The unclear future for gifted-and-talented education
wsj.com
wsj.com
Now I live near Palo Alto, and parents are suing the public schools (and winning) because the schools are erecting unreasonable and opaque barriers to advanced education. I never would have guessed that gifted education would be worse in the heart of Silicon Valley in 2022 than it was in Sacramento 30 years prior. But apparently the state changed the GATE requirements in 2014, and now districts can choose whether to offer it or not.
We've had huge challenges in our local school, which doesn't want to support our daughter in learning math. We've not pulled her from the schools just yet, but we know many families that have, for either private school or homeschooling. It's a pity things have gone in this direction, and quite so far.
This is a very unpopular idea in the current culture.
For example, it has become fashionable in liberal circles to argue for abolishing the SAT because, while it is not intrinsically racist, its results reflect our racist society: people with less access to education and tutoring perform poorly, and this results in measurable racial disparities. Problem is, the world becomes even worse without it. Under our current regime, very few people from underprivileged backgrounds can get into college and advance, but without the SAT, almost no one would be doing so.
Also it's unclear the kids doing well (better than everyone else, I imagine) are the ones who'd most benefit from special treatment, versus the struggling kids.
No kid should get special treatment; every kid should get treatment appropriate to their level. It's not even strictly speaking a matter of resources: you don't need fancy equipment to teach a more advanced class. It does mean you need more teachers and a larger school, so that people can be placed into classes of roughly equal levels of ability.
Or put differently: for this suggestion we can't pay. And we choose not to pay for even mild improvements to the current situation.
There is an argument to be made that we should improve education and bring more people up to speed (e.g. a lot of top10% of high schoolers can learn integration but it required a once-in-10-generations genius to figure it out for the first time).
But even the most fervent blank slaters should recognise that people have different interests, and come from different educational backgrounds.
The only reason to support equality of outcome is to repress high-performers.
In my state I was in Talented and Gifted (TAG) programs.
My own experience is that TAG-style teaching would have helped everyone I knew, certainly in grade school. And when it's doled out unevenly, that creates a caste system if it wasn't there and reinforces it if it already existed.
On the one hand, it harms all the non-TAG kids by withholding education. Curricula to withhold education in schools - the irony!
On the other hand, it harms the TAG kids by creating social barriers. And those students, in my experience, are one of the groups in school most likely to have existing problems with socialization.
TAG as it exists in US public schools harms all students.
For millions of students the education system is the only ticket out of poverty for themselves and their families. To ignore that because it might make some people feel uncomfortable is absolute nonsense and misses the point entirely.
The people uncomfortable with that should be asking themselves why they feel that way, repeatedly.
Denying everyone these opportunities because some students aren't gifted/talented is deranged, unnatural, and genuinely evil.
So we should deny everyone opportunities because some people are denied opportunities even when we try to give them?
You know, some people drown, others don't. It's often just not fair. I'd hate to hear your solution to this.
the reason i have problems with GATE is that it supposes than only those students benefit from or should have access to these opportunities, even in fact all students can benefit from them, depending somewhat on the program. for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by simulating a working exchange. There’s nothing about the notion of buying and selling that can’t be understood by any student—yet this was part of the curriculum only for the small number of students deemed intellectually worthy of the extra attention.
That said, many GT programs today are based on differentiated instruction, where students are not pulled out of the classroom but given different assignments depending on their demonstrated ability, such as maths worksheets/assignments that are a bit more difficult than the “normal” one, and i think these programs are significantly more equitable.
Differentiated instruction is a crock; a teacher who fails to be able to teach a classroom of roughly equal abilities is going to fail even harder to teach a classroom of mixed abilities. Giving extra worksheets with slightly harder problems doesn't cut it, when a significant minority of kids are one or more grade levels above grade (and a significant majority of kids are one or more level below grade).
