Should gifted students go to a separate school?
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theconversation.com
This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head:
1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? This will be highly correlated with race and socioeconomic status since we know that poor / minority communities don't have the best resources / results for early childhood development.
2. What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? "Smart" kids who never have to interact with anyone "below" them or "dumb" kids who never have to interact with anyone "above" them will have trouble navigating many social and professional situations.
3. "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. These parents are often the best advocates for positive change in their community. The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'
So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
Being a geek is a reason to find yourself at the bottom of the hierarchy, but so is being overweight, wearing glasses, being shy, being in a religious minority, etc. The particular reason doesn't matter to the bullying process, it's a free variable. I'm pretty sure that a school full of geek kids will find their own reasons to bully some of its students.
First, note that the standard the school has to meet isn't "no bullying", but rather "significantly less bullying". I presume this is what you mean.
Anyway: What is your evidence for this claim? Have you ever spent time in such a school and compared it to a regular school?
Data point of N=1. I went to a special "school for smart people only". There was dramatically less bullying than the regular-people school I came from.
But anyway the researchers are providing actual scientific evidence of this effect, and you appear to be arguing against it using, apparently, intuition based on no evidence whatsoever. "Yes, these experts say X, but that sounds unbelievable to me; therefore they must be wrong."
Surely you do not endorse this sort of reasoning.
As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
Imagine you are a great principle/counselor/teacher. You can work anywhere, because you are great at your job. Do you choose to go to the school with the superintendent that is nearly illiterate and completely incompetent at the district where the kids regularly assault each other and the staff? Or do you choose to go to the school where the kids love to learn, love to read, love to study, and respect their teachers and their school?
If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.
We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve.
This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.
In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject.
> We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids
This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.
For a given pair of students X and Y, it may be a poor investment for X to teach Y anything, if X will almost surely dominate Y within the problem domain. It would be stupid to force X to teach Y in this setting.
20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row...
" But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.
16:09 I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive.
16:36 And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you."
16:57 And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." "
Indeed, even in TFA:
> Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, developing behavioural problems both at school and at home, leading to disengagement and dropping out of school.
> When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance by their peers and minimise the risk of bullying and social isolation.
We can disagree about these conclusions, but I hope we agree that if they're right, it's not morally right to send a gifted kid to a regular school on the theory that they'll set an example for those around them if the above is the cost to the kid.
My point is that rather than assuming things we think are probably are true, we should try to argue from data. Especially since people have studied this, both professionally and experimentally.
I can think of plenty of ways that your argument might not be true. For example, per TFA, if gifted kids act up or intentionally tank themselves in "regular school", then maybe it's worse for everyone for the gifted kids to be in "regular school".
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But rather than making guesses based on nothing but our gut, why don't we consider the experts' studies and opinions?
What you're advocating is a deeply lonely (and I'd argue psychologically damaging) experience and it really bothers me to see so many people in this thread want more people to experience it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other.
To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments.
Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success):
* Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels.
* Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc.
* Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item.
* Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do.
* Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be.
* Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching.
* Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.
Have you heard the phrase, "Du bist nichts, das volk ist alles!" It's the tl;dr version of what you said.
Not to mention organizing people by intelligence is a shaky proposition at best, given our current best assessment, the IQ rating, is already proving to be inadequate as an objective measurement.
Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.
And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
You might also have failed to see all the bright kids who dumbed themselves down and achieved a lot less than they could have in order to attain popularity and avoid bullying. I'll take "well rounded" to mean "not really excelling in anything".
She was wrong. Almost everyone I work with is of above average intelligent. That's the nature of a professional career: you're not randomly paired up with some doofus who just happens to share your zip code.
Even in the cases where I do interact with people of below average intelligence, it's perfectly fine and pleasant because adults are generally speaking not assholes to each other. Part of growing up is learning some social graces.
In retrospect, I have no idea where this idea comes from. Do people think that the idiot bully is going to magically get into Harvard and get a professional job?
This goes doubly for high end sales, BTB work, dozens of other professional environments. Maybe you work in a place where the only other people you see every day are coworkers that you like, but in my experience that isn't very commonplace.
Sure. I'm not claiming that everyone I interact with is as educated or intelligent as me.
But it's not like an alternative education would have zero diversity. When I went to boarding school, the average IQ went way up—but there was still plenty of variation. Plus, I had the whole new challenge of learning to interact with people from different cultures—some of whom had very limited English.
I'm not claiming everyone I work with is tech-savvy or even equally intelligent. What I'm disputing is the claim that being forced to undergo years of bullying and unchallenging instruction is somehow educational.
2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do.
3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.
Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.
The parent's argument is exactly the same if we change "giving people food" to "giving people who have food that isn't suitable for them food that's more suitable for them".
Maybe you think that the parent's argument is flawed because you think that all people have the same basic educational needs. That's what TFA is arguing is not true, but maybe it's wrong; you could make that case. But quibbling over the exact formulation of an analogy is not the kind of concrete thinking that you're asking for.
Determining the value in integrating "gifted" kids with "non-gifted" kids is in effect the same argument that is held with regard to determining the affect that charter schools have on our school system, simply change the modifier from gifted/non-gifted to interested/uninterested in school and we are having the same debate.
There are pros and cons to both models and people have to admit to both sides of it, otherwise they are being disingenuous with their analysis.
Presumably even in my analogy the people not given food had some food, since they were merely weak and not starved to death.
But that ignores my argument anyway! My point is that you should do what you can do, even if it's imperfect. The food analogy was to show that the argument 'don't help some people because it's unfair to the people you don't help' is extremely stupid.
That's a moral argument, and my reply was a moral argument.
This is quite an anecdote you've got there ... cause in my experience (gifted, and in gifted classes with many much brighter than me), all of us kept a pretty diverse (academically) social group.
But that's _my_ anecdote ... surely people will exist on the entire spectrum between self-seclusion to social butterfly.
RE 2. The previous post does not say "every kind of diversity is automatically good". But I certainly agree that social and intellectual diversity has benefits for all parties.
RE 3. "Smart people do well and often have smart children", well it is not genetic though. While often "smart" parents have "smart" kids because they value education and know what to push. It is an oversimplification to say that education is equal to "smart". And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet. Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good. I believe that the whole intellectual spectrum of kids can learn from each other and together. I believe that smarter kids should be able to learn more if they want to, but I strongly believe in the benefits of having all kids together in the same school, from kindergarten to university. Some kids might need more time, some could learn more and/or go faster, but they will still benefit from each other.
Have you been around children? While there are few exceptions that shine no matter the environment, there are far more who excel with a better peer group. This idea that "smart kids are always going to be intrinsically motivated" is just as bogus as "smart people do well and have smart children". What happens in those situations is that the smarter children usually wind up coasting through, simply because they find it so easy to stay ahead of the mean.
> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.
And yet people do every minute, "smart" or not. Being a free country does allow people the freedom to search for the best possible opportunity given their resources, and not be forced into regressing into the mean.
For the early part of my life, that was me.
Working 10 years of jobs that I hated were my big motivator to resume my education with a renewed vigor. It has worked out well for me since but I would have been much better off if I had not been in that sea of mediocrity during my formative years.
Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that I can ignore your theory about what is 'collective good' because it is stupid and will do me and my family irreparable harm, and I can substitute my own theory of what is actually going to move us towards more 'collective good' and act according to that. That is what being free means.
Yes. That's precisely what it means.
Serving the collective good is a fine ideal but for me to pursue my own interests before yours (and for you to pursue yours before mine) is a mandate.
Once you mandate the good of the state over the good of your own children, you are no longer a free society.
> Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. Let's not use the words dumb but lets say, "less smart". If this were the case, why would parents fight to get their kids into magnet and charter schools? Also special needs kids benefit from mainstreaming. Evidence > Unsubstantiated opinion.
> The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can [cite needed]
> They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. [cite needed] - in fact, as a "gifted" kid, I often felt ostracized because of being selected (nerd).
> I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering [cite needed]
How can I find a citation for a my own statement that I believe something?
Are you under the impression that the comments section of HN is a scholarly journal where all claims are documented? I notice that you don't ask for citations for any of the claims in this thread that you agree with, so your demands for citations are really just an obnoxious lack of argument.
Frankly the tone of your comment troubles me. None of these students are more or less "deserving"; the goal is to help every student reach their potential.
As for me, programming since the age of about 10, when I went into secondary school (age 13), the level of IT (in)competency amazed me. I was reprimanded for finishing assigned work quickly and studying independently. I was kicked off the network for writing code because it wasn't understood. Nothing got better, yet I was forced to waste 5 years of my ~81.5 years on Earth (~6.13%) of my ALE, getting a pointless state education that from that day on has not once helped me.
Further education wasn't any better. I joined a course at a local vocational college, one with certificates of excellency, with the prospectus stating it would teach the fundamentals of computing; data structures, networking, algorithms, through to applied computing including ASM, C, C++, et al. In my three weeks there, they taught (very poorly) VB.NET and had students design flyers in Publisher. I was refused entry to the one-year pre-university course as I didn't have the correct number of education goody points. The response I got to quitting was that you can't always have everything you want in life.
