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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Disagreed. Public school should target the broadest possible audience. Gifted pupils are rarely held back in school and special needs people need additional effort.
Of course you cannot really teach them together in the same environment, it is not the task of gifted students to drag everyone with them, it is on teachers to provide necessities. But as long as school doesn't hold them back, they will be fine.
They want the culture to die. Then from the rubble they will build their brave new socialist utopia.
Except as any student of history knows, what we actually get is Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
> 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.
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s working out for many of the gifted kids I meet because it pushes their parents to put them in charter/private/montessori
There really isn’t a “gifted” program in a public school setting. Mostly it’s just more volume of work, not acceleration of learning. Head Start is certainly one of the better programs, but it’s not great compared to a Montessori or Project-Based Learning approach.
Another factor: in public school kids are generally punished socially for doing significantly above average. They learn to isolate their emotional selves from everyone and become a “success object” for the school.
It’s so critical for all children, including our best and brightest, to experience being valued as a person distinct from their performance. As Paul G has often said, following your interest is how to maximize your potential for impact.
Public schools for a long time fought to hang on to top performing students to improve outcomes. I think the push against outcome-based approached is necessary, if misguided in this case. Outcome based policies have failed, wholesale, across the globe. They create strange, unproductive learning environments where signals of learning become the only thing children work on. “Most Likely to Succeed” is a phenomenal book on why outcomes-based learning is a farce and what the better way is.
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.
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
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.
> 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 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?
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.
> “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."
Which policies? What you've said is something the right wing frequently asserts is happening, but can never say how. It goes in the same bucket as
"mexico is invading us" and "Portland burned to the ground during BLM" until proven otherwise.
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.
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.
Yeah, I’m skeptical about the benefits of skipping lots of grades. If you have money to throw around, hire private tutors to teach them more advanced subjects and let them enjoy the social aspects of school with their peers.
Otherwise, what’s the best outcome? The kid spends their entire school years socially isolated from peers who are in different stages of puberty and growth. They enter college at 14/15 and risk missing a lot of what college has to offer besides education.
Then, finally, they enter the wage machine at 18-19, having lost a lot of their childhood and now having to behave like adults.
Everything may work out and they’ll retire at 40 to live the life they missed, or they may be socially and psychologically scarred by the pressure put on them by others and by themselves throughout their life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Recess isn't socially isolated, class instruction time isn't particularly social, and a variety of classes are not IQ based.
One needs to select a learning environment that can provide skill developing challenge in both IQ-appropriate and socially-appropriate milieus. Note I didn't say "age appropriate", as that's not a real thing, it's a responsibility-abdicating proxy.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reality is that, even in a rural shithole like I went to, if you WANTED to learn, their was near infinite opportunity, especially in the 2000s as the internet grew. I didn't have much in terms of AP classes, but we had a vocational wing and that was essential to ensuring everyone could find a passion to really pursue. So many kids that would be seen as slackers or dumb found something they were passionate about in the vocational wing that set them up for a future and gave them a real opportunity.
But if you or your friends decide that learning or striving for education isn't a good thing, you're fucked. You only get one chance to live through public school and so many kids waste it.
All we gotta do is build a society where education for it's own sake is seen as a desirable thing to have. 99% of education is motivation. You cannot learn if you don't want to.
99% of the people I see saying "Why didn't school teach me <X>" were busy sniffing glue in the back of class and not paying attention to the school system explicitly teaching them <X>. We had one kid in honors chemistry who literally snorted garlic powder one day and was not considered smart but his desire to learn meant he was willing to try the harder class, and he did well.
So many kids are raised by parents who fill them with anti-intellectualism and hostility to learning. "When am I ever going to use this" say kids who can't even compare the unit price of competing brands because they didn't want to pay attention in math class. "Why don't the democrats stop <Bad Thing>" they say despite reading aloud in 6th grade how you need enough votes in the senate to do anything at all. "Nobody needs math" they say when they agree to a predatory 72 month loan on a shitty car.
