I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school.
This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the children who had difficulties learning or even the opposite- elevating children who were learning well; instead the entire class would slow to a crawl when it came time to do some form of verification that we're actually learning.
In many cases 'tests' would stop any possibility of new content being added to the class for months.
I was bored out of my mind and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. School is an absolute torturous prison when there's no stimulation of any kind; and they also wonder why you seek fulfillment by acting out.
Conversely, before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with, those output the most well educated people and were free for the public too. They just had very strict requirements for entry and you could be expelled for not keeping up. A stark contrast to the kids in my class who were unwilling or unable to allow the class to move forward as a unit.
Gah. I hated my childhood and I absolutely hated formal education because of this.
Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing.
I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how to bubble in a multiple choice answer sheet. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for weeks on end having the fact we need a #2 pencil and that you shouldn't fill outside the bubble when answering the scantron on the TAAS test.
This. I grew up in Texas, first in a small suburb that had its own school system (elementary through 7th) and then as a part of the greater Dallas school system, in another city (8th through graduation).
My original school system was always trying to push me forward; they placed me in gifted programs, encouraged me to compete in academic competitions (you know the ones I'm talking about), and often recommended to my parents that I should be allowed to skip a couple of grades.
Conversely, my latter school system, in an attempt to meet standards and retain order (I assume), simply taught down to the lowest denominator. As a result, I lost a lot of the drive and motivation previously impressed upon me. It's only after growing up that I've gotten some of that back, however, I doubt it will ever reach its previous high.
So, as unemotional as it may seem, there should be a mechanism for either removing those at the bottom in order to accelerate their learning and return them back to the general population, or a similar mechanism to allow the higher levels to avoid decline.
Oh the TAAS...I spent 10 years being told I would finish that crap in the 10th grade...only to find out in the 10th grade that TAAS II was coming out and we were the lucky candidates to take it...in the 11th grade.
The #2 pencil is spot on. I carried an entire box of pencils and would trade them for a slice of pizza at lunch.
For those not from Texas or too young to have experienced it, TAAS was horrible even compared to other standardized tests.
Other standardized tests at least pretend to assess a student's learning. TAAS assessed a students ability to parse octuple negatives and poorly typeset mathematics.
So, there were three portions: reading comprehension, math, grammar, and persuasive writing. The maximum score for any of the TAAS portions is a 4, with 3 as the minimum passing grade. The first three were ridiculously easy, but the writing portion was a nightmare.
I don't remember all the details anymore, but IIRC you were expected to include a statistic and a quote from an expert in your paper. The kicker? You weren't allowed any outside materials, and you were expected to make up the statistic and the quote. That's right: the assignment was to write something that would be considered fake news nowadays.
I got a 2. I only passed because I got a 4 on the grammar portion, because for some reason the persuasive writing portion and the grammar portion were averaged together to form what they called the "writing" portion.
My year (10th grade 2000-2001) was the second-last to take the TAAS, and we were the last to take only the TAAS, as it was being phased out in favor of the TAKS. The year behind me took both the TAAS and the TAKS, with only the TAAS counting for graduation requirements (they only had to take the TAKS because the state wanted to do a dry run before switching over), and the people two years behind me only took the TAKS. The timeline went like:
* 2000-2001: 10th grade takes the TAAS (my class)
* 2001-2002: 10th grade takes the TAAS
* 2002-2003: 11th grade takes the TAKS (dry run, same class as above)
I had an opposite experience in Texas (semi-rural Texas no less). The gifted and talented programs (i.e. things sometimes referred to in other districts as "Quest", "Omega", etc...not AP as occurs in later grades) did the exact opposite of focusing on standardized testing. The vast majority of time was spent on "above and beyond" and critical thinking. Granted you tested into it and all of your time was not spent there, but even times in standard classes were not heavily focused on standardized testing.
This goes to show that the problem is more localized than state level, it is a municipal and district-level choice so long as you meet minimum testing requirements. Now when students don't meet minimum testing requirements, most districts unfortunately fall into the trap of teaching to test as opposed to teach.
> Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing.
Exact same situation here, but Florida. Elementary school was alright, but middle school became pure FCAT preparation and nothing else. My parents withdrew me from them at that point and put me back into regular classes.
