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Worse, eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite. Like "i'm going to make these kids do worse to make it fair", not "i'm going to make t

Worse, eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite. Like "i'm going to make these kids do worse to make it fair", not "i'm going to make these other kids do better to make it fair". What we want is to make the kids who do worse do better, not some abstract ideal of "fairness", because not everybody has the same aptitude so the only way you will get that is by reducing to lowest common denominator.

q1w2 5y ago
> What we want is to make the kids who do worse do better Not exactly. The optimal strategy is to make every kid do their best. That means giving some resources to every kid in proportion to how much better it'll make them. We don't only excel because of our average performance. We also excel, as a society, because of the outlier contributions of some of our most gifted students.
trutannus 5y ago
Equality of outcome is easier to enforce by punishing the top percentile, rather than bringing the bottom percentiles up to par. By definition, there's less in the upper percentile, so less work is needed. From my understanding of education in America, the path of least resistance is the one taken.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  > Equality of outcome is easier to enforce by punishing the top percentile More so the top percentile have the ability, and in my opinion, the moral responsibility to push the entire standard of education up for everyone, rather than their own kin.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    I'm not sure the outcome you actually want here. Failing students for not performing at gifted levels is obviously not the outcome anyone wants.. What exactly should the gifted students be doing?
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    It's more important to watch the median standard of living explode upwards over the last 200 years than to blame the peak for being a little higher. It's not the top percentile who have the ability. We have to all do it for each other.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      > It's not the top percentile who have the ability. We have to all do it for each other. Sure. And part of that is making sure that wealth is being distributed with the health of society in mind, rather than individual happiness at the top :)
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        > And part of that is making sure that wealth is being distributed with the health of society in mind, rather than individual happiness at the top :) Making sure it will happen will kill it. You have to have the right mechanisms in place to encourage it, and it may happen.
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        Fixed pie fallacy. We have a shrinking middle class because the middle class has become the upper class, not because the rich are richer. The top being higher doesn't lower the base. There is more money today than a decade ago. Merely taking money from the wealthy does nothing to improve the standard of living.
        aaomidi 5y ago
        Have literally any proof of what you're saying? > There is more money today than a decade ago. Where is it then?
        vorpalhex 5y ago
        https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2 https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a-good-thing/ https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a... The answer to where the money has gone is sort of everywhere. Everything from social security payments to military budgets has increased. Everyone makes more and things cost more too.
  - IAmWorried 5y ago
    This is a little ridiculous. You expect elementary school students, now removed from their gifted classes, to "push the entire standard of education up for everyone"? I think they will be a little too concerned with Minecraft and Roblox to support your grand ideas of social justice and moral responsibility.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      > I think they will be a little too concerned with Minecraft and Roblox to support your grand ideas of social justice and moral responsibility. I mean other than the fact that this is extremely dismissive, again, Finland is the example that did get rid of all this crap and is doing pretty well for itself.
      - lrem 5y ago
        Are you from Finland to be so sure of your argument? I've been a "gifted" kid so I'm sure about your interlocutor's. My parents have been summoned, more than once, to have a discussion about a group of four problematic pupils spending ~75% of the time playing cards. Turns out that we were consistently finishing all of the assignments, including the stretch goals, at the beginning and spent the rest of the time waiting for the others to catch up. But somehow none of us got an idea to try to tutor a bully or something. The system also didn't have a response to this.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        Finland significantly increased the education standards for teachers and fired a lot of bad ones. Those two things will never happen in the US.
      - dmitrygr 5y ago
        > is doing pretty well for itself. Yup, world leader in startups, inventions, science, etc... oh wait...
  - kurikuri 5y ago
    Which top percentile are you referring to, the wealthy citizens or the gifted children? I believe the comment you’re replying to is referring to the latter, while you’re referring to the former.
    - trutannus 5y ago
