17 ms·

California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

• dogprez 2y ago
  She makes some good points, but my take is that we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our weakest links. Our world has become so complicated, one small mistake can have dire consequences. So, it's the state's priority to spend its limited resources helping those struggling to tread water. Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family. I know since I gave myself an almost complete college education in computer science before I graduated from high school. Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life too.
  • Dilettante_ 2y ago
    >Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family. That's extremely optimistic.
    • nostrademons 2y ago
      Well-off gifted kids will get the stimulus they need at home. Poor gifted kids are out of luck. And thus, the policy serves to entrench socioeconomic disadvantage in the name of making everybody equal.
      • dogprez 2y ago
        I don't believe it. Almost every kid in America has access to the internet, a public library and a teacher. How many don't have access to any of those? That's a different problem.
        • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
          But they often don't have an easy way to get to the library, or a quiet place where they can sit and watch a Youtube tutor, or even a trusted authority who tells them that all of this is worth their time.
        • nostrademons 2y ago
          The issue is time, attention and guidance. Well-off kids have parents who are usually well educated and who (if they arrange their priorities appropriately) can make time to spend with their kids. Poor kids do not have such parents; their parents usually wouldn't know where to begin, and even if they did, they don't have time to spend with their kids if they're working multiple jobs that they get fired from if they're late. If you let a random kid loose on the Internet, they will probably find propaganda / political / incel / gaming / porn / alt-right bullshit, because that is simply what the majority of the Internet is. I remember folks doing experiments back at Google in the '00s where they set a user-agent loose to follow links at random on the web, and the result was that you always ended up back at porn. Kids need some form of guidance to say "This is worth pursuing, this is not worth pursuing", and for a gifted kid, it needs to be someone who can personalize this guidance to their own interests. An involved parent can do that, but a teacher who is literally trying to keep their 30 other students from killing each other cannot.
          • dogprez 2y ago
            I appreciate what you are trying say. I'm having a hard time believing it because I was one of those kids. The only thing my parents gave me was access to books, technology, love and free time. They possessed zero experience in engineering or technology, gave zero guidance. In fact they told me I was wasting my time being on the computer so much. I think people like to inject themselves as some sort of necessary mentor but gifted kids are gifted.
            • nostrademons 2y ago
              > love and free time I think that kids who got those tend not to realize both how important and how non-universal these are. I grew up the child of an elementary school teacher and a househusband (formerly a nuclear chemist), and didn't have a whole lot of money but did have a whole lot of curiosity. Taught myself to program and a whole bunch of other things. For most of my teens and twenties I was very much like "Anyone can do what I did - all it took was a public library card, Internet access, and a lot of time spent reading and tinkering." But then as I grew up I met lots of other people who were gifted too, sometimes very much so, sometimes with a lot more financial resources than my family had. But they lacked the "love, attention, and free time" part. What'd happen is that their brain wouldn't let them focus on anything long enough to really master it or apply it effectively. They'd be off chasing the void that the lack of love left in them, often in extremely self-destructive ways. Many of them are dead now. We all need the "love and attention" part, but it functions at such a subconscious level that people who have it just assume that everybody else does too, while those who don't keep seeking it, oftentimes in ways that won't build anything durable for themselves, to the detriment of everything else in their life.
  • drawkward 2y ago
    What is the purpose of government? Maybe its some sort of collective action/game theory thing, i.e., handle problems that is in no individual's best interest to solve. But if that's the case, then government should probably be serving the greatest number, instead of a relatively small amount.
  • rangestransform 2y ago
    > we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our weakest links only because they can vote > Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students: - whose parents may not even know anything about the field that the student is interested in - whose parents may see higher education as a waste of time or have other anti-intellectual views like a sizeable chunk of the US - who may have ADHD (pretty likely actually) and need some kind of external structure to pursue something to the student's maximum potential > Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life too Gathering gifted kids together, instead of bunching them with lowest common denominators, can result in lifelong friendships. Out of 5 friends from high school that I'm still close with, 4 are in big tech and 1 is in a prestigious PhD program, we still try to gather a few times a year even though we've been out of high school for 10 years.
    • tonyedgecombe 2y ago
      > This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students: - whose parents may not even know anything about the field that the student is interested in - whose parents may see higher education as a waste of time or have other anti-intellectual views like a sizeable chunk of the US Why are you assuming that because the parents are poor they are automatically ignorant or anti-intellectual?
      • rangestransform 2y ago
        poorer kids will be more affected by family attitudes because they will be less likely to be in a well funded school system with sufficient support for gifted kids
    • dogprez 2y ago
      > This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students: I don't think that's as big of an issue because kids have access to teachers, libraries and the internet. > Gathering gifted kids together, instead of bunching them with lowest common denominators, can result in lifelong friendships. Kid's together creates the opportunity for friendships. Focusing too much on academics at a young age will miss key milestones for social development. It's particularly acute for high functioning autistic kids.
  • ImJamal 2y ago
    You can help the weakest links without tearing down the most gifted.
    • nashashmi 2y ago
      it is not a teardown we are talking about. But rather giving attention. Give certain students more attention and that takes away equal attention from everyone else. if you gave attention to two kids, one was smart and quick, and the other was slow and stiff, who would you help more?
      • ImJamal 2y ago
        You tear them down by not providing the education they deserve. You tear them down by forcing them into classes with dumb kids. You tear them down by forcing them into classes with trouble maker kids. Nobody is getting more or less attention and nobody is advocating for that. I would help both kids equally by having two teachers. One who could help the smart kids and one who could help the less intelligent kid. This isn't an either or situation.
        • nashashmi 2y ago
          > not providing/ forcing Seems a bit of an entitlement
          • ImJamal 2y ago
            Do you want to address the actual points instead of picking on my word choice?
  • marcus0x62 2y ago
    > but my take is that we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our weakest links. Bound in what way? Gated by? Morally obligated to?
    • dogprez 2y ago
      It's just the truth. Look at the boeing dreamliner failures. Hundreds of smart people doing a bang up job. It just took one a few missteps to jeopardize the whole production and peoples lives.
    • anonCoffee 2y ago
      Chained to our legs, making every step harder. And you're a bigot if you refuse additional chains.