This is why education in the UK sucks.
I think if you see a child who has potential, let them explore that potential. There are hundreds of other children who will go through the standard educational system, get their GCSEs and A Levels and useless degrees, before getting ordinary jobs. Let the ones with potential do something different.
Reminds me of the kid recently whose school refused to let them take the time out to work on an acting opportunity, due to the loss of education that a week would present. I'm sure the child would have learnt a lot more about their most likely future career in that week than they did in the classroom.
Anyway, rant over. Standardised education sucks.
Also, you absolutely can't 'let' kids move at different speeds in the same school. You can let kids move at speeds where you enough kids at that speed. For a 90th percentile kid that is fine, there are roughly 10% of the students that share their speed (or nearly do) so you can form a class of them. For the top 1% or top .1% you just can't, and the 99.9th percentile kid can learn much, much, much faster than the 90th percentile kid, and can immediately understand concepts that the 90th percentile kid won't be able to grasp until they are years older (if ever). Putting those kids in the same class means one will be impossibly behind or the other will be incredibly bored.
Classes were tiered into ability, even at this age (I do not remember what the rubric was for deciding your tier) and for math classes I was pulled in to a self-study course along with 2 or 3 other students. There was no 'formal' class and instead the teacher would spend varying amounts of time with each student as they worked through the material on their own. Each student would work at his or her own pace.
I think this sort of system would do wonders for those both at the very top and at the very bottom. In college, I found office hours were somewhat similar in that students both behind and in front could get focused time with a professor to either catch up or advance even further ahead.
This is ignoring any budget and teacher constraints, but this seems like a real issue for both the 'top' and 'bottom' students.
I can relate to the IQ wall in communication, I can relate to fail education, I can relate to stupid people with great education, I am lucky to have a good paying job considering my lack of formal education.
If not properly handled, above than average IQ is actually more a problem than a great asset in western system (I won't talk about Asian countries, as I don't have first hand experience but the competition mindset should help)
It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track.
> What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
> "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.
Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'.
_edited for clarity_
...which doesn't apply when the "track" is a set program at a different school.
Being advanced(PhD) or gifted usually means pursuing more open-ended type interests and research. The foundational skills, which form the majority of K-12 curriculum, won't be out of reach for someone keeping pace in non advanced tracks.
Jumping in and out of the "gifted" track should be possible if such a thing exists; however to your point, how would the track be defined and what should it contain? Would there be a list of items that need to be mastered? What evaluations determine if you can jump in... or when you need to "jump out"? Would the "gifted" track be age based the way it is currently or could the contents be tailored to fit the needs of the individual students?
Following that line of thinking, at what point do you qualify for a job? Also, what social stigmas would we attach to "jumping out"?
I don't have answers, but your point led me to some very interesting questions. Thank you!
Because we have working models for high performing specialty schools.
We already have endless infighting about improving every school.
And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?
I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school.
I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason.
So just because?
>"And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?"
There is no "better" for everyone. Rather than just segregating students (and requiring more teachers resources etc.), work to made education better for your students. Have different classes at different speeds.
>"I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school. I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason."
That's fine, and that's your prerogative as a parent. However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
Because we know it can be done and how to do it.
Have different classes at different speeds.
We already have that. Education is more than a series of classes. It's the social interactions too.
However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
I find it dangerous, reckless and disingenuous for you to use a loaded term like "segregation".
Sure, we all know the historical connotations, but we also all know the actual definition of the word. Though I will say, given the correlation between educational resources and race, the historical connotation may be appropriate in some of these gifted vs non gifted situations.
Who said anything about segregation? I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely. The only way to get forced out of "advanced school" should be failing out.
Saying that student A must attend school B because of trait C and student X must attend school Y because of trait Z, is segregation. It just so happens to be based upon you deemed "educational qualities" rather than what we normally think about, race. Or more economic status.
> I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely.
We already have free choice. There are a myriad of private schools you can choose to send your children to. Pay the fees and send them.
The right thing for an average student is not the same as what is right for either the gifted, or the "retarded" (I forget what the correct term is.
Resources don't cut it, the best students learn more from reading a text book than the average students learn from the best classes. There are a lot of fads in education, but elite schools mostly maintain their status by having elite students not elite instructors.
If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.
You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention.
You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else.
If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Feel free to browse my comment history if you suspect I am trolling.
> You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people.
No, I think we should prepare them just like we prepare everyone else. And I think many of them will make valuable contributions. I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
> Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
I didn't say anything like that. I think you assumed that because I disagree with your premise (only the education of the elites matters) that I must therefore believe in the opposite conclusion (we should only educate non-elites). But I believe in universal education.
I don't mind correcting you, but this conversation would go a lot faster if you responded to my actual words rather than what you assume I must think because I am disagreeing with you.
> Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Neither of us. I was saying teenagers who are already destined to be given hard power, because their parents have it, will tend to get into good schools, and will also tend to reinforce hegemony, which I consider a negative thing.
Wrong. I did not assert this. I asserted that resources should be focused on improving the abilities of the group most likely to be in key positions in the future.
One good seed can really foster a lot of inspiration.
What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism.
We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom.
It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.
Segregating gifted children in with the regular population
No, it is not sufficient to make a policy decision, for instance. But if I have to go and vote on this issue, it is at least something I could base my judgment on.
Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people.
I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.
I'm wondering how you feel about "smart" kids like Terence Tao.[1][2]
At age 14, he was in enrolled in college instead of attending high school with his "less smart" peers. At age 17, he was a graduate student at Princeton instead of being a senior at high school with other kids his age. (And working backwards from those 2 points in his timeline, he was in highschool when he should have been in middle school, etc.)
Should the young Terence Tao regardless of intelligence be denied the ability to "remove" himself from the school he is "supposed" to go so that other kids can benefit from his intellect? If at age 8, he's pulled from regular school to attend high school instead, are his parents selfish?
Is there a political movement to force all geniuses to stay with their age group and normally assigned school to fulfill a societal goal?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao
[2] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.h...
* On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education.
* On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split the class into two for that section. Once I slipped into this lesser "higher" class, I felt I could never move up to the higher/higher class because I never learned ahead enough to meet the needs of the next pre-test. (It never occurred to younger me to read ahead in the book. So much for being gifted.)
So I think the arguments you list ALL have validity and should absolutely be taken seriously. OTOH, I think current schools do a poor job of keeping talented or more educated students engaged, which can drag down things for everyone. I don't know what the answer is - you've done a good job of talking about why separate schooling is a bad solution - but I think the status quo is also a bad solution.
(that said, I'm in favor of raising educational opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged first, because I'd rather have talented-but-only-adequately-taught people in a world of adequately taught people than I would have a world of poorly taught people save for a few bright stars)
1. There are standard tests and evaluations for giftedness, these can be given at any time past age 4. They are about thinking and behavior, not achievement. Years of study shows that these traits don't generally change much with age. So called "late bloomers", if they are gifted, would almost certainly have been gifted much earlier in life but maybe not identified.
2. I think this is a valid point, but I'd propose that this be addressed more by making sure that kids are interacting with peers outside the academic context. Putting kids in the same classroom where they are underserved on either extreme simply because it's good to socialize seems like the wrong priority to me.
3. This is an artifact of how we identify giftedness today. Giftedness exists in all cultures and socioeconomic groups. Today, only the most motivated parents get their gifted kids identified. We could fix that with a national initiative to identify gifted students. Additionally. Not that this is necessarily your argument, but motivated parents do not make children gifted. No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically. Likewise,profoundly gifted kids given very few opportunities can be and are still gifted.
Proper early nutrition will. There's no bottom for parents' motivations, nor to their capacity, unfortunately.
As someone who was classified as "gifted" and went to one of these special programs, your third point is a common occurrence.
All that aside though, I think the very notion of gifted-ness is harmful (in a labelling sense) to both the are's and the are-not's. Your first two points are relevant on this. For that reason, I'm not sure we should even discuss/judge gifted-ness, regardless of whether it even exists.
I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school.
This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the children who had difficulties learning or even the opposite- elevating children who were learning well; instead the entire class would slow to a crawl when it came time to do some form of verification that we're actually learning.
In many cases 'tests' would stop any possibility of new content being added to the class for months.
I was bored out of my mind and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. School is an absolute torturous prison when there's no stimulation of any kind; and they also wonder why you seek fulfillment by acting out.
Conversely, before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with, those output the most well educated people and were free for the public too. They just had very strict requirements for entry and you could be expelled for not keeping up. A stark contrast to the kids in my class who were unwilling or unable to allow the class to move forward as a unit.
Gah. I hated my childhood and I absolutely hated formal education because of this.
I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how to bubble in a multiple choice answer sheet. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for weeks on end having the fact we need a #2 pencil and that you shouldn't fill outside the bubble when answering the scantron on the TAAS test.