      Gifted students, this wasn't supposed to have anything to do with wealth distribution.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  "Harrison Bergeron" all over again. It's astonishing to me. I'm handicapped, but I would never want to drag people down to my level. Occasionally, it becomes useful to remind people that "no, that isn't an option for me," but this just seems to be an urge to make everyone equally miserable if we can't all have it wonderful.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    Crabs in a bucket effect, Harrison Bergeron, Ressentiment -- different names, same thing. Its always been there, but when we give into it and allow the sentiment to guide legislation, we go nowhere good.
- bloodyplonker22 5y ago
  Yep, and then these top percentile will leave the country or state and all of the value they create will go to another country or state. We can take, for example, Tesla leaving California for Texas.
aaomidi 5y ago
Alternatively, Finland has seen great success from banning private schools and school districts. If rich people knew the only way to get good schooling for their kids is to make schooling better entirely, then we'd have better schools. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  Banning private schools is a completely different matter from banning public schools’ gifted programs, as is being discussed here. Apples to oranges.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Not really. There shouldn't be "gifted programs", because they're not actually measuring "intelligence" but "how much money do the parents have to create extra schooling" What about this, why not have __every__ school provide personalized education to each person? Do we not have the money for that? Because we are __the richest country__.
    - andrepd 5y ago
      But that's precisely what we're saying: gifted programs for any student, regardless of wealth. You have special education for students with needs that prevent them from being able to learn in a "normal" classroom, why not for gifted students as well?
      - aaomidi 5y ago
        > gifted programs for any student, regardless of wealth. Right "any student" - so please explain to me what causes the huge disproportionate racial gap in these schools? There's really two arguments here: - Biological - Non biological If anyone thinks its the first one, I'm not having this discussion with you. If you think it's the second one, are taxes going to gifted schools actually...helping society?
daenz 5y ago
The "I can't have it so nobody should" is a powerful and pervasive mindset that has infiltrated many different aspects of life. It has found a home in many angry people and often masquerades effectively as the noble idea of fairness. "Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  > "Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation. Probably because it's impossible for a person to make a billion dollar in value without stealing from others. Name me a single example that has made it up there without - labor violations - stealing profits from workers - causing damage to the people who have worked for them
  - encoderer 5y ago
    Ok you're a troll but I'll feed you anyway. How about Paul Graham?
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      ycombinator actively takes ownership of the means of production by providing loans. Any founder knows how predatory external funding is, but, it is the only choice to get a company up and running.
      - infamouscow 5y ago
        A founder with the choice of taking YC money also is free to make the decision not to take YC money. What's the problem besides some abstract argument of moral superiority?
        aaomidi 5y ago
        Think out of the box for a second, is this really the only possible choices we have here? Or are billionaires using and designing the system to create more opportunities to make $$$ at the expense of others work.
antisthenes 5y ago
Helping kids who are falling behind is a hell of a lot more difficult than just putting a glass ceiling over gifted kids by eliminating talent programs. It's a lot easier to destroy than it is to create. This is just people taking the easy way out, without thinking about second order effects.
wsinks 5y ago
Anecdotally, I attribute most of my success in life to my 7th grade teacher's decision that since I was far beyond the rest of the class in math and followed direction well, she put me outside the classroom with a self-directed algebra book. She created a gifted program with me, and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through. I was always a distracted kid otherwise, and this got me really excited about a subject that I may not have engaged with otherwise.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  > and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through. So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you. That's the whole point of what I'm getting at. That's what EVERY kid needs. Imagine now, we actually did fund education to this goal. Where would we be in a few decades?
  - csa 5y ago
    > So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you. In Finnish, does “self-directed” imply more time with a teacher? In American English, it almost always means less… sometimes zero. Source: Me. I was a self-directed learner through quite a few math subjects in junior high school and high school. Total teacher one-on-one time was typically 30 minutes or less per year. I encourage you to try to be a slightly more sympathetic reader in this thread. You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      > You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said. I honestly definitely can see how it comes off that way. And thank you for giving me a chance to see this doubly so. However, my comments are thinking a bit beyond the system at hand, and a lot more __critically__ about the things we hold universally true, or important, or moral. This is mainly why my comments are going to sound outrageous or outright "trolly" because it's breaking a LOT of basic assumptions people have about the way the world is setup. Apologies for coming off this way.