They also used a "block schedule", where each day, you would only attend half your classes, but for twice as long, alternating which classes on which days, and then rotating the order of the classes. (So of your 6 classes, you attended daily: 1,3,5 then 2,4,6, then 3,5,1, then 4,6,2, then 5,3,1...).
Here's an calendar I found of a school currently doing this, tell me this isn't confusing as hell:
Ah, bubbling in the correct little bounded area. My experience was about the same. Maybe no one thought to stop that the kids who couldn't fill in a little area didn't know the answer to the questions in the first place?
In any case, I'll share another funny anecdote: I took a reading comprehension test in 3rd grade. It said I was reading a college level. I'm not really sure what that meant then, but in any case it was as high as the system went. Not only did I have to take the same test in 4th grade again, my parents were sent a letter with a very concerned tone. It said I was not making progress on my reading skills and that soon I would fall behind the other children. It recommended I be placed in a remedial comprehension course so I could catch up.
But, on the flip side, faster-learning kids need to learn how to live/work/deal with slower-learning kids and vice versa. The purpose of schooling goes beyond the accumulation of facts.
Nice in theory, doesn't work in practice. At least growing up where I did, a lot of the "slow" kids weren't slow. They just didn't give a fuck and would disrupt the class. No one needs to "learn" to deal with that bullshit. I don't have to deal with disruptive assholes in the real world.
I was one of those "disruptive assholes" in school. It was simply too easy for me to take seriously. A big part of it was also seeing through a lot of the teachers. I realized if there was a way to be successful in the world none of these people have a clue how to do it.
Weirdly the smart kid that started this thread claims that he decided to disrupt the class and "seek fulfillment in acting out" because he was bored, so even if you segregate by ability you'll find the same if they're not stimulated. Maybe the same solution applies for the kids you are talking about.
This argument always comes up but I'm not convinced. In society people tend to congregate in professions and social where people have similar intellectual capabilities. How many people here were interested in a career in Software Engineering because the people in it had similar interests and values to you? I know I was.
Sure you need to be able to talk to other groups of people but not to the extent that you require 35 hours a week of education along side them for years. Additionally I'm not sure being educated alongside them actually helps. There are a a hell of a lot of intelligent people who become resentful of that situation and that attitude can take years to mature out of, if they ever do.
The problem is the entire class is geared to the slower kids. Since the faster kids learn the entire year's work in the first month or prior to the beginning of the year, the only thing they learn is how to deal with slower kids or amuse themselves quietly. My son read most of the fiction in his elementary school before I took him out to go to a private school.
I programmed games on my calculator, wrote stories and poems, printed out stories to read in tiny 4pt font so the teacher wouldn't notice, and constantly doodled drawings to keep my mind occupied. I sometimes think I learned more doing that than I did in school (at least until college, which was like a brutal wake-up call I wasn't prepared for).
Honestly I think the worst part is when teachers would get annoyed that you weren't 'paying attention' and force you to stop doing the crap that's keeping your mind busy and 'focus on school', even though you already get pretty much straight A's.
They learn to deal with slow-learning kids at the cost of not learning from a slower paced class at all. The negatives outweigh the positives for the gifted kids.
But they do. I went to a Dutch gymnasium at age 12. The smartest 5% of the population is admitted there. Did the concept of faster-learning kids and slower-learning kids disappear there? Hardly! There were huge differences in aptitude.
Why? Everyone always trots this out as though it's unequivocally true.
I ended up teaching my AP Statistics course. It was ludicrous: as a junior I somehow understood the material better than the teacher and was expected to teach a class full of seniors.
Yes, it was more educational than the alternative (sitting in a corner reading a book while totally phoning it in) but I also have no doubt that I would've learned far more in a course which actually challenged me.
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Also, this notion that our real world experiences are anywhere near as heterogeneous as public schools is downright ludicrous. It's not like we hire random people off the street to be software engineers. The average IQ of everyone I interact with is well the national average.
>> "before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with"
I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and forth on whether that is a good idea. The biggest issue is that the amount of pressure placed on 10/11 year olds to pass that exam and get into a grammar school, not to mention the 18 months or so of preparation is very high. Too high arguably. It also fails children who don't do well with standardised exams. I know people who failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well.
A better system may be having one school with optional advanced classes (we even had this for GCSE Maths/Advanced Maths in out grammar school). That way people can take advanced courses in the areas they naturally excel at rather than hindering their entire education by denying them the higher quality teaching at a grammar school.
> failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well
Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?
Possibly. Although there were also many people in that school who did well in the entrance exam and did not succeed in the school. Thinking about both groups of people it's very obvious in retrospect that that the people that managed to get accepted despite the bad grade in the exam worked very hard and wanted to succeed no matter how difficult they found it. They'd put in 3x as much work as everyone else.
You break kids up by test score and then put all the top kids together, all the middle kids together, and all the bottom kids together. My public school experimented with it for one year, but reverted. Rumor was, parents felt like their kids were being written off in the 6th grade.
Streaming is the best approach (IMO), as long as the schools are large enough or homogeneous enough (or have appropriate intercollegiate relationships with nearby schools) to make it happen. If you can't make a full class of pupils of whom you expect top grades, then the range of abilities can be a bit too big.
You ideally need to be able to promote and demote, which means having at least one subject teacher per stream per year, so that pupils can shift between streams without timetable changes, and having small enough class sizes that the teachers can all cope with a few more being added (as well as possibly doing a bit of extra coaching to get a promoted pupil up to the level of the rest of the class).
Selective schooling as a norm can write talented kids off at age 11 if their talents aren't broad enough. Streaming means that children can still excel in their best disciplines even if they are lacking in others.
I don't know about today, but this was how it was when I was in high school around 1990 in the US. We had "basic", "college prep" and "honors/advanced placement" levels, plus some kind of level for the special-ed kids. However, it was only at the high school level (4 years just prior to college); before that, in the earlier grades, everyone was mostly lumped together.
The solution to the problem you describe is different classes for students of different abilities, not different schools. The school I went to (in England) split most classes into 4 sets where the 'best' student's in each subject went to set 1 and the ones that need extra help went to set 3 or 4. Then there where extra-curricular 'clubs' in certain subjects for students that wanted to go even deeper than the lessons allowed. Even the most gifted of students may need some extra help in some subject. I, for example, was in set 1 for math and science, but set 4 for french.
In my experiences abilities in different subjects are highly correlated. So someone who is very good in science/math is unlikely to be completely dumb when it comes to history/language. So your proposal would actually give rise to (intellectually) segregated schools in all but name. So we might as well make it formal.
So your proposal would actually give rise to (intellectually) segregated schools in all but name
I didn't find that at all. There is more to school than classes, and we did have a bunch of classes that weren't segregated by ability (history, geography, religious studies, shop classes, sometimes PE, etc.) Plus we had lunch and all breaks together. My friends where absolutely not all in the same math set as me.
This is actually a great compromise solution (and practical). I had the experience of being in a "gifted" class from third grade to sixth grade. It seemed to be a win-win situation where the school (and students) got the benefits of intellectual diversity but allowed kids to learn more at their own pace.
I agree w/ dagw.
Schools need to have extra classes, extra-curricular classes, etc based on set of similarly gifted students' abilities, or based on set of similarly non-gifted/regular students' lack-of-abilities to improve their abilities. If needed, eligible volunteer or paid teacher should be arranged on specific time. A separate school for gifted students or a separate school for regular/non-gifted students is very-bad/non-gifted idea w/evil & ineffective motives.
The other advantage of having everything in the same school is that it makes moving up (and down) in the sets a lot easier. A kid who is right on the cusp between set 1 and set 2 in math can be put into set 1 for a term and see how it works out. Or a kid who, for whatever reason, starts slipping can be moved down a set and given some extra support. If these changes required moving schools then that will never happen.
For example, if they made half the kids do better, and half the kids do worse, does that count as working? While you sometimes get claims that it's for their own good that less academically inclined pupils are sent to the non-grammar schools, I'd guess the same people who say this would freak right the hell out if their own kid failed the exam and didn't get in, which kind of undermines that argument.
I meant that they work for the individual, a child sent to a grammar school will get a solid education.
I take your point about the wider ramifications, but I feel as though I got a good education, and if I ever have kids, I would want them to go to a grammar school too.
One of the problems is that kids in the top streams in highly-selective schools do very well. The kids at the bottom often don't so as well, and sometimes become problem cases. These same kids -- who are very bright -- would be stars / top students if they'd gone to a lesser school.
