Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair
americasfuture.org
americasfuture.org
I was essentially raised by a single working mother who spent 12 years getting herself a Master's Degree while working full time and raising a very independent and even more obstinate little boy.
We weren't the poorest people I knew, but clothes came from Goodwill and we did not have enough money to put oil in our home's heater during some winters.
By 7th grade, I had been managing my own meals, hygiene, laundry and getting to and from school for a few years. I was also running as fast as I could directly to jail or worse. I had become feral.
I was extremely lucky that my mother forced me to try out for a magnet program, which got me into a different social group and even though I continued to find some trouble, I did not continue to find ever worse kinds of trouble.
Of course, I could be wrong, but I believe that art program and the teachers, students and counselors there saved my life.
It would be a real shame if we allowed people to dismantle those programs, as I certainly am not the only economically disadvantaged person who found themselves at least somewhat stimulated and essentially saved by the experience.
Gifted programs were providing that, via extra supervision and easier classes to manage (everyone wants to be there). These activists are now robbing these kids of their only alternative at having a functioning environment for 8 hours a day.
I think that was the most impactful part. I'm curious what you think though.
If you were to dissect what makes actually makes a gifted and talented program different or better is it actually anything to do with the selection part of it or is it a result of being surrounded with peers from better socioeconomic backgrounds who are more likely to make it through the selection in the first place?
Take another step back and also consider if you had a twin with virtually the same upbringing as you up until your mom forced you to try out for the magnet program, would they benefit more or less from the g&t school existing or if that funding had been distributed to their under-funded schools? Would more kids on average benefit from the existence of these programs than not?
Obviously there are other confounding factors here but I'll enter this in as a counter-anecdote, I went to a small suburban school district in the north east that had a single, well-funded public high school, our graduation rates, testing outcomes, and college acceptance rates were comparable with g&t schools in other states.
For me, I don't think it was the curriculum or the socioeconomic background of the kids so much as the little sliver of hope it gave me/us.
It was the remote possibility that I just might be able to build a life that did not look like the adult lives I could see. A life that wouldn't be a decades long, living nightmare of hypocrisy, low-wage slavery, overwhelming debt and silent desperation, which is what I could see in most adults I had ever met, even (maybe especially?) the "wealthy" ones.
I'm not sure regular public schools generally offer that kind of possibility or outlet to basically hopeless, misguided (but creative) kids like I was. My previous schools only offered extra discipline in the form of regular beatings [1] which mainly just triggered and reinforced my lifelong distrust of authority figures.
[1]: I (wrongly) assumed corporal punishment had long ago been outlawed or at least effectively banned in Florida's public schools decades ago, but alas our government officials will never permit anyone to besmirch our earned reputation as an ignorant backwater. Corporal punishment is apparently still permitted to this day:
> If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.
> For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.
In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?
Dumbest fucking idea ever.
Recognizing reality and adapting to it is the opposite of dumb.
The label could change but it wouldn't make much difference except for politically.
And the cost to society when even one of them falls short of their potential is incalculable.
Most people really don't end up mattering that much. If we can identify the ones that will matter, and do so far enough in advance, it's impossible to argue that we won't be better off for having done so.
I'm not saying we shouldn't treat prodigies differently. I'm saying that 99.99% of these "gifted" kids aren't anything like prodigies and that the money aimed at them is better off spent elsewhere.
An unprovable assertion if there ever was one.
Which means that the NYC public schools (the subject of this conversation, recall) have ~1000 kids like that right now.
Now their various "gifted" programs do take more kids than that; the bar for such things is often at the 95th percentile, not the 99.9th.
The irony here is that I first learned the Logo language in one of these enrichment programs.
Probably any sport or art in which people tend to peak very young (early 20s), or that have opportunities available for young participants that will effectively lock them out of further high-level advancement if they miss them (because you're expected to have done those if you're "serious"), are like that.
Imagine someone forcing you to sit at a desk and practice spelling of basic English words?
And they can lose faith in school. And also it can be harder for them to find friends, when their thoughts and interests are a lot more grown up than their classmates.
It can be frustrating and lonely for them.
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/conscientiousness-to...
The problem with this model is twofold:
1. First it ostracizes the ones in that enrichment class, and demotivates children left behind. It also causes rifts and resentment among friend groups. Every day the other children see Sam and Sally leave class and go to a "special kid room", and this turns into jealousy and bullying. The kids in the enrichment class feel bad for being there, and the kids not in the enrichment class feel bad for not being there. We learned a whole lot, but I think this model could have been implemented such that we could still have learned those things without the associated social costs.
2. It's not a great selection mechanism. For example, they passed over some of my friends who, in my experience, are way smarter than me. Why? Well one had slight dyslexia, but he was a math genius. Another is a music and art genius, but she wasn't great at numbers. So we have people who would have benefitted from these programs, arguably both have a very high IQ, and yet this whole process left them feeling "less than". They had to sit in boring, sad reading class while us "enrichment" kids were putting on a production of Macbeth. If that's the kind of thing we were doing, why wasn't my artist friend invited? Because she couldn't do algebra in 3rd grade?
So if there's so much social pressure, resentment, bullying, and the selection method isn't even that great anyway.... then what are these programs for? Can't we come up with a better model that enriches all kids? Instead of asking some magic sorting hat and trusting it's selecting the best students?
Anyway, that was my experience decades ago... maybe things are different now. Obviously I have no idea what's going on with 3rd grade social dynamics these days.
Yes I agree we should be wary of setting up Lord of the Flies in our schools, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore the existence of children like Bluejay[1].
> Can't we come up with a better model that enriches all kids?
I think the basic answer is "no". Past a certain pace/complexity many children will simply be unable to keep up and retain information. We should strive to rid ourselves of the modern delusion that since everyone is equal morally, they must all be equally capable and have equal potential.
For instance, why aren't we putting all the kids into a room and testing their artistic aptitude, and funneling the kids who are the best artists into elite art programs to foster that ability? Why were IQ tests the only tool used to distinguish students? My wife's school had various different "academies" with disciplined focus areas -- arts, music, sports, etc. - which sound like a good way to do things.
I guess my general point is that all children deserve enrichment, not just the high IQ ones. And even if the high IQ children are more needing or deserving of this enrichment, the methods I've experienced used to make the determination as to who is of high IQ are heavily flawed, although my experience is out of date.
The city I live in has several such schools and does exactly that, so I agree.
> all children deserve enrichment
This seems almost like a contradiction in terms. If all children get enrichment then surely it stops being enrichment.
These are exceptions. Skills tend to be highly correlated at both the low and high end: people good at math also tend to be good at reading/writing. Also, many gifted programs may only focus on a single subject or are individualized, such as being accelerated in math but grade level at reading.
>1. First it ostracizes the ones in that enrichment class, and demotivates children left behind. It also causes rifts and resentment among friend groups. Every day the other children see Sam and Sally leave class and go to a "special kid room", and this turns into jealousy and bullying. The kids in the enrichment class feel bad for being there, and the kids not in the enrichment class feel bad for not being there. We learned a whole lot, but I think this model could have been implemented such that we could still have learned those things without the associated social costs.
Welcome to the real world. This is what life is like. Life is not fair. Why do Google employees earn more than Amazon warehouse workers.
The argument against the name "gifted and talented" isn't that some children have gifts that are different from others, it's that the sole arbiter of whether a child is "gifted", as if it were something anointed by Jesus, is not that they did well on some standardized test in kindergarten.
I definitely agree with the author, something like "accelerated learning" is a much better name
But as much as I love the Simpsons, I'm not sure of its value as evidence in a policy discussion either way.
“Now I don’t want you to worry, class, these tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and success, if any.”
— Mrs. Krabappel
As you pointed out, Bart admits to cheating and gets sent back to his ordinary class. The GP’s point is that these tests merely determine who will be admitted to the “gifted and talented” classes, not who will succeed in them, and the Simpson’s episode bears that out. If there were a more accurate way of predicting success in gifted classes then we should use that instead of standardized test scores.
I'm not using the Simpsons episode as "evidence", I just thought Mrs. Krabapple's statement of "Now I don’t want you to worry, class, these tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and success, if any." was such a hilarious statement, and while of course it is hyperbolic, does have evidence to support the gist, that leading kids into different "tracts" at such an early age can have an outsized effect on their life, and that effect can be unwarranted based on what can be small differences in the "cutoff" to get into gifted programs.
The Simpsons episode however is more designed towards the social status aspect. If being in a gifted program grants status, without any connection to the education conducted within the program, all we are simply describing is moving kids into segregated groups of those that has money and power and those that doesn't. The actually program itself has no meaning and could as easily be renamed as the rich people club (private schools?) with the same education material and program as everyone else.
When it comes to people on the lower end of the IQ spectrum, we do see that a single test would not work to determine which tract a student should follow. A failing test could be a sign of low IQ where the student need to be at a school for children with special needs, or it could just be a temporary setback where the regular program is perfectly suitable. In border cases there would basically be an extended period of testing and trial attempts to see which one would be best suited to the individual.
In theory the same process should be on the higher end of the IQ spectrum. If you got a border case where a individual is just slightly above or below the qualifications for a gifted program then what would be best for the individual would be to extended the testing phase and see where they develop best.
But this is wrong wrong wrong, so wrong that it's almost a trivial logical fallacy: just because most dogs have 4 legs, doesn't mean that all 4-legged animals are dogs, nor that a dog with 3 legs stops being a dog. Testing for "dog-ness" by counting 4 legs, is wrong. Likewise, just because a school district designs an arbitrary test of "gifted-ness", doesn't mean that all children who pass it are gifted, nor that children who don't pass it have no gifts. These tests cannot possibly capture the full range of human gifts.