  • toast0 2y ago
    > Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family. Or by disrupting the rest of the class. > Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life too. Single streaming gifted kids can also warp them socially. Gifted kids in a single stream classroom need to learn to play dumb or become a social pariah. My school district had tracked 1-6, and semi-tracked 7-12. It was a real adjustment leaving the core group where learning and knowledge was appreciated and developed, even if most of the kids in the 'honors/advanced' sections were people I knew from the tracked grade school experience. My child had pullout 'branches' in his current school district 2-4, and AFAIK, it seemed pretty useless; my spouse had a similar pullout program growing up and also reports not getting much out of it, other than a target on their back, socially. Not having a core group supportive of learning gave my kid a lot of trouble in grade 7; although 7-8 is generally a hard time for kids; we're having a lot better experience in 8 at a small private school where the kids all want to learn. OTOH, I have a cousin who absolutely hated her experience in a tracked system, so I get that too. There's a bunch of different things all clamoring for more resources in education, and prioritizing is hard, but I think a lot of the conversation in the past few years has been about "why do they get this nice thing? they shouldn't have it" as opposed to "why can't we all have this nice thing" or "how do we make sure selection criteria is not discriminatory". But I'm pragmatic. Gifted kids can often work more self-directed, so let their class sizes float upwards, and have the other classes float downward.
    • dogprez 2y ago
      > Or by disrupting the rest of the class. Kids that are struggling in class can be just as disruptive. > Gifted kids in a single stream classroom need to learn to play dumb or become a social pariah. Aka learn to function in society? Here's my story from the other side. I have one gifted child and one child with dyslexia, but doesn't qualify for special education. My school district has a gifted program that is a whole separate school, but they have a handful of specialists to help kids struggling to read. They are shared across the grades and hard to get assigned. One of them has to actually be paid for by the PTSA since the district won't pay for it. That's messed up.
• rcpt 2y ago
  It's not because of BLM. It's because of Prop 13.
  • BadHumans 2y ago
    Go on...Going to need a little bit more of an explanation here.
    • edmundsauto 2y ago
      Prop 13 limits property taxes which are typically used for funding local schools. The comment is implying that it’s low school funding in Ca that is the culprit.
      • BadHumans 2y ago
        I understand now thanks. That point doesn't make sense to me in the context of the article because the article is claiming that black and Latino gifted children were under-scouted until the BLM movement. Seems that this and that are 2 different issues.
        • pfisherman 2y ago
          Prop 13 had a huge negative effect on quality of public schools in California, which I got to experience first hand. The difference was quite apparent to me during high school when I compared my older siblings’ yearbooks to my experience of the same school a decade later. They had so many more classes, clubs, sports, programs, and activities available to them than I did.
      • itbeho 2y ago
        Property prices in California have skyrocketed in the last decase, and so have tax revenues. Spending more money wastefully won't solve the problem.
    • cosinetau 2y ago
      Prop 13 prevents new property tax without a direct referendum. Without new revenue streams, gifted programs were affordable for school districts until they were not.
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  “But they’re not just fine. Gifted children, more than others, tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others, a phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third-grader’s reading skills might be at 11th-grade level while her social skills are more like a kindergartner’s. They often find it hard to connect with other children. They also are in danger of being turned off by school because the lessons move slowly.” Huh. I was a gifted kid. I was also an ass. But now that I think about it, I was mostly in ass in reading-based classes. I always read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-photographic memory, and so excelled at recall-based examination, which is most of the liberal arts and social studies in school. Meanwhile, I never acted out in my math classes, particularly once school went multi track, and I didn’t consider that it was because I was engaged. (My math, economics and engineering teachers consequently liked me more. Go figure.)
  • rz2k 2y ago
    > I always read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-photographic memory, and so excelled at recall-based examination, which is most of the liberal arts and social studies in school. Then you were definitely under-served by your school. An encyclopedia of knowledge is useful, but these subjects are almost entirely about critical thinking. At the best schools, students are expected to complete about ten pages of writing across all their subjects each week by eight grade. That's a pretty high workload for teachers though, so I guess it makes sense that schools with a lower teacher to student ratio have to take shortcuts and use different instruments to assess their students. However, it does mean that students without writing experience spend a significant portion of their college careers catching up with their peers.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > you were definitely under-served by your school Sure. It’s why the G&T programmes helped. By the eighth grade the writing assignments were there. But at the elementary level, a lot of work is put into ensuring reading comprehension. If you have that the lessons are terrible.
• asdasdsddd 2y ago
  Are there really no public school gifted options in the bay area?
  • throwaway106382 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • elzbardico 2y ago
    that would be racist[2]
• resource_waste 2y ago
  What is the goal for gifted students? Skip a grade and teach them stuff ahead of time (No, their social skills cant handle it apparently) Teach them extended topics... aka waste their time on stuff they can already do. I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it and I got it in my head. I don't really understand pacing of US K12. In Retrospect, its basically teaching people math and reading skills. If we are just looking for daycare, sure the status quo is fine. Otherwise it seems school should be built around those fields rather than arbitrary ages.
  • AstralStorm 2y ago
    Teach them more skills and/or use the extra time they do not need on their strong sides to boost weak ones with extracurricular activities. Yes, you cannot skip a grade, but nobody is stopping a kid from going to a later grade for some classes really. The school social atmosphere has to be right for it though. But nobody wants to pay for it.
    • JoshTriplett 2y ago
      > nobody is stopping a kid from going to a later grade for some classes really Nobody should be, but many people are. At a minimum, the college-style model of subject-based classes and prerequisites for those classes should start much, much earlier, in elementary school. There are elementary-school students who should be in calculus classes, and there are high-school and university students who should be in remedial arithmetic classes. (Though in some cases the latter would be less true if K-12 hadn't failed them so badly thus far.)
  • bagels 2y ago
    My gift for learning ahead in high school was to sit in the office for an hour each day, not learning, but instead helping with administrative work against my will, lest I get a bad grade on "we don't know what to do with you" time.
  • influx 2y ago
• csa 2y ago
  It’s not just California, but California may be one of the more egregious state neglecters. The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for the gifted and talented communities. Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron. Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally does not afford equality of opportunities is a fool’s game that ends with Bergeron-esque levels of absurdity. Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we all aren’t equal, we don’t all have access to the same opportunities, but as a country we can implement policies that lessen the imbalance. Head Start is a good example. Well-run gifted and talented programs in schools are also good examples. Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society.
  • philipov 2y ago
    While I may have sympathy for your more substantive points, anytime I hear someone mention virtue signalling, it makes it sound like they're virtue signalling. Better to just not bring up that dog whistle.
    • exe34 2y ago
      it's a perfectly good phrase to describe what it says. if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
      • lern_too_spel 2y ago
        In my experience, people who use the term "virtue signalling" don't understand the problems that the supposed virtue signalers are trying to solve and simply use the term as a cheap dismissal of their policies. If the policies are bad, explain why they're bad. Don't just say that people putting the 10 Commandments in schools are virtue signalling.
        • exe34 2y ago
          Or indeed, it's possible that neither you nor the virtue signallers understand why they're doing it.