Source: Personal experience. I went a grammar school in the UK. I also taught in a top UK grammar school and a not-very-good comprehensive school. I've seen it happen numerous times.
You just described why so many people support school choice and voucher policies. It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model.
EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.
> It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model.
It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society, it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices.
Whether or not options should be restricted in schooling is a topic for cost/benefit analysis, but as a general point, I don't see anything mind-boggling about this perspective.
This makes no sense - you are proposing restricting the options of high performers so that they don't make self interested choices. Why not restrict the choices of low performers instead?
Because with this definition of the problem, the "low performers" don't have options to restrict.
My point, as applied to this case, is that giving the option of "smart-only schools" will predictably lead to people taking it, which may lead to issues described by 'habosa here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591. It's a reasonable question to ask if this is what is beneficial to the society (including its economy), and if the answer is no, then not giving such an option in a first place is an entirely logical approach.
Then why not just rephrase the problem, so the "low performers" can simply be removed from the education system entirely? That's what you're proposing when you tell someone gifted they can't have education that _actually educates_ them.
How is "getting a good education" a negative effect? It is the opposite. If smart people do the things they need to do to become even smarter, everyone benefits.
Smaller schools have less educational diversity. Suppose you want a gifted and talented education, but also want to play baseball. At tiny schools that may not be an option, but at a larger school you can have upper tier classes and a wider range of clubs.
EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.
IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.
You're also assuming that such a shift must play in the current model. There's no reason that sports couldn't be separated into community activities totally separate from the educational aspects of multiple smaller schools.
I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club activities, hikes, music lessons and just hangout. As a bonus, the people in these areas DON'T need a masters degree to do their job as we separate educational aspects of schools from social aspects.
Dozens of small schools could easily work together in a community under this model with changes in the classroom schools having no impact on the activity centers. You could even go to certain schools on different days for areas of specialization/interest being taught.
There are a whole world of possible options that open up if we don't lock in the model that we have today. IMO, it's not about defunding the schools. It's about WANTING to fund them.
You would need the same number of teachers if the day was 4h long unless you had some students start with community centers and then swap. Now, if population density was high enough your model might work, but you are going to sacrifice a lot of time busing people around in the middle of the day.
Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.
If that is the case, public education does not exist to educate children (or at least this is not its primary goal), but rather exists as some sort of bizarre redistribution program. High IQ parents are then expected to feed their children into the hopper for the gain of others.
Personally, the biggest concern I would have with school choice / voucher policies is maintaining accountability and quality standards.
The recent fraud investigations in the USA for-profit college market (eg where several scam-ish type outfits churned out expensive but useless degrees to people lured in by slick marketing) absolutely shows that, sometimes, more options can be worse.
The issue is that funding for public schools is extremely limited. Having more choice means even less funding for those that need it the most. Ideally, there would be endless funding and so more choice doesn't negatively impact those at the bottom. But that's not the reality we face.
I agree. This is going to sound conceited, but I really blame the public school system for never giving me a challenge.
Until I eventually got into private school for the last 2 years of high school, I had never had to work to get straight As. I could often complete homework assignments before class was even over.
Unfortunately, this conditioned me to be incredibly lazy. As I never developed a strong work ethic, in college I continued to put in a minimum of effort though that wasn't enough for straight As.
I've never really had the experience of consistently trying to do something hard. Even though I'm trying to force myself to do it now (setting ambitious fitness goals and taking advanced online classes), I can't help but feel that it would've been a lot easier to develop this grit when motivation didn't entirely depend on me.
You've described the fate of an entire generation of gifted students. It's awfully hard to overcome years and years of this instilled at an early/formative age. Teaching children to work for goals is one of the most important tasks that parents and to a lesser extent society, have.
You have to sit an exam called the 11+ to enter which is much more like an IQ test than a standard subject based exam.
The most comman argument against them is that privelleged families can afford to tutor their kids specifically to pass this exam.
I was lucky enough to pass the exam, and while there definitely were instances of well off kids who had massive amounts of tutoring, the vast majority were from all kinds of different backgrounds, and levels of education.
For me it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, but I completely understand both sides of the argument.
Here in the U.S., very few public high schools have single-track education, at least not for "core" subjects such as English, math, and science. There are typically remedial, standard, honors, and AP classes for these subjects.
And I would think that if you're OK with multi-track education, it would seem like having a separate school for gifted students is just an extension of that.
