The war on gifted education
fasterplease.substack.com
fasterplease.substack.com
What I needed was not just higher level reading, but content catered to someone 5 years younger than the usual age group for that reading. I needed help writing fast enough to keep up.
Because grade school curriculum came easily and I could ‘figure out’ everything, I hit a wall when stuff got genuinely difficult or required significant work. What I needed was to learn how to put forth effort to do things that were hard or required work for desired output. I needed help socializing because I didn’t relate to people my age and was too inexperienced to engage people who were on my intellectual level as peers.
I needed help creating because the standards for myself were so high. Not exceeding those standards always felt like failure
My 2nd grader can burn through material from the first half of the year. But current material... good luck getting her to do it. Difficult work makes people uncomfortable, and most young kids don't like being uncomfortable.
With traditional schools all the kids are throw together. This results in kids who lag behind to further lag behind because they can't keep up with the class and lose confidence in themselves. A kid who is ahead gets bored and lose interest in school and never gets challenged to maintain that independence.
The idea that you should interact so much with your peers is kind of strange to be honest. Is it really healthy for kids to interact regularly with their peers? I'd argue it's much better for children to interact with adults. Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
And historically, kids were cared for in quite large variety of setting. And quite a lot of those were not romantic at all.
You're either ignoring history, or assume that people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way... Sure kids can learn from each other, and in a healthy way, but the structures that we have in place to foster that (universal public school) are fairly new in the grand scheme of things...
I think the phrase "[the kid has] stunted social and emotional intelligence" hides a lot of nuance. The more useful rephrasing might be: "this person's ability to relate to people and navigate complex social interactions, particularly in the culture in which they were raised, is below average".
The important takeaway is what matters most is your ability to handle social interactions with peers.
> people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way
"Emotionally damaged" is a very culturally relative term. If you transported people from 150 years ago to the present day many would be considered "emotionally damaged" by modern standards even though they were functional people in their own time. This is because social intelligence is measured against a person's lived context.
Coming back to homeschool - many home schooled kids have not had the same level of socialization as their peers in schools. That lack of socialization causes a negative feedback loop where more socialized kids don't want to interact with the homeschooled kids leading to the homeschooled kid being even more under socialized. The window of opportunity to effectively intervene when this process starts is short and when parents fail to act I have seen it cause decades of suffering for their kids.
1. The current age of your child 2. How much less socialization they're getting than their peers 3. Their natural proclivities towards socialization
Socialization starts becoming important around ages 2-3. Points 2 and 3 being equal, the size of window expands as children age. Isolating your child about 6 months between 3.5 and 4 could cause a potentially permanent setback if not actively addressed. By age 12 a year of isolation is probably around the limit before rapid action is necessary.
A major caveat to these guidelines is they don't really apply during COVID. While the reduced socialization for children is probably not good for them, lots of children are being under socialized and so your child can likely still find peers at similar socialization levels to interact with and not fall into the feedback cycle.
Infrequent contact with other kids can open the door to social anxiety and awkwardness as they grow. Not to mention, it's cruel. Kids are social beings too and they don't get their rocks off listening to adults talk down to them.
But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.
When the word "resource" gets thrown around at companies and they obviously mean a human being, it peeves me. I will never use that word when referring to a person. When I'm involved in a conversation where someone uses it, I always ask for clarity that they mean a person, employee, contractor, candidate, etc.
I know it's just a word, but calling people resources makes it seem like they are nothing more than something to be expended and used. And maybe that is the case, but I don't think it should be encouraged and perpetuated.
It's Bob. You mean Bob. You want to change the project Bob is on. Have we talked to Bob about it?
I always see takes like this but it just strikes me as a Conspiracy theory. We can easily get to the modern US education system via poorly thought out incentives and incompetence. You don't need malicious actors to get there. I would be curious if you had evidence to support a claim like this?
To the downvoters: Do you honestly believe there is a Cabal in the US Government who sit in a room and say "Yes we must crush gifted students and make sure our education system is terrible so we have more drones for the factory/work force/military??
Of course intent matters which is why we make distinctions between things like Manslaughter and Murder, and OP was explicitly stating that this system was very much intentionally built to have the outcomes they described.
I see that claim often, but never any evidence of it. I do see a lot of evidence of imposing political and/or religious views on the students. Everybody wants to shape the students into their own image. Hence all the fights over the curriculum.
Unless you want to say that this isn't skilled work and it can be done by anyone with no training. In this case: why do you think that?
Obviously, every kid has different needs and every parent has limits on how much they can be present during school hours but putting kids in traditional public school doesn't have to be a passive experience of surrender to the state.
Having a handful of solid adult role models is key, but a lot of social skills are learned by trial and error, and it’s way more helpful when you’re learning those alongside others who are also figuring it out, that’s also how new ideas and new cultural zeitgeists are created, by challenging old concepts and not having the baggage of the old way of doing things.
Obviously there’s pitfalls with taking all your social cues from hormone riddled peers, but it’s a trial I think everyone needs to go through to prepare them on how to socialize with the world at large.
Although it seems to have stopped mattering once I got to the "adult" world, where whether one is 30 or 80, there is a fairly standard template for treating and dealing with people.
It was a relief to stop being in a stratified age driven hierarchy.
I am also terrible at code switching (I fit in better in the college classes while homeschooled than I ever did in public school, for whatever that is worth). And always have been. And I don't see it as a problem, since the implication that it's beneficial in a given context implies that context isn't diverse or inclusive, and thus I want out of it, not to conform to it.
Youth examples:
- You may swear in conversations with peers, but you should not in conversations with people higher in the hierarchy.
- When people ask "how are you?", they are not genuinely asking in most cases. It is just a greeting. But there are exceptions like your grandmother and a teacher you have not seen in years, but are close to.
Adult examples:
- You can tell a rich person about your great vacation, but not a poor person. If you have a high paying job, you are expected to be happy when talking to a person who earns less than you do.
- Random men (I am also a man) will find it completely appropriate to start a conversation with you discussing the body parts of a nearby woman. It has happened enough times that otherwise successful people view it as an appropriate way to start a conversation on a train. Pretty sure they do not do that with non-peers/women as it is pretty creepy.