My original school system was always trying to push me forward; they placed me in gifted programs, encouraged me to compete in academic competitions (you know the ones I'm talking about), and often recommended to my parents that I should be allowed to skip a couple of grades.
Conversely, my latter school system, in an attempt to meet standards and retain order (I assume), simply taught down to the lowest denominator. As a result, I lost a lot of the drive and motivation previously impressed upon me. It's only after growing up that I've gotten some of that back, however, I doubt it will ever reach its previous high.
So, as unemotional as it may seem, there should be a mechanism for either removing those at the bottom in order to accelerate their learning and return them back to the general population, or a similar mechanism to allow the higher levels to avoid decline.
The #2 pencil is spot on. I carried an entire box of pencils and would trade them for a slice of pizza at lunch.
For those not from Texas or too young to have experienced it, TAAS was horrible even compared to other standardized tests.
Other standardized tests at least pretend to assess a student's learning. TAAS assessed a students ability to parse octuple negatives and poorly typeset mathematics.
So, there were three portions: reading comprehension, math, grammar, and persuasive writing. The maximum score for any of the TAAS portions is a 4, with 3 as the minimum passing grade. The first three were ridiculously easy, but the writing portion was a nightmare.
I don't remember all the details anymore, but IIRC you were expected to include a statistic and a quote from an expert in your paper. The kicker? You weren't allowed any outside materials, and you were expected to make up the statistic and the quote. That's right: the assignment was to write something that would be considered fake news nowadays.
I got a 2. I only passed because I got a 4 on the grammar portion, because for some reason the persuasive writing portion and the grammar portion were averaged together to form what they called the "writing" portion.
My year (10th grade 2000-2001) was the second-last to take the TAAS, and we were the last to take only the TAAS, as it was being phased out in favor of the TAKS. The year behind me took both the TAAS and the TAKS, with only the TAAS counting for graduation requirements (they only had to take the TAKS because the state wanted to do a dry run before switching over), and the people two years behind me only took the TAKS. The timeline went like:
* 2000-2001: 10th grade takes the TAAS (my class)
* 2001-2002: 10th grade takes the TAAS
* 2002-2003: 11th grade takes the TAKS (dry run, same class as above)
* 2003-2004: 11th grade takes the TAKS (for real)
This goes to show that the problem is more localized than state level, it is a municipal and district-level choice so long as you meet minimum testing requirements. Now when students don't meet minimum testing requirements, most districts unfortunately fall into the trap of teaching to test as opposed to teach.
Exact same situation here, but Florida. Elementary school was alright, but middle school became pure FCAT preparation and nothing else. My parents withdrew me from them at that point and put me back into regular classes.
They also used a "block schedule", where each day, you would only attend half your classes, but for twice as long, alternating which classes on which days, and then rotating the order of the classes. (So of your 6 classes, you attended daily: 1,3,5 then 2,4,6, then 3,5,1, then 4,6,2, then 5,3,1...).
Here's an calendar I found of a school currently doing this, tell me this isn't confusing as hell:
In any case, I'll share another funny anecdote: I took a reading comprehension test in 3rd grade. It said I was reading a college level. I'm not really sure what that meant then, but in any case it was as high as the system went. Not only did I have to take the same test in 4th grade again, my parents were sent a letter with a very concerned tone. It said I was not making progress on my reading skills and that soon I would fall behind the other children. It recommended I be placed in a remedial comprehension course so I could catch up.
Sure you need to be able to talk to other groups of people but not to the extent that you require 35 hours a week of education along side them for years. Additionally I'm not sure being educated alongside them actually helps. There are a a hell of a lot of intelligent people who become resentful of that situation and that attitude can take years to mature out of, if they ever do.
Honestly I think the worst part is when teachers would get annoyed that you weren't 'paying attention' and force you to stop doing the crap that's keeping your mind busy and 'focus on school', even though you already get pretty much straight A's.
I ended up teaching my AP Statistics course. It was ludicrous: as a junior I somehow understood the material better than the teacher and was expected to teach a class full of seniors.
Yes, it was more educational than the alternative (sitting in a corner reading a book while totally phoning it in) but I also have no doubt that I would've learned far more in a course which actually challenged me.
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Also, this notion that our real world experiences are anywhere near as heterogeneous as public schools is downright ludicrous. It's not like we hire random people off the street to be software engineers. The average IQ of everyone I interact with is well the national average.
I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and forth on whether that is a good idea. The biggest issue is that the amount of pressure placed on 10/11 year olds to pass that exam and get into a grammar school, not to mention the 18 months or so of preparation is very high. Too high arguably. It also fails children who don't do well with standardised exams. I know people who failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well.
A better system may be having one school with optional advanced classes (we even had this for GCSE Maths/Advanced Maths in out grammar school). That way people can take advanced courses in the areas they naturally excel at rather than hindering their entire education by denying them the higher quality teaching at a grammar school.
Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?
Is streaming out of fashion in state schools these days? I know its alive and well in public schools as my son was streamed.
Edit: For those outside the UK: public schools are a type of private school.
You break kids up by test score and then put all the top kids together, all the middle kids together, and all the bottom kids together. My public school experimented with it for one year, but reverted. Rumor was, parents felt like their kids were being written off in the 6th grade.
You ideally need to be able to promote and demote, which means having at least one subject teacher per stream per year, so that pupils can shift between streams without timetable changes, and having small enough class sizes that the teachers can all cope with a few more being added (as well as possibly doing a bit of extra coaching to get a promoted pupil up to the level of the rest of the class).
Selective schooling as a norm can write talented kids off at age 11 if their talents aren't broad enough. Streaming means that children can still excel in their best disciplines even if they are lacking in others.
People were moved between streams fairly frequently.
I didn't find that at all. There is more to school than classes, and we did have a bunch of classes that weren't segregated by ability (history, geography, religious studies, shop classes, sometimes PE, etc.) Plus we had lunch and all breaks together. My friends where absolutely not all in the same math set as me.
I definitely believe that they work, it's a shame they don't have them in England.
For example, if they made half the kids do better, and half the kids do worse, does that count as working? While you sometimes get claims that it's for their own good that less academically inclined pupils are sent to the non-grammar schools, I'd guess the same people who say this would freak right the hell out if their own kid failed the exam and didn't get in, which kind of undermines that argument.
I take your point about the wider ramifications, but I feel as though I got a good education, and if I ever have kids, I would want them to go to a grammar school too.
Source: Personal experience. I went a grammar school in the UK. I also taught in a top UK grammar school and a not-very-good comprehensive school. I've seen it happen numerous times.
EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.
It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society, it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices.
Whether or not options should be restricted in schooling is a topic for cost/benefit analysis, but as a general point, I don't see anything mind-boggling about this perspective.
My point, as applied to this case, is that giving the option of "smart-only schools" will predictably lead to people taking it, which may lead to issues described by 'habosa here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591. It's a reasonable question to ask if this is what is beneficial to the society (including its economy), and if the answer is no, then not giving such an option in a first place is an entirely logical approach.
EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.
IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.
I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club activities, hikes, music lessons and just hangout. As a bonus, the people in these areas DON'T need a masters degree to do their job as we separate educational aspects of schools from social aspects.
Dozens of small schools could easily work together in a community under this model with changes in the classroom schools having no impact on the activity centers. You could even go to certain schools on different days for areas of specialization/interest being taught.
There are a whole world of possible options that open up if we don't lock in the model that we have today. IMO, it's not about defunding the schools. It's about WANTING to fund them.
Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.
The recent fraud investigations in the USA for-profit college market (eg where several scam-ish type outfits churned out expensive but useless degrees to people lured in by slick marketing) absolutely shows that, sometimes, more options can be worse.
I agree that for-profit institutions have no place in education.
Until I eventually got into private school for the last 2 years of high school, I had never had to work to get straight As. I could often complete homework assignments before class was even over.
Unfortunately, this conditioned me to be incredibly lazy. As I never developed a strong work ethic, in college I continued to put in a minimum of effort though that wasn't enough for straight As.
I've never really had the experience of consistently trying to do something hard. Even though I'm trying to force myself to do it now (setting ambitious fitness goals and taking advanced online classes), I can't help but feel that it would've been a lot easier to develop this grit when motivation didn't entirely depend on me.
You have to sit an exam called the 11+ to enter which is much more like an IQ test than a standard subject based exam.
The most comman argument against them is that privelleged families can afford to tutor their kids specifically to pass this exam.
I was lucky enough to pass the exam, and while there definitely were instances of well off kids who had massive amounts of tutoring, the vast majority were from all kinds of different backgrounds, and levels of education.
For me it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, but I completely understand both sides of the argument.
And I would think that if you're OK with multi-track education, it would seem like having a separate school for gifted students is just an extension of that.
That said, in my own experience, although there were down sides to having some single-track subjects (e.g. physical education), one benefit of attending a school with children of all ability levels was that you were exposed to children from all walks of life.
I would imagine that a school for gifted students would have skewed socioeconomic demographics compared to a school for students of all ability levels, and in many places, that might also mean less racial diversity.
