Comment by jtms

I think there's a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they're outliers. If you're going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don't make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I'm screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don't know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it's strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A's in the gifted program, and D's in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D's so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not gifted.

Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don't just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they're doing to kids...

edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I've obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.

I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life.

BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies.

I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was.

So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I'd at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)

I would imagine it varies a lot. I went through three different programs in my midsize town growing up, with different class sizes and teachers. They varied in many ways and one way was the attitude of other children. When the program was large, like a magnet school, there weren’t social problems. When we had a class of 12 kids in a school of 300 we were ostracized.

I stood out so much in normal classrooms that it was difficult to participate. I was about three years or more ahead of everyone, reading at a college level in fourth grade while some students still struggled to read compound sentences. I felt very fortunate to be put in a class with a few people my age who were at a similar level of intellectual ability.

I was in a similar situation. My elementary school recommended to my parent that I skip a grade and join the [GRADE+1] cohort, which would remove me from my (already small) group of friends. This ended up happening over my strong, for a 10 year old, objection. In the first quarter I deliberately engineered my grades to be all C’s (was previously a straight A kid) which triggered school admin to reverse the decision. I consider this my first “achievement unlocked” moment.

It was the best thing that happened to both of my step kids. They met great people, learned amazing things, socialized with people who had common interests and talent. Best of all they stopped hating school and flourished.

I only regret it wasn't around when I was young.

I was also in the gifted program and the thing that helped me the most was getting involved in youth sports like little league, rec basketball, and soccer. It allowed me to be friends with both the smart kids and athletic kids. I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids

In middle school I was placed, by standardized testing, into bonehead classes, where I was extremely bored, not because I was so smart that I knew it already, but because it was boring. I took a writing elective course, impressed the teacher sufficiently that she got me into eighth grade honors English, where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. I lived it, but I struggled to get my C. Getting extra credit for reading Chaucer, on my own initiative, probably made the difference--or more likely my teachers good will and support. Teachers count.

Not sure I would have ended up where I did but for their intervention.

I was awkward, and it was about the only place I could focus entirely on academics and be among peers that valued that.

My identity is complicated (and queer) and while my adolescence would have been a mess no matter what, having something that I could work hard on and had meaning - grades - made a ton of difference. At a school where everyone was an awkward geek, I didn't stand out.

I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

I am sorry that your experience was so terrible, but the plural of anecdote is not data.

For a counter-anecdote, my experience of gifted programs is that it was the first place where I wasn't bullied for being more interested in books than sports. This didn't help me fit in with other kids my own age, but it did wonders for my self-confidence and significantly improved my odds of having a decent life.

My wife's experience is similar.

The moral is that gifted programs are not in and of themselves good or bad. What they are is good for some kids and bad for others. The trick is figuring out which is better for any particular kid.

I don't think that's always true. I found "gifted" programs much less isolating that regular school. I was lucky enough to participate in some summer academic programs, and while I still had a lot of social difficulty, at least there was a feedback loop where people would engage with what I was saying and I could evaluate and adjust my behavior according to people's reactions. I remember gaining a lot of social confidence in those summer programs and going back home and starting the school year thinking, I'm finally catching on, I've learned how to engage in this back-and-forth where I interact with people and watch their reactions to me, I've learned how to learn, only to go right back to being isolated and mystified in school, unable to see a relationship between my behavior towards people and their behavior back towards me.

For me, I needed to have a little bit more in common with my peers before I could even get traction socially. In fact, it might have been a net negative for me to be surrounded by other kids and cut off from them at the same time, because it messed with my confidence so badly. In the long run it is proving harder to unlearn the bad habits that stemmed from that than it was to learn basic social skills when I got the chance.

I have a friend who was in a gifted program when he was growing up. (They didn't have them when and where I grew up. Hmph.) As I understand it, they effectively took the gifted students and put them into their own school.

He says it didn't do much academically or in terms of later life, but it did do something he values very much: it gave him a normal childhood.

According to him, they took the ostracized nerds out of other schools and combined them so that some of them were the jocks of their school, some were the nerds, most were run-of-the-mill students, and so on.

He's pretty damn smart.

As another anecdote, I was in one and do recommend it. Yes, the social isolation is a real thing and you have to work harder to meet other kids outside the program. However, I made lasting friendships with others in the program who remain my closest friends today. I think I covered more ground academically and it set me up well to take advanced classes in middle school. Note, this was in a well-funded public school and over 15 years ago so your mileage may vary.

I was in the gifted program in elementary school and it was the absolute best part of school. I was normally completely bored but "horizons" was the only class I got to learn at my own pace, explore what I found interesting, and be with other kids like me.