• bilbo0s 2y ago
  My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the government, would take gifted options more seriously if there weren’t so many kids who did nothing more than learn the multiplication table early being classified as gifted. You limit enrollment to only the extreme outliers and at that point there would be national security benefits to identifying these children. (Heck, I'd bet the federal government might even try to step in and take over the education of gifted children for its own benefit.) As it stands, it’s just a bunch of kids who mostly land on boringly normal tracks to public flagships. There’s not much upside in even identifying them, because "gifted" has been reduced to mean, well, pretty much anyone who can get a good grade.
  • corpMaverick 2y ago
    Perhaps you need several program levels? remedial, normal, advanced and gifted. My naive take is that there is a need for each. remedial helps kids to catch up. Normal is where you have perhaps 70% of the students, advanced where you have kids with more natural ambition in some subjects and gifted is where you send the top 5%?
  • bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the government, would take gifted options more seriously if there weren’t so many kids who did nothing more than learn the multiplication table early being classified as gifted. It isn't that unreasonable to ask for an education system that pushes kids as fast as the kid keeps up with and eases them back if they regress to the mean at some point Learning the multiplication table early isn't necessarily a sign that someone is a genius, but it does mean they are ahead of their class. There is no benefit to holding them back to the level of other kids their age "just in case they might not actually be gifted" or whatever it is you are proposing If they wind up graduating high school early but then not really doing anything exceptional in their lives that's actually fine
    • bilbo0s 2y ago
      It isn't that unreasonable to ask for an education system that pushes kids as fast as the kid keeps up with and eases them back if they regress Surely you can see the damage this would do to the majority of children currently being told they are "gifted"? Being "gifted" until the 6th, 7th, or 8th grade would psychologically cripple a lot of these kids through high school. It's better to not allow that "advanced but not gifted" demographic in from the outset, than it is to unceremoniously boot them at some arbitrary time in the future if they fail to keep up with those at the extremes. The better ideas are the remediation, normal, advanced and then gifted classifications. And you don't get the gifted label unless you are on the extreme of exceptional.
• atomicUpdate 2y ago
  > There’s little doubt that racism played a role in identifying children as gifted even though the label was based on supposedly objective criteria. Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only reason for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists? I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback there is by those accused of it.
  • thinkingtoilet 2y ago
    Honest question, you're a first grade teacher in LA. How do you "push back"? Write a tweet?
    • recursive 2y ago
      Cancel your subscription I guess. How are the subscription numbers?
    • sickofparadox 2y ago
      Have each of your students write a letter to the editors of the LA Times saying it is not nice to imply that you are a bigot.
    • atomicUpdate 2y ago
      My first thought is using your union representative to amplify your voice. Presumably the union doesn't want to be associated with, or known to be representing, racists so it's in their best interests to denounce these types of statements.
  • User23 2y ago
    Because the alternative hypothesis to racist teachers is literally unspeakable.
    • vundercind 2y ago
      … centuries of disadvantage compounding over generations? The predictable outcomes of poverty? People talk about those all the time.
• throwaway106382 2y ago
  This is what happens when you push equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. Everyone gets the same crappy outcome. Freedom is inherently unequal.
  • Jcampuzano2 2y ago
    Equality of outcome could even eventually lead to an objectively worse outcome for society as a whole when on a larger time scale due to holding back brilliant minds. Those who were clearly brilliant and may have been entirely capable of pushing societal, technological, medical etc. advances forward in a larger time scale are held back, stifled, or even in cases of things like affirmative action (which I believe should exist, but only on the economic level, not on the basis of race or identity) have been denied of opportunity to go on and do great things.
    • foogazi 2y ago
      > have been denied of opportunity to go on and do great things. Well, if they’re so brilliant…
• norir 2y ago
  I think fundamentally the problem is we are trying to fit everything into an industrial, and authoritarian, model of schooling. Students can't be trusted to self learn so we put them into a room, atomize them, strip away almost all of their freedom and force them to learn at the pace of the slowest learner in the group. It's little wonder that acting out is a constant problem. Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping away at some of the problem don't generally do much about the structural problems in schools and clearly amplify some of their existing biases. I do not have children but I have given a lot of thought to how terrible our schooling is. I would never want to subject my children to 20 years of what I went through. But the presence or absence of traditional gifted programs is nowhere near the top of my concerns.
  • gaoshan 2y ago
    I was a gifted program kid who was part of a new style of unstructured, learn at your own pace, self-learn program called the "informal" program. This was back in the early 1980s (the program itself had started in the 1970s). The net result was that the highest achieving gifted kids did really well and the slacker gifted kids (myself included) did abysmally. Turns out some of us needed a level of structure and rigor enforced on us to nurture whatever gifted talents we had. Some kids learned it at home, for some it seemed to be innate and for others we did not have it anywhere in our lives and needed to be instructed in how to study, what to do, when to do it and at what pace.
    • Spivak 2y ago
      I mean this is pretty much a summary of all the problems of our education, including the problem highlighted by the article. It's a system for teaching the masses and creating societal outcomes but folks want it to be a system for teaching specifically $their_child according to their needs. I think a lot of the discussion fades away when you're forced to pin down that it's for raising the floor and that at best what you'll get from public schools with the resources is 1-3 tracks remedial, "normal", and AP/IB. Everyone with special needs in either direction needs to switch to private or a school system in a rich area that can afford more individualized instruction.
  • 2y ago
• glimshe 2y ago
  I had to leave California so my gifted child could get a proper education. Now he's getting it, while I'm paying roughly half in property taxes.
  • wood_spirit 2y ago
    Can you share more details? Where have you moved to? What alternatives did you consider?
    • glimshe 2y ago
      I moved to Forsyth County, GA, where my child has access to excellent computer science and musical education (not to mention AP classes and 3 tiers bases on student achievement). In fact, he didn't make it to the top tier in everything because they were just too strong. This is a good thing! In his supposedly "10" California school, music had been defunded to spread equality to other school systems; also, no career emphasis programs or special tracks were available. I considered moving to one of the Dallas suburbs, but I like the Southeast weather and setting better. Note: I'm "Latino", whatever that means, and my son is mixed (my wife is a snow white American) with a "Latino" last name.
      • goodhombre 2y ago
        Latino is widely understood to refer to people descended from the population of Latin America.