- For a more comic take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tms0yk9kqVM. Basically the war should not be mentioned by a Brit to a German, but you can mention the war to another Brit.
For an extreme example, note how you raise the pitch of your voice, and use very simple language when talking to a toddler.
I'll admit to bias because of the homeschoolers I've met, who seemed much more relaxed and able to be forthcoming in discussions, rather than 'act'.
They’d also have a fair amount of siblings and cousins, the children of hired help, and entire village’s worth of other children to interact with. And depending on the era, a fair amount of absenteeism when it comes to actual parenting. So having peers of your age was both common, historically encouraged (stories of childhood friends abound), and important in establishing your place inside your community.
That being said, they were exposed to more adults on a daily basis, and integrated more into the life of adults. Particularly, they were exposed to the daily lives of adults at work. Which I think is a large part of helping to influence a child’s growth.
Childhood as we know it now is also a modern concept — the switch from childhood to adult was more child > young adult who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, rather than our modern child > adolescent > young adult path. (Edit because I hit submit too early). Childhood as also being an experience of being sequestered from the outside world is also modern.
> They’d also have a fair amount of siblings and cousins, the children of hired help, and entire village’s worth of other children to interact with.
There's no reason to think that what we did historically is somehow better. We've made many changes for very good reasons - apropos to our conversation, universal schooling and literacy - and I hope to keep moving forward!
If we mean it as evidence of how we evolved, then working on farms certainly isn't it. We evolved as nomadic hunter-gatherers, over ~200,000 years as homo sapiens, and over millions of years as our homo ancestors (I believe our line separated from chimps about 7 million years ago). Farming is a recent hack!
This is hugely missing nowadays.
The average honors students have grown up the happiest by far. They got great jobs, cheated on exams, got drunk on weekends. Personally, I should have studied less I think and been a little more dishonest like them.
All this bullshit over education - what a waste.
Tiger parents excel at raising miserable soulless kids. It's no wonder they grow up angry, resentful, or just fail out and become the black sheep of the family.
Tired of reading articles like this and the corresponding threads.
Oh yes. Social skills are vitally important. You have to learn those by doing.
> Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
I don't think that's even true. I think historically kids were told to go away/be quiet until they were old enough to be productive.
I also think that we're producing better socialized kids these days.
The thing is that everyone hits that wall at some point. Some just hit it later than others. But I agree that acceleration should only ever occur in a context of learning for mastery - if complete mastery is not attained in the "easy" subjects, pushing through the 'wall' of the actually challenging ones is way too difficult.
I had to drop AP Calc for another class to get my required English credit that semester. It was astoundingly basic. “Circle the right word” worksheets with “Joe [is/are] an astronaut.” I would do the work and pass out at my desk. The other students would slide the paper out from under my arm and copy my answers.
I hit that wall my freshman year at Caltech. What a disaster. All my strategies of effortless A's blew up in my face. I'd get comments like "I really should fail you, but I'm going to give you a break." At the end of first semester of sophomore year, I had to come to grips with solving this or leaving.
After that, each semester came easier and easier, as I learned how to learn.
I'm so glad freshman year was pass/fail, as my execrable performance that year did not affect my final GPA. I also am indebted to several people who freely gave the gift of their time to help me out.
(I never would have succeeded with remote learning.)
MIT had the same policy when I was there, and I felt the same way about it: I needed that year to at least get started developing the study habits I didn't have to develop in high school.
Parents: Make sure you're kids can write before they get out of high school because it's a crucial skill
And not just writing: he made us perform Shakespeare. Really handy when you're interviewed on TV and have two minutes to summarize your book. Or when you're invited to do a keynote speech at a conference.
Yep, I learned to code in 1965 (assembler & Fortran II on our high school's IBM-1620). Learned calculus, organic chem, and basic electronics as well. But nothing came close to three years of terrific (and challenging) high school English classes.
I remember kids in school complaining about math, "we're never going to use this!" Analyzing ancient literature is something you're actually never going to use.
Ancient literature, yes, but there are a frightening amount of people who could deal with a reintroduction to ideas like 'unreliable narrators' in the age of social media.
Just like any particular math course, you probably won't use your analysis of ancient literature directly. But school isn't training; it's not about learning direct skills, like a training course in a new application at work. It's about learning how to think critically, using may different tools, and about learning about the world.
By analyzing ancient literature, you gain several things: You gain ability in thinking critically about texts - possibly the most essential skill in a post-truth Internet world where we are deluged by texts of varying intentions and truth. You gain skill in writing, by studying how the best authors before you wrote. And not least, you gain exposure to a culture and ideas far outside your own, giving you context and perspective on humanity and on your own culture and ideas.
They probably aren't going to use it, which is why their investments in lottery tickets don't turn out well :-(
I remember hiring a contractor to build an elliptical patio of a certain size. He staked it out, and soon a couple pallets of pavers appeared on the driveway. Something didn't look right. So I measured the major and minor axis of the ellipse, and computed the area. It was 30% smaller than the contracted amount. I then did a little math on the pavers. 30% fewer than was needed.
So I was being overbilled by nearly half.
I asked the contractor about the discrepancy, and he apologized for the "mistake" (ya right) and the bill was adjusted.
I bet the contractor noticed over time that he could shrink the size of the work, and the customer wouldn't notice. So he'd shrink it more for the next customer, and so on, till it got to a whopping 30%.
But if I didn't know high school math, I would never have determined I was being way overbilled.
It would have been so much better to hit that wall as a kid.
This was, to me, the greatest benefit of being put in a gifted program in 3rd grade. I was so used to everything being easy that I cried at home that I had homework taking longer than 10 minutes that I actually had to concentrate on. I asked my dad to go back to the regular program, and he said I should stick it out for at least another month. I did, and learned how to work through things that seemed challenging at first.
The experience of having to put forth effort early(ish) in my life set me up far better for dealing with life later, because I learned how to push past things that were uncomfortable instead of giving up (i.e. "grit" became a part of my psyche when it was still pretty flexible).
I probably could have learned this lesson in other ways, but the fact that it's one of my clearest childhood memories certainly speaks to the impact it had on my life. And I know plenty of friends whose first experience needing to put effort happened in college, and things seemed a lot harder for them emotionally.
