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The Bright Students Left Behind

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133 pointstokenadult203 comments

So often, when it comes to gifted education, I hear people crying elitism and even making snide remarks about gifted students, which nobody seems to have a problem with.

What people are missing is that average and below average students are challenged in school from day one. And, in being challenged, they learn to stretch and to work harder to learn the material.

So often, gifted programs do not exist in very early elementary school. Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. They learn that tests and homework are a joke. So, when the day comes that things aren't quite as easy, they don't have the necessary skills to help them level up.

Every kid deserves to be challenged and to be taught to do their very best. Sadly, in the United States, that didn't happen - even before the stupid No Child Left Behind rules kicked in.

From a cost standpoint it makes sense. You're capturing most students. How many students will use a gifted program? They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum. That's not cheap, and not subsidized by the federal government, unlike students under IEPs.

Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact which justifies increased investment. The real issue is most 'gifted' programs are a joke with little impact.

> Economically gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact

If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?

Can you please elaborate or share some kind of story on why you think this would happen? Where are they leaving to, and why?

We fund schools because on the whole it all works out; if San Francisco teaches a kid who moves to New York, well, New York taught a kid that moved to Portland and Portland taught a kid that moved to a Kansas farm and Kansas taught a kid that moved to Texas, and in the end everybody wins pretty well.

jerf, the problem is that there is nothing to keep Alabama from defecting, except for the fact that educated people like to live around places with good education systems and tend to vote in favor of education.

Edit: Parent was missing a comma. Punctuation is important.

I think Retric meant Economically, gifted students...

Or you can realize that GP left out a comma, or with a slight rephrasing:

  Economically speaking, gifted students ...

I think they forgot a comma. "Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact"

If there's a sensible read of someone's comment it's preferable to use that interpretation. "Economically gifted" makes no sense in the context of the discussion.

The OP was saying your tax dollars are likely to get a good return by fostering the progress of gifted students.

I think there's a comma missing there. Plenty of gifted students in my son's school qualify for the free lunch program.

Seeing as a lot of people are pointing out the omission of a comma, what would you say to a person who wasn't economically fortunate but ended up in a GT program? Would that justify the tax expense?

Economically, education is a public subsidy that helps private wealth. Taxpayers pay for your worker training for free. In exchange society makes some demands on the educational process, primarily that it spend some amount of time preparing students to be responsible citizens/members of society alongside the office drone prep these gifted programs want to accelerate.

Keeping all the smart kids locked in an ivory tower where they don't have to deal with humanity or ever get any context into how society actually works is how you get Ayn Rand afficionados well past the age-appropriate teenage years, and nobody wants that.

That may be less true if you consider the costs of dealing with the disruptions caused by the behavioral problems frequently displayed by unchallenged gifted students.

But, yes, there's a lot of government policy at all levels that favors focussing on the low end and ignoring the high end of the ability scale -- that's exactly the thing that seems to be the focus of the complaint. So saying that the thing being complained about makes sense because of the exact thing being complained about is, somewhat circular logic.

So it is OK to use dedicated teachers and staff as well as a special curriculum for the kids at the bottom, but when you suggest it for kids at the top, it is too expensive?

Your point about government subsidy is on the mark, but why are the kids at the bottom subsidised while those at the top are left to languish? It illustrates a double standard that has somehow become embedded in the culture of the country. If Americans truly believed in giving each child their fair share, then politics would force the resources to be spread more evenly.

Regarding the "why" notion of so much effort being put into the kids at the bottom, it's my personal experience that the most vocal parents tend to come from the pool toward the bottom, be it physically or mentally disabled. They have a point, certainly, in asserting their children have a right to equal access...but I do think the costs associated with such access typically burden the state far more than the parent in terms of accommodation. As in, some special needs kids genuinely don't belong in mainstream education environments, but through parental outcry and pressure, sometimes this gets over-ruled.

What has bothered me the most, time and again, is the assumption that smart kids will 'turn out fine' without additional challenges and, by contrast, there's any reasonable ROI expectation with the a large portion of developmentally challenged / mentally deficient kids. It's a sensitive issue for sure. Somehow just postulating this kind of thinking draws up feelings of insensitivity, but I'm trying to focus on some empirical observations. Difficult tight rope!

In absolute terms, it would really be much cheaper to provide the resources to push the gifted students than what is spent on the lowest-performing students. $1000 dollars worth of books, software and a cheap laptop per student per year is far cheaper than hiring a one-on-one ed tech at $20-30k to babysit children with severe learning disabilities and behavior issues, or the still greater sums on the "severe and profound" students that have to be "educated" until they age out.

Further, in terms of societal impact, the productivity from a well-educated gifted student is going to greatly outmatch the gains from 'educating' a low-achiever.

They're required to make sure the kids at the bottom can pass. The kids at the top already are passing, so spending money on them is extra.

You aren't accounting for an enormous cost, should we stay on this path for much longer: brain drain.

Magnet schools can fix this issue. If you have 10 high schools, running 1 as a gifted program and the other 9 as before should not cost significantly more.

Of course, people complain about negative effects on the remaining schools [0] on the basis that removing gifted students hurts the remaining ones. This seems like a strange concern to me -- why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers?

[0] http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/magnet-schools-m...

>why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers?

Some variant of academic socialism?

Could it be packaged with social socialism for the gifted kids who lack in other social areas?

It's an interesting concept. I agree with you completely, but we're basically saying that the gifted have no responsibility to the average and below average. While in this specific situation, it seems obvious that a child shouldn't have to receive a lower quality education in order the help those with less ability, that concept has some Randian implications if you extrapolate it to society in general.

They are going to spend the rest of their lives helping those with less ability -- who do they have to be handicapped in school so as to be less capable of doing so? And have a miserable time of it to boot?

The gifted students are already segregated into their upper level classes. They have little to no contact with average students outside of the cafeteria or gym class.

> The gifted students are already segregated into their upper level classes.

Unless you have a special gifted program, that's generally only true in high school and maybe middle school, and (even then), is subject to the availability of distinct "upper level" classes, which even in high schools may be limited in districts where the effort is focused on maintaining the middle and bringing up the bottom.

Some people view the children in public schools as resources to be applied to their own ends.

The point in that article is a bit more subtle than that: "What should have been done was to pull out the bottom ten percent."

The author's thesis is that the real benefit, to average and gifted kids alike, is not having to be in the same class as the bottom rung of kids.

I find that thesis at least plausible. I went to regular public school for K-8, then a magnet school for 9-12. It's really the bottom 10%, usually kids with behavioral or social problems, that makes the experience worse for everyone.

At the same time, I'm not sure my magnet school experience would've been appreciably worse with a bunch of average kids in the class. Maybe the teachers would have had to teach the material more slowly and we would've covered less of it, but the fact is that very little you learn in K-12 matters anyway.

the fact is that very little you learn in K-12 matters anyway

And herein lies the problem with K-12 for gifted students. Why should kids be learning things that don't matter when they are capable of more?

(Note: I disagree with the claim that little in K12 matters; every bit of knowledge lays the foundation for the next layer of abstraction. E.g. counting->arithmetic->algebra->calculus/statistics, or alphabet->spelling->vocabulary->grammar->reading->writing->essay writing/research.)

> but the fact is that very little you learn in K-12 matters anyway.

I disagree. Most of what is learned in K-12 is foundational for things learned later (literacy, numeracy, and basic social skills at the earlier grades, more developed hard and soft analytical and communications skills in later grades.) Even to the extent that the nominal subject matter may not be particularly generally useful later, it tends to serve as a focus for more generally applicable skills.

My point is that covering more or less of the nominal subject matter doesn't particularly matter because the nominal subject matter isn't particularly useful itself.

What if there is only one high school in the area?

Also, the argument isn't that gifted students are responsible for pulling up peers. The argument is that by being around people like that, it benefits others. Much like integrating schools and having different income levels in the same school helps others.

"From a cost standpoint it makes sense." Only if you view education as a cost center. What's the ROI of spending on gifted education? I've not seen such studies; however, what if you could dramatically improve GDP, etc. based on supporting gifted individuals.

"How many students will use a gifted program?" Approximately 6 to 10% are gifted

"They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum." Not necessarily. They may (depending on levels of giftedness); however, differentiation and what not are also acceptable approaches in some cases.

This, I feel, is the exact story of my childhood...I figured out at somewhere around 6th grade or so that I could get all the same grades w/o doing any of the homework or studying. So I figured, why bother?

Fast-forward a few years to college, and it turns out that I have no idea how to study, how to push myself to do the work required for classes. I had a very hard time turning that around.

Are there any resources you might recommend to others who have fallen down that same kind of path?

I had the same issue. TOtally quit doing homework in the 5th grade, coasted through highschool (mostly) with a 3.5.

Fortunately (for me) I had a not so good HS Counselor who I never met and who never explained to me that it was possible to go to college without having rich parents.

So I joined the Army straight out of high school, and that's where I learned how to work my ass off. Not mentally so much, but in general how to have an expectation of myself that I should always keep pushing myself to do better.

That was 25 years ago mind you. Your mileage will definitely vary.

When I was in academia, some of the students I rooted for the most were non-traditional students, especially those who were former/current military. None of that "b...but, when will I ever use this in REAL LIFE! Waaahhh!" or "will this be on the test?". Just a willingness to work their ass off.

When I was in academia, some of the most intolerable time wasting, tangential and selfish people were non-traditional students taking courses because they had the means and time to do so...just sayin'

I guess that could be a function of one's discipline. I was a mathematician, so there were very few attempts at time-wasting and being tangential (and when there were, a quick "That's a great question, but it's a bit far afield from what we need to cover right now. I'd love to discuss it during office hours, though" would defuse the situation).

Personally I find the, "Will this be used in real life?" question a very important one that sadly isn't answered frequently enough. There is a disconnect between educators and students who are there to prepare to enter the workforce.

That's the problem: college does not--nor should it--solely exist for preparation to enter the workforce. That's why we need a resurgence of trade programs.