That said, in my own experience, although there were down sides to having some single-track subjects (e.g. physical education), one benefit of attending a school with children of all ability levels was that you were exposed to children from all walks of life.
I would imagine that a school for gifted students would have skewed socioeconomic demographics compared to a school for students of all ability levels, and in many places, that might also mean less racial diversity.
At my public high school, we had a program where students at standard-level or above would assist special-education students. That type of opportunity would probably be missing from a school for only gifted students. You would be less likely to come into contact with (and befriend) people with intellectual disabilities, or even people with average intelligence.
Edit: One other point. Academic giftedness is often thought of as one monolithic thing, but I know several people whose giftedness varies wildly by subject. If you attend a school for gifted students, would there be an expectation that you would be gifted in all subject areas? Would it be more difficult for you to get help in the subjects where you struggle?
Mostly what I learned in high school was how to talk to kids from blue-collar families. Don't use multi-syllabic words, and talk only in concrete terms. Avoid use of abstraction and don't pontificate about anything.
Wow, as a member of a blue-collar family this is downright insulting. The gross generalization of an entire social class is anything but healthy.
Funny enough, I just finished reading the article and comments from the story on what it's like to be poor at an Ivy League (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480802). Personally, I thought that I never really felt disparate enough where I actually stuck out to my peers, and that the thoughts everyone had were more akin to class anxiety. It seems that the thoughts are not always unfounded I guess. Oh well.
I was frequently picked on for using words they (other students, many better off than me) knew the meaning of but would rather play dumb and try to make me feel bad.
I tried to empathize, but since I didn't value going along to get along, I didn't play along, and I didn't earn a lot of loyal friends that way.
It's not about class so much as values, and it wasn't my parent's values so much as it was my identity and valuing intelligence (although no adults I ever met devalued intelligence).
I strongly agree that the benefits of exposing students to a wide variety of mindsets, abilities and experiences is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than being able to tailor curricula to fit the ability of students perfectly.
I think the ideal is a little bit of both: strong multi-track curricula with common social ground + experiences.
> Here in the U.S., very few public high schools have single-track education, at least not for "core" subjects such as English, math, and science. There are typically remedial, standard, honors, and AP classes for these subjects.
It's not just curriculum, though. The whole structure of the school is usually oriented toward "managing the lowest common denominator." Grade schools have more in common with prisons than they do with any other societal institution.
Imagine a school with a few fixed lectures during the day, self-directed study time built in, and the ability to take a break or get a snack at the student's convenience. That's basically college for most people, but a lot of kids are mature enough to handle something like that at a much younger age.
My high school was mostly like this. "Block-8" scheduling was utilized, which resulted in four, roughly ninety minute classes per day, with our days alternating between an "A" and a "B". This provided for 8 classes per semester. Classes were typically broken up into 30-45 minutes of lecture and the remaining time for group work or individual study.
While it's heavily maligned, this was one of the points of The Bell Curve.
200 years ago, the smartest and dumbest person both probably lived and died on the same farm. 100 years ago, it wasn't noticeably different. Around the 1920s/30s, society started segmenting the higher end out into higher education and then completely different career/life paths. Fast forward another 50 years and people on the higher and lower ends of intellect rarely meet.
Think of the people you interact with on a daily basis - unless you're doing things completely outside the realm of intellect - and you'll start to realize that the vast majority of them aren't far off from you intellectually. This applies at the top and bottom.
The diversity bit sounds nice in theory but as a kid who loved learning and went to highschool in a socioeconomically challenged area I would have given anything to go to a charter school. It was frankly a terrifying environment.
Also a significant amount of the school's resources went to these kids who just didn't want to be there. They had to pay for two security guards, overtime pay for the teachers who did detention/Sunday school, etc. They only offered 4 AP classes each of which had ~50 students because they were the ones who wouldn't get into fights if you just stuffed them into a room with some books.
Yea, I was in a school full of knuckleheads and criminals (rural town, most students were expected to go work in the local mill after graduating. College? LOL). I can count on one hand the number of students in my year who ever even made it out of the state. Most of the rest are probably in jail or running meth labs. I would have given anything to go to one of the richer schools where you could interact with folks, peers and teachers, who gave a shit, and where didn't have to worry about getting assaulted daily.
