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I'm sold on gifted education.

I'm not sold on gifted education, but I am sold on providing advanced classes for students who are further along.

I don't believe you are gifted or not. If I did, I wouldn't be as successful as I am, because I didn't start out as "gifted."

I’m not sold.

It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others. At least that what it can sound like outside the gifted bubble.

Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.

Why would there be more investments in the “gifted” program? In its simplest form, it’s the exact same classroom, exact same teacher, just different stuff being taught - less repetition, less simple exercises, progressing faster through concepts, learning harder stuff.

I think my life would be very different if I was challenged more in school.

I think the trope is it "takes money away" from the other students.

I strongly suspect that per-student spending is heavily biased towards special education programs at the not highest-achievement end of the spectrum.

I support the necessity of those programs, but the idea that money is flowing upwards on the achievement curve is probably contradicted by the data, given the intense needs of special education programming.

I think there may be some truth to that, I think some gifted programs pay the teachers a bit extra.

But, often, it may just be the appearance of extra things; if the gifted class does more 'enrichment' activities, it's often because they've got more time left after doing the required curriculum. Or, in my district, the gifted program had busing (which costs money) to get enough kids together to run one class per grade.

If the issue is money though; maybe it could be addressed through demonstrably worse conditions in the gifted program. Maybe a cap of 35 students per class in gifted, and 25 in mainstream. Then there's a tradeoff. My district had bussing as a negative characteristic for the gifted program as well (although my neighborhood school was the bus destination for four out of six years, so it wasn't bad for me)

>It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others.

Schools already do this ever since No Child Left Behind. It's just in the opposite direction. Kids below the average get far far more money than the median student. Why not have gifted classes as well to support those who excel?

Gifted class don't just “support those who excel”, they support those who perform poorly and disrupt the class because they are not engaged because the mainstream coursework is targeted well below their capacity.

It also mitigates the way which this has gotten worse since NCLB and it's successor policies because schools strongly prefer not to advance students (pre-NCLB, this was an issue because of somewhat legitimate developmental/emotional concerns, but since NCLB and ratings based on the distribution of performance vs. grade level on standardized tests, preventing advancement is now also a way of juicing metrics.)

Of course both forms of special ed are blunt instruments to deal with not doing better by-student calibration across the board to students, incliding those in the wide middle of performance.

Because those kids who are below average will suck up way more state and federal money in the long run if left to their own devices than anyone will benefit because Gifted Greg got to take Linear Algebra in high school.

I think its more about segmenting based on aptitude and interest. The gifted classes consist of children that can move at a quicker pace with less distraction. I don't think its about giving more resources to that set of children, but be able to alter the curriculum to challenge them more.

>Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.

Well, one could propose that "AP Calculus" should be the high standard for a high-school diploma for _all_ students but neither the parents nor teachers would support that.

EDIT to reply: the "AP Calculus" was just a placeholder that people are familiar with and not intended as a tangent into any hidden self-serving agenda of The College Board revenue generation. We can just call it "Calculus 101" for purposes of this discussion. The parents would not universally support passing "Calculus 101" as a mandatory requirement for their child to get a high-school diploma.

It’s no surprise that parents and teachers would not support “AP Calculus” as a standard, as it is run by the College Board with no oversight. The school has to pay for each child enrolled and pay again if the child doesn’t take the exam at the end of the class, the exams are graded but offer zero feedback to the teacher or student.

They have annual revenue >$1B with over $100 million in “excess revenue” (you can’t call it profit because they are a non-profit). The CEO earns over $1 million per year, sold his education consulting company to a huge education textbook publisher, claims that he “had” to get a job at McKinsey because he couldn’t find work as a high school English teacher, etc.

You think this would be an improvement?

I was lucky to test into the gifted program in high school in the mid-late 80s in poor rural US nowhere, it worked exactly like that - kids demonstrate ability to get selected (not race/status), as the resources were very slim. It allowed me to use/learn the TRS-80/3 and Apple ][e and make a career in tech - there is absolute value in these programs for the kids as an anecdotal story from one of them decades later. ;)

Different students have different needs. It doesn't make sense to provide the same experience to every student. Homogenizing the experience is a disservice to all students, not just the gifted.

> "It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others."

Which side of the bell curve do you think gets more investment dollars? Left or right?

I'm not. There were approximately 30ish "gifted" students in my graduating class. By that, I mean they were identified as gifted early on and attended gifted classes until middle school when there were other minor accelerated learning classes (like taking Algebra a year early).

For the vast majority of "gifted" children, the reason they were gifted at all has a ton to do with the amount of time their parents spent with them outside of the classroom. Usually, "giftedness" is about a parent's ability to focus their child in a way that the child would likely not focus on their own.

Just look at the science fair projects that get national recognition. It takes no effort at all to determine the difference between a project produced by a kid and a project created by a parent who guided the kid through the steps necessary to produce a scientifically valid conclusion.

I'm all for high schools pairing with universities to let high school students knock out college classes and get high school credit for them, though. English III and English IV are particularly useless classes which do nothing for most kids. Replace them with college classes.

Oh, about the 30 gifted kids:

None of them became medical or PhD doctors. One became a lawyer. Two have Master's degrees.

Their classmates? 7 PhDs. 4 MDs. About 10 MBAs (that I am aware of), 8 lawyers, 2 psychologists, 3 SLPs, at least 5 with MEs, and several self-made millionaires.

Gifted doesn't mean genius. For most, it simply means they have a head start. Head starts don't last once your peers have a reason to compete.

This is why I don't care whether gifted programs live or die. Place the child in the system where he needs to be, but stop pretending that little Bobby with the parents who have been trying to teach him to read since he was crapping his diaper is a genius simply because people spent time forcing him to learn something. For many kids, telling them they're gifted compared to their peers simply inflates their egos past their talent.

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