At my public high school, we had a program where students at standard-level or above would assist special-education students. That type of opportunity would probably be missing from a school for only gifted students. You would be less likely to come into contact with (and befriend) people with intellectual disabilities, or even people with average intelligence.
Edit: One other point. Academic giftedness is often thought of as one monolithic thing, but I know several people whose giftedness varies wildly by subject. If you attend a school for gifted students, would there be an expectation that you would be gifted in all subject areas? Would it be more difficult for you to get help in the subjects where you struggle?
I think the ideal is a little bit of both: strong multi-track curricula with common social ground + experiences.
It's not just curriculum, though. The whole structure of the school is usually oriented toward "managing the lowest common denominator." Grade schools have more in common with prisons than they do with any other societal institution.
Imagine a school with a few fixed lectures during the day, self-directed study time built in, and the ability to take a break or get a snack at the student's convenience. That's basically college for most people, but a lot of kids are mature enough to handle something like that at a much younger age.
200 years ago, the smartest and dumbest person both probably lived and died on the same farm. 100 years ago, it wasn't noticeably different. Around the 1920s/30s, society started segmenting the higher end out into higher education and then completely different career/life paths. Fast forward another 50 years and people on the higher and lower ends of intellect rarely meet.
Think of the people you interact with on a daily basis - unless you're doing things completely outside the realm of intellect - and you'll start to realize that the vast majority of them aren't far off from you intellectually. This applies at the top and bottom.
Also a significant amount of the school's resources went to these kids who just didn't want to be there. They had to pay for two security guards, overtime pay for the teachers who did detention/Sunday school, etc. They only offered 4 AP classes each of which had ~50 students because they were the ones who wouldn't get into fights if you just stuffed them into a room with some books.
I think a superschool should allow each student to be ordinary in X subjects. In other words, two levels of acceptable marks depending on the student.
Splitting a student's school life between two schools cannot be an option, it also doubles administration.
I think this is a big leap. I went to a large public high school (~2500 students total) with 3 tracks for each subject. I was in the highest track the whole time, but I would not support physically segregating students like me into a separate school. There are a number of benefits to keeping people in the same school:
1. It's socially beneficial to have high school friends who are different than you are. Many of my best friends were not in my classes but we hung out at lunch time and in after school activities. I think we learned a lot of intangible things from each other.
2. Parental involvement. Parents of kids who are high achievers are more likely to want to see the school go in the right direction. Having involved parents keeps the whole school administration on their toes and brings the general standard of the school up for everyone. If the high achievers had their own school the other students would have fewer advocates.
When American schools were racially desegregated we saw gains across the board: https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica...
While separating gifted students is not the same as separating by race, I think a lot of lessons can be learned from that previous experience.
The danger is that having this focus in school means that kids get neglected once they pass that threshold. When a school is graded by "% of kids who are at-level" there is no incentive for the best ones. In my opinion this is why these kids need to be pulled into separate schools where the ambitions are higher than the minimum threshold.
I see it with kids who are several grades ahead in math and reading, and their only options are skipping grades (and being socially awkward) or being bored out of their mind in class.
This isn't permanent tracking, but it's giving the option to excel for those who are ready and willing.
However, most of the comments here seem to be assuming that school is 100% of a child's learning.
If you are a "gifted" student, then there are plenty of hours in the day to develop other skills. Or pony up the cash for private school.
The public school should be for educating the public. When I was young there was already basically two tiers of education within the public school, the AP track and the vocational track.
>The danger is that having this focus in school means that kids get neglected once they pass that threshold.
Is this a bad thing? Does it even qualify as neglect?
If a child is so far ahead of his peers, what benefit is it to have them increase that gap? At some point, they will need to interact with the group they left behind, how does that become an easier task when the distance is even greater?
I find it hard to believe that a gifted child is so spectacular that she is miles ahead of her peers in every possible area. It's certainly true that they can be ahead in the small subset of skills we consider 'essential' in school, but there are likely other areas where they are not. There's a reason depression is correlated in a curious way with increased intelligence.
It's certainly true that they could benefit from classes with older kids; but then, the issue is really the age based segregation of school, isn't it?. It seems like the entire "gifted" idea would vanish in a sense if we removed the erroneous idea that intelligence is correlated with age, at least in how it informs the idea of "grades" being "all kids born in x year".
Kids learn at uneven paces, so there is no perfect formula for how to split schools, but an imperfect split is still more efficient than boring the best.
In New York City they have a lot of G and T programs, but there it is more about lazybtrachers letting the kids teach themselves. At least it's a stronger peer group.
>> tailored learning strategies
>> education supported by a challenging curriculum
>> teachers trained in gifted education
>> more exposure to students of similar ability
>> opportunities for acceleration
I find this interesting, coming from the "gifted" track in HS and being married to a special education teacher at a public school. The same list applies to both groups, and i don't see why it wouldn't apply just to all students.
How could any of these be more important for some students and not others? They can't be. Its just that public schools don't have the ability to deal with a class of students 25 large and deal with 25 different ways of teaching. Technology and public school funding hasn't caught up here... huge gap. So, we've dreamed up schools where we group kids to deal with the shortcoming. We're not helping students here, we're helping ourselves ignore real solutions.
A separate school for "advanced" students doesn't outright bother me; however, I think defining "advanced" is more challenging than most would initially consider. There are many reasons that a student may be ahead/behind at any point in their education.
I agree that defining "advanced" is very challenging, and goes beyond just the academic as well. There's also something to be said for being academically engaged with people similar to you (ie - some (most?) high school kids may learn more from peers in a self-selected AP Calculus class than they would from a Calc 1 class at the local college taken by kids looking to fill a requirement).
It seemed to me that if I took the dual/early enrollment college course that I would definitely get the credit, whereas the AP course would actually require far more repetitive homework, lots more class time (which I didn't want to do), and only then would I have a chance to qualify for college credit.
That's a no-brainer, in my book, but so many of my peers refused to follow my lead to the University when I tried to persuade them.
In spite of lots of sales training, I've never been a good salesman.
As an added bonus, I could compete calculus in a semester instead of a full year. It was way better for me.
By contrast AP was just a choice I could sign up for when choosing classes.
I do not have good feelings towards those people still to this day.
Of course, now I realize why when I asked him why he would discourage me, he repeated my question loudly for the rest of the guidance department to hear - he was covering his butt on the matter.
Next year she will be a senior and have one morning class at her high school, and the rest will be college. She should finish her Associate's (2 year) degree two semesters after graduating high school.
Some more academically gifted students have managed to graduate high school and finish their two year degree simultaneously.
I did that, it's not as useful as it seems.
What did you find non-useful about it? Did you end up having to take just as much undergraduate coursework to make up for some perceived deficiency?
I'm genuinely curious.
2) Most dual enrollment programs restrict what coursework you can take. Near zero intersection with my CS coursework, though I did get my general ed requirements done.
3) It's community college, it's not something you can put on a resume.
With the credits I got I'd need to do a heavy schedule to graduate even in 3.
More restrictive set of courses for the AA means you're taking classes you don't enjoy for a requirement you don't need. The "name value" of a community college AA also isn't as great, particularly for kids who want to go to a higher-ranked public or top private university for undergrad.
That being said, if you know you want to go to a local/state school where the credits will transfer easily, getting the AA early can be great. I know people who graduated early but still received all 4 years of scholarship money (direct deposited in their bank).
In practice, separating gifted students does two things:
1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students)
2. Remove equality of opportunity.
What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular students?
- Small classes? Help regular students to extent.
- Better curriculum? Hey! Helps regular students.
- More practical education? Also helps regular students
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I'm not against segregation in theory. However, in practice there's very little evidence that the gifted schools would NOT benefit regular students. If you believe that gifted students should receive more education than regular students, then that's an entirely separate discussion.
If you have evidence, I'd love to see it (I'm very interested in education, in particular).
2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging.
- Small classes: maybe, it's not necessary at all.
- better curriculum: well, yes, smarter kids can cover a topic more quickly and in more depth. The less smart kids can't keep up, so they have to skim less deeply and/or cover less material.
- more practical: ??? did you feel like you needed 3 bullets or something?
You should have separate schools because there aren't enough gifted kids in one regular school to even fill one class. This comes directly from the definition of gifted, if gifted is say the top 1% of students, a large high-school with 1500 kids would only have 15 of them across 4 grades. You have to do something like a magnet school to have enough kids at the same level in the same room for it to work at all.
In any case, you didn't seem to refute my main point that gifted schools would also benefit regular students.
In what way would it possibly benefit a typical student to be placed in a school where they can't keep up? How would it feel for that child to be in an environment where it's normal for their peers to take college courses before reaching high school age? In my experience, it's extremely demotivating and leads to a lot of pain for the child, no matter how wealthy his or her parents may be.
As justin_vanw pointed out (in an undeservedly flagged sibling post), it seems an awful lot like you deny the existence of gifted children to begin with.
