6 ms·

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

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.
    - candiodari 4y ago
      Then there's only 1 solution: 1 teacher per child. Half that would make the education budget exceed the total tax income of the state ... Or put differently: for this suggestion we can't pay. And we choose not to pay for even mild improvements to the current situation.
tomp 4y ago
It’s only unpopular to the extent it correlates with (or against) certain racial groups.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  The sense I've gotten from talking to vocal opponents is that they are philosophically blank slaters and strongly, fundamentally believe that people do not have fundamentally different aptitudes.
  - tomp 4y ago
    I doubt they’re arguing in good faith. There is an argument to be made that we should improve education and bring more people up to speed (e.g. a lot of top10% of high schoolers can learn integration but it required a once-in-10-generations genius to figure it out for the first time). But even the most fervent blank slaters should recognise that people have different interests, and come from different educational backgrounds. The only reason to support equality of outcome is to repress high-performers.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      I've heard a bunch of different flavors of the argument, and some dumber ones. I think it all boils down to a one size fits all model being bad for most students.
infamouscow 4y ago
Not accepting the reality that some people are more or less gifted/talented is objectively worse.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Citation needed. In my state I was in Talented and Gifted (TAG) programs. My own experience is that TAG-style teaching would have helped everyone I knew, certainly in grade school. And when it's doled out unevenly, that creates a caste system if it wasn't there and reinforces it if it already existed. On the one hand, it harms all the non-TAG kids by withholding education. Curricula to withhold education in schools - the irony! On the other hand, it harms the TAG kids by creating social barriers. And those students, in my experience, are one of the groups in school most likely to have existing problems with socialization. TAG as it exists in US public schools harms all students.
  - infamouscow 4y ago
    You've constructed a straw-man rather than address the central point some people are more or less gifted/talented. For millions of students the education system is the only ticket out of poverty for themselves and their families. To ignore that because it might make some people feel uncomfortable is absolute nonsense and misses the point entirely. The people uncomfortable with that should be asking themselves why they feel that way, repeatedly. Denying everyone these opportunities because some students aren't gifted/talented is deranged, unnatural, and genuinely evil.
    - candiodari 4y ago
      > Denying everyone these opportunities because some students aren't gifted/talented is deranged, unnatural, and genuinely evil. So we should deny everyone opportunities because some people are denied opportunities even when we try to give them? You know, some people drown, others don't. It's often just not fair. I'd hate to hear your solution to this.
karmajunkie 4y ago
that’s not at all true. as a data point, i can certainly accept that some students have more aptitude in one subject or another than some other students. the reason i have problems with GATE is that it supposes than only those students benefit from or should have access to these opportunities, even in fact all students can benefit from them, depending somewhat on the program. for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by simulating a working exchange. There’s nothing about the notion of buying and selling that can’t be understood by any student—yet this was part of the curriculum only for the small number of students deemed intellectually worthy of the extra attention. That said, many GT programs today are based on differentiated instruction, where students are not pulled out of the classroom but given different assignments depending on their demonstrated ability, such as maths worksheets/assignments that are a bit more difficult than the “normal” one, and i think these programs are significantly more equitable.
- scarmig 4y ago
  There's plenty about the notion of buying and selling that can't be understood by any student. An appalling number of kids in public school aren't able to answer questions like "how do you make change for $5.67 if you're given a $10 bill." Differentiated instruction is a crock; a teacher who fails to be able to teach a classroom of roughly equal abilities is going to fail even harder to teach a classroom of mixed abilities. Giving extra worksheets with slightly harder problems doesn't cut it, when a significant minority of kids are one or more grade levels above grade (and a significant majority of kids are one or more level below grade).
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  >for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by simulating a working exchange. There’s nothing about the notion of buying and selling that can’t be understood by any student—yet this was part of the curriculum only for the small number of students deemed intellectually worthy of the extra attention. It's all well and good to point out that buying and selling are fundamentally simple concepts, but that's not the same as saying that the instruction could be given universally. First, students have to be stable enough personally and in their lives that they can show up and pay attention for all the instruction that makes the exercise get off the ground at all. Then, students need to care about the material and believe that there is justification to learn it, or it's casting pearls before swine. In my public school experience, you've just lost 80-90% of the student body with those two factors. Then, if you have all that, you need teachers who are confident enough with stock markets to teach the material and go beyond a narrow track of reciting facts, and that goes way further than just 'buying and selling'. On top of that, the teacher needs to be able to make or facilitate a simulation that moves at the right pace and adjusts as necessary, including getting all the students to work well together. From the perspective of a school administration, you only get a few teachers who will have those skills and personality, and it's pretty important to have them doing work like that, because teaching-as-remedial-fact-recitation for a standardized test will get rid of those good teachers pretty quickly, and now you have no one left to teach the kids who could have benefitted from the differentiated curriculum. Source: I went to public school and now teach and manage at a school that focuses on a lot of simulations and role-playing.
