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Should gifted students go to a separate school?

• dijit 10y ago
  Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the children who had difficulties learning or even the opposite- elevating children who were learning well; instead the entire class would slow to a crawl when it came time to do some form of verification that we're actually learning. In many cases 'tests' would stop any possibility of new content being added to the class for months. I was bored out of my mind and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. School is an absolute torturous prison when there's no stimulation of any kind; and they also wonder why you seek fulfillment by acting out. Conversely, before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with, those output the most well educated people and were free for the public too. They just had very strict requirements for entry and you could be expelled for not keeping up. A stark contrast to the kids in my class who were unwilling or unable to allow the class to move forward as a unit. Gah. I hated my childhood and I absolutely hated formal education because of this. [0] https://youtu.be/kz2ENxjJxFw https://youtu.be/kz2ENxjJxFw
  • shiftpgdn 10y ago
    Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing. I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how to bubble in a multiple choice answer sheet. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for weeks on end having the fact we need a #2 pencil and that you shouldn't fill outside the bubble when answering the scantron on the TAAS test.
    • dvdhnt 10y ago
      This. I grew up in Texas, first in a small suburb that had its own school system (elementary through 7th) and then as a part of the greater Dallas school system, in another city (8th through graduation). My original school system was always trying to push me forward; they placed me in gifted programs, encouraged me to compete in academic competitions (you know the ones I'm talking about), and often recommended to my parents that I should be allowed to skip a couple of grades. Conversely, my latter school system, in an attempt to meet standards and retain order (I assume), simply taught down to the lowest denominator. As a result, I lost a lot of the drive and motivation previously impressed upon me. It's only after growing up that I've gotten some of that back, however, I doubt it will ever reach its previous high. So, as unemotional as it may seem, there should be a mechanism for either removing those at the bottom in order to accelerate their learning and return them back to the general population, or a similar mechanism to allow the higher levels to avoid decline.
    • chrisabrams 10y ago
      Oh the TAAS...I spent 10 years being told I would finish that crap in the 10th grade...only to find out in the 10th grade that TAAS II was coming out and we were the lucky candidates to take it...in the 11th grade. The #2 pencil is spot on. I carried an entire box of pencils and would trade them for a slice of pizza at lunch.
      • Pulcinella 10y ago
        heh TAAS. For those not from Texas or too young to have experienced it, TAAS was horrible even compared to other standardized tests. Other standardized tests at least pretend to assess a student's learning. TAAS assessed a students ability to parse octuple negatives and poorly typeset mathematics.
        • amyjess 10y ago
          Oh god, the TAAS. So, there were three portions: reading comprehension, math, grammar, and persuasive writing. The maximum score for any of the TAAS portions is a 4, with 3 as the minimum passing grade. The first three were ridiculously easy, but the writing portion was a nightmare. I don't remember all the details anymore, but IIRC you were expected to include a statistic and a quote from an expert in your paper. The kicker? You weren't allowed any outside materials, and you were expected to make up the statistic and the quote. That's right: the assignment was to write something that would be considered fake news nowadays. I got a 2. I only passed because I got a 4 on the grammar portion, because for some reason the persuasive writing portion and the grammar portion were averaged together to form what they called the "writing" portion. My year (10th grade 2000-2001) was the second-last to take the TAAS, and we were the last to take only the TAAS, as it was being phased out in favor of the TAKS. The year behind me took both the TAAS and the TAKS, with only the TAAS counting for graduation requirements (they only had to take the TAKS because the state wanted to do a dry run before switching over), and the people two years behind me only took the TAKS. The timeline went like: * 2000-2001: 10th grade takes the TAAS (my class) * 2001-2002: 10th grade takes the TAAS * 2002-2003: 11th grade takes the TAKS (dry run, same class as above) * 2003-2004: 11th grade takes the TAKS (for real)
  • stinky613 10y ago
    But, on the flip side, faster-learning kids need to learn how to live/work/deal with slower-learning kids and vice versa. The purpose of schooling goes beyond the accumulation of facts.
    • 67726e 10y ago
      Nice in theory, doesn't work in practice. At least growing up where I did, a lot of the "slow" kids weren't slow. They just didn't give a fuck and would disrupt the class. No one needs to "learn" to deal with that bullshit. I don't have to deal with disruptive assholes in the real world.
      • cmdrfred 10y ago
        I was one of those "disruptive assholes" in school. It was simply too easy for me to take seriously. A big part of it was also seeing through a lot of the teachers. I realized if there was a way to be successful in the world none of these people have a clue how to do it.
      • ZeroGravitas 10y ago
        Weirdly the smart kid that started this thread claims that he decided to disrupt the class and "seek fulfillment in acting out" because he was bored, so even if you segregate by ability you'll find the same if they're not stimulated. Maybe the same solution applies for the kids you are talking about.
      • lol214365 10y ago
        Then separate out the problem kids, not the slow kids.
        • deleted 10y ago
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        • cloudwizard 10y ago
          For some, the problem is the class is too slow. The slow classes are CREATING the problem kids.
  • k-mcgrady 10y ago
    >> "before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with" I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and forth on whether that is a good idea. The biggest issue is that the amount of pressure placed on 10/11 year olds to pass that exam and get into a grammar school, not to mention the 18 months or so of preparation is very high. Too high arguably. It also fails children who don't do well with standardised exams. I know people who failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well. A better system may be having one school with optional advanced classes (we even had this for GCSE Maths/Advanced Maths in out grammar school). That way people can take advanced courses in the areas they naturally excel at rather than hindering their entire education by denying them the higher quality teaching at a grammar school.
    • jgust 10y ago
      > failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?
      • k-mcgrady 10y ago
        Possibly. Although there were also many people in that school who did well in the entrance exam and did not succeed in the school. Thinking about both groups of people it's very obvious in retrospect that that the people that managed to get accepted despite the bad grade in the exam worked very hard and wanted to succeed no matter how difficult they found it. They'd put in 3x as much work as everyone else.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • arethuza 10y ago
    The very humble comprehensive I went to in Scotland addressed this issue with streaming - which seemed to work pretty well. Is streaming out of fashion in state schools these days? I know its alive and well in public schools as my son was streamed. Edit: For those outside the UK: public schools are a type of private school.
    • lallysingh 10y ago
      What's streaming?
      • jonathankoren 10y ago
        Tracking. You break kids up by test score and then put all the top kids together, all the middle kids together, and all the bottom kids together. My public school experimented with it for one year, but reverted. Rumor was, parents felt like their kids were being written off in the 6th grade.
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • T-hawk 10y ago
        Dividing students by ability, into groups such as honors/regular/remedial, with different levels of challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)
    • maverick_iceman 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)
    • frobozz 10y ago
      Streaming is the best approach (IMO), as long as the schools are large enough or homogeneous enough (or have appropriate intercollegiate relationships with nearby schools) to make it happen. If you can't make a full class of pupils of whom you expect top grades, then the range of abilities can be a bit too big. You ideally need to be able to promote and demote, which means having at least one subject teacher per stream per year, so that pupils can shift between streams without timetable changes, and having small enough class sizes that the teachers can all cope with a few more being added (as well as possibly doing a bit of extra coaching to get a promoted pupil up to the level of the rest of the class). Selective schooling as a norm can write talented kids off at age 11 if their talents aren't broad enough. Streaming means that children can still excel in their best disciplines even if they are lacking in others.