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?
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.
I mean this is pretty much a summary of all the problems of our education, including the problem highlighted by the article. It's a system for teaching the masses and creating societal outcomes but folks want it to be a system for teaching specifically $their_child according to their needs.
I think a lot of the discussion fades away when you're forced to pin down that it's for raising the floor and that at best what you'll get from public schools with the resources is 1-3 tracks remedial, "normal", and AP/IB. Everyone with special needs in either direction needs to switch to private or a school system in a rich area that can afford more individualized instruction.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Let’s say I have a set of newborn white rats and another of gray rats.
The gray rats get nutritious meals at periodic intervals, have access to their rat mamas, and are allowed to roam free in a large, comfortable and safe environment. As they grow, I give them intellectual challenges in exchange for food, incentivize them to exercise and continue giving them all nutrients they need.
The white rats, however, are kept isolated in small cages and are fed every two days with the scraps of the gray rats. I don’t give them intellectual challenges or the opportunity to properly exercise.
After a couple of years, I administer a test on them. The test is very similar to the intellectual challenges I was giving before to the gray rats.
To my surprise, the gray rats do a lot better than the white rats.
Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.
——
This is obviously an exaggeration, but I hope it helps people understand how similar things can and do happen in the real world with real humans.
It’s the environment they are raised in, their relationships, the incentives, the adult examples they encounter, their access to good and empathetic education, role models they can relate to and aspire towards.
Those, I assure you, are much better indicators of intelligence and education than their physical appearance or genetics.
> Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.
Well, they did, didn't they?
The wrong conclusion would be "This is the limit of what white rats can do", which is not how I interpreted GP's comment.
TBH, this is not an easily solved problem: some cultures are better at producing superior students and productive people than other cultures. Those superior individuals are not superior due to inherent traits, but due to environment (culture).
How on earth do you change those under-performing cultures? Any attempt to do so will be met with cries of racism or similar.
[As an aside, my general observation with the the GP's list of IQ is that those cultures who prioritize sport less do better. While GP showed a correlation between race-groups and IQ, I observe the same correlation, but inverse, between sports-focused-cultures and IQ. Removing pro-sports-tracks programs from schools is probably going to do wonders for the bottom 10% of performers in a school]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
Why are "running a business" or "holding a regular job" the options? That's the most mundane description of making a living I can imagine. What about "extend laser emissions to a new part of the spectrum to enable new imaging modalities" or "found a nonprofit focused on addressing the coming water crisis," or "teach gifted kids what they're capable of accomplishing"...anything less boring than "run a business?" They should have exposed you to the wider potential you had available and tried to find your motivation.
I went the way the article discusses--stopped doing homework, finished high school on schedule with a C average. I found my motivation ten years later, and I guess I should be grateful for that, but it's been a long road to recovery. My best years were squandered drinking and fighting pointless wars, and I resent that.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It's still IQ test, at least when I was in the program ~5-10 years ago. To be honest, though, there was still a clique of nerdy kids and "the rest" even within the program (which for me was 2 separate classes of kids, so for each grade in the whole school there were 2 classes worth of gifted kids.)
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%?
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.
In my experiences with them, prior to high school they just amount to a few additional worksheets on top of existing assigned work. In elementary school, my girls were pulled out for about an hour a day to go to another room for their "advanced" classes. There was no advanced instruction. Just more math worksheets. It's not really until high school where you have real AP classes that involve actual teaching and not just isolation from the rest of the kids. My experience was much the same, but I actively didn't have friends so enjoyed the isolation at the cost of a few worksheets. They did nothing to actually help us "advance" though.
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.
G&T was a great way for me to learn a smug sense of superiority over my classmates and believe that inherit ability is more important to success than hard work.
That being said - in most of my non honors classes kids would get made fun of for doing the work or knowing an answer. G&T was nice not because the curriculum was so much different, but rather because it created space where the kids who liked learning could be left in peace.