You are arguing a strawman that the person you replied to never stated. Yes exceptional people exist, this was never under debate and that poster did not claim otherwise. But "gifted" programs do not perfectly identify all exceptional people across all dimensions of exceptionality with universal perfect accuracy. Replacing "gifted" programs with accelerated learning programs could achieve the same goal of offering advanced learning for SOME exceptional students, without going through the fundamentally flawed and oversimplified binary sorting process that inaccurately labels all students as either "gifted" or "not gifted".
Why have we become so terrified of assigning adjectives to people? Why can't a person be "smart" or "dumb" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "strong" or "weak" or "disabled" or "retarded"? Just because some of these things are subjective doesn't mean that they are useless. Why have we started to pay such close attention to the feelings of some people assigned to categories they don't care for? "gifted" is just a word to denote such a category. If people don't like being "not gifted" they will learn to dislike "non-accelerated learning student" just as well.
Also, we are not 'terrified' of adjectives - we are 'terrified' of a world that is unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival. If our monkeybrains were unable to evolve social constructs allowing the cooperation and common action of more than 7 people we'd still be stone age apes barely capable of using tools.
The key social "technology" that enables that is empathy with a monkey whose experience doesn't match the small tribe of individuals we're personally capable of caring about. It's an abstraction that enables everything else and it's important.
I'm having a hard time parsing this, but I think you're arguing that the world is getting less empathetic, and therefore less cooperative? I disagree, and think the reverse is true. The more we can disregard emotions and work as cogs in a machine, the more productive we ultimately are. It's exactly this capability that allows us to cooperate in groups of many hundreds of thousands: the ability to interface with each other not as emotionally complex primates, but as executors of a function.
Natural human empathy has very, very low limits. You can only really care about 7 or 8 people at any given time. The rest is social constructs that allow a sort of abstract empathy where in-groups are gradually expanded.
Human civilization simply doesn't work without this kind of social construct. We degrade to feces-slinging apes pretty quickly.
1. An expansion of the concept of 'harm', so that now even casual word usage is thought to be evidence of causing harm. (ex: "Indirectly suggesting some students are 'not gifted' harms them")
2. Operating on an ideal that we are all born equal (not speaking of 'rights' here, but competencies, value to society, etc.). We are but a blank slate, to be molded by social structures. Any unequal outcome on anything has to be a sort of 'systemic discrimination'. (ex: "I see that there's some group that is underrepresented in that gifted program, therefore they obviously are discriminated against")
3. Operating as if humans do not have free will. Any underperformance on anything is not their fault, it's "the system".
America seems to be rekindling a bent for things like racial essentialism and wanting to bring the idea of identity groups to the forefront of any conversation on anything. This tendency has a way of clouding the underlying reality on any given issue. Culturally, there is an expectation that you must reinforce these ideas in conversation, and pay lip service to the group-based narratives or else be labeled a 'group-ist'. It then becomes very difficult to actually talk about the underlying principles and factors at play on any given issue.
My personal take is you have to sort of utilize this group-based thinking yourself as a sort of trojan horse, to then attempt to highlight the true underlying principles/factors at play in the conversation. It's a way to sort of short-circuit the uncritical thinking that many have around issues of the day.
I'm guessing some kids who would fit in those programs, might feel it's not for them, simply because they don't think about themselves as "gifted"? Maybe especially often kids from a poorer background?
I'd guess a name change is a good idea
Regarding these two in particular, they were stops on a euphemism treadmill:
Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974,[18] also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"
Mentally disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly-used insults. The medical diagnosis was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into a pejorative against those with mental disabilities. More specific diagnoses were created, like "autism", but—while less common--"autistic" is still sometimes used as an insult. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although "What are you, special?" has begun to crop up as a school-yard insult.[23] As of August 2013, the Social Security Administration replaced the term "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability".[24] Since 2012, that change in terminology has been adopted by the National Institutes of Health and the medical industry at large.[25]
Part of the trouble we have with communicating between one another has to do with the fact that the inner states of interlocutors are only partially observable to one another. i.e. I have no idea what you are feeling in your head and what you have experienced apart from what you communicate to me through expressions or words, and vice versa. You can use any words you want with a person, but you have no idea how the words you use will impact their internal state. You can make a guess, but it's not guaranteed.
When some words are used by bullies to bring violence onto other children, it adds a new dimension to an otherwise benign word. I play the violin and the word "retard" is used often, because it means to play the music "slowly". But when it's also being used as an invective against a child by a bully, well now it has a darker meaning.
I can go through life simply saying this word without thinking about other people's feelings. But it's going to change the way some people perceive certain conversations. For instance, if I am conversing with someone who has not played violin and does not speak French, and has only seen this word being used by bullies to make other children feel lesser, or has been bullied themselves using such words, that is going to increase anxiety in the internal state of this person. They will wonder why I am using that word, and they may question whether or not I have bullied people in the past using that word. They may recall memories of themselves being bullied. Now all of a sudden the conversation is derailed just because you said the word "retarded", even without any ill-intentions.
While it would be nice if we could write down a word and settle on a definition for all time, that's never going to happen. The reason for this is we will never be able to settle on a universal dictionary definition for all words, and even if we could, no person can really know the dictionary definition of all the words they use, so it definitions would end up being ad hoc anyway. The meaning of words therefore comes from the dictionary as well as our own personal experience with the way those words are used. Unfortunately, we all have different experiences with the way words are used -- for me the word "retard" is the word I see at a beautiful violin solo before I play it. For others it's the word they hear before getting stuffed in the locker. In order to maintain copasetic conversations with all individuals I encounter, I strive to understand these "sensitivities" as you call them, but really they are just different perspectives, and no one is more or less valid than another.
Since people's internal states are unknowable, it's impossible to predict them accurately 100% of the time. Dictionaries provide an oracle for parsing language. If we're forced to consider how people might feel in response to any factual statement that we make, we end up in absurd situations[1].
I'm suggesting that we shift the burden of managing emotional states away from the speaker and towards the listener. Just like with laws (codified social/behavioural protocol), so with language (codified communication protocol) ignorance of a word or definition is your problem, not everyone else's. Don't impose your ignorance on others. If you're not sure, the right thing to do is ask "Why are you using that word? What does it mean?" not jump immediately to offense.
In order to maintain copasetic (great word, thank you for it) conversations, I personally strive not to be offended by anything and expect others do the same.
> While it would be nice if we could write down a word and settle on a definition for all time
I mean, we can and many languages with prescriptive dictionaries do. All we have to do is collectively agree that clear communication is more important than people's feelings. The value proposition seems clear enough.
1. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/niggardly-attitude-to-word-c...
But ...
> People's internal emotional states are their own to manage. Language is a tool for communication...
It is not very good communication to not consider how people understand what you say.
Communication has two ends and simply blaming people for not understanding you when you were aware that a word has multiple meanings in general usage makes no sense.
Also, word meanings change through usage. A non-pejorative word becomes pejorative. Ignoring that is not good communication.
This is not just about "internal emotional states" but simply what the word means to someone else objectively. I.e. "internal rational states", if you will.
A word whose common usage has become pejorative is in rational fact, and in any up-to-date definition, pejorative. If you are not trying to be pejorative, you achieve better communication by not using it. Even if in the past it did convey what you wish it still did.
This seems like a distressingly common construction. Is it a logical fallacy? Does it have a name?
The word "jealousy" comes to my mind
Maybe sometimes feelings, not logic underlies the arguments? And any logics was made up afterwards
These arguments are built on the apparent either-or black-and-white setup, while in the reality, a range of possibilities exists.
In regards to racial biases towards IQ tests, it isn't necessary for the tests themselves to have racial bias. These tests aren't given out to all students, they must be recommended for it by their teachers. Maybe certain teachers would display less bias in a 'this student seems bored by the lessons' line-of-thinking versus 'this student seems gifted'. I have no idea about that part.
Isn't this basically nonsense? Are you sure every child is exceptional in some way? How do you know? Have you measured? How would you react to a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable child? Would your worldview just collapse? What does the word "exceptional" mean to you?
> quality that isn't necessarily intrinsic
Why does the intrinsicness of the property matter?
> learning environment that meets their potential
How would you label people who have high potential? What about low potential? Now, in the interest of clarity and simplicity, what single word would you use to label each category?
> aren't given out to all students, they must be recommended for it by their teachers
To my knowledge they are given out to all students at a particular grade/age - YMMV. If teachers must select students then clearly teacher bias would be a factor.
While there are some concerns that have been raised about bias within the tests themselves[1], in my experience the concern about testing among actual educators is usually that the tests are pitched as objectively "measuring intelligence" when in reality they measure a confluence of factors.
Intelligence is certainly a major factor but external factors such as having a stable home with quiet times that are conducive to studying, good nutrition, good role models, and good teachers play a major role as well.
There have been controversial attempts to control for those factors, for example by including information about the test takers socioeconomic status, but for the most part "intelligence tests" do not attempt to control for external variables. So it's impossible to tell how much of the delta in scores between two individuals reflects actual differences in their intelligence compared to differences in their environment and starting conditions.
The risk of tracking students solely based on such tests is that you end up compounding the existing penalties of having a bad environment.
Don't get me wrong, I think testing has an important role to play, but we should be honest and stop pretending that these are "intelligence tests".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_bia...
Edit: also your link doesn't cite any serious claim that these tests are inappropriate for use within a westernized country like the US.
Interesting. To me it seems like intelligent students with negative environmental factors would yield the highest ROI from being admitted into a gifted program. Just look at the testimonials from commenters in this thread who came from humble beginnings and credit gifted programs with helping them climb the social ladder. Whereas sufficiently well-off kids have parents who can make sure they get excellent educational resources and will be fine regardless of how they score on some test.
> Edit: also your link doesn't cite any serious claim that these tests are inappropriate for use within a westernized country like the US.
To be clear, I agree that concerns about inherent cultural bias within the tests themselves are somewhat overblown. The real issue is that the tests do not solely measure intelligence and yet we act as if they do.
