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The Bright Students Left Behind

133 points by tokenadult 11y ago

ColinWright 11y ago
Reminds me of the short story: http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-henry-seslar/ http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-hen... I won't post spoilers alerts, but the mere fact that I put this link here should be enough for you to deduce the ending.
- dudul 11y ago
  Great story.
- hguant 11y ago
  I thought you were going to post this - considerably longer, but an interesting take on future education. http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
- toth 11y ago
  I simply have to mention this great little story: http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-test/ http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-test/
amykhar 11y ago
So often, when it comes to gifted education, I hear people crying elitism and even making snide remarks about gifted students, which nobody seems to have a problem with. What people are missing is that average and below average students are challenged in school from day one. And, in being challenged, they learn to stretch and to work harder to learn the material. So often, gifted programs do not exist in very early elementary school. Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. They learn that tests and homework are a joke. So, when the day comes that things aren't quite as easy, they don't have the necessary skills to help them level up. Every kid deserves to be challenged and to be taught to do their very best. Sadly, in the United States, that didn't happen - even before the stupid No Child Left Behind rules kicked in.
- navait 11y ago
  From a cost standpoint it makes sense. You're capturing most students. How many students will use a gifted program? They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum. That's not cheap, and not subsidized by the federal government, unlike students under IEPs.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact which justifies increased investment. The real issue is most 'gifted' programs are a joke with little impact.
    - navait 11y ago
      > Economically gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?
      - jschwartzi 11y ago
        Can you please elaborate or share some kind of story on why you think this would happen? Where are they leaving to, and why?
      - jerf 11y ago
        We fund schools because on the whole it all works out; if San Francisco teaches a kid who moves to New York, well, New York taught a kid that moved to Portland and Portland taught a kid that moved to a Kansas farm and Kansas taught a kid that moved to Texas, and in the end everybody wins pretty well.
      - afarrell 11y ago
        jerf, the problem is that there is nothing to keep Alabama from defecting, except for the fact that educated people like to live around places with good education systems and tend to vote in favor of education.
rayiner 11y ago
An important fact to keep in mind whenever PISA scores come up is that the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf (over 20%, versus under 5% for Finland or under 10% for Germany). If we adjusted PISA scores to reflect those demographics, the U.S. would come out about the same as France, Germany, or the U.K., though still a step behind Finland: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... Also: > Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal. Ultimately, if that's the case, there is very little hope for improving American education. It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.
- normloman 11y ago
  > It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country. A few decades ago, a majority of Americans didn't support gay marriage. Now it has majority support, and is legal in every state. This didn't happen by accident either. A lot of groups were involved in promoting gay rights and funding legal battles across the country. This isn't the first time this happened either: women's rights, civil rights, etc. Even today, organized groups are winning hearts and minds in the fight for criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. So it's very possible to instigate cultural change (perhaps force is a strong word). It just takes a long time.
  - harryh 11y ago
    It's probably easier to get a person to change their opinion on what someone else can do than to get them to change their own behavior.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    This is a great example. Cultural change happens faster than most people imagine. Look at slavery, an institution that had existed for a long, long time. Look at atheism. Women's right to vote. All these things flipped from everyone being one way to another in a brief time (ok slavery is a bit complicated, having evolved differently in the US and UK).
eemph 11y ago
>It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that if you take high school students from some US minority group, say, American Scandinavians, they'll turn out to be doing better than Scandinavians in Scandinavia, and the same goes for most other minority groups (apparently including American Chinese), as well as for white Americans vs the population of most other countries. What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries. I have not fact-checked this, but it is an interesting perspective.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  The first things you say are correct but then it goes subtly wrong. Yes, studying in a foreign language is a hindrance -- but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture. In fact, even native English-speaking pupils/students of South American (and African) descent tend do rather bad. There is an alternative theory that this is mostly an IQ issue -- and that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs (given vastly different historical evolutionary pressures and a belief in evolution itself). This is extremely well backed with research.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    There's a nice Scientific American blog post about this hypothesis by John Horgan; the essential argument is that this research question is a pointless area of inquiry because the answer should make no difference in a non-evil society: >I'm torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine. (for example, the claim it's "extremely well backed" that IQ is both "heritable" and "largely genetic", when both are hotly contested, the former is impossible to have decent evidence for given all of the confounding variables, and the latter ("largely") is definitely not true, even given the necessarily poor state of evidence on this question:) > For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture. > But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere -- should simply be banned. I don't say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value. > Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.) > Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies. > Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I'm sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge: > "Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like."
calibraxis 11y ago
> "While everyone focuses on boosting the weakest students, America’s smartest children are no longer being pushed to do their best." Ugh. I went to a so-called "gifted school", and this article's whole mindset is repugnant. For one thing, it's humiliating to anyone who got "weak student" stamped on their forehead... particularly galling coming from an educational system run by administrators who avoid intelligence at every opportunity. I know perceptive high-achievers haunted by revenge fantasies where they humiliate those who laughed at them for being in the remedial track. And it's really discussing a certain kind of intelligence. Smart children are often booted from the institution and end up selling drugs or whatever. The desirable "smart children" have assignable curiosity, can be herded into professional/managerial type jobs, etc. Maybe they despise the know-nothing teaching the class, but they'll do what it takes to get to the next rung. (http://disciplined-minds.com/ http://disciplined-minds.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8hfUkmk6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8hfUkmk6Q) A lot of people walking down the street no doubt have great ideas for how a fundamentally better educational system would work. But they can't really do anything about it; who'll listen to them? > "If we cannot bring ourselves to push smart kids as far as they can go, we will watch and eventually weep as other countries surpass us in producing tomorrow’s inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and scientists." Always at the end an appeal to patriotism, partitioning ourselves into nations where the weaker ones get bullied. Gotta "push" kids around (don't want to rely on dangerous self-motivation), because we'll weep if those we're sitting on start doing something better than us!