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.
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.
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?
I’m from Oregon suburbs right by Intel’s largest campus. I went to all public schools and I was really fortunate that for the most part I was able to intellectually explore and take advanced classes. I took full courseloads in high school instead of having empty periods like most of my peers. I entered college as a a junior credit wise. What I read about California often horrifies me
I believe with great confidence that this board has a higher than average population of individuals that were in gifted and talented programs compared to most sites.
I was in the 'ungifted and talentless' program in my youth. I am curious, how did life turn out for you all? Have you used your gift in any meaningful way? If so, how? (I'm asking with sincerity and not judgement).
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 think you're taking the wrong read on the situation, if you have a cross-section of your students that are failing a class that doesn't match with the roughly normal distribution you would expect then it means that it's a failing of the class. You have a bunch of affluent involved parents who are looking to advantage their child in any way possible teaching their kids algebra outside school hours. It's not a bad thing, it's actually great that parents are involved, but it means the class isn't doing anything one way or the other so why even have it?
You only see this kind of behavior in math where there's an on-paper advantage to be conferred by letting kids jump ahead, you don't see it with social studies or english.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah sorry I don't care about some click bait US News list on "best states". Also, the methodology is based on test scores which I could care less about. Being good at the SATs and ACT just mean you have rich parents that can steamroll your tutoring, which tracks with high cost of living places like Mass.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
This sounds like immense cope for not getting into the gifted program.
As a 1 of 3 children in the gifted program in primary school, I can assure you that none of us studied for it and solved all the year's math within the first couple months, that's why they needed it for us. We landed some of the highest paying jobs in the US, one graduated CalTech Physics, nothing to do with "getting pregnant" or "bad grades."
In the State of California your lucky if you can read and write.
Basic literacy requirements to graduate, like the high school exit exam, are often called racist and removed.
Plus California is essentially a state of socioeconomic apartheid. The gap between the rich and poor is insane. You have kids who are semi homeless being told they just need to work harder, etc.
Hell on earth.
Honestly education itself is outdated. Instead of acting as part day care part jail let kids test out of the system early. If you can pass a GED test at 16 and do something more productive do that.
This is partially offset by California's University system which is probably the best on earth ( at least publicly funded). The community colleges are top notch and a great option for anyone who's iffy on continuing school.
I went from my 2nd eviction to getting enough aid for my own apartment. I did pretty well in college, dated girls from all over the world and made life long friends.
It's not perfect, if your parents aren't stable you might have a really hard time getting aid. Interestingly enough they carved out exceptions for LGBT students who had falling outs with their parents, but other were out of luck.
You have a real conundrum here. Say both your parents make 75k, that's only going to be 120k after taxes. Where's that extra 20 to 30k for school expenses supposed to come from ? You're well past qualifying for aid.
If I ran the world I'd make state college completely free contingent on 2 years of community college.
You don't even need a degree to benefit which I think a lot of people forget.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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 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 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’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.
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> 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?
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
>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
Disagreed. Public school should target the broadest possible audience. Gifted pupils are rarely held back in school and special needs people need additional effort.
Of course you cannot really teach them together in the same environment, it is not the task of gifted students to drag everyone with them, it is on teachers to provide necessities. But as long as school doesn't hold them back, they will be fine.
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward
Do gifted students move society forward ?
Where is society moving to ?
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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?
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You are totally over romanticizing institutional learning. It’s worth abolishing and starting over.
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They want the culture to die. Then from the rubble they will build their brave new socialist utopia. Except as any student of history knows, what we actually get is Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...
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.
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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.
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In what way are you certain that she's gifted?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
I don't know; the overly-ambitious parents push has been working out pretty well as evidenced by the Asian community in the US.
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.
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> 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?
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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?
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> 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.
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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.
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.
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it's a perfectly good phrase to describe what it says. if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
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>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?
> 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?