Indeed placing smart kids into gifted programs does help them, that's why these programs should not be abolished. However IQ doesn't fluctuate that much over one's lifespan, so at worst we're missing some children on the edges, which is inevitable in any human system.
Tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices [1] should make all of these things irrelevant except nutrition, since the tasks involved are things nobody really studies for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
That certainly looks like an improvement, but I would imagine that things like poverty and the student's home situation would still play a similar role to nutrition. That is: given two children of equivalent raw "intelligence", if one has a stable home situation with loving parents who stress focus and discipline and the other bounces between homes in the foster care system with no good role models, I would expect the former to score higher on just about any test you could give them.
> the tasks involved are things nobody really studies for
Perhaps that is true today, but I see no reason Goodhart's law would not apply -- if you start basing a student's educational opportunities on how well they score on an RPM test, then a cottage industry of RPM test prep will emerge. There are some tests that are exceedingly hard to train for (e.g. dual n-back comes to mind) but looking at RPM it doesn't seem like something that would take much practice to pick up some reasonable strategies.
Again, I still think testing is very useful, especially for spotting outliers in a similar-enough population and ensuring they get additional resources necessary to excel. I'm just skeptical about social scientists' claims that intelligence can be objectively measured by a multiple-choice test in a way that cannot be gamed by people with enough resources.
"The first practical intelligence test was developed between 1905 and 1908 by Alfred Binet in France for school placement of children. Binet warned that results from his test should not be assumed to measure innate intelligence or used to label individuals permanently."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Early_IQ...
IQ is environmentally malleable; particularly relevant to this, nutrition near the time of the test is relevant, and this is strongly associated with socioeconomic status, even moreso before children enter school where meal programs exist as a levelling force. Processes like NY once-and-done test at 4 years old maximize the disparities produced this way (later start or multiple chance programs that test in school mitigate some of that disparity.)
The gifted program selection process making use of the test is racially biased, and there is limited (though some) ability to mitigate that while still using the test. Whether the test is racially biased in some abstract sense detached from the context of use is irrelevant.
Gifted and talented programs are one type of solution when fast learning children in combination with a somewhat supporting environment create a situation where they do no longer fit in the regular system, having to artificial slow down their own learning and development as a person. Racial disparities in this context is likely caused by a difference in supporting environments occurring much earlier in the childs life.
That being said, not sure what the alternative is. On one hand, challenging students to the limit of their abilities and bump them higher as soon as they exhaust a level is a laudable goal. Alas, as long as the educational pedigree is used in competitive scenarios (grant, internships, jobs), this will simply create an inflationary pressure to bump everyone to the top level and degrade the top level quality to the lowest common denominator.
We are missing a objective bar, for example a hard standardized exam to gate college admissions. Such an exam becomes an incentive for developing strong programs. Time to take a clue from China's gaokao. Alas this requires that we come to terms that not all schools, not all programs, not all demographics, not all kids are equal, which doesn't seem to be something XXI century America is willing to publicly accept.
For example, I believe this conversation around these programs would be different if they were called something like the "Harder work program".
I hated when any teacher referred to me as gifted, incidentally. I thought it had an implication that my performance was bestowed on me from some outside power. A little too woo-woo for my teenage self.
Even though teacher after teacher had nominated me for the program no one actually gave me the placement test until 7th grade. Some math, lots of puzzles, timed quizzes, etc. I passed and spoke with the teacher. We didn't get along, and in today's slang she would be considered a 'Karen'.
I was the only person of color in the program, in a majority-minority school. And with the gifted teacher not wanting me there I asked to be taken out, went back to my 'ghetto ass friends'. I took the classes I liked and never gave the G&T program another thought.
I went on to take regular accelerated maths, language, history with a sprinkling of AP, dual credit classes. Where I met up with all those supposedly gifted students again.
Based on my experience on schooling in the 90s. The G&T programs have a serious racial issue that is only now being reckoned with.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...
Speaking as someone who moved around a lot as a child, and would be identified as a G&T candidate in each new place if there was such a program available there; when it wasn't, school was unbearable. In the last 2 years of High School, I stopped going to class, and stopped handing in assignments, and still did well... enough. My teachers liked me, could tell that I didn't belong there, helped out where they could.
I think it's helpful to think of G&T kids as having a learning disability. It sounds strange, but if they aren't stimulated, they are miserable, and will not do well in school.
One of the silliest things about this entire argument is that there are only a handful of prodigies born every year, and most of the "gifted" kids aren't really any brighter than their classmates, they just get more attention at home.
> "One of the silliest things about this entire argument is that there are only a handful of prodigies born every year,"
Are people saying that?
> "...and most of the "gifted" kids aren't really any brighter than their classmates, they just get more attention at home."
Are you saying that no one is really brighter than anyone else? Or that the G&T kids at your school were mislabeled over others who actually are gifted?
> "but they had been coddled so much by their labels..."
I actually agree that the narrative told to G&T kids are actively harmful. "You are Gifted and Special" isn't helpful, at least as it's presented. It can lead to an inflated self-worth and insecurity, among other problems.
> "...and their parents that most of them were complete social incompetents"
Now here you veer into some assumptions that I don't think are fair, but you do seem to be committed to the idea that G&T is not a thing at all. You explain the phenomena, then, as an illusion created by coddling parents?
This is extremely toxic dogma and your anecdote does not disprove the fact that competence is roughly normally distributed. If we do not collectively acknowledge this fact and allocate extra resources to high achievers, we are handicapping our society in some misguided pursuit of an impossible equitable utopia.
Almost all kids who are in accelerated programs are there because they already HAVE extra resources at home. These are the people who are going to be ahead anyway. I'd rather lift the bottom up first, which is where the opportunity to benefit society the most lies, and then worry about using additional resources on the top.
More so the top percentile have the ability, and in my opinion, the moral responsibility to push the entire standard of education up for everyone, rather than their own kin.
It's not the top percentile who have the ability. We have to all do it for each other.
Sure. And part of that is making sure that wealth is being distributed with the health of society in mind, rather than individual happiness at the top :)
The top being higher doesn't lower the base. There is more money today than a decade ago.
Merely taking money from the wealthy does nothing to improve the standard of living.
> There is more money today than a decade ago.
Where is it then?
https://fee.org/articles/why-our-shrinking-middle-class-is-a...
The answer to where the money has gone is sort of everywhere. Everything from social security payments to military budgets has increased. Everyone makes more and things cost more too.
Making sure it will happen will kill it. You have to have the right mechanisms in place to encourage it, and it may happen.
To suggest that there's equally distributed chance, ability and responsibility is perverse; it flies in the face of reality.
I didn't suggest that. And if I did, it wouldn't be perverse.
I mean other than the fact that this is extremely dismissive, again, Finland is the example that did get rid of all this crap and is doing pretty well for itself.
Yup, world leader in startups, inventions, science, etc...
oh wait...
It's astonishing to me. I'm handicapped, but I would never want to drag people down to my level. Occasionally, it becomes useful to remind people that "no, that isn't an option for me," but this just seems to be an urge to make everyone equally miserable if we can't all have it wonderful.
If rich people knew the only way to get good schooling for their kids is to make schooling better entirely, then we'd have better schools.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...
What about this, why not have __every__ school provide personalized education to each person? Do we not have the money for that? Because we are __the richest country__.
You have special education for students with needs that prevent them from being able to learn in a "normal" classroom, why not for gifted students as well?
Right "any student" - so please explain to me what causes the huge disproportionate racial gap in these schools?
There's really two arguments here:
- Biological
- Non biological
If anyone thinks its the first one, I'm not having this discussion with you.
If you think it's the second one, are taxes going to gifted schools actually...helping society?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...
> Traditional explanations for the black-white test score gap have not stood up well to the test of time. During the 1960s, most liberals blamed the gap on some combination of black poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate funding of black schools. Since then, the number of affluent black families has grown dramatically, but their children’s test scores still lag far behind those of white children from equally affluent families. School desegregation may have played some role in reducing the black-white test score gap in the South, but school desegregation also seems to have costs for blacks, and when we compare initially similar students in today’s schools, those who attend desegregated schools learn only slightly more than those in segregated schools.
Automatically blaming any discrepancy on outcomes between different racial groups on racism isn't helping anyone. It also doesn't really feel like you're looking to discuss or learn anything here, rather just to scold people for being racist. This is a tough question that doesn't have a solid answer yet.
Where did I scold people, or call people racist?
I said I'm not interested in the discussion if you think there is a _biological reason_ behind it.
Measure height in 10 different ways on 10 different days, and you'll get the same value. Measure IQ 10 different ways on 10 different days and you'll get 10 different values. Do I have the same IQ at 3am after I haven't eaten all day, as I do at noon on a full stomach and a good night's sleep? I guarantee you my score will be different in both scenarios, so does that mean I have two IQs? Sleepy IQ vs. Alert IQ? When measuring IQ, is sleepiness vs. alertness controlled for? Is hunger?
Somehow I took a test in 3rd grade that changed the trajectory of my life. What if I didn't eat that morning? No one checked, and the only one to feed me was my mother. What if she didn't feed me? Would my IQ have dropped 10 points on that test and caused my entire life to change? Very possibly, I was on the threshold. I'm quite sure that some people in the room taking the test with me didn't eat that day, maybe not since lunch time the day before, since the test was at 8am. Would it surprise you to know that of the people in my class who were hungry while taking that test that day, most of them were children of color?
How do you think the IQ results turn out when a majority of children of color are hungry while taking it, and the majority of white kids are well-fed. At my school it meant that a majority of "gifted" students were white. Actually, come to think of it, all of them were. Not a single minority, despite minorities being represented at a proportionate rate at my school.
What's scary to me is that the unstated opinion in some of my social circles is that this situation is the result of whites simply having a higher IQ. As your post seems to imply here.
Edit: To the dead comment below me:
> IQ is very well defined - it's the grade you get in an IQ test
That's called a tautology, so what you're saying is that the tests are not measuring anything except themselves. The rest I will leave dead because it's subjective, so no need to resurrect it, but the way you defined IQ here is a verifiable logical flaw in your argument.
