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> I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed. This isn’t true. Gifted and talented education receives maybe 1% of the funding tha

> I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed. This isn’t true. Gifted and talented education receives maybe 1% of the funding that special needs education does, if that. In NYC de Blasio is trying to dismantle the existing system because the students are too Asian. Most of the US has nothing approaching that system. Normal high schools are at best indifferent to students who want to go higher than AP; they’re certainly not going out of their way to help and encourage those capable of doing college work to do so. Face it, at barest minimum 10% of 16 year olds could be in high schools like those associated with Bard College at Simon’s Rock[1], where they graduate with an Associate’s degree having completed half of the coursework for a Bachelor’s. I don’t know what percentage of 14 year olds could do the same or complete a Bachelor’s before 18 but it’s 100s of times greater than those who actually do. [1] https://simons-rock.edu/ https://simons-rock.edu/

knzhou 7y ago
My point is that there's been an explosion in opportunities that kids can use that go around what schools provide. Even when I was in high school, you could get most of an undergraduate education from MIT OpenCourseWare for free, and the situation is even better now. (You couldn't get a credential out of it... but who cares, when either way you'll have the knowledge?) Though I'm upset about the political drama over NYC magnet schools, it's important to note that their outcomes aren't due to magic teachers or better equipment. The kids are making things happen on their own! The core benefit these schools provide is mostly that they allow the kids to meet each other.
- sologoub 7y ago
  You have to know that MIT OpenCourseWare exists. Many people do, but I suspect an even larger number do not. Gifted kids can come from all backgrounds. When parent involvement is there and the parents know how the system works and where to find resources, it’s an ocean of opportunity out there. When parents don’t know the system (immigrants for example), don’t have the luxury of a lot of involvement (work multiple jobs), the asymmetric knowledge/access are now an issue. Public education is supposed to level that field somewhat and what many are pointing out is a gap through which many gifted students fall through. Then you get behavioral and social problems, as called out in the research.
  - ramraj07 7y ago
    There might be some _very_ unlucky kids who can't even access the internet, but once you can get to Wikipedia and youtube I'm sure a very smart kid can figure out where to find what they want to learn. Now, if they don't get the time to immerse themselves because their household demands their attention on more fundamental survival needs, well that should be addressed whether the kid is smart or not.
    - zekrioca 7y ago
      Social and familiar needs are linked with someone being smart or not. You can’t have one without the other, they are interdependent. You can’t just count on someone — specially an young one — sneaking in to get access to Wikipedia and find the extra resources they need. You minimize negative impacts on the social environment for it to flourish.
    - benibela 7y ago
      You can learn so much on the internet But I wonder if it really helps. I did not have internet or tv as kid and I have learned a lot from books. Now I have internet, and I spend far more time on social media and watching shows than I spend on learning things
      - theamk 7y ago
        Isn’t this general kids vs adult things? I think most (but not all) people learn less and less as they get older. For practical, “try at home” things, internet is just making everything so much better. You can read books a lot, but if you want to learn how to make a laser from scratch (for example), no book will be nearly as good as a bunch of blog posts and forum to connect to others.
      - Hoasi 7y ago
        > I did not have internet or tv as kid and I have learned a lot from books. Growing up in a TV-free household as a kid was and still is an advantage to develop learning skills, independence, and imagination. > Now I have internet, and I spend far more time on social media and watching shows than I spend on learning things That may be, but you have the choice. The main difference is that you can find way more information than in books, even if you lived in a library. The main problem on top of the continuous distraction is curation.
- travisoneill1 7y ago
  How are you supposed to go around what schools provide and do MIT courses when you are required to sit in school all day and then waste even more time on the pointless busy work they make you do at home?