2. The alternative is equality of outcome, i.e. cut down the tall poppies. This isn't a solution. Keeping gifted children lockstep with their age-mates does them serious damage that can last a lifetime.
Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum into two or three years, whereas the gifted can. The reality is that these kids need to be surrounded by their ability peers if they are going to reach their potential.
For evidence, check out the work of Miraca Gross, who did her work in Australia. She has a book called Exceptionally Gifted Children, where she details the lives of several of these kids and shows how devastating the school system can be to them if extra accommodations are not made.
2. False dichotomy.
I've read the book you're referring to. It doesn't make any of the claims you're making, in particular:
> Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum.
If I'm wrong (and I may, it's been a while), feel free to reply with a quote and a page number. I have the book.
In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.
The reality is this: schools for "gifted" children just tend to be better schools. The same better schools that would lead to better outcomes, for everyone. Mind you, this isn't the same as putting, for example "special-ed" students in separate classrooms.
Case and point:
> The major finding of this study is that third and fourth grade classroom teachers make only minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students. This result holds for all types of schools sampled. It also holds for classrooms in different parts of the country and for different types of communities. Implications of these findings for researchers and gifted education specialists are discussed. [1]
[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0162353293016002...
My point about regular students not being able to benefit from a compacted K-5 curriculum in two or three years comes from the fact that gifted student can move through academic material faster than a regular student. A regular student may be able to move faster than is currently being done, but not as fast as a gifted student.
> In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.
So ability grouping as opposed to age grouping? Yes, I agree it would help a lot, though as I'm sure you know, the gifted prefer to be around themselves rather than older regular children. Gross' book shows a trend that the more satisfied the kids are with their education, the better they do in life, which is why a separate school makes sense to me. The gifted population is small enough and funding is small enough that I think it will make a much greater positive impact on gifted students than a negative impact on regular students.
While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system.
>2. Remove equality of opportunity. That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it.
To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.
However, in regards to your first point: I said nothing about crippling those ahead. I'm curious what makes you say that honestly. Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. Regression to the mean, would be putting gifted students in an environment where they wouldn't thrive. However, this said environment would also cripple regular students. So the solution, as I've said, and you agree with is to make education better, more generally.
How is it not? "Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school where they're already ahead. "Gifted" students aren't different from other children, they're responsive to the same social pressures all students face, and placing them with a "gifted" peer group allows them to thrive. Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
>"Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school...
"Regular" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school... I'll even humor you and apply this argument for "at risk" students. They, too, require pressure and engagement to excel. [1]
> Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
Indeed. Some gifted program curricula are simply minor modifications to standard ones, begging the question, why waste all of that money trying to barely change the curriculum? It would be better spent making school better in general. See my other sibling posts for citations.
[1] http://www.viriya.net/jabref/Academic_success_among_students...
This problem of cooperative education (wherein we separate students with similar features) is well studied, for both "at-risk" and "gifted" students, and it's been show that regular classroom practices do not benefit either group [1].
Here's some information that supports your argument...
> It is clear from the results that teachers in regular third and fourth grade classrooms make only minor modifications in the curriculum and their instruction to meet the needs of gifted students. (pg 125)
...however.
> 61% of the responding teachers have received no staff development in the area of gifted education (pg 125)
> gifted resource teachers have little effect on what classroom teachers do to meet the needs of the gifted (pg 127)
---
In any case, your citation agrees with the holistic in practice.
> "...efforts must certainly must certainly include the selection or development of curriculum materials specifically design for classroom teacher use. They should also compact the regular curriculum, and to become more flexible in meeting the needs of all students, including gifted students." (pg 126)
P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.
Also, yes, I do believe it's possible to improve schools holistically.
Then I doubt I'll convince you through internet comments, but I think our goals are aligned (better education for all). However, we want to take different approaches to achieve it. The source I cited agrees that we should create an environment in which teachers are flexible, but my point in citing is that despite the comprehensive research that's been done on this topic, we've made very few steps towards actually accomplishing it, so I think it's time to give up that line of thought and try another, which is to separate students.
Separated schooling does have advantages, such as challenging gifted students ("A troubling finding that emerged was the preference of a few of the [gifted] students for heterogeneous classes because they were easier and enabled them to attain a high class ranking with little work")[1] and separation of children enable them to grow at a faster pace ("After 2 years, academically handicapped students in cooperative elementary schools had significantly higher achievement in reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, language expression, math computation, and math application in comparison with similar students in comparison schools") [2].
> P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.
Likewise, thank you for being a good discussion partner as well.
[1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0016986204048001... [2]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0002831203200232...
So you put a regular student there. Pretty soon, they miss some key bit of understanding. Class doesn't pause and replay. Class moves on. Very quickly, the situation becomes hopeless. Why pay attention to calculus when you don't understand negative numbers or fractions? Why attempt Hamlet when you can't read words with more than one syllable?
Sometimes the problem with education isn't the building, or the teachers, or the administration: it's the students (and by extension their parents) and if we can't fix them at least we can teach everyone according to their ability.
As for Detroit. Most of Michigan's "gifted" schools are private and NOT free [1] [2].
[1] http://migiftedchild.org/faq/#zero
[2] http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/sites/default/files/Nationa...
So much for the land of the free...
To the point: you are arguing that segregating students by capability increases income inequality - which is false to disingenuous over generations.
To solve this problem, we should not allow the special Nike sports camps because I do not make as much as a basketball player as an NBA player. We need to equalize all opportunity at the lowest common denominator. Of course the US would never see another gold medal in the Olympics.
Gifted students do not require you to repeat the same things as often. By forcing them to go at the same pace as other students, you bore them and stunt their growth.
I attended the long-running #1 public school in the nation. The School for the Talented and Gifted Magnet High School in Dallas, TX. The environment fostered creativity and learning. There were no distractions or negative pressures or stressors. Being smart didn't result in being bullied, it resulted in being respected.
The question is whether it's good for society as other schools may suffer
In a meritocratic society, the smartest kids go to the best schools, then to the best colleges, then the most elite companies, then likely marry someone from school or work, and then have the smartest kids.
Socioeconomic classes become set due the stability of cognitive function across generations.
Is it ideal to have a cognitively and economically stratified america with a cognitive elite and cognitive under-class?
Is it ideal that this cognitive elite has little to no interaction with the rest of America, and little understanding of how the rest of the country lives?
Being smart is not a guarantee of success so we should make it harder so the less intelligent do not suffer any disadvantage.
Given the strong correlation between academic aptitude and economic success, removing the smart students also remove the wealthy students. The funding model falls apart, and the students who remain get even less extracurricular enrichment.
Granted, we could design programs that mostly avoid the problem. In my county, the gifted high school (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) only takes absolutely brilliant students. Many of whom truly fit the "too smart to fit in" stereotype. Across a large county, that still leaves plenty of gifted/wealthy students in the normal schools, which offer a broad selection of AP/IB/dual-enrollment options.
But it does mean you can pay to get them tutored to jump through hoops, and generally push them harder. There's a very strong relationship between wealth and elite college admission for example. Which is down to culture and opportunity as much as gifts and talents.
If being selective means controlling for socioeconomic background when assessing potential - then I'd be more of a cheerleader for it.
So...affirmative action like in colleges but for earlier forms of education?
To be fair, the TAG Magnet did have race-based quotas until very recently. Let's just say that the school is now ... less diverse. Although, the 1% "other", which encompassed all East and West Asian, has now makes up roughly one-third of the enrollment. The former court ordered 33/33/33/1 resulted in rejecting some of the most meritorious students.
That's a very broad generalization. Yes, there are areas where education is not seen as a positive.
But, looking at trends in our major suburban areas, I think you're way off base. It is increasingly difficult to gain admission to the top state colleges in many areas of the nation because of overwhelming demand. This in turn has led to a massive increase in the number of after-school tutoring programs, math enrichment programs, expansion of AP/honors course availability, etc.
I think these are great benefits and we should focus on making them available for all students, regardless of whether or not they're "gifted".
Glad to see another Townview graduate representing us well. :)
When I was in normal schools (public and private) I stood out. I don't mean, I was precocious and didn't everyone notice how clever I was. I mean, I was bullied. By everyone. Including my teachers. My life was hell, every day getting worse. I was physically sick just thinking about going to school every morning.
Until I was in a Gifted and Talented program in 5th grade. The material wasn't challenging (this is NOT about getting challenging material), but I had a teacher that understood me and peers who didn't hate me.
Giving children a space where they're not constantly tortured is a good policy. As a now-productive member of society, there is no amount of my current success I would not ransom so that children now don't have to go through what I did. It's not something a civilized society should allow.
1. gifted education is a difference in kind, not degree. Gifted kids need different things from their teachers to succeed, not just "more." I don't see anyone asking to devote significantly more resources to gifted students, what they are asking for is to educate them in ways that give them the best chance of success.
2. It's a fallacy to think that giftedness means that students will just do fine in regular courses, and may be just a little bored. Many gifted children (and some of them have posted to this list) will fail completely in a regular class setting, because they are unable to engage with the material or their peers. A significant number of gifted kids end up dropping out or under-achieving because they aren't being served.