I hit that when I was 35yo. Oh boy it was difficult: you've been breezing through the life, and suddenly hit a brick wall.
Btw, any tips for how to learn how to put forth effort to do things that require work for desired output? If they're "just" hard, curiosity tends to do well, but effort other than trying to grasp new concepts is surprisingly hard to bring forth...
I skipped a bunch of grades, got into MIT but went to a local college at 13 (who lets their 13-year-old live in a college dorm?), ended up working for a bit then going back to school with my peers.
If I could do it again I'd have taken _breadth_ instead of depth. Finished high school math? Good for me, now grab a third language. Bored in school? Off to a foreign country to learn by immersion. No courses left undone? Take six months and see if I can realize my dream of making the national team in my sport, etc.
Going deep is very risky. Eventually you end up at the end of the easy path of coursework and classes and are in the same place as everyone else (just a year or two earlier). Unless you're absolutely, positively sure that that specific area is where you want to spend the rest of your life, that head start wins nothing enduring.
I knew a 13 year old going to a local college in Bryn Mawr/Haverford, but I don't think he was attending either of those prestigious colleges.
I don't recall his name (this was nearly 30 years ago) and I wondered what happened to him.
Reading these comments it sounds like a lot of people feel like you do about acceleration being an issue.
For me, I was both Gifted and Learning Disabled, and both programs were unprepared for the issues of someone who was both very smart but also had significant learning issues.
It was very difficult. :(
Honestly I don't think any "program" is truly prepared to meet the needs of anybody at all. It was difficult for me, too, but I think striving, suffering, etc are all human conditions that we all experience regardless of how we get there. "Gifted" and "Learning Disabled" programs exist for the benefit of normalizing behavior and capabilities that are farther outside the curve. That they existed when we were young is merely a testament to a collective desire for general cohesiveness.
I was extremely lucky and privileged to go to school that catered to LD and LD/Gifted students. Sadly while the school is still there, they've changed focus to other types of students, namely Autistic students.
While Autistic students are certainly important, seeing the niche I was in having one less resource makes me sad.
Sounds like the premise for an American Pie movie.
Though it looks like he's 15, not 13.
I almost think it is because our entire view of education is conflated with a type of sporting event. You were one of the grand champions of this sporting event even though obviously it would have just made sense to learn more. Instead it is this weird sporting event race and the concept of learning more just isn't part of objective of the game.
I only skipped one grade and still felt isolated from other kids sometimes. I can’t imagine how you’d feel! As a parent I’d personally rather let my kid have a somewhat normal childhood than maximize their intellectual potential if that meant sending a 13yr old to college.
The fundamental issue is that some kids learn faster than others, so that if you want gifted kids to be around other kids their own age while still being challenged, you need to draw from a large region and cluster them together in one place. The most gifted children will have to be the most clustered. If you needed to go to MIT to be challenged, that is because of a lack of gifted education.
Separately, I think we should be very skeptical of the idea that a good default path for kids is to spend most days surrounded by kids within 12 months of their age. This sort of schooling has only been widespread for roughly a century; for the vast majority of history kids grew up with a much broader range of ages around them. I agree that getting thrown into a college dorm at 13 might be very bad, but I find spending all day with other 13 year olds to also be very bad.
It is likely to depend on the child and what they would do well in.
Can you elaborate on your experience? What's MIT like as a 13 year old? Did you ever live in the dorms?
I did not have this experience; a commenter upthread did. I was very lucky and had the opportunity to go to a good middle school and highly accelerated high school (Thomas Jefferson HSST in Virginia). But, knowing what I know about normal middle/high schools and MIT dorms, I would have rather gone to the latter than the former if those were my options.
One of the kids who attended full time tried to transfer to CalTech after two years, and they rejected him, told him he wasn't well rounded enough. So he joined every club on campus and ran for President of every single one. Most did not let him because he was only 15, a few did. CalTech still rejected him. He ended up graduating from state school and going to grad school a few years later at an Ivy League school, having basically missed out on the entire undergrad experience.
I on the other hand got to do all the normal "high school" stuff while I was mostly bored in my high school classes, but then I got into Berkeley and went there with my peers. I feel like I had the better experience.
He took a band trip to Vegas this week but got left behind last night because he was the only under 21 on this trip. Part of me is annoyed that no one was willing to skip the clubs and tables to not leave him hanging alone. But I remember back to that age and there's no way I would have done that at 21 with a per diem. He made the best of it and had a really good meal and explored the Strip but the age difference matters a lot in the college years.
This has been a big change in thinking for me as well. You might be able to impress some folks with your graduation year, but otherwise you are just another graduate.
1) some school systems see them as critical to "raising up" other students around them, but I never see any analyses as to if this "holds down" the gifted student's development.
2) I've read that students learn a huge proportion of things from their peers. That implies that true gifted education involves comingling a sufficient population of gifted students of the same rough age range among each other.
3) gifted students really benefit from "gifted" teachers. They don't necessarily need deep PhDs in academic subjects, more they just need to be "broadly smart".
#1 sounds like it sucks for the gifted, especially with the substantial undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American education and the specter of bullying. Maybe in a day of 7-8 classes you do gifted + nongifted intermixing for 1-2 classes at once.
#2 needs a sufficient population of gifted students
#3 is really hit or miss in schools
All three of those are why class conscious parents pay a lot of attention to the school district of a school, and are defensive of other students coming into "good" school districts. Also, per "The Bell Curve", smart people tend to be well-off, and so the specter of NIMBYism and housing exclusion rears its head over education.
Deep learning in traditional subjects is the default of gifted, but I agree that what is needed (as hinted at in breadth-smart teachers) is breadth-first learning. Because unfortunately gifted students have their passions decided for them: You're going to get good grades!
If my kid is gifted, and based on the inheritability of IQ, he probably will be, I'm not subjecting him to acceleration. It'll probably take some degree of home schooling instead.
The only acceleration I'd be in favor of is skipping Junior/Senior high school years and going part time to local colleges. Accelerate maybe 1-2 grades tops in specific things.
There are some previous HN comments that discuss this including [2], which names Terrence Tao, UCLA math prof, as one of the participants in the study.