bob1029 5y ago
> eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite I hate that this is my natural take too. I really want to believe that most people arent like this, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold this position.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Worse, eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite. No, its done based on research showing that tracked gifted/mainstream bifurcated programs are: (1) worse compared to known practical same-classroom alternatives for the students identified as gifted, (2) worse compared to the same alternatives for the students not identified as gifted, (3) as implemented in practice, based on criteria that heavily bias for out-of-school environments rather than purely assessing intellectual ability. “Gifted programs” were a top of the line social technology of the 1980s, and the two track industrial system they embody was better than the one-track industrial system. But we know how to do better than either, now.
- dantheman 5y ago
  If we know how to do better then let the parents decide, let the schools compete and see what happens.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  This is just wrong. Tracking is needed to optimize outcomes across all levels of performance. I hate to sound rude but you have no clue what you’re talking about, in all due respect. Public education, if you think it should exist, must track students. There is no alternative and nobody disagrees about that.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Tracking is needed to optimize outcomes across all levels of performance Multidimensional/multilevel tracking of the type used in secondary schools seems to be, if not essential, at least useful to that goal. Unidimensional two-track gifted/mainstream tracking has show itself to be suboptimal, especially for gifted students, who tend to be all over the map in their performance levels in different skill areas. The same techniques of providing assignments that engage at multiple levels and individualized enrichment needed to deal with that within gifted classrooms turns out to also be better for non-gifted classrooms, and to render the whole gifted/non-gifted segregation a pointless exercise that only causes unnecessary harm, stigma, and division.
- 5y ago
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
You pretty much just described socialism.
UncleMeat 5y ago
There are plenty of us who attended these programs who nevertheless don't think they are a great idea. That cannot be spite.
worker767424 5y ago
There's a case for some amount of equity with special ed so special needs kids can grow up to be contributing members of society, but equity at the top end will just stunt national achievement, putting a country at a competitive disadvantage compared to countries that are less concerned with "social equity" and more concerned with being the global semiconductor leader in 20 years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yboris 5y ago
A short story by Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron about a society where everyone is brought down to the lowest level to make everyone equal. The protagonist has massive weights on his body to make his strength more equal to others'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
DaveExeter 5y ago
In New York City, it is not a problem of spite. The problem is that Asian New Yorkers, on average, have higher IQs then everyone else. So they end up in the G&T (Gifted and Talented) programs. African New Yorkers, on average, have lower IQs then everyone else. So the G&T programs have only a smattering of darker-skinned students. This is called "systemic racism." “The move to get rid of G&T is long overdue,” said Rachel Griffiths of Brooklyn. “You can tell at a glance in my sons’ school which class is G&T and which class isn’t — the racial divide is that stark. What does that say to all the kids about who is gifted and who isn’t? In addition to learning reading and writing, the kids get an ugly real-life lesson in systemic racism.” [1] [1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan-to-end-gifted-and-talented-program/ https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan...
- starky 5y ago
  IQ has nothing to do with it. That is simply a crappy measure of certain types of problem solving ability. That is a cultural divide problem. Asian cultures value education so much more than North American culture so families have a large focus on ensuring their children are well educated (in spite of our education system) as they view that as their ticket to success. If we in Western countries continue to eschew improvements to our education system, and even reduce the ability for students to access programs that provide them a proper education, then we will continue to fall further and further behind Asian countries in innovation and productivity. Instead we look at the few programs for students that thrive in spite of the system and kill them because it is cheaper than investing in bringing other students up to that level.
- cosmotic 5y ago
  Elimination of the G&T program won't fix the underlying systemic racism that is causing the racial disparity you see.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > In New York City, it is not a problem of spite. Sounds like it is, actually. Fast-and-loose claims of "systemic racism", absent any kind of constructive proposal aimed at actually addressing perceived prejudicial attitudes, are just the politics of envy writ large.
Nasrudith 5y ago
It is worse than that - guess who isn't affected by that? The priveledged prep school set. It is the same old shit of declaring themselves righteous while fucking things up for everyone else.