- octorian 11y ago
  > I know perceptive high-achievers haunted by revenge fantasies where they humiliate those who laughed at them for being in the remedial track. Ahh yes, every time I manage another great achievement, my parents joke about how to best rub it in the face of that school administrator who said I'd grow up to be a pizza delivery guy. Of course we still haven't followed through, and its really way too late now for them to even remember. (For context, I went to an over-achiever magnet school my freshman year of HS. They pushed so hard, that I basically broke and became an academic failure. The administrator in question was at that school. I did the remaining 3 years at my normal HS, where I actually did quite well. Though it did take those 3 years to recover my GPA.)
speeder 11y ago
Here in Brazil we are having a similar problem... Also I witnessed closely, its bad effects. Example: In Brazil universities frequently has students separated in classes, then the whole class go to see the necessary teacher (ie: very different than the "credit" system used in US where each student choose what he will attend), the university where I went, they had a common, but rarely admitted practice of separating the classes according to the ranking in the entrance tests. I ended in the A class, we had a B and a C class. Yet, the C class (not only of my course, but of some others too, or of other years) frequently outperformed the A and B classes, even if their students were frequently obviously outright dumb... The reason is that the C class students learned to do two things: one, work hard, including being very creative in cheating if needed, C class students never shied from hard work if it was needed, and two, they were really, really good at being friends of teachers and other staff, and socialize their way into success. The A class, that theoretically had the best students (example of difference: A class students frequently already had past experience in the job we were learning, and was the class that least needed to ask questions to teachers, also in simple enough tests always scored very high), but it don't worked, most A class students didn't knew how to hard work, they would just coast, and when some advanced teamworking was needed (example: team of 7 students asked to make a 6 month long project that would affect the grades of all subjects), the A class students would often start to fight each other (sometimes physically), have big egos, don't cooperate, and so on. Altough this is what I saw from personal experience, I got curious and looked more into it, and saw this everywhere, the smartest kids fail in real life, they don't work hard, don't socialize decently, and when facing a big challenge they fail, they panic, or get confused, or procastinate or lot, or give up before even starting. The "C class" kids although they often are the typical party animals (frequently going to bars, getting drunk, being rowdy, skipping unecessary work, etc...) when they face a challenge, they take it, they work hard, either to do it the right way, or to do it the wrong way, or to figure how to avoid it completely, but they don't give up, they just figure how to do it somehow. Practical final example: I once went to some seminars in a hard to understand subject, the speakers were all students, it was mandatory to all students to speak. The brightest students, gave boring seminars, everything was correct, but not really detailed, and the work was clearly half-assed. Now, watching the seminars of the students that were infamous for being often drunkards and dumb was awesome, some of these just creatively figured a way to nail it. One guy gave a really, really awesome seminar, 100% correct, 100% charismatic, and very detailed. Later I learned that what he did was meticulously create a script for the seminar using his comedy skills to copy, paste and edit parts of books, then record himself reading the script, then play that recording during the seminar while hiding the headphone on his hair, it is work intensive, and he don't understood half of what he said, but he got a 10 of 10 grade, and I understood the subject he needed to teach very well. Another guy just tried to learn everything he needed to say like if he was an actor, and just acted his way through, he also don't understood shit of what he said, but everyone else did, and he got a 9.5 of 10
Spooky23 11y ago
I was in middle/high school when our district flipped the switch. I went to a small school district (grades 6-12 in one building, 80 kids in the graduating class), so the impact was really easy to spot. Previously they had four classes in core subjects, that were roughly segregated by capability. They switched to a "blended" approach when I was in 9th grade. The district was like 95% white, so racial factor wasn't really present. I was in the "smart" group. The difference was night and day. Classes that had once hosted pretty intense debate and academic competition got disrupted by the disruptive kids. The entire dynamic of the classroom experience shifted from learning stuff to dealing with the class clowns. The only exceptions were history, which I was lucky to be among the 5 kids picked for an AP class shared between districts, and Math, where I was on an accelerated path and the jokers were in remedial classes. In any case, it fundamentally changed the course of our futures. I was fortunate to have gone to a good college, but many of my friends who came from poorer families, especially farm families ended up going to community college or some other less optimal path. And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere. Top-down controlling bureaucrats might think it more egalitarian, but treating everyone indifferently to their particular needs is not egalitarian. The world is rich enough to provide ample resources for all children to meet all their needs. If children and educators could organize education to meet their needs instead of being forced to obey governments or markets, that would be egalitarian.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  This kind of classroom blending also has the potential to promote misanthropy among the shafted gifted kids.
imareaver 11y ago
"Among the handful of American high achievers, only one in eight comes from the bottom socioeconomic quartile. In Canada it’s one in four; Germany one in six; and Singapore one in three." One in three high achievers in Singapore come from the bottom quartile? That means the bottom quartile is OVERrepresented among high achievers, which sounds very odd to me.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  Recent immigration from mainland China? If the newcomers are bright, hungry, and hardworking whereas the native Singapore Chinese are by now a bit more laid back + if the Singapore Malay are not as bright, hungry, and hardworking but more established so above them in SES, then it might make sense. Singapore is far from ethnically homogeneous.
  - sopooneo 11y ago
    In Boston high schools, immigrant students make up close to or exactly 100% of the valedictorians each year.
tvanantwerp 11y ago
One of the unintended lessons I learned in school was that pushing myself was not a requirement for success. Tests and homework were easy for me. As a result, school became that place I had to go during the day until I could come home and play video games or otherwise goof off. It took a very long time for me to internalize the values of hard work and studying, since I never needed either in school. It depresses me to speculate on where I could be and what I could have accomplished if I'd been pushed harder at an age where I was too naive to know that I should push myself.
- Thriptic 11y ago
  Oh man same here. I look at what some people I know have accomplished through consistent hard work at a young age and I kick myself for my laziness which was so consistently reinforced during school. Oh well, those thoughts just push me to study harder and improve myself now.
- douche 11y ago
