
Because the alternative hypothesis to racist teachers is literally unspeakable.
… centuries of disadvantage compounding over generations? The predictable outcomes of poverty?
People talk about those all the time.
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.
That Africans are less intelligent than all other races is undisputed scientific fact.
“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.)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> have been denied of opportunity to go on and do great things.
Well, if they’re so brilliant…
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.
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
You're making a generalization about all of Europe vs just Norway, the country OP mentioned.
Check out the link below to be educated on how incorrect your assumption is. No offense intended -- I didn't realize how much better the life of an average Norwegian is compared to that of the average American!
What really stood out to me is that, by comparison, an American is > 10X more likely to die in childbirth, and 24% more likely to be poor. It seems like the Norwegians must be doing something right!
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/compare/norway/united-states
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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).
> 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.
> 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?
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
> 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.
> 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.
>Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family.
That's extremely optimistic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Chained to our legs, making every step harder. And you're a bigot if you refuse additional chains.
You can help the weakest links without tearing down the most gifted.
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?