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    I totally half arsed school for this reason. There's much more fun (and learned skill) in learning stuff how you want. Personally, I took the route of combining all my subjects (maths, physics, CS) and took the route of building a couple basic physics sims. Best education of my life.
  - myself248 7y ago
    I feel so lucky that my elementary school, in the 80s, had a special-education coordinator who recognized gifted and talented as part of her job, co-equal with developmentally disabled. Not all special needs are remedial, after all. As a result, my parents had an ally who knew the workings of the system, had resources and connections, and would go to bat for me/us when the rest of the administration had their heads in the sand. The end result was that I had some time each day to work on my own projects, and my teachers were required to make accommodations. I ended up leaving the school anyway because of one perniciously evil teacher and I'm still in therapy for the sequelae, but there were definitely some bright spots. I can't say everyone aims 'em right, but there are definitely hammers to swing against the traditional structure and the disservice it does to gifted and talented students. In recent years, I understand that the guidelines around individual accommodation plans have only strengthened. I'd imagine there must be folks out there equally adept at making them work. Some of them might just need a reminder that their job includes this function.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    Here's what they used to do at my school( state school, Lithuania,90s): the more gifted ones had a few options: they could skip a year(i.e. from 8th to 10th grade), not follow the curriculum the rest of the class did and simply do something more advanced during that time. I'm not gifted but was probably smart enough to find school easy,but couldn't be asked to do too much,so teachers usually used to leave me alone.
golemiprague 7y ago
Asians are not necessarily more "gifted" or "talented", they are hard workers and in high school age, because the material is not that difficult, hard work can bring great results. I am not sure we should reward hard work at that age that much, so in some way I can see why de Blasio is not impressed. But I do think grouping hard workers together with other hard workers or gifted with gifted as a good idea. Homogeneity is our strength, not diversity. People do great things when they are in an environment where everybody are synchronised and follow the same rules and conventions. I don't know who came up with this idea that diversity is so great, it has its uses but it's a meme and a stale one at that.
dasil003 7y ago
I agree that better support and acceptance of gifted and talented is important. I'm not sure I'd measure it in funding versus special needs though. Special needs teaching is brutal work, requiring a lot of baseline time and attention costs that can't really be reduced in a humane way. Supporting the high-end of the spectrum is an entirely different challenge. The kids have an ability to excel independently. Yes, facilities and other resources can enhance outcomes, but also consider the difficulty of finding qualified teachers to really challenge them. Our entire Victorian education system is not equipped to handle them, and frankly I think they'll always be held back if we encourage a rigid structure and reliance on a system which is designed for the masses. We'd be better off finding low-case ways to give more open-ended resources and access to centralized specialists and higher education professors who are true experts in their fields.
closeparen 7y ago
The bright children of the upper middle class going on to have great life outcomes are the core of inequality in America. Schools that nurture and socialize these kids with each other are an important mechanism in that outperformance. If you intend to reduce inequality, then that is exactly what you want to disrupt. Secret racism is too easy a copout. This goes right to the core of defining relative inequality (vs. absolute outcomes) as the important issue.
- refurb 7y ago
  Wait, are you arguing we shouldn’t provide opportunities for gifted kids because it reduces inequality?
  - garmaine 7y ago
    He is saying we should have more equal opportunities regardless of socio-economic background.
    - quotemstr 7y ago
      Which is meaningless, especially with respect to this discussion
  - RobertoG 7y ago
    I think he is saying that they don't get the opportunities because they are gifted kids, but because they are upper-middle class.
    - Viliam1234 7y ago