Anyway, for every course that is not Math, everything you learn was created for a reason (make that a "most things you learn" for Math).

Yet, before one enters an university, teachers almost universally refuse to answer this question.

Everything will be used in real life somewhere. Also, education is about more than just the immediate facts being presented. Its primary purpose is (or should be) developing the ability to recognize connections between subjects, events, and ideas, and use those connections as the common language of society for communicating and understanding.

The lack of this intended benefit of education is what allows talking heads to polarize society by shouting past each other.

I can't say that I know of much off-hand...for me the turning point was actually failing a few classes. That seemed to finally give me the wakeup call I needed to light a fire under me, so to speak. Not that I recommend failing, per se, that's just the way things ended up for me.

One thing that certainly helped me was to take a slight detour from my graduation path for a semester to take classes that genuinely interested me. I found that taking a few courses where I was more willing to put time in out of sheer interest helped hone those same habits for classes which maybe were less interesting / more tedious.

Hope this helps, and best of luck!

For me this behaviour worked all the way until my bachelor's thesis. That was the first time I faced difficulty, and I didn't know how to deal with that. I'm still recovering from the problem but I've been able to identify some solutions.

1. Choose your peer group carefully. Your values will shift to those of your peers. In high school my friends were the smart kids. At first we were highly motivated and competitive and earned high marks, but that didn't sit well with the rest of the class. We got excluded for being try-hards. Therefore the new game was to pass the class with the least amount of effort. When I went to college I associated with similar people. It was cool to pass with the least amount of effort. Make friends who have values that you want to have: people who value effort, not talent.

2. Don't fall for the incentives trap. Your success gets measured by passing classes and getting good grades. It's natural for humans to game the incentives. Your motivation shifts to doing well on the incentives. Instead view passing the class as a bare minimum. The goal is learning, the test should be an easy byproduct.

3. Learn how to handle failure in a healthy way, otherwise you'll find yourself avoiding things that may lead to failure. When failure does come, try to stay positive. Don't try to keep up appearance of success. Be open about your failures. Find somebody you can talk to 100% openly; a friend, your parents, your gf/bf, a sibling. Make sure that your self worth isn't reliant on your success.

4. Don't rely on willpower. Using willpower is a losing battle. Design your life so that you don't need to rely on it. Set up meetings to do your homework with friends. Build good habits. Beware of slippery slopes. Now you're skipping class once, in a year you're skipping class entirely.

What was more difficult for me in college was getting used to having lower marks than I was accustomed to. My high school life wasn't so great whereas my grades were decent, so my identity became entirely wrapped around my grades and academic success. Anytime I faltered academically it precipitated an identity crisis - I started shying away from challenging courses. I think even just the idea that you might not be as bright as you think you are would be a nice kick in the pants for otherwise bright students to really accomplish a lot in life.

There's a growing body of work that seems to show that students in high-achieving countries from Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc.) have a very low opinion of their abilities -- and there's some thought that this attitude seems to be helpful in encouraging study.

Knuth wrote something along the same lines about himself: he didn't think he was all that good so he worked his ass off (and got a bleeding ulcer back in the 60's). Of course, he was all that good and the hard work certainly didn't make him less good.

I've heard about that being a thing in the US (I don't know where you are from). I've never met anybody who actually fell into that trap, so there might be interesting cultural issues at play.

Personally, I got humbled early on when I realized that I wouldn't be able to read all the interesting books in the world. I wouldn't even be able to keep up with just the new interesting books being published. A very sad day, that was.

It was a simple matter of reading (and not quite understanding) a few real books aimed at researchers to see that some people were far brighter than me. Just like some were far better at drawing or playing football or high jumping. I count on someone (or many someones) being better than me at absolutely every single thing that I might be good at. Hopefully, the talent profile I have will be good enough anyway, especially if I work hard and avoid winner-takes-all areas.

(It did take a long time to learn how to apply myself, though, after so many years of enforced boredom.)

Same here!

I got a bad view of school in general via my similar childhood experiences. I went to community college because my parents pushed me to get a degree, but I had a kid before I was done with college and went into the workforce and now have no motivation to go back to school.

I coasted through community college as well (including classes considered difficult) still bored and getting As and Bs. I probably needed to have cared more in high school and gone to a harder college for me to get the wake up call to learn to study.

As it is, I learn on my own time and program. It's not the worst, but I always wonder what I'd been capable of with more motivation.

My 6th-grade teacher saved me from exactly that. She pushed me and taught me to work and study. (So did a teacher in junior high - but her I resented, maybe because, you know, junior high.) When I hit college, it was (mostly) still there.

This, I too feel, is the exact story of my childhood. Cut class and ace the tests. It worked perfectly until it suddenly stopped working at all; when real life began.

I had the same problem. When I finally went to college (after a few years post high-school being very disenfranchised with education), I decided that I needed to learn these skills and spent a few years in community college taking remedial courses containing material I mostly already knew -- starting with one class a semester.

I challenged myself with the simple notion, "If I'm so smart, I should be able to ace any of these classes" and I simply worked my tail off until I did.

I over worked for a while until I was satisfied that I understood the "how" of studying and then learned how to do it more efficiently and slowly ramped up the course load.

I didn't finish my undergrad with a 4.0, but darn near it, and I fairly coasted through my grad program and still nailed above a 3.5.

It all boiled down to those boring couple years where I really challenged myself to learn how to learn, because up until that point school had come so easy I hadn't bothered.

I'm sure you don't mean it that way, but this always feels like such a humblebrag to me. "Oh, I was actually a lousy college student, and you know what, my superior intelligence is what did me in."

I can imagine that having to learn how to study (and developing the character to actually do it) is something that takes time and commitment, but if everything else is so easy for you, surely it can't be impossible?

> I can imagine that having to learn how to study (and developing the character to actually do it) is something that takes time and commitment, but if everything else is so easy for you, surely it can't be impossible?

Studying is more of a practice/habit, than an area of knowledge; someone that has avoided needing it because they pick up knowledge well without it and hasn't had their ability to pick up knowledge challenged isn't necessarily going to pick it up easily, especially, if they have many years of strongly ingrained contrary habits when, suddenly, for the first time their ability to gain knowledge is stressed and they need studying to keep up.

Sure, its not an impossible skill to develop. OTOH, when you've missed out on many years of before-college skill development in it and try to catch that all up in time to make a difference once you get to college, its not all that likely to succeed as well as you'd like.

But assuming that a person really does have superior intelligence, how strong do their study habits really need to become to succeed in college? Stronger than they were in high school for sure, but if the difference is astronomical, then wouldn't it be astronomical too for less intelligent people who already have good study habits? Wouldn't they, too, have to suddenly study that much harder and with that much more persistence? It just doesn't add up for me.

> but if the difference is astronomical, then wouldn't it be astronomical too for less intelligent people who already have good study habits?

The weighting of college admissions exams (which are heavily weighted toward measuring ability rather than study skills) and high school grades (which measure a combination of study skills and ability, such that you can't pull the two apart distinctly) in admissions means its easier for someone with high intelligence and weak study skills to get themselves in over their head in the college program they are admitted to than for someone with less intelligence and stronger study skills to do.

Plus, the difference between not having study skills and needing to learn them from scratch and having study skills but needing to study more is one of kind, not merely of degree.

(But, sure, lots of people have transition problems with college, even though those problems can have different sources, natures, and manifestations.)

I was in a gifted program grades 1-6 and 8, and I still wasn't challenged by the material we were covering.

I took the entire 7th grade off (officially I was homeschooled, but my parents didn't teach me anything) and played on the computer every day. I taught myself how to be a better Javascript and PHP programmer and explored math concepts that interested me on my own.

I came back ahead of the class.

I'm not convinced there's much value in the gifted program I was enrolled in. (I'm also not convinced that I'm exceptionally intelligent by any meaningful measure.)

I spent most of my childhood reading and doing sports. Didn't ever pay attention in school except math and history, where I lucked out and had good teachers who kicked our asses.

Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible. My best teacher was in 3rd grade, and he was made to quit because some parents thought he graded too hard. Dude was chill, read us Beowulf, Watership Down, made us write poetry every night.

> Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible.

My point was that, despite being lazy for a year and only advancing at the rate that my curiosity dictated, I ended up ahead of my peers who spent 7 hours a day in class learning school stuff, and countless hours doing homework.

This led to a very boring 8th grade year.

One of the interesting problems gifted programs deal with is that "gifted" students are often gifted in very different ways and in different subject areas, and the system hasn't yet figured out how to determine these narrow gifted areas and how to challenge those.

The programs also try to cultivate those gifted areas instead of trying to bring the non-gifted parts up to speed as well. So the gifted student gets disservice from both ends.

I'm not even convinced I was ever gifted in any meaningful capacity. I met far too many peers in high school that were never part of any gifted program that demonstrated aptitude at or above my own.

Gifted simply means you're not being challenged by the coursework. It's a label they hand to certain kids, like ADD, that doesn't mean anything other than what they've observed. They don't have the time or the expertise in every school to drill any deeper.

> Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying.

Or, even worse, these 8 year olds are incapable of sitting in a chair without any stimulation for 6 hours a day. So they're labeled as troublemakers, spend a lot of time with the principal (or these days, the police), and end up getting put on drugs that turn them into compliant zombies.

I can still hear my high school science teacher's warning/chide/encouragement to everybody else 'Just wait until those smart people who don't have to study get to college. They're going to be stuck, while those of you who have to work for it will be prepared.' She was right, I knew she was right, and experience proved her out.

Alternatively, my best friend and chief competitor in 8th grade made me a better problem solver. A checklist on the wall listed the various math modules to be worked through in a self-paced course, and he and I were out in the lead as measured by checkmarks. I'd probably have coasted otherwise. Too bad we moved the next year.

It's the curse of the gifted: http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...

I hypothesize this happened to me somewhat. I was just under the radar enough for the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education ) Program that I didn't get in. 4th grade through graduating High School was a breeze, even when my bad study habits caught up with me. I even got into university too!

