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Here's the opposite perspective: https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2012-02-06-bs-ed-gifted-education-20120206-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/

• cortesoft 7y ago
  Right, so it raises the question: What is the relative importance of helping the best students verse helping the worst students? Even if we solve the talent identification problem, SOME kids are going to be the lower achievers.... are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best? How much are we willing to sacrifice in either direction?
  • ZhuanXia 7y ago
    >.... are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best? How much are we willing to sacrifice in either direction? It is so strange reading this comment, as I know how Americans are primed to respond to it, and how precisely opposite my response is.
    • cortesoft 7y ago
      Care to share what your response is? I am not sure I know what the traditional American response is?
      • barry-cotter 7y ago
        Look at how the US K-12 education system works in practice. This is probably a reasonable enough guide to what the populace want because of democracy. You see a system designed and run for the pretty average children with substantial investment in bringing up those who are academically behind, whether or not there’s any prospect of them becoming average or exceeding it. You see basically nothing spent on the most academically gifted, as such. If they’re lucky there’ll be streaming with honours or AP classes. Special needs gets about 25% of K-12 education spending. Gifted and talented hovers around 1%.
        • waterhouse 7y ago
          Miraca Gross, writing about Austrialia, says this: "Two studies a decade apart (Start, John, and Strange, 1975; Start, 1985) surveyed every Australian tertiary institution which offered teacher education programmes. Each was contacted with a questionnaire relating to their teacher education offerings in four areas: mentally, physically, or emotionally handicapped children, migrant children, socio-economically deprived children, and gifted and talented children. The situation regarding teacher preparation in gifted education was twice as positive in the mid-1980s as it had been in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, in 1984, for every hour on teaching the gifted, student teachers had been exposed to 18 to 24 hours on teaching the disadvantaged. Furthermore, sessions on gifted education usually comprised one single-hour lecture in a general course, or elective units of three to six lectures. Whereas every institution had at least one compulsory unit or course on one or other form of disadvantage, no institution in Australia had a compulsory unit on gifted. One college replied to the survey saying that its students could consider the intellectually able as one topic in a comprehensive course, and approximately one lecture would be devoted to the area. The name of the course was "Controversies in Education" (Start, 1985)." She says it's less bad in the United States—as of 1993. The figure you give isn't encouraging, though.
  • toasterlovin 7y ago
    > are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best It's not clear to me that separating more talented kids into their own groups and classes hurts less talented kids. What is your thinking here?
    • cortesoft 7y ago
      Isn't that the entire conclusion of the article? That separating kids out hurts the average, meaning more kids are worse off than better?
    • swish_bob 7y ago
      Numerous studies appear to show this.
  • sokoloff 7y ago
    Having grown up in public schools in a G&T cohort and participating in CTY/SET, I absolutely favor teaching all kids to the highest level of challenge they can benefit from. That’s going to mean some are challenged by simple arithmetic. Others by multi-variate calculus in 10th grade. I think that necessarily means segregating the kids by ability in a subject, but I’m not married to that input or mechanism near as much as married to the outcome that every kid is appropriately challenged. If challenging kid A results in a worse outcome for kid B, so be it.
    • mumblemumble 7y ago
      Having been a kid who moved around a fair bit, and was in the "gifted" (cor, I hate that word) programs when they were available, and in the regular classes when they weren't, I decry this false dilemma. The truth of the matter is, I learned more and was more intellectually stimulated when I was in the regular classes. Because they let me burn through the homework more quickly, leaving more time in the evening to pursue my own projects and pursuits. The gifted programs were certainly more difficult. But they largely achieved that by assigning more homework, and it was invariably crap work - at best, something that was much more interesting to the teacher than it was to me, and just as often pure busywork that was made artificially difficult for the sake of "challenging" me. In some sense, I even found them insulting, and I found my parents' need to put me in them insulting, because the clear implication was that the only achievements of mine that mattered were ones that could be written down and certified by the school. Spending my time learning more musical instruments wasn't an option, because school would only give me a report card grade on one instrument at a time. Spending my time learning an additional language - perhaps a more challenging one than anything my school offered - wasn't an option, because school would only give me a report card grade in Spanish. Spending my time learning linear algebra so I could do 3D graphics programming (this was before OpenGL was really a thing, so you had to DIY) didn't count, because that wasn't on the list of kinds of math that had been blessed by the school's curriculum. It was absolute BS; from my perspective my personal interests were being subtly curtailed because they couldn't be pursued in a way that let my parents feel like they were Good Students™ vicariously through me. And the worst of it is, I'm pretty sure parents and school systems are so busy stumbling over themselves to create these elitist selective enrollment programs that they trap both the kids who do get into them and everyone else into a local minimum. The very best classes I experienced in school weren't the "advanced" ones, they were the regular (on paper) ones that followed more of an inverted classroom model, where the lecture time in the classroom was kept to a minimum, so that more time could be reserved for working together on homework. And the very best of those was a math class, where those of us who had a relatively easier time following the textbooks and lectures could put that advantage to good use by then trying to explain the new concepts to our classmates who were having a harder time. It was better for me intellectually, because, unlike what a lot of gifted programs seem to believe (or at least did a few decades ago), depth of knowledge is at least as important as breadth of knowledge, and there's no better way to ensure you've mastered a subject than teaching it to others. And it was better from a mental health perspective, too, because it steered clear of turning school into this awful competitive tar pit where the students who are having an easier time are seen as making everyone else seem comparatively inferior due to an unearned natural talent.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    Nobody needs to be sacrificed! The right way to do this is obviously that everyone gets an education adapted to their needs and talents! That means special programs for the "gifted" as well as for the "not much with the book learning" kids. A "one size fits all" education will always be a compromise that's maybe optimal for the median kid.