  The worst thing is the discouragement that public schooling gives gifted students when they do push themselves. I was always getting in trouble for reading ahead in English class, or moving too quickly through the lessons in math. Creates too much work for the teachers grading, I suppose. They also don't like it when you point out that they are teaching falsehoods.
  - dceddia 11y ago
    And then on top of that, there's the discouragement from your peers. It wasn't a particularly good thing to be the "smart kid". There's a lot of peer pressure to be average, and the outliers don't gain any popularity points.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      More the just not earning popularity points, being ahead of the curve can often make one the target of bullying and ostracism. Especially if one's social intellect lags behind their book smarts.
qudat 11y ago
One size fits all is cheaper and easier to manage for an inept government to handle. Education should emphasize experimentation. How can we expect a system to actively challenge students to think critically when the system itself was designed without any critical thought whatsoever?
sopooneo 11y ago
When I taught in a "disadvantaged high school" in Boston, the metric by which the school was judged was not the average student score on the state's standardized test (the MCAS), but the percentage of students achieving minimal proficiency. I think this is the same across the country. So the pressure is to keep pulling and pulling those last few students up over the bar. There is no fundamental incentive to help the kids that can already pass, because that has zero effect on the metric by which you are judged.
- danielweber 11y ago
  "What you measure is what you get."
- emodendroket 11y ago
  To be fair, while I don't think we're doing it the right way it is really shameful how many American students do not have even the most basic proficiency in things like reading.
stdbrouw 11y ago
Certainly, some enrichment programs have been shown to work, but others, like the track system in which students are grouped into different classes by ability, has in many cases been shown to be not particularly beneficial for either less or more talented students. See e.g. Jo Boaler's "When even the winners are losers: Evaluating the experiences of top set' students" (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002202797184116#.Vdc1KFOqq8Q http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002202797184116#....). It's also funny how the only standard for a well-rounded education seems to have become whether you perform well on standardized tests or have what it takes to become the next "inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and scientists." Everyone seems to want gifted children to receive a deeper education, not a broader one. I'm an absolute proponent of differentiation and enrichment for gifted students, just don't make the mistake of thinking that the solution is as simple as giving smart people a more challenging curriculum and equally smart peers and you're done. A lot is possible within (or in addition to) mixed-ability classes. Also, are we really seriously still doing this whole "BUT LOOK AT FINLAND, LOOK AT SOUTH KOREA" dance?
- yourapostasy 11y ago
  I strongly suspect the mixed-ability class arrangements works when the band of abilities is not "too" wide, and especially when the lower ability segments are not linked to behavior-based issues leading to behavioral classroom disruptions. Too often, I see little to no emphasis within these arrangements to link intensive mental health and other support infrastructure counseling to assist students and their families, and manage behavioral issues before introducing those students into mixed-ability classes. A big advantage I see in mixed-ability classes where behavioral issues are managed ahead of time is the opportunity for the students who grasp a particular topic sooner start teaching and explaining it to their peers who don't grasp it yet, which cements their understanding, and this can continue onwards down the age and and ability spectrums. There is nearly nothing quite like having to teach a topic to really reveal how well you grasp it.
  - douche 11y ago
    In the public school system, this is mainly a way for lazy teachers to farm off their job to their more able students.
clavalle 11y ago
This is why my family and so many people we know are either homeschooling or pooling resources to create small schools for their kids to attend where we have some sort of control over their education and expectations of the students. You can't get tailored clothes at Wal-Mart and you can't educate high performing kids in public school. A lot of people have a problem with this approach but, you know, it is easy to ignore those vague ideologically driven arguments when it comes to doing what is best for your own kids especially when you are seeing great results. I have a feeling more people are going to go the bespoke education route even if it takes one parent staying home to do it.
- noobiemcfoob 11y ago
  While I plan to do the same for my own children unless the system dramatically changes, this approach unfairly favors the middle and upper classes who have the time to do this. The lower classes simply don't have the time and money to do this. That said, if you do have the time and money, more power to you! No reason to disadvantage your kids because the government and bureaucracy can't do it right.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - AlexEatsKittens 11y ago
    Very true. It's a feedback loop as well. Schools perform poorly, so affluent people remove their high-performing children, which lowers the average performance of the school and gives it less funding. And so on. The thing is, you can't blame people for optimizing for their own children, but doing so drags down the quality even further for everyone else. It's a problem that requires some serious intervention.
    - clavalle 11y ago
      I honestly think that is a 'treat the symptom' analysis. We need to think about why there are poor performers to begin with and it has very little to do with the few hundred dollars per student a school might lose because of not hitting performance targets.
j2kun 11y ago
I did gifted programs all through elementary school and these were also a joke. There was far less supervision and it was not significantly more challenging. It wasn't until I was given somewhat unstructured time to follow my interests (in late high school) that I found ways to challenge myself with things I actually cared about.
leni536 11y ago
I studied in Hungary and I'm really glad that there is a really high quality science journal aimed for high school students. It has a competition in mathematics, physics and informatics. You have to send back solutions to problems from the monthly issues. http://www.komal.hu/info/bemutatkozas.e.shtml http://www.komal.hu/info/bemutatkozas.e.shtml They translate the problems to English and I think high school students from other countries can participate too, though it's mainly a Hungarian competition. This really helped me learning physics through tricky problems. I could never solve any problems from the "A" labeled math problems, though I never tried since high school.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  That journal was basically Erdős' high school, wasn't it? Glad to see that it's still around :) (Also glad to see that they had girls on the high score roster right from the beginning!)
Zigurd 11y ago
If you live within driving distance of Worcester, MA, there is a tuition-free state-run 2 year school called Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science that kids can transfer into for their junior and senior year of high school. The first year is taught by Mass Academy faculty and the second year kids take courses at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). This program was started to address exactly the issue of bright kids in schools that don't have the resources of, for example, Acton-Boxborough.
Beltiras 11y ago