untalentedturd 4y ago
In my experience it doesn't require accepting that at all. Most students in my GT program were average at best with ambitious parents. A minority of us had no tutors, study programs or other leg up for the standardized test used to select GT students. But most students were there for their parents' prestige. I'm still a fan of GT though, at least it means the school system has to provide a decent education to some students. Plus it was a pretty big deal for those of us not coming from privilege.
- dwater 4y ago
  That was my experience as well in the 90's. The biggest difference was the behavior of the students, which allowed the class to move at a faster pace. Gifted and Talented was certainly a misnomer, but the environment that behavior enabled was a benefit to everyone in the classroom across all levels of gifts and talents.
  - empressplay 4y ago
    This was also my experience in the early 90s, which was frustrating (at the time) because in the 1980s admission was based on IQ tests and in those programs we did a lot of cool things! (computer programming, robotics, rockets, chemistry, biology etc. etc.) High-achieving students could skip grades if they wanted to, but the program itself wasn't just doing more of the same, and I valued that.
com2kid 4y ago
> This is a very unpopular idea in the current culture. Let's be clear. When I went to a gifted program in the 90s, it was only offered in the nicer part of town. My mother had to repeatedly threaten and read the district's own rules to them to eventually force them to send a taxi cab to pick me up in my poor neighborhood and take me up to the rich neighborhood so I could attend the gifted program. The school district had since ended such services, and now requires parents transport their own children, something that working class families will be unable to do. Even at the time, funding was tight (it is worse now), and teachers did not have enough resources to run classrooms. It was well into the 90s before I learned the soviet union had fallen, as all of our history books and atlases still had the USSR on them[1]. The district is now going to shut down all their gifted programs, but honestly I feel that is due to the district not having enough teachers, money, or any other sorts of resources. There are schools with lead in the pipes where students shouldn't drink the water, managing a gifted program may just be beyond the district's capabilities at this time. To return to my overall point, the gifted program here was designed around racism and classism. Poor students and minority students, even if they tested in, had barriers put in place so they could not attend. The unpopular idea in the current culture is that rich white people should get a better education than everyone else.[2] (One can argue that a counter force is rich white people who think their kids are gifted even if their kids are not at all gifted...) Of course the closure of the gifted programs means all the parents who give a shit about their kid's education are either moving out of the city, or going into private schools. When I was in school, I saw parents move their kids out of private schools to go to the public school's gifted program! [1] At one point we got new math textbooks that were so bad our teacher gave us extra credit for going through the book and finding math errors in it. It was incredibly easy for a bunch of 12 year olds to find errors on seemingly every page. Another time we got corporate sponsored history books where all historical events had been sugarcoated to hell and back. Slavery, banana republics, revolutions, nothing bad had ever happened in human history according to that text book! And yes it did have the corporate sponsor's name all over the back cover. [2] Gifted programs also largely self select for families who care deeply about education, and who are therefor more involved with their child's education. This is reflected in the behavior of the children who themselves actually care about being at school. The single largest difference in the gifted classes I attended vs the mainstream classes was the attitude of the students. Students in the gifted program listened to the teacher and were actively involved in the classroom, in lessons, and in all aspects of learning, they wanted to be at school and to learn. I am 99.9% sure that a large percent of students would move at least a bit to the right on the bell curve if everyone had that same attitude about education.
MengerSponge 4y ago
There are people who believe that. There's also the fact that wealthier (read: white) parents can doctor shop around and force little Brayden into the Gifted track. The result of those forces is wildly regressive, especially when schools are so underfunded. Poor kids and minority kids wind up in classrooms that are doubly starved for resources. Funding education to the point where schools have tracks that students can move between (advanced, normal, remedial) would be much more equitable and much better pedagogically too.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  This claim about wealth == white isn't all that accurate. Last I checked the sub-poverty population in the USA has an ancestral breakdown of 45% european 25% african 25% south/central american 5% asian/native north american. While the wealthiest 1% is overwhelmingly european those people uniformly send their children to private schools with lots of resources and hire private tutors for their college entrance exams. In any case, nothing in your comment justifies eliminating advanced learning programs in any school, even if some parents want to push their kids into such programs even if they're not really ready for it.