  • dagw 10y ago
    The solution to the problem you describe is different classes for students of different abilities, not different schools. The school I went to (in England) split most classes into 4 sets where the 'best' student's in each subject went to set 1 and the ones that need extra help went to set 3 or 4. Then there where extra-curricular 'clubs' in certain subjects for students that wanted to go even deeper than the lessons allowed. Even the most gifted of students may need some extra help in some subject. I, for example, was in set 1 for math and science, but set 4 for french.
    • maverick_iceman 10y ago
      In my experiences abilities in different subjects are highly correlated. So someone who is very good in science/math is unlikely to be completely dumb when it comes to history/language. So your proposal would actually give rise to (intellectually) segregated schools in all but name. So we might as well make it formal.
      • dagw 10y ago
        So your proposal would actually give rise to (intellectually) segregated schools in all but name I didn't find that at all. There is more to school than classes, and we did have a bunch of classes that weren't segregated by ability (history, geography, religious studies, shop classes, sometimes PE, etc.) Plus we had lunch and all breaks together. My friends where absolutely not all in the same math set as me.
    • neap24 10y ago
      This is actually a great compromise solution (and practical). I had the experience of being in a "gifted" class from third grade to sixth grade. It seemed to be a win-win situation where the school (and students) got the benefits of intellectual diversity but allowed kids to learn more at their own pace.
    • atErik 10y ago
      I agree w/ dagw. Schools need to have extra classes, extra-curricular classes, etc based on set of similarly gifted students' abilities, or based on set of similarly non-gifted/regular students' lack-of-abilities to improve their abilities. If needed, eligible volunteer or paid teacher should be arranged on specific time. A separate school for gifted students or a separate school for regular/non-gifted students is very-bad/non-gifted idea w/evil & ineffective motives.
  • jmkni 10y ago
    We still have Grammar Schools in Northern Ireland. I definitely believe that they work, it's a shame they don't have them in England.
    • ZeroGravitas 10y ago
      Can you define "work" in this instance? For example, if they made half the kids do better, and half the kids do worse, does that count as working? While you sometimes get claims that it's for their own good that less academically inclined pupils are sent to the non-grammar schools, I'd guess the same people who say this would freak right the hell out if their own kid failed the exam and didn't get in, which kind of undermines that argument.
      • jmkni 10y ago
        I meant that they work for the individual, a child sent to a grammar school will get a solid education. I take your point about the wider ramifications, but I feel as though I got a good education, and if I ever have kids, I would want them to go to a grammar school too.
        • scholia 10y ago
          One of the problems is that kids in the top streams in highly-selective schools do very well. The kids at the bottom often don't so as well, and sometimes become problem cases. These same kids -- who are very bright -- would be stars / top students if they'd gone to a lesser school. Source: Personal experience. I went a grammar school in the UK. I also taught in a top UK grammar school and a not-very-good comprehensive school. I've seen it happen numerous times.
  • brightball 10y ago
    You just described why so many people support school choice and voucher policies. It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model. EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model. It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society, it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices. Whether or not options should be restricted in schooling is a topic for cost/benefit analysis, but as a general point, I don't see anything mind-boggling about this perspective.
      • zepto 10y ago
        This makes no sense - you are proposing restricting the options of high performers so that they don't make self interested choices. Why not restrict the choices of low performers instead?
        • TeMPOraL 10y ago
          Because with this definition of the problem, the "low performers" don't have options to restrict. My point, as applied to this case, is that giving the option of "smart-only schools" will predictably lead to people taking it, which may lead to issues described by 'habosa here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591. It's a reasonable question to ask if this is what is beneficial to the society (including its economy), and if the answer is no, then not giving such an option in a first place is an entirely logical approach.
          • hydrogen18 10y ago
            Then why not just rephrase the problem, so the "low performers" can simply be removed from the education system entirely? That's what you're proposing when you tell someone gifted they can't have education that _actually educates_ them.
  • morgante 10y ago
    I agree. This is going to sound conceited, but I really blame the public school system for never giving me a challenge. Until I eventually got into private school for the last 2 years of high school, I had never had to work to get straight As. I could often complete homework assignments before class was even over. Unfortunately, this conditioned me to be incredibly lazy. As I never developed a strong work ethic, in college I continued to put in a minimum of effort though that wasn't enough for straight As. I've never really had the experience of consistently trying to do something hard. Even though I'm trying to force myself to do it now (setting ambitious fitness goals and taking advanced online classes), I can't help but feel that it would've been a lot easier to develop this grit when motivation didn't entirely depend on me.
    • greedo 10y ago
      You've described the fate of an entire generation of gifted students. It's awfully hard to overcome years and years of this instilled at an early/formative age. Teaching children to work for goals is one of the most important tasks that parents and to a lesser extent society, have.
  • zefman 10y ago
    Strangely grammar schools still exist in Kent. You have to sit an exam called the 11+ to enter which is much more like an IQ test than a standard subject based exam. The most comman argument against them is that privelleged families can afford to tutor their kids specifically to pass this exam. I was lucky enough to pass the exam, and while there definitely were instances of well off kids who had massive amounts of tutoring, the vast majority were from all kinds of different backgrounds, and levels of education. For me it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, but I completely understand both sides of the argument.
• KiwiCoder 10y ago
  This article frames the question rhetorically. Of course we should not disadvantage gifted children by depriving them of tailored learning strategies etc. Why on earth would we even consider it? But it's not so easy to define what this means in practice, particularly in the UK where the debate over selective schooling is bound up with issues related to class and wealth.
• jawns 10y ago
  Here in the U.S., very few public high schools have single-track education, at least not for "core" subjects such as English, math, and science. There are typically remedial, standard, honors, and AP classes for these subjects. And I would think that if you're OK with multi-track education, it would seem like having a separate school for gifted students is just an extension of that. That said, in my own experience, although there were down sides to having some single-track subjects (e.g. physical education), one benefit of attending a school with children of all ability levels was that you were exposed to children from all walks of life. I would imagine that a school for gifted students would have skewed socioeconomic demographics compared to a school for students of all ability levels, and in many places, that might also mean less racial diversity. At my public high school, we had a program where students at standard-level or above would assist special-education students. That type of opportunity would probably be missing from a school for only gifted students. You would be less likely to come into contact with (and befriend) people with intellectual disabilities, or even people with average intelligence. Edit: One other point. Academic giftedness is often thought of as one monolithic thing, but I know several people whose giftedness varies wildly by subject. If you attend a school for gifted students, would there be an expectation that you would be gifted in all subject areas? Would it be more difficult for you to get help in the subjects where you struggle?
  • jschwartzi 10y ago
    Mostly what I learned in high school was how to talk to kids from blue-collar families. Don't use multi-syllabic words, and talk only in concrete terms. Avoid use of abstraction and don't pontificate about anything.
    • dvcc 10y ago
      Wow, as a member of a blue-collar family this is downright insulting. The gross generalization of an entire social class is anything but healthy. Funny enough, I just finished reading the article and comments from the story on what it's like to be poor at an Ivy League (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480802). Personally, I thought that I never really felt disparate enough where I actually stuck out to my peers, and that the thoughts everyone had were more akin to class anxiety. It seems that the thoughts are not always unfounded I guess. Oh well.
• iplaw 10y ago
  Yes. Without a single doubt. I attended the long-running #1 public school in the nation. The School for the Talented and Gifted Magnet High School in Dallas, TX. The environment fostered creativity and learning. There were no distractions or negative pressures or stressors. Being smart didn't result in being bullied, it resulted in being respected.