I've had several IQ tests throughout the years and consistently tested in the highest 1% of test takers for my age class. I was skipped past first grade as a result at the age of 5. In my opinion that was a terrible mistake. This basically put a bullsmark on me for bullies and alienated me from my peers. At eight I wanted to be relieved of class duty since I loved the library and felt I learnt a lot more from assimilating information I wanted rather than being force-fed stuff I had no interest in. I wish I had the retort I have no when asked how this would result in a rounded education. My opinion is that kids will become interested in a field and start studying it and at some point in time they will need more practical things and ask their elders how to solve the things that would "round out" their education. Instead I just felt bored and my grades suffered. Consistent in teachers remarks is that I could be doing so much better. It sounds a bit hypocritical to me now that I actually asked to be able to do better, was refused and later scolded for not doing better. I was reading advanced physics texts at age 9, understood the difference between GR and SR. I wish that someone would have poked me in the general direction of Plato. I feel that if someone had, my intellectual development would have been accelerated a lot by it. Instead I was reading a collection of folk legends, the mythology of the Norse and a whole lot of popular fiction (both science and fantasy). I turned into a CS grad eventually and make a living coding. I think it would have happened a lot faster if there was a real program for misfit-brights instead of the minor changes to regular curricula I endured. My point is that it's not enough to detect the brights. You have to do something substantive to succeed in nurturing them.
sarciszewski 11y ago
Anyone have a non-paywalled excerpt?
will_brown 11y ago
This article seems like a submarine from a wealthy lobby group trying to influence the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. For starters the article shows a complete failure to understand educational funding, example: >Both Ontario and Taiwan treat gifted children as eligible for “special education,” much like disabled students, giving them access to additional resources. So does the US...Perhaps the misunderstanding is much broader than I give credit, but in the US everyone is entitled to a free and appropriate education, including ESE students. It seems people think ESE is just for disabled children, but it is also for gifted students. As a lawyer who advocated on behalf of ESE students, I saw everything from a disabled child being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to a blind student being denied a ~$100 reading program (maybe one of the most rewarding moments of my legal career was getting the school to agree to purchase that program - but was a lawyer really necessary?), and advocating for a gifted ESE high school student who attended some classes at the local university via duel enrollment. If US students' scores are lagging behind their international counter-parts it is not because gifted students in the US are not getting funding. There are more resources now than ever for gifted students, including: duel enrollments, online curriculum, and vouchers for private/charter schools.
- jrwoodruff 11y ago
  But all of your options for gifted students are outside of the regular school system, while the options for disabled children are part of the system. I doubt a gifted student would be granted money for a special tutor or more difficult lessons, but disabled students are subsidized hundreds of thousands of dollars for in-classroom aides, assistive devices, etc. Meanwhile, gifted students should leave the public system and use vouchers for a private education?
  - amateurpolymath 11y ago
    I can't speak for other states, but in Florida it's very easy to do dual enrollment, possibly the best option for a gifted high school student. As long as your courses are at a public university or community college, your tuition is fully funded by the state. Your high school credits are satisfied by college courses, you get college credits that are easily transferred to other universities when you graduate, for free. There are also plenty of challenging classes for gifted students, but this might vary from school to school.
backtoyoujim 11y ago
Did anyone here benefit from a No Child Left Behind program?
DrNuke 11y ago
If we talk West and non-wealthy backgrounds, bright students must take care of themselves: do self-learning, look for role models, start messing with small projects, find a way to second own pace. Fundamentally, they must survive their own gift without losing enthusiasm or drive.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I had an absolutely amazing principal in H.S. She took notice of me and made it her mission to make sure I wasn't bored to the point I would quit. Some of my teachers did too, while others told me to just quit. I would get excellent marks in math and science related subjects, but fail everything else. I would complain the only thing different between sophomore, junior and senior English was the color of the book and one had to write a term paper their junior year. So I slept. A lot. I'd stay up late on my Commodore programming and be exhausted the next day. I remember waking up in my second year accounting class one day to the teacher telling some students, "When your scores are as high as his in my class, you can sleep too." I actually felt bad because I learned that day I was bothering other students. Not enough to change though. I was stubborn.
roymurdock 11y ago
At the high school & college level, the grading structure is a major part of the problem in the US. If a student needs to answer 90-100% of a test correctly to get an A, there must be a serious lack of rigor and choice to the material he/she is studying. I studied abroad in London at the LSE for a year of college. The grading system at the LSE made so much more sense to me. An "A" in the UK system is >70%. LSE exams reserve a full 30% range for the recognition of genius and/or mastery of the subject. A common joke at LSE is that “any paper scoring above 90% is basically ready to be published in a journal”. This is not to say that students attempt create new economic models during their exams, but it does imply that a 90% answer will require an extremely thorough understanding of the theory behind the subject, above and beyond the class slides and lecture material. A solid understanding of the material (70%) is still rewarded with the highest distinction; thus impossibly high expectations do not cause grade disinflation or penalties. The UK system presents you with a buffet of knowledge, pushing you to sample that one extra topic that lies just beyond what you think you can comfortably retain. The US system forces predetermined topics down your throat, deducting points if you find one topic unbearably boring, overly complex, or simply flawed. I discussed the experience in more depth here: http://roymurdock.com/essays/2014/06/the-difference-between-uk-and-us-universities/ http://roymurdock.com/essays/2014/06/the-difference-between-...
- aianus 11y ago
  Why go above and beyond to get a 95% when you end up with the same grade as someone who got 70%? How can grad schools and employers distinguish between someone who did ok and someone really good? That grading system and letter grading in general don't make any sense. The college I went to put your percentage grades directly on your transcript and every percentage point went towards your class ranking.
  - peterfirefly 11y ago
    He has a point (expressed in a roundabout way) about grading systems with low ceilings. I believe you are expressing the same point in straightforward manner: Low ceilings are bad. Your point: top grade at 70%? That's bad, can't distinguish between ok and really good. His point: top grade at 90%? So nobody is ever taught anything hard, then? Otherwise, how would so many people be able to get the top grade?
deleted 11y ago
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mrdrozdov 11y ago
Maybe school is not the place for gifted students to grow. There are online communities, meetups, and more routes outside of the classroom that you could take advantage of. You could probably talk to schools and colleges beforehand to make sure that you could take time out of the day to do these things. In the worst case scenario, you simply ignore school if they are not willing to help you pursue personal growth, and start your own company.
linkydinkandyou 11y ago
I used to think, "yeah, right. Every parent thinks his little snowflake is gifted." But in recent years, I've flipped 180 degrees. Nobody wants to admit the hard facts: "IQ" tests are extremely accurate at predicting future academic success. And we can give kids IQ tests when they're 10 or 11 and more efficiently spend our resources educating the top 10% of kids specially, rather than try to make the other 90% catch up, which they never will.
jseliger 11y ago
In 1991 Daniel J. Singal published "The Other Crisis in American Education" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.htm http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.ht... , which makes the same point but did so 25 years ago.