Two passages that I think highlight the extremes both in acceleration and outcome are:
“… 17 of the 60 young people were radically accelerated. None has regrets. Indeed, several say they would probably have preferred to accelerate still further or to have started earlier…. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universi- ties in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achieve- ment. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.”
“The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling,… Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficul- ties at university,…”
In other words, set up a new sort of school - which tags its graduates as mature, responsible adults. Not top-percentile test-takers, nor elite pampered princelings. Then see which type of graduate is preferred by colleges and employers.
I think it might be in the genre of HaHaOnlySerious.
As Wikipedia notes:
> In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.
Opening with that title, complete with correct capitalization, reads like an allusion. It's enough to make me think exceptionally skeptically about a proposal to turn gifted students into what is sometimes euphemistically termed peer educators.
Many private schools make it very clear to the parents, as well as the kids, that there are plenty of other students that want the slot the child has, which gives them leverage to educate how they want.
Public schools, at least in California, are beholden to the loudest, worst-behaved parents. There was a serious disciplinary issue recently at a local school that resulted in a multi-day suspension, which pretty much everybody involved agreed probably wasn't going to change the behavior. After digging a bit and having some frank conversations, the administration wouldn't pursue any other form of consequence because of fear of being sued by the parents. If expulsion were a legitimate option it would have given the administration bargaining power, but for anything which defending an expulsion is not a slam-dunk win in court, the only 3 "safe" options for teachers and administrators are:
1. Loss of playtime during recess/lunch
2. Detention
3. Suspension
I don't know how big of an actual problem torts are, but I see a lot of bad policies (in education and elsewhere) enacted due to fear of torts.
In that situation it starts to approach "is there something on campus with your last name on it" levels of donations if you want to avoid getting kicked out...
If you think private schools won't act on those pressures - either by getting the kids the help they need, or by kicking them out - I have a tunnel to sell you.
That's part (part!) of why per-pupil spending in public schools seems so high for the outcomes they produce, and part of why private schools have an advantage.
At least in my area there seems to be a huge preference for new or fancy infrastructure. Many of the buildings are only built to last 20 years or so. The new middle school around here has a 2 story by 100 foot glass front to it. The glass panes are massive. Who thought that was a good idea (hearing/cooling, cost, possibly safety)?
I went to school in buildings that were 50+ years old and made out of cinder block. No artificial turf fields or fancy stuff.
Edit: why downvote?
Mostly true. The stadium was the only field with lights.
This track was cancelled (10+ years ago) in the modern progressive fashion, being derided as some blend of discrimination. The end-result was students who were into school being put into the same pot of students in the rest of the courses (non-AP, AP - your choice). Unfortunately for the tracked students, we were hit with a one-two punch of the end of tracking and the administration's pursuit of glory and State recognition. Our guidance counselors aggressively recommended or, in some cases, forcibly placed students in AP courses for which they had neither the interest nor the proclivity.
Personally, I was forced into a high-tier Spanish course my third (and final) year of high-school, despite having no aptitude and lower-end grades (80-85%) for the language despite three years of study. Resulted in my skipping all courses and writing my "Kiss My Ass" in another foreign language I pursued during my free time. I rode into the sunset with a grade of 30% or so, a job waiting for me in the city as an apprentice software engineer and a full-ride to university.
Frankly, schools in the US just don't seem to exist to put out good, well educated thinkers but like many government institutions (and I say this as a former government worker) - to continue their own existence, find glory for those at the top, and if good things happen for the citizens this is a nice side-effect and typically at the expense of the soldiers in the trench rather than good, altruistic stewardship.
Worked as something of a TA in several high school computer courses (MS Business Applications, Programming (Basic), Programming (Java)) with many students of varying levels and competencies. Was quite a fond memory in quite a lot of ways. Schools should encourage more of that sort of thing and less batshit test prep. Unfortunately, true well-rounded human beings don't solicit eyeballs and award shows and budget dollars.
This is already the case for gifted schools, though the critics may not say it out loud. Stuyvesant High School has a lower budget per student than the average NYC high school, and Lowell High School has a lower budget per student than the average San Francisco high school.
No one seemed interested in the "what might be done, within existing resources and sensitivities, for the more promising poor & unwanted children?" angle. Admittedly, few folks on HN are likely to recall Dr. Swift's subtitle, or care much about helping the poor & huddle masses, yearning...
Already a disproportionate number of gifted kids are from wealthy families, and if gifted education goes away, those kids aren't going to be in the "regular" public classes, they are going to private school. The clear losers in that situation seems to be the remaining gifted kids from less wealthy backgrounds.
- You'll lose all of the gifted children of the wealthy and upper-middle class anyways
- The gifted children of the poor suffer the most
Most private schools aren't set up to cater to gifted kids. If you don't believe me, ask the folks running a private school how they deal with kids who are 2-3 grade levels ahead in math.
Then ask them for concrete examplea of what they actually mean. And concrete examples of the outcomes this differentiated instruction has achieved for those kids.
Private schools often have smaller class sizes, nicer physical environment, better equipment and higher expectations. But the curriculum is still aimed at the average kid in that school, with little consideration for the outliers.
EDIT: I should have mentioned, that I interpret 'gifted' to mean something like top 3% by ability (corresponding to an IQ of about 130). Back when SFUSD used to identify kids at gifted and talented, they were talking about the top ~30%, which is totally different.
Which covers about 75% of what parents expect out of a gifted program.
A) throughout all grades, OR
B) by the end of high school
A implies a different starting position, but no difference in pace. B implies a ~10% faster pace.
This is easy to see in metro areas with a balkanized public education system, like Saint Louis. Your typical child has access to one public school, which could be quite good, or horrible, depending on where it is: The better the school, the more expensive it is to get a house that can sends kids to it. If you don't want to move for your favorite school, you go into one of hundreds of private schools. The differences amongst them are so wide, locals ask others where they went to high school as a shortcut to get a lot of information about them. On the gifted end, you will find private schools where less than 15% of the class is stuck "only" at grade level in math, and that's probably because they are way ahead somewhere else. Those schools tend to be so interested in high performers that there's a great chance there's quite a bit of financial aid for those with blue collar parents.