>giftedness varies wildly by subject. If you attend a school for gifted students, would there be an expectation that you would be gifted in all subject areas?
I think a superschool should allow each student to be ordinary in X subjects. In other words, two levels of acceptable marks depending on the student.
Splitting a student's school life between two schools cannot be an option, it also doubles administration.
> And I would think that if you're OK with multi-track education, it would seem like having a separate school for gifted students is just an extension of that.
I think this is a big leap. I went to a large public high school (~2500 students total) with 3 tracks for each subject. I was in the highest track the whole time, but I would not support physically segregating students like me into a separate school. There are a number of benefits to keeping people in the same school:
1. It's socially beneficial to have high school friends who are different than you are. Many of my best friends were not in my classes but we hung out at lunch time and in after school activities. I think we learned a lot of intangible things from each other.
2. Parental involvement. Parents of kids who are high achievers are more likely to want to see the school go in the right direction. Having involved parents keeps the whole school administration on their toes and brings the general standard of the school up for everyone. If the high achievers had their own school the other students would have fewer advocates.
I attended the long-running #1 public school in the nation. The School for the Talented and Gifted Magnet High School in Dallas, TX. The environment fostered creativity and learning. There were no distractions or negative pressures or stressors. Being smart didn't result in being bullied, it resulted in being respected.
I think the question was what happens to the students who are not labeled as 'bright'? How does their being cast off to a "lower" school affect society in the long run.
It reduces social mobility. Charles Murray talks about how there is a trade-off between social mobility and meritocracy due to the heredity of IQ.
In a meritocratic society, the smartest kids go to the best schools, then to the best colleges, then the most elite companies, then likely marry someone from school or work, and then have the smartest kids.
Socioeconomic classes become set due the stability of cognitive function across generations.
Is it ideal to have a cognitively and economically stratified america with a cognitive elite and cognitive under-class?
Is it ideal that this cognitive elite has little to no interaction with the rest of America, and little understanding of how the rest of the country lives?
Cognitive elite or financial elite. The rich get to send their kids to private schools. Smart poor kids get locked into mediocre public schools with reducing standards. Rich parents pass on their wealth at a lower tax rate.
Being smart is not a guarantee of success so we should make it harder so the less intelligent do not suffer any disadvantage.
The circlejerk here is that it would "help immensely" and "move the needle forward" but it would just result in further deepening the gap between rich and poor. The mindset of this sub is deeply anti-Communist and you can see it in the replies.
Separating class from this issue is absolutely impossible.
I can think of a few reasons why we shouldn't optimize purely for the academic achievements of our most talented students:
-Less excellent students tend to benefit from having more excellent students in their classes
-Even if their academic outlooks are improved, the excellent students are segregated from having to learn how to deal with a wide range of intellectual levels and abilities
-I'm not convinced it's really the most efficient way to allocate our educational resources, especially as there's pretty clear evidence that "excellence" in students is correlated to affluence, so we might really just be segregating by class anyway.
In the US, much of a school's extracurricular program is funded via PTA, fund-raising, or simply charging extra fees. In this system, the well-to-do parents/families subsidize the others (poor students granted waivers to the various fees, or don't contribute to the PTA monetarily).
Given the strong correlation between academic aptitude and economic success, removing the smart students also remove the wealthy students. The funding model falls apart, and the students who remain get even less extracurricular enrichment.
Granted, we could design programs that mostly avoid the problem. In my county, the gifted high school (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) only takes absolutely brilliant students. Many of whom truly fit the "too smart to fit in" stereotype. Across a large county, that still leaves plenty of gifted/wealthy students in the normal schools, which offer a broad selection of AP/IB/dual-enrollment options.
How other schools will suffer? Endowments from rich parents? Being rich does not mean your kid is smart and these gifted schools should be very selective to whom they admit.
But it does mean you can pay to get them tutored to jump through hoops, and generally push them harder. There's a very strong relationship between wealth and elite college admission for example. Which is down to culture and opportunity as much as gifts and talents.
If being selective means controlling for socioeconomic background when assessing potential - then I'd be more of a cheerleader for it.
To be fair, the TAG Magnet did have race-based quotas until very recently. Let's just say that the school is now ... less diverse. Although, the 1% "other", which encompassed all East and West Asian, has now makes up roughly one-third of the enrollment. The former court ordered 33/33/33/1 resulted in rejecting some of the most meritorious students.