133 points by tokenadult 11y ago

Reminds me of the short story: http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-henry-seslar/ http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-hen... I won't post spoilers alerts, but the mere fact that I put this link here should be enough for you to deduce the ending.

dudul 11y ago
Great story.
hguant 11y ago
I thought you were going to post this - considerably longer, but an interesting take on future education. http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
toth 11y ago
I simply have to mention this great little story: http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-test/ http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-test/

amykhar 11y ago

So often, when it comes to gifted education, I hear people crying elitism and even making snide remarks about gifted students, which nobody seems to have a problem with. What people are missing is that average and below average students are challenged in school from day one. And, in being challenged, they learn to stretch and to work harder to learn the material. So often, gifted programs do not exist in very early elementary school. Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. They learn that tests and homework are a joke. So, when the day comes that things aren't quite as easy, they don't have the necessary skills to help them level up. Every kid deserves to be challenged and to be taught to do their very best. Sadly, in the United States, that didn't happen - even before the stupid No Child Left Behind rules kicked in.

navait 11y ago
From a cost standpoint it makes sense. You're capturing most students. How many students will use a gifted program? They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum. That's not cheap, and not subsidized by the federal government, unlike students under IEPs.
- Retric 11y ago
  Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact which justifies increased investment. The real issue is most 'gifted' programs are a joke with little impact.
  - navait 11y ago
    > Economically gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?
    - jschwartzi 11y ago
      Can you please elaborate or share some kind of story on why you think this would happen? Where are they leaving to, and why?
    - jerf 11y ago
      We fund schools because on the whole it all works out; if San Francisco teaches a kid who moves to New York, well, New York taught a kid that moved to Portland and Portland taught a kid that moved to a Kansas farm and Kansas taught a kid that moved to Texas, and in the end everybody wins pretty well.
    - afarrell 11y ago
      jerf, the problem is that there is nothing to keep Alabama from defecting, except for the fact that educated people like to live around places with good education systems and tend to vote in favor of education.

rayiner 11y ago

An important fact to keep in mind whenever PISA scores come up is that the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf (over 20%, versus under 5% for Finland or under 10% for Germany). If we adjusted PISA scores to reflect those demographics, the U.S. would come out about the same as France, Germany, or the U.K., though still a step behind Finland: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... Also: > Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal. Ultimately, if that's the case, there is very little hope for improving American education. It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.

normloman 11y ago
> It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country. A few decades ago, a majority of Americans didn't support gay marriage. Now it has majority support, and is legal in every state. This didn't happen by accident either. A lot of groups were involved in promoting gay rights and funding legal battles across the country. This isn't the first time this happened either: women's rights, civil rights, etc. Even today, organized groups are winning hearts and minds in the fight for criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. So it's very possible to instigate cultural change (perhaps force is a strong word). It just takes a long time.
- harryh 11y ago
  It's probably easier to get a person to change their opinion on what someone else can do than to get them to change their own behavior.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- lordnacho 11y ago
  This is a great example. Cultural change happens faster than most people imagine. Look at slavery, an institution that had existed for a long, long time. Look at atheism. Women's right to vote. All these things flipped from everyone being one way to another in a brief time (ok slavery is a bit complicated, having evolved differently in the US and UK).

eemph 11y ago

>It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that if you take high school students from some US minority group, say, American Scandinavians, they'll turn out to be doing better than Scandinavians in Scandinavia, and the same goes for most other minority groups (apparently including American Chinese), as well as for white Americans vs the population of most other countries. What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries. I have not fact-checked this, but it is an interesting perspective.

peterfirefly 11y ago
The first things you say are correct but then it goes subtly wrong. Yes, studying in a foreign language is a hindrance -- but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture. In fact, even native English-speaking pupils/students of South American (and African) descent tend do rather bad. There is an alternative theory that this is mostly an IQ issue -- and that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs (given vastly different historical evolutionary pressures and a belief in evolution itself). This is extremely well backed with research.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  There's a nice Scientific American blog post about this hypothesis by John Horgan; the essential argument is that this research question is a pointless area of inquiry because the answer should make no difference in a non-evil society: >I'm torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine. (for example, the claim it's "extremely well backed" that IQ is both "heritable" and "largely genetic", when both are hotly contested, the former is impossible to have decent evidence for given all of the confounding variables, and the latter ("largely") is definitely not true, even given the necessarily poor state of evidence on this question:) > For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture. > But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere -- should simply be banned. I don't say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value. > Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.) > Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies. > Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I'm sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge: > "Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like."

calibraxis 11y ago

> "While everyone focuses on boosting the weakest students, America’s smartest children are no longer being pushed to do their best." Ugh. I went to a so-called "gifted school", and this article's whole mindset is repugnant. For one thing, it's humiliating to anyone who got "weak student" stamped on their forehead... particularly galling coming from an educational system run by administrators who avoid intelligence at every opportunity. I know perceptive high-achievers haunted by revenge fantasies where they humiliate those who laughed at them for being in the remedial track. And it's really discussing a certain kind of intelligence. Smart children are often booted from the institution and end up selling drugs or whatever. The desirable "smart children" have assignable curiosity, can be herded into professional/managerial type jobs, etc. Maybe they despise the know-nothing teaching the class, but they'll do what it takes to get to the next rung. (http://disciplined-minds.com/ http://disciplined-minds.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8hfUkmk6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8hfUkmk6Q) A lot of people walking down the street no doubt have great ideas for how a fundamentally better educational system would work. But they can't really do anything about it; who'll listen to them? > "If we cannot bring ourselves to push smart kids as far as they can go, we will watch and eventually weep as other countries surpass us in producing tomorrow’s inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and scientists." Always at the end an appeal to patriotism, partitioning ourselves into nations where the weaker ones get bullied. Gotta "push" kids around (don't want to rely on dangerous self-motivation), because we'll weep if those we're sitting on start doing something better than us!

octorian 11y ago
> I know perceptive high-achievers haunted by revenge fantasies where they humiliate those who laughed at them for being in the remedial track. Ahh yes, every time I manage another great achievement, my parents joke about how to best rub it in the face of that school administrator who said I'd grow up to be a pizza delivery guy. Of course we still haven't followed through, and its really way too late now for them to even remember. (For context, I went to an over-achiever magnet school my freshman year of HS. They pushed so hard, that I basically broke and became an academic failure. The administrator in question was at that school. I did the remaining 3 years at my normal HS, where I actually did quite well. Though it did take those 3 years to recover my GPA.)