It's all well and good to point out that buying and selling are fundamentally simple concepts, but that's not the same as saying that the instruction could be given universally. First, students have to be stable enough personally and in their lives that they can show up and pay attention for all the instruction that makes the exercise get off the ground at all. Then, students need to care about the material and believe that there is justification to learn it, or it's casting pearls before swine. In my public school experience, you've just lost 80-90% of the student body with those two factors.
Then, if you have all that, you need teachers who are confident enough with stock markets to teach the material and go beyond a narrow track of reciting facts, and that goes way further than just 'buying and selling'. On top of that, the teacher needs to be able to make or facilitate a simulation that moves at the right pace and adjusts as necessary, including getting all the students to work well together.
From the perspective of a school administration, you only get a few teachers who will have those skills and personality, and it's pretty important to have them doing work like that, because teaching-as-remedial-fact-recitation for a standardized test will get rid of those good teachers pretty quickly, and now you have no one left to teach the kids who could have benefitted from the differentiated curriculum.
Source: I went to public school and now teach and manage at a school that focuses on a lot of simulations and role-playing.
I'm still a fan of GT though, at least it means the school system has to provide a decent education to some students. Plus it was a pretty big deal for those of us not coming from privilege.
Let's be clear.
When I went to a gifted program in the 90s, it was only offered in the nicer part of town. My mother had to repeatedly threaten and read the district's own rules to them to eventually force them to send a taxi cab to pick me up in my poor neighborhood and take me up to the rich neighborhood so I could attend the gifted program.
The school district had since ended such services, and now requires parents transport their own children, something that working class families will be unable to do.
Even at the time, funding was tight (it is worse now), and teachers did not have enough resources to run classrooms. It was well into the 90s before I learned the soviet union had fallen, as all of our history books and atlases still had the USSR on them[1].
The district is now going to shut down all their gifted programs, but honestly I feel that is due to the district not having enough teachers, money, or any other sorts of resources. There are schools with lead in the pipes where students shouldn't drink the water, managing a gifted program may just be beyond the district's capabilities at this time.
To return to my overall point, the gifted program here was designed around racism and classism. Poor students and minority students, even if they tested in, had barriers put in place so they could not attend.
The unpopular idea in the current culture is that rich white people should get a better education than everyone else.[2] (One can argue that a counter force is rich white people who think their kids are gifted even if their kids are not at all gifted...)
Of course the closure of the gifted programs means all the parents who give a shit about their kid's education are either moving out of the city, or going into private schools. When I was in school, I saw parents move their kids out of private schools to go to the public school's gifted program!
[1] At one point we got new math textbooks that were so bad our teacher gave us extra credit for going through the book and finding math errors in it. It was incredibly easy for a bunch of 12 year olds to find errors on seemingly every page. Another time we got corporate sponsored history books where all historical events had been sugarcoated to hell and back. Slavery, banana republics, revolutions, nothing bad had ever happened in human history according to that text book! And yes it did have the corporate sponsor's name all over the back cover.
[2] Gifted programs also largely self select for families who care deeply about education, and who are therefor more involved with their child's education. This is reflected in the behavior of the children who themselves actually care about being at school. The single largest difference in the gifted classes I attended vs the mainstream classes was the attitude of the students. Students in the gifted program listened to the teacher and were actively involved in the classroom, in lessons, and in all aspects of learning, they wanted to be at school and to learn. I am 99.9% sure that a large percent of students would move at least a bit to the right on the bell curve if everyone had that same attitude about education.
>My mother had to repeatedly threaten and read the district's own rules to them to eventually force them to send a taxi cab to pick me up in my poor neighborhood and take me up to the rich neighborhood so I could attend the gifted program.
>Even at the time, funding was tight (it is worse now), and teachers did not have enough resources to run classrooms.
>but honestly I feel that is due to the district not having enough teachers, money, or any other sorts of resources. There are schools with lead in the pipes where students shouldn't drink the water, managing a gifted program may just be beyond the district's capabilities at this time.