But once there, I got a major kick in the ass. Classes were hard all of a sudden. They would fail you and leave you behind if you didn't catch up.

I also tend to flail when doing a thing, it goes well for a bit and then all of a sudden it gets hard. My formative years in school didn't really prep me for handling a challenge.

This is, in large part, the result of prioritizing self-esteem over self-control, and equivalence over excellence.

This is not done in high-achieving Asian schools, nor in Germany. Schools in those settings also do not allow children to define the culture in the schools (popularity contests based on fashion, media, or cliquishness).

You have almost exactly described high school for me. Everything before, say, grade 10 was a cakewalk. When things started to require actual, you know, work, I crashed and burned. And I was in Ontario, which had dedicated gifted classrooms (at least in grades 5 through 8). As a result, my performance suffered in the last years of high school, which resulted in my going to a community college because I couldn't meet the entrance requirements for Computer Science University degree programs.

It took me a while to figure out how to consistently apply real effort to hard projects. There was always this nagging sense that things should be easier since they were in the past.

This is a good point; it's very important to provide advanced students with a challenging environment. I'd argue that just as important, however, is the access to other advanced students that comes along with it.

TL;DR for the below brain dump: when your peer group values low achievement as its own form of achievement, it takes a lot of lucky breaks and facepalm worthy epiphanies to right the ship.

PS: having now written the below, I realize the entire thing sort of hinges on whether I am actually smart and a reader has no reason to assume that is the case. I'm leery of looking like a narcissistic humblebragger but at the same time need to justify including myself in the group "smart people." My "I'm pretty smart" creds: pre-personal dark age, I won my middle school geography bee and did decently at the state-level competition; post-personal dark age I scored a 1600 on the GRE. I'm loathe to mention either and never do IRL because they were both kinda gimmes I was born into vs achievements earned via hard work but I think here they provide useful context.

The anecdote proper:

Growing up, I was in gifted classes through 7th grade. Life got hard in the way it does for kids that age though and, with my grades slipping, I was moved into normal classes.

As a smart kid taking standard difficulty classes, one is very much exposed to the anti-intellectualism that is so popular in America currently. If getting picked on for being a dweeb in the half of the day i wasn't in the advanced classes wasn't optimal, moving out of them completely was markedly less so. Some people adapt and overcome. Personally, I internalized the bullying and negative feedback, adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy and proceeded to waste years trying to impress the wrong people with how normal and cool I could be. I graduated in the bottom quartile of my class, one F shy of spending a fifth year in high school.

On the strength of an oddly incongruent SAT score and a letter of recommendation that I would give my right hand to read, I still managed a very good scholarship to an out of state public school. Even with this opportunity dropped into my lap, I had to be talked/coerced(!) into taking the scholarship. I just did. not. get. it. AT ALL.

I went to college because my parents were going to start charging me rent and I more or less thought I'd party for a while and then drop out and "join the Marines or something." My first semester I found a new group of bros just like the ones from high school and earned a 1.7 GPA.

Something else happened that semester though. When I did manage to make it to my lectures, I really enjoyed them. I'd skip tests and not do classwork but I'd read and listen to lectures diligently. There was one specific class called "Primates, People and Prehistory" that particularly blew my mind. If curiosity is a pilot light, that course was the spark that reignited it.

I came back that Spring ready to work, just missed a 4.0 (damn you, B+ in Português!) and managed to bring my grades up above a 3.0 to keep my scholarship. I spent several more years gradually learning to be okay with the fact that I enjoyed learning. I still hid it behind an "aww shucks, I'm just here to party" veneer but every semester I drifted further from my friends, had more excuses to bail on them and read until we were entirely different people. I still care about them and keep in touch, but I'm definitely the "weird one" now.

Were it not for a ridiculous letter of recommendation, or that long shot scholarship, or the awakening to the broader world of learning that first semester, my life would be entirely different. I had a huge "working hard and caring is for suckers" chip on my shoulder in high school and I think wherever I'd ended up, I'd still be sneering at the try hards and glorying in how I could have done just the same if I'd wanted to. It's taken years to recover from that detour and get my head right about who I am.

I'd like to think that if I'd stayed on the track most of my middle school peers were on, if I'd stayed surrounded by people who gave a damn, my detour into doubt and self-loathing might have been curtailed. As a 29 year old, I feel like it has only been in the past 2-3 years that I've shifted out of neutral and really earnestly started engaging with the world.

I'm wholeheartedly in favor of anything we as a society can do to save other "dumb smart kids" similar heartburn.

I was in middle/high school when our district flipped the switch. I went to a small school district (grades 6-12 in one building, 80 kids in the graduating class), so the impact was really easy to spot.

Previously they had four classes in core subjects, that were roughly segregated by capability. They switched to a "blended" approach when I was in 9th grade. The district was like 95% white, so racial factor wasn't really present.

I was in the "smart" group. The difference was night and day. Classes that had once hosted pretty intense debate and academic competition got disrupted by the disruptive kids. The entire dynamic of the classroom experience shifted from learning stuff to dealing with the class clowns.

The only exceptions were history, which I was lucky to be among the 5 kids picked for an AP class shared between districts, and Math, where I was on an accelerated path and the jokers were in remedial classes.

In any case, it fundamentally changed the course of our futures. I was fortunate to have gone to a good college, but many of my friends who came from poorer families, especially farm families ended up going to community college or some other less optimal path. And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere.

> And while it may have been more egalitarian to treat everyone the same, the kids on the bottom didn't really go anywhere.

Top-down controlling bureaucrats might think it more egalitarian, but treating everyone indifferently to their particular needs is not egalitarian.

The world is rich enough to provide ample resources for all children to meet all their needs. If children and educators could organize education to meet their needs instead of being forced to obey governments or markets, that would be egalitarian.

This kind of classroom blending also has the potential to promote misanthropy among the shafted gifted kids.

One of the unintended lessons I learned in school was that pushing myself was not a requirement for success. Tests and homework were easy for me. As a result, school became that place I had to go during the day until I could come home and play video games or otherwise goof off.

It took a very long time for me to internalize the values of hard work and studying, since I never needed either in school. It depresses me to speculate on where I could be and what I could have accomplished if I'd been pushed harder at an age where I was too naive to know that I should push myself.

Oh man same here. I look at what some people I know have accomplished through consistent hard work at a young age and I kick myself for my laziness which was so consistently reinforced during school. Oh well, those thoughts just push me to study harder and improve myself now.

The worst thing is the discouragement that public schooling gives gifted students when they do push themselves. I was always getting in trouble for reading ahead in English class, or moving too quickly through the lessons in math. Creates too much work for the teachers grading, I suppose. They also don't like it when you point out that they are teaching falsehoods.

And then on top of that, there's the discouragement from your peers. It wasn't a particularly good thing to be the "smart kid". There's a lot of peer pressure to be average, and the outliers don't gain any popularity points.

More the just not earning popularity points, being ahead of the curve can often make one the target of bullying and ostracism. Especially if one's social intellect lags behind their book smarts.

I went to school in Iowa. Just the opposite - I was encouraged to read ahead, to ask questions, to push myself. But Iowa is known for having some of the best schools in America, for about a century now. Maybe we don't need to go to the Netherlands for examples of good schools.

Having gone to high school in Germany and gotten my Masters degree in the US I'm really surprised by this. All the teachers I had would have loved you for studying ahead. Teachers even enjoyed arguing with me when I thought they were wrong.

I still remember a student getting yelled at for working ahead in the book in 1st grade. I guess I learned my lesson because I never did it.

He wasn't even a very good student, and my reaction (that I was wise enough to not vocalize) was "well, he's finally doing some work, this is a good thing, right?"

There are a bunch of people in school administration who have as priority #1 "make the system as easy to run as possible." Priority #2 is to drive out anyone who questions priority #1.

One thing to keep in mind in this kind of discussion is that the US is really big. It has 13,500 school districts. Its population is almost half that of all of Europe. Put another way, it has a population roughly the same size as Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain all put together.

Among other factors that result from thus, there's a lot more variance in experience across US schools than there are in many European nations.

In my experience at a (well-off) US public school, I had some teachers who were annoyed at my reading ahead/knowing things before they were taught, a select few who encouraged it, and a majority of teachers who mostly ignored me.

Edit: It's -> Its

Very much this. My favorite teacher in Middle School was a Spanish teacher who would actually give me information and printouts about "things we haven't learned yet" when I asked about something we hadn't covered yet.

So many language teachers, if I'd ask about some other part of the grammar after class, would tell me not to worry, and "That's next year." or "You don't need to know that.". So it was a revelation, and a moment I still remember clearly, when I asked something about the future tense, she said "Great question, here, let me make you a copy from next year's book".

I've now completed a Ph.D in Linguistics, and I can't help but think that her finally fueling my interest to learn probably played a role in language being my field.

Yep, I didn't really know what it meant to push myself, either, until I got to college.

I was foolish enough to get talked into taking 19 credits for my first college semester. I ended that semester with a GPA of 1.6, but it shot up and rose steadily as I started learning--for the first time in my life--how to truly focus.

I don't wanna tell you that you learned the wrong lesson, but consider that the very negative lesson you learned was to equate success with victories on tests and homework.

What changes in a lot of people is not that they learn the value of "hard work" which is kind of neutral in itself, but their goals shift to objectives that require work and long-term investments in developing skills.

Maybe that's the same thing or too subtle a distinction, but it seems like an interesting idea to me.

The whole education system is broken. People learn at different rates and they should learn different things. Having dozens of kids in a classroom all trying to learn the same things is definitely not the most efficient way to teach kids IMHO.

> People learn at different rates and they should learn different things. Having dozens of kids in a classroom all trying to learn the same things is definitely not the most efficient way to teach kids IMHO.

Its almost certainly not the most effective in terms of any reasonable outcome measure without considering efficiency. It may be the most efficient, for at least some subjects, depending on what the resource usage you are trying to optimize in producing whatever the outcome measure is you are looking at.

