Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

My 2 cents as a parent... The "Don't let any kids fall behind" is an extremely laudable goal. Educating everyone, and aiming for a high standard for people of all abilities and socio-economic backgrounds is extremely vital. We may not be achieving that goal well, but it a very worthy one, and will do more than almost anything else to reduce income inequality.

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.

Agreed, a civilized society should have a basic education curriculum which all students may participate in, regardless of sex, religion, or socio-economic status. This is the minimum bar that all should be granted.

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.

Devil's advocate here:

>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".

There are schools that decouple learning from age (example: Khan Academy Lab School) but I haven't seen many public ones that pull it off.

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.

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