Below your accusation, I've quoted you in three places: the first, where a school district committed extra resources to accommodate you outside of their normal competencies; the last two, where you point out that schools are constrained in resources and may not be up to the task of providing accelerated programs. How does any of that show a basis of racism?
I also mentioned the district shut down that transportation program a few years after I stopped using it. Rather unfortunate for everyone who came after me...
Barriers:
1. Placing gifted programs in traditionally (rich!) white neighborhoods and not providing transportation for minority students to those schools even if a student qualifies to attend
2. Having a limited number of spaces in programs so that not everyone who qualifies to attend can attend
The schools lack of funding is a separate issue, especially given the 16k spent per student each year.
In regards to #2, if you run the math, if you do entry by qualification, poor students who may have passed the entrance qualifications, but not by the same margin as students from families with $$, will not get a spot. On the surface it sounds fair, the best get in, but in reality tests are always +/- a few points given day to day performance, and students who have worse home life (inadequate nutrition, lack of private educational resources, etc) already had to work harder to earn a passing score, so little Johnny who hasn't had breakfast in 2 years being 5 points behind Jennifer who has a private nanny with a degree in early childhood education, is not a fair comparison.
But hey, limited spaces so...
Lottery systems are slightly more fair, but they also hurt disadvantaged groups. The real solution is to build enough gifted classrooms, in enough areas of the city, so that anyone who qualifies can attend, full stop.
Limited spaces and biased test results tend to be more universal problems.
IMHO NYC's solution of opening up more spaces is the best way to go.
The point of these tests isn't to make fair comparisons of students' whole lives. They are designed (and succeed to varying degrees) to make fair comparisons of a particular skillset across students, hopefully in a way that is highly correlated to the task at hand. In a finite world, that is how you make good use of scarce resources.
Yes, this results in uneven outcomes. If we only have so much of a given resource (teacher time, facilities, learning resources, etc.) to dedicate, then putting the difficult but tailored material in front of Jennifer is a better use of resources than trying to accumulate enough second chances so that Johnny can eventually achieve escape velocity from his circumstances by happenstance.
Except Jennifer is likely to do alright in life no matter what, while the opportunity afforded to Johnny can mean he escapes generational poverty.
Or we could just build enough classrooms so everyone gets the best education possible. As a bonus, this is long term profitable because Johnny goes on to pay a metric ton of taxes that pay for his education many times over.
Funding education to the point where schools have tracks that students can move between (advanced, normal, remedial) would be much more equitable and much better pedagogically too.
In any case, nothing in your comment justifies eliminating advanced learning programs in any school, even if some parents want to push their kids into such programs even if they're not really ready for it.
> Funding education... would be much more equitable...
Again the US setup is peculiar: most (public) school funding comes from local (school-district) and state level, with a tiny amound of federal funding. Hence zipcodes are a strong proxy for much of this.
Sure some bribery and networking occur. But they also send their kids to tutors, set high expectations, don't let them watch too much TV/tablet, have better diets, etc.
Nothing about gifted programs requires that non-gifted classrooms need to be underfunded.
This is confusing cause and effect. People of higher intelligence end up with wealth and status, and since intelligence is genetic, their children generally have higher intelligence then average.
Ok, obviously ingesting lead or not being fed can lead to a decrease in IQ.
Just as not being fed as a child can lead to a decrease in adult height, but we can still say that height is 100% genetic.
People always assume this to be the case, but it doesn't seem to be true whenever I look at specific school districts. For example, D.C. and Baltimore public schools have a student body with _many_ more poor and minority children than the national average, and the per pupil spending at these schools is also well above the national average.
I obviously don't know anything about your educational background, but the two run-of-the-mill public schools I attended growing up both let people move into and fall out of the top tracks. Having said that, it became progressively rarer over time as the work required to catch up became greater and greater, and, on the other hand, as the cohort increasingly committed to and identified with their schoolwork.