This article seems like a submarine from a wealthy lobby group trying to influence the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. For starters the article shows a complete failure to understand educational funding, example:

>Both Ontario and Taiwan treat gifted children as eligible for “special education,” much like disabled students, giving them access to additional resources.

So does the US...Perhaps the misunderstanding is much broader than I give credit, but in the US everyone is entitled to a free and appropriate education, including ESE students. It seems people think ESE is just for disabled children, but it is also for gifted students. As a lawyer who advocated on behalf of ESE students, I saw everything from a disabled child being subsidized to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to a blind student being denied a ~$100 reading program (maybe one of the most rewarding moments of my legal career was getting the school to agree to purchase that program - but was a lawyer really necessary?), and advocating for a gifted ESE high school student who attended some classes at the local university via duel enrollment.

If US students' scores are lagging behind their international counter-parts it is not because gifted students in the US are not getting funding. There are more resources now than ever for gifted students, including: duel enrollments, online curriculum, and vouchers for private/charter schools.

But all of your options for gifted students are outside of the regular school system, while the options for disabled children are part of the system. I doubt a gifted student would be granted money for a special tutor or more difficult lessons, but disabled students are subsidized hundreds of thousands of dollars for in-classroom aides, assistive devices, etc.

Meanwhile, gifted students should leave the public system and use vouchers for a private education?

I can't speak for other states, but in Florida it's very easy to do dual enrollment, possibly the best option for a gifted high school student. As long as your courses are at a public university or community college, your tuition is fully funded by the state. Your high school credits are satisfied by college courses, you get college credits that are easily transferred to other universities when you graduate, for free.

There are also plenty of challenging classes for gifted students, but this might vary from school to school.

will, I respectfully disagree.

My family has been involved in gifted education in a number of ways for several decades. While ESE does encompass both sides of the spectrum, gifted funding, in general is massively shortfunded compared to the other side of the spectrum. Another fun fact is that those that are gifted can also have learning disabilities (You can, for example, be gifted and have dyslexia).

If you want to get specific, here are some examples. States are largely responsible for the funding of gifted education; however, it is _largely_ not regulated at the federal level (in contrast with special education). In the state of Illinois for example, there was $0 towards gifted education from 2010 - 2013. In comparison, California (with approximately 3 times the number of students) spent approximately 44 mil per year (those 3 academic years) on gifted education. There are plenty of statistics available at various resources such as the NAGC. A great summary they provided:

  In 2013-14:
  14 states provided no funding to local districts for gifted education
  Of the 25 states that provided funds to districts
    8 provided $40 million or more
    9 states provided between $1 million and $10 million
    9 states have policies specifically permitting acceleration of students; 22 states leave the decision to school districts
    17 states do not collect demographic data about their gifted student population
    9 states report on the academic performance / learning growth of gifted students as a separate group on state report cards or other accountability measures

I am not saying the numbers you provide are inaccurate, but they reflect the data of a special interest group who is trying to raise money. Alternatively, we can look at just 9 states that disclosed their funding for gifted programs in 2010-2011 and see an annual budget of >$1B for gifted program funding:

FL: 267M GA: 301M TX: 138M NC: 68M OH: 65M VA: 45M LA: 65M SC: 26M AR: 25M

Moreover, examples such as Illinois you highlighted don't tell a full story by saying $0 of funding for gifted programs. Illinois did cut all state funding of the gifted program (mostly citing a $100B pension shortfall) but the gifted programs are still funded by the school districts, this does leave gaps or haves/have-nots but that is one of the issues that vouchers are intended to balance to ensure a free and appropriate education. When discussing funding of gifted programs we should refrain from comparing it to "the other side of the ESE spectrum", because it is not a give and take from one group to the other, and even if it were it is not an appropriate comparison in terms of overall number of students, and average cost/student for services. Otherwise we would look at non-ESE students and say they don't get any special funding, or kids who qualify for free lunch

"I am not saying the numbers you provide are inaccurate, but they reflect the data of a special interest group who is trying to raise money." - That's a fair criticism; however, like any other data, trying to find "true" data is quite difficult. For example, if I look at the florida number (which I found via) that also includes money for low SES and ESL students. I don't see what percentage unfortunately. I think it's fair to say not all 267 M is spent in what is traditionally considered gifted education in that case. That being said... a billion dollars? Extrapolating for a moment and looking at the states you picked they're approximately 1/3 of the population of the united states. That would suggest around 3 billion dollars being spent nationally... We have approximately 50 million k-12 students in the US. With around 5 to 10% of that population being gifted that would give us 600 to 1200 per gifted pupil in additional spending. Average spending per pupil (non-gifted) is around 9k or so. My point is we trivially fund gifted education in this country.

"it is not a give and take from one group to the other". I know ... and that's why I pointed out that people can belong to both groups (gifted dyslexics for example).

"that is one of the issues that vouchers are intended to balance". Intent is great. That doesn't mean it produces said results, does it?

The main reason US students lag behind is that there is wild disparity between schools. If you focus on kids attending affluent schools American students do a lot better.

An important fact to keep in mind whenever PISA scores come up is that the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf (over 20%, versus under 5% for Finland or under 10% for Germany). If we adjusted PISA scores to reflect those demographics, the U.S. would come out about the same as France, Germany, or the U.K., though still a step behind Finland: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin....

Also:

> Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal.

Ultimately, if that's the case, there is very little hope for improving American education. It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.

> It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.

A few decades ago, a majority of Americans didn't support gay marriage. Now it has majority support, and is legal in every state. This didn't happen by accident either. A lot of groups were involved in promoting gay rights and funding legal battles across the country. This isn't the first time this happened either: women's rights, civil rights, etc. Even today, organized groups are winning hearts and minds in the fight for criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. So it's very possible to instigate cultural change (perhaps force is a strong word). It just takes a long time.

It's probably easier to get a person to change their opinion on what someone else can do than to get them to change their own behavior.

This is a great example. Cultural change happens faster than most people imagine. Look at slavery, an institution that had existed for a long, long time. Look at atheism. Women's right to vote. All these things flipped from everyone being one way to another in a brief time (ok slavery is a bit complicated, having evolved differently in the US and UK).

Maybe more relevant. We got rid of de jure segregation in the 1950's, but today today only 23% of black children in the south go to a school that is majority white. And nationwide, 40% of black children go to a school that is over 90% minority. The typical black child goes to a school where 60% or his classmates are low income. And those numbers are up substantially in the last 20 years. Its been really hard to change the culture of segregation with top-down directives.

While socio-economic status is an important predictor for student performance within the same country, it does not explain why some poor countries such as Poland and Estonia can outperform the US, while rich countries with very low inequality (such as Sweden and Norway) perform even worse.

"Socialism" might be a really good explanation for both Poland/Estonia and Sweden/Norway.

(It takes some background knowledge to unpack but I really do believe it is the core reason. Different kinds of Socialism, though.)

There are other factors which explain PISA score gaps quite nicely, and don't run into quite so many measurement issues as poverty (e.g., how does "poverty" in the US compare to "middle class" in Bulgaria):

http://super-economy.blogspot.in/2010/12/amazing-truth-about...

http://super-economy.blogspot.in/2011/01/how-well-do-above-a...

These other factors also address the issue raised in rbehrends' comment.

Umm, the methodology appears to be rather unsound.

> For all countries except the U.S. all first and second generation immigrant scores are excluded.

> For the U.S, Asians, Latin speakers, and all groups other than non-Hispanic whites are excluded. European immigrants are included.

This is really an apples vs. oranges comparison. For starters, some countries (such as Australia and Canada) have immigration policies that favor high-skilled immigrants, therefore such an adjustment hurts them (relatively speaking); then the author uses a special rule for the US that just happens to exclude poor minorities.

Given the data available, how would you slice it better? Do you believe the result would change significantly if a better slicing were done?

I wouldn't. Sometimes you simply can't draw conclusions (one way or the other) from the available data.

Looking at the article again, I'm also concerned that the author seems to have an agenda and somehow perceives this as a US vs. Europe issue; frankly, it is not. There are, as I noted, wealthy European countries (Sweden, Norway) that do worse than the US.

Also, at least for math, you don't really need to look that hard for explanations. US high school math is a disaster area; it is no secret that there's too much focus on teaching rote procedures [1], which will hurt you on PISA (which is more about figuring out the solutions to problems) and that by the end of 12th grade, the average American student will lag 1-2 years behind many other developed countries. Note that this problem extends even to the first years of college.

[1] Not really a secret, see (for example) "The Teaching GAP" by Stigler and Hiebert, which analyzed video recordings that were taken as part of the TIMSS 1998.

[2] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-cor...

I wouldn't. Sometimes you simply can't draw conclusions (one way or the other) from the available data.

Then strangely, you do exactly that two paragraphs later:

So making a crude attempt to control for demographics is invalid, and you can't draw conclusions from the data. Yet if you make no attempt to control demographics, it's somehow valid? Huh?

Also, your theory that teaching rote procedures causes poor performance is already refuted by Sanandaji's article. It works just fine for Asian Americans, who perform just as well as wealthy Asians in Asia. Doesn't that piece of data contradict your theory?

> Then strangely, you do exactly that two paragraphs later:

No. I'm drawing conclusions from different things, such as curriculum content, plus the huge body of existing research on teaching math in the US [1].

My larger point is that it's pointless to treat statistics as a black box and try and make conjectures (or worse, massage the data to fit your conjectures), when there are known documented deficiencies.

> Also, your theory that teaching rote procedures causes poor performance is already refuted by Sanandaji's article. It works just fine for Asian Americans, who perform just as well as wealthy Asians in Asia. Doesn't that piece of data contradict your theory?

No. First, it merely shows that when you select the highest performing group, you'll get a higher than average performance. The thing is, the same happens elsewhere, too. For example, the best-performing cantons in Switzerland (a country that is as ethnically diverse as the US [2]) had an average PISA score in math of around 560 in 2009, when the average was 531.