It's weird that on one hand you suggest IQ may be a poor, simplistic measure of whether a student is 'gifted', but then on the other hand reduce basketball skill/ability to a simplistic measure such as height.
It also seems you are making a number of claims or hypotheses here that I'm personally interested in knowing if there is any data/evidence to support:
1. Taking a test on multiple days produces high enough variance in results, that the test results are not predictive of any sort of ability or future outcomes
2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white)
3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests
Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?
For example, would you say hunger/tiredness is the core reason white children don't all have the same exact scores?
What I'm saying here is that hunger and sleep are two confounding factors always present in any testing situation, at least in my experience as an educator. I have seen it personally in my students, especially when comparing my 8am section performance with my 12pm section's performance for the same class on the same tests and material. The 8am section consistently performs worse (sometimes by half a letter grade or more) on their tests compared to their 12pm peers, and this has been true across my career. What's interesting is I can compare these students across semesters, since they take multiple classes with me. I can see how they perform at 8am one semester vs 12pm another. But this is just my own little experience with college-age students, I'm not familiar with recent literature.
Anyway, the point is if I'm seeing these things in my students there is no reason to thing we wouldn't see these performance drops on 3rd graders doing an IQ test as well. So the question is: why aren't they controlling for these things? Or are they, and I don't know. Because they didn't control them for my cohort when I was tested.
> 2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white) 3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests
I wasn't making a generalization here, I was specifically talking about my school.
> Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?
Don't read between the lines here too much, I was making a concrete argument: If we want to measure something like IQ, we should do so rigorously and with purpose, because otherwise what are we even doing?
Even if we just assume IQ is defined as the result of the IQ test, we know that test result can vary based on testing conditions and the emotional state of the tester during the test. With regular testing this is not so bad because the effects average out over time, unless the problem is chronic. With IQ test though, the presence of these confounding factors is especially vexatious, because there is a general perception that IQ is a fixed, immutable quantity, so the score you get on the test cannot be improved.
In the context of gifted programs it means these tests are usually administered once and early during the normal course of a child's 12 year education, and these program really only exist in elementary school; by the time children get to middle and high school there are other mechanisms for sorting children (standard, honors, ap, electives, votech etc.). With something so consequential, we need to do it right, rather than just do a thing because it sounds right and hope that it works out for the best for everyone. If the consequences weren't so monumental than the slapdash approach I experienced (and again, this was a long time ago but at the same time not so long ago. Maybe it's different now, but this is how it was for me maybe things have changed drastically).
Of course those taxes are helping society. There are gifted students living in poor school districts who wouldn't be getting the resources that let them excel if it weren't for the tax dollars funding those resources for them.
I'll answer that question myself: no, it does not. Detroit Public Schools receives more funding per student than the average school district in Michigan, yet it is one of the worst performing school districts in the nation.
You cannot simply throw money at bad schools to make them better, so why punish gifted students by removing their ability to learn at a level that's more appropriate for them?
To put this in clearer language: If I have a bunch of 100-sided dice: 90 blue dice in one bucket, and 10 red dice in another, and I roll them all and select the top 10 numbers rolled, I'll have a greater proportion than 90% of blue dice, because there are more total dice rolls in that group.
If I toss 9 quarters and a nickel and count the fraction of tails that rolled on the nickel then it will be equal to 1/10 of all the tails only if all coins roll tails or all roll heads i.e. in 2 outcomes out of 1024. In half of the other cases nickel tails will be overrepresented and in in the other half - underrepresented. It's because you cannot roll a fraction of a tail.
It just seems really odd to me: It seems like because you get 9x the number of dice rolls for one group you would end up with a final distribution that favors the majority group, but that is obviously not the case. I need to wrap my brain around that one.
I think you have a misunderstanding about what a gifted program is.
I went through a gifted program as a child and I can assure you that my parents paid no money for it, considering our income was so low that we qualified for free lunches in school.
The idea behind banning gifted/special programs is to treat all students equally with equal opportunity and the same curriculum. Individualized grading by the teacher completely violates this idea.
So I am still unsure what point you are trying make. Based on my research Finland clearly rejects that notion of teaching and grading everyone the same.
This is a dramatic oversimplification, to the point of being entirely misleading. Money =/= better schooling. Parental involvement, cultural attitudes about education, and not using a one-size-fits-all approach is what makes schooling improve. Is the implication is that if we forced rich people to send their kids to public schools, they'd use their rich person influence to raise taxes on themselves in order to get more funding?
Wealth is a clumsy proxy. A single-income home, with a parent deeply invested and active in the child's education (rather than how to get food on the table next week), implies a lot of unmeasured but real resources. Resources that are more readily invested in "communities with means." Leaving the communities without those same means deprived, deprived of resources that are not easily tracked by "how much money does the school get."
Of course wealth can play a role too. Consider a poor neighborhood where some of the money from the school goes to paying for school lunches, where in the wealthier neighborhood students are typically sent with their own lunchbox. It's not just about the money. It's about the people that have the money.
It's not something you can easily policy away, imho, because it's a systemic cultural issue, with a lot of messy tangles.
Private tutors...
But see, we aren't.
The kids are (often? Usually?) better at reading and writing in the new language, than their parents
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...
https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-sc...
"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation.
Probably because it's impossible for a person to make a billion dollar in value without stealing from others.
Name me a single example that has made it up there without
- labor violations
- stealing profits from workers
- causing damage to the people who have worked for them
I'm a founder. I can tell you, external funding is as generous now as it's ever been, and in my network there are YC alumns (and 2-time alums) that would disagree with your take.
Also, we are in a golden age of bootstrapping, you don't need to raise to get a company up and running.
All this to say: Maybe just possibly capitalism isn't so bad? My dad is the manager of a gas station, and I am the founder of a startup with financial security. Anything really is possible when you work for it.
That's the best part, it isn't for a chunk of people. It destroys life for another chunk of people.
So yeah, maybe, to you, it's not bad. To others? It's fucked.
2. Do you consider all the supply chain related deaths, all the prison related deaths, all the civilians killed in America going after oil part of "people killed under capitalism?"
Ironically, you know who else thought the exact same thing, lavishing praise on capitalism? Karl Marx. Maybe educate yourself and open your horizons to something outside your narrow views. I have no problem with people being ignorant (nobody knows everything), but it's grating when somebody is proud of it.
> Anything really is possible when you work for it.
Actually nevermind, such naivete is mind-boggling.
1 is obviously a value judgement. 2 contributes nothing to the discussion.
Communism is an outright religion - there is no experimentalism, outcomes are preordained, and no results may change the assumptions. The only thinking is telological. If anybody pays X for a product and sells it for X + Y where Y is greater than zero it is automatically exploitation by their conveniently loaded definitions.
1. The idea that loaning it out isn't providing any value in itself is objectively wrong. If it provides no value is ridiculous in even a preindustrial economy - let alone an industrialized one where economies of scale and large capex are why markets wind up dominated by big players.
2. The idea that it is a small monopoly is also objectively wrong - money is fungible and it doesn't matter if you get one million in a loan from one entity or ten thousand ones. Even if we accept the standards of morality "if it is a good thing" is irrelevant a question as asking if it is a good thing that vehicles use electricity or break down fuels to move. Those are the mechanisms by which it works - we don't have an option of movement without expending energy. Similarly if you ask for all loans to be free to avoid "exploitation" there is no reason to lock up the money in delays and put it at risk.
Your response is typical of psudo-intellectuals called out on their bullshit. It's a lot easier to say "I'm right regardless of the facts" instead of directly addressing the points raised.
Provide a rebuttal or stop with your nonsense.
2. "Communism is an outright religion - there is no experimentalism, outcomes are preordained" is a case of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong. I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to this other than "pick up a book".
3. "If anybody pays X for a product and sells it for X + Y where Y is greater than zero it is automatically exploitation by their conveniently loaded definitions." Again, this is the idea of "communizm" I had when I was 12 or 13. As you can imagine, either everyone who is a socialist or anarchist or left-libertarian or whatever is a complety drooling idiot, or this is a stupid straw-man designed to fool people with zero critical thinking skills.
4. "If it provides no value is ridiculous in even a preindustrial economy - let alone an industrialized one where economies of scale and large capex are why markets wind up dominated by big players." Again, this is circular reasoning: in the current system providing capital is a valuable service, therefore the system is good since in the system the system is good... do you see what I mean? You cannot justify a thing by reasons internal to the thing itself.
5. "Those are the mechanisms by which it works" See above. I'll also add: capitalism (and specifically our current flavour thereof) is not a Law of Nature: it is the result of a very specific course that history took over the past 300 years. Alternatives are possible. Criticism is legitimate. Ambition to improve is a good thing.
Shall I go on? I learned it's not useful to talk with people who are not in good faith from the get go. Why bother?
First-a, he deserves what he has (as far as you can make such a statement in a complex society). He provided some value, got paid for it, he now takes a risk helping others do the same. The only difference between him and me consuming X, providing X+Y value, and using the Y to buy tiny parts of public companies to have some claim on their profits is scale.
First-b, and yes, if someone came and took away my Y for "fairness", I would start working less to just make what I consume. And I mostly /like/ my job, unlike most people.
Second-a, after critically thinking about it, I actually believe it's better for people like him to allocate capital, instead of either some "democratic process", or even worse some semi-elected bureaucrats. I wish we could have people like Bezos, Buffett, Graham, etc. run MANY MORE things (generally speaking, not attached to a particular implementation). We have all of history to indicate who does things better. Second-a-a, even if we were to say "free market is bad in this area, no free market is allowed [e.g. healthcare or housing]" (to be clear, I disagree with that, but let's say we did) I would prefer to install a conventionally-defined-self-made billionaire from another industry to run said area, instead of a govt bureaucracy like we do now.