3. Gifted kids are often born to gifted parents, but that does not mean rich or successful parents. There are a huge number of gifted kids in minority communities who are living in poverty.
Want to learn more? Documentary filmmaker Marc Smolowitz is working on a feature-length film on giftedness. http://documentaries.org/cid-films/the-g-word/
- Being "gifted" isn't a black and white trait, it's much more diverse;
- Different people are gifted in different topics. I've always learned maths faster than my peers, but they all dance better than I do;
- How do you even decide who is gifted and who isn't? Just give everyone the same oportunities;
But I do believe that school should be tailored to fit the student. What I propose is to allow the student to progress at his own pace:
- Classes should be open for every student that has passed all the prerequisites to join;
- The student can choose when he he's ready to take the test about the topics he already learned;
- Some teachers should keep track of the progress of the students;
- There should be always teachers with free time ready to help students who request it;
EDIT: Fixed broken formatting.
The end result was just that-- all of the attention was given to the students who needed it. The cirriculum was dumbed down, and the "gifted" students didn't learn almost anything.
It was better for the students who needed help, and much worse for the students that didn't.
I view the end result akin to eliminating salary negotiations to help those who are too afraid to negotiate.
My fiancée, a HS math teacher for eight years, saw this in her classes too. The smarter kids (the kids that got the material quicker) would catch up the kids that were lagging behind. While she did have to prepare more nuanced lesson plans, she did see improvement in kids with similar characteristics of classically-underperforming kids she taught previously.
Given this, I think smart schools do humanity a great disservice.
I was in what you could define as the "gifted program" throughout middle and high school.
Even though I ostensibly received a more advanced and tailored education, I still shared classes with students much less engaged than I. I was always at the top of my classes and was never truly challenged. I also never had the opportunity to participate in any kind of maths or informatics competitions.
Having never been exposed to excellence, I chose to go to the much cheaper state school (their education will be just as good, the counselors claimed...).
There too I excelled in my classes with minimal effort, took multiple graduate level courses, and received glowing recommendation letters from my professors.
By the time I entered my PhD in a tier 1 university, I was so woefully unprepared -- both academically and emotionally -- that my eventual dropping out was a foregone conclusion.
I spiraled into a deep depression and wasted a couple years of my life playing video games and living with my parents. I ideated suicide almost daily and willfully put my life in danger (standing at the edge atop tall buildings, driving very fast, imbibing liquor until I blacked out).
Now, a decade later, I've mostly come to terms with my mediocrity, but perhaps I could've risen a bit from it had my intellect been properly fostered. But more to the point, had I been exposed to other smart kids and participated in competitions earlier on, my ego could've been slowly molded over my youth, rather than shattered in a few months.
Maybe this deprives the kids in the neighborhood school of some diversity near the top end of achievement, but maybe they shouldn't have been dicks to us in middle school if they wanted us to stick around.
I also think free public school is critical to having an educated productive populace.
There's an apparent disconnect between my first opinion and the second. That disconnect is, and I know this will sound trite, questioning authority and facts. It's a critically important practice that schools actively discourage.
I believe the current system's limitations stem from the teacher's capacity to attend to at most 30 students at a time, this may have been the case when everything was whiteboard. But now you have iPads and interactive websites and so on.
Overall, this seems like an unhelpful place to invest compared to more fundamental educational issues (and, pragmatically, I can see many areas where this goes awry, ie many aptitude tests for kids being biased for socioeconomic reaosns).
(It's entirely possible that I'm overlooking some nuances in how education budgets work, but I'm talking more in the macro sense.)
(Our high school's approach to that was just offering "study hall" as an elective, with the implication that you could just skip study hall and nobody cared.)
When I was a kid, I had to slop pigs, and shovel the shit out of the pen. My dad would say to me as we were shoveling pig shit or doing some other awful work, "This is why you get good grades. Some day you are going to college so you don't end up like your old man."
I had issues with my oldest kid taking a bad attitude at school and not caring about her education. I thought back to my childhood, then I took my daughter out and gave her a shovel. When she asked what she was supposed to do with it, I told her, "You are going to dig so you can practice up on how to be good at digging ditches, since that is the type of work you will be qualified for if you don't get a good education."
I got a call from her teacher a few weeks later telling me how they couldn't believe the complete 180 she had made at school and that she had never seen anything like it. She wanted to know what I had done. When I told her the teacher was amazed at what a harsh yet unique "punishment" it was, but said that "maybe more kids should be made to dig ditches".
I set strong boundaries and consistent enforcement for all of them. For minor infractions, my go to punishment is to make them do a plank while we "discuss" what they did wrong. If you have ever done planks you know the agony of holding a plank for long enough. The great thing about this as a disciplinary technique is that it is good for them physically; they are building core muscles so the older the kids is the longer they can hold the plank.
For serious offenses, I always like to come up with something more unique and memorable so it really sinks in.
After learning basic fractions for 4 years in the public school system, a friend and I made a chess set out of paper scraps. Our typical day involved doing the day's classwork and homework in an hour while the teacher lectured and then playing chess for the rest of the day. We played chess for several months until near the end of the year when a substitute confiscated our set and threw it away.
Very gifted students will start knowing more about what they are studying than the teacher between 3rd and 5th grades. They will be completely bored throughout high school if held back to the speed of even above average students. This teaches them that they can coast.
It's a huge disservice to our society that our smartest kids are hobbled and quite often exposed to abuse from peers, leading them to be isolated and preventing them from learning appropriate social skills. Certainly this isn't always what happens, but it very often is exactly what happens.
I have heard of lots of anecdotes of this occurring. I can believe it takes place. IMO this reason is exceptional and should get special attention.
The article is fairly Aussie-specific. In the US we have an education system which has a lot of opportunity for improvement. But the metrics focus on either the median student performance against milestones/proficiency or the median student progress. As long as this is the way they're measured, the outliers will not get special attention. As a result, parents should be prepared to spend time and money educating their gifted children above and beyond the school curriculum.
Or my wife, who knew her egyptian history inside out and got laughed at because "she could not name Cleopatra as a female pharaoh". (Cleopatra was greek aristocrat, not a pharaoh)
Needless to say my enthusiasm for math really wasn't the same after that. Or her eagerness for history.
To be totally disconnected from ones peers is a torture no child should be forced to suffer. To be taught by teachers who aren't actually comfortable with their discipline.
And this was 30 years ago in Finland, now touted as one of the best examples in primary education.
Yes, she was a Greek decent of Alexander, and the Ptolemaic Dynasty was of his blood, not Egyptian, but it's founder Ptolemy declared himself Pharaoh, and therefore she had the title as well.
It's similar as to how Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of Canada, even though she is English. To say she isn't the Queen of Canada is simply incorrect.
This level of hubris is a perfect example of why mixed education is a good thing. Nobody is so gifted to be above the human frailty of being wrong.
I think this kind of segregation is harmful to the development of all students, including the gifted students.
Gifted students can help raise up their less gifted classmates. If these gifted students are to be the next generation of leaders this is an invaluable skill.
Nobody exists in a vacuum and putting students in an echo chamber during their formative years seems irresponsible. A diverse viewpoint and understanding of people different than you is crucial to a healthy society. If we learn early on that we are better or worse than others because of an arbitrary metric that will be carried forward for the rest of our lives.
Would those that support segregated schools based on academic performance also support schools segregated based on athletic performance?
I agree that gifted students have needs and those should be addressed but I don't think a separate school is the solution. Even AP classes feel like a problem to me because the most gifted students are not available to help those that struggle.
Standardized testing hurts all students, not just gifted ones. We need to take a serious look at how education works in general so we can challenge all students to achieve their best. I don't think this can be done with echo chambers that create an increasing gap in academic performance and student development.
When I was a gifted student in a classroom of regular students, I learned a great deal.
What I learned was not how to help raise up my classmates. What I learned was that my classmates were petty and cruel people who got their jollies bringing me pain. Combine this with material that was far below me and rarely able to hold my attention and the result was a thoroughly miserable experience for a number of years.
I got a diverse viewpoint and understanding of people different from me. I came to learn something else, too - I despised them.
Gifted students are students. Please don't treat them as unpaid assistant teachers. They need to be cared for, kept safe, challenged, and taught. The same as every single other student.
It's perhaps less than ideal to restrict gifted students to the level of their less gifted peers in the interests of said peers having resources to turn to for aid in learning. They are often unable to engage as equals.
Have you considered that this has distinct disadvantages for the gifted, who are then unable to pursue their full potentials so that they can learn to raise up their less gifted peers? This might not be a joyous experience for all concerned.
I believe that the system described fails because it neglects the needs of everyone involved. The proposal neglects the needs of the gifted by refusing to offer them instruction and material at a level that challenges them and instead attempts to coerce them into being teaching assistants. The proposal neglects the needs of the less gifted by relying on them learning from their more gifted peers instead of offering sufficient instructional infrastructure. The proposal neglects the needs of society by failing to meet the needs of any of the students involved in an attempt to use one group of students to meet the needs of another.
