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I grew up in the 80s/90s in Sacramento and went to public schools that had great advanced education programs. They were all free, and they were open to kids no

I grew up in the 80s/90s in Sacramento and went to public schools that had great advanced education programs. They were all free, and they were open to kids no matter what neighborhood you lived in. The teachers were free to challenge students and the students loved the challenge. I think of one friend who immigrated to the US at age 11 and went on to Harvard and Harvard Law. What an amazing opportunity. Now I live near Palo Alto, and parents are suing the public schools (and winning) because the schools are erecting unreasonable and opaque barriers to advanced education. I never would have guessed that gifted education would be worse in the heart of Silicon Valley in 2022 than it was in Sacramento 30 years prior. But apparently the state changed the GATE requirements in 2014, and now districts can choose whether to offer it or not. We've had huge challenges in our local school, which doesn't want to support our daughter in learning math. We've not pulled her from the schools just yet, but we know many families that have, for either private school or homeschooling. It's a pity things have gone in this direction, and quite so far.

mistrial9 4y ago
after experiencing public schools in California in an environment that was hostile to advanced education (and writing about it here) I do not have much positive to say.. only an observation that there are multiple factors that can aggregate into an open, purposeful deconstruction of advanced placement education. > It's a pity things have gone in this direction that is putting lace on the latrine, in my experience. It is not a "pity" and that style of language is telling. There are confluent forces that prefer to deconstruct advanced education in a public setting.
i_like_apis 4y ago
What are the barriers in Palo Alto? I can imagine they are facing a very high percentage of parents pushing their kids as gifted. (And truthfully there are a lot of above average folks in Palo Alto. Not necessarily all the kids though.)
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I live in Menlo Park, and the school has been very resistant to allowing kids to do learning above grade level. They have mightily dragged their feet on even assessing our daughter, and even after she demonstrated that she had a firm grasp on all of the math for her current grade (they chose not to test anything above that), they still made her sit through math instruction with the rest of the class. By the end of the year they finally let her do some IXL (math app) beyond her grade level, but this provides no instruction — just drilling on concepts you have already learned. The school refuses to set any goals for what an advanced student should learn over the course of a year. When pressed, they talk about thinking deeper about grade-level concepts she already understands. Of course, there is no way to measure if she is in fact thinking deeper about anything, so it is essentially an unmeasurable goal. And yes, there are many high-achieving parents here, most of whom assumed the schools would allow their students to study material at the same level they studied when they were children. Parents are beginning to organize to get the school to make this happen. In addition to seeing their children not learn, parents are upset that children are getting bored with school, getting sloppy with their work because they think it's too easy/below them, or thinking that "school is dumb". Perhaps most importantly, the children are never experiencing a challenge, which means that they'll be in for a rude awakening when they finally encounter one in the real world.
  - i_like_apis 4y ago
    I don't have children, and I have a day job that would prevent me from overseeing significant home-schooling. But I often daydream about what the ideal home schooling curriculum would be. I have a lot of it planned out. If I had the money or the right flex WFH schedule, I would absolutely home-school my children. It would be something where they satisfy the standard curriculum, and do mostly self-directed learning into college subjects starting around middle school age. I think homeschooling is probably the right thing for gifted children. As long as each subject can be attended to properly, and the kid is kept on a discipline of doing enough work. For areas like SV / The Peninsula I think there need to be homeschooling Co-Ops. I don't mean Charter Schools, just parents collectively could come together to supervise self-directed homeschooling. I would want such a group to only perform: 1) sharing constructed curricula 2) Administrating standardized tests 3) Perhaps organizing socialization for the children. Anything more doesn't scale well IMO. There are a lot of crappy private schools that do alternative learning. I looked into a lot of them when I was grade school. If I could afford 100% focus I would involve less groups and rely more on educating my kid solo / I'd frankly rather not involve any of the inevitable politics, misalignments, and mediocrity that would come from most groups. I was a GATE kid for a little while in CA and a similar program in another state. Ultimately most learning was self-directed though. If the kid is smart, they just need to be set free (given the time) to study on their own, and guided by parents to do that instead of being distracted by all of the normal things which distract kids (and adults). I also used to live in Menlo Park. Another city with lots of smart folks.
codefreeordie 4y ago
The difficulty with gifted/talented education is that offering it requires inherently accepting that some people are not gifted/talented (or, at a minimum, less gifted/talented). This is a very unpopular idea in the current culture.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I don't know that it is. I think we all accept on some level that some people are more advanced and some aren't. What I think people take issue with is when getting access to programs like this - that can drastically change the future of your child - has gatekeeping and politics around it, and no "path" that every family can uniformly follow to get accepted into such a program. This is where most of the tension is.
  - psi75 4y ago
    The issue is that while (a) society absolutely needs these programs, (b) they, by definition, can't be made available to everyone. Some people are going to get in, and some are not. No matter what we do, there are going to be results we don't like, both at an individual and aggregate level. For example, it has become fashionable in liberal circles to argue for abolishing the SAT because, while it is not intrinsically racist, its results reflect our racist society: people with less access to education and tutoring perform poorly, and this results in measurable racial disparities. Problem is, the world becomes even worse without it. Under our current regime, very few people from underprivileged backgrounds can get into college and advance, but without the SAT, almost no one would be doing so.
  - throwfh80h82 4y ago
    Yeah I think the identification of "gifted" children is pretty imprecise and error prone. Also it's unclear the kids doing well (better than everyone else, I imagine) are the ones who'd most benefit from special treatment, versus the struggling kids.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      I agree that a binary gifted/nongifted is not really descriptive of reality or useful. No kid should get special treatment; every kid should get treatment appropriate to their level. It's not even strictly speaking a matter of resources: you don't need fancy equipment to teach a more advanced class. It does mean you need more teachers and a larger school, so that people can be placed into classes of roughly equal levels of ability.