Third, as others have mentioned you don't have to take his money, you can bootstrap (and then get rich and loan money just like him).
Second-b, combining second-a and third in a more narrow scope, do you think either voters or bureaucrats would fund startups (and, do it better than the likes of VCs)? It has happened, but rarely and almost always in response to an existential threat. Viaweb FAQ says they were financed by angels to the tune of $2m 90ies-dollars. What are the alternative sources of funding you envision in the "fairer" allocation structure for such startups, be it Tesla, Google, or Viaweb, given their success rate?
I have a $1m MMR startup that I founded without any external funding - but mostly because I was naive to such structures existing at all. I would have saved years of struggling if I had an initial cash infusion of a few hundred thousand.
Idk about you, but I would trade 10% of my $1m MMR company for more free time during my early 20s.
Yes. But again, not a lot of options to avoid it as you said.
Like for example just build something and start selling it and make money.
That's what I did. Millions others have too. You are on Hacker News, you are probably a hacker, you can just create assets out of thin air!
> "Warren Buffett has made his money using ... land ownership and exclusivity ... a human construct"
Well, sheesh... if your starting frame of reference is that "capitalism is stealing by definition", then there's really no further discussion to be had.
Why not? Is Capitalism the universal truth or something that we can't touch or change?
Nothing like this to show you're open to healthy discussion.
But the comment you replied to had a subtantitive point about the linked article, and you replied to a tertiary part of that post with a political message (no billionares exist without theft/etc) that had nothing to do with the thrust of the conversation.
That led me to believe you were being a troll. You engaged in a way that seemed straight forward so maybe you are just somebody who feels very strongly about a political view.
So you mean they're paper billionaires by "owning the means of production" Yeah. I know. :)
Can you explain? If they have options, and they probably do, then it will go up. What is your question based on?
I don't know how you could misread this badly. A paper billionaire means that they don't have billions in the bank; it's just the sale price of the last share that was traded in their company multiplied by the number of shares they own. It's not real, and any attempt to confiscate shares will not result in real money being given to anyone else. Shares are only worth real money when they're sold, and no one will buy shares in a confiscation world.
People act like we don't understand how "value" and "equity" works.
We do. We don't want money. The idea is to own the means of production. Amazon is nothing without its workers. No company is anything without its workers. The workers deserve to be represented in that huge equity.
Every time you say things like "we" and "people" you discredit yourself. It's a pointless statement. You can have equity; start a company, or join a company (such as Amazon) that awards share options.
That becomes the crux of this. "Billionaires are bad" is a discussion about the system that actually allows them to exist, rather than the people themselves.
Warren Buffett has made a ton of his money using state-backed monopolies like real-estate. Land ownership and exclusivity, even when the land use is unproductive, is a human construct after-all.
Note I’m pretty sympathetic to the argument that extreme wealth inequality (billionaires) are are symptom of a poorly configured economic system and should be minimised, but your hyperbole is off-putting. And it’s probably hindering rather than helping you make your point.
She made something appealing to hundreds of millions of people, and they willing gave her money for it. The horror.
Maybe we should put a limit on charity giving? Or do you have an official list of Authorized Ways to spend money?
The actual problem is people can use wealth to corrupt others, e.g., buy political influence. But instead of railing on that, you can't see that you're fighting against value generation itself.
Punishment, for writing such addictive tales of wizardry!
You and that other guy clearly have a bone to pick.
And her books sold well enough before the movies and merch.
There are ~500mm Harry Potter books in print (all years, all languages). Author royalties are between 6 and 15 percent of the cover price. She would definitely have been wealthy, but not billionaire.
What's your actual "you've provided too much value to willing participants" amount? If she negotiated royalties of 20% she would have been a bad person? If she put her money in an index fund and it doubled every 10 years, she'd become immoral later?
Okay, let me try. I'll go with Jerry Seinfeld.
What labor violations did he do? Who did he steal from and what damage did he cause to the people who worked for him?
All the staff that made his shows possible. All the workers that made his ability to make tons of profit possible, and they saw essentially no real amount of it.
not all billionaire are good, and not all are bad.
Minecraft became what it is because of the third-party developer community. They saw nothing of it.
> j.k. rowling
Has already been explained. But also, her editors, and the fact that copyright/intellectual property is still a govt backed monopoly.
> George Lucas
Same deal as J.K.
critically, they did so voluntarily and for the compensation of entertainment, passion, and helping themselves.
rowling and lucas didn’t harm workers nor did they violate labor laws. complying with IP laws was not in the criteria, nor should it be.
In my opinion the Labor Theory of Value is a tautology.
As an example, try this: ask someone who doesn't believe that billionaires should exist if they could snap their fingers and make all billionaires vanish, but nobody would become any wealthier, would they? I've seen that answered yes way too many times. That tells me that some people just don't want to know that someone is doing better than them, regardless of if it actually impacts them or not.
Though to be even more fair, if the political class didn't prostitute their influence, there would be nothing for the wealthy to buy, so making billionaires vanish does not address that problem.
The nasty-but-necessary aspect of capitalism is that you need a few rich people at the top and many more beneath agreeing to those rules that put them there on the offchance they'll make it up to those lofty heights themselves.
It's a lot easier to destroy than it is to create.
This is just people taking the easy way out, without thinking about second order effects.
She created a gifted program with me, and ended up sending more kids outside with a guide on how much we should get through.
I was always a distracted kid otherwise, and this got me really excited about a subject that I may not have engaged with otherwise.
So, you had a teacher spend one-on-one time with you. That's the whole point of what I'm getting at. That's what EVERY kid needs.
Imagine now, we actually did fund education to this goal. Where would we be in a few decades?
In Finnish, does “self-directed” imply more time with a teacher? In American English, it almost always means less… sometimes zero.
Source: Me. I was a self-directed learner through quite a few math subjects in junior high school and high school. Total teacher one-on-one time was typically 30 minutes or less per year.
I encourage you to try to be a slightly more sympathetic reader in this thread. You seem to be ignoring and/or twisting things many people have said.
I honestly definitely can see how it comes off that way. And thank you for giving me a chance to see this doubly so.
However, my comments are thinking a bit beyond the system at hand, and a lot more __critically__ about the things we hold universally true, or important, or moral.
This is mainly why my comments are going to sound outrageous or outright "trolly" because it's breaking a LOT of basic assumptions people have about the way the world is setup.
Apologies for coming off this way.
Maybe this isn’t the right part of the thread to ask, but I wonder if the difference in Finland versus the US is that the concept of what a “good education” looks like is largely shared in Finland while there are very divergent and often times conflicting views of what “good education” looks like in different US communities.
Oh 100%, there are cultural differences here that are significant. And America is a far more diverse country than, essentially anywhere else in the world.
With that being said, I think a lot of our problems stem from the extreme segregation that is still with us today.
In reality, segregation legally ended, but we really didn't take efforts to "undo" the damages done by segregation and have kinda...let it become a compounding failure.
Our economic system, has an amazing marketing team. Low regulations, government steps out and only comes in to protect your property & your rights. But in reality it ignores that:
1. Society health depends on *everyone in society*. Society health is important. People suffering in your country is not something that anyone likes.
2. Okay, so people are suffering. We have a system where they can... well, try to better their lives. But is that actually the case?
3. Okay, fine, it's not actually the case. What *is* fundamentally broken then? What CAN we do to actually live up to the American dream?
These questions have really lead me down into the path of "I...don't think Capitalism is optimized for social health, but focused on individual health. And I think that's bad"
I hate that this is my natural take too. I really want to believe that most people arent like this, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold this position.
No, its done based on research showing that tracked gifted/mainstream bifurcated programs are:
(1) worse compared to known practical same-classroom alternatives for the students identified as gifted,
(2) worse compared to the same alternatives for the students not identified as gifted,
(3) as implemented in practice, based on criteria that heavily bias for out-of-school environments rather than purely assessing intellectual ability.
“Gifted programs” were a top of the line social technology of the 1980s, and the two track industrial system they embody was better than the one-track industrial system. But we know how to do better than either, now.
Multidimensional/multilevel tracking of the type used in secondary schools seems to be, if not essential, at least useful to that goal.
Unidimensional two-track gifted/mainstream tracking has show itself to be suboptimal, especially for gifted students, who tend to be all over the map in their performance levels in different skill areas. The same techniques of providing assignments that engage at multiple levels and individualized enrichment needed to deal with that within gifted classrooms turns out to also be better for non-gifted classrooms, and to render the whole gifted/non-gifted segregation a pointless exercise that only causes unnecessary harm, stigma, and division.
What is the shiny new alternative?
The problem is that Asian New Yorkers, on average, have higher IQs then everyone else. So they end up in the G&T (Gifted and Talented) programs.
African New Yorkers, on average, have lower IQs then everyone else. So the G&T programs have only a smattering of darker-skinned students.
This is called "systemic racism."
“The move to get rid of G&T is long overdue,” said Rachel Griffiths of Brooklyn. “You can tell at a glance in my sons’ school which class is G&T and which class isn’t — the racial divide is that stark. What does that say to all the kids about who is gifted and who isn’t? In addition to learning reading and writing, the kids get an ugly real-life lesson in systemic racism.” [1]
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan...
Sounds like it is, actually. Fast-and-loose claims of "systemic racism", absent any kind of constructive proposal aimed at actually addressing perceived prejudicial attitudes, are just the politics of envy writ large.
What you just stated was actual racism, that other populations are unable to achieve what the Asian students have accomplished, so the program gives them an unfair advantage
Four-year olds are experiencing systematic racism?
Asians kids do better then whites. Racism against whites? Is that because we live in an Asian-centered society where white folk are marginalized? Asians keeping the white man down? Do we need affirmative action for white people? I think that is what Harvard is doing!
It looks like the next NYC mayor will be a black man, so he might be able to keep the "G&T" program going without being accused of racism.