      It can be both. To be smart is an advantage. To be born in a rich family is also an advantage. Life can be unfair in many ways simultaneously. Ironically, if you deny the importance of IQ, it mostly hurts the smart kids from poor families. Because the rich parents will find ways for their kids to realize their full potential -- whether it is a full potential of an average child, or a full potential of a gifted child. It is the gifted child born in a poor family who won't have a private tutor because their parents can't afford it, but also will be denied by the system because "IQ doesn't mean anything". Smart kids from poor families need even more help than smart kids from rich families, and we deny it to them in the name of fighting inequality. It's no child left behind the minimum requirements of the school system, but many children left miles behind their true potential; especially the poor ones.
watwut 7y ago
I dont think that ratio to special education says all that much. A lot of it is heavily disabled kids who do need expensive tools to even learn to walk and have kids-teacher ratio like 6:1 or even less. Mostly because they need a lot of support to just function - whether they are learning or not. The gifted education is comparatively cheaper. Plus, it is about kids that are bordering to being a danger to themselves or others. They need experts just to function. They are getting special education for the sake of other kids too. And failing their education means more money spend on prisons or social system once they grow. People imagine special education being about slightly slower kids. But these are not costing all that much.
jimhefferon 7y ago
> maybe 1% Honest question, not snide in any way: what would be the right percentage? Surely not 100%? Special Ed folks, folks on the left end of the bell curve for instance, need intensive one-on-ones. But folks on the other end of the bell would not need that same level of support? (I'm not saying 1% is OK. And I understand that you pulled that number out of the air.)
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Acceleration as of right instead of enrichment should be verging on free, requiring almost nothing in new expenditure. I’d be pretty happy with that alone to be honest. An early college programme like Bard College at Simon’s Rock in every metro area with over 100,000 people with provision for boarding for those outside commuting distance wouldn’t get you past 2% of education expenditure. That’s under 10% of what’s spent on special education. That would make me ecstatic.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    It's not about how much money, but rather how to spend it. Well, okay, to spend money some way you first need it, but the amount could be quite small. Most of the knowledge is already available online for free. (There are still some gaps that would be nice to fill, for example lessons for small kids whose first language is not English.) The problem is rather navigating the abundance of information. First, to distinguish genuine knowledge from crackpottery. Like, most of us probably know that 99% of videos on YouTube containing "quantum" in their titles are pure nonsense. But a smart 13 years old kid doesn't know that yet, and can waste a lot of time gaining negative knowledge (misconceptions that later require time and work to unlearn). We know that in case of doubt, the materials published by MIT are most likely solid. For that kid, even this is not necessarily obvious; it would be better to tell them explicitly. Second, lessons have prerequisites. I can find an interesting lesson, only to realize that I actually can't follow it, because it uses symbols and concepts I don't understand, and I don't even know how that missing part of knowledge is called. It would be great to have some guidance of form "you can learn X by watching Y, but first you need to understand M and N which you can learn by watching P and Q, etc.". A tech-tree of knowledge, kind of. For these two things, you don't actually need a school system. A website could be enough: a page for each topic, internal links to prerequisite topics, external links for educational resources checked for quality. You would need some budget for this, but I assume that for costs similar to running one school, you could serve the entire nation. -- And it wouldn't be only for the smart kids; the average kids could use it, too. Everyone could progress at their own speed. Actually, it would be even better if all the kids would use it, because then you wouldn't have to look specifically for the smart kids and advertise it to them, they would simply learn about it from kids around them. Now you can add extra services, like a silent place to go study if you don't have such place at home, a computer with an internet connection is you don't have one at home. Places to meet people studying the same topic. Etc. This all would be nice to have. I am just saying that the minimum solution that could help maybe 80% of gifted kids could actually be made very cheaply.