  • shawabawa3 10y ago
    I think there's no doubt that it's a good thing for the students that go to these schools. The question is whether it's good for society as other schools may suffer
    • maverick_iceman 10y ago
      How is it bad for society for bright students to excel?
      • habosa 10y ago
        I think the question was what happens to the students who are not labeled as 'bright'? How does their being cast off to a "lower" school affect society in the long run.
      • lol214365 10y ago
        It reduces social mobility. Charles Murray talks about how there is a trade-off between social mobility and meritocracy due to the heredity of IQ. In a meritocratic society, the smartest kids go to the best schools, then to the best colleges, then the most elite companies, then likely marry someone from school or work, and then have the smartest kids. Socioeconomic classes become set due the stability of cognitive function across generations. Is it ideal to have a cognitively and economically stratified america with a cognitive elite and cognitive under-class? Is it ideal that this cognitive elite has little to no interaction with the rest of America, and little understanding of how the rest of the country lives?
        • 10y ago
• seattle_spring 10y ago
  This is anecdotal, but in 10th grade I transferred to a charter school with no separate classes. The "gifted" students were in the same school as the students who needed extra attention. The end result was just that-- all of the attention was given to the students who needed it. The cirriculum was dumbed down, and the "gifted" students didn't learn almost anything. It was better for the students who needed help, and much worse for the students that didn't. I view the end result akin to eliminating salary negotiations to help those who are too afraid to negotiate.
  • ygaf 10y ago
    Going by other comments, it seems "equality of life" and fears for the future are more important than bright kids' wellbeing.
• OJFord 10y ago
  > Despite two Senate inquiries in 1988 and 2001, it has taken 15 years and a state parliamentary review for the Victorian government This is an incredibly disorienting sentence for one not familiar with where The Conversation is based! (Australia, I suppose, having had a few needed minutes!)
• wyldfire 10y ago
  > When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance I have heard of lots of anecdotes of this occurring. I can believe it takes place. IMO this reason is exceptional and should get special attention. The article is fairly Aussie-specific. In the US we have an education system which has a lot of opportunity for improvement. But the metrics focus on either the median student performance against milestones/proficiency or the median student progress. As long as this is the way they're measured, the outliers will not get special attention. As a result, parents should be prepared to spend time and money educating their gifted children above and beyond the school curriculum.
• jmduke 10y ago
  I know this article is Australia-centric, but most US schools, to my knowledge, have multi-track educational programs (gifted students can take more advanced courses, take Honors/IB/AP, etc. etc.) which have separate curricula and teachers. In this respect, they're already in a separate program: having them go to a separate school entirely just hurts socialization between groups of students, which is more important for a child's development. Overall, this seems like an unhelpful place to invest compared to more fundamental educational issues (and, pragmatically, I can see many areas where this goes awry, ie many aptitude tests for kids being biased for socioeconomic reaosns).
  • ng12 10y ago
    The problem in the US is that the AP kids get shafted because so much of the budget is spent on running a glorified daycare for the kids who really don't want to be there.
    • jmduke 10y ago
      If the issue is "not enough of an area's educational budget is devoted to AP kids", I don't see how that is solved by creating an entirely different school? If there's enough money to create a school for gifted kids, then I think that money is better spent investing in the AP programs in those multi-track schools. (It's entirely possible that I'm overlooking some nuances in how education budgets work, but I'm talking more in the macro sense.)
      • ng12 10y ago
        A few bad apples. The kids who don't care spoil the opportunities of the kids who do. The two need completely different support systems -- kids who don't care need to be monitored, kids who do need opportunities. As a finite example: they canceled the "electives" at my school (students could sign up for a 2x/week lecture on an eclectic subject) because a lot of the kids figured out they were the easiest to skip.
        • jmduke 10y ago
• germinalphrase 10y ago
  Alternatively, why not just allow advanced students to graduate and start college/career early, if they so desire. I know this happens in exceptional cases, but why force a kid to just load up with AP classes (which may - but probably do not - match college level rigor) rather than simply taking college courses? If they're past what high school can offer then let them finish and leave. We keep far too many students in high school longer than they want/need to be. Most - in my experience - just start to coast at that point. A separate school for "advanced" students doesn't outright bother me; however, I think defining "advanced" is more challenging than most would initially consider. There are many reasons that a student may be ahead/behind at any point in their education.
  • got2surf 10y ago
    College courses are a great option too (my school district allowed "dual enrollment" where you could take anywhere from one to all of your classes at one of the local community or state colleges). There are definitely some cases where the AP equivalent is "harder", better taught, or better suited to high-school age students, though. I agree that defining "advanced" is very challenging, and goes beyond just the academic as well. There's also something to be said for being academically engaged with people similar to you (ie - some (most?) high school kids may learn more from peers in a self-selected AP Calculus class than they would from a Calc 1 class at the local college taken by kids looking to fill a requirement).
    • aaronchall 10y ago
      I remember my decision making process: It seemed to me that if I took the dual/early enrollment college course that I would definitely get the credit, whereas the AP course would actually require far more repetitive homework, lots more class time (which I didn't want to do), and only then would I have a chance to qualify for college credit. That's a no-brainer, in my book, but so many of my peers refused to follow my lead to the University when I tried to persuade them. In spite of lots of sales training, I've never been a good salesman.
      • 10y ago
• MichaelBurge 10y ago
  The government should not be running any schools at all. They can impose taxes to fund them, but everyone should go to private schools that operate on the free market. Then you wouldn't need to ask the government to build another school; you could just do it.
  • analog31 10y ago
    The government would still have to operate schools, because of two failure modes: 1. Lack of capacity: Families that can't find schools for their kids, or entire regions that are "school deserts." 2. Schools that fail or go bankrupt. Both are cases of private businesses pocketing public money while externalizing their risks and leaving the government with the cost of bailing them out. I speculate that a law of economics or politics is: If something requires universal access for everybody, then it will be effectively supported by the government, even if the mechanism is not obvious.
  • Retra 10y ago
    The 'free market' is basically an fragmented informal feudalist government.
• makecheck 10y ago
  In order to keep students motivated, they should have opportunities to work at their best pace (i.e. let them work with other “gifted” students on interesting projects from time to time). On the other hand, learning how to interact with everyone is important and that will matter when it comes to functioning in society as an adult. It will also ensure that gifted people remain aware of and interested in all of society’s problems and not just whatever is happening in their silo.
  • maverick_iceman 10y ago
    I doubt it will matter very much. Smart kids will grow up to be employed in intellectually stimulating knowledge based work. They will be likely be surrounded by people with similar intellectual capabilities. I know that "learning how to interact with everyone" gives people a warm fuzzy feeling but the lack of it is unlikely to be a serious handicap.
• empath75 10y ago
  "Gifted" programs were primarily used as a way to resegregate schools. So no, I don't think so.
• mrcactu5 10y ago
  there are lots of people who have a knack for things that don't fall into the traditional Stanford-Binet definition of "gifted". Nor does it account for a person who matures in their teens or 20s or beyond. I am also somewhat nervous of bias in the definition of "gifted", which may have things build into it which are correlated with race or culture. Put simply, there are really bright people that the system never catches, at any stage.
