Why Do Schools Stigmatize "Gifted Children"? | Hacker News Reader

Why Do Schools Stigmatize "Gifted Children"?

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22 pointstokenadult24 comments

In the US, there is a lot of emphasis placed on "closing achievement gaps"

It's easier to slow the smart kids down than make the slow/non-responsive kids perform better.

I don't think there is an active conspiracy or anything, just neglect. In the state of NJ, the only categories on standardized tests given to all K-12 students are Advanced Proficient, Proficient, and Partially Proficient. Advanced Proficient is really what you would just call normal. There is no recognition for high performers. Schools spend almost all of their time on getting kids above the Proficient mark because this is ultimately how funding will be allocated. Also, if you have too many kids below Proficient, the state can take over administration of your district.

The article seems a bit vague, after reading it I still don't really get how schools `stigmatize gifted children`, besides of the perception that `gifted children schools` are elitist, a perception not from the schools but from the general population.

Growing up I was in 3 different 'gifted' classes, one for each level of school before high school (elementary, middle, junior). There was definitely a bit of a stigma involved -- against us by the people not in the gifted class, and within the class against whoever was deemed not as smart as the majority of the class. Nothing horribly damaging, but definitely present.

I can tell you my experience. I was placed in a gifted program in the 4th grade, iirc. From day to day we would skip a different class and attend the gifted program instead. One day I failed to turn in an assignment for a one if my "regular" classes. I didn't know about the assignment because I wasn't in class the previous day. The teacher told me that I should have been able to keep up because I was in the gifted program. I hated every minuted of it and ended up dropping out in fairly short order. Although I'll admit in retrospect that the program certainly could have been run better.

I was also in a 'Gifted Program' that had me out 1 day of every week. I was told that I was expected to keep up with ALL of the normal assignments, plus the Gifted Program assignments as well. I managed, easily, but some teachers weren't satisfied with that.

One of them decided that because I was in Gifted, I'd have to make sentences with my spelling words. Nobody else had to do this, and it wasn't part of the program. When that proved no problem, then I had to stand up and read them out loud to the class. I even got bored with that and started writing stories with the words. When I got bored with that, I started writing stories with the words, using the order they were given to me.

Right from the time I had to stand up and read, and I was the only one, the trouble started. I was bullied for years, and it only stopped when I started fighting back.

So yeah, they turned a peaceful, gifted child in to a violent child because they couldn't handle the situation.

There are definitely problems with how they handle the whole thing.

Having said that, having the class was still a LOT better than not having it. If I could go back and skip the class and miss out on the bullying, I wouldn't. I'd keep things as they were.

I've been educated in two different countries and the obsession that the US schools have at every level with segregating and separating students never ceases to surprise me. Administrators are so obsessed with the metrics used to perform this separation that they are no longer doing any real educating and are instead developing more and more arbitrary rules for separating students. If you don't believe me then I point you to the profits being made in making standardized tests. The solution is simple but it leaves a lot of educational pundits and standardized test makers out in the cold. Everyone is held to the same standards gifted or not with the caveat that special education still chugs along as it does today.

What of the students who can pass the 12th grade standards in 7th grade? Do they take the next 5 years off?

I didn't say anything about penalizing people. If you are so gifted that you can take college courses in 7th grade then be my guest but you'd be surprised to know that in most other nations what people learn in 6th and 7th grades is what the US students learn in 11th and 12th grades. The point is that educators should be focused on educating instead of providing a custom tailored product to suit the prevailing political climate in order to funnel more dollars to their school's districts. Removing all the testing and separation and holding everyone to the same standards makes it much easier to apportion tax dollars in a fair way. Currently there are so many bureaucratic layers and so many constantly changing rules that by the time textbooks are published they are already out of date and new ones have to be ordered for the next school year. Obviously this only benefits the book publishers who are more than happy to reprint materials sometimes even different materials for adjoining states and get paid for it.

It's not enough to just let students take the classes at their level; you also have to offer them classes at their pace. The 5th grader who's ready for algebra is probably capable of finishing the course in a third of the time that it would take a 9th grader who is taking algebra at the usual age for US students (at least, that was the case for me and the cohort of segregated gifted students I was in).

Offering special classes for gifted students can also help solve a lot of problems stemming from disparities in emotional and academic maturity, or offer instructors the chance to provide greater depth or branch out beyond the standard curriculum.