q1w2 5y ago

> What we want is to make the kids who do worse do better Not exactly. The optimal strategy is to make every kid do their best. That means giving some resources to every kid in proportion to how much better it'll make them. We don't only excel because of our average performance. We also excel, as a society, because of the outlier contributions of some of our most gifted students.

trutannus 5y ago

Equality of outcome is easier to enforce by punishing the top percentile, rather than bringing the bottom percentiles up to par. By definition, there's less in the upper percentile, so less work is needed. From my understanding of education in America, the path of least resistance is the one taken.

aaomidi 5y ago
> Equality of outcome is easier to enforce by punishing the top percentile More so the top percentile have the ability, and in my opinion, the moral responsibility to push the entire standard of education up for everyone, rather than their own kin.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I'm not sure the outcome you actually want here. Failing students for not performing at gifted levels is obviously not the outcome anyone wants.. What exactly should the gifted students be doing?
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  It's more important to watch the median standard of living explode upwards over the last 200 years than to blame the peak for being a little higher. It's not the top percentile who have the ability. We have to all do it for each other.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    > It's not the top percentile who have the ability. We have to all do it for each other. Sure. And part of that is making sure that wealth is being distributed with the health of society in mind, rather than individual happiness at the top :)
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      > And part of that is making sure that wealth is being distributed with the health of society in mind, rather than individual happiness at the top :) Making sure it will happen will kill it. You have to have the right mechanisms in place to encourage it, and it may happen.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      Fixed pie fallacy. We have a shrinking middle class because the middle class has become the upper class, not because the rich are richer. The top being higher doesn't lower the base. There is more money today than a decade ago. Merely taking money from the wealthy does nothing to improve the standard of living.
      - aaomidi 5y ago
        Have literally any proof of what you're saying? > There is more money today than a decade ago. Where is it then?
        vorpalhex 5y ago
        https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2 https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a-good-thing/ https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a... The answer to where the money has gone is sort of everywhere. Everything from social security payments to military budgets has increased. Everyone makes more and things cost more too.
- IAmWorried 5y ago
  This is a little ridiculous. You expect elementary school students, now removed from their gifted classes, to "push the entire standard of education up for everyone"? I think they will be a little too concerned with Minecraft and Roblox to support your grand ideas of social justice and moral responsibility.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    > I think they will be a little too concerned with Minecraft and Roblox to support your grand ideas of social justice and moral responsibility. I mean other than the fact that this is extremely dismissive, again, Finland is the example that did get rid of all this crap and is doing pretty well for itself.
    - lrem 5y ago
      Are you from Finland to be so sure of your argument? I've been a "gifted" kid so I'm sure about your interlocutor's. My parents have been summoned, more than once, to have a discussion about a group of four problematic pupils spending ~75% of the time playing cards. Turns out that we were consistently finishing all of the assignments, including the stretch goals, at the beginning and spent the rest of the time waiting for the others to catch up. But somehow none of us got an idea to try to tutor a bully or something. The system also didn't have a response to this.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      Finland significantly increased the education standards for teachers and fired a lot of bad ones. Those two things will never happen in the US.
    - dmitrygr 5y ago
      > is doing pretty well for itself. Yup, world leader in startups, inventions, science, etc... oh wait...
- kurikuri 5y ago
  Which top percentile are you referring to, the wealthy citizens or the gifted children? I believe the comment you’re replying to is referring to the latter, while you’re referring to the former.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    Gifted students, this wasn't supposed to have anything to do with wealth distribution.
at_a_remove 5y ago
"Harrison Bergeron" all over again. It's astonishing to me. I'm handicapped, but I would never want to drag people down to my level. Occasionally, it becomes useful to remind people that "no, that isn't an option for me," but this just seems to be an urge to make everyone equally miserable if we can't all have it wonderful.
- trutannus 5y ago
  Crabs in a bucket effect, Harrison Bergeron, Ressentiment -- different names, same thing. Its always been there, but when we give into it and allow the sentiment to guide legislation, we go nowhere good.
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
Yep, and then these top percentile will leave the country or state and all of the value they create will go to another country or state. We can take, for example, Tesla leaving California for Texas.