PISA scores are spread out over a pretty wide range. Poor teaching does not make you unable to perform at high levels, it merely handicaps you. Other factors can compensate for it, such as the known higher work ethic of Asian Americans and cultural valuation of intelligence and cognitive skills [3].

Second, he uses a composite score, while I'm specifically talking about math, where the US score is really bad (as opposed to, say, reading).

[1] To get started, look at what @tokenadult has written on this, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5054856 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8825364

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8416.full.pdf

If it's a disaster, why does the same curriculum work well for Asian Americans (raising their scores to east Asian levels), but badly for white Americans?

First, it merely shows that when you select the highest performing group, you'll get a higher than average performance.

Ok. What causes the variance between high and low performing groups? Since the school system seems the same, it doesn't seem to be educational techniques.

Other factors can compensate for it, such as the known higher work ethic of Asian Americans and cultural valuation of intelligence and cognitive skills

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be more or less agreeing with me here. Some trait which is very common among Asians appears to be the primary driver of test score deltas.

the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to

That really depends on definitions of "poverty:" http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/how... . Using consistent definitions often deflates the "poverty" rate to under 5%.

One way to increase real income (which poverty often doesn't consider) involves loosening land-use controls in high-income urban areas: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/06/thomas-p... , but such proposals are rarely considered in discussions of poverty / income / etc.

OECD uses a consistent definition of poverty across countries: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/factbook-2010-en/11/02/02... (it's defined as % of population below half the median income).

... and that sort of definition is precisely the problem Cowen's post alludes to: defining "poverty" as a percentage of income means that poverty can never be alleviated and will always be with us, and even if real incomes in a given area double, the "poverty" rate will remain.

When I taught in a "disadvantaged high school" in Boston, the metric by which the school was judged was not the average student score on the state's standardized test (the MCAS), but the percentage of students achieving minimal proficiency. I think this is the same across the country.

So the pressure is to keep pulling and pulling those last few students up over the bar. There is no fundamental incentive to help the kids that can already pass, because that has zero effect on the metric by which you are judged.

"What you measure is what you get."

To be fair, while I don't think we're doing it the right way it is really shameful how many American students do not have even the most basic proficiency in things like reading.

This is why my family and so many people we know are either homeschooling or pooling resources to create small schools for their kids to attend where we have some sort of control over their education and expectations of the students.

You can't get tailored clothes at Wal-Mart and you can't educate high performing kids in public school.

A lot of people have a problem with this approach but, you know, it is easy to ignore those vague ideologically driven arguments when it comes to doing what is best for your own kids especially when you are seeing great results.

I have a feeling more people are going to go the bespoke education route even if it takes one parent staying home to do it.

While I plan to do the same for my own children unless the system dramatically changes, this approach unfairly favors the middle and upper classes who have the time to do this. The lower classes simply don't have the time and money to do this.

That said, if you do have the time and money, more power to you! No reason to disadvantage your kids because the government and bureaucracy can't do it right.

Very true. It's a feedback loop as well. Schools perform poorly, so affluent people remove their high-performing children, which lowers the average performance of the school and gives it less funding. And so on.

The thing is, you can't blame people for optimizing for their own children, but doing so drags down the quality even further for everyone else. It's a problem that requires some serious intervention.

I honestly think that is a 'treat the symptom' analysis.

We need to think about why there are poor performers to begin with and it has very little to do with the few hundred dollars per student a school might lose because of not hitting performance targets.

> this approach unfairly favors the middle and upper classes who have the time to do this.

Yes, that's the argument against it. And it is even worse than you might guess because they don't do just regular classroom stuff. They go on trips. They build things. They talk to experts. They use nice tablets and laptops. etc.

Our local nice private school costs ~$20K a semester. We blow the doors off that cost just in lost wages alone.

I'm a big believer in solving all problems at once -- we are solving this problem for ourselves and I think we are building a model for public schools to strive for if they ever care to look. We also need to try and solve the larger societal problem you mentioned.

The key factor is parent focus and involvement. You can't reform schools alone to make that happen. The government is not getting it right, but not just because the schools aren't running as they should. We need to get to the point where people have the time and resources to care about their kids education on a day to day basis even at the lowest end of the socio-economic scale. We must get a better handle on poverty in this country.

My wife went to a Shang-Gri-La school until high school. No really, it sounds like a fantasy to me still. She decided on her curriculum from 1st grade onward and she decided on her tests. Yes, heavy guidance from teachers and parents here, but she did push back and insist on certain areas like dance and swimming. The ethos of the school was self improvement. She gave herself grades. Yes really. Here's the site: https://sites.google.com/a/bvsd.org/horizonsk8/

Granted this is Boulder CO, and it was 2 decades ago. As far as she has told me, it was public at that time too. Yes, that was/is a public school, money comes from the state and parents. https://sites.google.com/a/bvsd.org/horizonsk8/supporting-ho...

Looking at the outcomes of the students and her friends, they tend to be either PhDs or in an art collective. They all are very high preforming and great people (I did in fact marry her, so I am biased). As far as she has told me, the economic backgrounds of the kids were independent too. Our maid-of-honor and her best friend through this school came from a household tornado'd by drugs. The maid-of-honor's mother can barely hold a sentence together from all the opiate damage.

I say this because when you say "...and you can't educate high performing kids in public school." you are without any doubt completely and totally wrong.

Any school can be a great place for any child. I understand that state laws are very different here, but that is not an excuse in a democracy. Especially when you are talking about education of your children. The entire point of society, of having governments, of the whole damn species is children. Education, dollar for dollar, is by far the most important thing you can spend money on as a society or democracy. So not fighting for great public schools like the one my wife went to is just ... sad.

I'm telling you, collectives of homeschools may seem like a great idea at the time. But then you get schools like the ones in upstate NY (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a...) and other crazys hell bent on religious based discrimination. Great public schools are worth fighting for, they are worth battling entrenched unions and politicians for, they are worth sending your kids to.

I know, because my wife went to one and I didn't (http://www.drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/2415/ http://www.calstate.edu/pa/clips2004/july/2july/ca.shtml). And, you know what, she's gonna be a public school teacher too.

>I say this because when you say "...and you can't educate high performing kids in public school." you are without any doubt completely and totally wrong.

You're going to find exceptions if you take any statement as an absolute.

>Any school can be a great place for any child.

Could be. But the are not presently.

> Education, dollar for dollar, is by far the most important thing you can spend money on as a society or democracy.

I 100% agree.

>So not fighting for great public schools like the one my wife went to is just ... sad.

I think we should, we need to be fighting for those kinds of schools. I simply can't afford wait around for that shift to yield results.

And, yes, there are some pretty wacky collectives and homeschoolers. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find course material without some sort of weird agenda baked in. But it is just wrong to paint all of them with that brush.

>Great public schools are worth fighting for,

Yep.

>they are worth battling entrenched unions and politicians for,

Agreed.

> they are worth sending your kids to.

Nope. That's where you lose me. What good is it for me to throw my kids into a cesspool? Will that get it cleaned up any faster? No, sorry, I'm not going to turn my kids into martyrs for what little political leverage having them in a regular public school might give me. Like you said, education is the most important thing.

We are starting to see some change in public schools. I don't think it is an accident that we are seeing that change now that they have real competition. What you are asking for is a return to a broken status quo in trade for a vague hope that they get their shit together after decades of decline.

We can simultaneously fight for better public schools and educate our high performers to the best of their ability.

I think you are wrong still, but good lord am i glad to have an honest discussion about it. I see you points and agree with a lot of them, but I think that for most folk, the only way to get them to fight for the schools is to have their kids in them, to have skin in the game. Still, thanks.

I've had several IQ tests throughout the years and consistently tested in the highest 1% of test takers for my age class. I was skipped past first grade as a result at the age of 5. In my opinion that was a terrible mistake. This basically put a bullsmark on me for bullies and alienated me from my peers. At eight I wanted to be relieved of class duty since I loved the library and felt I learnt a lot more from assimilating information I wanted rather than being force-fed stuff I had no interest in. I wish I had the retort I have no when asked how this would result in a rounded education. My opinion is that kids will become interested in a field and start studying it and at some point in time they will need more practical things and ask their elders how to solve the things that would "round out" their education. Instead I just felt bored and my grades suffered. Consistent in teachers remarks is that I could be doing so much better. It sounds a bit hypocritical to me now that I actually asked to be able to do better, was refused and later scolded for not doing better. I was reading advanced physics texts at age 9, understood the difference between GR and SR. I wish that someone would have poked me in the general direction of Plato. I feel that if someone had, my intellectual development would have been accelerated a lot by it. Instead I was reading a collection of folk legends, the mythology of the Norse and a whole lot of popular fiction (both science and fantasy). I turned into a CS grad eventually and make a living coding. I think it would have happened a lot faster if there was a real program for misfit-brights instead of the minor changes to regular curricula I endured.

My point is that it's not enough to detect the brights. You have to do something substantive to succeed in nurturing them.

Reminds me of the short story:

http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/2008/examination-day-by-hen...

I won't post spoilers alerts, but the mere fact that I put this link here should be enough for you to deduce the ending.

Great story.

I thought you were going to post this - considerably longer, but an interesting take on future education.

http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

I simply have to mention this great little story:

http://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-test/

"Among the handful of American high achievers, only one in eight comes from the bottom socioeconomic quartile. In Canada it’s one in four; Germany one in six; and Singapore one in three."

One in three high achievers in Singapore come from the bottom quartile? That means the bottom quartile is OVERrepresented among high achievers, which sounds very odd to me.

Recent immigration from mainland China?

If the newcomers are bright, hungry, and hardworking whereas the native Singapore Chinese are by now a bit more laid back + if the Singapore Malay are not as bright, hungry, and hardworking but more established so above them in SES, then it might make sense.

Singapore is far from ethnically homogeneous.

In Boston high schools, immigrant students make up close to or exactly 100% of the valedictorians each year.