However, the collapse of the British Empire was due in large part to greed and incompetent management (not that Empires are all that desirable) but the 20th century history of technological development in Britain isn't all that great. In contrast, looking at the biographies of many leading American scientists and entrepreneurs of the 20th century reveals that a great many of them came from places like impoverished MidWest farming communities and were only able to move on to higher academics, research centers, etc. because of their access to 'advanced learning programs' in their local areas.
If the argument is that bias exists in who gets into advanced/gifted programs in the K-12 public schools because there is a limited number of slots, the solution is obviously to expand the number of slots, not to eliminate the programs altogether.
What we need is fine grained tracking and the ability to appropriately serve children at all levels. This includes, btw, people at the bottom of the distribution: if you're teaching material targeting people at the 50% percentile of preparedness, you're not serving the kids at 25% or 10% at all and are setting them up for failure.
Exactly! And then perhaps as we continue to raise the bar and challenge our students and teachers to higher academic levels earlier, we’ll raise the bar on education everywhere and start catching up to our peer nations.
The anti-intellectualism that pervades the entire spectrum of US political beliefs is astounding.
You and your other US peers represent the very tip of academic achievement in the country and perhaps are either the result of great teachers and/or programs that fostered that independent thinking, or were naturally inclined to do so anyways and your academic predispositions led you to where you are today.
But let’s face it. The average American school never gets that far. And public schools in the US (based on the miles of anecdata published on the internet) seem to enforce rote memorization anyways. Standardized testing, teaching to the test, “my way or highway” teachers. So not only are we doing the same as our peer nations, but doing it worse. And any attempt to do critical thinking type teaching (a la Finland) gets lost in a sea of terrible schools, incompetent teachers, mediocre curriculums, and an education system that fatalistically lowers rigor and standards in favor of not challenging students to do better.
No this is not a funding problem. Schools in the US have some of the highest per-student funding in the world. And those are also paradoxically the worst performing ones.
It's good that these schools are focused on trying to help children who are struggling in certain areas. But they seem to be fine with providing poor service to the children who are ahead, which should be unacceptable. It isn't possible to meet every child at their level, but at least there should be some effort made to fit each child's needs. The attitude I see a lot of the time is "You're doing well, so shutup and sit there while we ignore you."
This is one of the reasons I hated school, when you can read the book, understand the material and complete the work in 20 minutes and you have an hour allotted and then just have to sit there it makes you dread going in every day.
This wasn't the case in every subject but when it came to maths and science it was just painful.
Allowing tracking would let kids who are not behind actually grow to their capacity. As it is currently structured, the kids at the top are never challenged, and they may not even realize that so many of their peers are also talented and unchallenged.
Teachers shouldn't have to teach a span of 3-4 grade levels. But in our district, the teachers and administration are the ones who are fighting hardest against tracking. It's not fair of them to fight tracking and then complain that teaching advanced kids would be too hard. It's only hard in the current system, where tracking (in our district) is not allowed.
But broadly we're in agreement, and the resistance you mention speaks to a broader, uncomfortable-to-discuss issue with the priorities educators have.
Private tutoring probably had a large role to play in this perception
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...
I prefer systems that make advanced coursework and guidance available to anyone willing and able to put in the work. And the "who" may vary from year to year or course to course based on the individual student interest.
Well, there’s a bar. One side figured out how to exceed the bar. The other didn’t. That’s a pretty big difference that I wouldn’t attribute to “luck.”
That is the real problem. Accepting that some ethnic groups have a higher average IQ than others goes against the American ideal of equality.
> All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents... The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided... An important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics 'talent' and 'giftedness' with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway... There is no cutoff determining when one child is 'gifted' and another is not.
> It's a pity things have gone in this direction
that is putting lace on the latrine, in my experience. It is not a "pity" and that style of language is telling. There are confluent forces that prefer to deconstruct advanced education in a public setting.
(And truthfully there are a lot of above average folks in Palo Alto. Not necessarily all the kids though.)