mistrial9 4y ago

after experiencing public schools in California in an environment that was hostile to advanced education (and writing about it here) I do not have much positive to say.. only an observation that there are multiple factors that can aggregate into an open, purposeful deconstruction of advanced placement education. > It's a pity things have gone in this direction that is putting lace on the latrine, in my experience. It is not a "pity" and that style of language is telling. There are confluent forces that prefer to deconstruct advanced education in a public setting.

i_like_apis 4y ago

What are the barriers in Palo Alto? I can imagine they are facing a very high percentage of parents pushing their kids as gifted. (And truthfully there are a lot of above average folks in Palo Alto. Not necessarily all the kids though.)

gnicholas 4y ago
I live in Menlo Park, and the school has been very resistant to allowing kids to do learning above grade level. They have mightily dragged their feet on even assessing our daughter, and even after she demonstrated that she had a firm grasp on all of the math for her current grade (they chose not to test anything above that), they still made her sit through math instruction with the rest of the class. By the end of the year they finally let her do some IXL (math app) beyond her grade level, but this provides no instruction — just drilling on concepts you have already learned. The school refuses to set any goals for what an advanced student should learn over the course of a year. When pressed, they talk about thinking deeper about grade-level concepts she already understands. Of course, there is no way to measure if she is in fact thinking deeper about anything, so it is essentially an unmeasurable goal. And yes, there are many high-achieving parents here, most of whom assumed the schools would allow their students to study material at the same level they studied when they were children. Parents are beginning to organize to get the school to make this happen. In addition to seeing their children not learn, parents are upset that children are getting bored with school, getting sloppy with their work because they think it's too easy/below them, or thinking that "school is dumb". Perhaps most importantly, the children are never experiencing a challenge, which means that they'll be in for a rude awakening when they finally encounter one in the real world.
- i_like_apis 4y ago
  I don't have children, and I have a day job that would prevent me from overseeing significant home-schooling. But I often daydream about what the ideal home schooling curriculum would be. I have a lot of it planned out. If I had the money or the right flex WFH schedule, I would absolutely home-school my children. It would be something where they satisfy the standard curriculum, and do mostly self-directed learning into college subjects starting around middle school age. I think homeschooling is probably the right thing for gifted children. As long as each subject can be attended to properly, and the kid is kept on a discipline of doing enough work. For areas like SV / The Peninsula I think there need to be homeschooling Co-Ops. I don't mean Charter Schools, just parents collectively could come together to supervise self-directed homeschooling. I would want such a group to only perform: 1) sharing constructed curricula 2) Administrating standardized tests 3) Perhaps organizing socialization for the children. Anything more doesn't scale well IMO. There are a lot of crappy private schools that do alternative learning. I looked into a lot of them when I was grade school. If I could afford 100% focus I would involve less groups and rely more on educating my kid solo / I'd frankly rather not involve any of the inevitable politics, misalignments, and mediocrity that would come from most groups. I was a GATE kid for a little while in CA and a similar program in another state. Ultimately most learning was self-directed though. If the kid is smart, they just need to be set free (given the time) to study on their own, and guided by parents to do that instead of being distracted by all of the normal things which distract kids (and adults). I also used to live in Menlo Park. Another city with lots of smart folks.

codefreeordie 4y ago

The difficulty with gifted/talented education is that offering it requires inherently accepting that some people are not gifted/talented (or, at a minimum, less gifted/talented). This is a very unpopular idea in the current culture.

no_wizard 4y ago
I don't know that it is. I think we all accept on some level that some people are more advanced and some aren't. What I think people take issue with is when getting access to programs like this - that can drastically change the future of your child - has gatekeeping and politics around it, and no "path" that every family can uniformly follow to get accepted into such a program. This is where most of the tension is.
- psi75 4y ago
  The issue is that while (a) society absolutely needs these programs, (b) they, by definition, can't be made available to everyone. Some people are going to get in, and some are not. No matter what we do, there are going to be results we don't like, both at an individual and aggregate level. For example, it has become fashionable in liberal circles to argue for abolishing the SAT because, while it is not intrinsically racist, its results reflect our racist society: people with less access to education and tutoring perform poorly, and this results in measurable racial disparities. Problem is, the world becomes even worse without it. Under our current regime, very few people from underprivileged backgrounds can get into college and advance, but without the SAT, almost no one would be doing so.
- throwfh80h82 4y ago
  Yeah I think the identification of "gifted" children is pretty imprecise and error prone. Also it's unclear the kids doing well (better than everyone else, I imagine) are the ones who'd most benefit from special treatment, versus the struggling kids.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I agree that a binary gifted/nongifted is not really descriptive of reality or useful. No kid should get special treatment; every kid should get treatment appropriate to their level. It's not even strictly speaking a matter of resources: you don't need fancy equipment to teach a more advanced class. It does mean you need more teachers and a larger school, so that people can be placed into classes of roughly equal levels of ability.