7 ms·

An interesting thing I see here is that no one seems to be discussing the needs of the kids themselves in all this. It's all about races, politics, ideologies.

An interesting thing I see here is that no one seems to be discussing the needs of the kids themselves in all this. It's all about races, politics, ideologies. However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students. At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening. A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane. Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).

yarcob 6y ago
I think the smarter thing to do would be to stop demanding everyone complete the same tasks. Let the quicker students skip the repetitive exercise and give them something challenging. Or let them explain it to the slower kids.
- superflit 6y ago
  The "challenging" is called advanced learning.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    I meant without first testing them and putting them in separate classes.
    - toast0 6y ago
      I think the challenge is it's pretty difficult to be customizing instruction to 30 different students at wildly different levels. Having some students help instruct others can work, and when it works, I think there's a lot of positives. But, it can also be socially akward, and lead to a lot of negatives (especially outside the classroom). I think there are real issues with equal access to advanced classes, but making it equal by ending the program seems like the wrong thing to do.
- jonwachob91 6y ago
  A big factor is that not every teacher is capable of teaching gifted students. The gifted public school I went to recruited college professors to teach our middle school classes. I met a lot of HS teachers that couldn't keep up with the math the gifted students where doing as early as 7th grade. It's silly to expect for the average teacher to be able to teach every kind of student. Some teachers are better at challenging gifted students. Some teachers are better at teaching large groups of "average" students. Some teachers are better at teaching basic concepts to students that the educational system has failed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Well, one problem is that practically every teacher wants to teach the easy, gifted students that already know most of the material anyway. No one wants to deal with the not-so-easy ones, where teacher quality and proper discipline actually makes a huge difference to quality of education. That's why explicit tracking is so unpopular - it exposes these not-so-comfortable dynamics.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    My experience in school (and now with my kids in school) was that there was no such thing as a group of "average" students. There's a huge variation in most grades. Sure, you could pick the smartest kid in each class and put them in a gifted program, und give extra help to the slowest learners. But that wont help the rest of the class that still spans a huge range. That's why I think that education should move away from the "everyone does the same thing" type. I took some extra physics classes in high school. And guess what, in those extra classes every student got their own exercises. Because we were all at different levels and had different interests. Why don't they do that in normal classes?
- sitkack 6y ago
  See also the recent discussion on same-age vs mixed-age classrooms. By mixing age groups, the kid who is advanced in history can hang with a grade or two above her own. But she might be a grade below in writing, and that should be 100% ok. I was a poor kid that attended a gifted program in first grade, the majority of the parents were upper middle class doctors and lawyers. It was lord of the flies classist bs. I clearly wasn't supposed to have been let in and went back to normie classes. It wasn't again until 6th grade that I was back into a one class a day advanced program. I don't think there should be separate classes for advanced or gifted students. Many of the aspects of gifted programs are just better funded less shitty versions of regular classes. Just like the startup within a corp trope, the gifted programs are often just cover for a private school within a public school. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204386
  - vinger 6y ago
    Now you introduce a new social aspect where you could have freshman in senior classes and via versa. Would that encourage more relationship between 14 and 18 year olds friendship or otherwise and does matching maturity matter? Does that mean some are finishing in 2 years and others in 6. In some places you have a cutoff of 21 years where you need to go to adult school at that age.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      That already happened when I dropped out at 16 and attended community college with 16-60 year olds, as it should be. Maturity lessons would certainly help a whole lot of folks, myself included. Who said we had to have grades at all? And why there needs to be a split and a set progression? I think some might leave at 16 and some at 28, both could be fine and ideal.
- unanswered 6y ago
  > Or let them explain it to the slower kids. It's a good idea, except... It would defeat the main purpose of education, which is to teach obedience to authority and that knowledge and subsistence comes only from authority figures, not ones' peers.
- somethoughts 6y ago
  I think a great strategy would be to allow students who are done with the daily lesson early to have the freedom to be let lose on Khan Academy or other sites which aren't necessarily focusing on getting farther ahead but instead they are given the freedom to explore applications of topics being taught (i.e. mathematics as applied to bird migration patterns or cryptography, etc.).
undefined1 6y ago
that's an important observation. the students are secondary, at best, to the culture war being waged by activist adults. also the victims of teacher unions that are keeping schools closed, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting that position.