• wibbleywobbley 10y ago
  I don't think it's necessary. When I was in high school you could elect to take a more or less challenging course load. I effective did go to a different school than many of my peers simply by taking different classes.
• maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Hell ya. I was utterly bored in most classes at school since most of the stuff they covered I have done a few years ago. This was true not only of science and math but humanities subjects like history as well. Not to mention that many teachers couldn't handle the fact that a student was smarter than them. In addition, it was very hard to find intellectual peers at an average school.
• ctdonath 10y ago
  Vouchers should be available for all parents to send their children to whatever accredited school they deem appropriate for their child's needs.
  • michael_h 10y ago
    Suddenly, the school for gifted kids is inundated with new students.
    • ctdonath 10y ago
      If parents perceive the public school is not providing suitable services, and the private school is, then the public school finds reason to correct the deficiency - competition works. And if the private school can't handle the inundation, then there's incentive to either expand capacity and/or another school adapt/open to share the load.
• johnsmith21006 10y ago
  In the US. Our school does one day a week for the gifted kids. I have volunteered at the school and love the program. Only issue is it fair to the other kids? You get in based an IQ test.
• shanemhansen 10y ago
  Honestly I think that school is state sponsored babysitting. Once you understand that, the rhetoric teachers are often spouting about "misbehavior" "defiance" and "insubordination" all makes sense. At school a child's job is to not make a stir. I also think free public school is critical to having an educated productive populace. There's an apparent disconnect between my first opinion and the second. That disconnect is, and I know this will sound trite, questioning authority and facts. It's a critically important practice that schools actively discourage.
• Galinha 10y ago
  What do you mean by gifted students? How you define them? Are you speaking about extraordinary brains and high QI? In a normal basis, my answer is no, no and no. In Germany some schools start to separate kids when they have 10 years old. Is too soon. Intelligence it's not only about to be good at school - look at Einstein.
• brudgers 10y ago
  I suspect that some gifted kids would benefit from it and others would not and that whether or not a child should go to a separate school should be determined on an individual basis.
• Galinha 10y ago
  What do you mean by gifted? QI? Or just kids with better results at the exams? In Germany, some schools, start to do the separation when kids have only 10 years old. It seems to me too much stress and it's not even effective, bc you do it having an exam in consideration. School is not everything, look at Einstein :)
• scblock 10y ago
  As a gifted student who took gifted and accelerated classes from grade school through high school, including several classes at another school, emphatically no.
• cschmidt 10y ago
  The article reminds me a bit of the Maine School for Science and Mathematics (http://www.mssm.org/ http://www.mssm.org/). It is a free boarding school run by the state of Maine to support those kids who don't have a school district where they can really get into STEM. Tuition is free if you're from Maine, which is really cool. A great way to support kids in rural areas. It is usually rated one of the top high schools in the country.
• tabeth 10y ago
  I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular students? - Small classes? Help regular students to extent. - Better curriculum? Hey! Helps regular students. - More practical education? Also helps regular students --- I'm not against segregation in theory. However, in practice there's very little evidence that the gifted schools would NOT benefit regular students. If you believe that gifted students should receive more education than regular students, then that's an entirely separate discussion. If you have evidence, I'd love to see it (I'm very interested in education, in particular).
  • justin_vanw 10y ago
    1. Who cares? This is not an argument for or against this. It's totally inappropriate to decide the best way to educate a child based on your personal theories about how wealth should be distributed, and your untested wild ass guess about what effect some educational policy would have on that theory. 2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging. - Small classes: maybe, it's not necessary at all. - better curriculum: well, yes, smarter kids can cover a topic more quickly and in more depth. The less smart kids can't keep up, so they have to skim less deeply and/or cover less material. - more practical: ??? did you feel like you needed 3 bullets or something? You should have separate schools because there aren't enough gifted kids in one regular school to even fill one class. This comes directly from the definition of gifted, if gifted is say the top 1% of students, a large high-school with 1500 kids would only have 15 of them across 4 grades. You have to do something like a magnet school to have enough kids at the same level in the same room for it to work at all.
    • tabeth 10y ago
      I won't respond to the first point. If you're seriously asking "who cares" about income inequality then I don't think discourse will be productive. In any case, you didn't seem to refute my main point that gifted schools would also benefit regular students.
• habosa 10y ago
  A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? This will be highly correlated with race and socioeconomic status since we know that poor / minority communities don't have the best resources / results for early childhood development. 2. What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? "Smart" kids who never have to interact with anyone "below" them or "dumb" kids who never have to interact with anyone "above" them will have trouble navigating many social and professional situations. 3. "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. These parents are often the best advocates for positive change in their community. The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
  • Aqueous 10y ago
    4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots. We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'
    • hawkice 10y ago
      > We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If we're smart, we set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students and 'smart' students gain from theirs. So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
• hawkice 10y ago
  I can't imagine any policymaker would be reading this thread, but if so: YES, PLEASE, DEAR GOD YES. When I was in normal schools (public and private) I stood out. I don't mean, I was precocious and didn't everyone notice how clever I was. I mean, I was bullied. By everyone. Including my teachers. My life was hell, every day getting worse. I was physically sick just thinking about going to school every morning. Until I was in a Gifted and Talented program in 5th grade. The material wasn't challenging (this is NOT about getting challenging material), but I had a teacher that understood me and peers who didn't hate me. Giving children a space where they're not constantly tortured is a good policy. As a now-productive member of society, there is no amount of my current success I would not ransom so that children now don't have to go through what I did. It's not something a civilized society should allow.
• huffmsa 10y ago
  Yes, unless the curriculum is set to meet their level of educational capacity. Does trickle down education work? Would a middle quartile student benefit more from trying to keep up with the top quartile than they do for curriculum geared to them? Would be an interesting experiment.
• gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_View_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_View_School
• justin_vanw 10y ago
  Yea probably. There's no reason to hold them back or subject them to peer abuse, or condition them to hide their gift. Very gifted students will start knowing more about what they are studying than the teacher between 3rd and 5th grades. They will be completely bored throughout high school if held back to the speed of even above average students. This teaches them that they can coast. It's a huge disservice to our society that our smartest kids are hobbled and quite often exposed to abuse from peers, leading them to be isolated and preventing them from learning appropriate social skills. Certainly this isn't always what happens, but it very often is exactly what happens.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• JDazzle 10y ago
  As a most definitely non-gifted student, I wonder what the impact of removing gifted students from the school? I've seen gifted students help others succeed through tutoring or even by providing a role model for others to look up to. I believe having a gifted student in a regular school benefits the entire school and may help them in learning other, more social skills.
  • lutusp 10y ago
    One problem with mixing gifted with average students is that the gifted start coasting, not trying, not developing their abilities, because it's too easy to stay ahead of the rest of the students. Then, when that person gets to college, he/she is totally unprepared for real intellectual competition. There are many positive points to mixing the gifted with the average, but their personal scholarly advancement tends to suffer.
• chuckcode 10y ago
  In my experience learning is not a "one size fits all" product product, or even fits most. I'd really like to see schools have more resources and expertise to address different kids learning styles and aptitudes as I have yet to see a single style of teaching that works for all kids. Ideally they wouldn't have to go to different schools as I think it is good socially to learn to interact with all different types of people from an early age.
• searine 10y ago
  Growing up a lot of my friends went to a "gifted and talented" science magnet school, while I got left behind at a "normal" public school. Now that we're all adults, I've out achieved all of them in terms of science/tech aptitude/contribution. "Gifted and Talented" is a trophy label for suburban parents. That's it.