        • glimshe 2y ago
          That was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the term isn't very consistently applied. I mentioned it just in case someone thinks that a person from a Latino/Hispanic background would have a hard time in this part of the country (I've met people who assumed that). I live in a fairly diverse area.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  With most problems in society there is a huge stumbling block that people aren't actually interested in resolving because it conflicts with their other interests. For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing. Housing is too expensive. Housing needs to be cheaper. But too many people have a vested financial interest in maintaining and growing high prices. Interestingly, high property prices are a big contributing factor here too. Schools are funded by a mix of Federal, state and local taxes and a big part of local taxes come from property taxes. So the wealthier areas get better-funded schools. It's economic segregation in the same vein as redlining. California in particular has created a massive funding hole through Prop 13, which is essentially a massive tax break for the state's wealthiest residents. I would add another dimension to this: how gifted? 99th percentile students will largely be fine. There are scholarships and progrrams to find and nurture these people. You start to see more disparities when you look at the 90-98th percentiles. If you're from an affluent background, you're going to be fine. If you're from a poorer background, it's way more likely that things go wrong for you. Your quality of school matters. You may catch a criminal charge of some kind, which can entirely derail your life. While all this is going on there are significant and organized efforts to dismantle the public education system (ie "school choice" or "vouchers"), which are nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the providers of private education at the expense of everybody else.
  • echoangle 2y ago
    > For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing. Is that true? Without having a deep insight into the subject, homelessness seems to often be a symptom of mental illness and substance abuse. I don’t think having cheaper housing would really fix the issue of homelessness.
    • teachrdan 2y ago
      This is a major misconception. The people you see homeless on the streets are very disproportionately those with mental illness(es) and addiction problems. But studies show a huge percent of the homeless have jobs; the link below says 40% to 50%. But we don't see people workings and living in their car or in a shelter "being homeless," so we tend to think of the visibly homeless as representative of all homeless folks. And for those who do have mental illness or addiction problems, well, those problems are severely exacerbated by being homeless. They'd be more likely to get treatment and improve with housing. https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends
• nonameiguess 2y ago
  I was in California GATE programs in the 80s and 90s. I was also (and still am, I guess) Latino, so it's not like there was universal exclusion if you weren't white. As far as I remember, being placed in these programs was entirely a matter of scoring high on some IQ test you were given in 1st grade. It's hard to say the program made any difference. We took some extra classes I barely remember. We had special summer schools I actually do remember, and got some early exposure to computers before there were regular classes for them, but things I remember from these summer schools were learning how to make donuts and conducting a mock trial for Lex from Jurassic Park for getting Gennaro killed, not exactly tremendous intellecual challenges. Frankly, I don't say this to be a dick, but teachers don't exist who can handle kids like me. I spent 16 hours a day at the public library sometimes devouring 1000-page books about how lasers worked. I got a perfect SAT score. I also won a district-wide art show three out of four years in high school. I made varsity in four sports and won two state championships. I got second place in the state spelling bee. I was on a television quiz show when I was 12. I could run a 5-minute mile when I was 12 and slam dunk a basketball by the time I was 14. I was good at everything I ever tried to do. I was smarter than the teachers and I was a rotten little immature kid who let them know it. Some kids just aren't going to be served well by school no matter what you do, but what else was I going to be served well by? I took some college classes in high school and they weren't any more interesting. I had no interest in starting or running a business. I wasn't mature enough to hold a regular job. I can't think of anything the school system could have done that would have been better than just regular school. Much like this writer, I ended up okay anyway.
  • Aloisius 2y ago
    I went through California GATE at the same time. I was given an IQ test in either 1st or 2nd grade, then I had a second one-on-one test that was given verbally. IIRC, GATE was where I had my first exposure to programming (Logo).
  • s5300 2y ago
    >> but what else was I going to be served well by? Probably MMORPGs if you had been in the 2003-2008 timeframe
  • 2y ago
• r0p3 2y ago
  The author links to a Teach For America article as evidence of the "removing gifted programs in the name of equity" trend. That article in turn references 2 gifted programs potentially being suspended in Boston and Anchorage, one temporarily for a year due to administrative constraints and one due to budget cuts. Why does the author claim this is a broad trend with social justice and equity goals at its heart when that isn't what the evidence provided suggests? (Imo: clickbait.)
• frmersdog 2y ago
  This comment section is going to be a sh*tshow, but I think I agree with the author's central contention that the issue is one of lax definition, and a failure to prevent dilution of that definition by pushy parents. The racism aspect is a chicken-or-egg situation; whether such programs started as a way to allow engaged, mostly white parents to track and separate their kids from students of color, or merely became that, is probably a matter that varies by location, but the tensions that such a state conjures are clearly a major component of the initiative's undoing. It once again comes down to us not being able to have nice things until that racial hysteria is resolved - minority parents assured that their children aren't being mistreated because of conscious and unconscious perceptions on the part of the school, white and affluent Asian parents assured that their children aren't going to receive a subpar education just because their child's class is double-digits percentage black/brown - and, perhaps more broadly, there is a decoupling of elite educational attainment and basic economic stability. Suffice it to say that anyone telling you that the only problem is that schools are Harrison Bergeroning their little prodigies either aren't acknowledging the whole story or are hoping that you don't know it yourself.
  • gowld 2y ago
    As soon as we undo 3 centuries of systemic oppression and get the races roughly on par with each other, we'll have an easier time managing G&T programs.
    • frmersdog 2y ago
      Unfortunately. Happily, solving that solves a whole host of other problems.
• hardwaregeek 2y ago
  Did people read the article? There's actually some interesting points about how gifted/advanced curriculum isn't always the solution. I'd have to agree. I went to a magnet school, so already presumably for "gifted" students, that in turn had advanced courses like honors or AP. And while there were students who genuinely benefited, myself included, it also became a game of getting into the most advanced course so you could have it on your college applications. Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant. They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass. What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles and knew to put you in prep. Once you were in the school, if you wanted good teachers, you had to take honors. I had a fantastic history teacher who talked about how he loved teaching regular history, but he was constantly pressured by administration to only teach AP. So for a lot of students who didn't have the grades to do honors, they got stuck with the mediocre teachers. Not to mention, psychologically, it sucks being in the bottom 50%. There were so many kids who thought they were dumb or underachievers, but were really just in the wrong environment. When they went to college, they blossomed from not being in such a rat race. I'm not saying the solution is to eliminate gifted programs, but let's not pretend that they're universally great for kids. They're often much more status games than actual educational fulfillment.