What is proposed is not novel or new. I lived this proposal. It is not one that adequately serves the needs of any person involved.
Segregation may not be the answer, though it's a good way to describe what happens in tertiary education. What we have now - and what you propose - we know with certainty is not the answer.
After all, it's the same system that we all agree is failing for everyone involved.
And
> I agree that gifted students have needs and those should be addressed but I don't think a separate school is the solution. Even AP classes feel like a problem to me because the most gifted students are not available to help those that struggle.
Please, tell me if I'm mistaken. It sounds to me that you want to place gifted and less gifted students together, with the goal being to encourage and advance peer instruction of the less gifted by their gifted peers.
Removing the opportunity for the gifted students to learn how to cooperate with their less gifted peers does everyone a disservice, especially when as the future leaders those gifted students will have to know how to work with (and elevate) everyone, regardless of academic achievement. With this in mind segregated schools do a disservice to everyone involved.
I am not advocating a system where everyone is stuck in an introductory level class forever but I also don't think the opposite extreme is the solution.
It could take the form of encouraging gifted students to become tutors or changing curriculum requirements so that gifted students can progress ahead of their peers but without leaving the same classroom.
I don't have the answers but I don't think segregation is the solution.
Here we have the core of it. These two goals are in conflict. This is because the time in which to advance both of them is limited. The same is true of the resources to advance both of them.
You're not advocating a system in which everyone is stuck in an introductory class forever. You're instead describing a system in which gifted students cannot be challenged to their full capacity because they need to be on hand to help raise up their less gifted peers in order to become better leaders.
Trying to teach students of all abilities from the same material in the same classroom at the same time comes with... difficulties.
* The inconsistency in level and material is a significant source of work for the teacher.
* Instructional time is limited, with the side-effect being that all students get less time than they would benefit from as the teacher spends time on the diverse and distinct requirements in their classrooms.
* Encouraging gifted students to progress ahead of their less gifted peers inevitably means they are not ideally placed to aid in elevating their less gifted peers. Incidentally, this model is usually called benign neglect. The gap will tend to grow as time passes, until a gifted student is doing calculus at an age where their less gifted peers are starting to learn algebra.
* Asking gifted students to spend time elevating and raising up their less gifted peers takes away from time they might prefer to use advancing their own studies.
Thank you for coming out and saying you think gifted students should become tutors. I suspect you've been playing with that idea internally for this whole discussion.
Have you perhaps considered that not having the answers may mean just that? It's perhaps possible that known approaches could not be rejected out-of-hand, especially when one has no answers to offer. Consider, if you will, that most institutions of higher learning essentially function through de facto segregation.
Gifted students can often also be held back by their less gifted classmates, and feel a sense of isolation from being different. Gifted students with a stimulation-seeking kick also do not work well at all with traditional education.
Industrial-revolution-era ideas about school are terrible as far as i'm concerned, and made education a very sour experience for me once the novelty of going to school wore off.
I'm all for the notion that segregation of education is a bad idea (taxes that benefit only one's immediate district are terrible), but I totally don't buy into the notion that smart kids have anything to gain by being taught the way average and dumb kids have to be.
Also, this is anecdotal and field-dependent, but after high school you really do kind of live in a vacuum. In software especially, it feels like everyone kind of fits the archetype.
Gifted students should get what they need just like everyone else.
I don't think a segregated system is good for anyone and the vacuum chamber you mention after high school is a problem in my opinion. We should all learn to seek diverse viewpoints for our entire lives.
The solution and approach you described earlier is the one currently in use in a great many places. Indeed, it's the default approach in general, because it requires no efforts whatsoever on the part of the schools, faculty, or staff.
As a result, I believe that what you describe does not work.
I think we need to rethink the entire system. Every student learns differently and at a different pace so forcing everyone into the exact same experience isn't going to work. Maybe there is a case for more advanced opportunities based on academic (or athletic, or any other criteria) achievement. I don't think that requires an entirely separate school.
You're absolutely right that every student is a unique individual. You want to teach students individually. One of the drawbacks of this is that the gifted will not reliably be positioned to raise up their less gifted peers, as divergence in individual instruction compounds over time.
I've seen schools that offer advanced opportunities based on academic or athletic criteria. In practice, they tend to look like gifted students in AP or IB courses and their less gifted peers in other courses. You don't need separate schools to get de facto segregation - all it takes is a series of advanced opportunities on offer.
With all this in mind, how do you propose to offer gifted students opportunities and material equal to their abilities while keeping them available and relevant to help raise up their less gifted classmates?
Like I said, I don't know how it would work but I don't think segregated schools are the solution, that's a step too far that eliminates opportunities for students of differing academic achievement to find common ground and teach each other something.
All students should be challenged up to their potential, having two options isn't fine grained enough. What do you do about the kids that are bored even in the "gifted" programs?
The best known solution that I'm familiar with is to allow independent study work. Larger schools also allow for more coursework offerings, enabling far more than just two sets of courses.
I'm sure you won't be on board with this, because it's de facto segregation. It's an option that can be done today and is better able to offer appropriate challenges to students of all abilities.
I will take an option that serves the goal I consider of overriding importance over an uncertain rejection of a known solution with no other options on the table. I am hesitant to trade-off this primary goal via rejection of known methods to advance it in the interest of... let's go with the euphemism "encouraging peer instruction".
If the right techniques are used on the classroom, this might be true. In practice, gifted students who aren't challenged not only underperform their own potential, but also become disruptive influences that impair the learning environment for their classmates.
> Would those that support segregated schools based on academic performance also support schools segregated based on athletic performance?
Having sports-focussed magnet schools would be somewhat novel, but not given the existence of not only gifted-specific magnets but also tech-focussed magnets, performing arts magnets, and others, a athletics-focussed magnet with athletic aptitude as a key consideration in selection criteria wouldn't be that odd, and might improve education for everyone (including those selected into it -- having an sports-amd-athletics focus in the academic subjects might keep those students more interested and successful.)
We need to focus on using the right techniques for all students, not just the gifted ones.
The best education I ever received was in 6th grade. https://megsss.org/elements-curriculum it got progressively worse every year after that program ended.
It is better to increase the effectiveness of your best at the cost of your not best. The best invent/do/produce/control more over their lifetimes. They're also easier to make more effective because they already have a better base to amplify.
If you try to amplify your non best at the cost of your best, you'll find that its very hard to drag them kicking into utility. Most countries / businesses / families are great because of the outliers of greatness in them.
Rising the oceans ever so slightly by cutting down the piers, is a bad deal.
There are a lot of [selective schools; not just one or two, but 46](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selective_high_schools...)!
You can see in the implementation that some are full selective, and others are partially selective.
Furthermore in primary school there are also [opportunity class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_class) which is also for gifted students. All of these schools are partially selective with around half the spots of high school.
My observation from these schools are that the _location_ of these schools don't matter much. Students will travel from the other side of Sydney to attend any of these schools! For example, there would be a lot of students from the south-west Sydney attending school in North Sydney.
However, segregation based on academic abilities do yield some...results which I have also read about in the US:
* Areas of top selective schools and top OC schools will generally yield higher asian population. * Schools will tend to have a higher asian population
Also (unsurprisingly) these schools have dominated university entrance exams, with the median mark of the top school (James Ruse Agricultural School) typically well within the top 1% of all exam-takers within the state.
In practice, the selective school places are awarded to the children of parents who are willing to send their kids to coaching college throughout years 4 and 5. Hence the higher asian population. Actually having a high IQ (my two children were tested by a leading psychologist above 99.8% and 99.9% of the population for example) doesn't get you there.
And slightly worse -- if you are smart and are accelerated, then you hit high school below the age range for which you can sit the selective test.
The result is that schools such as James Ruse underperform: when the candidature were all in the top 1-2% at year 7, there are plenty of year 12 students who don't get even in the top 5%.
But in principle it works out very well. The teachers can run classes at a rate more appropriate for the students, bullying is less prevalent, etc. So it's definitely worth doing (for the students) if the entrance criteria are half-way sane.
The effect it has on the students who don't get into selective school though is a bit sad. It's also depressing for the teachers at comprehensive schools who may be working just as hard as those at the selective schools, but won't get rewarded from having highly successful students.
Some thoughts:
Can school administrators reliably identify "gifted" students? Gifted in one subject? Averagely gifted?
Should we remove the better able students from regular school, leaving the average ability much lower?
If there aren't very high quality teachers available to teach "gifted" students, then what's the point? Conversely, if we had more very high quality teachers, wouldn't that go a long way toward fixing our education problems anyway?
Affluent and/or highly educated parents can easily skew the finding that their child is gifted.
Source: I went to a highly selective, private school outside the US (the inspiration for Hogwarts, fwiw). My kids go to public school in the US - one has been identified by the school as gifted (but doesn't want to participate in the gifted program), the other has not. Our school district receives something like 0.5% of the funding they get for special needs students, for their gifted program.