I studied in Hungary and I'm really glad that there is a really high quality science journal aimed for high school students. It has a competition in mathematics, physics and informatics. You have to send back solutions to problems from the monthly issues.

http://www.komal.hu/info/bemutatkozas.e.shtml

They translate the problems to English and I think high school students from other countries can participate too, though it's mainly a Hungarian competition. This really helped me learning physics through tricky problems. I could never solve any problems from the "A" labeled math problems, though I never tried since high school.

That journal was basically Erdős' high school, wasn't it?

Glad to see that it's still around :)

(Also glad to see that they had girls on the high score roster right from the beginning!)

At the high school & college level, the grading structure is a major part of the problem in the US.

If a student needs to answer 90-100% of a test correctly to get an A, there must be a serious lack of rigor and choice to the material he/she is studying.

I studied abroad in London at the LSE for a year of college. The grading system at the LSE made so much more sense to me.

An "A" in the UK system is >70%. LSE exams reserve a full 30% range for the recognition of genius and/or mastery of the subject. A common joke at LSE is that “any paper scoring above 90% is basically ready to be published in a journal”. This is not to say that students attempt create new economic models during their exams, but it does imply that a 90% answer will require an extremely thorough understanding of the theory behind the subject, above and beyond the class slides and lecture material. A solid understanding of the material (70%) is still rewarded with the highest distinction; thus impossibly high expectations do not cause grade disinflation or penalties.

The UK system presents you with a buffet of knowledge, pushing you to sample that one extra topic that lies just beyond what you think you can comfortably retain. The US system forces predetermined topics down your throat, deducting points if you find one topic unbearably boring, overly complex, or simply flawed.

I discussed the experience in more depth here: http://roymurdock.com/essays/2014/06/the-difference-between-...

Why go above and beyond to get a 95% when you end up with the same grade as someone who got 70%? How can grad schools and employers distinguish between someone who did ok and someone really good? That grading system and letter grading in general don't make any sense.

The college I went to put your percentage grades directly on your transcript and every percentage point went towards your class ranking.

He has a point (expressed in a roundabout way) about grading systems with low ceilings. I believe you are expressing the same point in straightforward manner: Low ceilings are bad.

Your point: top grade at 70%? That's bad, can't distinguish between ok and really good.

His point: top grade at 90%? So nobody is ever taught anything hard, then? Otherwise, how would so many people be able to get the top grade?

> Otherwise, how would so many people be able to get the top grade?

You had to be really good to get 90% at my school. Top decile at least. I don't know what he's talking about.

I did gifted programs all through elementary school and these were also a joke. There was far less supervision and it was not significantly more challenging. It wasn't until I was given somewhat unstructured time to follow my interests (in late high school) that I found ways to challenge myself with things I actually cared about.

> "While everyone focuses on boosting the weakest students, America’s smartest children are no longer being pushed to do their best."

Ugh. I went to a so-called "gifted school", and this article's whole mindset is repugnant. For one thing, it's humiliating to anyone who got "weak student" stamped on their forehead... particularly galling coming from an educational system run by administrators who avoid intelligence at every opportunity. I know perceptive high-achievers haunted by revenge fantasies where they humiliate those who laughed at them for being in the remedial track.

And it's really discussing a certain kind of intelligence. Smart children are often booted from the institution and end up selling drugs or whatever. The desirable "smart children" have assignable curiosity, can be herded into professional/managerial type jobs, etc. Maybe they despise the know-nothing teaching the class, but they'll do what it takes to get to the next rung. (http://disciplined-minds.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8hfUkmk6Q)

A lot of people walking down the street no doubt have great ideas for how a fundamentally better educational system would work. But they can't really do anything about it; who'll listen to them?

> "If we cannot bring ourselves to push smart kids as far as they can go, we will watch and eventually weep as other countries surpass us in producing tomorrow’s inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and scientists."

Always at the end an appeal to patriotism, partitioning ourselves into nations where the weaker ones get bullied. Gotta "push" kids around (don't want to rely on dangerous self-motivation), because we'll weep if those we're sitting on start doing something better than us!

> I know perceptive high-achievers haunted by revenge fantasies where they humiliate those who laughed at them for being in the remedial track.

Ahh yes, every time I manage another great achievement, my parents joke about how to best rub it in the face of that school administrator who said I'd grow up to be a pizza delivery guy. Of course we still haven't followed through, and its really way too late now for them to even remember.

(For context, I went to an over-achiever magnet school my freshman year of HS. They pushed so hard, that I basically broke and became an academic failure. The administrator in question was at that school. I did the remaining 3 years at my normal HS, where I actually did quite well. Though it did take those 3 years to recover my GPA.)

If we talk West and non-wealthy backgrounds, bright students must take care of themselves: do self-learning, look for role models, start messing with small projects, find a way to second own pace. Fundamentally, they must survive their own gift without losing enthusiasm or drive.

Certainly, some enrichment programs have been shown to work, but others, like the track system in which students are grouped into different classes by ability, has in many cases been shown to be not particularly beneficial for either less or more talented students. See e.g. Jo Boaler's "When even the winners are losers: Evaluating the experiences of top set' students" (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002202797184116#....).

It's also funny how the only standard for a well-rounded education seems to have become whether you perform well on standardized tests or have what it takes to become the next "inventors, entrepreneurs, artists and scientists." Everyone seems to want gifted children to receive a deeper education, not a broader one.

I'm an absolute proponent of differentiation and enrichment for gifted students, just don't make the mistake of thinking that the solution is as simple as giving smart people a more challenging curriculum and equally smart peers and you're done. A lot is possible within (or in addition to) mixed-ability classes.

Also, are we really seriously still doing this whole "BUT LOOK AT FINLAND, LOOK AT SOUTH KOREA" dance?

I strongly suspect the mixed-ability class arrangements works when the band of abilities is not "too" wide, and especially when the lower ability segments are not linked to behavior-based issues leading to behavioral classroom disruptions. Too often, I see little to no emphasis within these arrangements to link intensive mental health and other support infrastructure counseling to assist students and their families, and manage behavioral issues before introducing those students into mixed-ability classes.

A big advantage I see in mixed-ability classes where behavioral issues are managed ahead of time is the opportunity for the students who grasp a particular topic sooner start teaching and explaining it to their peers who don't grasp it yet, which cements their understanding, and this can continue onwards down the age and and ability spectrums. There is nearly nothing quite like having to teach a topic to really reveal how well you grasp it.

In the public school system, this is mainly a way for lazy teachers to farm off their job to their more able students.

The high-school I attended used that method. I was often forced to spend significant chunks of class time teaching other students how to do their work. It was frustrating, and generally a waste of time. It made me hate going to class, because I couldn't spend my time learning, I had to dedicate my efforts to trying to get some kid who would rather be "making beats" on his desk to learn basic math.

I think a better idea would be to have high-performers help teach the kids at the middle of the pack, and leave the low-performers to teachers who have the specific skills needed to deal with their all too common behavioral problems and lack of interest.

In high-school calculus, I would arrange to answer the questions other kids in class had, so that I could then ask the teacher the questions that I had.

It wasn't too bad, because I was teaching other honors students.

Yes, and I suspect that the primary issue of this approach is it doesn't scale. You need top-end teaching talent to pull it off, extremely strong parental support, and a school that has the wherewithal to remove uncooperative students whose behavior crosses a quality boundary, for more intensive support elsewhere (just not in those classrooms). I've seen this approach work well in a private school setting. But that school's endowment was already self-funding (thus tuitions added to the capital funding but had no real impact on operational funding that was largely drawn from interest) so the school had no qualms whatsoever instantly dismissing any disruptive students, and there was a line of previously-passed-over, eager students ready to take their place.

Behavioral problems inside the classroom were extremely rare in that setting (what little existed was negligible and ignorable by public school standards, like simply doodling "to" another student), and the academic atmosphere was far more supported by the students than I've seen in the American public school system. Supporting your anecdotal experience, many of the attending students were either honor roll or in the highest academic tracks in their previous public school lives; at that private school, they were ranked as average.

In the public school system I've never seen this approach work beyond one-off, heroic single-teacher-led efforts. Once that teacher leaves, the approach leaves with them; I've never seen a public school officially run classes this way. Ironically, the "more primitive" one-room schools of American yore were supposedly run this way, but I've never been able to locate academic studies of their effectiveness.

I had an absolutely amazing principal in H.S. She took notice of me and made it her mission to make sure I wasn't bored to the point I would quit. Some of my teachers did too, while others told me to just quit. I would get excellent marks in math and science related subjects, but fail everything else. I would complain the only thing different between sophomore, junior and senior English was the color of the book and one had to write a term paper their junior year.

So I slept. A lot. I'd stay up late on my Commodore programming and be exhausted the next day. I remember waking up in my second year accounting class one day to the teacher telling some students, "When your scores are as high as his in my class, you can sleep too." I actually felt bad because I learned that day I was bothering other students. Not enough to change though. I was stubborn.

If you live within driving distance of Worcester, MA, there is a tuition-free state-run 2 year school called Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science that kids can transfer into for their junior and senior year of high school.

The first year is taught by Mass Academy faculty and the second year kids take courses at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

This program was started to address exactly the issue of bright kids in schools that don't have the resources of, for example, Acton-Boxborough.

Maybe school is not the place for gifted students to grow. There are online communities, meetups, and more routes outside of the classroom that you could take advantage of. You could probably talk to schools and colleges beforehand to make sure that you could take time out of the day to do these things. In the worst case scenario, you simply ignore school if they are not willing to help you pursue personal growth, and start your own company.

In 1991 Daniel J. Singal published "The Other Crisis in American Education" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.ht... , which makes the same point but did so 25 years ago.

One size fits all is cheaper and easier to manage for an inept government to handle. Education should emphasize experimentation. How can we expect a system to actively challenge students to think critically when the system itself was designed without any critical thought whatsoever?

Here in Brazil we are having a similar problem...

Also I witnessed closely, its bad effects.