How far are you going to atomize the students? Grade level, proper pacing, emotional development, what else? The logistics of what you are suggesting is simply impossible. I have been involved in the education space and I know people that are still in it. If we had more resources and a lot more teachers then providing a customized education experience for students would be possible but the system is simply not there and won't be there for a very long time because everyone is focused on making the system more and more convoluted. There is no push to simplify and streamline standards and processes because there is more money to be gained from making things convoluted. The problem is that politicians treat it as a business and consider tax dollars spent on it as an investment and naturally they want to see a return on this investment so they start to measure things which almost always ends up being the wrong way to approach the problem because an education is a holistic process and treating it in six month chunks makes no sense whatsoever.

Well, it's going to have to be something other than "Keep doing the same thing but throw more money at it."

What about scrapping about 80% of the curriculum and returning to an apprentice system as a serious career path? Does teaching "item A" in the curriculum really matter if the resulting system still churns out 90% of its graduates who don't know or can't do A? What about really deeply integrating computers, in a way that isn't just "Keep doing what we're doing, but throw more computers at it?" What about any of these things but different for different children?

I don't really know what the answer is, but I observe that it simply can't be "keep doing what we're doing". The entire world has changed a lot in the past few decades and schools are starting to look distinctly 19th century. Not a typo. And I don't mean that the answer is "add lots of shiny technology" necessarily, but this factory mentality has got to go and I don't know that we can get there by incremental change.

"How far am I going to atomize the students?" Why, until they are what they actually are again: Individuals.

I agree - universities often (depending on your degree) allow you the freedom to choose courses of various difficulty across various faculties to suit your interests and skills. This doesn't seem like a massive extension of that.

How are you comparing public schools to universities? First of all each state has maybe a dozen universities but it has a hundred or more school districts, in some larger states, each with at least a dozen schools. The complexity of managing public schools is on a completely different level and saying universities do it so why can't public schools is way too simplistic.

A school has an entire staff of administrators and teachers, and they can't manage to allow students to choose their own courses rather than pre-allocating them?

Who are you quoting? Is it me? If it is how did you infer I propose doing the same thing but with more money? In fact I'm advocating the opposite. Currently the move is towards more and more customized education and it's not working out well at all. The whole thing is so convoluted that whenever a student ends up learning something people have no idea if it was because of their efforts or some other factor so moving towards even more customized education is going to make things worse not better. Also, in the future please refrain from putting words in my mouth if you were indeed quoting me.

Obviously I wasn't quoting you. Your text was right there and clearly did not include those phrases. Quotes can also be used grammatically to turn a phrase into something that can then be commented on as a phrase, rather than as direct speech of the speaker. This is why the Lisp quote operator is called what it is, for instance, it is doing the same thing.

I may overuse it, but, well, I'm just very comfortable with that usage. Sometimes it's just what is called for.

The whole idea of levels where each kid should be at certain ages forces achievement down. While some kids are sufficiently challenged, others are bored and those with different learning styles are left behind.

Wouldn't it be better if children learned topics that they care about about and at their own pace? How long must the development of the mind be hampered by bad ideas?

Wouldn't it be the best possible outcome if children grew to love the learning process instead of learning to sit and regurgitate?

Hear. Hear.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

This has been a pet issue of mine ever since I was offered a take-it-or-leave-school grade skip that I didn't request from fifth to seventh grade.

At their own pace, sure, but I'm in favor of required general education for children, even if they don't care about it. These are kids, not college students, and as for high school, how many care about learning at all?

It may be worthwhile to teach high level math and science to kids wanting to be astronauts, and a solid Statistics base for kids who like sports, though.

Several points:

First, children aren't the best judges of the topics they should be learning.

Second, children aren't the best judges of how to most effectively spend their time and judge their own pace, nor should they be: They're children. If I were given a choice in high school, I would have skipped all literature and English classes, played videogames all day, or something else that would be equally destructive to my future.

    > Wouldn't it be the best possible outcome if children grew to love the learning process instead of learning to sit and regurgitate?

You're knocking down a straw man: Allowing children absolute freedom isn't necessarily going to lead to them love the learning process, nor is the current system completely about regurgitating facts.

Yeah, those are the two choices. learning or playing video games. straw man, you say?

He gave an example, not a false dichotomy.

Gifted education doesn't encourage entrepreneurship and is likely to lead to careers that are less enjoyable.

TL;DR: School sucks

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