- smcin 4y ago
  Why is "doctor shopping" in any way related to admission to the Gifted track? For everyone unfamiliar with the unique peculiarities of the US setup on GATE (Gifted-and-Talented Education). Are you referring to doctor-shopping for ADHD or autism diagnoses, esp. in 4-7-year-olds, as is rampant in the US? Or something else? And how numerically does that influence GATE admission rates? (In the past I've looked for (aggregate) statistics on autism/ADHD diagnoses influencing SAT scores or college admission rates, but the industry increasingly invokes "healthcare privacy" to hide even reporting anonymized aggregate statistics, per-zipcode/per-school/per-college). I believe the record is held by one zipcode in Connecticut where 18% of schoolchildren have autism diagnoses. > Funding education... would be much more equitable... Again the US setup is peculiar: most (public) school funding comes from local (school-district) and state level, with a tiny amound of federal funding. Hence zipcodes are a strong proxy for much of this.
  - 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
I see a lot of similarities to British trends in the late 19th century with the'public school' (posh/aristocrat) vs state-run (prole/serf) system. By definition, the aristocratic class was considered to be universally gifted, and the serf class was considered to be universally inferior, so having a 'gifted program' in the school for the proles risked the danger of breaking class lines. However, the collapse of the British Empire was due in large part to greed and incompetent management (not that Empires are all that desirable) but the 20th century history of technological development in Britain isn't all that great. In contrast, looking at the biographies of many leading American scientists and entrepreneurs of the 20th century reveals that a great many of them came from places like impoverished MidWest farming communities and were only able to move on to higher academics, research centers, etc. because of their access to 'advanced learning programs' in their local areas. If the argument is that bias exists in who gets into advanced/gifted programs in the K-12 public schools because there is a limited number of slots, the solution is obviously to expand the number of slots, not to eliminate the programs altogether.
- scarmig 4y ago
  Expanding slots isn't itself a solution, because ultimately you end up with gifted programs that are targeting people mildly above average. I've heard of some school districts in Virginia where 50% of students are in gifted programs. This waters down the curriculum so that people in the top 5-10% are no longer challenged and engaged. What we need is fine grained tracking and the ability to appropriately serve children at all levels. This includes, btw, people at the bottom of the distribution: if you're teaching material targeting people at the 50% percentile of preparedness, you're not serving the kids at 25% or 10% at all and are setting them up for failure.
- quartesixte 4y ago
  >solution is obviously to expand the number of slots, Exactly! And then perhaps as we continue to raise the bar and challenge our students and teachers to higher academic levels earlier, we’ll raise the bar on education everywhere and start catching up to our peer nations. The anti-intellectualism that pervades the entire spectrum of US political beliefs is astounding.
veilrap 4y ago
I think the problem is that the measurement, detection, and access to so-called gifted and talented programs is a major issue. The more exclusive the programs are the more it restricts the access to advanced studies to students not lucky enough to make the cutoff. The differences of students on one side of a cutoff and the other side of a cutoff are negligible. I prefer systems that make advanced coursework and guidance available to anyone willing and able to put in the work. And the "who" may vary from year to year or course to course based on the individual student interest.
- junofan 4y ago
  > The differences of students on one side of a cutoff and the other side of a cutoff are negligible. Well, there’s a bar. One side figured out how to exceed the bar. The other didn’t. That’s a pretty big difference that I wouldn’t attribute to “luck.”
DaveExeter 4y ago
I don't think that is the problem. The problem is that the gifted/talented are disproportionally Asian. That is the real problem. Accepting that some ethnic groups have a higher average IQ than others goes against the American ideal of equality.
betaby 4y ago
Interestingly enough in Canada/USA is very OK and cool to say 'gifted athlete' or 'talented goalkeeper' but totally no-no to say 'mathematically gifted student'. Speaking from the personal experience of kids being in high school.
- okaram 4y ago
  I've no clue what you are talking about. It is perfectly OK to say mathematically gifted student
  - scarmig 4y ago
    From the new Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: > All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents... The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided... An important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics 'talent' and 'giftedness' with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway... There is no cutoff determining when one child is 'gifted' and another is not.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      I thought they pulled back the "reject ideas of natural gifts and talents" in the most recent draft, after massive public outrage?
    - quartesixte 4y ago
      As someone who has friends in education PhD programs this is not an ironic statement these are true beliefs held by the institutions that train our teachers today.