- avs733 6y ago
  If naming victims is important, than we should also name the students who are victims of their parents being systematically excluded and oppressed as well I would imagine?
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
>A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system All sane people agree with you. However, those who prioritize "equity of outcome" disagree.
hpcjoe 6y ago
Exactly. Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc. If you want to improve the outcomes of the lower performers, you have to address the environmental factors. You do not take away the challenges for the high performers. That solves no problems, and creates more. Most importantly, you cannot, and should not, ever, let ideology dictate what is best for the kids. Doing so does a grave disservice to all kids. Some kids need far more challenge. Give it to them. Some kids need extra help. Give it to them.
- undefined1 6y ago
  > Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc. Thomas Sowell puts an even finer point on this: "If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"
- jgalt212 6y ago
  If you don't have equal outcomes that is prima facie evidence of structural racism (or some other ism). It's like solving an integral and setting C at whatever value makes the equation work for your preferred solution value.
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    First, there may be biological differences. Asians tend to be shorter, while africans tend to be stronger. Similarly men tend to be taller. Second, the ism may be classism. Poor students with less access to education might perform worse. Classifying classism as racism and solving it that may be wrong. Third, the ism may be cultural too. If asian parents drive their kids harder by their parenting technique, that's not racism either. It does not help to call all differences as only racism. The truth is differences are caused by a variety of reasons, of which racism is one.
    - 6y ago
fatnoah 6y ago
>Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone). Agree. My company had a Diversity and Inclusion series, and the one thing that resonated most with me was the concept of Equity vs. Equality. It was accompanied by a picture of two kids trying to watch a ballgame over a fence, where one kid could not quite see over the fence and the other was far too short. In the part labelled "Equality", each kid has a 6" tall box to stand on. They get the same things, but the result is that the too-short kid still can't see the game, and the taller kid simply gets a better view. For the part labled "Equity", the tall kid gets a 2" box and the short kid gets an 8" box, resulting in each having an equal view. Now, that's a pretty simplistic presentation, but does highlight that simply giving every person the same thing is not a solution. Needs will vary across the population, and that's what we should be targeting.
- Yoofie 6y ago
  I happen to know the image you are talking about. Luckily I saved it when I first saw it somewhere. https://imgur.com/a/dlo0Y2k https://imgur.com/a/dlo0Y2k
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    God is that a bad image. "Helping others means cutting off your own leg" isn't really something I can get behind.
    - paleotrope 6y ago
      It's the Harrison Bergeron solution.
  - adonovan 6y ago
    In case it's not obvious, this is a cynical parody of the original cartoon.
- lurquer 6y ago
  The same should apply for the baseball game they are watching. The less able players should get 4 strikes, the better players maybe 2. Correct? I’m familiar with the illustration you referred to. It’s sad how so few miss the fact that the kids are trying to watch a Competition! And, if the rules were as set forth above, the game wouldn’t be worth watching in the first place.
JeremyNT 6y ago
Fundamentally, we have no idea how to educate kids at scale. This is especially true of disadvantaged youth who have difficult home lives with their own myriad particularized challenges. Is the solution to hold back those who are advantaged and just toss them into unaltered "normal" classrooms? That doesn't really seem correct. It's difficult to understand how it might help anybody. However, maybe there's something we haven't figured out yet. Something that isn't the de facto racial segregation we currently accept, that also isn't so painful and counterproductive for the advantaged students. This problem seems to require a creative solution that we are unable or unwilling to identify. Addressing wealth inequality would be an obvious start, but this is out of the purview of educators. Sadly, dismantling one system that has known defects (but also obvious benefits for the advantaged students) without having any idea how to address the underlying problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  The ideal school lets every student learn at their own pace, using a tablet with pre-recorded lectures and computer-graded quizzes. Instead of lecturing, teachers tutor small groups that did poorly on the same quiz, to help them understand the material and progress. This is the mastery learning model [0]. Classroom experiments have shown that mastery learning students learn much more with the same time spent with teachers [1] [2]. This shows that society knows how to educate children equitably and at scale. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning [1] http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105487
- cafard 6y ago
  I have an idea how to educate kids to scale: don't. Unfortunately, the American genius is for replacing labor with machinery. When we encounter a field in which that simply doesn't work, we are thrown for a loss.
- mickeym2021 6y ago
  It's not that we don't know how. We just can't accept the results.
trynton 6y ago
@biren34: Well put ..