speeder 11y ago

Here in Brazil we are having a similar problem... Also I witnessed closely, its bad effects. Example: In Brazil universities frequently has students separated in classes, then the whole class go to see the necessary teacher (ie: very different than the "credit" system used in US where each student choose what he will attend), the university where I went, they had a common, but rarely admitted practice of separating the classes according to the ranking in the entrance tests. I ended in the A class, we had a B and a C class. Yet, the C class (not only of my course, but of some others too, or of other years) frequently outperformed the A and B classes, even if their students were frequently obviously outright dumb... The reason is that the C class students learned to do two things: one, work hard, including being very creative in cheating if needed, C class students never shied from hard work if it was needed, and two, they were really, really good at being friends of teachers and other staff, and socialize their way into success. The A class, that theoretically had the best students (example of difference: A class students frequently already had past experience in the job we were learning, and was the class that least needed to ask questions to teachers, also in simple enough tests always scored very high), but it don't worked, most A class students didn't knew how to hard work, they would just coast, and when some advanced teamworking was needed (example: team of 7 students asked to make a 6 month long project that would affect the grades of all subjects), the A class students would often start to fight each other (sometimes physically), have big egos, don't cooperate, and so on. Altough this is what I saw from personal experience, I got curious and looked more into it, and saw this everywhere, the smartest kids fail in real life, they don't work hard, don't socialize decently, and when facing a big challenge they fail, they panic, or get confused, or procastinate or lot, or give up before even starting. The "C class" kids although they often are the typical party animals (frequently going to bars, getting drunk, being rowdy, skipping unecessary work, etc...) when they face a challenge, they take it, they work hard, either to do it the right way, or to do it the wrong way, or to figure how to avoid it completely, but they don't give up, they just figure how to do it somehow. Practical final example: I once went to some seminars in a hard to understand subject, the speakers were all students, it was mandatory to all students to speak. The brightest students, gave boring seminars, everything was correct, but not really detailed, and the work was clearly half-assed. Now, watching the seminars of the students that were infamous for being often drunkards and dumb was awesome, some of these just creatively figured a way to nail it. One guy gave a really, really awesome seminar, 100% correct, 100% charismatic, and very detailed. Later I learned that what he did was meticulously create a script for the seminar using his comedy skills to copy, paste and edit parts of books, then record himself reading the script, then play that recording during the seminar while hiding the headphone on his hair, it is work intensive, and he don't understood half of what he said, but he got a 10 of 10 grade, and I understood the subject he needed to teach very well. Another guy just tried to learn everything he needed to say like if he was an actor, and just acted his way through, he also don't understood shit of what he said, but everyone else did, and he got a 9.5 of 10

Spooky23 11y ago

I was in middle/high school when our district flipped the switch. I went to a small school district (grades 6-12 in one building, 80 kids in the graduating class), so the impact was really easy to spot. Previously they had four classes in core subjects, that were roughly segregated by capability. They switched to a "blended" approach when I was in 9th grade. The district was like 95% white, so racial factor wasn't really present. I was in the "smart" group. The difference was night and day. Classes that had once hosted pretty intense debate and academic competition got disrupted by the disruptive kids. The entire dynamic of the classroom experience shifted from learning stuff to dealing with the class clowns. The only exceptions were history, which I was lucky to be among the 5 kids picked for an AP class shared between districts, and Math, where I was on an accelerated path and the jokers were in remedial classes. In any case, it fundamentally changed the course of our futures. I was fortunate to have gone to a good college, but many of my friends who came from poorer families, especially farm families ended up going to community college or some other less optimal path. And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere.

danharaj 11y ago
> And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere. Top-down controlling bureaucrats might think it more egalitarian, but treating everyone indifferently to their particular needs is not egalitarian. The world is rich enough to provide ample resources for all children to meet all their needs. If children and educators could organize education to meet their needs instead of being forced to obey governments or markets, that would be egalitarian.
nitrogen 11y ago
This kind of classroom blending also has the potential to promote misanthropy among the shafted gifted kids.

imareaver 11y ago

"Among the handful of American high achievers, only one in eight comes from the bottom socioeconomic quartile. In Canada it’s one in four; Germany one in six; and Singapore one in three." One in three high achievers in Singapore come from the bottom quartile? That means the bottom quartile is OVERrepresented among high achievers, which sounds very odd to me.

peterfirefly 11y ago
Recent immigration from mainland China? If the newcomers are bright, hungry, and hardworking whereas the native Singapore Chinese are by now a bit more laid back + if the Singapore Malay are not as bright, hungry, and hardworking but more established so above them in SES, then it might make sense. Singapore is far from ethnically homogeneous.
- sopooneo 11y ago
  In Boston high schools, immigrant students make up close to or exactly 100% of the valedictorians each year.

tvanantwerp 11y ago

One of the unintended lessons I learned in school was that pushing myself was not a requirement for success. Tests and homework were easy for me. As a result, school became that place I had to go during the day until I could come home and play video games or otherwise goof off. It took a very long time for me to internalize the values of hard work and studying, since I never needed either in school. It depresses me to speculate on where I could be and what I could have accomplished if I'd been pushed harder at an age where I was too naive to know that I should push myself.

