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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

> I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed.

This isn’t true. Gifted and talented education receives maybe 1% of the funding that special needs education does, if that. In NYC de Blasio is trying to dismantle the existing system because the students are too Asian. Most of the US has nothing approaching that system. Normal high schools are at best indifferent to students who want to go higher than AP; they’re certainly not going out of their way to help and encourage those capable of doing college work to do so.

Face it, at barest minimum 10% of 16 year olds could be in high schools like those associated with Bard College at Simon’s Rock[1], where they graduate with an Associate’s degree having completed half of the coursework for a Bachelor’s. I don’t know what percentage of 14 year olds could do the same or complete a Bachelor’s before 18 but it’s 100s of times greater than those who actually do.

[1] https://simons-rock.edu/

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My point is that there's been an explosion in opportunities that kids can use that go around what schools provide. Even when I was in high school, you could get most of an undergraduate education from MIT OpenCourseWare for free, and the situation is even better now. (You couldn't get a credential out of it... but who cares, when either way you'll have the knowledge?)

Though I'm upset about the political drama over NYC magnet schools, it's important to note that their outcomes aren't due to magic teachers or better equipment. The kids are making things happen on their own! The core benefit these schools provide is mostly that they allow the kids to meet each other.

You have to know that MIT OpenCourseWare exists. Many people do, but I suspect an even larger number do not.

Gifted kids can come from all backgrounds. When parent involvement is there and the parents know how the system works and where to find resources, it’s an ocean of opportunity out there.

When parents don’t know the system (immigrants for example), don’t have the luxury of a lot of involvement (work multiple jobs), the asymmetric knowledge/access are now an issue.

Public education is supposed to level that field somewhat and what many are pointing out is a gap through which many gifted students fall through. Then you get behavioral and social problems, as called out in the research.

There might be some _very_ unlucky kids who can't even access the internet, but once you can get to Wikipedia and youtube I'm sure a very smart kid can figure out where to find what they want to learn. Now, if they don't get the time to immerse themselves because their household demands their attention on more fundamental survival needs, well that should be addressed whether the kid is smart or not.

Social and familiar needs are linked with someone being smart or not. You can’t have one without the other, they are interdependent. You can’t just count on someone — specially an young one — sneaking in to get access to Wikipedia and find the extra resources they need. You minimize negative impacts on the social environment for it to flourish.

You can learn so much on the internet

But I wonder if it really helps. I did not have internet or tv as kid and I have learned a lot from books.

Now I have internet, and I spend far more time on social media and watching shows than I spend on learning things

Isn’t this general kids vs adult things? I think most (but not all) people learn less and less as they get older.

For practical, “try at home” things, internet is just making everything so much better. You can read books a lot, but if you want to learn how to make a laser from scratch (for example), no book will be nearly as good as a bunch of blog posts and forum to connect to others.

> I did not have internet or tv as kid and I have learned a lot from books.

Growing up in a TV-free household as a kid was and still is an advantage to develop learning skills, independence, and imagination.

> Now I have internet, and I spend far more time on social media and watching shows than I spend on learning things

That may be, but you have the choice.

The main difference is that you can find way more information than in books, even if you lived in a library. The main problem on top of the continuous distraction is curation.

In order to look for something, you generally need to know it exists. When you live in the given social circle, you tend to develop a point of view on what’s doable/achievable that’s in line with that circle. Some people are not constrained by this and have this almost built-in dream. Others have to learn to dream big.

This even happens in US all the time - kids emulate their parents, neighbors, etc. Even the access is there, but these kids don’t know it and therefore can’t make use of this access.

To support your point, I grew up in a poor urban area, and over 30% of the gifted kids didn’t graduate. Another 30% developed addiction or had teen pregnancies. Being poor is much more disadvantaged than being smart is advantageous.

The problem isn’t access.

Being smart means you're bored a lot. Being bored means you find other things to occupy your time. Being poor means you have fewer good options, and are more likely to settle on the bad ones.

I think being smart and being poor multiply each other's effects. Most of the troublemakers were really smart, and got into shit because they had nothing better to do. Outsmarting the teachers was fun, making jokes meant you had to know exactly what was going on in order to skewer it, sneaking around was a thrill and a show of skill.