• WhoBeI 10y ago
  Right, but aren't the groupings supposed to be called Erudite, Abnegation, Amity, Dauntless and other silly names like that. Intellectual, social, creative and physical sound so bland. :) Seriously though: I'm not against separate classes but dislike the idea of separate schools. Mostly because of where the best teachers, and budget, will be and what effect that will have on the less fortunate.
• WhoBeI 10y ago
  Right, but aren't the groupings supposed to be called Erudite, Abnegation, Amity, Dauntless and other silly names like that. Intellectual, social, creative and physical sound so bland. :) Seriously though: I'm not against separate classes but dislike the idea of separate schools. Mostly because of where the best teachers, and budget, will be and what effect that will have on the less fortunate.
• lutusp 10y ago
  For political reasons, in the U.S. this idea is a non-starter -- many people won't accept the idea of paying taxes to support special programs for the gifted, but are willing to do it for those below average. So in the U.S., the expression "special needs children" is a euphemism for handicapped, not gifted, children. There are noteworthy exceptions, usually in large cities with well-educated taxpayers, but for the majority of locales, earmarks for the gifted are just too controversial. An interesting side effect of this anti-intellectual bias is today sitting in the White House.
  • dpayne 10y ago
    There are many high schools like this in the U.S. that are state funded, both in very liberal and very conservative states.
• randomgyatwork 10y ago
  As a child, I had a learning disability, my school's principal told my parents that I'd never do anything with my life. My parents disagree and so did I, they found a private school that specialized in teaching students like me. The school did some intellectual tests to make sure I could learn, and learn I did. They spent tens of thousands of dollars so that I could be taught, in that environment I excelled. I don't trust the government to be a good judge of students abilities, because someone like me would be labelled dumb and be left behind forever.
  • erroneousfunk 10y ago
    So you're in favor of separate schools for kids with differing abilities and needs (like you had), but better testing and assessment to determine those abilities and needs? It sounds like you agree with the article.
    • randomgyatwork 10y ago
      Naw, I specifically said I don't trust the government. Parents should be able to choose the kind of school their child goes to... Though, this is unfair to kids with bad parents. That said, people who will (knowingly) be bad parents, shouldn't have kids in the first place.
      • erroneousfunk 10y ago
        The basic premise of the article is simply that gifted children do better when separated. It doesn't necessarily advocate for "the government" doing the separation, only that a separation should occur. "Who does the choosing" is a separate debate...
• akhilcacharya 10y ago
  They do, it's called college.
• backtoyoujim 10y ago
  Should the un-gifted students be required to build that school ?
• Pica_soO 10y ago
  No, but there should be seperated, one project based, the other classic frontal teaching and a way to trade gifted-extra-credits into "have the non-gifted work on your project for better grades".
• saluki 10y ago
  I don't think a separate school is a good thing. I was in the gifted program in grade school and junior high, it was an awesome experience. (US Midwest) Three points. 1. Not all kids are gifted in all areas so usually we were in a mix of gifted and non-gifted classes. 2. It's important to interact with all levels/types of kids and there are experiences at school outside of classes. 3. It makes it feel more special that you get to go to certain classes/do special things and events that not everyone is in. Keep it as a program inside the school.
• dkarapetyan 10y ago
  No. There is something one learns by going to public schools and seeing all his fellow human beings held to the same standards. I grew up in Armenia in the post soviet union era. The one thing they got right was the education part. There were no distinctions. We all learned the same material, gifted or not. Those that lagged got extra attention and help. When I first got here the segregation of "gifted" vs "non-gifted" always felt viscerally incorrect to me.
  • stale2002 10y ago
    OK, so if you are all learning the same material, what happens when someone learns all the material months before everyone else? Do they just sit around and do nothing? Is that really a productive use of their time?
    • dkarapetyan 10y ago
      I guess that would make them some kind of genius in which case they can start attending university. I was learning matrix algebra in 4th grade based on the soviet system whereas everyone here was barely doing 2 + 2 = ? in some worksheet. Surprisingly folks managed to not be bored. If your standard is what the current system teaches then it's not hard to improve it and have people not be bored while still not drawing a distinction between "gifted" and "non-gifted".
      • stale2002 10y ago
        No... That does not make you a genius if you are ahead of the class. Getting a couple months ahead is easy, when everyone else is going slowly. Sure, if the entire class is going quickly, that is effectively as if everyone is in the gifted class. We shouldn't dumb things down to keep up with the lowest common denominator. Students should be able to work at their own pace, and if they get ahead, them they should be put ahead.
• dboreham 10y ago
  I think much of the time what we have is "gifted parents". Some thoughts: Can school administrators reliably identify "gifted" students? Gifted in one subject? Averagely gifted? Should we remove the better able students from regular school, leaving the average ability much lower? If there aren't very high quality teachers available to teach "gifted" students, then what's the point? Conversely, if we had more very high quality teachers, wouldn't that go a long way toward fixing our education problems anyway? Affluent and/or highly educated parents can easily skew the finding that their child is gifted. Source: I went to a highly selective, private school outside the US (the inspiration for Hogwarts, fwiw). My kids go to public school in the US - one has been identified by the school as gifted (but doesn't want to participate in the gifted program), the other has not. Our school district receives something like 0.5% of the funding they get for special needs students, for their gifted program. I have also taught coding in middle school. In my time in the class room I saw several students who came from higher income/higher educated households that performed well. I saw a big middle group who did ok. I saw several students who didn't care to do any work. I saw one student from a lower income demographic who showed uncommon promise in the subject. Given that evidence what am I to do with a gifted student budget assuming I have one? All I could do at the time was to approach the parent of that one student and give my feedback, ask that they consider encouraging his talents. I have no idea what happened after that. The other thing I could do is help the smart motivated kids from affluent families achieve even better results than their peers than they were already able to. I'm really not sure that would be a good use of my time and money..
• caw 10y ago
  It's been a while since I took German in high school, but I remember there being a distinction between Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. The opportunities offered to students of each school were different (vocational or University), and you had a test to determine which one you went to. That sounds similar to the proposal in the article. Is there any data from this system that would support the premise of a separate gifted school being a better way of teaching advanced students?
• stoic 10y ago
  I don't know about anyone else (a problematic side effect), but I went to a science-focused public magnet school instead of my neighborhood high school and it made a world of difference in my life, both in terms of instruction and social experience. Maybe this deprives the kids in the neighborhood school of some diversity near the top end of achievement, but maybe they shouldn't have been dicks to us in middle school if they wanted us to stick around.
• strathmeyer 10y ago
  I scored the highest in my county on a middle school math exam. I got a 4.0GPA in high school and perfect math SATs. 2 years of calculus and 1 of stats and a college level CS course before I graduated high school. Played sports, presidented clubs, eagle scouted. Was rejected from 5 universities so I ended up going to some loser school nobody had ever heard of called Carnegie Mellon University and after I graduated with a worthless degree in Computer Science they told me they didn't have any help for me and it should be easy for me to find a programming job. I asked for help until they banned me from campus and prohibited me from speaking to anyone in the "CMU community" or else they would arrest me and hold me in jail for a few weeks again. So, yes, it would've been nice if we couldn't gone to a separate school where they could've explained us our opportunities.
