5 ms·

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

by 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.
  - justin_vanw 10y ago
    Ok, I will bet that you don't even believe that there are intelligence differences between people, right? Every person is equally capable and it all comes down to whether you give them enough opportunities and resources? EDIT: I'm saying 'who cares' in the context of deciding whether to set up a gifted magnet school or not. You shouldn't decide what is good for a child based on your pet theories about who should or should not have a yacht.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    What is there in your main point that needs "refuting"? Putting ordinary students in schools optimized for the gifted is no better than demolishing schools for special needs students and sending the children to regular schools regardless of the consequences. In what way would it possibly benefit a typical student to be placed in a school where they can't keep up? How would it feel for that child to be in an environment where it's normal for their peers to take college courses before reaching high school age? In my experience, it's extremely demotivating and leads to a lot of pain for the child, no matter how wealthy his or her parents may be. As justin_vanw pointed out (in an undeservedly flagged sibling post), it seems an awful lot like you deny the existence of gifted children to begin with.
ehsankia 10y ago
I don't think complete segregation is the answer, but within a given school, I believe there can be more malleability. In general, the idea of which class you end up in being more skill based than age based. And not everyone is better at every subject. Having it per subject allows someone to go further in math even if they struggle with some other subject.
- tabeth 10y ago
  I agree with you. See my comment from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472276
cousin_it 10y ago
Gifted kids flourish when other kids have interesting conversations with them instead of beating them up. If you know how to make that happen in a regular school, I'm all ears. But in my experience that's impossible and segregation is the only answer.
- tabeth 10y ago
  That's a completely different discussion and problem.
automorphism 10y ago
1. Gifted children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take the brightest students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential. 2. The alternative is equality of outcome, i.e. cut down the tall poppies. This isn't a solution. Keeping gifted children lockstep with their age-mates does them serious damage that can last a lifetime. Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum into two or three years, whereas the gifted can. The reality is that these kids need to be surrounded by their ability peers if they are going to reach their potential. For evidence, check out the work of Miraca Gross, who did her work in Australia. She has a book called Exceptionally Gifted Children, where she details the lives of several of these kids and shows how devastating the school system can be to them if extra accommodations are not made.
- tabeth 10y ago
  1. Children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential. 2. False dichotomy. I've read the book you're referring to. It doesn't make any of the claims you're making, in particular: > Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum. If I'm wrong (and I may, it's been a while), feel free to reply with a quote and a page number. I have the book. In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level. The reality is this: schools for "gifted" children just tend to be better schools. The same better schools that would lead to better outcomes, for everyone. Mind you, this isn't the same as putting, for example "special-ed" students in separate classrooms. Case and point: > The major finding of this study is that third and fourth grade classroom teachers make only minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students. This result holds for all types of schools sampled. It also holds for classrooms in different parts of the country and for different types of communities. Implications of these findings for researchers and gifted education specialists are discussed. [1] [1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016235329301600203 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0162353293016002...
whorleater 10y ago
>1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system. >2. Remove equality of opportunity. That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it. To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.
- tabeth 10y ago
  I won't address your second point, as the problem we'd then be discussing is completely different (i.e. we're now discussing resource allocation). However, in regards to your first point: I said nothing about crippling those ahead. I'm curious what makes you say that honestly. Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. Regression to the mean, would be putting gifted students in an environment where they wouldn't thrive. However, this said environment would also cripple regular students. So the solution, as I've said, and you agree with is to make education better, more generally.
  - whorleater 10y ago
    > Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. How is it not? "Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school where they're already ahead. "Gifted" students aren't different from other children, they're responsive to the same social pressures all students face, and placing them with a "gifted" peer group allows them to thrive. Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
tropo 10y ago
What will help gifted students and not regular students: faster curriculum, with less practice and review So you put a regular student there. Pretty soon, they miss some key bit of understanding. Class doesn't pause and replay. Class moves on. Very quickly, the situation becomes hopeless. Why pay attention to calculus when you don't understand negative numbers or fractions? Why attempt Hamlet when you can't read words with more than one syllable?
thereisnospork 10y ago
How can you argue pt.1 when the kids of high income parents already receive, at great expense but to great personal benefit, the kind of academically segregated education you are arguing against? How is a smart kid from Detroit or Camden supposed to catch up to his intellectual peer who is learning calculus while he/she is stuck in a school right out of Stand and Deliver? Without help one of them is going to Harvard and the other Community College, maybe, and quite frankly that is a waste of potential. Sometimes the problem with education isn't the building, or the teachers, or the administration: it's the students (and by extension their parents) and if we can't fix them at least we can teach everyone according to their ability.
- tabeth 10y ago
  I can relate to the situations you describe, but they're not going to happen. The link we're all discussing is not talking about making these schools public, free or even accessible. It talks about, more generally, whether segregation should exist. As for Detroit. Most of Michigan's "gifted" schools are private and NOT free [1] [2]. [1] http://migiftedchild.org/faq/#zero http://migiftedchild.org/faq/#zero [2] http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/sites/default/files/National%20Consortium%20List%20%20BY%20STATE.pdf http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/sites/default/files/Nationa...
  - thereisnospork 10y ago
    So you advocate mandatory public education? In fact mandatory boarding public education? -- I can think of no other way to avoid intellectual segregation as surely their are more 'gifted' children in Berkeley than Compton. So much for the land of the free... To the point: you are arguing that segregating students by capability increases income inequality - which is false to disingenuous over generations.
cloudwizard 10y ago
It does accelerate inequality. The answer is to make sure we are all equal. To solve this problem, we should not allow the special Nike sports camps because I do not make as much as a basketball player as an NBA player. We need to equalize all opportunity at the lowest common denominator. Of course the US would never see another gold medal in the Olympics. Gifted students do not require you to repeat the same things as often. By forcing them to go at the same pace as other students, you bore them and stunt their growth.