The school refuses to set any goals for what an advanced student should learn over the course of a year. When pressed, they talk about thinking deeper about grade-level concepts she already understands. Of course, there is no way to measure if she is in fact thinking deeper about anything, so it is essentially an unmeasurable goal.
And yes, there are many high-achieving parents here, most of whom assumed the schools would allow their students to study material at the same level they studied when they were children. Parents are beginning to organize to get the school to make this happen.
In addition to seeing their children not learn, parents are upset that children are getting bored with school, getting sloppy with their work because they think it's too easy/below them, or thinking that "school is dumb". Perhaps most importantly, the children are never experiencing a challenge, which means that they'll be in for a rude awakening when they finally encounter one in the real world.
I think homeschooling is probably the right thing for gifted children. As long as each subject can be attended to properly, and the kid is kept on a discipline of doing enough work.
For areas like SV / The Peninsula I think there need to be homeschooling Co-Ops. I don't mean Charter Schools, just parents collectively could come together to supervise self-directed homeschooling. I would want such a group to only perform: 1) sharing constructed curricula 2) Administrating standardized tests 3) Perhaps organizing socialization for the children. Anything more doesn't scale well IMO.
There are a lot of crappy private schools that do alternative learning. I looked into a lot of them when I was grade school. If I could afford 100% focus I would involve less groups and rely more on educating my kid solo / I'd frankly rather not involve any of the inevitable politics, misalignments, and mediocrity that would come from most groups.
I was a GATE kid for a little while in CA and a similar program in another state. Ultimately most learning was self-directed though. If the kid is smart, they just need to be set free (given the time) to study on their own, and guided by parents to do that instead of being distracted by all of the normal things which distract kids (and adults).
I also used to live in Menlo Park. Another city with lots of smart folks.
I have considered homeschooling but the social aspect would be a challenge. But we have talked with other public school families that are also on the brink, and I wouldn't be surprised if we jump ship before all our kids are grown. If anyone else is interested in chatting about this, my contact info is in my profile.
For socializing, it would be simply a group that meets every Friday for about 3+ hours in the afternoon, at an environment like a municipal community center (some are really nice, especially on the peninsula) or a good YMCA community room, or similar space.
One adult present to prevent shenanigans. Should probably leave them alone and just check up every half hour. Lunch and snacks. BYO computer required. No video games. (they have to talk to each other).
All kids home schooled for gifted reasons. Maybe 10-30
No forced scholastics or presentations at the social meeting. Just smart kids hanging out. They will naturally share their interests and goals with each other without being pressured, and will tend to resist if pressured to be scholastic in front of each other.
Then they will form cliques who want to hang out on their own time.
The parents could also have a similar meeting once a month on Friday evenings.
Now how do you promote and grow that group into something with at least about 10 kids? (Or potentially many more) (while also ensuring that they are all in fact gifted kids?) I don't know. Slick website? Blog? Newsletter? Viral philosophy? Simple word-of-mouth is very powerful. Not sure but it seems like something to throw a little SV ingenuity at in terms of viral marketing.
If you do it, just remember to keep it simple!
I remember getting marked wrong on “3-4=-1” because the class hadn’t learned about negative numbers so the “correct” answer was “you can’t do that”. Or my “which statements are true” answer getting marked wrong for being in the wrong order. I came from using electric saws and hot glue guns at age 5 to not being able to use a paper cutter until age 14.
GATE would take us out of regular class for an hour a day. The school was on a rotating schedule, so each day we’d miss something different. It didn’t matter. I was reading a sci fi or fantasy book under my desk anyway. We’d still ace any tests.
GATE wasn’t just accelerated school topics. We’d solve fake court cases (the upside down horse shoe is the one that stuck with me), create and draw 3d block structures on isometric paper (learning about optical illusions), sudoku, circle threading, logic puzzles, etc.
It wasn’t just the activities, it was putting me with other people that also wanted to do them. It taught me that learning is fun. I realize that mixed-ability grouping is beneficial, but it’s also a huge burden to have to constantly bear. Getting out of that dynamic for an hour gave me so much motivation—way more than skipping a grade of math ever did.