    • rtpg 7y ago
      A very good example of "win-win" scenarios that aren't just "isolate the smart kids" are classes built around group work and projects. Group work means that more successful groups can probably get pretty far on their own without needing much teacher intervention, freeing teacher resources for less successful groups. Group work also means students can help each other, and the "teaching" students can get experience in passing knowledge to others, the "taught" students also get attention and help from their peers (hopefully in ways that improve student relations more than harm them) This kind of work can also be a bit freeform and usually ends in a "real" work product, so students can feel pride in making a thing, and in being in charge of what is going on. The difficulties are mainly around evaluation and resources. It's hard to generalise evaluation of this in the same way as standardised testing does (which is more of a problem for means testing than for actually educating people). Teachers also probably need to be more prepared for these kinds of things, because students will end up in a variety of situations that the teacher might not have ever seen before. But the elephant in the room is just money. Try to do a robotics thing, and now you gotta buy a bunch of equipment. Same for lots of stuff involving computers. In other domains it could be easier (I had a math class that worked on this model, and the costs were basically the book and the calculator), but there's a need for money. Too many teachers are already fronting relatively inexpensive stuff like stationary.
      • skissane 7y ago
        > Group work means that more successful groups Very often, they try to "mix" the groups up and make each group a mix of ability. The inevitable result of that, is that the high ability students often feel like they have no choice but to do all the work. Do you want to get marked down because you include your peers' sub-standard work in the end product, or do you just replace it with higher standard work of your own?
  • whiddershins 7y ago
    That’s saying it is a zero sum game. Why is that the assumption? It seems intuitive that separating students by aptitude/achievement would make it easier to teach the cohort effectively. If the range of abilities is too wide in a group of students the teacher is going to be miserable and so are all the students who don’t fall within the range the program is optimized for.
  • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    Why should talented kids be forced to sacrifice their progress and happiness to help the poor kids (or rather, for the odd chance it might help some poor kids)? That is tyranny, right there. The government is using their bodies, against their will. If society wants to help poor kids, it should use tax money to pay for people to help those kids. Forcing other kids to give up their possible achievements is exploitation.
    • Kbelicius 7y ago
      > If society wants to help poor kids, it should use tax money to pay for people to help those kids. Forcing other kids to give up their possible achievements is exploitation. And using tax money to pay for people to help talented kids is not exploitation?
      • pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
        I said "if society wants it". At least society has a democratic choice. I grant that it can still amount to exploitation for some people. Also for society as whole perhaps even an economic argument could be made, like the benefits for society of helping those kids could be higher than the costs. Then in summary nobodies tax money would be misappropriated.
• itsdrewmiller 7y ago
  The only stats in the opposite perspective are "30%-50% of 90th percentile students regress" which seems like regression to the mean, and smaller gains for minorities and low income students at high achievement levels. That's not a super compelling counterpoint.
• notadoc 7y ago
  Keep in mind the original post is an opinion piece with a political agenda, it is not evidence based. There is no shortage of bad opinion pieces with all sorts of terrible politically driven opinions out there. This is one of them.
  • teej 7y ago
    I’ll give a short anecdote that might sway your opinion. I grew up poor in Baltimore City. I directly benefitted from the CTY program, where I was able to take accelerated math courses over the summer. My family didn’t pay a dime of the $3k+ per summer cost to attend. After several summers of CTY, I was able to take AP Calculus as a freshman in high school. I would not be who I am today without CTY. I agree, that article written by the director of CTY is biased. And most who attended were rich kids, so maybe in aggregate their approach doesn’t make a difference. But it made a difference for me. CTY provided opportunities for me I never would have had otherwise.
    • dluan 7y ago
      I definitely noticed class differences in CTY my first time - there were kids who seemed like CTY was normal but for myself, I was blown away and felt like I was in another world. Eventually I realized these kids were also ones who traveled internationally a lot, or did science fair competitions regularly, played multiple musical instruments, were learning different languages like chinese and french, were legacy kids for ivy league parents, etc. Meanwhile I was the kid who was good at basketball and soccer during breaks because everyone else was a nerd.