So yes, most private schools are definitely not better: Hell, I'd argue that in a city like this, most private schools are worse academically. But when there are enough private schools, self-assortment surrounds kids with others that are more like them, whether it's athletic focus, qualifying as gifted, following Christian Science, or making sure most girls are rich enough to own horses. Whether this is good or bad for the city is a different story, but I suspect the gifted kids come out ahead.
And yes, all of this will only happen in large enough metros with enough children. A gifted child in a small town is probably served more or less equally badly by public and private schools.
Yes. I should explain my perspective. I live in San Francisco, which has ~900k people, and maybe 80k school-age children.
So perhaps 180 (80000/13*0.03) kids per grade are gifted. Enough to fill 7 to 10 classrooms.
Even so, as far as I'm aware, San Francisco has no elementary schools focused on gifted kids. The nearest gifted-only elementary school is private, pricey, a 30+ min drive away, and has way more qualified applicants than places.
Also, SF has some elementary schools that are considered much better than others. Rooftop, for instance. If it isn't the student body or budget, what makes Rooftop better?
Public schools in SF? They don't.
Private gifted schools? Using psychologist-administered tests.
"If it isn't the student body or budget, what makes Rooftop better?"
During the most recent year for which data are available (2019) half of Rooftop 3rd graders were not meeting state standards in math. 45% were not meeting state standards in ELA (English Language Arts).
So I'm not sure what you mean by 'better'?
Just by filtering out the most disruptive kids, having small class sizes, and teachers aligned with the school, kids, and parents, you are catering to the gifted and the rest of the students as well.
I tested at the top ~0.1% back in the day and, digging out the old recommendations my parents were given, it was recommended I skip several grades, be given private tutoring, and have access to additional programs with my peers.
Top 3%-1%, they recommended skipping grades + specialized instruction in areas of strength and additional programs.
(They also had recommendations for the actual Einsteins/Michelangelos/Mozarts, which amounted to "there is no reason for this child to be in the K-12 education system"; I always wondered what their experiences were like.)
I was a six year old whose main interests were astronomy (particularly the stellar lifecycle and black holes), PARENTING (as in I was a six year old with an interest in child psychology), and web development. At that level, you have to personalize it, or at the very least give the child unorthodox information resources.
- The first track is the high school degree that includes 13 years of school and afterwards allows people to attend university. Generally the students with the best grades attend this track. Everybody learns English as a first foreign language starting grade 3 nowadays in all tracks, but starting grade 7 students in this track have to pick either French or Latin as their second (and then in 9th grade have the choice to pick the other one as a third language). Further, math and science education are much faster and better compared to the other tracks. - The middle track starts learning French as a second foreign language in grade 9 and the whole track only includes 10 years. It is geared towards people that will do an apprenticeship afterwards, for example in business or some other non-university subjects. - The third track is the lowest track for the worst performing students and does not include any second foreign languages. It's only 9 years of school and these are the people that often go into trades jobs like car mechanics, contractors, etc.
Personally I think this is a great systems. Students that can learn more and faster get to learn with students similar to them and are not slowed down by students that can't keep up. Students in the other tracks afterwards can continue on to eventually get the higher degrees through various different ways if they want and are able to.
Also I'm actually not sure I wouldn't have preferred to have a wider range of people in the school, especially because I also saw problems with wide gaps in progression in normal class. Not an expert but I'd hazard a guess that for every main subject out of 30 people you could have easily moved 10 up one class and 10 down one class and then the result wouldn't have been worse than repeating the same things 10 times, per subject, and not to the same people.. (Spoiler alert: I hated school, I wasn't a really good student, my main motivation for staying and not slacking off completely was that I needed to graduate in order to be able to study CS, but I would have loved to focus on some subjects and ignore others)
The main problem for society is that 50 years ago you didn't need to have great grades to get into great courses, or colleges. Now you have to be in the top 5-10% whatever. There are lots of people who are in the regular schools that could be doctors/engineers/lawyers but wont get in because its an arms race. If you have to be in the right elementary/middle/high school to be a doctor its too hard for regular people.
Edit: why downvote?
With Endowments well into the tens of $Billions there is no reason schools like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Etc. can't have freshman classes of 10,000 instead of 2,000.
People there really hacked themselves into all kinds of things, be it making your own PCB, learning six different languages, caring for paedomorphic salamanders, writing lyric, or building your "own" copies of popular software products. None of that seemed particularly strange to us young teenagers.
We shouldn't have children at vastly different ability levels in the same classroom. Struggling kids are made no better, and the exceptional are dragged down.
It would be very different if teachers could meaningfully specialize towards providing effective instruction for these lower-achieving students. But we barely manage to do this for actual "special" ed, and then only at huge cost.
I'm just advocating we act with more purpose and honest intention about what we're already doing.
And, from a pure efficiency standpoint, we should absolutely seek to give every possible opportunity to those gifted students. For the lower performing kids, focus on teaching values and ethics, along with realistic and practical goals, to make up for any issues in their upbringing. I think attitude is as important as aptitude for the middle and lower end spectrum kids.
A: 1&8
B: 2&7
C: 3&6
D: 4&5
The ole Catan split
That doesn't ring true to me. Why wouldn't a good teacher take pride in taking kids below the curve up to Average? I would wager that this probably has a better net impact than pushing the elite kids that much further.
I disagree
I've been terrible student (think of passing subjects, but pretty close to the "edge") until last two years of HS
where I actually started putting effort into math/english and then I looked at the best students after working with them for a while and I was like "why can't you do better, just like them? are you worse or something?"
that was huge motivation, just awarness that you could do better itself
it works in other things in life too - internet, programming, hackernews.
If I were in a group with people similar to me, then I don't know how it'd end, honestly and it pretty scares me to think where I'd be now in life
Where would you be if you had the best education?
Actually I've been in such a class in elementary school for students that performed worse. For me, they focused mostly on improving writing and probably something else that I don't remember
I'm unable to say now how much it actually gave me, I still cannot write (handwriting), but that's mostly because I never care about that, I felt like that was useless skill and nowadays I rarely use pen.
>Where would you be if you had the best education?
That's hard to answer, I don't know, especially that "best education" varies by person, but assuming the one that fits my preferences, then probably... I don't know.