>whites* Oh boy, looks like I struck a nerve there. If any student isn't testing well enough to enter then that's how it is. Good someone else has that chance. I wouldn't have a problem if there were no white people in it as long as everyone is testing against the same criteria.
>It looks like the next NYC mayor will be a black man, so he might be able to keep the "G&T" program going without being accused of racism. I accused you of racist commentary and logic, not the mayor. And if he said what you did, it would be racist as well, regardless of their color, which is not a qualifier on the capability of being racist.
That is a cultural divide problem. Asian cultures value education so much more than North American culture so families have a large focus on ensuring their children are well educated (in spite of our education system) as they view that as their ticket to success.
If we in Western countries continue to eschew improvements to our education system, and even reduce the ability for students to access programs that provide them a proper education, then we will continue to fall further and further behind Asian countries in innovation and productivity. Instead we look at the few programs for students that thrive in spite of the system and kill them because it is cheaper than investing in bringing other students up to that level.
Not exactly. The optimal strategy is to make every kid do their best. That means giving some resources to every kid in proportion to how much better it'll make them.
We don't only excel because of our average performance. We also excel, as a society, because of the outlier contributions of some of our most gifted students.
This is one of those statements where you can feel the kindhearted rationale behind it, and sorta agree, but it is ultimately based on a false premise. It is absolutely true that only certain children are gifted. Otherwise, all education could be at the same level since no one stands out enough - good or bad - to require different approaches.
I think you are doing a massive disservice to the children who have a knack for some kind of knowledge/skill by trying to regress everyone to the mean so that no one feels left out. You might think, "this isn't a big deal, we're just shifting around definitions", but I know the push from "equity-minded education reformers" will not stop at mere terminology shifting.
Though I completely agree that not providing a track for these kids to go as fast as they can is wrong.
This characterization of "gifted" is so profoundly incorrect that I'm having trouble coming up with a concise explanation as to why.
I agree that the term is not the best, but... I think you may not be familiar with the full spectrum of abilities that "giftedness" implies.
From what I remember, the interview focused on pattern recognition. "Here's a picture: tell me what's wrong with it?" "Here's three shapes, which one of the others comes next?" Pattern recognition is considered a proxy for general intelligence, right or wrong.
I'm not sure why. A "gift" isn't something you've earned, it's something that was given to you. Seems accurate to me.
The thing is, education, especially public education, has to work for _everyone_. That means gifted and motivated STEM students, like most in this forum, on top of kids who would probably do better working the trades. Given the small pool of money in the US for public education, tradeoffs must be made to benefit the greatest number of students.
Is this true? My understanding is that the US spends large amounts on public education when compared to other industrialized nations.
I have only a surface level understanding, but this seems to suggest they spend the fourth largest amount: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
This conversation is regarding K-12 schooling, not K-12 and post-secondary.
Edit: I'm real dumb and looked at the table without reading the paragraph on top. Ignore and move past. HOW DO I DO STRIKETHROUGH ON HERE
I grew up in a ghetto and went to a school that ran classrooms in trailers and had dilapidated power delivery and sports facilities. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450844 for more depth.
It really doesn't make much sense to me to fund schools based off local property taxes. At the very least, it seems like they should go into some state-wide fund that is evenly distributed to schools.
Heh I'm trying to be careful to not prescribe any solutions here because I honestly don't have one. I have pretty mixed feelings on this post as a whole, because I'm trying to see it from both my own perspective and the perspective of others.
I think this is the big mistake that is bringing everyone down instead of building everyone up. There can never be one system that works for everyone, unless you force everyone to be exactly the same.
A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower.
I think there will always be really good and really bad students in every subject. The hard part is everyone else.
Does that mean we also get rid of IEP programs for the learning disabled?
What I mean to say is: when talking about education policy, think about aggregate outcomes. Not just the outcomes for yourself, your friends, or your cohort. You went to school and your general contractor went to school. Both of you should succeed.
[0]Why they 'need' to know it is another question.
===
Is school about bringing the best up or is it about educating the general populace? Public education in the US is about offering a minimum level of education and acculturation to students. It is _not_ about producing elites.
A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower.
===
> I may come across as an asshole for this but I don't really care, I think it's far better to reward the top percentage for trying than to throw them in the shitter with the kids that don't care at all and make them suffer 12 years of their youth learning worthless drivel far below their capabilities.
It's not about being an asshole. This is the danger of thinking about your own personal experiences. _You_ viewed the experience as drivel and far below your capabilities. But how does this affect the aggregate experience of students? For that matter, how does this affect the experience of elite students?
Punishing the top by forcing them to deal with all the problems of the bottom is the absolute dumbest way to try and improve the system. It's just going to make the talented people suffer for no benefit of the lower percentages.
Seems that'd benefit most students
If each class had two rooms, one silent "library room" and one where it was ok to talk a bit. And the students could choose freely.
Just that if they made noise in the silent room, a school janitor would have them go to the other room instead
And the fast students could get an unlimited supply of more and more harder and harder study books. Regardless of in which room they were. (Note that I didn't write "gifted" -- maybe some students get lots of things done, are comparatively fast, primarily because they work a lot.)
You have to speak from your own personal experiences when it comes to education. You did so yourself in other places in the thread despite your own warning. Everyone that went through the public school system in america has a bias because they experienced it personally. To attempt to ignore that experience and bias for some theoretical broader good is a farce.
The curricula was definitely far below my capabilities in K-12. However, what I care about here is not so much the capabilities, as much as it is to try and foster an environment of students that at least try compared to the kids that show up and are complete jackasses.
If we're really talking about aggregates, how would removing gifted programs possibly benefit the aggregate? How would the kid that would never be in a gifted program possibly benefit from the removal of said programs? The existence of the programs benefits elite students because it segregates them from idiots that don't care, regardless of the joke curriculum.
Society reaps greater benefit from its outliers. I am not sure starving them of education in the name of equality is the way to go for anything but mediocrity. A very fair mediocrity, mind you, but still mediocre.
And after all, we want equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, no matter what; to see any other result would be viewed as evidence of a systemic -ism. This is perhaps the reason behind the shuffle of the last few years from equality to equity.
There's a greater debate here about the gini coefficient and its effect on the economy and society, but I don't have an answer to this.
We are applying to private schools.
Even today, I am occasionally bullied for being engaged in a topic, and even as an adult I hate it - but I learned to live with.
I think there is a hard tendency towards trying to shrink whatever you are not able to understand - and correspondingly shrink your vis-a-vis, if they appear smarter than you.
I just never expected this to apply on such a massive scale.
I went to a "tier 2" school for exactly this reason and got a great merit scholarship deal, ivies didn't offer me shit because all their money is in "need-based" or diversity aid. Perversely, I qualify for "diversity" based scholarships that are restricted to some groups but I didnt think to apply, then my younger sister did and she got almost as much money as I did even though she wouldnt have qualified for the merit scholarships. Part of me is glad for her, but part of me is mad af about it.
There’s simply no need for merit based scholarships because they are affordable to anyone who can get in. ~50% of people at those schools pay full price, so their financial aid is not just some token program.
If you can get into an Ivy-tier school, it will almost certainly be more affordable than your local state school.
But top tier schools have extremely generous financial aid packages for students whose parents are not very high income, including any reasonable definition of middle class.
I was a so-called gifted child and it honestly made me feel sick and guilty. “Do I really deserve this? Am I really gifted? What if I don’t reach my high expectations, will the rest of my life be a disappointment?”
I know that others have similar feelings. Being called gifted and special messes with your psyche almost like being called inferior.
But also, whenever a kid is easily completing all of his work so it’s just busy work to him, he should get harder work. Otherwise you’re wasting their time.
There are kids who spend all their time on schoolwork, literally have no exercise or social life, and yet their grades suck and they’re not even smart because their “homework” and “studying” is rote memorization and garbage. I feel really bad for those kids.
My idealistic recommendation for his education should work is this: give each student work until they learn, then give them harder work. Also let students have some choice over the type of work, and try to make problems as interesting as possible, while still making sure each student gets a general education and learns important key details. Each student spends X amount of time on schoolwork, like a full-time job, then they have other activities and free time. Some students will get more work done in the same time period, and advance further. Once the students grow up, they know what academic path or career they should take based on how far they’ve progressed.
Call it something different fine but tracking is tracking.
>whenever a kid is easily completing all of his work so it’s just busy work to him, he should get harder work. Otherwise you’re wasting their time.
Agreed. The most efficient way to do this is not to have every teacher running multiple teaching levels within each class. It is to take all those kids who are completing the work early and getting bored, and putting them all on one teacher who can run a single lesson that matches their ability.
You're just asking for a gifted program that's done individually instead of in batches - same thing but infeasibly expensive.
This isn't something that impacts every student, and most students won't come out and say that they feel this way, especially not to their peers. It's like depression or anxiety. People don't often come out and say, "I feel depressed and have constant negative thoughts and suffer from suicidal ideation." They keep it to themselves for fear of how they will be perceived if they admit they don't belong or feel that they don't belong.
This is not a direct problem of gifted programs or gifted kids — it’s a problem of unreasonable expectations about what gifted means.
It’s not an issue of “deserving” anything. Being gifted is as much a curse as a blessing. Furthermore, being gifted is typically negatively correlated with success in aggregate (average income decreases as iq increases past about 140-150 or so).
There is an idea that occasionally bounces around (iirc, I first read it in the book Greatness in grad school) that folks with a certain IQ differential (+/-20 to +/-30 is the range I usually see) fundamentally perceive the world in a different way. This often leads to communication breakdown since two people can be talking about the same thing from very different baselines.
The beauty of gifted programs, imho, is that you are able to put together these people who perceive the world very differently than most of their peers.
On a personal level, this was incredibly calming. All of a sudden, not only was my perspective on the world not unique, but my peers were able to extend and expand on my perspectives. Furthermore, I was able to reciprocate. Most/all of my peers (we had a separate high school) felt the same, and we intensely missed that environment after leaving high school despite many of us going to very elite schools.