yarcob 6y ago

I think the smarter thing to do would be to stop demanding everyone complete the same tasks. Let the quicker students skip the repetitive exercise and give them something challenging. Or let them explain it to the slower kids.

superflit 6y ago
The "challenging" is called advanced learning.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I meant without first testing them and putting them in separate classes.
  - toast0 6y ago
    I think the challenge is it's pretty difficult to be customizing instruction to 30 different students at wildly different levels. Having some students help instruct others can work, and when it works, I think there's a lot of positives. But, it can also be socially akward, and lead to a lot of negatives (especially outside the classroom). I think there are real issues with equal access to advanced classes, but making it equal by ending the program seems like the wrong thing to do.
jonwachob91 6y ago
A big factor is that not every teacher is capable of teaching gifted students. The gifted public school I went to recruited college professors to teach our middle school classes. I met a lot of HS teachers that couldn't keep up with the math the gifted students where doing as early as 7th grade. It's silly to expect for the average teacher to be able to teach every kind of student. Some teachers are better at challenging gifted students. Some teachers are better at teaching large groups of "average" students. Some teachers are better at teaching basic concepts to students that the educational system has failed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Well, one problem is that practically every teacher wants to teach the easy, gifted students that already know most of the material anyway. No one wants to deal with the not-so-easy ones, where teacher quality and proper discipline actually makes a huge difference to quality of education. That's why explicit tracking is so unpopular - it exposes these not-so-comfortable dynamics.
- yarcob 6y ago
  My experience in school (and now with my kids in school) was that there was no such thing as a group of "average" students. There's a huge variation in most grades. Sure, you could pick the smartest kid in each class and put them in a gifted program, und give extra help to the slowest learners. But that wont help the rest of the class that still spans a huge range. That's why I think that education should move away from the "everyone does the same thing" type. I took some extra physics classes in high school. And guess what, in those extra classes every student got their own exercises. Because we were all at different levels and had different interests. Why don't they do that in normal classes?
sitkack 6y ago
See also the recent discussion on same-age vs mixed-age classrooms. By mixing age groups, the kid who is advanced in history can hang with a grade or two above her own. But she might be a grade below in writing, and that should be 100% ok. I was a poor kid that attended a gifted program in first grade, the majority of the parents were upper middle class doctors and lawyers. It was lord of the flies classist bs. I clearly wasn't supposed to have been let in and went back to normie classes. It wasn't again until 6th grade that I was back into a one class a day advanced program. I don't think there should be separate classes for advanced or gifted students. Many of the aspects of gifted programs are just better funded less shitty versions of regular classes. Just like the startup within a corp trope, the gifted programs are often just cover for a private school within a public school. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204386
- vinger 6y ago
  Now you introduce a new social aspect where you could have freshman in senior classes and via versa. Would that encourage more relationship between 14 and 18 year olds friendship or otherwise and does matching maturity matter? Does that mean some are finishing in 2 years and others in 6. In some places you have a cutoff of 21 years where you need to go to adult school at that age.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    That already happened when I dropped out at 16 and attended community college with 16-60 year olds, as it should be. Maturity lessons would certainly help a whole lot of folks, myself included. Who said we had to have grades at all? And why there needs to be a split and a set progression? I think some might leave at 16 and some at 28, both could be fine and ideal.
unanswered 6y ago
> Or let them explain it to the slower kids. It's a good idea, except... It would defeat the main purpose of education, which is to teach obedience to authority and that knowledge and subsistence comes only from authority figures, not ones' peers.
somethoughts 6y ago
I think a great strategy would be to allow students who are done with the daily lesson early to have the freedom to be let lose on Khan Academy or other sites which aren't necessarily focusing on getting farther ahead but instead they are given the freedom to explore applications of topics being taught (i.e. mathematics as applied to bird migration patterns or cryptography, etc.).

undefined1 6y ago

that's an important observation. the students are secondary, at best, to the culture war being waged by activist adults. also the victims of teacher unions that are keeping schools closed, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting that position.

avs733 6y ago
If naming victims is important, than we should also name the students who are victims of their parents being systematically excluded and oppressed as well I would imagine?