Then middle school came along and ruined it. It became an after-school class that thought of big homework projects to give us and we collectively said “fuck that”.
Trying to generalize education means classes will have to deal with a far larger variance in education levels. Anyone who knows a bit of pedagogy and psychology would understand making things too easy or too difficult is a great way to make kids bored. Add a lack of discipline to it, and you're setting up for dysfunctional class rooms. And with the limited time and large classes, it's extremely difficult to appeal to both extremes, meaning most classes will appeal only to some small range while the remainder questions what they are doing.
The primary thing I take from the article, is the immense focus on the gifted. That's the attitude I kinda get in general: kids at the lower rungs are just "there". They have to make it out themselves, while the upper echelons get all the benefits. Of course the less fortunate would fight back when the system itself is a positive feedback loop for anyone up high, and a negative one for anyone all the way down. Segregating based on class levels isn't just there to boost the high ones further up at the cost of everyone else.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-sc...
There has been a similar move to eliminate the VSB's year-long gifted programs (Multi Age Cluster Class) by breaking it into six-week part-time sessions of which any student could attend some. Again, the proponents of the change see this as being a means to expand the "inclusiveness" of schools: “The model would enable students to experience full inclusion at their current schools while simultaneously receiving best-practice enrichment programming”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...
I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of public education. It was an awfully boring experience. It seems like it’d be great for a utopia of clones but less useful for diverse populations like we have. The only way to solve education is through the market, unfortunately.
The solution is less meritocracy, more democracy.
Could you expand on this? It seems almost to fly in the face of the very definition of "smart"
To me it means that wealth and power flows to best person for the job. This creates incentive for people to do what they are best at (in Pareto efficient sense). Governments job is to ensure fair play and a minimum quality of life for all
Yes, this is called autonomy. It's the basis of evolution, scientific inquiry, every concept underpinning democracy and freedom, technological progress, decreased infant and all-cause mortality, reduced poverty/starvation/privation/exploitation, and even the very idea that it's worth understanding or investigating anything at all.
Obviously, I'm not suggesting that we should return to that world, but meritocracy is also bad. The solution is egalitarianism and democracy.
Meritocracy certainly has negative consequences, as do all systems, including egalitarianism and democracy. Putting full faith in any of these systems is a reliable road to evil.
My friends grew up to be happy and successful, while I still struggle with depression and burnout. It's actually a running joke now on social media:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gifted%20kid...
https://www.reddit.com/r/BurntOutGiftedKids/
https://www.tiktok.com/tag/burntoutgiftedkids
In some ways, the world is far worse today than when I was growing up, but GT filled my head with idealism. I thought we'd be on our way to a Star Trek meritocracy for all the peoples of the world by now, not various dystopias converging on A Christmas Carol or The Handmaid's Tale. People can vehemently disagree with my take on that but.. look at an arial view of Mexico City slums. Or the wealth inequality in Dubai. Or any glacier, coral reef or rain forest. Daily life for billions of people is a living nightmare and the things I personally care about are mostly in decline.
Writing all of this out, I'm realizing that GT isn't what I thought it was (an art colony) but is more like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Maybe someone predicted how bad things would get and created a youth league to someday combat it. Maybe now's our time, and we should quit feeling sorry for ourselves and the fate of the world and step up to saving it..
So, Special Needs programs segregate kids, and use resources for Needy kids. Seems self-evident.
I lost a lot of quality of life as a result.
Even if you love diversity, do you really want an affirmative action neurosurgeon? Or do you want the smartest kids to get the best education even if they're asian?
Some kids (e.g. special needs or gifted kids) are going to require more hands-on time to reach their potential. For others, the standard curriculum is a great fit for them.
It's a nice thought that all children get an equal amount of everything, but the fact of the matter is that not all children need an equal amount of everything.