knzhou 7y ago

My point is that there's been an explosion in opportunities that kids can use that go around what schools provide. Even when I was in high school, you could get most of an undergraduate education from MIT OpenCourseWare for free, and the situation is even better now. (You couldn't get a credential out of it... but who cares, when either way you'll have the knowledge?) Though I'm upset about the political drama over NYC magnet schools, it's important to note that their outcomes aren't due to magic teachers or better equipment. The kids are making things happen on their own! The core benefit these schools provide is mostly that they allow the kids to meet each other.

sologoub 7y ago
You have to know that MIT OpenCourseWare exists. Many people do, but I suspect an even larger number do not. Gifted kids can come from all backgrounds. When parent involvement is there and the parents know how the system works and where to find resources, it’s an ocean of opportunity out there. When parents don’t know the system (immigrants for example), don’t have the luxury of a lot of involvement (work multiple jobs), the asymmetric knowledge/access are now an issue. Public education is supposed to level that field somewhat and what many are pointing out is a gap through which many gifted students fall through. Then you get behavioral and social problems, as called out in the research.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  There might be some _very_ unlucky kids who can't even access the internet, but once you can get to Wikipedia and youtube I'm sure a very smart kid can figure out where to find what they want to learn. Now, if they don't get the time to immerse themselves because their household demands their attention on more fundamental survival needs, well that should be addressed whether the kid is smart or not.
  - zekrioca 7y ago
    Social and familiar needs are linked with someone being smart or not. You can’t have one without the other, they are interdependent. You can’t just count on someone — specially an young one — sneaking in to get access to Wikipedia and find the extra resources they need. You minimize negative impacts on the social environment for it to flourish.
  - benibela 7y ago
    You can learn so much on the internet But I wonder if it really helps. I did not have internet or tv as kid and I have learned a lot from books. Now I have internet, and I spend far more time on social media and watching shows than I spend on learning things
    - theamk 7y ago
      Isn’t this general kids vs adult things? I think most (but not all) people learn less and less as they get older. For practical, “try at home” things, internet is just making everything so much better. You can read books a lot, but if you want to learn how to make a laser from scratch (for example), no book will be nearly as good as a bunch of blog posts and forum to connect to others.
    - Hoasi 7y ago
      > I did not have internet or tv as kid and I have learned a lot from books. Growing up in a TV-free household as a kid was and still is an advantage to develop learning skills, independence, and imagination. > Now I have internet, and I spend far more time on social media and watching shows than I spend on learning things That may be, but you have the choice. The main difference is that you can find way more information than in books, even if you lived in a library. The main problem on top of the continuous distraction is curation.
travisoneill1 7y ago
How are you supposed to go around what schools provide and do MIT courses when you are required to sit in school all day and then waste even more time on the pointless busy work they make you do at home?
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  I totally half arsed school for this reason. There's much more fun (and learned skill) in learning stuff how you want. Personally, I took the route of combining all my subjects (maths, physics, CS) and took the route of building a couple basic physics sims. Best education of my life.
- myself248 7y ago
  I feel so lucky that my elementary school, in the 80s, had a special-education coordinator who recognized gifted and talented as part of her job, co-equal with developmentally disabled. Not all special needs are remedial, after all. As a result, my parents had an ally who knew the workings of the system, had resources and connections, and would go to bat for me/us when the rest of the administration had their heads in the sand. The end result was that I had some time each day to work on my own projects, and my teachers were required to make accommodations. I ended up leaving the school anyway because of one perniciously evil teacher and I'm still in therapy for the sequelae, but there were definitely some bright spots. I can't say everyone aims 'em right, but there are definitely hammers to swing against the traditional structure and the disservice it does to gifted and talented students. In recent years, I understand that the guidelines around individual accommodation plans have only strengthened. I'd imagine there must be folks out there equally adept at making them work. Some of them might just need a reminder that their job includes this function.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Here's what they used to do at my school( state school, Lithuania,90s): the more gifted ones had a few options: they could skip a year(i.e. from 8th to 10th grade), not follow the curriculum the rest of the class did and simply do something more advanced during that time. I'm not gifted but was probably smart enough to find school easy,but couldn't be asked to do too much,so teachers usually used to leave me alone.

golemiprague 7y ago

Asians are not necessarily more "gifted" or "talented", they are hard workers and in high school age, because the material is not that difficult, hard work can bring great results. I am not sure we should reward hard work at that age that much, so in some way I can see why de Blasio is not impressed. But I do think grouping hard workers together with other hard workers or gifted with gifted as a good idea. Homogeneity is our strength, not diversity. People do great things when they are in an environment where everybody are synchronised and follow the same rules and conventions. I don't know who came up with this idea that diversity is so great, it has its uses but it's a meme and a stale one at that.

dasil003 7y ago

I agree that better support and acceptance of gifted and talented is important. I'm not sure I'd measure it in funding versus special needs though. Special needs teaching is brutal work, requiring a lot of baseline time and attention costs that can't really be reduced in a humane way. Supporting the high-end of the spectrum is an entirely different challenge. The kids have an ability to excel independently. Yes, facilities and other resources can enhance outcomes, but also consider the difficulty of finding qualified teachers to really challenge them. Our entire Victorian education system is not equipped to handle them, and frankly I think they'll always be held back if we encourage a rigid structure and reliance on a system which is designed for the masses. We'd be better off finding low-case ways to give more open-ended resources and access to centralized specialists and higher education professors who are true experts in their fields.

closeparen 7y ago

The bright children of the upper middle class going on to have great life outcomes are the core of inequality in America. Schools that nurture and socialize these kids with each other are an important mechanism in that outperformance. If you intend to reduce inequality, then that is exactly what you want to disrupt. Secret racism is too easy a copout. This goes right to the core of defining relative inequality (vs. absolute outcomes) as the important issue.