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

>A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system All sane people agree with you. However, those who prioritize "equity of outcome" disagree.

hpcjoe 6y ago

Exactly. Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc. If you want to improve the outcomes of the lower performers, you have to address the environmental factors. You do not take away the challenges for the high performers. That solves no problems, and creates more. Most importantly, you cannot, and should not, ever, let ideology dictate what is best for the kids. Doing so does a grave disservice to all kids. Some kids need far more challenge. Give it to them. Some kids need extra help. Give it to them.

undefined1 6y ago
> Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc. Thomas Sowell puts an even finer point on this: "If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"
jgalt212 6y ago
If you don't have equal outcomes that is prima facie evidence of structural racism (or some other ism). It's like solving an integral and setting C at whatever value makes the equation work for your preferred solution value.
- legolas2412 6y ago
  First, there may be biological differences. Asians tend to be shorter, while africans tend to be stronger. Similarly men tend to be taller. Second, the ism may be classism. Poor students with less access to education might perform worse. Classifying classism as racism and solving it that may be wrong. Third, the ism may be cultural too. If asian parents drive their kids harder by their parenting technique, that's not racism either. It does not help to call all differences as only racism. The truth is differences are caused by a variety of reasons, of which racism is one.
  - 6y ago

fatnoah 6y ago

>Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone). Agree. My company had a Diversity and Inclusion series, and the one thing that resonated most with me was the concept of Equity vs. Equality. It was accompanied by a picture of two kids trying to watch a ballgame over a fence, where one kid could not quite see over the fence and the other was far too short. In the part labelled "Equality", each kid has a 6" tall box to stand on. They get the same things, but the result is that the too-short kid still can't see the game, and the taller kid simply gets a better view. For the part labled "Equity", the tall kid gets a 2" box and the short kid gets an 8" box, resulting in each having an equal view. Now, that's a pretty simplistic presentation, but does highlight that simply giving every person the same thing is not a solution. Needs will vary across the population, and that's what we should be targeting.

Yoofie 6y ago
I happen to know the image you are talking about. Luckily I saved it when I first saw it somewhere. https://imgur.com/a/dlo0Y2k https://imgur.com/a/dlo0Y2k
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  God is that a bad image. "Helping others means cutting off your own leg" isn't really something I can get behind.
  - paleotrope 6y ago
    It's the Harrison Bergeron solution.
- adonovan 6y ago
  In case it's not obvious, this is a cynical parody of the original cartoon.
lurquer 6y ago
The same should apply for the baseball game they are watching. The less able players should get 4 strikes, the better players maybe 2. Correct? I’m familiar with the illustration you referred to. It’s sad how so few miss the fact that the kids are trying to watch a Competition! And, if the rules were as set forth above, the game wouldn’t be worth watching in the first place.

JeremyNT 6y ago

Fundamentally, we have no idea how to educate kids at scale. This is especially true of disadvantaged youth who have difficult home lives with their own myriad particularized challenges. Is the solution to hold back those who are advantaged and just toss them into unaltered "normal" classrooms? That doesn't really seem correct. It's difficult to understand how it might help anybody. However, maybe there's something we haven't figured out yet. Something that isn't the de facto racial segregation we currently accept, that also isn't so painful and counterproductive for the advantaged students. This problem seems to require a creative solution that we are unable or unwilling to identify. Addressing wealth inequality would be an obvious start, but this is out of the purview of educators. Sadly, dismantling one system that has known defects (but also obvious benefits for the advantaged students) without having any idea how to address the underlying problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

mleonhard 6y ago
The ideal school lets every student learn at their own pace, using a tablet with pre-recorded lectures and computer-graded quizzes. Instead of lecturing, teachers tutor small groups that did poorly on the same quiz, to help them understand the material and progress. This is the mastery learning model [0]. Classroom experiments have shown that mastery learning students learn much more with the same time spent with teachers [1] [2]. This shows that society knows how to educate children equitably and at scale. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning [1] http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105487
cafard 6y ago
I have an idea how to educate kids to scale: don't. Unfortunately, the American genius is for replacing labor with machinery. When we encounter a field in which that simply doesn't work, we are thrown for a loss.
mickeym2021 6y ago
It's not that we don't know how. We just can't accept the results.

trynton 6y ago

@biren34: Well put ..