  • mturmon 2y ago
    I agree with you, and wish this perspective had informed many of the comments nearby. I'm commenting because my own kid went through the LAUSD highly gifted (HG) magnet program -- which is a subset of the "gifted" program -- his high school was: https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org. (Without belaboring the point, it's a very high-achieving bunch. Multiple Harvard, MIT, and Stanford admissions in his rather small graduating class of ~70.) There are good things and bad things about the LAUSD HG program. One good thing is that most admissions are done just by testing. There are 2 layers of tests, one for gifted and one (later) for highly gifted. If you test 99.5%+, you can be admitted to the HG program. The tests are done relatively early (4th grade for my kid) so they aren't as easy to game, although I'm sure it is done. Every LAUSD student gets the first test, so that's pretty egalitarian. You have to ask for the second test. That's the good part. One thing the article discusses is the other paths to admission at some schools -- paths that are much more subject to gaming, esp. by parents. Things like outside evaluations and private testing to substitute for the LAUSD-administered test. That has been a source of controversy, rightfully IMHO, because these parents can be bulldogs. The possibility of gaming the system is the bad part. One other thing to re-inforce in the above comment. The HG program did tend to favor "high-achieving" rather than "gifted" students. So there was a high proportion of boring grindset students, weighted towards STEM, and the result was that the actually creative types were in a minority. My conclusion is that these programs can benefit the special needs of HG kids, but the devil is in the implementation details and the parents and status game will tend to mess it up. Also, we should have no illusions that their existence is in part a reaction to racial/social inequities, and that they tend to reproduce the problems of the outside society.
• bobfromsf 2y ago
  As a father with a son with IQ over 160, I can tell you unequivocally that California thinks gifted kids are the enemy. Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we were utterly ignored. We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age. My kid is 6 grades ahead in math, scored over 175 in his VCI and they refused to even entertain the idea of skipping even a single grade. California is doing whatever it takes to drive away any family that cares even a modicum for their children’s education and had the means or is willing to sacrifice to ensure their children are adequately educated. Meanwhile they are dropping the requirements at the same time, so the gap between private school and public school educated kids keeps growing more and more. It’s pretty telling that in SFUSD, 50% of the black and brown kids graduate high school without being able to read properly. The real racism isn’t gifted kids, it’s dropping the educational standard for those that can’t afford private school so that they graduate and can’t compete when they get into the workforce because they have been undereducated their entire lives.
  • qwerpy 2y ago
    I’m happy that you were able to work around the state’s horrible treatment of your gifted child, by throwing money at the problem. I’ll probably have to do the same with my children in my Seattle suburb. The real victims are the kids whose parents can’t afford to do this. It tends to be disproportionately the kids in the very demographics that the left professes to care about. So it’s weird to me that they would choose to do things that make it harder for these groups to have economic mobility.
    • decremental 2y ago
      [dead]
  • euroderf 2y ago
    > We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age. Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th. I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.
• jjmarr 2y ago
  Speaking as someone who attended a public high school with competitive admissions, the students are much more important than the teachers or the education itself. Being around a group of talented and driven people motivates you to do well. I also previously attended special education when my academic abilities were questionable, at best. I benefitted from intensive education on phonics and basic literacy skills, rather than being shoved through the pipeline without comprehending the curriculum. The contrast was evident when I spent my lunch times in Grade 11 tutoring a "hopeless" student in Grade 9. Over the course of a few weeks, it became abundantly clear to me that this student did not understand any of the math he had allegedly learned before. He more or less pattern-matched his way to eventually getting the right answer and blundered his way through converting a fraction to a ratio without realizing they are fundamentally the same concept. That was good enough to keep pushing him through grades, I suppose. I was just getting into formal logic as a hobby, so I focused on teaching basic reasoning. As an example, I spent a lot of time explaining that the "equals" sign is a statement that two things are the same. I proceeded to focus on logical implications---that some statements can follow from other statements. It became much easier to teach everything else once we had those fundamentals. His ability to solve problems was much better when he understood the logical sequence of steps he should take to reach an answer. His math teacher later thanked me in Grade 12, because he started getting good marks and switched to university-track mathematics. That probably wouldn't have happened if he didn't get attention specific to him. There should be a reframing of the problem space. Sorting students into gifted or special education based on an accurate assessment of their abilities isn't a case of giving more resources to smarter people and less to dumber. A class of gifted students should require less resources because the students can self-motivate and aren't limited by their peers. This frees up resources for those who need them.
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    > Speaking as someone who attended a public high school with competitive admissions, the students are much more important than the teachers or the education itself. Being around a group of talented and driven people motivates you to do well. Which ultimately means it's up to the parents more than anything. I suspect that's why magnet schools perform well. The parents interested and capable of going out of their way to put their child into a good school district are more likely to also be invested in their child's educational outcomes which can make all the difference.
• cljacoby 2y ago
  Seems there's a lot of comments in here expressing discontent with the dismantling of GT programs. I won't speak as to where/how GT programs should be implemented, I have no idea. However, I did attend a GT program during elementary school. This school was a "regular" public elementary school in the sense it had a local geographic boundary, and kids in the area attended this as their default public school. However, then kids who qualified for GT would be bussed in from around the county to go to this school. Within the school, past the 3rd grade classes were segmented into GT and "base" classes (i.e. non-GT). The "base" classes were local kids who did not qualify for the GT program. GT qualification was based off a single test score, taken in the second grade. Kids in the GT and base classes were often respectively referred to as GT or base kids. In retrospect, it's always appeared super detrimental to me that those kids were called "base" as if they were a somehow more basic version of the GT kids. The name "base" in itself was probably intended as a kind euphemism, to not otherwise default to calling them non-GT kids, i.e. non Gifted nor Talented. Anyway, all of this to say GT programs probably have a place, but in my own anecdotal experience they were not always executed flawlessly.
  • gowld 2y ago
    Even base kids aren't all stupid. No matter what you call the program, the kids will know that's where the smart kids went.
• afthonos 2y ago
  My take that seems to never get cold: let kids skip grades. Anything I hear against this runs into the wall of the lived experience of several people I know including mine. It’s fine! And it doesn’t have to be permanent: if a kid doesn’t thrive in the next grade, put them back! Then everyone at grade level gets grade level resources and teachers get students at the right level of knowledge. Having to homeschool or pay for private school to get this simple experience is wild to me.
• bunderbunder 2y ago
  As an alum of gifted programs with many friends who were also alums, I think most of us would say, "good riddance". In fact, I'm pretty sure the strongest haters of gifted programs I know are people who used to be in them. For most of us, the reality was that our status as relatively studious kids created a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development. Gifted programs mostly served as easy, almost dismissive solution for our parents, who would rather see our very real social-emotional challenges as further evidence of our intellectual excellence and the importance of separating us from our peers so they won't "hold us back." Quite the opposite. Being in class with my friends is what kept me emotionally grounded, and being separated from them, in a way that sends a clear message to everyone involved (including me) that it needed to happen because I was somehow too good to be in the same classes as them, did lasting harm. Even now my lifelong best friend is obnoxiously deferential to me on all sorts of subjects because he sees me as "the smart one" instead of a more sensible perspective like "the one who happens to enjoy math." But I did move around as a kid enough times to see a few different ways of doing this sort of thing, so I can say with certainty what does work, and it works well for everyone involved: flipped classrooms. It's magical. In a group where kids who have mixed skill levels on a particular subject are asked to support each other instead of competing with each other, they do just that. And I can say from experience that it's a much better way to make a classroom more challenging for kids who do better in that subject. Helping your peers understand a tricky subject is a much more interesting intellectual challenge - and builds more useful life skills - than an artificially "accelerated" learning program ever will be. And it's better for long-term learning, too, because it helps build even stronger foundations of understanding. And I am also seeing, now that my kids are in a school that uses flipped classroom teaching, that it's better for everyone else, too. My younger child, who has been having trouble with reading, gets an immense amount of value from being able to pair with friends who are stronger readers.
