Comment by Shenglong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shenglong | Hacker News Reader

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Being a gifted student is no great feat in today's education system. This article is a perfect example of poor information. Just because you manage a 5-10% increase in the number of gifted students (which is arbitrarily defined), does not mean you get any sort of increase in the quality of the top students.

Some students are simply smarter than others - and I don't think that's a point anyone can argue. Some debate on different types of learning, and specialized subjects, but from my experience, the gifted students do well in every subject (music/arts an exception). By having more gifted students in a class, it is absolutely inevitable that more time will be spent teaching certain subjects, more clarification will be required, and material will probably need to be dumbed down at least a bit.

While this can create an increase in the pure number of students who reach a certain level, it is unfair to the actually gifted students who require an absolute top level of stimulation.

We've seen that economic communism doesn't work, and I'd bet an arm and a leg that intellectual communism doesn't work either.

I didn't downvote you, but I'm not certain you really understand the results presented. This operates just like labeling theory. If teachers stopped treating kids as dumb kids and boring them with idiotic busy work, then those kids wouldn't feel so bored and demotivated at school. There's a huge detrimental effect to any student's learning when they feel that the teacher has a low opinion of them. Why should they work their butts off to try to earn the respect of a teacher when the teacher has had their mind made up about the kid from day one? I've had friends who were labeled "slackers" try to work hard and reverse the label only to be accused of cheating when their test scores were no longer in line with the teacher's expectation of them.

Most teachers have no awareness of how the petty status games they play in their classrooms deeply impact the performance of their students. Many teachers also don't understand that if they can't communicate an enthusiasm for the subject, then they've failed as educators.

I understand the concept behind this, and I understand your argument as well. The reasoning, I think, is pretty simple.

Let me try to better explain what I'm trying to say, as a series of steps:

1. Teachers start treating everyone as smart

2. To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced.

3. As a result of increased motivation/whatever, the size of the gifted student pool doubles. 80% of the class is still not at a gifted level.

4. No Child Left Behind, morality, failing students, angry parents come into play, and educators are forced to answer questions about the other 80%.

5. Two problems are now in play: First, there is the failing 80%. Second, of the 20% of gifted students, 10% is smarter than the other 10%.

6. Because there can be no tier separation of students (gifted/not gifted), material must be taught the same way, and the same material must be taught (otherwise, discrimination?)

7. Educators have a decision to make: Teach dull material that suits the last 10% and 80%, or teach engaging material that suits the top 10%, but is difficult for the second 10%, and near impossible for the 80%.

8. Choice A results in the top 10% of students losing out on an education, and Choice B results in 80% of the class failing.

9. I hate to bring this up for a very liberal and optimistic audience but: the 20-80 rule is very prevalent in society. It's inevitable that the top 10% will probably account for a good 50% or so of the nation's GDP and innovation when they're older (no, I have no evidence, but it makes sense).

Are you beginning to see my point? I went on a first-date last night, and compared my high school experience (didn't learn a thing, wasn't told about SATs, people were stabbed, no AP/IB) with my date's high school (UTS in Toronto... 2 entrance exams to get in, contests and opportunities made available, etc). I'll tell you now, that I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunity. By changing education to this model, you'll find more people who feel that way (maybe not as extreme).

PS. My education was so bad, in fact, that by the time I took my SAT II subject tests, I know I needed 800s and I hadn't learned 70% of the material in Math II, Physics, or Chemistry. I bought books, and for the first time in high school, I actually studied.

1. Teachers start treating everyone as smart

2. To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced.

Thank you for the detailed step-by-step reply to the comment above yours. Looking at your first two steps on the basis of international comparisons, I would say that the empirical observation of what happens in countries where step 1 and step 2 are followed is that learners IN GENERAL become smarter and reach higher levels than learners in the United States generally do. I am most familiar with the situation in Taiwan (where my nieces and nephews live, and where my wife grew up and I and my children lived for a time). The international comparative study TIMSS

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

shows that the entire bell curve for certain countries is shifted to the right, with "average" level of students in those countries being close to the gifted level in the United States, or, from another point of view, the "gifted" level of the United States being barely above the "average" level of those countries. (See Exhibit 1.1 on pages 34 and 35 of the linked document for a beautiful example of a statistical chart comparing score levels in different countries.)

The international comparisons show that learners rise to higher expectations. Examination of the poor (by international standards) performance of the top students in the United States

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

suggests there is plenty of headroom in the United States population that hasn't been explored by the typical United States curriculum. So it is commendable that the researchers mentioned in the submitted link are trying to test the limits of the United States population and see how much academic performance can increase here, as it has in other countries I know during my lifetime.

While I don't think that anyone would argue there is plenty of headroom, using international comparisons to make this case seems somewhat dubious for philosophical reasons. (Some people also strongly criticize the methodology of these international comparisons, but I don't know enough about this to say anything intelligent.)

"To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced."

Why? I see no logical reason for this to be the case. I know in my elementary and middle school the gifted programs were actually easier than regular classes, and I would assume that this is actually fairly common if not the norm. John Taylor Gatto talks a lot about treating his kids like they're gifted, and if anything his classes seem much easier than normal too. (He doesn't actually believe that more than a tiny percent of kids are really gifted, but AFAIK the way he treats them is basically in line with what most education theorists who advocate this would endorse.)

1. Teachers start treating everyone as smart

There are two independent factors here:

1.a. Assuming the students have a high IQ.

1.b. Assuming the students can benefit from being like and paid attention to.

If you actually read the article, you find that they are talking entirely about 1.b. One of the student groups is African, so they have a mean IQ around 85. Vanishingly few of them are going to be studying calculus prep at age 13 (option 1.a.). They also explicitly state that they are teaching using techniques used for gifted classes, not the subject material.

So what they are really doing is moving kids out of warehouses and putting them in actual, you know, schools. Amazingly it turns out that an average IQ of 85 is enough to learn useful things.

Why the downvotes? African-Americans really do have an average IQ of 85, meaning they have real difficulty with abstract reasoning. They really did have horrific failure during the "new math" and "whole word" teaching era because they have trouble deducing general principles from specific examples, and school for them often did become pointless warehousing. And this research does show that people with an IQ of 85 can in fact learn useful things and are valuable members of our society.

What is bad about giving all kids the "gifted" classroom? It's obviously better than the regular classroom when you look at outcomes, that's what the study says.

I didn't see a word about defining gifted down or watering down the school experience of the "real" gifted students.

I don't think your super stimulative genius level classroom actually exists...

It's not bad to give all kids the "gifted" classroom. It's just impossible. There's not enough "gifted" resources to go around. It's a zero sum game at some level - to give "gifted" education to someone you have to take it away from someone else.

I would not call this impossible. I would just call it ripe for disruption. Why not remove "idiot" resources and give them to "gifted"? Why not make your whole school "gifted", like they are doing in the follow-on study?

The whole point of this is that the teachers were not special teachers. The students were not special students. But the joint exercise they did was new and interesting. It is more about changing teachers' attitudes and skills than about stratifying resources and kids into gifted and not-gifted.

You might be saying that sea changes are impossible due to entrenched interests in education. I do think some reform there is very important. But I also think that as administrations and states see the benefits for teachers and students, they will start gravitating in this direction.

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