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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

If it was that simple I'm sure we would have seen it already. I imagine any gifted program, and you can imagine it in any way you like, will inevitably promote a majority from a certain group, thus by definition will be a target for every discrimination complaint - because basically it will be supporting and pumping more money to an already privileged group. So somebody has to decide: either targeted to constant fussing and worse, or no program at all and wait for the somewhat fewer gifted from the group with possibilities to still bubble up. Of course this can change every few years, and given a ideal situation when you had addressed the challenges of poverty, you can draft now a challenge-free gifted program. Note: From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.

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> Note: From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.

Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else? The point is that different kids has different needs, the general classroom is designed for the average student and doesn't fit those who are very different regardless in what way they are different.

>Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else?

Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other. One could argue that the disadvantaged kids should be prioritized because they need more help, and are less likely to succeed without it.

Whereas gifted kids might be bored in school and do worse than if they had dedicated programs, but they still have the chance to find enrichment outside of school or catch up later in life.

Of course, whether those statements are true would need to be an area of research. How would you calculate the overall ROI for society between the two options? Is it more import to "lift up the bottom" or "accelerate the top"?

And of course ideally we would do both.

I'm just saying it's not surprising that most (liberal / social democrat type) people will default to supporting the "more needy" first.

> Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other.

That seems like a heavy assumption to me. The gifted kids are still being allocated to classes, so you can serve them better using the same resources you would anyway by just grouping them together.

> From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.

If you have a group of animals where most of them are dogs but a few are cats, then use statistics to justify treating them all like dogs, that is not fair to the cats, is it?

The issue is deeper than that: it's that we take some singular conception of what a dog is, and ruthlessly beat any deviation from that idealized dog out of all the individual dogs. Which ends up being every dog.

Well said. The unusual dogs are just beaten more

In the past, in many states entry into gifted education classes required a professionally administered IQ test. Many locations needed 130+. Those requirements have gone away but I feel it wasn’t discriminatory. Can it really be criticized as such?

Certainly there are those who say the IQ tests themselves are discriminatory. I'm not qualified to say how much truth there is in that. But that is the likely reason they went away.

In my case I changed schools in the middle of second grade. A month later teachers submitted their list of students who should be admitted the the G+T program. Obviously I didn't make the cut since my teacher barely knew me. My parents tried for years to get me into the program but the district held firm that I had missed the window. Ultimately, I ended up third in my graduating class and attended a top university. The outcomes from the G+T kids were mostly disappointing. One teaches at a university, another works at Walmart. The rest are somewhere in between but mostly closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.

Maybe I actually dodged a bullet.

The IQ test is heavily influenced by where and how you grew up. So yes, it can be criticized as such. Did I mention it's a very difficult, impossible even, task to balance all arguments?

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