Anecdotally, one of the most brilliant kids I went to school with was also a teen mom, because yeah, gotta keep busy somehow. And that was in one of the most affluent and highest-rated districts in the state if not the country. I can only imagine it's much worse where there are fewer resources.

How are you supposed to go around what schools provide and do MIT courses when you are required to sit in school all day and then waste even more time on the pointless busy work they make you do at home?

I totally half arsed school for this reason. There's much more fun (and learned skill) in learning stuff how you want. Personally, I took the route of combining all my subjects (maths, physics, CS) and took the route of building a couple basic physics sims. Best education of my life.

I feel so lucky that my elementary school, in the 80s, had a special-education coordinator who recognized gifted and talented as part of her job, co-equal with developmentally disabled. Not all special needs are remedial, after all.

As a result, my parents had an ally who knew the workings of the system, had resources and connections, and would go to bat for me/us when the rest of the administration had their heads in the sand.

The end result was that I had some time each day to work on my own projects, and my teachers were required to make accommodations. I ended up leaving the school anyway because of one perniciously evil teacher and I'm still in therapy for the sequelae, but there were definitely some bright spots.

I can't say everyone aims 'em right, but there are definitely hammers to swing against the traditional structure and the disservice it does to gifted and talented students. In recent years, I understand that the guidelines around individual accommodation plans have only strengthened. I'd imagine there must be folks out there equally adept at making them work. Some of them might just need a reminder that their job includes this function.

Here's what they used to do at my school( state school, Lithuania,90s): the more gifted ones had a few options: they could skip a year(i.e. from 8th to 10th grade), not follow the curriculum the rest of the class did and simply do something more advanced during that time. I'm not gifted but was probably smart enough to find school easy,but couldn't be asked to do too much,so teachers usually used to leave me alone.

It’s the classic way to treat school. Do your math homework during history class. During math class, prop up your school textbook and read a more advanced one behind it. Avoid any courses that advertise themselves as containing lots of busywork in the name of “rigor”.

I dont think that ratio to special education says all that much. A lot of it is heavily disabled kids who do need expensive tools to even learn to walk and have kids-teacher ratio like 6:1 or even less. Mostly because they need a lot of support to just function - whether they are learning or not.

The gifted education is comparatively cheaper.

Plus, it is about kids that are bordering to being a danger to themselves or others. They need experts just to function. They are getting special education for the sake of other kids too. And failing their education means more money spend on prisons or social system once they grow.

People imagine special education being about slightly slower kids. But these are not costing all that much.

> maybe 1%

Honest question, not snide in any way: what would be the right percentage? Surely not 100%? Special Ed folks, folks on the left end of the bell curve for instance, need intensive one-on-ones. But folks on the other end of the bell would not need that same level of support?

(I'm not saying 1% is OK. And I understand that you pulled that number out of the air.)

Acceleration as of right instead of enrichment should be verging on free, requiring almost nothing in new expenditure. I’d be pretty happy with that alone to be honest. An early college programme like Bard College at Simon’s Rock in every metro area with over 100,000 people with provision for boarding for those outside commuting distance wouldn’t get you past 2% of education expenditure. That’s under 10% of what’s spent on special education. That would make me ecstatic.

It's not about how much money, but rather how to spend it. Well, okay, to spend money some way you first need it, but the amount could be quite small.

Most of the knowledge is already available online for free. (There are still some gaps that would be nice to fill, for example lessons for small kids whose first language is not English.) The problem is rather navigating the abundance of information.

First, to distinguish genuine knowledge from crackpottery. Like, most of us probably know that 99% of videos on YouTube containing "quantum" in their titles are pure nonsense. But a smart 13 years old kid doesn't know that yet, and can waste a lot of time gaining negative knowledge (misconceptions that later require time and work to unlearn). We know that in case of doubt, the materials published by MIT are most likely solid. For that kid, even this is not necessarily obvious; it would be better to tell them explicitly.

Second, lessons have prerequisites. I can find an interesting lesson, only to realize that I actually can't follow it, because it uses symbols and concepts I don't understand, and I don't even know how that missing part of knowledge is called. It would be great to have some guidance of form "you can learn X by watching Y, but first you need to understand M and N which you can learn by watching P and Q, etc.". A tech-tree of knowledge, kind of.

