Comment by csa

Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?

I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to the general student population, when studies have found that students entered into charter lotteries who are not selected do about as well as those who get to go to the charter school).

I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for situations where it's clear that there's less need for deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.

As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value in having a broad body of knowledge and much more usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span and cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal punishment to make them work.

I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster in the classroom to encourage students to value performance.

As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade.

However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math.

I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a lot of the busywork that school presents to you - because I saw little point in it, I knew the material, I'd read the book, I could write about it and often passed tests on it with flying colors.

If I'd been given an opportunity to do more engaging learning, and less information regurgitation style learning, I wonder where I would be. Like an introduction to computer programming class, would have completely changed the trajectory of my life - yes I'm a working engineer today, but it took me a long time to work my way up from a low wage service job.

This sounds thoroughly unappealing to gifted students though? I mean, repetition is _a_ tool in the toolset.

Respectfully I'm not seeing how your point is surprising at all. Are you just saying that when we do spend money on disadvantaged (whatever word is correct for "opposite of gifted") it isn't effective?

>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.

Sure, but don't try to get people who can't hack college into college at the expense of those who can.

When I was growing up decades ago, we had a gifted program and a special education program. The gifted program was an attempt to expose gifted students to more complex thinking, while the special education program was an attempt to give student who struggle with normal education special attention to allow them to learn as best they can. It worked well.

In the 80's, the education system was the product of 200+ years of figuring out how to do it. For some reason, we decided it was wrong and introduce new methods of education that don't seem to be doing as well.

>The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.

This seems like hyperbole. I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.

> > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.

> Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.

I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.

You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society?

The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.

Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

What is good for a society and what feels just are often disparate things.

But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are born with lower potential than others. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life.

What is just then?

To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?

To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are particularly likely to bring benefits to society?

We know that the vast majority of significant advances in engineering and science are brought to life by people that are significantly above average capability in their fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even before they entered school.

We know that significant advances are unlikely to be contributed by people for whom day to day life is a significant cognitive challenge.

This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the effort into one person.

The best likely case scenario for the bright student is that they go on to create something remarkable and useful. Advancements in technology and science are responsible for millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of benefit.

The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better quality of life. The best argument is probably that it might make a difference in how he approaches parental responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of slightly better character.

I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your resources on the least productive in society, unless the reason for their lower potentiality is something that is inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in their education.

OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast track them to a level of education that they can produce benefits to their society. To let them languish in a classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the often know more than, only creates habits and preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting activities and away from the paths that might lead them to greatly benefit society at large.

Either way it’s kind of a shit sandwich though, so who knows.

Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual development, and probably moved me farther away from a life of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a worthwhile goal when I was 9.

Showing me that other people understood and valued my intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do something admirable with my life.

It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate was not great.

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lol, when people talk about these things they’re talking about the Lowell High kids that want to go to Yale, not normal people like me. Let’s be real here.

Is that why Elon Musk's mom went on TV to explain just how much of a genius he is? It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

> it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.

Quite obviously. That's what's being strip-mined at the moment.

I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.

These programs have been removed since. It's holding those that need the most help back, while in no way hurting the people intended. The kids who have the ultra-parents with unlimited resources are going to private schools to begin with.

> If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.

Short of extremely well-off suburbs (and neighborhoods in a handful of cities I suppose) this was never a thing in the public school system. Those generational wealth students don't touch the public school system at all. They are not relevant to the discussion and never have been.

> equality of opportunity

Correct. Equality of opportunity is what matters. The folks removing any gifted and talented programs, advocating for killing off magnet schools, etc. are the ones removing said opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. It's dragging everyone down to an extremely low bar and pretending they did something good.

Without inner city public school programs oriented towards the G&T crowd I would not be where I am today because my parents were working class at best. They were good parents, but they simply did not have resources to keep up with the "legacy" crowd. All they could do was try to get me into the "right" public schools and hope I'd be given a chance. This worked. Those programs are now gone - and anyone who grew up where I did in the same circumstances is more or less shit out of luck.

This is outright evil. Strong language and emotion be damned. It's deserved in this case.

> There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of opportunity.

Indeed. Wealth creates opportunities. When we have large disparities in wealth, we don't have equality of opportunity. A depressing amount of talk about "equality of opportunity" seems to focus on things like "when you reach age 18, you have the 'opportunity' to get into the same college as someone else" rather than "when you are born, your family's material resources are comparable to everyone else's". The thing is that that essentially requires some measure of equality of outcomes for the previous generation.