by tabeth 10y ago

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.
- justin_vanw 10y ago
  Ok, I will bet that you don't even believe that there are intelligence differences between people, right? Every person is equally capable and it all comes down to whether you give them enough opportunities and resources? EDIT: I'm saying 'who cares' in the context of deciding whether to set up a gifted magnet school or not. You shouldn't decide what is good for a child based on your pet theories about who should or should not have a yacht.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  What is there in your main point that needs "refuting"? Putting ordinary students in schools optimized for the gifted is no better than demolishing schools for special needs students and sending the children to regular schools regardless of the consequences. In what way would it possibly benefit a typical student to be placed in a school where they can't keep up? How would it feel for that child to be in an environment where it's normal for their peers to take college courses before reaching high school age? In my experience, it's extremely demotivating and leads to a lot of pain for the child, no matter how wealthy his or her parents may be. As justin_vanw pointed out (in an undeservedly flagged sibling post), it seems an awful lot like you deny the existence of gifted children to begin with.

ehsankia 10y ago

I don't think complete segregation is the answer, but within a given school, I believe there can be more malleability. In general, the idea of which class you end up in being more skill based than age based. And not everyone is better at every subject. Having it per subject allows someone to go further in math even if they struggle with some other subject.

tabeth 10y ago
I agree with you. See my comment from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472276

cousin_it 10y ago

Gifted kids flourish when other kids have interesting conversations with them instead of beating them up. If you know how to make that happen in a regular school, I'm all ears. But in my experience that's impossible and segregation is the only answer.

tabeth 10y ago
That's a completely different discussion and problem.

automorphism 10y ago

1. Gifted children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take the brightest students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential. 2. The alternative is equality of outcome, i.e. cut down the tall poppies. This isn't a solution. Keeping gifted children lockstep with their age-mates does them serious damage that can last a lifetime. Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum into two or three years, whereas the gifted can. The reality is that these kids need to be surrounded by their ability peers if they are going to reach their potential. For evidence, check out the work of Miraca Gross, who did her work in Australia. She has a book called Exceptionally Gifted Children, where she details the lives of several of these kids and shows how devastating the school system can be to them if extra accommodations are not made.