• fsloth 10y ago
  Yes. Anyone who in primary school did their entire math book on one sitting for the fun of it and got admonished for it - "what on earth I'm going to do with you now in math, that was the entire material" probably agrees with me. Or my wife, who knew her egyptian history inside out and got laughed at because "she could not name Cleopatra as a female pharaoh". (Cleopatra was greek aristocrat, not a pharaoh) Needless to say my enthusiasm for math really wasn't the same after that. Or her eagerness for history. To be totally disconnected from ones peers is a torture no child should be forced to suffer. To be taught by teachers who aren't actually comfortable with their discipline. And this was 30 years ago in Finland, now touted as one of the best examples in primary education.
  • run4yourlives2 10y ago
    Your wife (and you) are wrong. Cleopatra was a Pharaoh. Yes, she was a Greek decent of Alexander, and the Ptolemaic Dynasty was of his blood, not Egyptian, but it's founder Ptolemy declared himself Pharaoh, and therefore she had the title as well. It's similar as to how Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of Canada, even though she is English. To say she isn't the Queen of Canada is simply incorrect. This level of hubris is a perfect example of why mixed education is a good thing. Nobody is so gifted to be above the human frailty of being wrong.
• trumpeta 10y ago
  I think we have the technology to challenge the smart kids in a mixed classroom. The dumber kids will act as a sort of social regularizer and the smart ones will be allowed to progress at a faster pace. I think classes should be "stationary" and individual students will move through them at their own pace, challenging for the good ones and slow for the slower ones. No kid should leave the class until they have mastered the subject. They could also move at different paces through different subjects. I believe the current system's limitations stem from the teacher's capacity to attend to at most 30 students at a time, this may have been the case when everything was whiteboard. But now you have iPads and interactive websites and so on.
• mholmes680 10y ago
  >>students who are gifted have specific learning needs that require: >> tailored learning strategies >> education supported by a challenging curriculum >> teachers trained in gifted education >> more exposure to students of similar ability >> opportunities for acceleration I find this interesting, coming from the "gifted" track in HS and being married to a special education teacher at a public school. The same list applies to both groups, and i don't see why it wouldn't apply just to all students. How could any of these be more important for some students and not others? They can't be. Its just that public schools don't have the ability to deal with a class of students 25 large and deal with 25 different ways of teaching. Technology and public school funding hasn't caught up here... huge gap. So, we've dreamed up schools where we group kids to deal with the shortcoming. We're not helping students here, we're helping ourselves ignore real solutions.
  • CaptSpify 10y ago
    I would have loved to have gone to a class with only 25 students. Mine usually had ~32. I think this is the real issue: To effectively help any student, gifted, slow or average, they all need more focused attention and curriculum.
  • jraedisch 10y ago
    I think that the issue is how much society is willing to spend on education as a whole. Sure, if we do not want to spend more, we can have some trophy schools and lower the quality of the rest a bit further, and if we let just the good students go there, that will ensure the success of those schools even more. On the other hand we could try to get some gifted people into every school as teachers. Of course that would be much more expensive.
• mathattack 10y ago
  My 2 cents as a parent... The "Don't let any kids fall behind" is an extremely laudable goal. Educating everyone, and aiming for a high standard for people of all abilities and socio-economic backgrounds is extremely vital. We may not be achieving that goal well, but it a very worthy one, and will do more than almost anything else to reduce income inequality. The danger is that having this focus in school means that kids get neglected once they pass that threshold. When a school is graded by "% of kids who are at-level" there is no incentive for the best ones. In my opinion this is why these kids need to be pulled into separate schools where the ambitions are higher than the minimum threshold. I see it with kids who are several grades ahead in math and reading, and their only options are skipping grades (and being socially awkward) or being bored out of their mind in class. This isn't permanent tracking, but it's giving the option to excel for those who are ready and willing.
  • new_hackers 10y ago
    Agreed, a civilized society should have a basic education curriculum which all students may participate in, regardless of sex, religion, or socio-economic status. This is the minimum bar that all should be granted. However, most of the comments here seem to be assuming that school is 100% of a child's learning. If you are a "gifted" student, then there are plenty of hours in the day to develop other skills. Or pony up the cash for private school. The public school should be for educating the public. When I was young there was already basically two tiers of education within the public school, the AP track and the vocational track.
  • run4yourlives2 10y ago
    Devil's advocate here: >The danger is that having this focus in school means that kids get neglected once they pass that threshold. Is this a bad thing? Does it even qualify as neglect? If a child is so far ahead of his peers, what benefit is it to have them increase that gap? At some point, they will need to interact with the group they left behind, how does that become an easier task when the distance is even greater? I find it hard to believe that a gifted child is so spectacular that she is miles ahead of her peers in every possible area. It's certainly true that they can be ahead in the small subset of skills we consider 'essential' in school, but there are likely other areas where they are not. There's a reason depression is correlated in a curious way with increased intelligence. It's certainly true that they could benefit from classes with older kids; but then, the issue is really the age based segregation of school, isn't it?. It seems like the entire "gifted" idea would vanish in a sense if we removed the erroneous idea that intelligence is correlated with age, at least in how it informs the idea of "grades" being "all kids born in x year".
• stephancoral 10y ago
  Hell no. The last thing we need is to segregate arbitrarily designated 'gifted' students from the rest of the school population. Not only will that breed resentment amongst peer groups, it also reduces the amount of important social interaction that takes place. Some of my best friends and the most inspiring people to me were so-called 'average' students who I wouldn't have met if I had gone to some smarty pants academy. I was considered a gifted student and had the chance to go to some fancy private schools but I stayed at my public school and you know what, I absolutely loved it. Were the classes slow for me and too easy? Obviously, but I always brought a book (or three) and would read them throughout the day and at lunch. I slacked off on my homework and taught myself how to program. I helped my friends with their work - not cheating, but actively tutoring and explaining the principles. One of my friends who absolutely sucked at math is now graduating with a chem degree. If a student is truly gifted, they will learn on their own and help others. As society becomes ever more unequal and stratified, we need as much social pollination as possible. Hell, the way public schools are going we should keep as many smart kids in there as we can. There were some student-run after school courses at my HS that were amazing.
• SlySherZ 10y ago
  No, let me explain why: - Being "gifted" isn't a black and white trait, it's much more diverse; - Different people are gifted in different topics. I've always learned maths faster than my peers, but they all dance better than I do; - How do you even decide who is gifted and who isn't? Just give everyone the same oportunities; But I do believe that school should be tailored to fit the student. What I propose is to allow the student to progress at his own pace: - Classes should be open for every student that has passed all the prerequisites to join; - The student can choose when he he's ready to take the test about the topics he already learned; - Some teachers should keep track of the progress of the students; - There should be always teachers with free time ready to help students who request it; EDIT: Fixed broken formatting.