aaomidi 5y ago

Alternatively, Finland has seen great success from banning private schools and school districts. If rich people knew the only way to get good schooling for their kids is to make schooling better entirely, then we'd have better schools. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
Banning private schools is a completely different matter from banning public schools’ gifted programs, as is being discussed here. Apples to oranges.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Not really. There shouldn't be "gifted programs", because they're not actually measuring "intelligence" but "how much money do the parents have to create extra schooling" What about this, why not have __every__ school provide personalized education to each person? Do we not have the money for that? Because we are __the richest country__.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    But that's precisely what we're saying: gifted programs for any student, regardless of wealth. You have special education for students with needs that prevent them from being able to learn in a "normal" classroom, why not for gifted students as well?
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      > gifted programs for any student, regardless of wealth. Right "any student" - so please explain to me what causes the huge disproportionate racial gap in these schools? There's really two arguments here: - Biological - Non biological If anyone thinks its the first one, I'm not having this discussion with you. If you think it's the second one, are taxes going to gifted schools actually...helping society?

daenz 5y ago

The "I can't have it so nobody should" is a powerful and pervasive mindset that has infiltrated many different aspects of life. It has found a home in many angry people and often masquerades effectively as the noble idea of fairness. "Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation.

aaomidi 5y ago
> "Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation. Probably because it's impossible for a person to make a billion dollar in value without stealing from others. Name me a single example that has made it up there without - labor violations - stealing profits from workers - causing damage to the people who have worked for them
- encoderer 5y ago
  Ok you're a troll but I'll feed you anyway. How about Paul Graham?
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    ycombinator actively takes ownership of the means of production by providing loans. Any founder knows how predatory external funding is, but, it is the only choice to get a company up and running.
    - infamouscow 5y ago
      A founder with the choice of taking YC money also is free to make the decision not to take YC money. What's the problem besides some abstract argument of moral superiority?
      - aaomidi 5y ago
        Think out of the box for a second, is this really the only possible choices we have here? Or are billionaires using and designing the system to create more opportunities to make $$$ at the expense of others work.

antisthenes 5y ago

Helping kids who are falling behind is a hell of a lot more difficult than just putting a glass ceiling over gifted kids by eliminating talent programs. It's a lot easier to destroy than it is to create. This is just people taking the easy way out, without thinking about second order effects.

wsinks 5y ago

Anecdotally, I attribute most of my success in life to my 7th grade teacher's decision that since I was far beyond the rest of the class in math and followed direction well, she put me outside the classroom with a self-directed algebra book. She created a gifted program with me, and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through. I was always a distracted kid otherwise, and this got me really excited about a subject that I may not have engaged with otherwise.

aaomidi 5y ago
> and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through. So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you. That's the whole point of what I'm getting at. That's what EVERY kid needs. Imagine now, we actually did fund education to this goal. Where would we be in a few decades?
- csa 5y ago
  > So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you. In Finnish, does “self-directed” imply more time with a teacher? In American English, it almost always means less… sometimes zero. Source: Me. I was a self-directed learner through quite a few math subjects in junior high school and high school. Total teacher one-on-one time was typically 30 minutes or less per year. I encourage you to try to be a slightly more sympathetic reader in this thread. You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    > You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said. I honestly definitely can see how it comes off that way. And thank you for giving me a chance to see this doubly so. However, my comments are thinking a bit beyond the system at hand, and a lot more __critically__ about the things we hold universally true, or important, or moral. This is mainly why my comments are going to sound outrageous or outright "trolly" because it's breaking a LOT of basic assumptions people have about the way the world is setup. Apologies for coming off this way.