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    > a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development Not an educator, but it seems like "supporting gifted kids" is one of those phrases where everyone acts as if its meaning were clearly defined and agreed-upon, while avoiding looking too hard at how it is neither. What should the goal be for institutions or parents? For example, to accelerate these kids to the end of the curriculum ASAP? To quickly get them into the workforce? To whisk them through a carousel of possible specializations in the hopes of matching genius to a tough problem? The above options intend to direct their strengths, rather than support their weaknesses and trusting that the rest will follow.
• hintymad 2y ago
  Did anyone check the course material of the gifted programs? My honest assessment is that even students in a gifted class are not necessarily challenged. For instance, the math problems of 6th-grade gifted class on negative integers are something like "calculate -1 - (-2)". In contrast, an easiest problem when I was in the same grade would be something like "N is a negative even number, and K is a non-negative odd number. What is the smallest value of K - N". My point is not to brag how challenging my school work can be, but that most kids need careful nurturing to maximize their potential. It really pains me to see that so many kids squander their time just because the schools do not do their jobs.
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    In my experiences with them, prior to high school they just amount to a few additional worksheets on top of existing assigned work. In elementary school, my girls were pulled out for about an hour a day to go to another room for their "advanced" classes. There was no advanced instruction. Just more math worksheets. It's not really until high school where you have real AP classes that involve actual teaching and not just isolation from the rest of the kids. My experience was much the same, but I actively didn't have friends so enjoyed the isolation at the cost of a few worksheets. They did nothing to actually help us "advance" though.
• laidoffamazon 2y ago
  I think we should stop focusing on the cognitive elite at the expense of everyone else, actually. Why should people that think folks like me are failures deserve the bulk of our attention?
  • MarkusQ 2y ago
    Because somebody needs to keep things running for the rest of us? Seriously, we need all the bright people we can get, working on the tough problems and solving them. And we need even more basically competent people educated to keep what we have got figured out running smoothly. Life isn't some role playing game where everyone who wants to should get a turn being a surgeon or flying the jumbo jet. Competence actually matters.
    • laidoffamazon 2y ago
      The people that designed jumbo jets were people that went to Washington State University and UDub in the 60s. John Aaron saved Apollo 12 and 13 with a degree from Southwestern Oklahoma State. These are not people that were in “gifted programs” and they don’t fit what you perceive to be “gifted” (aka - able to get into one of 10 elite undergrad schools).
      • MarkusQ 2y ago
        Sure they were. College has changed a lot, as has college enrollment; instead of the top 10%, colleges now take the top 40% or so, close to the fraction that graduated high school in the 1960s. Courses that used to be taught in high school are now taught in undergrad, and what used to be covered in undergrad is put off until grad school. What we call "gifted" today was what we called "college bound" back then. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...
        • laidoffamazon 2y ago
          I went to a state school in the 2010s - which menial job do you think I should be doing due to my obvious lack of “giftedness”?
• TrackerFF 2y ago
  Some countries, like the Nordics, have few (to no) options for gifted students. The mentality there is that it is better to raise the average, than to focus resources on a small % of the population. Seems to have worked pretty well for them, all things considered.
  • fusivdh 2y ago
    [dead]
  • tomr75 2y ago
    How has it worked well? Europe is having issues with productivity — too expensive to live there AND higher paying jobs in the US. Eg People have to leave Norway to start businesses due to the tax system
    • teachrdan 2y ago
      You're making a generalization about all of Europe vs just Norway, the country OP mentioned. Check out the link below to be educated on how incorrect your assumption is. No offense intended -- I didn't realize how much better the life of an average Norwegian is compared to that of the average American! What really stood out to me is that, by comparison, an American is > 10X more likely to die in childbirth, and 24% more likely to be poor. It seems like the Norwegians must be doing something right! https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/compare/norway/united-states https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/compare/norway/united-states
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• 1024core 2y ago
  Forget catering to "gifted students". San Francisco's school district (SFUSD) wanted to take algebra out of 8th grade, simply because poor kids and POCs were failing it at disproportionate levels. Here's a relevant article: https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-san-francisco https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-... So the solution to bad grades in some communities was to take away the opportunity for ALL communities. Thankfully, a vocal group of people raised a stink about it and even put it on the ballot. The uproar caused the school to backtrack and bring Algebra back in 8th grade starting this year. This kind of idiotic "social engineering" that the SFUSD is doing is killing the public schools. Parents who can afford to spend the $50K/year on private schooling are taking their kids out of SFUSD and the district is losing funding. Democrats often say that the Republicans would like to kill public education. But the Democrats are doing a great job of it themselves! Case in point: my friend's kid goes to an SFUSD Middle School. Their 5thgrade class has no math teacher! Math is taught via Zoom and "self-paced learning". SMFH...
  • Spivak 2y ago
    I think you're taking the wrong read on the situation, if you have a cross-section of your students that are failing a class that doesn't match with the roughly normal distribution you would expect then it means that it's a failing of the class. You have a bunch of affluent involved parents who are looking to advantage their child in any way possible teaching their kids algebra outside school hours. It's not a bad thing, it's actually great that parents are involved, but it means the class isn't doing anything one way or the other so why even have it? You only see this kind of behavior in math where there's an on-paper advantage to be conferred by letting kids jump ahead, you don't see it with social studies or english.
• EarthBlues 2y ago
  I really think most of the education debate in elides the central issue, which is that there is no coherent vision of what education is for. We’re going to keep changing things with no progress until that’s settled. To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of ends.
• WillAdams 2y ago
  The best school I ever attended divided classes between academic (attended at one's grade level) and social (attended at one's age level) --- some teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and once one had finished a subject through 12th grade, one could begin taking college courses --- many students were awarded 4-year college degrees along with their high school diploma when graduating. The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since it conferred an advantage on students who were able to work and study well enough to move ahead, but failed to make arrangements for students who couldn't to get free college after graduating from high school.
  • bell-cot 2y ago
    > The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since ... I'm thinking the same legal rationalizations could be used to rule that high school football programs are illegal. No advantage conferred on the students who fail to make the team, and no free college for those who don't end up with an athletic scholarship.