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?
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> 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...
It looks like this:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
It’s working out for many of the gifted kids I meet because it pushes their parents to put them in charter/private/montessori
There really isn’t a “gifted” program in a public school setting. Mostly it’s just more volume of work, not acceleration of learning. Head Start is certainly one of the better programs, but it’s not great compared to a Montessori or Project-Based Learning approach.
Another factor: in public school kids are generally punished socially for doing significantly above average. They learn to isolate their emotional selves from everyone and become a “success object” for the school.
It’s so critical for all children, including our best and brightest, to experience being valued as a person distinct from their performance. As Paul G has often said, following your interest is how to maximize your potential for impact.
Public schools for a long time fought to hang on to top performing students to improve outcomes. I think the push against outcome-based approached is necessary, if misguided in this case. Outcome based policies have failed, wholesale, across the globe. They create strange, unproductive learning environments where signals of learning become the only thing children work on. “Most Likely to Succeed” is a phenomenal book on why outcomes-based learning is a farce and what the better way is.
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.
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> 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...
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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.
> 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?
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> 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?
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> 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.
> “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."
László Polgár kind of did it three times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Polgár
Which policies? What you've said is something the right wing frequently asserts is happening, but can never say how. It goes in the same bucket as "mexico is invading us" and "Portland burned to the ground during BLM" until proven otherwise.
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.
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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.
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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 $$$.
> Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell
No it didn't.
Not debating whether bullying happened, but your skip isn't what resulted in a bullying prone and bullying tolerating hellscape.
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Yeah, I’m skeptical about the benefits of skipping lots of grades. If you have money to throw around, hire private tutors to teach them more advanced subjects and let them enjoy the social aspects of school with their peers. Otherwise, what’s the best outcome? The kid spends their entire school years socially isolated from peers who are in different stages of puberty and growth. They enter college at 14/15 and risk missing a lot of what college has to offer besides education. Then, finally, they enter the wage machine at 18-19, having lost a lot of their childhood and now having to behave like adults. Everything may work out and they’ll retire at 40 to live the life they missed, or they may be socially and psychologically scarred by the pressure put on them by others and by themselves throughout their life.
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.
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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.
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.
Your link didn't work. Something like this maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuU4KM9htf0
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Recess isn't socially isolated, class instruction time isn't particularly social, and a variety of classes are not IQ based.
One needs to select a learning environment that can provide skill developing challenge in both IQ-appropriate and socially-appropriate milieus. Note I didn't say "age appropriate", as that's not a real thing, it's a responsibility-abdicating proxy.
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.
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Nevada? https://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/
> 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.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
The reality is that, even in a rural shithole like I went to, if you WANTED to learn, their was near infinite opportunity, especially in the 2000s as the internet grew. I didn't have much in terms of AP classes, but we had a vocational wing and that was essential to ensuring everyone could find a passion to really pursue. So many kids that would be seen as slackers or dumb found something they were passionate about in the vocational wing that set them up for a future and gave them a real opportunity.
But if you or your friends decide that learning or striving for education isn't a good thing, you're fucked. You only get one chance to live through public school and so many kids waste it.
All we gotta do is build a society where education for it's own sake is seen as a desirable thing to have. 99% of education is motivation. You cannot learn if you don't want to.
99% of the people I see saying "Why didn't school teach me <X>" were busy sniffing glue in the back of class and not paying attention to the school system explicitly teaching them <X>. We had one kid in honors chemistry who literally snorted garlic powder one day and was not considered smart but his desire to learn meant he was willing to try the harder class, and he did well.
So many kids are raised by parents who fill them with anti-intellectualism and hostility to learning. "When am I ever going to use this" say kids who can't even compare the unit price of competing brands because they didn't want to pay attention in math class. "Why don't the democrats stop <Bad Thing>" they say despite reading aloud in 6th grade how you need enough votes in the senate to do anything at all. "Nobody needs math" they say when they agree to a predatory 72 month loan on a shitty car.