Thriptic 11y ago
Oh man same here. I look at what some people I know have accomplished through consistent hard work at a young age and I kick myself for my laziness which was so consistently reinforced during school. Oh well, those thoughts just push me to study harder and improve myself now.
douche 11y ago
The worst thing is the discouragement that public schooling gives gifted students when they do push themselves. I was always getting in trouble for reading ahead in English class, or moving too quickly through the lessons in math. Creates too much work for the teachers grading, I suppose. They also don't like it when you point out that they are teaching falsehoods.
- dceddia 11y ago
  And then on top of that, there's the discouragement from your peers. It wasn't a particularly good thing to be the "smart kid". There's a lot of peer pressure to be average, and the outliers don't gain any popularity points.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    More the just not earning popularity points, being ahead of the curve can often make one the target of bullying and ostracism. Especially if one's social intellect lags behind their book smarts.

qudat 11y ago

One size fits all is cheaper and easier to manage for an inept government to handle. Education should emphasize experimentation. How can we expect a system to actively challenge students to think critically when the system itself was designed without any critical thought whatsoever?

sopooneo 11y ago

When I taught in a "disadvantaged high school" in Boston, the metric by which the school was judged was not the average student score on the state's standardized test (the MCAS), but the percentage of students achieving minimal proficiency. I think this is the same across the country. So the pressure is to keep pulling and pulling those last few students up over the bar. There is no fundamental incentive to help the kids that can already pass, because that has zero effect on the metric by which you are judged.

danielweber 11y ago
"What you measure is what you get."
emodendroket 11y ago
To be fair, while I don't think we're doing it the right way it is really shameful how many American students do not have even the most basic proficiency in things like reading.

stdbrouw 11y ago

Certainly, some enrichment programs have been shown to work, but others, like the track system in which students are grouped into different classes by ability, has in many cases been shown to be not particularly beneficial for either less or more talented students. See e.g. Jo Boaler's "When even the winners are losers: Evaluating the experiences of top set' students" (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002202797184116#.Vdc1KFOqq8Q http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002202797184116#....). It's also funny how the only standard for a well-rounded education seems to have become whether you perform well on standardized tests or have what it takes to become the next "inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and scientists." Everyone seems to want gifted children to receive a deeper education, not a broader one. I'm an absolute proponent of differentiation and enrichment for gifted students, just don't make the mistake of thinking that the solution is as simple as giving smart people a more challenging curriculum and equally smart peers and you're done. A lot is possible within (or in addition to) mixed-ability classes. Also, are we really seriously still doing this whole "BUT LOOK AT FINLAND, LOOK AT SOUTH KOREA" dance?

yourapostasy 11y ago
I strongly suspect the mixed-ability class arrangements works when the band of abilities is not "too" wide, and especially when the lower ability segments are not linked to behavior-based issues leading to behavioral classroom disruptions. Too often, I see little to no emphasis within these arrangements to link intensive mental health and other support infrastructure counseling to assist students and their families, and manage behavioral issues before introducing those students into mixed-ability classes. A big advantage I see in mixed-ability classes where behavioral issues are managed ahead of time is the opportunity for the students who grasp a particular topic sooner start teaching and explaining it to their peers who don't grasp it yet, which cements their understanding, and this can continue onwards down the age and and ability spectrums. There is nearly nothing quite like having to teach a topic to really reveal how well you grasp it.
- douche 11y ago
  In the public school system, this is mainly a way for lazy teachers to farm off their job to their more able students.

clavalle 11y ago

This is why my family and so many people we know are either homeschooling or pooling resources to create small schools for their kids to attend where we have some sort of control over their education and expectations of the students. You can't get tailored clothes at Wal-Mart and you can't educate high performing kids in public school. A lot of people have a problem with this approach but, you know, it is easy to ignore those vague ideologically driven arguments when it comes to doing what is best for your own kids especially when you are seeing great results. I have a feeling more people are going to go the bespoke education route even if it takes one parent staying home to do it.

noobiemcfoob 11y ago
While I plan to do the same for my own children unless the system dramatically changes, this approach unfairly favors the middle and upper classes who have the time to do this. The lower classes simply don't have the time and money to do this. That said, if you do have the time and money, more power to you! No reason to disadvantage your kids because the government and bureaucracy can't do it right.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- AlexEatsKittens 11y ago
  Very true. It's a feedback loop as well. Schools perform poorly, so affluent people remove their high-performing children, which lowers the average performance of the school and gives it less funding. And so on. The thing is, you can't blame people for optimizing for their own children, but doing so drags down the quality even further for everyone else. It's a problem that requires some serious intervention.
  - clavalle 11y ago
    I honestly think that is a 'treat the symptom' analysis. We need to think about why there are poor performers to begin with and it has very little to do with the few hundred dollars per student a school might lose because of not hitting performance targets.

j2kun 11y ago

I did gifted programs all through elementary school and these were also a joke. There was far less supervision and it was not significantly more challenging. It wasn't until I was given somewhat unstructured time to follow my interests (in late high school) that I found ways to challenge myself with things I actually cared about.

leni536 11y ago

I studied in Hungary and I'm really glad that there is a really high quality science journal aimed for high school students. It has a competition in mathematics, physics and informatics. You have to send back solutions to problems from the monthly issues. http://www.komal.hu/info/bemutatkozas.e.shtml http://www.komal.hu/info/bemutatkozas.e.shtml They translate the problems to English and I think high school students from other countries can participate too, though it's mainly a Hungarian competition. This really helped me learning physics through tricky problems. I could never solve any problems from the "A" labeled math problems, though I never tried since high school.

peterfirefly 11y ago
That journal was basically Erdős' high school, wasn't it? Glad to see that it's still around :) (Also glad to see that they had girls on the high score roster right from the beginning!)

Zigurd 11y ago

If you live within driving distance of Worcester, MA, there is a tuition-free state-run 2 year school called Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science that kids can transfer into for their junior and senior year of high school. The first year is taught by Mass Academy faculty and the second year kids take courses at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). This program was started to address exactly the issue of bright kids in schools that don't have the resources of, for example, Acton-Boxborough.