Generally yes.

Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.

The fact you have a professional resume to point to likely means you are moving society forward. HN seems to have a weirdly high bar for this, and perhaps a very low understanding of just how bad "general" classes at inner city schools are.

You don't seem to have the right perspective to talk about things at scale like this. Taking that personally is unfathomable.

A bold stance given your username.

Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your opinion

100% agree with you. We went with a religious option because of cost, and, despite the religious aspect, are finding it much better.

We couldn't afford the private schools that are ~$50K, but, like you say, higher cost doesn't necessarily mean better education.

> You can also learn outside of school, too.

As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.

> In my experience all that people talk about how private and homeschooling affects your ability to socialize with normal people is true.

In my experience, people are surprised that I spent 2/3 of my pre-college education in various forms of homeschooling. "You're so well-adjusted", is a frequent refrain.

In Seattle, there's actually a test you can take to get you into the "HCC" program which is the gifted program in Seattle Public Schools. Seattle, however, has been trying (successfully) for years to dismantle it. So even if you pass the test, there's not very many places that you can go to get these services.

IMO any student that is 1-2 years ahead can be considered gifted for the purposes of parents who are thinking about how to optimize public or private education for their kids.

Based on how a lot of education systems work in the US (recognizing only discrete progress in a student), if your child is 1-2 years ahead then that's worth recognizing and start nurturing. That's about when public schools also recognize the giftedness of a student.

You don't need brilliant children to achieve this kind of advantage, just a careful eye and consistent nurturing.

> Instead, call it something like asynchronous development

"Differently abled" works just fine both ways, that there is stigma attached to the title helps since it means parents wont push for it for no reason.

The problem with changing the terminology is that people/kids are clever enough to turn it to a diss regardless. It's only a matter of time.

Anyways, I don't see the big deal. I was too dumb to make it into gifted classes in school but it's not like that stopped me from going to college. I just went to a lesser college. Still make good money

Yep - I remember the CCAT from 4th grade that resulted in my being placed into a different class for 5th. AFAIK, we were given this test "cold" (no prep) and I remember it being timed.

It’s literally illegal to give students IQ tests in California.

Stack ranking kids sounds terrible.

>Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else?

Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other. One could argue that the disadvantaged kids should be prioritized because they need more help, and are less likely to succeed without it.

Whereas gifted kids might be bored in school and do worse than if they had dedicated programs, but they still have the chance to find enrichment outside of school or catch up later in life.

Of course, whether those statements are true would need to be an area of research. How would you calculate the overall ROI for society between the two options? Is it more import to "lift up the bottom" or "accelerate the top"?

And of course ideally we would do both.

I'm just saying it's not surprising that most (liberal / social democrat type) people will default to supporting the "more needy" first.

The issue is deeper than that: it's that we take some singular conception of what a dog is, and ruthlessly beat any deviation from that idealized dog out of all the individual dogs. Which ends up being every dog.

Certainly there are those who say the IQ tests themselves are discriminatory. I'm not qualified to say how much truth there is in that. But that is the likely reason they went away.

In my case I changed schools in the middle of second grade. A month later teachers submitted their list of students who should be admitted the the G+T program. Obviously I didn't make the cut since my teacher barely knew me. My parents tried for years to get me into the program but the district held firm that I had missed the window. Ultimately, I ended up third in my graduating class and attended a top university. The outcomes from the G+T kids were mostly disappointing. One teaches at a university, another works at Walmart. The rest are somewhere in between but mostly closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.

Maybe I actually dodged a bullet.

The IQ test is heavily influenced by where and how you grew up. So yes, it can be criticized as such. Did I mention it's a very difficult, impossible even, task to balance all arguments?

> To be clear about the how, I strongly advocate for increasing access to academic opportunities rather than limiting access to academic opportunities in order to generate an equality of outcomes at an overall lower level.

I agree. We may quibble about the details of how best go about achieving that, but yes, this is the goal.

> If it were just for optics and they didn't actually hold their positions, these issues would be far easier to deal with.

No, then it would have been easier. Virtue signaling is so hard to deal with since people don't want to lose their virtue, they have to stay the course and continue to upheld that what they did was virtuous or they lose all their hard work.

A good sign is if you call your opponents names rather than try to win them over, then you are just virtue signaling instead of trying to fix anything, insults doesn't improve anything except act as signaling. This is how most politicians acts, it tend to make you very popular and make your tribe view you as very virtuous, virtue signaling works.