Example: In Brazil universities frequently has students separated in classes, then the whole class go to see the necessary teacher (ie: very different than the "credit" system used in US where each student choose what he will attend), the university where I went, they had a common, but rarely admitted practice of separating the classes according to the ranking in the entrance tests.

I ended in the A class, we had a B and a C class. Yet, the C class (not only of my course, but of some others too, or of other years) frequently outperformed the A and B classes, even if their students were frequently obviously outright dumb... The reason is that the C class students learned to do two things: one, work hard, including being very creative in cheating if needed, C class students never shied from hard work if it was needed, and two, they were really, really good at being friends of teachers and other staff, and socialize their way into success.

The A class, that theoretically had the best students (example of difference: A class students frequently already had past experience in the job we were learning, and was the class that least needed to ask questions to teachers, also in simple enough tests always scored very high), but it don't worked, most A class students didn't knew how to hard work, they would just coast, and when some advanced teamworking was needed (example: team of 7 students asked to make a 6 month long project that would affect the grades of all subjects), the A class students would often start to fight each other (sometimes physically), have big egos, don't cooperate, and so on.

Altough this is what I saw from personal experience, I got curious and looked more into it, and saw this everywhere, the smartest kids fail in real life, they don't work hard, don't socialize decently, and when facing a big challenge they fail, they panic, or get confused, or procastinate or lot, or give up before even starting.

The "C class" kids although they often are the typical party animals (frequently going to bars, getting drunk, being rowdy, skipping unecessary work, etc...) when they face a challenge, they take it, they work hard, either to do it the right way, or to do it the wrong way, or to figure how to avoid it completely, but they don't give up, they just figure how to do it somehow.

Practical final example: I once went to some seminars in a hard to understand subject, the speakers were all students, it was mandatory to all students to speak. The brightest students, gave boring seminars, everything was correct, but not really detailed, and the work was clearly half-assed. Now, watching the seminars of the students that were infamous for being often drunkards and dumb was awesome, some of these just creatively figured a way to nail it. One guy gave a really, really awesome seminar, 100% correct, 100% charismatic, and very detailed. Later I learned that what he did was meticulously create a script for the seminar using his comedy skills to copy, paste and edit parts of books, then record himself reading the script, then play that recording during the seminar while hiding the headphone on his hair, it is work intensive, and he don't understood half of what he said, but he got a 10 of 10 grade, and I understood the subject he needed to teach very well. Another guy just tried to learn everything he needed to say like if he was an actor, and just acted his way through, he also don't understood shit of what he said, but everyone else did, and he got a 9.5 of 10

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I find this very fascinating. I wonder if the phenomenon you describe has been subjected to a scientific experiment ... anybody in HN have any insight into the psychological basis of this?

Did anyone here benefit from a No Child Left Behind program?

Anyone have a non-paywalled excerpt?

>It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers.

An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that if you take high school students from some US minority group, say, American Scandinavians, they'll turn out to be doing better than Scandinavians in Scandinavia, and the same goes for most other minority groups (apparently including American Chinese), as well as for white Americans vs the population of most other countries. What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries.

I have not fact-checked this, but it is an interesting perspective.

The first things you say are correct but then it goes subtly wrong.

Yes, studying in a foreign language is a hindrance -- but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture. In fact, even native English-speaking pupils/students of South American (and African) descent tend do rather bad.

There is an alternative theory that this is mostly an IQ issue -- and that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs (given vastly different historical evolutionary pressures and a belief in evolution itself). This is extremely well backed with research.

There's a nice Scientific American blog post about this hypothesis by John Horgan; the essential argument is that this research question is a pointless area of inquiry because the answer should make no difference in a non-evil society:

>I'm torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine.

(for example, the claim it's "extremely well backed" that IQ is both "heritable" and "largely genetic", when both are hotly contested, the former is impossible to have decent evidence for given all of the confounding variables, and the latter ("largely") is definitely not true, even given the necessarily poor state of evidence on this question:)

> For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.

> But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere -- should simply be banned. I don't say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value.

> Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.)

> Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies.

> Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I'm sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge:

> "Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like."

So, in other words, suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like? Strong stuff, that.

> suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like?

Do not fund lines of thought where the harms outweigh the potential benefits, and/or where ethical commitments are violated.

That policy is neither particularly strong or particularly uncommon. It's the guiding principle behind IRBs, which are pervasive. (In fact, as Horgan points out, one of the primary motivations for IRBs was racist scientists conducting downright evil experiments on black men.)

There are two components to this analysis.

First, do benefits outweigh harms? This is easy because there are no benefits. Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge?

Second, are there any ethical violations? Also easy. Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, this is one of very situations where the motivation behind Godwin's Law doesn't apply.

> Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge?

Stop affirmative action? Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy?

It is in fact possible to find it evil to NOT do so...

> Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, [...]

They are exactly "political outcomes that I don't like". Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.

> Stop affirmative action?

Affirmative action is motivated by either an absolute belief in diversity being good (e.g., there are benefits for economic minorities that apply ragardless of race), and/or as an intervention meant to correct for structural violence in recent history.

The racial question is irrelevant to either of those issues.

> Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy?

Immigration and crime policy written under the belief that some races are genetically superior to others...

Didn't I ask for examples that aren't fucking evil?

In any case, EVEN IF there is a correlation (after controlling for the hundred of obvious things and god knows what else), other factors (including variation that race doesn't explain and environmental factors) are so extraordinarily dominant that racial variation is more an excuse for racist bullshit than an objective justification for it.

Which is exactly why we don't even need to know the answer to the question.

> Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.

I have no idea what this means.

WRT affirmative action this is barely an intelligible position, because anyone with half a brain will realize that there are massive environmental factors that definitely dominate any difficult-to-even-validate racial causation.

WRT crime and immigration policy: writing either informed by a barely statistically significant correlation that's probably impossible to even actually prove because of thousands/millions of latent variables is pretty fucking far from treating people like individuals. Especially when that "science" conveniently validates white superiority theory.

It appears that you consider, among other things, Singapore's rise over the last 50 years to be "evil". This puts you at odds with practically the entire economics profession, and just about everyone else in the world trying to actually improve conditions in poor countries instead of burning perceived witches and warlocks.

> Singapore's rise over the last 50 years

You mean conducting eugenics experiments on low-income women?

Or did you mean encouraging only educated people to have children?

If you really think sterilizing and performing experiments on the poor without consent constitutes social progress... I don't really know what to say.

Anyways, it's a pretty far stretch to say that Singapore's eugenics program had anything at all to do with its economic performance over the past 50 years. More-over, the changes to reproductive rates in Singapore are pretty uniform throughout the population. So even if population control has helped Singapore, it was just the population control -- not the class-centered eugenics schemes.

And all of this is discounting the fact that it's not even effective when judged on its own terms... turns out governments don't make for very good PD controllers.

> with practically the entire economics profession

This is obviously not true. It is not the case that the majority of practicing ecnomists support eugenics...

Second, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Economists are not geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, etc. They are absolutely not trained to make the sort of assessments I'm talking about above.

Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model.

You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.

Doesn't Chomsky make a pretty big assumption there? I feel that he chills intellectual inquiry in this area by calling anyone interested in these questions racists and so forth.

It seems that there are legitimate questions that could be informed by this line of inquiry. For example, research might affect one's opinion about race-based affirmative action programs mandating that the admitted student body mirror the overall population (assuming that IQ is a relevant factor in college admissions). In the scientific realm, if IQ were indeed heritable and if there were substantive differences across large groups of people, wouldn't people be curious why, and by figuring out the pathway, perhaps be able to design supplements or lifestyle changes to raise people's IQs?

I'm not saying that this area of research should be given priority, but it does seem legitimate. As Horgan concedes, this overall sentiment does seem to go against the grain of freedom of scientific inquiry.

> For example, research might affect one's opinion about race-based affirmative action programs mandating that the admitted student body mirror the overall population

No, because affirmative action programs operate from an absolute commitment to diversity and/or a recognition of systemic violence against certain communities in recent history. Those commitments hold (or not) regardless of genetic variation.

> In the scientific realm, if IQ were indeed heritable and if there were substantive differences across large groups of people, wouldn't people be curious why, and by figuring out the pathway, perhaps be able to design supplements or lifestyle changes to raise people's IQs

There's a whole field of research called "Education" that studies essentially this question, but not unnecessarily confined to IQ as a sole metric.

And yes, many education researchers investigate the effectiveness of interventions in the context of communities (include racially-defined ones).

The race/IQ correlation question is totally irrelevant to the discovery and evaluation of assessments among subcommunities.

How could knowledge of racial differences in IQ possibly do to push forward education research? Everything we know about differences between subcommunities points to behavioral interventions being effective, and nurture aspects playing a dominate causal role.

And even if you want to go full on eugenics / genetic engineering, we have some comparatively stronger hypotheses about some genetic causes for IQ variation that are absolute (i.e., genes that effect IQ but are not correlated with race).

So even in a crazy futuristic (I would say dystopian) world of genetic engineering for things like intelligence, investigating racial theories is still a waste of time.

> I feel that he chills intellectual inquiry in this area by calling anyone interested in these questions racists and so forth.

Well, duh? Chomsky's explicitly trying to chill discussion/research into hypothesis.

First because it has no intellectual value -- it's like asking whether red is a better color than purple. Even if there were an answer to such an odd question, it would be useless. Hence, the answer is more likely to be used as a rhetorical sword in political debates than for e.g. effective interventions (which are pretty difficult to imagine short of eugenics in any case).

Second because he doubts it's a sincere inquiry. He questions, I think, whether the outcomes of this research will be scientifically grounded and used for good, or more likely to be taken on face value (no matter how confounded/weak) and become an excuse to validate overtly racist eugenics/immigration policies.

In other words, Chomsky is calling bullshit on this line of "research" being either "intellectual" or a sincere "inquiry".

I'd expect there to be a higher proportion of intelligent immigrants via controlled immigration. Those who merely have to just hop the border are less likely to be engineers, doctors, etc., while Europeans and Asians have no choice but to deal with the legal system which can vet them.