For these two things, you don't actually need a school system. A website could be enough: a page for each topic, internal links to prerequisite topics, external links for educational resources checked for quality. You would need some budget for this, but I assume that for costs similar to running one school, you could serve the entire nation. -- And it wouldn't be only for the smart kids; the average kids could use it, too. Everyone could progress at their own speed. Actually, it would be even better if all the kids would use it, because then you wouldn't have to look specifically for the smart kids and advertise it to them, they would simply learn about it from kids around them.

Now you can add extra services, like a silent place to go study if you don't have such place at home, a computer with an internet connection is you don't have one at home. Places to meet people studying the same topic. Etc. This all would be nice to have. I am just saying that the minimum solution that could help maybe 80% of gifted kids could actually be made very cheaply.

Aren't you basically describing Khan Academy?

It has good education material - including exercises - that you go through at your own pace, and is organised as a tree of learning.

Last time I looked it didn't go into university level subjects though.

Khan Academy is a great project. At least as a general idea; there may be some small technical details (there is some criticism on Wikipedia that seems reasonable, but maybe it was already addressed). I only tried it shortly, so I am not sure how complete it is beyond math.

Now if I may dream, I imagine something like Khan Academy, but:

- containing all lessons from all subjects of elementary and high schools (and optionally some university lessons);

- somehow certified by the state, similarly how textbooks are certified, so you would have some official statement saying "this is at least as good and as complete as public schools" (and if something specific is missing or not up to standards, the problematic topics would be clearly listed);

- with the consequence that if you complete Khan Academy (and take extra courses/exams in the problematic topics), you would get a certificate equivalent to completing the elementary or high school (perhaps after taking an exam to check that it wasn't e.g. your parents doing the tests for you), without having to attend a school, and regardless of your age (so a gifted kid could have high school completed as 10 years old);

- maybe with an option that teachers could upload their own versions of existing lessons or new lessons, and the users would by default use the standard Khan Academy videos, but could choose the optional ones, and based on popularity and administrator decision, the new videos could become the default ones; this is how the content could continuously improve and new topics (e.g. the university lessons) get added; also, repetition is the mother of learning, but instead of listening to the same video again, you could now listen to an alternative version of the lesson;

- with some way to create an individualized study plan, so you could specify e.g. "I want to be a lawyer, but I also want to make computer games", and the lessons that lead you there would be highlighted.

Also, I'd like to see a competitor or two, of comparable quality.

> what would be the right percentage? Surely not 100%?

You say that like 100% is some kind of meaningful threshold. It should be a lot more than 100%, for the same reason that spending on growing crops in China is more than 100% of spending on growing crops in Antarctica, or spending on basketball coaching for men who are six feet tall is more than 100% of spending on basketball coaching for men who are four feet tall.

How about the future value of dollar spent today? What the best and brightest do is advance science, including the science which later alleviates the issues plaguing the the bottom 1%. This is the whole idea of universal education in the first place. It pays for itself in the long run. The top 1% pay super-extra dividends to everyone.

I agree that better support and acceptance of gifted and talented is important. I'm not sure I'd measure it in funding versus special needs though. Special needs teaching is brutal work, requiring a lot of baseline time and attention costs that can't really be reduced in a humane way.

Supporting the high-end of the spectrum is an entirely different challenge. The kids have an ability to excel independently. Yes, facilities and other resources can enhance outcomes, but also consider the difficulty of finding qualified teachers to really challenge them. Our entire Victorian education system is not equipped to handle them, and frankly I think they'll always be held back if we encourage a rigid structure and reliance on a system which is designed for the masses. We'd be better off finding low-case ways to give more open-ended resources and access to centralized specialists and higher education professors who are true experts in their fields.

The bright children of the upper middle class going on to have great life outcomes are the core of inequality in America. Schools that nurture and socialize these kids with each other are an important mechanism in that outperformance. If you intend to reduce inequality, then that is exactly what you want to disrupt.

Secret racism is too easy a copout. This goes right to the core of defining relative inequality (vs. absolute outcomes) as the important issue.