> It's distracting because it's a low signal quip that asserts that your opponents have no substance behind their views beyond looking good. Just make your argument.

That is the argument.

> Finally, we have to contend with the fact that people earnestly believe in the things they say and do. If it were just for optics and they didn't actually hold their positions, these issues would be far easier to deal with.

The point of the argument isn't that people don't genuinely believe these issues. Its that they participate in these views in earnest because of social conformity as opposed to a genuine understanding of, and commonly without any intention of helping resolve them. The symptom then is blindly electing leaders with no real plan (or worse) and the result is predictably poor outcomes. Its used as a battering ram in discussions; I thought it was a dog whistle too before moving out to the West coast by my god it really is everywhere here, and it really does stifle discussion. Its a real issue.

> if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.

That's even vaguer and less compelling rhetoric than "virtue signaling".

In my experience, people who use the term "virtue signalling" don't understand the problems that the supposed virtue signalers are trying to solve and simply use the term as a cheap dismissal of their policies. If the policies are bad, explain why they're bad. Don't just say that people putting the 10 Commandments in schools are virtue signalling.

Nah, that was the aughts. These days the only anxiety is about cost of living, but it doesn't hit until college age. Speaking completely truthfully, my perception is that the teens of today are better adjusted psychologically than any generation before them.

That doesn't seem to be a problem in practice as discriminatory hiring around protected classes is illegal.

Regardless—point taken.

It's not a question of funding it's a question of administrative competence.

This is also funding related. Yes, it takes time to turn things around and there needs to be oversight. No, withholding funds from failing schools wont' work. It's like beating people until they are happy.

Yeah that’s fair, you might need to make the formula more complicated. The goal though would be to alter what we have now, which is extreme differences in quality between schools in rich areas and schools in poor ones, to a model where everyone can access a similarly decent quality of public schooling. Maybe the formula would need to look something like

(the money required to maintain the school building) + (a wage thats similar to the wages for other teachers in the state, with cost of living factored in) * (the best teacher to student ratio achievable across the state) * (student count at the school)

That doesn't even make sense. We've seen lots of positive outcomes from increasing funding directly to less-well-resourced schools.

We have to defy rich people's preferences to do that, but that is entirely possible.

To be clear I think the goal should not be to equalize opportunities or outcomes. I think the goal should be to equalize the amount of challenge each student experiences, wherever they are. (It's like strength training.)

> [0]: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/yes-scientific-pro...

I agree with your overall message but it's those thousand people and the hundreds of thousands ( maybe millions ) of people who make the scientific progress possible. It takes a community and an infrastructure to turn a scientific discovery into scientific progress.

Like it took thousands or millions of people to take the discoveries of von Neumann, Church, Turing, etc into something worthwhile.

I don't care about G&T program per se, either. Nor did my country have it when I grew up. I do care about education. I guess my fundamental assumption is that when everyone maximizes their full potential, the outcome will naturally be different. So, pushing students to realize their potential will be against equity, but will be the best way to minimize the equity gap.

Now the nuances for us in the US specifically: the US system is really good for the most and the least talented. The most talented get access to all kinds of free yet prestigious programs and camps, excellent books in local libraries, and professors in colleges. The least talented are carefully looked after, and they don't necessarily have much pressure to get into a college, and rightly so. It is, unfortunately, the vast middle who get hurt because they squander their time in school. They think they have learned, but they barely scratch the surface. NYT used to report that a straight-A student dreamed to become a scientist, yet couldn't even pass placement test of her college. Malcom mentioned in his book David and Goliath that a straight-A student failed her organic chemistry class in Brown University. Similarly in my personal experience, if it weren't for my teacher, I wouldn't know how deep I could go. If a student like me, who managed to stay top of the classes in elite universities, still needed intense nurturing from my teachers, I'd imagine many more do as well.

All those are about equality, namely equal access. I'm totally for that. What I'm not for is manufactured equity, namely equal outcome by force.

You probably know a typical situation in many families: one kid is years ahead of math program without even trying, and another struggles with math no matter hard the parents try but is good at reading and writing. According to the progressive government, the parents should mandate the former kid to learn less math and the latter to do less reading, so they can achieve the same degree of learning. That's just insane.

I’m not advocating for isolation, rather I’m talking about anarchy. Being able to self select who you learn from and not being in a graded and tracked institutional setting. It’s soulless and contrived.