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"
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.
I mean this is pretty much a summary of all the problems of our education, including the problem highlighted by the article. It's a system for teaching the masses and creating societal outcomes but folks want it to be a system for teaching specifically $their_child according to their needs.
I think a lot of the discussion fades away when you're forced to pin down that it's for raising the floor and that at best what you'll get from public schools with the resources is 1-3 tracks remedial, "normal", and AP/IB. Everyone with special needs in either direction needs to switch to private or a school system in a rich area that can afford more individualized instruction.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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Let’s say I have a set of newborn white rats and another of gray rats.
The gray rats get nutritious meals at periodic intervals, have access to their rat mamas, and are allowed to roam free in a large, comfortable and safe environment. As they grow, I give them intellectual challenges in exchange for food, incentivize them to exercise and continue giving them all nutrients they need. The white rats, however, are kept isolated in small cages and are fed every two days with the scraps of the gray rats. I don’t give them intellectual challenges or the opportunity to properly exercise.
After a couple of years, I administer a test on them. The test is very similar to the intellectual challenges I was giving before to the gray rats.
To my surprise, the gray rats do a lot better than the white rats.
Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.
——
This is obviously an exaggeration, but I hope it helps people understand how similar things can and do happen in the real world with real humans.
It’s the environment they are raised in, their relationships, the incentives, the adult examples they encounter, their access to good and empathetic education, role models they can relate to and aspire towards.
Those, I assure you, are much better indicators of intelligence and education than their physical appearance or genetics.
> Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.
Well, they did, didn't they?
The wrong conclusion would be "This is the limit of what white rats can do", which is not how I interpreted GP's comment.
TBH, this is not an easily solved problem: some cultures are better at producing superior students and productive people than other cultures. Those superior individuals are not superior due to inherent traits, but due to environment (culture).
How on earth do you change those under-performing cultures? Any attempt to do so will be met with cries of racism or similar.
[As an aside, my general observation with the the GP's list of IQ is that those cultures who prioritize sport less do better. While GP showed a correlation between race-groups and IQ, I observe the same correlation, but inverse, between sports-focused-cultures and IQ. Removing pro-sports-tracks programs from schools is probably going to do wonders for the bottom 10% of performers in a school]
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.
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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.
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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.
Says who? Race is an arbitrary social concept and IQ tests have biases that explain the differences.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately. Happily, solving that solves a whole host of other problems.
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.
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/...
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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
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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Why are "running a business" or "holding a regular job" the options? That's the most mundane description of making a living I can imagine. What about "extend laser emissions to a new part of the spectrum to enable new imaging modalities" or "found a nonprofit focused on addressing the coming water crisis," or "teach gifted kids what they're capable of accomplishing"...anything less boring than "run a business?" They should have exposed you to the wider potential you had available and tried to find your motivation.
I went the way the article discusses--stopped doing homework, finished high school on schedule with a C average. I found my motivation ten years later, and I guess I should be grateful for that, but it's been a long road to recovery. My best years were squandered drinking and fighting pointless wars, and I resent that.
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).
>> but what else was I going to be served well by?
Probably MMORPGs if you had been in the 2003-2008 timeframe
https://archive.is/20241126171410/https://www.latimes.com/op...
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.
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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.
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.
It's still IQ test, at least when I was in the program ~5-10 years ago. To be honest, though, there was still a clique of nerdy kids and "the rest" even within the program (which for me was 2 separate classes of kids, so for each grade in the whole school there were 2 classes worth of gifted kids.)
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%?
"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...)
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.
In my experiences with them, prior to high school they just amount to a few additional worksheets on top of existing assigned work. In elementary school, my girls were pulled out for about an hour a day to go to another room for their "advanced" classes. There was no advanced instruction. Just more math worksheets. It's not really until high school where you have real AP classes that involve actual teaching and not just isolation from the rest of the kids. My experience was much the same, but I actively didn't have friends so enjoyed the isolation at the cost of a few worksheets. They did nothing to actually help us "advance" though.