I have also taught coding in middle school. In my time in the class room I saw several students who came from higher income/higher educated households that performed well. I saw a big middle group who did ok. I saw several students who didn't care to do any work. I saw one student from a lower income demographic who showed uncommon promise in the subject. Given that evidence what am I to do with a gifted student budget assuming I have one? All I could do at the time was to approach the parent of that one student and give my feedback, ask that they consider encouraging his talents. I have no idea what happened after that. The other thing I could do is help the smart motivated kids from affluent families achieve even better results than their peers than they were already able to. I'm really not sure that would be a good use of my time and money..
I am also somewhat nervous of bias in the definition of "gifted", which may have things build into it which are correlated with race or culture. Put simply, there are really bright people that the system never catches, at any stage.
And if the private school can't handle the inundation, then there's incentive to either expand capacity and/or another school adapt/open to share the load.
If you accept that a 9-year-old student can learn productively in the same room as an 11-year-old student, you no longer need to consider setting aside a separate room for all the 9-year-olds with ability equal to the median 11-year-old. You just put the smart kids into the more advanced classes.
Just let the fast kids read ahead on their own. If they can get far enough ahead of the instructor, they can skip a semester, and either start the next class in the sequence early, or cram an elective class into the gap. There's no need to ship them off to another building.
So, gifted students are like every other student and excel with educational approaches tailored to their style of learning. Okay. You could say this exact same thing about kids with ADD, kids with Autism, boys, girls, kids with brown hair, etc, etc.
The arguments for this type of segregation and any other type of segregation are exactly the same. Do boys excel when removed from girls? Some of them do, others to a negligible degree.
The issue is that the government isn't trying to educate "your kid", it's trying to educate "every kid". Why? Because having a baseline education in your society - particularly in a democracy - is a very beneficial thing, for far too many reasons to get into here.
So the purpose of public schooling is not to bring you up to your full potential, it's to provide you with a base level starting point. Equality not of outcome, but of opportunity in life.
There is a fine balance between the good of the individual and the good of the overall society. The latter often supporting the former. It does us no good to further isolate ourselves from each other in ways that simply aren't compatible with maintaining a sustainable and just society overall. Western democracy has historically been able to walk the line between self-determination and individual freedom and collective control and deference to the state, but I fear we're starting to see shifts away from the centre into more extremes. Clamoring for segregation is just another form of destructive identity politics at the end of the day.
All that being said, I'll have to just come out and say that of course individual kids will be better off in tailored environments than they would be in the general populace. That isn't the question. The question really should be, are they better off growing up in an environment so removed from the reality of the world they are going to help run in the future? I'm not so sure.
They spent tens of thousands of dollars so that I could be taught, in that environment I excelled.
I don't trust the government to be a good judge of students abilities, because someone like me would be labelled dumb and be left behind forever.
Parents should be able to choose the kind of school their child goes to... Though, this is unfair to kids with bad parents. That said, people who will (knowingly) be bad parents, shouldn't have kids in the first place.
That sounds similar to the proposal in the article. Is there any data from this system that would support the premise of a separate gifted school being a better way of teaching advanced students?
I was in the gifted program in grade school and junior high, it was an awesome experience. (US Midwest)
Three points.
1. Not all kids are gifted in all areas so usually we were in a mix of gifted and non-gifted classes.
2. It's important to interact with all levels/types of kids and there are experiences at school outside of classes.
3. It makes it feel more special that you get to go to certain classes/do special things and events that not everyone is in.
Keep it as a program inside the school.
Victorian here. Back when I was in HS is semi-rural setting, the school ran an interesting experiment for students for most of the time I was there. The curriculum was designed in 6m semesters with students allowed to move up years in subjects they excelled in. It was labelled, "vertical integration"/ There were advantages and disadvantages. You could for instance move up two years in study, move from year nine to years eleven maths. I know of one student who did this. While they handled the subject, they didn't handle the social dynamics well. This is a problem that could have been solved.
Having to move to another school isn't feasible on a daily basis due to distances involved. Government schools in my state have been gutted by all measures, facilities, buildings and specialised teacher training, so maybe the powers-to-be are centralising smart kids and looking at ways of funding schools even less?
My son, on the other hand, thrived in our town's public school. He would have resented going to the school my daughter went through. He would have seen it as unnecessary, even punitive. He is at a very large university and is thriving there, too.
Different kids have different kinds of intelligence and maturity levels at different ages. Some never "fit in" and some kids are the kids everyone likes and have the high school social thing totally under control while pulling straight As.
If you undermine public schools by segregating the smart kids, my son would not have had time to play football, lacrosse, and baseball and teach skiing as his after school job. He would have felt getting good grades was a curse.
Seriously though: I'm not against separate classes but dislike the idea of separate schools. Mostly because of where the best teachers, and budget, will be and what effect that will have on the less fortunate.
I believe having a gifted student in a regular school benefits the entire school and may help them in learning other, more social skills.
There are many positive points to mixing the gifted with the average, but their personal scholarly advancement tends to suffer.
But it's not so easy to define what this means in practice, particularly in the UK where the debate over selective schooling is bound up with issues related to class and wealth.
Now that we're all adults, I've out achieved all of them in terms of science/tech aptitude/contribution.
"Gifted and Talented" is a trophy label for suburban parents. That's it.
But corporate learning should be done away with. Any system that involves all students learning at the same pace just isn't cutting it. There will still be teachers and subjects, but it is more defined by how fast or slow each individual student can learn.
Do this, and you wont need different schools.
If there is consensus then there also has to be a way to cross pollinate between both groups as gifted children are discovered later and those who are gifted but unable to cope are moved back.
And finally since the fundamental basis for any such exercise is ensuring gifted children get the attention they need, any plan has to ensure full and comprehensive support to the unprivileged so children who are gifted but from unprivileged backgrounds are not denied opportunities to exploit their full talent because of circumstance.
Does trickle down education work? Would a middle quartile student benefit more from trying to keep up with the top quartile than they do for curriculum geared to them?
Would be an interesting experiment.
- more tracked classes
- let people advance based on what they learn instead of based on their age
- individualized technology-based instruction instead of large lectures
Sugragation is never a good thing, besides how you can prove that your kid is gifted. Moreover, it will open the door to so many more prejudice and biased toward certain race and ethnicity.
I grew up in Armenia in the post soviet union era. The one thing they got right was the education part. There were no distinctions. We all learned the same material, gifted or not. Those that lagged got extra attention and help. When I first got here the segregation of "gifted" vs "non-gifted" always felt viscerally incorrect to me.
Do they just sit around and do nothing? Is that really a productive use of their time?
I was learning matrix algebra in 4th grade based on the soviet system whereas everyone here was barely doing 2 + 2 = ? in some worksheet. Surprisingly folks managed to not be bored. If your standard is what the current system teaches then it's not hard to improve it and have people not be bored while still not drawing a distinction between "gifted" and "non-gifted".
Getting a couple months ahead is easy, when everyone else is going slowly.
Sure, if the entire class is going quickly, that is effectively as if everyone is in the gifted class.
We shouldn't dumb things down to keep up with the lowest common denominator. Students should be able to work at their own pace, and if they get ahead, them they should be put ahead.
In Germany, some schools, start to do the separation when kids have only 10 years old. It seems to me too much stress and it's not even effective, bc you do it having an exam in consideration. School is not everything, look at Einstein :)
This is an incredibly disorienting sentence for one not familiar with where The Conversation is based! (Australia, I suppose, having had a few needed minutes!)
There are noteworthy exceptions, usually in large cities with well-educated taxpayers, but for the majority of locales, earmarks for the gifted are just too controversial.
An interesting side effect of this anti-intellectual bias is today sitting in the White House.
When I was in high school you could elect to take a more or less challenging course load. I effective did go to a different school than many of my peers simply by taking different classes.
I was considered a gifted student and had the chance to go to some fancy private schools but I stayed at my public school and you know what, I absolutely loved it. Were the classes slow for me and too easy? Obviously, but I always brought a book (or three) and would read them throughout the day and at lunch. I slacked off on my homework and taught myself how to program. I helped my friends with their work - not cheating, but actively tutoring and explaining the principles. One of my friends who absolutely sucked at math is now graduating with a chem degree.
If a student is truly gifted, they will learn on their own and help others. As society becomes ever more unequal and stratified, we need as much social pollination as possible. Hell, the way public schools are going we should keep as many smart kids in there as we can. There were some student-run after school courses at my HS that were amazing.
In a normal basis, my answer is no, no and no. In Germany some schools start to separate kids when they have 10 years old. Is too soon. Intelligence it's not only about to be good at school - look at Einstein.
1. Lack of capacity: Families that can't find schools for their kids, or entire regions that are "school deserts."
2. Schools that fail or go bankrupt.
Both are cases of private businesses pocketing public money while externalizing their risks and leaving the government with the cost of bailing them out.
I speculate that a law of economics or politics is: If something requires universal access for everybody, then it will be effectively supported by the government, even if the mechanism is not obvious.