Beltiras 11y ago

I've had several IQ tests throughout the years and consistently tested in the highest 1% of test takers for my age class. I was skipped past first grade as a result at the age of 5. In my opinion that was a terrible mistake. This basically put a bullsmark on me for bullies and alienated me from my peers. At eight I wanted to be relieved of class duty since I loved the library and felt I learnt a lot more from assimilating information I wanted rather than being force-fed stuff I had no interest in. I wish I had the retort I have no when asked how this would result in a rounded education. My opinion is that kids will become interested in a field and start studying it and at some point in time they will need more practical things and ask their elders how to solve the things that would "round out" their education. Instead I just felt bored and my grades suffered. Consistent in teachers remarks is that I could be doing so much better. It sounds a bit hypocritical to me now that I actually asked to be able to do better, was refused and later scolded for not doing better. I was reading advanced physics texts at age 9, understood the difference between GR and SR. I wish that someone would have poked me in the general direction of Plato. I feel that if someone had, my intellectual development would have been accelerated a lot by it. Instead I was reading a collection of folk legends, the mythology of the Norse and a whole lot of popular fiction (both science and fantasy). I turned into a CS grad eventually and make a living coding. I think it would have happened a lot faster if there was a real program for misfit-brights instead of the minor changes to regular curricula I endured. My point is that it's not enough to detect the brights. You have to do something substantive to succeed in nurturing them.

sarciszewski 11y ago

Anyone have a non-paywalled excerpt?

will_brown 11y ago

This article seems like a submarine from a wealthy lobby group trying to influence the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. For starters the article shows a complete failure to understand educational funding, example: >Both Ontario and Taiwan treat gifted children as eligible for “special education,” much like disabled students, giving them access to additional resources. So does the US...Perhaps the misunderstanding is much broader than I give credit, but in the US everyone is entitled to a free and appropriate education, including ESE students. It seems people think ESE is just for disabled children, but it is also for gifted students. As a lawyer who advocated on behalf of ESE students, I saw everything from a disabled child being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to a blind student being denied a ~$100 reading program (maybe one of the most rewarding moments of my legal career was getting the school to agree to purchase that program - but was a lawyer really necessary?), and advocating for a gifted ESE high school student who attended some classes at the local university via duel enrollment. If US students' scores are lagging behind their international counter-parts it is not because gifted students in the US are not getting funding. There are more resources now than ever for gifted students, including: duel enrollments, online curriculum, and vouchers for private/charter schools.

jrwoodruff 11y ago
But all of your options for gifted students are outside of the regular school system, while the options for disabled children are part of the system. I doubt a gifted student would be granted money for a special tutor or more difficult lessons, but disabled students are subsidized hundreds of thousands of dollars for in-classroom aides, assistive devices, etc. Meanwhile, gifted students should leave the public system and use vouchers for a private education?
- amateurpolymath 11y ago
  I can't speak for other states, but in Florida it's very easy to do dual enrollment, possibly the best option for a gifted high school student. As long as your courses are at a public university or community college, your tuition is fully funded by the state. Your high school credits are satisfied by college courses, you get college credits that are easily transferred to other universities when you graduate, for free. There are also plenty of challenging classes for gifted students, but this might vary from school to school.

backtoyoujim 11y ago

Did anyone here benefit from a No Child Left Behind program?

DrNuke 11y ago

If we talk West and non-wealthy backgrounds, bright students must take care of themselves: do self-learning, look for role models, start messing with small projects, find a way to second own pace. Fundamentally, they must survive their own gift without losing enthusiasm or drive.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

I had an absolutely amazing principal in H.S. She took notice of me and made it her mission to make sure I wasn't bored to the point I would quit. Some of my teachers did too, while others told me to just quit. I would get excellent marks in math and science related subjects, but fail everything else. I would complain the only thing different between sophomore, junior and senior English was the color of the book and one had to write a term paper their junior year. So I slept. A lot. I'd stay up late on my Commodore programming and be exhausted the next day. I remember waking up in my second year accounting class one day to the teacher telling some students, "When your scores are as high as his in my class, you can sleep too." I actually felt bad because I learned that day I was bothering other students. Not enough to change though. I was stubborn.

roymurdock 11y ago

At the high school & college level, the grading structure is a major part of the problem in the US. If a student needs to answer 90-100% of a test correctly to get an A, there must be a serious lack of rigor and choice to the material he/she is studying. I studied abroad in London at the LSE for a year of college. The grading system at the LSE made so much more sense to me. An "A" in the UK system is >70%. LSE exams reserve a full 30% range for the recognition of genius and/or mastery of the subject. A common joke at LSE is that “any paper scoring above 90% is basically ready to be published in a journal”. This is not to say that students attempt create new economic models during their exams, but it does imply that a 90% answer will require an extremely thorough understanding of the theory behind the subject, above and beyond the class slides and lecture material. A solid understanding of the material (70%) is still rewarded with the highest distinction; thus impossibly high expectations do not cause grade disinflation or penalties. The UK system presents you with a buffet of knowledge, pushing you to sample that one extra topic that lies just beyond what you think you can comfortably retain. The US system forces predetermined topics down your throat, deducting points if you find one topic unbearably boring, overly complex, or simply flawed. I discussed the experience in more depth here: http://roymurdock.com/essays/2014/06/the-difference-between-uk-and-us-universities/ http://roymurdock.com/essays/2014/06/the-difference-between-...

aianus 11y ago
Why go above and beyond to get a 95% when you end up with the same grade as someone who got 70%? How can grad schools and employers distinguish between someone who did ok and someone really good? That grading system and letter grading in general don't make any sense. The college I went to put your percentage grades directly on your transcript and every percentage point went towards your class ranking.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  He has a point (expressed in a roundabout way) about grading systems with low ceilings. I believe you are expressing the same point in straightforward manner: Low ceilings are bad. Your point: top grade at 70%? That's bad, can't distinguish between ok and really good. His point: top grade at 90%? So nobody is ever taught anything hard, then? Otherwise, how would so many people be able to get the top grade?

deleted 11y ago

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mrdrozdov 11y ago

Maybe school is not the place for gifted students to grow. There are online communities, meetups, and more routes outside of the classroom that you could take advantage of. You could probably talk to schools and colleges beforehand to make sure that you could take time out of the day to do these things. In the worst case scenario, you simply ignore school if they are not willing to help you pursue personal growth, and start your own company.

linkydinkandyou 11y ago

I used to think, "yeah, right. Every parent thinks his little snowflake is gifted." But in recent years, I've flipped 180 degrees. Nobody wants to admit the hard facts: "IQ" tests are extremely accurate at predicting future academic success. And we can give kids IQ tests when they're 10 or 11 and more efficiently spend our resources educating the top 10% of kids specially, rather than try to make the other 90% catch up, which they never will.

jseliger 11y ago

In 1991 Daniel J. Singal published "The Other Crisis in American Education" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.htm http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.ht... , which makes the same point but did so 25 years ago.