Gifted programs, when done well, are a great place for genius to develop and grow. Forcing these gifted kids into classes with few or no gifted peers is, to me, like capping the high-end potential of your society.
Complete no-brainer.
Fair should be taken to refer to economics, not IQ.
It's unfair that some dunces don't get to go into a gifted program, but economic inequality would only come into pay if they could pay their way in anyway; and their presence there then would be definitely unfair.
In any case, everyone should be clear about what they mean by fair, otherwise you engage in unproductive talking past one another or even equivocation.
Low-income students are historically underrepresented in gifted programs. "our estimates suggest that a student in the top SES quintile is about twice as likely to receive gifted services as a student in the lowest SES quintile in the same school who is achieving at similar levels in math and reading." [https://www.nagc.org/blog/low-income-students-are-profoundly...]
Further, "[The] Second [factor to being identified as gifted] is attending a wealthier school: Children who attend Title I schools are identified at only 58% the rate of those who attend Non-Title I schools." [https://www.education.purdue.edu/geri/new-publications/gifte...]
Anyone connected to TAG programs believes we need to do better at identifying the students from low-income backgrounds (and minority backgrounds, but I don't have those links saved on my computer).
The problem is, that would take massive resource re-allocation from wealthy to poor districts. That is something that no one is willing to talk about, let alone follow through on.
Therefore, it's easier to say we need to eliminate them, because it's not fair that someone has access to them and others don't.
It's smoke and mirrors to avoid the real problem.
And about this article in particular.
>Look at the success of special needs education.
What success? They cite nothing to back up that sentence. Are SpEd students more successful than they were before IEP's?
>Public schools are more than capable of providing different educational experiences for different children.
There is a broad and vast difference than being able to provide something in theory, and not actually being able to do it because of funding. My experience in public education is that many things are tracked into a 'warehouse' style because it's cheaper and the budget won't support the number of teachers and aides required for true in-class differentiation.
And finally, this is an old argument presented as if it is brand new. I believe it's done for attention. Not really sure why this would be 'policy' now. Is there a big, new push to eliminate TAG programs that I don't know about?
There is a push in CA to eliminate learning tracks entirely:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/04/californ...
I dont know what the magnet / charter / private school situation is like in CA, but public schools at least seem like they may start catering only to the lowest common denominator.
It’s plainly obvious that Blacks and Asians have physical and culture differences.
Many people just can’t get over with Asian students’ academic success, at the same time totally forget Black students are dominating in athletics. It’s totally fine for them to see no Asians in major sports, but immediately unacceptable when there are “too many” Asians in science and engineering. If this is not racism, I don’t know what is.
Overall I think there's a lot to be said for removing 'gifted' classes from elementary schools. Start in middle school ( 6th grade here ) and have advanced classes in each subject for students who qualify. It removes the connotation of 'gifted' and allows room for kids to excel in a single subject. I know a lot of bright kids who did _not_ get into the gifted class and I'm not sure it's fair to make them feel like academic failures at the age of 8.
Also, even at 8 there's competition. It's not hard to get study guides for the GATE tests.
That said, there are a lot of advantages to being in the gifted classroom that it would be hard to extend to every class. There's always going to be below average kids as well as above average kids - in the gifted classes they can move rapidly and not worry about leaving anyone behind.
You also get more involved parents with higher expectations. I had a parent in a 'regular' class say to me "Wow, you get a lot of communication from your teacher! Ours never tells us anything but <shrug> the kids seem happy". That wouldn't fly in the gifted class.
It's hard. I don't know what the answer is
Yes if the parents push for it, there will be competition. It's usually not the poor child's idea to start cramming for IQ tests when he's 8. Sounds fun though...let them deal with crushing anxieties and feelings of inadequacy as soon as they're 8!
No need to go to war against the US when they are content killing themselves.
That's the moral of Harrison Bergeron.
"And when everyone's super, no one will be."
Public schooling, without the proper funding, is useless. Rich people using private schools to avoid "bad schools" makes society less healthy for everyone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/America%27s_Future_Fou...
Surely we can find an article from an organization with less dirty money involved.
For those who interested who might not know about it, the 18th Chopin Competition is being held in Warsaw. Final result will be announced later this evening CET. Recordings on the site and on YT.
Agreed.
> gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs
Does anyone have a solution for this?
I think you could get a sufficiently gifted class just from splitting kids who gave a crap about school and those who have parents who viewed it as daycare and kids who viewed it as a place to be unruly.
> Does anyone have a solution for this?
I hardly remember my gifted program at all, but I thought it was just taking the students with the best grades. Isn't that basically the point of grades?
Maybe my school just implemented it poorly.
Some parents pay hundreds of dollars an hour for tutoring for their kids (as young as 4 years old) to score well on the gifted and talented tests.
And it works. (To an extent. I imagine such tutoring could bring a student in the 85th percentile into the 95th percentile, for example)
As a result the program favors kids whose parents have more money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28798337 (Oct 8) [260 comments]
> Families that can afford to, will switch schools in order to ensure that their children are still challenged in the classroom.
Locally funded schools have spawned this issue but from what I've seen families are pretty reluctant to actually pick up and move frequently to keep up with shifting educational programs - they will happily exploit cross-county enrollment if it's available with though.
Most cities have several private schools. You usually don't need to move you home to move your children to a new school.
We would have seriously considered private school for our gifted children if the public school hadn't offered it.
Just look at silicon valley. Few schools there, if not none, have gifted programs. The result? Tutoring schools pop up left and right. Families with means simply find good tutors or tutoring programs for their kids. RMS? check. AOPS? Check. Singapore Math? Check. Thinking Academy? Check. Private programs for STEM experiments and projects? Check. Creative writing? Check. Critical writing? Check.
Do the left really think that removing gifted programs will hinder the overachievers in the valley? Do they really think that the engineers, among whom more than 30% are PhDs, can't tutor and inspire their kids (if they have talent) with top-quality resources? But what about the poor kids in China town? What about this really talent kid whose parents struggle to have ends meet? Those who have talent but don't have means suffer. So much for so-called progressive social justice.
I think it would make sense to just let anyone join these programs, and make it difficult enough where students who aren't a good fit wouldn't want to join.
You're much more likely to go to day care or kindergarten with someone who will end up behind bars for robbery, compared to the likelihood of being in a Master's Degree program with someone who will end up behind bars for robbery.
Identifying gifted kids is just an early boost in this separation, which they need in order to have the best environment.
I think you fill find that if someone is opposed to gifted programs, what underlies it is that what they cannot stomach the separation.
Education is linked to economics; the social separation is related to the economic divide.
It boils down to: "Thou shalt not propel little people toward the prosperous side of the economic divide".
Because they regard it as a zero sum game. If some kid is put into a gifted program which improves their economic future, someone will surely end up losing because of that, and so it is a sin against Social Justice (regardless of whether that kid is rich or poor today).
With that out of the way, I support tracking, but not the broad brush tracking that is done today. There are a few kids who could advance very quickly if tracked. The rest should be thrown in with everybody else, with resources given to the kids who have little home support to help them not fall behind. There is nothing challenging about the pace of current high tracks, and everybody without a learning disability should be able to keep up.
I will be a big supporter of the right to private education going forward, there needs to be a backup in case public education goes to the shitter (as it has here).
All the debate for/against gifted programs fall into the same trap of not thinking critically enough about the pedagogical model that powers pretty much all of our education from childhood through higher ed. IMO, we're only debating about the symptoms of a outdated pedagogical model, and not talking enough about the underlying problem -- the factory model of education.
I believe it’s irresponsible to try to achieve equality by holding back those who could do better. It makes no sense to handicap athletes to such an extent that I could participate. It makes more sense to me to support those with natural talents so that we can all benefit from their achievements.
If you take away the gifted program, does anything change? Maybe. Maybe the gifted kids don't do as well. Maybe they do. Education is a tricky thing. Does leaving the gifted program in hurt anyone? Yeah, it probably hurts the same people that are hurt by the private school system. So where do we stand?
My city offers free tap water at a spot accessible to everyone (i.e. picnic water fountain at a park). But I still purchase bottled water.
Regardless, kids of today can use the internet to find the info they are looking for.
Is it fair to give each person the same level of material and expectations?
Is it fair to help each person where they are at do the best they can at what they want to or are most capable of going after?
These are mutually exclusive. What is fair, who gets to decide, and why?
We need to have conversations about this in depth.
>"If critical thinking were an important part of early educations, kids would care about it."
I challenge this because teaching critical thinking to kids is in no way a new concept. Educators have been teaching critical thinking skills for ages - even the Ancient Greeks tried to teach this stuff to their kids. I think the GP is right in saying that most people don't actually care to do much critical thinking. Not a lot of people actively want to challenge their own worldviews and deeply held beliefs - no matter how many tools you give them to enable that mindset.
I clearly remember the first time a teacher attempted to grill us about our critical thinking. It was a 10th grade World History teacher who didn't just want us to have the correct answer to a question, but he also demanded that we explain how we arrived at the answer. It's the first time that any teacher outside of a math class asked us to "show our work," and it changed a lot of kids' lives for the better.
Is this a claim that all individuals have the same amount of talent, potential, and intelligence?
In fact the only MIT admit from our class was a girl from the local neighborhood. She was about as privileged as a polar bear in India. But her talent showed through nonetheless.
As the child of an engineer and a dentist, I would have been fine without that program. What about her?
I have two children, one is 19 and one 16. My mom is a math professor and oversaw both of their math educations. My 19 year old went through an essentially "gen pop" middle tier of education through high school, really struggled with math and some really unfortunate circumstances (small high school in a remote location) prevented her from taking calculus in high school (they actually started the section, then killed it, and looking around, made her re-take algebra 2, which devastated her confidence). She and is now thriving in college and crushing her logic course, so as long as we don't tell her it's math, she's doing great.