Wait, are you arguing we shouldn’t provide opportunities for gifted kids because it reduces inequality?

He is saying we should have more equal opportunities regardless of socio-economic background.

Which is meaningless, especially with respect to this discussion

I think he is saying that they don't get the opportunities because they are gifted kids, but because they are upper-middle class.

It can be both. To be smart is an advantage. To be born in a rich family is also an advantage. Life can be unfair in many ways simultaneously.

Ironically, if you deny the importance of IQ, it mostly hurts the smart kids from poor families. Because the rich parents will find ways for their kids to realize their full potential -- whether it is a full potential of an average child, or a full potential of a gifted child. It is the gifted child born in a poor family who won't have a private tutor because their parents can't afford it, but also will be denied by the system because "IQ doesn't mean anything".

Smart kids from poor families need even more help than smart kids from rich families, and we deny it to them in the name of fighting inequality. It's no child left behind the minimum requirements of the school system, but many children left miles behind their true potential; especially the poor ones.

IQ doesn't matter. Every child deserves opportunities to learn and grow, opportunities that match their aptitude. There's no need for an IQ test when providing that. IQ testing is just used for gatekeeping.

IQ matters in terms of determining the spectrum of offerings that a funding-limited school system (which is all of them, just to different degrees) should provide.

If you measure achievement based on "percent reading at grade level and passing MCAS", then all high-IQ students are, in effect, "left behind". I agree strongly with your 2nd sentence, but disagree strongly with the first and fourth.

In theory, as long as we have some reliable way to measure the aptitude, and we provide the corresponding opportunities, I don't really mind if we avoid mentioning the word "intelligence".

But, you know, the offensive thing about IQ is exactly that it demonstrates that different people have different aptitude. So, in practice, I find it difficult to believe that people fighting against the concept of IQ would be willing to provide sufficient opportunities to children with high IQ.

Sadly, many people's instinctive reaction to a gifted child is throwing some obstacles in the child's way, to "prove" that the child "was actually not that smart". (This is even more likely, if the child is a minority, or autistic, or different in some other visible way.) Some of those people are teachers. I know stories...

Like, there is a girl I know who did math olympiads at elementary school. For some reason, this rubbed her math teacher the wrong way, so the teacher started bullying her in the classroom. Two years later, the girl had phobia of math, and was unable to do even school-level math. Then her parents intervened and transferred her to another school, and with some private tutoring (by me; that's how I know the story) she became a straight A student again, and later successfully completed a university that required a lot of math. She never got back to the competition level, though, because the wasted time made a difference.

This story is less rare than you might hope. Quite many gifted kids, unless they also have superior social skills, are bullied either by their peers or by adults. People are bad at tolerating difference; twice so, if the difference suggests that the different person is somehow superior. And the gifted kids with superior social skills aren't winners here either; when they tell you "I was interested in many things, but I was careful never to mention it in front of my classmates", it makes you wonder what they could have achieved if they were allowed to follow their interests freely.

I don’t know if it is, but i fully agree if that is OPs interpretation. They don’t need any help.

Education is good for society, not just the educated.

I think reducing inequality is a terrible goal because it commits you to positions like de Blasio's. But his actions are entirely consistent with his stated values. Gifted & talented programs push people into the right tail of the distribution, which increases its variance, which is exactly what "rising inequality" is.

You're being downvoted by people who don't like the truth or haven't seen a public school "equity" document recently.

A better solution is to raise taxes on those rich families, not handicap education.

We're talking about people in the ~155-180 IQ band; In a city the size of Chicago you have 20 or so people in that band.

The reason it's called "Gifted" is because you get born with it, just like your skin color. I didn't choose to have a high IQ. Frankly, with the way people have treated me in life and all the pain I've gone through due to it, I'm not so sure I'd want to be this way. I'm sure you know that feeling.

You want to explain performance differences in racial groups, look at complex trauma and cultural phenomina. Conduct an similar ACE study in the south-side and see what you get.

I think what you're going to find is 50% of the population has generational complex trauma they are trying to escape, and their outcomes would be improved draumatically by specialist intervention and I think one that is done, you are going to find out IQ isn't altogether different between racial groups in a country like the US.

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