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.
G&T was a great way for me to learn a smug sense of superiority over my classmates and believe that inherit ability is more important to success than hard work.
That being said - in most of my non honors classes kids would get made fun of for doing the work or knowing an answer. G&T was nice not because the curriculum was so much different, but rather because it created space where the kids who liked learning could be left in peace.
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.
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.
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?
I’m from Oregon suburbs right by Intel’s largest campus. I went to all public schools and I was really fortunate that for the most part I was able to intellectually explore and take advanced classes. I took full courseloads in high school instead of having empty periods like most of my peers. I entered college as a a junior credit wise. What I read about California often horrifies me
I believe with great confidence that this board has a higher than average population of individuals that were in gifted and talented programs compared to most sites.
I was in the 'ungifted and talentless' program in my youth. I am curious, how did life turn out for you all? Have you used your gift in any meaningful way? If so, how? (I'm asking with sincerity and not judgement).
Written by the author of "Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree." A book of which I know nothing (yet).
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 think you're taking the wrong read on the situation, if you have a cross-section of your students that are failing a class that doesn't match with the roughly normal distribution you would expect then it means that it's a failing of the class. You have a bunch of affluent involved parents who are looking to advantage their child in any way possible teaching their kids algebra outside school hours. It's not a bad thing, it's actually great that parents are involved, but it means the class isn't doing anything one way or the other so why even have it?
You only see this kind of behavior in math where there's an on-paper advantage to be conferred by letting kids jump ahead, you don't see it with social studies or english.
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)
I was a gifted student in CA public school. Now I code for food :(
Are there really no public school gifted options in the bay area?
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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.
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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!
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Spending per student isn't really that related to test performance so I don't really understand the link?
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.
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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.
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.
How are other countries handling the availability of ChatGPT for use by pre-college students?
homeschooling is a pretty amazing solution if done right
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
Yeah sorry I don't care about some click bait US News list on "best states". Also, the methodology is based on test scores which I could care less about. Being good at the SATs and ACT just mean you have rich parents that can steamroll your tutoring, which tracks with high cost of living places like Mass.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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“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…
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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
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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."
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.
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This sounds like immense cope for not getting into the gifted program.
As a 1 of 3 children in the gifted program in primary school, I can assure you that none of us studied for it and solved all the year's math within the first couple months, that's why they needed it for us. We landed some of the highest paying jobs in the US, one graduated CalTech Physics, nothing to do with "getting pregnant" or "bad grades."
In the State of California your lucky if you can read and write.
Basic literacy requirements to graduate, like the high school exit exam, are often called racist and removed.
Plus California is essentially a state of socioeconomic apartheid. The gap between the rich and poor is insane. You have kids who are semi homeless being told they just need to work harder, etc.
Hell on earth.
Honestly education itself is outdated. Instead of acting as part day care part jail let kids test out of the system early. If you can pass a GED test at 16 and do something more productive do that.
This is partially offset by California's University system which is probably the best on earth ( at least publicly funded). The community colleges are top notch and a great option for anyone who's iffy on continuing school.
I went from my 2nd eviction to getting enough aid for my own apartment. I did pretty well in college, dated girls from all over the world and made life long friends.
It's not perfect, if your parents aren't stable you might have a really hard time getting aid. Interestingly enough they carved out exceptions for LGBT students who had falling outs with their parents, but other were out of luck.
You have a real conundrum here. Say both your parents make 75k, that's only going to be 120k after taxes. Where's that extra 20 to 30k for school expenses supposed to come from ? You're well past qualifying for aid.
If I ran the world I'd make state college completely free contingent on 2 years of community college.
You don't even need a degree to benefit which I think a lot of people forget.
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.
> 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?
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> 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.
>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).
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> 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.
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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.
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?
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> 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.