tabeth 10y ago
1. Children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential. 2. False dichotomy. I've read the book you're referring to. It doesn't make any of the claims you're making, in particular: > Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum. If I'm wrong (and I may, it's been a while), feel free to reply with a quote and a page number. I have the book. In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level. The reality is this: schools for "gifted" children just tend to be better schools. The same better schools that would lead to better outcomes, for everyone. Mind you, this isn't the same as putting, for example "special-ed" students in separate classrooms. Case and point: > The major finding of this study is that third and fourth grade classroom teachers make only minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students. This result holds for all types of schools sampled. It also holds for classrooms in different parts of the country and for different types of communities. Implications of these findings for researchers and gifted education specialists are discussed. [1] [1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016235329301600203 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0162353293016002...

whorleater 10y ago

>1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system. >2. Remove equality of opportunity. That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it. To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.

tabeth 10y ago
I won't address your second point, as the problem we'd then be discussing is completely different (i.e. we're now discussing resource allocation). However, in regards to your first point: I said nothing about crippling those ahead. I'm curious what makes you say that honestly. Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. Regression to the mean, would be putting gifted students in an environment where they wouldn't thrive. However, this said environment would also cripple regular students. So the solution, as I've said, and you agree with is to make education better, more generally.
- whorleater 10y ago
  > Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. How is it not? "Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school where they're already ahead. "Gifted" students aren't different from other children, they're responsive to the same social pressures all students face, and placing them with a "gifted" peer group allows them to thrive. Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.

tropo 10y ago

What will help gifted students and not regular students: faster curriculum, with less practice and review So you put a regular student there. Pretty soon, they miss some key bit of understanding. Class doesn't pause and replay. Class moves on. Very quickly, the situation becomes hopeless. Why pay attention to calculus when you don't understand negative numbers or fractions? Why attempt Hamlet when you can't read words with more than one syllable?

thereisnospork 10y ago

How can you argue pt.1 when the kids of high income parents already receive, at great expense but to great personal benefit, the kind of academically segregated education you are arguing against? How is a smart kid from Detroit or Camden supposed to catch up to his intellectual peer who is learning calculus while he/she is stuck in a school right out of Stand and Deliver? Without help one of them is going to Harvard and the other Community College, maybe, and quite frankly that is a waste of potential. Sometimes the problem with education isn't the building, or the teachers, or the administration: it's the students (and by extension their parents) and if we can't fix them at least we can teach everyone according to their ability.

tabeth 10y ago
I can relate to the situations you describe, but they're not going to happen. The link we're all discussing is not talking about making these schools public, free or even accessible. It talks about, more generally, whether segregation should exist. As for Detroit. Most of Michigan's "gifted" schools are private and NOT free [1] [2]. [1] http://migiftedchild.org/faq/#zero http://migiftedchild.org/faq/#zero [2] http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/sites/default/files/National%20Consortium%20List%20%20BY%20STATE.pdf http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/sites/default/files/Nationa...
- thereisnospork 10y ago
  So you advocate mandatory public education? In fact mandatory boarding public education? -- I can think of no other way to avoid intellectual segregation as surely their are more 'gifted' children in Berkeley than Compton. So much for the land of the free... To the point: you are arguing that segregating students by capability increases income inequality - which is false to disingenuous over generations.

cloudwizard 10y ago

It does accelerate inequality. The answer is to make sure we are all equal. To solve this problem, we should not allow the special Nike sports camps because I do not make as much as a basketball player as an NBA player. We need to equalize all opportunity at the lowest common denominator. Of course the US would never see another gold medal in the Olympics. Gifted students do not require you to repeat the same things as often. By forcing them to go at the same pace as other students, you bore them and stunt their growth.