This is highly reductive. What you're really saying is that some practices benefit one ideal to the detriment of the other, and that's a problem and a fair complaint, but it is an unrealistic and negative/provocative leap to imply they are 100% mutually exclusive.
They are opposing values. To focus on one is to de-prioritize the other.
Is it true that only 22% of public school students are white? The population of the us in 61% white, so this shocked me.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cge/racial-ethnic...
The beneficiaries will be wealthier students who will receive advanced education elsewhere, and whose academic achievements will be relatively more stellar than their erstwhile peers.
For this thread, my views are different, and I suggest an approach that is simpler, easier, faster, cheaper, safer, etc.
First, K-12 and anything advanced are miles apart. Basically the staff in K-12 is unable to help, teach, or guide students to anything both advanced and worthy. Partly the staffs set up advanced work as ways to challenge students to test them and see who survives -- it is like they hate the students. A lot of students get seriously hurt, and nearly no students get benefit.
Net, for advanced work, f'get about K-12 -- the staffs are not qualified and will do more harm than good.
Second, some good paths to advanced work are available in some of the top universities. E.g., I knew a student who as an undergraduate got a lot of tutoring from unique world class mathematician A. Gleason at Harvard. But getting into Harvard as a ugrad is super difficult. For the usual colleges or state universities, their faculties are poorly qualified.
My suggestion: For the advanced work in academics (doesn't apply to the arts) just get a good path through a broad Master's in pure/applied math and pursue it via independent study of the best texts with some occasional contact with a carefully selected good mathematician. Pursue the path starting ASAP while in K-12 and then college, and don't expect any of the teachers to be able to help -- don't even mention your efforts to them; you don't want them involved.
So, right learn calculus, set theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, measure theory, Fourier theory, functional analysis, probability theory, number theory, and some applications to parts of physics, engineering, statistics, optimization.
Go to some talks in good math departments and there look for research problems. Might also attend talks in physics, engineering, and computer science departments. Might also try other departments, e.g., maybe some having to do with medicine. Commonly they have a lot of important problems to solve and a lot of data but are not very good at math, e.g., statistics. So, might find a problem you can solve to get some results important in their applied work using some math, maybe partly new; then publish that. Try to publish at least one research paper. Write the paper; pick a journal; submit your paper; see what happens.
Take the SAT exam in knowledge of ugrad math -- with the study of the topics above, should be able to blow that away like Michael Jordan in his prime trying out for a junior high basketball team.
Pick some universities, the top in the world (it does make a difference), and at those some of the best profs (it does make a difference), make personal contact with the profs, pick a prof (make sure he is a nice guy and won't be mean to you), and apply for a Master's and to their Ph.D. program. May get to skip the Master's and go directly into research for a Ph.D. dissertation.
By the way, never study any high school AP (advanced placement) materials. Instead, e.g., to learn calculus, just get the best freshman college calculus books (several) you can find (see what Harvard, Stanford, etc. are using; ask people; ignore Khan Academy and similar Internet sources).
Now have your coveted advanced education. Likely, with what I have outlined, it can be easier to get a Ph.D. at Harvard than to be accepted as a ugrad at Harvard.
Eventually you will discover that in high end academics "advanced" study, learning, and knowledge are not much respected; the high end understands clearly that no one can carry the library around between their ears. Instead the respect goes to research, finding new results -- sometimes that requires a lot of prerequisites, and sometimes not.
Independent study? Need to learn to do that anyway. All researchers and all teachers, profs, and professionals who want to keep up have to do that.
Independent study in math is relatively easy -- just be able to work the exercises. If also can prove the theorems, then there's no doubt you have done well enough. But, do get a good college math prof to read some of your first writing as you prove theorems -- need to learn how to write proofs and at the beginning have someone who knows how check your work. For a research paper with no exercises, learn, say, to prove the theorems.
Why pick math? Because the best work in all fields of science and technology mathematizes the field. So, for whatever field you want, math, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, business, ecology, ..., the best background you can have is math.