The only thing that I still haven't done in my career that I find really interesting is going for a year or two to US and working in CPU Fab or some compilers job, but I'm not sure whether with better edu I'd have it already done, especially that those require a lot of "non-school" effort
It was a great system for both teachers and students. Everyone in a class would be learning at roughly the same rate, and the school was able to allocate resources, such teachers aides, more efficiently.
Now I have two kids and prioritize learning how to learn with them. If you can develop the skills in a child required to work hard, find the answers, find the understanding, and teach themself then you've put them in a good spot to have at least a fighting chance when faced with the unknown.
To me that illustrates the general failure of public school is not teaching children how to learn.
1846 - Simpleton
~1876 - Feeble-minded
1910 - Moron
1900s Special Ed
1900s Intellectually Disabled
The label is useful. The condition is lamentable. Changing the label every few years doesn't make children not use the new one as an insult.
Using a new or old label doesn't positively imply that you hate the group or person you're applying the label to.
Not sure why we are talking about intellectually disabled kids. Someone else did this juxtaposition, and it is quite concerning that people tie poverty with lack of ability in this thread.
> The label is useful.
The labels have changed for a reason.
Any statistics or citations to back this up? In my experience, one cannot characterize thousands of schools this way because they have different governance and spending formulas across states, county lines, city limits, and even multiple districts within cities (which is especially true in urban cities).
I think you know very well that you're being asked to cite them, not merely say they exist.
It doesn't help much, because working conditions are so bad that anyone with options still doesn't want to work there. More funerals for kids. More 2nd-graders threatening teachers. More lockdowns over gun threats and such. More drug problems. More chronically-absent kids. More turnover among students. More horror-stories about home life. Most teachers who can afford to turn it down decide that their sanity & safety is worth more than an extra $8-12k/yr. Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast. It's brutal, and money—at least, money spent on education per se—does not seem to be the solution.
> The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.
Heh, yeah, and that's in most districts, not just the poor ones :-(
I have a friend who completed his teaching degree. He said the policies at the school where he student-taught were so bad that he decided not to apply to teaching jobs. Stuff like you weren't allowed to give less than a 50% as long as they put their name on the paper, and ineffective discipline options. Basically, the school was just passing kids through the grades without the kids really learning and some kids wouldn't even try. I guess if you just graduate them, they're no longer the school's problem...
So then you're a teacher with a bunch of 6th graders, say, 2/3 of whom are one or more grade levels behind on at least one subject, but that material's not what will be on the test that'll be used to evaluate your performance. The right thing to do is to go back and fill in the gaps for those kids, but you don't have the time, and showing them enough of this year's material that they might at least get a few answers on the standardized test correct is safer for your career anyway.
It sucks.
This applies to everyone.
Disappointing thread all around. Enough HN for today.
What we're saying is that we shouldn't hold someone born without the ability to be academically successful to unreasonable standards.
How does this relate to improving performance at schools in poor or de-stabilized districts? There are "high IQ" individuals there that merit attention.
Yes we should address the amount of waste that these poor performing districts generate, but there is idea of a zero sum game in this thread between poorer and richer districts that encourages dismissal of solutions.
Nobody has talked about intergenerational poverty yet in this thread. Just wild.
No one learns anything useful. "Education" is just a set of credentials that prove your IQ test wasn't a fluke.
To me, that is just an absurd view of reality.
It is always disappointing, to come from one of these districts and then having obtained social mobility through talent and luck, to see what my new peers (since I assume most of us here have gone to a top tier school and work somewhere in tech/finance) think of my neighborhood. No care for how these situations happened.
I would hope that people discussing the issues in education would be some evidence that they do care. Maybe misguided in some instances, but at least trying to identify root causes and solutions. If we don't talk about the problems, then they won't get fixed.
So much of my public school education was wasted on teachers having to deal with some subset of students who wanted to do nothing but disrupt everyone else.
It got better when I could choose AP classes since generally by that point everyone wanted to be in those classes.
Unintended consequence: kids have no fear of repercussions, teachers have no real authority and everyone ends up arguing about vagueries like "equity" and "giftedness" instead the actual work of education (which is increasingly left to parents and tutors).
> When California’s Instructional Quality Commission adopted a new mathematics framework in 2021 that urged schools to do away with accelerated math in grades one through 10, it explained the move this way: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”
I clicked the link and could find no such language or even any suggestion that high achieving students don't exist, and it had a lot of verbiage discussing the need for "high achieving" students to be challenged more than others. How a student became "high achieving", like if they were somehow born that way or otherwise gained such skills in early development, was not discussed, nor does it make much difference.
therefore I dont understand the point of this article if it's going to start out with claims that dont seem to be true.
[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter1.doc...
but in any case, now I can see the context, and my point stands, the author quoted this entirely out of context in order to conclude erroneously that the authors of this document don't believe that some students are more capable than others. they of course don't believe that.
It is kind of fascinating since it does seem plausible that treating a child as gifted with high expectations and then providing focused, advanced instruction may be a self-fulfilling sort of situation.
If you take "exposure" to mean the child has been introduced to a multitude of concepts and experiences both at their age-appropriate levels and grades above, the conjectured distribution starts to make sense. Wealthy children or those of highly educated parents tend to have incredibly high "exposure" increasing their representation in gifted programs. Those not from such a background will necessarily need to be highly curious and/or have high innate aptitude.
For the lower grades, gifted kids regardless of background will be in the upper decile of scores. As they grow older and "exposure" differences across the entire population minimize, those who were gifted only due to "exposure" will fall to the middle of the curve. Those with high curiosity/aptitude will continue to be in the upper decile, with those who had early and continued high exposure (usually a result of wealth or parent motivation) in the top percentile.
To your point, if you believe the goal should be to meet children where they are and advance them, this model isn't horrible. What it does point out is that there may be a fair amount of top percentile talent that is unrealized due to lack of "exposure" and resources.
When's the last time a single person on hn dared to look at the curriculum of the average degree in education? It consists of courses that any person with the slightest degree of intelligence would run from screaming. I'm interested in education but you couldn't pay me to attend one - it's 99% fluff and nonsense.
Because the bigger problem is not the existence or nonexistence of exclusive institutions but of the kind of people that would render such an education educational. Because neither the gifted nor the wise - particularly if male - go into education today.