    • WillAdams 2y ago
      The thing is, Title IX addressed this by requiring some level of equity in funding, at least in theory.
      • bell-cot 2y ago
        At most, Title IX addressed the "girl's can't make the team" issue here. Where's the equal funding for slow, out-of-shape klutzes? (Actually, I don't know if Title IX addresses co-ed sports. And no matter how co-ed on paper, the rough nature nature of standard football will still result in anything-but-equal gender representation - both on the team, and in those scholarships.)
        • WillAdams 2y ago
          At that point we are close to Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron". We need something a bit more equitable, which acknowledges the uniqueness of each student.
• Animats 2y ago
  > But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program. Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because these are the numbers: Average IQ [1] - Ashkenazi Jews - 107-115 - East Asians - 110 - White Americans - 102 - Black Americans - 90 There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results. (Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?) Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3] Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population. We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct. [1] https://iqinternational.org/insights/understanding-average-iq-by-race https://iqinternational.org/insights/understanding-average-i... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-score-gap-why-it-persists-and-what-can-be-done/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor... [3] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
  • khazhoux 2y ago
    Recognizing gifted students should not be just measuring IQ (which is known to be a flawed metric)
    • searealist 2y ago
• thimkerbell 2y ago
  Written by the author of "Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree." A book of which I know nothing (yet).
• reverendsteveii 2y ago
  Not from CA but had this experience growing up. I was bored in school so I hummed, read books from home, took naps and so on during lessons. Evidently that led to a discussion between my first grade teacher and my parents where they wanted to shunt me off into the developmental disabilities program. Thank God my mother was as involved as she was because what my teacher was reading as disability was merely the disinterest of someone hearing for the tenth time something they understood before they were told about it the first time. Had they put me in special ed in the first grade I'm sure that by the time anyone realized the mistake (assuming they did) I would have been so far behind that there would have been no fixing it. Instead my mom objected in the most vehement terms and they actually gave me some one on one time to assess my ability to learn material that was new to me and I ended up in the gifted program instead. My brother in law is similarly intelligent but has emotional processing issues among other things. He was put into the same program they wanted me to put into. He said he basically had to educate himself while the "teachers" just let them watch movies all day, and it was clear that the special ed program was nothing more than a sink into which they could dump problematic kids to ensure they don't disrupt the kids that the school hasn't technically given up on yet.
• briandear 2y ago
  This is why school choice matters. Parents can send their kids to whatever school is best for the kid, not whatever school is best for the teachers unions.
• fmitchell0 2y ago
  For those who may not be aware, this was precisely the spirit of why affirmative action existed and why I personally supported it. These are the type of things that happen when our society misunderstands an executive action (because it was never a law) and debates in bad faith the intent of the premise for political purposes. I agree that focusing on 'equality of outcomes' is not a good fit for our American culture and it should be about 'equality of opportunity'. From wikipedia (which quoted Harvard): "Affirmative action is intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the majority population." If focus is illiberally applied to the outcomes, then those at the edge of the bell curve are denied opportunities that likely work for them, i.e. the slashing of gifted programs as a gifted student.
• smurda 2y ago
  I was in GATE in a California school district in the 90’s. In our town of 100k people, 30 of us were put in a GATE classroom for grades 3-6. The best part about the program was being around other precocious peers. I think many of us would have been described as misfits - clever enough to sit at the adults table but clearly not a fit there. 30 years later, I have deeper relationships with those 30 people than my high school or college friends.
• kepp 2y ago
  I was in gifted, and transferred through a number of public schools too. Unfortunately I don’t remember much from those years except for them being very disorganized and being made very aware by teachers and others that we were supposed to be “different”. Whatever that meant. One thing I do know is that the outcome of kids that were part of the gifted program was very normally distributed. Some people made out just fine when they got to adulthood, and some of them absolutely ruined their lives. I still think the whole thing was ridiculous and instilled the wrong ideas and lessons to us.
• roguecoder 2y ago
  The whole point of "gifted" was that these are kids who are disproportionally likely to drop out of school, engage in risky behavior, get pregnant, get bad grades, etc. The problem is that A. they called it "gifted" so people thought it was something you _wanted_ your kids to be and B. the screening test they used was the IQ test, which you can massively improve your score on by studying for it. So parents were determined to get their kids into "gifted" education, and coached their kids on the tests to get in, and in the meantime kids from less-privileged backgrounds with the same characteristics were being labeled as behavioral problems and shunted into remedial programs. Now that we have the label of "neurodivergent", it seems to me it would be productive to reframe "gifted" education as "neurodivergent" education: rich parents would stop trying to get their kids into it, and it would be able to serve the kids it was intended to serve.
  • moralestapia 2y ago
    I ... I don't think that's true at all. >it seems to me it would be productive to reframe "gifted" education as "neurodivergent" education This I could get behind, because that's the definition of neurodivergent.
  • mattnewton 2y ago
    where did you get the impression the genesis for "gifted" programs was to solve high iq problem kids? this is the first I'm hearing of that.
    • pessimizer 2y ago
      TFA could be your second time hearing about it: > These programs were originally meant to meet the needs of students with intense, often irregular learning patterns. They used to be seen as not needing special attention because they often excelled. As standardized testing required schools to aim for student proficiency, all the focus went to those who hadn’t met that mark. Those who exceeded it were deemed to be just fine. > But they’re not just fine. Gifted children, more than others, tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others, a phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third-grader’s reading skills might be at 11th-grade level while her social skills are more like a kindergartner’s. They often find it hard to connect with other children. They also are in danger of being turned off by school because the lessons move slowly.
• niemandhier 2y ago
  My personal observation: It’s not gifted programs, it’s the environment. I work on a pretty good science campus in a smallish university town, lots of smart people and so on. There are a few products of gifted programs, but most people just meandered in. What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess club, post soviet backyard hacker pad, Berlin maker space … I think what would help much more than school run gifted programs, would be more opportunities for interested kids to mingle an push each other forward.
  • ratmeadow 2y ago
    This surely has a good amount of truth. Students won't engage with striving for excellence if they are socially/environmentally discouraged from it. How do parents/teachers/peers/school react to a student being very good at something?
  • thimkerbell 2y ago
    "almost everybody has a story (from previously) of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool"
  • mesh 2y ago
    I grew up going through a gifted program (in the 80s) and it was the gifted program that was the subculture i fell into that really pushed me. Before that I was isolated and flunking out. Maybe I would eventually have found my people, but at least for me the gifted program found me, and got me on the right path at an early enough age to matter. Btw, this was in a region where intellectual capability and success was not as celebrated as it is in the Bay area.