refurb 7y ago
Wait, are you arguing we shouldn’t provide opportunities for gifted kids because it reduces inequality?
- garmaine 7y ago
  He is saying we should have more equal opportunities regardless of socio-economic background.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    Which is meaningless, especially with respect to this discussion
- RobertoG 7y ago
  I think he is saying that they don't get the opportunities because they are gifted kids, but because they are upper-middle class.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    It can be both. To be smart is an advantage. To be born in a rich family is also an advantage. Life can be unfair in many ways simultaneously. Ironically, if you deny the importance of IQ, it mostly hurts the smart kids from poor families. Because the rich parents will find ways for their kids to realize their full potential -- whether it is a full potential of an average child, or a full potential of a gifted child. It is the gifted child born in a poor family who won't have a private tutor because their parents can't afford it, but also will be denied by the system because "IQ doesn't mean anything". Smart kids from poor families need even more help than smart kids from rich families, and we deny it to them in the name of fighting inequality. It's no child left behind the minimum requirements of the school system, but many children left miles behind their true potential; especially the poor ones.

watwut 7y ago

I dont think that ratio to special education says all that much. A lot of it is heavily disabled kids who do need expensive tools to even learn to walk and have kids-teacher ratio like 6:1 or even less. Mostly because they need a lot of support to just function - whether they are learning or not. The gifted education is comparatively cheaper. Plus, it is about kids that are bordering to being a danger to themselves or others. They need experts just to function. They are getting special education for the sake of other kids too. And failing their education means more money spend on prisons or social system once they grow. People imagine special education being about slightly slower kids. But these are not costing all that much.

jimhefferon 7y ago

> maybe 1% Honest question, not snide in any way: what would be the right percentage? Surely not 100%? Special Ed folks, folks on the left end of the bell curve for instance, need intensive one-on-ones. But folks on the other end of the bell would not need that same level of support? (I'm not saying 1% is OK. And I understand that you pulled that number out of the air.)

barry-cotter 7y ago
Acceleration as of right instead of enrichment should be verging on free, requiring almost nothing in new expenditure. I’d be pretty happy with that alone to be honest. An early college programme like Bard College at Simon’s Rock in every metro area with over 100,000 people with provision for boarding for those outside commuting distance wouldn’t get you past 2% of education expenditure. That’s under 10% of what’s spent on special education. That would make me ecstatic.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  It's not about how much money, but rather how to spend it. Well, okay, to spend money some way you first need it, but the amount could be quite small. Most of the knowledge is already available online for free. (There are still some gaps that would be nice to fill, for example lessons for small kids whose first language is not English.) The problem is rather navigating the abundance of information. First, to distinguish genuine knowledge from crackpottery. Like, most of us probably know that 99% of videos on YouTube containing "quantum" in their titles are pure nonsense. But a smart 13 years old kid doesn't know that yet, and can waste a lot of time gaining negative knowledge (misconceptions that later require time and work to unlearn). We know that in case of doubt, the materials published by MIT are most likely solid. For that kid, even this is not necessarily obvious; it would be better to tell them explicitly. Second, lessons have prerequisites. I can find an interesting lesson, only to realize that I actually can't follow it, because it uses symbols and concepts I don't understand, and I don't even know how that missing part of knowledge is called. It would be great to have some guidance of form "you can learn X by watching Y, but first you need to understand M and N which you can learn by watching P and Q, etc.". A tech-tree of knowledge, kind of. For these two things, you don't actually need a school system. A website could be enough: a page for each topic, internal links to prerequisite topics, external links for educational resources checked for quality. You would need some budget for this, but I assume that for costs similar to running one school, you could serve the entire nation. -- And it wouldn't be only for the smart kids; the average kids could use it, too. Everyone could progress at their own speed. Actually, it would be even better if all the kids would use it, because then you wouldn't have to look specifically for the smart kids and advertise it to them, they would simply learn about it from kids around them. Now you can add extra services, like a silent place to go study if you don't have such place at home, a computer with an internet connection is you don't have one at home. Places to meet people studying the same topic. Etc. This all would be nice to have. I am just saying that the minimum solution that could help maybe 80% of gifted kids could actually be made very cheaply.