bob1029 5y ago

> eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite I hate that this is my natural take too. I really want to believe that most people arent like this, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold this position.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Worse, eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite. No, its done based on research showing that tracked gifted/mainstream bifurcated programs are: (1) worse compared to known practical same-classroom alternatives for the students identified as gifted, (2) worse compared to the same alternatives for the students not identified as gifted, (3) as implemented in practice, based on criteria that heavily bias for out-of-school environments rather than purely assessing intellectual ability. “Gifted programs” were a top of the line social technology of the 1980s, and the two track industrial system they embody was better than the one-track industrial system. But we know how to do better than either, now.

dantheman 5y ago
If we know how to do better then let the parents decide, let the schools compete and see what happens.
newbamboo 5y ago
This is just wrong. Tracking is needed to optimize outcomes across all levels of performance. I hate to sound rude but you have no clue what you’re talking about, in all due respect. Public education, if you think it should exist, must track students. There is no alternative and nobody disagrees about that.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Tracking is needed to optimize outcomes across all levels of performance Multidimensional/multilevel tracking of the type used in secondary schools seems to be, if not essential, at least useful to that goal. Unidimensional two-track gifted/mainstream tracking has show itself to be suboptimal, especially for gifted students, who tend to be all over the map in their performance levels in different skill areas. The same techniques of providing assignments that engage at multiple levels and individualized enrichment needed to deal with that within gifted classrooms turns out to also be better for non-gifted classrooms, and to render the whole gifted/non-gifted segregation a pointless exercise that only causes unnecessary harm, stigma, and division.
5y ago

bloodyplonker22 5y ago

You pretty much just described socialism.

UncleMeat 5y ago

There are plenty of us who attended these programs who nevertheless don't think they are a great idea. That cannot be spite.

worker767424 5y ago

There's a case for some amount of equity with special ed so special needs kids can grow up to be contributing members of society, but equity at the top end will just stunt national achievement, putting a country at a competitive disadvantage compared to countries that are less concerned with "social equity" and more concerned with being the global semiconductor leader in 20 years.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

yboris 5y ago

A short story by Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron about a society where everyone is brought down to the lowest level to make everyone equal. The protagonist has massive weights on his body to make his strength more equal to others'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

DaveExeter 5y ago

In New York City, it is not a problem of spite. The problem is that Asian New Yorkers, on average, have higher IQs then everyone else. So they end up in the G&T (Gifted and Talented) programs. African New Yorkers, on average, have lower IQs then everyone else. So the G&T programs have only a smattering of darker-skinned students. This is called "systemic racism." “The move to get rid of G&T is long overdue,” said Rachel Griffiths of Brooklyn. “You can tell at a glance in my sons’ school which class is G&T and which class isn’t — the racial divide is that stark. What does that say to all the kids about who is gifted and who isn’t? In addition to learning reading and writing, the kids get an ugly real-life lesson in systemic racism.” [1] [1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan-to-end-gifted-and-talented-program/ https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan...

starky 5y ago
IQ has nothing to do with it. That is simply a crappy measure of certain types of problem solving ability. That is a cultural divide problem. Asian cultures value education so much more than North American culture so families have a large focus on ensuring their children are well educated (in spite of our education system) as they view that as their ticket to success. If we in Western countries continue to eschew improvements to our education system, and even reduce the ability for students to access programs that provide them a proper education, then we will continue to fall further and further behind Asian countries in innovation and productivity. Instead we look at the few programs for students that thrive in spite of the system and kill them because it is cheaper than investing in bringing other students up to that level.
cosmotic 5y ago
Elimination of the G&T program won't fix the underlying systemic racism that is causing the racial disparity you see.
zozbot234 5y ago
> In New York City, it is not a problem of spite. Sounds like it is, actually. Fast-and-loose claims of "systemic racism", absent any kind of constructive proposal aimed at actually addressing perceived prejudicial attitudes, are just the politics of envy writ large.

Nasrudith 5y ago

It is worse than that - guess who isn't affected by that? The priveledged prep school set. It is the same old shit of declaring themselves righteous while fucking things up for everyone else.