Perhaps a reason for the poor track record of modern education in producing any geniuses on par with those of the past and the long-standing dry spell of great works. And the larger trend of exclusive education producing little but "really excellent sheep".
"Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it."
In which case perhaps it's best it's done away with. It appears past fixing, the rot infiltrating to the core of the bureaucratic machinery.
Edit: fixed/clarified/extended ending.
To quote Colacho again "Reeducating man will consist of teaching him once again to value objects correctly: that is, to need few." Then perhaps we might have some hope.
This reeks of cognitive bias.
Here's one article on it I have on hand, if for some reason a search brings up nothing: https://scholars-stage.org/a-few-more-notes-on-the-dearth-of...
I am not at all against elite education, nor do I believe everyone should proceed roughly at the same pace. But I am very wary of an approach that imposes a bimodal solution onto what is almost certainly a more normally distributed population.
There are various ways this was implemented over the last 50 years. When I was in the SFUSD gifted program in the late 1970s, I believe it was done by some kind of IQ assessment. When my own kids were in SFUSD in the late 2000s, they took the top 10% of each class, as defined by test scores on the STAR test, which is an academic test. There were a few ways to test in (both verbal and reading in the top 10%, or one or the other in the top 10% two years in a row, or nominated by a teacher - there may have been a few others).
Ok, but then what happens to the kid who scored 89%ile consistently? Are we getting behind a solution that takes the top 10% off into a class which is taught at the 95%ile, and then leaves the 89%ile student to now be taught at the 45%ile?
Even people who support more advanced learning for more advanced students must see a problem here. Seems like we need a better solution. The top 10% isn't the only group that may benefit from a specifically tailored curriculum.
I don't have an opinion about magnet schools and admission policies, and I'm sure, like everyone else is, that Lowell was a factor for some recall voters, but if it was the only issue, it seems likely that the board members would have survived the vote. The arguments about school closures and the renaming debacle seem much more plausible.
I couldn't really discern any actual argument in this. From the blog title onwards it felt like it was aimed at an audience that already agreed and so didn't need to actually present any arguments. But I'd be interested if they actually have any as lotteries have a lot of useful applications but some people are wary of them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Think of the time and energy we'd save if we just chose some smart people for a task rather than waste their time writing essays about their extracurriculars.
Then we could treat the people who don't make it as smart but unlucky and actually have a plan for them too, rather than discard them as stupid and further increase the competition for the few slots at the top.
Detailing the problems of the "education system" would be very controversial, as the schools have become political entities in their own right, parents are major contributors to the problems, and the culture we present our kids is a problem. For many it is better, read easier, to pretend those problems don't exist, and to do away with anything that highlights them. But that doesn't improve anything, and actually makes the schools worse.
Money doesn't seem to be a panacea; except wealthier parents and parents who care, which seems to be by far the biggest driver of good outcomes (and the opposite poor).
But a good gifted program usually has other support beyond just curriculum. It's not just because the other classes have to be dumbed down so much.
Maybe my experience isn't universal. I was in the gifted program. I was ahead in math (not by as much as many here) and very gifted at music. But was in basic english lol. Completely lazy i never did homework and just got along by being smart. So for me it wasn't totally about just being in advanced classes.
It was more the extra support we had and the benefit of grouping those like minded students together. Just as friends, being able to grow help each other, etc. Had weekly small group meetings too. Kind of like counseling and guidance other students did not get.
More hands on learning. Which was the only time I paid attention or put in actual work.
Got special permissions, like I got to skip classes to do music. Access to more resources and connections to summer activities or outside education.
We had a dedicated gifted staff person who doesn't teach, just facilitates.
Their program was super valuable to me and pretty well known. I think a big draw for the school
If the round hole is the mythical meritocracy, the comical square peg is wealthy parents having their kids "compete" to get into a nursery school and declare the entrants got in by "merit". What a farce.
My kid might (or might not) be gifted; but he has highly educated parents; he's being exposed to concepts that might not be aligned with average educated parents. He's bright enough. I'm concerned that there won't be adequate content for him in the school district due to some concern that smart people demonstrate inequality or something.
I periodically wonder if https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron is taken as some kind of blueprint, to be honest.
Additionally, I think that jumping past a grade and succeeding in the higher one is rather difficult unless you are very gifted. Enrichment can make the eventual acceleration easier.
Disclaimer: I am not an education professional though; just someone who once was a gifted student.
I want to point out that the "notion of meritocracy" in the Chinese imperial examination system was a myth. The amount of time and energy required to study for these examinations, the resources required to acquire the knowledge necessary to pass them, and the myriad ways that connections could help one bypass various steps of the process all added up to a system which heavily favored the elite while nominally remaining open to all. Needless to say there are some strong parallels to the state of education in the United States in the 21st century...
In my own case, I grew up in a rural area with very small schools and limited resources, what was available for enrichment was likewise limited but thankfully included at least libraries and access to computers and eventually the pre-Internet network community.
I don't believe in meritocracy in education--I saw enough inequality of opportunity to disabuse me of the notion that achievement in education at every stage was simply because the cream rose to the top. The best student of mathematics I ever knew became a surveyor because that was the career available to him--he HAD to be earning a living within three months of graduation. Exceptional ability, for him, meant only that he had the option of a less physically demanding job. Regarding real meritocracy on the achievement side there are enough stories like https://twitter.com/cesifoti/status/1494369809538195456 or almost any female PhD can relate if you care to listen to hopefully convince anyone that meritocracy is certainly suspect if not absent in education.
If it is not a meritocracy then what is the purpose of the highly competitive educational system including gifted programs? There is almost always some element of talent to be sure but there is also the luxury to pursue the opportunity, willingness or eagerness to compete, additional resources spent in preparing for admission and even just motivation or focus on the opportunity. Not all of this is dependent upon the individual, as others have pointed out, but also on parents who try get the best for their child. Perhaps the competitive system exists to make it easier for resourceful competitors to apply influence to get the result they desire.
I would prefer to see efforts which reduce the value of pursuing the competitive game. Why not self-paced programs available to anyone? Why not MOOCs? The self-selective participation even in high profile MOOCs like Sebastian Thrune's Stanford robotics MOOC points towards interest and self-motivation being the most important determiners. This seems like something we should want to reward. Maybe the reward for completion of MOOCs should be more individual attention up to and including enrolment. Perhaps there were even those who thought that self-enrichment was an inferior choice to more traditional approaches for optimizing educational competitiveness. Should we really reward that?