My 16 yo son is so far ahead in high school that he's going to run out of math classes at the local community college before he graduates high school (he's also in debate and plays tennis and writes his own drone swarming programs for fun). But we actually had to homeschool him before the pandemic, where my math prof mom got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. I'm fairly certain that if he didn't have the advanced math opportunities (we now live in the heart of Silicon Valley) he would be setting things on fire and skipping school out of sheer boredom (because that's exactly what my friends and I did in Kansas 30 years ago).
You want the local public schools to be well-funded and attract talented teachers, but presumably the rich would have exercised their connections to defund public schools entirely already, so why hasn't the bottom dropped out everywhere?
There is, fortunately, a balancing effect: private schools tend to be small, so they tend to lack the depth of resources larger public school districts can afford. Yes, the private school performance peak may be right-shifted a bit through selection, but the private schools can't afford the range that the public schools can. You want auto shop, Latin, and SDEs? Good luck getting that at the local parochial high school.
The problem is really in the South, where centuries of racism is baked into every corner of the law. There, the public schools weren't so much defunded as they were never funded, because the blacks couldn't vote back in the day and are now overwhelmingly poor and functionally disenfranchised. The whites send their kids to a subset of private or highly selective high schools which are moderately constrained by size, and the blacks send their kids to a different set of public high schools, where the extreme lack of resources renders school as an essentially poorly attended day care with atrocious graduation rates. Rich white Northerners might be shocked, but I've raised school-age kids in New Orleans and Virginia, and my wife worked in the public schools while our kids went to both private schools. These are not controversial opinions in the South, they are statements of fact.
The Southern states send legislators to Congress to influence national policy, and unshockingly, they fight tooth and nail to send public education dollars to charter schools, church schools, whatever non-public schools their kids went to.
This creates the perception that this is about haves and have-nots. Yes, it is. And in private, the good-ol-boys will tell you that, if they trust you to keep your mouth shut.
But the issue is not solved by doing away with gifted programs. The issue is addressed by defunding private schools and expanding enrollment in public schools. I want the height of the performance curve at the 4th standard deviation of the public school system to be higher than the peak of the private schools.
Also: teachers don't always love private schools. The principals can by tyrants with little supervision, and the pay can be brutally low. But they hope it's a chance to make connections, so they bear it.
Of course this doesn't invalidate their arguments on gifted programs, but I found the background interesting.
Doesn't this argument in fact show us why maybe something like this is necessary?? If a single curriculum private school is the answer for these rich parents when the public school drops GT programs, then the system is already not "equitable." It paints this picture that GT is already a compromise "we will put more resources into kids... but only if they deserve it." Because presumably, that's all they can afford.
This shows at the end of the day its just about money, and we are already settled that we wont give public schools at large the money that they need, so we set up little challenges and give resources to those kids that show merit rather than on some kind of principled serious pedagogy (and that is not even getting into the fact, as the writer again notes, that this "merit" that is calculated is based off of standardized tests, which are incredibly fraught with problems and conflicts of interest in themselves, but more importantly are hugely profitable private companies with incredible lobbying power, and we should maybe ask why this part of the equation isn't really talked about in these conversations).
If the writer wants to respect, as they say, that everyone learns differently, it seems to me that the answer is to remove merit based GT programs and put money into education in general, for everyone. Also abolishing standardized testing.
As it reads like you want to mock and shame kids who do well in school (which I hope wasn’t your intent).
Not at all.. That was the opposite fo my intent.
I believe names like 'talented and gifted' actually make it out so that the kid's hard work is not appreciated and recognized. I hoped that 'studied harder's would indicate that the reason the kids were in this course is because they worked hard, and that anyone could achieve what they did if they too worked hard enough.
IME, as a 'talented and gifted' kid, a lot of people chocked up my success to innate talent, while they slacked off and explained away their slacking off as 'Oh well I'm just not as naturally smart as iammisc..'. I don't believe labeling children as innately gifted is a useful thing. Any child can accomplish these advanced HS / middle school courses with hard work. This is not particularly difficult material.
In another comment, I changed my suggestion to 'high achievers'. Sorry I'm not great at coming up with new names on the spot.
This kind of thinking, which is getting more common every day, make us smile when it's done by children. When it's adults however, it's absolutely terrifying to me.
We're not talking about asking TAG students to develop a new version of string theory. We're asking them to ingest already discovered information and apply it. The idea that this requires innate intelligence is just silly. Anyone can be trained to do these things. Those who work harder will be able to get into these courses.
What I find dangerous is the attribution of all material differences between people to genetics/predisposition. This thinking leads to the end of meritocracy, and even the celebration of achievement.
The simple truth is that some topics will require more time and effort to acquire skills and knowledge in for some people. Math, science and reading were stupid easy for me, but some of my friends struggled with those while blowing my somatic and creative skills (painting, singing, acting, shop classes) out of the water.
Neither of us should be held back from accelerated learning and practice in the topics we excelled at.
You might as well argue everyone can run the same speed for the same amount of time. If you haven't observed this yourself, I would think you've probably just travelled through life in very homogeneous social circles.
Ignorance is different from intelligence. For example, it's highly unlikely Aristotle knew what maize was. That doesn't make him stupid. Just ignorant of certain things that he hadn't experienced.
Actually, this is an interesting point. I am also a great piano player. Many people chock this up to innate skill, when they hear me as an adult.
It's not. I just worked insanely hard at piano practice. In fact, I was a well below average piano student. My teachers were often frustrated with me, and other students were much better. However, those students are now much worse than I am. It's because in high school and middle school, I spent hours upon hours at the piano, and now I can play better.
For example, I can play very well by ear, and pump out a piece without much practice now. People think this is due to some innate talent. People ask if I have perfect pitch, was a musical prodigy, etc. I was not a prodigy, and I do not have perfect pitch (in fact I often failed the aural portion of my piano exams). What I do have is an absolutely insane number of hours that I practiced, publicly and privately, to make up for what I perceived as a deficiency.
I do not believe in innate intelligence, at least not in the general case. I believe in exceptional circumstances. For example, Mozart started playing very young and was in a very musical family. In retrospect, had my parents been more musical, I think I would have been 'better' at the piano early on, because several discoveries about music I made later on would have been inculcated in me earlier.
So in general, I reject the idea of 'innate' ability. Those that have 'innate' ability often only appear to have it. In reality, they worked insanely hard.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...
>Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
>Does one have to be a genius to do mathematics?
>The answer is an emphatic NO. In order to make good and useful contributions to mathematics, one does need to work hard, learn one’s field well, learn other fields and tools, ask questions, talk to other mathematicians, and think about the “big picture”. And yes, a reasonable amount of intelligence, patience, and maturity is also required. But one does not need some sort of magic “genius gene” that spontaneously generates ex nihilo deep insights, unexpected solutions to problems, or other supernatural abilities.
>The popular image of the lone (and possibly slightly mad) genius – who ignores the literature and other conventional wisdom and manages by some inexplicable inspiration (enhanced, perhaps, with a liberal dash of suffering) to come up with a breathtakingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts – is a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one, at least in the world of modern mathematics. We do have spectacular, deep and remarkable results and insights in this subject, of course, but they are the hard-won and cumulative achievement of years, decades, or even centuries of steady work and progress of many good and great mathematicians; the advance from one stage of understanding to the next can be highly non-trivial, and sometimes rather unexpected, but still builds upon the foundation of earlier work rather than starting totally anew. (This is for instance the case with Wiles‘ work on Fermat’s last theorem, or Perelman‘s work on the Poincaré conjecture.)
By writing my comment I meant that a serious talent is not enough
Also:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/
>Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but, generally speaking, at the graduate level or higher it doesn’t.
>One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics; contrary to public opinion, mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by “Eureka” moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work, directed of course by experience and intuition. (See also “the cult of genius“.)
Not the same thing. Orthogonal, in point of fact. You can have both gifted and non-gifted who work hard or do not work hard.
Some people are just born stronger, or with more energy, or with more social skill. Some people are just quicker about patterns and facts. And some people are unflagging about whatever they put their mind to.
The idea that a program should only be for those with 'innate' intelligence is silly. In fact, the name of the program is why it's controversial and being targeted by these groups. Instead, the group should be renamed to indicate that it's for anyone that wants to achieve.
For example, 'high achievers' or something. Anyone is capable of doing these classes. This is not some advanced theoretical physics / mathematics course.
That's not what's happening in NYC, but, it sounds like a good idea.
While we're fantasizing about alternatives, I think we should stop having traditional classes altogether, and have them be ongoing modules. In traditional classes, they last 2 or 3 months, the teacher has a specific tempo of imparting information, and everyone is expected to absorb it at the same rate. But that's not true. People absorb the information differently. Kids who are slower in the topic don't have time to get it, and kids who are quicker in the topic have to wait around until the class ends for everyone. Or maybe some kids struggle, then suddenly "get it", but because they struggled at first, their grade suffers.
Let's decouple "demonstrate mastery" from "specific amount of time". Have an ongoing module. The teacher is there to help you understand a specific, limited topic. If you're quick on the uptake for that topic and can "demonstrate mastery" in two months, or a day, whatever, let's move you on to the next topic post haste. If you struggle with it, hang around until it clicks, no shame. If your life is going to shit for some reason and you need a break, no big deal, take a break, and come back when you're ready. It does not have to affect your grade because there is no conveyor belt along which all kids must move together, come hell or high-water.
That way the smart kids - hard-working, innately intelligent, prodigy, privileged, whatever explanation you prefer - can speed along as quick as they please. The kids who struggle can get the extra time they need to master the topic.
After they demonstrate mastery of the core program - those basics that all civilized people are expected to know - the kids can leave, no matter how early they got through it. Maybe they can apply to college, or get a job if they're old enough. Or maybe the school offers more advanced courses like multivariate calculus or novel-writing or whatever.