• Zigurd 10y ago
  My daughter transferred out of a great school in our home community to go to a math and science oriented selective school. She was bored and her grades slipped. In the school she transferred to, she got her ass kicked for two years and learned to be self-sufficient and learned she would not always be the smartest person in the building. Now she's a CMU SCS alum. I don't know if she could have made it through SCS without that preparation. My son, on the other hand, thrived in our town's public school. He would have resented going to the school my daughter went through. He would have seen it as unnecessary, even punitive. He is at a very large university and is thriving there, too. Different kids have different kinds of intelligence and maturity levels at different ages. Some never "fit in" and some kids are the kids everyone likes and have the high school social thing totally under control while pulling straight As. If you undermine public schools by segregating the smart kids, my son would not have had time to play football, lacrosse, and baseball and teach skiing as his after school job. He would have felt getting good grades was a curse.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• run4yourlives2 10y ago
  > students who are gifted have specific learning needs that require: tailored learning strategies, education supported by a challenging curriculum, teachers trained in gifted education, more exposure to students of similar ability, opportunities for acceleration So, gifted students are like every other student and excel with educational approaches tailored to their style of learning. Okay. You could say this exact same thing about kids with ADD, kids with Autism, boys, girls, kids with brown hair, etc, etc. The arguments for this type of segregation and any other type of segregation are exactly the same. Do boys excel when removed from girls? Some of them do, others to a negligible degree. The issue is that the government isn't trying to educate "your kid", it's trying to educate "every kid". Why? Because having a baseline education in your society - particularly in a democracy - is a very beneficial thing, for far too many reasons to get into here. So the purpose of public schooling is not to bring you up to your full potential, it's to provide you with a base level starting point. Equality not of outcome, but of opportunity in life. There is a fine balance between the good of the individual and the good of the overall society. The latter often supporting the former. It does us no good to further isolate ourselves from each other in ways that simply aren't compatible with maintaining a sustainable and just society overall. Western democracy has historically been able to walk the line between self-determination and individual freedom and collective control and deference to the state, but I fear we're starting to see shifts away from the centre into more extremes. Clamoring for segregation is just another form of destructive identity politics at the end of the day. All that being said, I'll have to just come out and say that of course individual kids will be better off in tailored environments than they would be in the general populace. That isn't the question. The question really should be, are they better off growing up in an environment so removed from the reality of the world they are going to help run in the future? I'm not so sure.
• mgarfias 10y ago
  Yes.
• throwanem 10y ago
  Not that it's going to get any traction, but I find myself compelled to ask: is it possible that the problems with attempting to enable human beings to make the most of their individual capabilities, by means of an assembly line, are not best solved by incremental modification of the stations and routing on that line?
• throw2016 10y ago
  This can be simple as long as there is a scientific way to identify gifted children that is fairly and unequivocally available to all children and as a society there is clarity and consensus on what to do with both groups. If there is consensus then there also has to be a way to cross pollinate between both groups as gifted children are discovered later and those who are gifted but unable to cope are moved back. And finally since the fundamental basis for any such exercise is ensuring gifted children get the attention they need, any plan has to ensure full and comprehensive support to the unprivileged so children who are gifted but from unprivileged backgrounds are not denied opportunities to exploit their full talent because of circumstance.
• opensandwich 10y ago
  I come from the state of NSW (in Australia), the state with this program, and was also one of the students from selective schools. It is important to note that in Sydney, Australia: it isn't only the public school system which have selective schools, but there exists private schools where academic exams are required to gain entrance (see Sydney Grammar School). There are a lot of [selective schools; not just one or two, but 46](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selective_high_schools_in_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selective_high_schools...)! You can see in the implementation that some are full selective, and others are partially selective. Furthermore in primary school there are also [opportunity class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_class) which is also for gifted students. All of these schools are partially selective with around half the spots of high school. My observation from these schools are that the _location_ of these schools don't matter much. Students will travel from the other side of Sydney to attend any of these schools! For example, there would be a lot of students from the south-west Sydney attending school in North Sydney. However, segregation based on academic abilities do yield some...results which I have also read about in the US: * Areas of top selective schools and top OC schools will generally yield higher asian population. * Schools will tend to have a higher asian population Also (unsurprisingly) these schools have dominated university entrance exams, with the median mark of the top school (James Ruse Agricultural School) typically well within the top 1% of all exam-takers within the state.
  • solresol 10y ago
    More worryingly, only one of the Sydney selective schools actually is vaguely representative of the Sydney population. James Ruse, for example has far less students from low-income families than Cumberland High does, which is on the other side of the street. In practice, the selective school places are awarded to the children of parents who are willing to send their kids to coaching college throughout years 4 and 5. Hence the higher asian population. Actually having a high IQ (my two children were tested by a leading psychologist above 99.8% and 99.9% of the population for example) doesn't get you there. And slightly worse -- if you are smart and are accelerated, then you hit high school below the age range for which you can sit the selective test. The result is that schools such as James Ruse underperform: when the candidature were all in the top 1-2% at year 7, there are plenty of year 12 students who don't get even in the top 5%. But in principle it works out very well. The teachers can run classes at a rate more appropriate for the students, bullying is less prevalent, etc. So it's definitely worth doing (for the students) if the entrance criteria are half-way sane. The effect it has on the students who don't get into selective school though is a bit sad. It's also depressing for the teachers at comprehensive schools who may be working just as hard as those at the selective schools, but won't get rewarded from having highly successful students.
• novia 10y ago
  I just listened to a This American Life episode this morning that I feel is tangentially related. I would recommend giving it a listen if you want something to listen to for the next hour. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
• codingdave 10y ago
  Should they get tailored education? Certainly. Does that mean different schools? I'm not qualified to say, probably. I know I've seen programs recently where gifted students ended up mentoring their peers, thereby learning the material even better, and all students are lifted to a higher level. That seems like a pretty cool solution to me. But I'm not a professional educator, so I don't know what all the possible solutions are. But I do think that holding up just one possible answer for just one group of students and asking a yes/no question of whether that answer is correct is probably not looking at a big enough picture for all children.
• james_niro 10y ago
  Ideas word spreading.... Sugragation is never a good thing, besides how you can prove that your kid is gifted. Moreover, it will open the door to so many more prejudice and biased toward certain race and ethnicity.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• vikascoder 10y ago
  You could look at an actual implementation of such a system in Germany. They have a three tier structure and divide students on the basis of their "ability" at a very tender young age of 10 or so ( 4-5th grade). http://www.economist.com/node/5465005 http://www.economist.com/node/5465005
• URSpider94 10y ago
  People are disregarding three points: 1. gifted education is a difference in kind, not degree. Gifted kids need different things from their teachers to succeed, not just "more." I don't see anyone asking to devote significantly more resources to gifted students, what they are asking for is to educate them in ways that give them the best chance of success. 2. It's a fallacy to think that giftedness means that students will just do fine in regular courses, and may be just a little bored. Many gifted children (and some of them have posted to this list) will fail completely in a regular class setting, because they are unable to engage with the material or their peers. A significant number of gifted kids end up dropping out or under-achieving because they aren't being served. 3. Gifted kids are often born to gifted parents, but that does not mean rich or successful parents. There are a huge number of gifted kids in minority communities who are living in poverty. Want to learn more? Documentary filmmaker Marc Smolowitz is working on a feature-length film on giftedness. http://documentaries.org/cid-films/the-g-word/ http://documentaries.org/cid-films/the-g-word/
• mulmen 10y ago
  To answer the question in two words: absolutely not. I think this kind of segregation is harmful to the development of all students, including the gifted students. Gifted students can help raise up their less gifted classmates. If these gifted students are to be the next generation of leaders this is an invaluable skill. Nobody exists in a vacuum and putting students in an echo chamber during their formative years seems irresponsible. A diverse viewpoint and understanding of people different than you is crucial to a healthy society. If we learn early on that we are better or worse than others because of an arbitrary metric that will be carried forward for the rest of our lives. Would those that support segregated schools based on academic performance also support schools segregated based on athletic performance? I agree that gifted students have needs and those should be addressed but I don't think a separate school is the solution. Even AP classes feel like a problem to me because the most gifted students are not available to help those that struggle. Standardized testing hurts all students, not just gifted ones. We need to take a serious look at how education works in general so we can challenge all students to achieve their best. I don't think this can be done with echo chambers that create an increasing gap in academic performance and student development.