  • parpfish 2y ago
    The right peer group makes all the difference. I currently live in a rural environment with tiny schools and wonder how I would’ve turned out if that’s where I did high school. I think you need a critical mass of other gifted kids to really set the bar and drive some aspirational goals. If your class has a single gifted kid, they’ll just see that they exceed their peers and coast; if there’s a whole group they’ll push each other once they know more about where the ceiling is.
• Eumenes 2y ago
  In addition to many wise things stated, such as school choice and accepting some kids aren't as smart as others, teachers unions (and any public worker union, esp police) need to be abolished asap.
  • teachrdan 2y ago
    Massachusetts is the state rated #1 in pre-K to 12 education, and they have about 100% of teachers in unions. This seems to destroy your argument that teachers unions need to be "abolished" in the name of helping students. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/massachusetts https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/massachusetts
    • Eumenes 2y ago
      Yeah sorry I don't care about some click bait US News list on "best states". Also, the methodology is based on test scores which I could care less about. Being good at the SATs and ACT just mean you have rich parents that can steamroll your tutoring, which tracks with high cost of living places like Mass.
      • teachrdan 2y ago
        You are literally choosing to dismiss data that destroys your argument while providing none which supports it. Your opposition to teachers unions is clearly based on your emotions and ideology rather than any facts. Please do better when posting on HN.
        • Eumenes 2y ago
          correlation does not equal causation homie. a US news listicle with a method of ranking doesn't mean anything. i can find a list that has mass towards the middle or bottom depending on the bias of the ranking i share.
          • teachrdan 2y ago
• thimkerbell 2y ago
  How are other countries handling the availability of ChatGPT for use by pre-college students?
• aorona 2y ago
  I was a gifted student in CA public school. Now I code for food :(
• chinabot 2y ago
  homeschooling is a pretty amazing solution if done right
• didibus 2y ago
  Wasn't there something about gifted students not necessarily translating into gifted adults? And that it's just that they are faster to reach a level of development, but doesn't mean they will go beyond the normal limit. Like the rate of development and learning just follows a different curve, but ends up near the same point once an adult. I think it was only some gifted student retain an advantage in adulthood, and it is normally when they are gifted in a specific discipline for which they maintain a consistent and continued practice through to their adulthood.
  • roguecoder 2y ago
    That's kind of what we would expect to happen in the case where other kids get actual support & "gifted" kids are left to fend for themselves, or even sent to the library to keep them from disrupting everyone else.
    • didibus 2y ago
      That would mean that throughout the last 30 years in many places around the world, gifted kids have never been given what they need to capitalize on their gift? Which maybe... I can't remember where I saw that in the first place, but I'd assume it would have gone off historical data, and hopefully looked across a few different places. So it might be that we never really supported gifted kids, or it could mean that it's a temporary gift.
  • casey2 2y ago
    You can just as easily measure the second derivative, i.e. see how fast they are improving at improving.
    • didibus 2y ago
      Couldn't that also be on a different curve though? Like they might have accelerated improvement right now, but will reverse in their late teens for example, thus still ending up in the same place in the end?
• bparsons 2y ago
  The argument against these programs is that they directed scarce resources toward the students who least need it. The mandate of public schools is to get as many people to a baseline of education. There are many jurisdictions that can afford to do both, but most are not in that position. There is far more wasted potential in the case of the hundreds of thousands of kids who fall through the cracks because of a crummy education system. Many states already create an uneven playing field by funding each school system based on the quantum of local taxes collected in their particular communities. Poor kids shouldn't have to further compete for resources within their own, poorly funded institution.
• deleted 2y ago
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• jaco6 2y ago
  It’s the modern hatred of hierarchy at work. People today so desperately want to believe in equality that they deny the plain and simple truth of intellectual hierarchy. The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.
• casey2 2y ago
  IMO students should be take the class that maximizes the probability of getting a c * the probability of engagement. Note that this isn't "at least a c" but a just a c. There should also be weekly surveys the directly question the students engagement. No matter how important the topic, if the student isn't engaged then they aren't learning it and are better served learning literally anything else. Even if that means not learning to read past a 1st grade level for 5 or 10 years. Transferring classes should become the norm, once you lose engagement it is too difficult to get it back (and if half the class leaves then that teacher now knows what NOT to do)
• ksynwa 2y ago
  https://archive.is/20241126171410/https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-11-18/special-education-schools-gifted https://archive.is/20241126171410/https://www.latimes.com/op...
• hirvi74 2y ago
  I believe with great confidence that this board has a higher than average population of individuals that were in gifted and talented programs compared to most sites. I was in the 'ungifted and talentless' program in my youth. I am curious, how did life turn out for you all? Have you used your gift in any meaningful way? If so, how? (I'm asking with sincerity and not judgement).
• 999900000999 2y ago
  In the State of California your lucky if you can read and write. Basic literacy requirements to graduate, like the high school exit exam, are often called racist and removed. Plus California is essentially a state of socioeconomic apartheid. The gap between the rich and poor is insane. You have kids who are semi homeless being told they just need to work harder, etc. Hell on earth. Honestly education itself is outdated. Instead of acting as part day care part jail let kids test out of the system early. If you can pass a GED test at 16 and do something more productive do that. This is partially offset by California's University system which is probably the best on earth ( at least publicly funded). The community colleges are top notch and a great option for anyone who's iffy on continuing school. I went from my 2nd eviction to getting enough aid for my own apartment. I did pretty well in college, dated girls from all over the world and made life long friends. It's not perfect, if your parents aren't stable you might have a really hard time getting aid. Interestingly enough they carved out exceptions for LGBT students who had falling outs with their parents, but other were out of luck. You have a real conundrum here. Say both your parents make 75k, that's only going to be 120k after taxes. Where's that extra 20 to 30k for school expenses supposed to come from ? You're well past qualifying for aid. If I ran the world I'd make state college completely free contingent on 2 years of community college. You don't even need a degree to benefit which I think a lot of people forget.
• flustercan 2y ago
  G&T was a great way for me to learn a smug sense of superiority over my classmates and believe that inherit ability is more important to success than hard work. That being said - in most of my non honors classes kids would get made fun of for doing the work or knowing an answer. G&T was nice not because the curriculum was so much different, but rather because it created space where the kids who liked learning could be left in peace.
• oooGuy 2y ago
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• barfingclouds 2y ago
  I’m from Oregon suburbs right by Intel’s largest campus. I went to all public schools and I was really fortunate that for the most part I was able to intellectually explore and take advanced classes. I took full courseloads in high school instead of having empty periods like most of my peers. I entered college as a a junior credit wise. What I read about California often horrifies me
• fu_caturds 2y ago
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• fu_caturds 2y ago
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