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?
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...
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Dumbest fucking idea ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/conscientiousness-to...
The irony here is that I first learned the Logo language in one of these enrichment programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.