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.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    Then there's only 1 solution: 1 teacher per child. Half that would make the education budget exceed the total tax income of the state ... Or put differently: for this suggestion we can't pay. And we choose not to pay for even mild improvements to the current situation.

tomp 4y ago

It’s only unpopular to the extent it correlates with (or against) certain racial groups.

ch4s3 4y ago
The sense I've gotten from talking to vocal opponents is that they are philosophically blank slaters and strongly, fundamentally believe that people do not have fundamentally different aptitudes.
- tomp 4y ago
  I doubt they’re arguing in good faith. There is an argument to be made that we should improve education and bring more people up to speed (e.g. a lot of top10% of high schoolers can learn integration but it required a once-in-10-generations genius to figure it out for the first time). But even the most fervent blank slaters should recognise that people have different interests, and come from different educational backgrounds. The only reason to support equality of outcome is to repress high-performers.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    I've heard a bunch of different flavors of the argument, and some dumber ones. I think it all boils down to a one size fits all model being bad for most students.

infamouscow 4y ago

Not accepting the reality that some people are more or less gifted/talented is objectively worse.

drewcoo 4y ago
Citation needed. In my state I was in Talented and Gifted (TAG) programs. My own experience is that TAG-style teaching would have helped everyone I knew, certainly in grade school. And when it's doled out unevenly, that creates a caste system if it wasn't there and reinforces it if it already existed. On the one hand, it harms all the non-TAG kids by withholding education. Curricula to withhold education in schools - the irony! On the other hand, it harms the TAG kids by creating social barriers. And those students, in my experience, are one of the groups in school most likely to have existing problems with socialization. TAG as it exists in US public schools harms all students.
- infamouscow 4y ago
  You've constructed a straw-man rather than address the central point some people are more or less gifted/talented. For millions of students the education system is the only ticket out of poverty for themselves and their families. To ignore that because it might make some people feel uncomfortable is absolute nonsense and misses the point entirely. The people uncomfortable with that should be asking themselves why they feel that way, repeatedly. Denying everyone these opportunities because some students aren't gifted/talented is deranged, unnatural, and genuinely evil.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    > Denying everyone these opportunities because some students aren't gifted/talented is deranged, unnatural, and genuinely evil. So we should deny everyone opportunities because some people are denied opportunities even when we try to give them? You know, some people drown, others don't. It's often just not fair. I'd hate to hear your solution to this.

karmajunkie 4y ago

that’s not at all true. as a data point, i can certainly accept that some students have more aptitude in one subject or another than some other students. the reason i have problems with GATE is that it supposes than only those students benefit from or should have access to these opportunities, even in fact all students can benefit from them, depending somewhat on the program. for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by simulating a working exchange. There’s nothing about the notion of buying and selling that can’t be understood by any student—yet this was part of the curriculum only for the small number of students deemed intellectually worthy of the extra attention. That said, many GT programs today are based on differentiated instruction, where students are not pulled out of the classroom but given different assignments depending on their demonstrated ability, such as maths worksheets/assignments that are a bit more difficult than the “normal” one, and i think these programs are significantly more equitable.

scarmig 4y ago
There's plenty about the notion of buying and selling that can't be understood by any student. An appalling number of kids in public school aren't able to answer questions like "how do you make change for $5.67 if you're given a $10 bill." Differentiated instruction is a crock; a teacher who fails to be able to teach a classroom of roughly equal abilities is going to fail even harder to teach a classroom of mixed abilities. Giving extra worksheets with slightly harder problems doesn't cut it, when a significant minority of kids are one or more grade levels above grade (and a significant majority of kids are one or more level below grade).
QuarterReptile 4y ago
>for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by simulating a working exchange. There’s nothing about the notion of buying and selling that can’t be understood by any student—yet this was part of the curriculum only for the small number of students deemed intellectually worthy of the extra attention. It's all well and good to point out that buying and selling are fundamentally simple concepts, but that's not the same as saying that the instruction could be given universally. First, students have to be stable enough personally and in their lives that they can show up and pay attention for all the instruction that makes the exercise get off the ground at all. Then, students need to care about the material and believe that there is justification to learn it, or it's casting pearls before swine. In my public school experience, you've just lost 80-90% of the student body with those two factors. Then, if you have all that, you need teachers who are confident enough with stock markets to teach the material and go beyond a narrow track of reciting facts, and that goes way further than just 'buying and selling'. On top of that, the teacher needs to be able to make or facilitate a simulation that moves at the right pace and adjusts as necessary, including getting all the students to work well together. From the perspective of a school administration, you only get a few teachers who will have those skills and personality, and it's pretty important to have them doing work like that, because teaching-as-remedial-fact-recitation for a standardized test will get rid of those good teachers pretty quickly, and now you have no one left to teach the kids who could have benefitted from the differentiated curriculum. Source: I went to public school and now teach and manage at a school that focuses on a lot of simulations and role-playing.