Yes. But I think the US got a bunch of Vietnamese boat refugees, didn't they? I believe they turned out mostly okay.

> This is extremely well backed with research.

Sounds like a bold claim in an area of controversy. Do you have recommendations for publicly available online articles that substantiate your claim that are:

1) readable by non-academics

2) well-regarded / reputable and

3) control for confounding factors?

It's only bold because there is a large number of people (often state founded, often controlling at least the lower levels of education, often with major influence on media) who strongly feel otherwise -- with no numbers to back them up, of course.

---

If you actually do want to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's "Intelligence: A Short Introduction" as a place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-A-Very-Short-Introduction...

(Who knows, if you dig around a bit you might even be able to find a PDF, perhaps at Emil Kirkegaard's website.)

You can also choose to spend an hour on this talk by Stephen Hsu who does research on IQ and genetics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

You can read some of Plomin's stuff -- he is very much into genetics:

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v20/n1/full/mp2014105a.html

There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ. This is a result that is extremely hard to explain away if one believes in nurture, SES, microaggressions, racism, ESL difficulties, etc.

Since it is such a rhetorically important paper, I hope somebody else can chime in with a proper citation (I can also swear that even though I downloaded it at a university library, it has somehow also ended up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Emil Kirkegaard).

This paper only gives us points at the lower end of IQ/DNA similarity, of course. We already have numbers at the higher end where we know that the points still fit -- but it was possible to explain it away with nurture, SES, and all that. There has been a longer chain of arguments for about a hundred years that counteracted that (adoption studies, parents who die when their children are young or unborn, divorce and remarriage, etc.) -- but since it was longer, it was easy to ignore.

---

Ian Deary runs the Lothian Birth Cohort study which is really interesting if you are at all interested in how people's outcome in life differ and why (and to what degree it can be predicted and bad outcomes be prevented).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Deary#Lothian_Birth_Cohort...

http://www.lothianbirthcohort.ed.ac.uk/

The "Newsletters" links in the sidebar gives you access to PDF's for the newsletters they send to the participants in the studies (and their relatives/caretakers). They are very easy to read/skim compared to normal research papers.

Definitely well worth reading if you are at all interested in education, intelligence, and outcomes (especially if you don't really believe in intelligence yet, i.e. if you are a flat-earther/creationist/timecubist).

---

Bloggers:

http://www.drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/

http://infoproc.blogspot.dk/

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/

All three do active research on intelligence (Emil mostly in the form of contributing statistical know-how).

---

There's a lot more but this is what I'm going to dig up for now. You are basically asking me to find a short text using small words that is on the internet and tailored to precisely your beliefs (false or true), precisely your background knowledge, that describes thousands of well-done studies apparently without difficult maths and lots of numbers AND that is "reputable" in "an area of controversy", which means you give yourself permission to dismiss anything if whomever you choose to hold in authority doesn't like it. That's a tall order, especially since there are so many dimwits within education "research" who believe false things and who can't do statistics.

A more forthcoming query from you that 1) showed that you had done your homework (you clearly haven't), 2) told me what you know and don't know, and 3) told me which precise points you don't understand or aren't yet willing to believe would -- naturally -- have produced a more useful answer from me.

I can tell, though, that a degree in education doesn't seem to make a difference in the efficacy of the teacher. But their IQ does. The IQ of the students matter, too. The discipline and noise level in the class also matters. It certainly also matters that the teacher knows the subject he or she is teaching. There is also a correlation between how long a teacher has taught and how well he or she teaches -- probably a combination of a selection effect and a training effect but I don't think anybody yet knows how much each matters.

As always, correlation does not imply causation. Since clearly nurture has a very strong effect on IQ, unless you control for the background of these subjects, I don't think it means anything. It's clear that for a random sample of people in the world today, there will be a clear correlation between race and background.

> Since clearly nurture has a very strong effect on IQ

It actually hasn't, however clear it might be to you.

(Well, it does have on childhood measurements of IQ but then it tapers off to practically nothing. Adopted children end up with adult IQs similar to that of their biological parents, not to that of their adopted parents.)

> A more forthcoming query from you that 1) showed that you had done your homework (you clearly haven't), 2) told me what you know and don't know, and 3) told me which precise points you don't understand or aren't yet willing to believe would -- naturally -- have produced a more useful answer from me.

Actually, this response is already sufficiently useful. This is not an area that I have researched, nor is it one that I intend to spend much time on, so I appreciate the list that you've put together. I listened to most of Stephen Hsu's talk and liked it (he sounds like he's well-versed with the research, and he used sufficiently "small words" to be understandable).

Sorry about the bitchiness -- I hate vague questions :(

The thing with "average IQ in an arbitrary population" is that it does not give any predictions that would help education reach its goals.

Doesn't it?

Knowing about it helps prevent incorrect inferences that lead to bad policies that in turn lead to bad outcomes.

Sorry, you lost me - our reference contexts are probably totally different. Can you elaborate?

Yes, but not today as I'm tired and can't brain. I am at a christening tomorrow after which I am going to be really tired. I also have appointments Monday and Tuesday. It might take me several days to get back to you. Remind me at <username> @ gmail if I don't.

To help me write an answer that helps you, can you tell me a bit more about where you come from in the meantime?

In the battle between Righteousness and empirical studies, I am firmly in the latter camp. I hope you are, too.

Hm, okay.

From what I gather on education the work of an individual teacher is the far most important factor when comparing outcomes. I.e. if one compares "average" student bodies with varying backgrounds within the same cultural contexts and one is taught by an encouraging teacher and the other by a non-engaging and non-encouraging type I would bet the former group would usually provide better learning results. I fail to see how IQ measurements would help in this when the key to is to get teachers to be engaged and encouraging - and, non-discriminating.

From this point of view there seems to be little value in using any "population average IQ" scores to guide educational policies when the best approach is always to empower the individual teacher to be empowering and encouraging. The corollary to this view that massive government control of teaching through massive testing etc. is kinda pointless beyond setting certain national targets for the minimum body of knowledge to teach. And, that the quality of the teachers is the most important deciding factor.

Extremely low IQ that would warrant special assistance is another thing entirely, of course.

> but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture.

Stormfront? Is that you?

Everything you claim is utter tripe.

  Students from low income families consistently, regardless of ethnicity or race, 
  score well below average. [1]

Most research into academic performance associate poverty and the risk factors of systemic poverty as the main contributor to poor academic performance even after race is accounted for.

> that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs

There's so much wrong and 1/2 truths in this statement. First, while IQ does have a genetic component it is not crystalized. The genotype is a range of IQ whose phenotype is influenced primarily by...yeah, poverty and risk factors associated with poverty. Environment can influence a person's realized IQ by as much as 12-18 points.[2]

To put this in perspective, the average IQ of college graduates is 115. Of STEM graduates is ~125. So environment can mean the difference between not graduating from college and being a Physicist, Computer Scientist, Doctor, or Mathematician.

But, probably the most absurd claim you make is that we should expect the genetic variation to adhere to arbitrary identifiers like skin tone.

Why would you assume the color of skin is somehow a higher indicator of relatedness than height, or hair color, or nose length? In fact, it's actually a far worse indicator of relatedness than many metrics.

An East African can be more genetically related to Northern Europeans than to a West African regardless of similarity in skin tone. The concept of race that you're portraying; one where you can look at someone's skin color along some spectrum and by that attribute group them into categories of more or less genetic relatedness is unscientific garbage.[3]

1. http://www.academicjournals.org/article/article1379765941_La...

2. http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf

3. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674417311

> Stormfront? Is that you? Everything you claim is utter tripe.

From the HN guidelines: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."

The rest of your comment does do that, but please edit out the rude and uncivil bits from now on.

Done.

To be clear, I think my other reply to this comment should be read at a meta-level. I'm frankly astounded that HN is a moderated community and yet comments containing an overtly racialized (S America / African) causal theory of intelligence aren't flagged away.

These ideas don't hold any capital in scientific communities. There really is no intellectual debate to be had here. More-over, allowing these comments to stay (in the presence of a moderation mechanism) is extremely unwelcoming.

Despite the continued presence of crackpots claiming the existence of empirical/scientific evidence that women are inherently feeble-minded in mathematics, in science, or in general, I've seen such comments get down-voted to oblivion or flagged away. So why are equivalent comments about South Americans and Africans tolerated?

I also do not have specific data, but when almost 1/10th[1] of the student body is learning in a second language, it's obvious that test scores will be lower and resources will need to be stretched a bit further and certain groups(such as gifted) will not receive the best possible education for their unique abilities.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=96

> An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that [...] What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries.

Well, if that's really an opinion on US education from "a person who's made a huge contribution to US education", that's pretty sad statement for US education, even before considering the more detailed claims. South America isn't a particularly significant source of immigrants to the US (even if you only consider immigrants for whom English is not their first language.)

When the most basic, obvious, and widely known facts are this badly messed up...

Don't (US) Americans often think of Mexico as part of "South America"?

North or Central America would be more correct geographically but the major divider in practice is the US/Mexican border, isn't it?

We (in Western Europe) also called some of the Central European states "Eastern Europe" for a long time because the Iron Curtain was the thing that mattered, not the actual East/West position.

> Don't (US) Americans often think of Mexico as part of "South America"?

I've lived in the US for my whole life -- more than four decades -- and this is literally the first time I've seen this abuse of "South American", so I'm going to say, no, its not that common.

> North or Central America would be more correct geographically but the major divider in practice is the US/Mexican border, isn't it?

Well, the US/Mexican border is the "major divider in practice" between US and Mexico, but not between North and South America (when a common term for the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries of North and South America is needed, "Latin America" is the usual collective term.)

Heck, even ignorant Americans abusing a term will just call everyone who seems like they might be Latin American "Mexican" rather than "South American". (Which, wrong as it is in general, is a far better approximation when you are talking about US immigration.)

> and this is literally the first time I've seen this abuse of "South American", so I'm going to say, no, its not that common.

Ok, thanks. Bad guess on my part.

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