  • Kalium 10y ago
    I understand and sympathize. These children are the best and brightest of us. The future will be build by, of, and for them. We cannot have them isolated from everyone else. That way lies disconnection, alienation, resentment, and a total lack of empathy. Madness! When I was a gifted student in a classroom of regular students, I learned a great deal. What I learned was not how to help raise up my classmates. What I learned was that my classmates were petty and cruel people who got their jollies bringing me pain. Combine this with material that was far below me and rarely able to hold my attention and the result was a thoroughly miserable experience for a number of years. I got a diverse viewpoint and understanding of people different from me. I came to learn something else, too - I despised them. Gifted students are students. Please don't treat them as unpaid assistant teachers. They need to be cared for, kept safe, challenged, and taught. The same as every single other student.
    • mulmen 10y ago
• bootload 10y ago
  "Despite two Senate inquiries in 1988 and 2001, it has taken 15 years and a state parliamentary review for the Victorian government to decide to build a specialist high school for students who are gifted, specifically targeting those from rural and regional Victoria." Victorian here. Back when I was in HS is semi-rural setting, the school ran an interesting experiment for students for most of the time I was there. The curriculum was designed in 6m semesters with students allowed to move up years in subjects they excelled in. It was labelled, "vertical integration"/ There were advantages and disadvantages. You could for instance move up two years in study, move from year nine to years eleven maths. I know of one student who did this. While they handled the subject, they didn't handle the social dynamics well. This is a problem that could have been solved. Having to move to another school isn't feasible on a daily basis due to distances involved. Government schools in my state have been gutted by all measures, facilities, buildings and specialised teacher training, so maybe the powers-to-be are centralising smart kids and looking at ways of funding schools even less?
• rustmemcpy 10y ago
  How I wish I had gone to a separate school! I was in what you could define as the "gifted program" throughout middle and high school. Even though I ostensibly received a more advanced and tailored education, I still shared classes with students much less engaged than I. I was always at the top of my classes and was never truly challenged. I also never had the opportunity to participate in any kind of maths or informatics competitions. Having never been exposed to excellence, I chose to go to the much cheaper state school (their education will be just as good, the counselors claimed...). There too I excelled in my classes with minimal effort, took multiple graduate level courses, and received glowing recommendation letters from my professors. By the time I entered my PhD in a tier 1 university, I was so woefully unprepared -- both academically and emotionally -- that my eventual dropping out was a foregone conclusion. I spiraled into a deep depression and wasted a couple years of my life playing video games and living with my parents. I ideated suicide almost daily and willfully put my life in danger (standing at the edge atop tall buildings, driving very fast, imbibing liquor until I blacked out). Now, a decade later, I've mostly come to terms with my mediocrity, but perhaps I could've risen a bit from it had my intellect been properly fostered. But more to the point, had I been exposed to other smart kids and participated in competitions earlier on, my ego could've been slowly molded over my youth, rather than shattered in a few months.
• Animats 10y ago
  NYC did this in 1938 with the Bronx High School of Science. That school has produced eight Nobel Prize winners.
• nmca 10y ago
  Having been to a bunch of different schools, selective, not, public and private, I honestly think the solution to this will be primarily technological. Allowing kids to learn at their own pace with a solid kick towards an interactive textbook of some kind seems like a much better solution than segregation. Let teachers stick to what they're good at (supporting kids) and keep them away from the stuff they suck at (maths). And yeah, this will be biased towards the more self-motivated. But that seems fairer than a one-off arbitrary test determining a huge proportion of your future.
• vondur 10y ago
  I was fortunate when in first grade to be recognized as "gifted" and the school district I went to basically put us all in one class that was separate from the other students. From that point on, we basically had the same students in our classes until high school. In high school, most of had the same core classes together, but we'd be in classes with the regular students for our electives. We all had the same lunchtime and breaks with everyone else.
• cwbrandsma 10y ago
  Should they go to different schools? No. But corporate learning should be done away with. Any system that involves all students learning at the same pace just isn't cutting it. There will still be teachers and subjects, but it is more defined by how fast or slow each individual student can learn. Do this, and you wont need different schools.
• logfromblammo 10y ago
  The question itself falls apart when you remove the requirement that all schools follow a rigid curriculum based on grade levels modeled upon a particular age cohort. If you accept that a 9-year-old student can learn productively in the same room as an 11-year-old student, you no longer need to consider setting aside a separate room for all the 9-year-olds with ability equal to the median 11-year-old. You just put the smart kids into the more advanced classes. Just let the fast kids read ahead on their own. If they can get far enough ahead of the instructor, they can skip a semester, and either start the next class in the sequence early, or cram an elective class into the gap. There's no need to ship them off to another building.
• arikrak 10y ago
  Everyone should be taught according to their ability. It doesn't make sense to mix people who learn at different rates into all the same lectures and the same overall grade system. Why make children spend 8 (boring) years in elementary school if some of them could have learned the same material in 2-6 years? Why hold children back from achieving their potential just because they have a higher potential? Gifted schools is one solution but there are many other possibilities as well: - more tracked classes - let people advance based on what they learn instead of based on their age - individualized technology-based instruction instead of large lectures
• nunez 10y ago
  There is a good "This American Life" episode that touches on this argument somewhat. Due to mismanagement and zoning issues, students at a low-income and underperforming public school in Missouri were forced to go to a wealthier and better performing school a few towns over. The daughter of a family profiled for this episode demonstrated significant gains in her grades, vocabulary and social life. She isn't alone; there is data that supports that "integrating" students like this improves performance in kids that would typically underperform at a less accomplished school alone. My fiancée, a HS math teacher for eight years, saw this in her classes too. The smarter kids (the kids that got the material quicker) would catch up the kids that were lagging behind. While she did have to prepare more nuanced lesson plans, she did see improvement in kids with similar characteristics of classically-underperforming kids she taught previously. Given this, I think smart schools do humanity a great disservice.
• nikdaheratik 10y ago
  I think some separate program is good for a variety of reasons, but a separate school, or even education where a majority of their time is spent on the program is not good. They do have different needs from most students that should be addressed, but separating them out is just as bad as moving mildly disabled children into a separate program when they don't have to be there.
• RichardHeart 10y ago
  Yes. The smart kids don't help the dumb kids much. The dumb kids more often harm the smart ones though. Sometimes through malice, sometimes just through criminal habits and had behaviors that rub off. Companies and governments don't have a quota of stupid people they have to bring on board, why should schools? The best education I ever received was in 6th grade. https://megsss.org/elements-curriculum https://megsss.org/elements-curriculum it got progressively worse every year after that program ended. It is better to increase the effectiveness of your best at the cost of your not best. The best invent/do/produce/control more over their lifetimes. They're also easier to make more effective because they already have a better base to amplify. If you try to amplify your non best at the cost of your best, you'll find that its very hard to drag them kicking into utility. Most countries / businesses / families are great because of the outliers of greatness in them. Rising the oceans ever so slightly by cutting down the piers, is a bad deal.
• djr96 10y ago
  Where does this leave the twice-exceptional?