untalentedturd 4y ago

In my experience it doesn't require accepting that at all. Most students in my GT program were average at best with ambitious parents. A minority of us had no tutors, study programs or other leg up for the standardized test used to select GT students. But most students were there for their parents' prestige. I'm still a fan of GT though, at least it means the school system has to provide a decent education to some students. Plus it was a pretty big deal for those of us not coming from privilege.

dwater 4y ago
That was my experience as well in the 90's. The biggest difference was the behavior of the students, which allowed the class to move at a faster pace. Gifted and Talented was certainly a misnomer, but the environment that behavior enabled was a benefit to everyone in the classroom across all levels of gifts and talents.
- empressplay 4y ago
  This was also my experience in the early 90s, which was frustrating (at the time) because in the 1980s admission was based on IQ tests and in those programs we did a lot of cool things! (computer programming, robotics, rockets, chemistry, biology etc. etc.) High-achieving students could skip grades if they wanted to, but the program itself wasn't just doing more of the same, and I valued that.

com2kid 4y ago

> This is a very unpopular idea in the current culture. Let's be clear. When I went to a gifted program in the 90s, it was only offered in the nicer part of town. My mother had to repeatedly threaten and read the district's own rules to them to eventually force them to send a taxi cab to pick me up in my poor neighborhood and take me up to the rich neighborhood so I could attend the gifted program. The school district had since ended such services, and now requires parents transport their own children, something that working class families will be unable to do. Even at the time, funding was tight (it is worse now), and teachers did not have enough resources to run classrooms. It was well into the 90s before I learned the soviet union had fallen, as all of our history books and atlases still had the USSR on them[1]. The district is now going to shut down all their gifted programs, but honestly I feel that is due to the district not having enough teachers, money, or any other sorts of resources. There are schools with lead in the pipes where students shouldn't drink the water, managing a gifted program may just be beyond the district's capabilities at this time. To return to my overall point, the gifted program here was designed around racism and classism. Poor students and minority students, even if they tested in, had barriers put in place so they could not attend. The unpopular idea in the current culture is that rich white people should get a better education than everyone else.[2] (One can argue that a counter force is rich white people who think their kids are gifted even if their kids are not at all gifted...) Of course the closure of the gifted programs means all the parents who give a shit about their kid's education are either moving out of the city, or going into private schools. When I was in school, I saw parents move their kids out of private schools to go to the public school's gifted program! [1] At one point we got new math textbooks that were so bad our teacher gave us extra credit for going through the book and finding math errors in it. It was incredibly easy for a bunch of 12 year olds to find errors on seemingly every page. Another time we got corporate sponsored history books where all historical events had been sugarcoated to hell and back. Slavery, banana republics, revolutions, nothing bad had ever happened in human history according to that text book! And yes it did have the corporate sponsor's name all over the back cover. [2] Gifted programs also largely self select for families who care deeply about education, and who are therefor more involved with their child's education. This is reflected in the behavior of the children who themselves actually care about being at school. The single largest difference in the gifted classes I attended vs the mainstream classes was the attitude of the students. Students in the gifted program listened to the teacher and were actively involved in the classroom, in lessons, and in all aspects of learning, they wanted to be at school and to learn. I am 99.9% sure that a large percent of students would move at least a bit to the right on the bell curve if everyone had that same attitude about education.

MengerSponge 4y ago

There are people who believe that. There's also the fact that wealthier (read: white) parents can doctor shop around and force little Brayden into the Gifted track. The result of those forces is wildly regressive, especially when schools are so underfunded. Poor kids and minority kids wind up in classrooms that are doubly starved for resources. Funding education to the point where schools have tracks that students can move between (advanced, normal, remedial) would be much more equitable and much better pedagogically too.