The threshold problem of competitive programs has always bothered me as well. Rather than a bright line threshold maybe we should be using chance to select amongst candidates; the higher the competitive score, the more likely your admission, but near the "solely by ranking" threshold choose among those above and below it with some degree of randomness. Why? Not just because it is unreasonable to regard the ranking criteria as infallible, but because selection on a narrow criteria is an imperfect determinant of outcome. Increasing the breadth of people who can enter the program will improve the selection of people who are motivated to apply and encourage applicants to try again. (Certainly I am only suggesting that programs only accept people which a high chance of completion in the program). Again, self-selection will drive those who really want it versus those who might be "qualified" on a competitive basis but actually disinterested. It grieves me when I hear of people graduating from highly competitive research physics programs or similar to go off and be a quant at some bank. Not because of my hatred of banks but because producing a quant is a wrong outcome for a competitive physics program; what the hell is the point if it doesn't make research physicists as promised?
The standard deviation of IQ is 15, and a typical IQ threshold for a gifted program is 130, about 2 SD above the mean. Given that average IQs for whites and blacks in the U.S. are about 100 and 85, blacks will be quite under-represented in any merit-based admissions system. Similar white-black gaps are found in other tests such as SAT, ACT, and NAEP. Do we ignore that fact or give up on merit whenever it causes unequal outcomes?
This only helps people who can afford sending their kids to exclusive private schools. Thus in a way, increasing racism because most of the rich are in a specific race.
I think they meant people with (lots of) money.
The goal has shifted to equality of outcomes, not equality in inputs / resources. The least capable are lavished with the greatest resources while the most capable are ignored and held back.
I think this is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that every human is equally capable given the same opportunities and resources, and somehow the school district is the place to compensate for perceived “equity” gaps.
I’d expect the macro level effect is a dumbing down of society to the least common denominator. Or to put it another way, the bottom half of IQ adolescents may do marginally better in the next 30 years in terms of quantifiable contributions to society such as lifetime earnings or degrees obtained or patents filed, etc., whereas the top half of IQ adolescents will do dramatically worse.
The linked articles cites some evidence that moving high achieving/gifted students have a positive effect on their math and ELA achievement. I don't believe that anyone is contesting that having a classroom for gifted students has a positive effect on their learning.
On the other hand, there is a growing concern of the negative externality of this decision on the other students in the larger school community. In other words, we know that having high performing peers have a positive effect on students learning (this is a positive externality of having a desk mate that is gifted). The theory goes that removing these gifted students from regular classrooms has a negative effect on everyone else that remains. Again, this is a process that makes intuitive sense.
The tough sell in this argument is that, at the end of the day, this remains an externality for gifted students. Helping your desk mate does not directly impact you and, in all honesty, might even hurt your chances for a perfect SAT score or of admission at a top university because you took a lower division courses than your peers that were scooped away to a gifted classroom. Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
We know a big part of education success is home environment. You can surround a kid with Einstein schoolmates but if he's getting beat daily and not getting fed, it doesn't matter. Add in unsafe living conditions and no access to books and you have a disaster nobody but the kids parents can solve.
Why then should we harm the gifted? Why should we allow them worse outcomes because someone's parents are garbage? You aren't going to make a shitty parent into a capable one when they fundamentally don't care to begin with, no matter how many high performing students you drag down in the process.
On an individual basis my duty is to do the best I can do for my kids, and that is all I can do.
It's a hard, if not impossible, sell to ask any parent to sacrifice their child on that altar no matter how competitive they are.
Regarding children as some kind of state resource is just wrong.
As a thought experiment, if your IQ were measured at above two standard deviations from the average (~100), it may be worth asking whether meeting someone with an IQ below 110-115 on Tinder could raise ethical questions because of the relative intelligence differences.
It's provocative, but when groups of outlier intelligence people can now find each other and co-ordinate online, you're into mutant powers risk, where someone could, for example, create a new world currency they alone controlled the value of out from under central banks, build a total surveillance panopticon in their dorm room, forge a conspiracy that infiltrated the cabinets of world governments and subordinate them to a single agenda, encircle the planet with a million cryptographically sovereign network nodes in space, enslave millions using a credit system, etc. We should have gifted programs to integrate these people socially and elevate the people around them, because otherwise you're just going to get super villains.
Gifted kids are a myth. Overwhelmingly, these kids are just privileged.
Privileged to grow up in an educated family, privileged to not have to help out at home, privileged to not have to take a job in high school to support a struggling family, privileged to be afforded extra tutoring specifically designed to jump through all the hoops in the system. (which don't measure talent or giftedness, just familiarity with and ability to jump through the hoops) (if you can even call tutoring a privilege - I know I would prefer if kids were allowed to be kids and not shut into a room with a tutor when they're already done with school for the day)
etc etc
and before anyone starts to reply "aKsHullY..." YES of course there's the odd legitimately GIFTED child out there, but they're a rare exception and even in the proposed system, if they're not from the right family, they wouldn't be picked up - other, rich, ungifted kids would take their place. Let alone that if you look at biographies of legitimately GIFTED kids, they often don't do well in or take well to school in the first place.
Basically to me this whole thing reeks of disingenuous masking of privilege as "giftedness" and completely misguided and mistaken ideas about actually gifted kids.
EDIT I should add that to really bring progress across the board, the focus should be on the bringing the bulk of the kids to the highest possible levels, and the most support focused on the kids who struggle the most. Privileged kids already have privilege - they will develop anyway don't need public support. Non-privileged kids do.
I think in any school system you'll see some kids pick up the material, remember it, talk about it. Other kids won't. Blaming it on their parents doesn't really point to a solution either.
No, that's completely orthogonal to all this. I'm simply pointing out the author is calling for entrenching a system where privilege is rewarded and exacerbated irrespective of actual giftedness, or whether any actual giftedness is a result of nurture or nature.
Every kid is unique, and pretending that the top 5% of learners should be in the same classroom as the bottom 5% of learners does a disservice to both.