photochemsyn 4y ago
This claim about wealth == white isn't all that accurate. Last I checked the sub-poverty population in the USA has an ancestral breakdown of 45% european 25% african 25% south/central american 5% asian/native north american. While the wealthiest 1% is overwhelmingly european those people uniformly send their children to private schools with lots of resources and hire private tutors for their college entrance exams. In any case, nothing in your comment justifies eliminating advanced learning programs in any school, even if some parents want to push their kids into such programs even if they're not really ready for it.
smcin 4y ago
Why is "doctor shopping" in any way related to admission to the Gifted track? For everyone unfamiliar with the unique peculiarities of the US setup on GATE (Gifted-and-Talented Education). Are you referring to doctor-shopping for ADHD or autism diagnoses, esp. in 4-7-year-olds, as is rampant in the US? Or something else? And how numerically does that influence GATE admission rates? (In the past I've looked for (aggregate) statistics on autism/ADHD diagnoses influencing SAT scores or college admission rates, but the industry increasingly invokes "healthcare privacy" to hide even reporting anonymized aggregate statistics, per-zipcode/per-school/per-college). I believe the record is held by one zipcode in Connecticut where 18% of schoolchildren have autism diagnoses. > Funding education... would be much more equitable... Again the US setup is peculiar: most (public) school funding comes from local (school-district) and state level, with a tiny amound of federal funding. Hence zipcodes are a strong proxy for much of this.
- 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

I see a lot of similarities to British trends in the late 19th century with the'public school' (posh/aristocrat) vs state-run (prole/serf) system. By definition, the aristocratic class was considered to be universally gifted, and the serf class was considered to be universally inferior, so having a 'gifted program' in the school for the proles risked the danger of breaking class lines. However, the collapse of the British Empire was due in large part to greed and incompetent management (not that Empires are all that desirable) but the 20th century history of technological development in Britain isn't all that great. In contrast, looking at the biographies of many leading American scientists and entrepreneurs of the 20th century reveals that a great many of them came from places like impoverished MidWest farming communities and were only able to move on to higher academics, research centers, etc. because of their access to 'advanced learning programs' in their local areas. If the argument is that bias exists in who gets into advanced/gifted programs in the K-12 public schools because there is a limited number of slots, the solution is obviously to expand the number of slots, not to eliminate the programs altogether.

scarmig 4y ago
Expanding slots isn't itself a solution, because ultimately you end up with gifted programs that are targeting people mildly above average. I've heard of some school districts in Virginia where 50% of students are in gifted programs. This waters down the curriculum so that people in the top 5-10% are no longer challenged and engaged. What we need is fine grained tracking and the ability to appropriately serve children at all levels. This includes, btw, people at the bottom of the distribution: if you're teaching material targeting people at the 50% percentile of preparedness, you're not serving the kids at 25% or 10% at all and are setting them up for failure.
quartesixte 4y ago
>solution is obviously to expand the number of slots, Exactly! And then perhaps as we continue to raise the bar and challenge our students and teachers to higher academic levels earlier, we’ll raise the bar on education everywhere and start catching up to our peer nations. The anti-intellectualism that pervades the entire spectrum of US political beliefs is astounding.

veilrap 4y ago

I think the problem is that the measurement, detection, and access to so-called gifted and talented programs is a major issue. The more exclusive the programs are the more it restricts the access to advanced studies to students not lucky enough to make the cutoff. The differences of students on one side of a cutoff and the other side of a cutoff are negligible. I prefer systems that make advanced coursework and guidance available to anyone willing and able to put in the work. And the "who" may vary from year to year or course to course based on the individual student interest.

junofan 4y ago
> The differences of students on one side of a cutoff and the other side of a cutoff are negligible. Well, there’s a bar. One side figured out how to exceed the bar. The other didn’t. That’s a pretty big difference that I wouldn’t attribute to “luck.”

DaveExeter 4y ago

I don't think that is the problem. The problem is that the gifted/talented are disproportionally Asian. That is the real problem. Accepting that some ethnic groups have a higher average IQ than others goes against the American ideal of equality.

betaby 4y ago

Interestingly enough in Canada/USA is very OK and cool to say 'gifted athlete' or 'talented goalkeeper' but totally no-no to say 'mathematically gifted student'. Speaking from the personal experience of kids being in high school.

okaram 4y ago
I've no clue what you are talking about. It is perfectly OK to say mathematically gifted student
- scarmig 4y ago
  From the new Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: > All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents... The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided... An important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics 'talent' and 'giftedness' with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway... There is no cutoff determining when one child is 'gifted' and another is not.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I thought they pulled back the "reject ideas of natural gifts and talents" in the most recent draft, after massive public outrage?
  - quartesixte 4y ago
    As someone who has friends in education PhD programs this is not an ironic statement these are true beliefs held by the institutions that train our teachers today.