That's great. I wish we could figure out how to change the culture in general though. Some cultures in the world value smarts. USA culture generally does not
That's a very broad generalization. Yes, there are areas where education is not seen as a positive.
But, looking at trends in our major suburban areas, I think you're way off base. It is increasingly difficult to gain admission to the top state colleges in many areas of the nation because of overwhelming demand. This in turn has led to a massive increase in the number of after-school tutoring programs, math enrichment programs, expansion of AP/honors course availability, etc.
>The environment fostered creativity and learning. There were no distractions or negative pressures or stressors. Being smart didn't result in being bullied, it resulted in being respected.
I think these are great benefits and we should focus on making them available for all students, regardless of whether or not they're "gifted".
This is anecdotal, but in 10th grade I transferred to a charter school with no separate classes. The "gifted" students were in the same school as the students who needed extra attention.
The end result was just that-- all of the attention was given to the students who needed it. The cirriculum was dumbed down, and the "gifted" students didn't learn almost anything.
It was better for the students who needed help, and much worse for the students that didn't.
I view the end result akin to eliminating salary negotiations to help those who are too afraid to negotiate.
> Despite two Senate inquiries in 1988 and 2001, it has taken 15 years and a state parliamentary review for the Victorian government
This is an incredibly disorienting sentence for one not familiar with where The Conversation is based! (Australia, I suppose, having had a few needed minutes!)
> When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance
I have heard of lots of anecdotes of this occurring. I can believe it takes place. IMO this reason is exceptional and should get special attention.
The article is fairly Aussie-specific. In the US we have an education system which has a lot of opportunity for improvement. But the metrics focus on either the median student performance against milestones/proficiency or the median student progress. As long as this is the way they're measured, the outliers will not get special attention. As a result, parents should be prepared to spend time and money educating their gifted children above and beyond the school curriculum.
I know this article is Australia-centric, but most US schools, to my knowledge, have multi-track educational programs (gifted students can take more advanced courses, take Honors/IB/AP, etc. etc.) which have separate curricula and teachers. In this respect, they're already in a separate program: having them go to a separate school entirely just hurts socialization between groups of students, which is more important for a child's development.
Overall, this seems like an unhelpful place to invest compared to more fundamental educational issues (and, pragmatically, I can see many areas where this goes awry, ie many aptitude tests for kids being biased for socioeconomic reaosns).
The problem in the US is that the AP kids get shafted because so much of the budget is spent on running a glorified daycare for the kids who really don't want to be there.
If the issue is "not enough of an area's educational budget is devoted to AP kids", I don't see how that is solved by creating an entirely different school? If there's enough money to create a school for gifted kids, then I think that money is better spent investing in the AP programs in those multi-track schools.
(It's entirely possible that I'm overlooking some nuances in how education budgets work, but I'm talking more in the macro sense.)
A few bad apples. The kids who don't care spoil the opportunities of the kids who do. The two need completely different support systems -- kids who don't care need to be monitored, kids who do need opportunities. As a finite example: they canceled the "electives" at my school (students could sign up for a 2x/week lecture on an eclectic subject) because a lot of the kids figured out they were the easiest to skip.
I agree, but I think "kids who are actively harming the educational system" and "gifted kids" is a false dichotomy: the spectrum of "kids whose educational experience is damaged by bad apples" is wider than the gifted kids discussed in this article, and by only helping out that small subset I think we leave a whole bunch of kids left hanging (and arguably the ones who need a strong education the most.)
(Our high school's approach to that was just offering "study hall" as an elective, with the implication that you could just skip study hall and nobody cared.)
A lot of kids today think that laziness and a "fuck all" attitude is totally ok. They don't think education is important and frankly don't realize the potential consequences this may have on them in later life.
When I was a kid, I had to slop pigs, and shovel the shit out of the pen. My dad would say to me as we were shoveling pig shit or doing some other awful work, "This is why you get good grades. Some day you are going to college so you don't end up like your old man."
I had issues with my oldest kid taking a bad attitude at school and not caring about her education. I thought back to my childhood, then I took my daughter out and gave her a shovel. When she asked what she was supposed to do with it, I told her, "You are going to dig so you can practice up on how to be good at digging ditches, since that is the type of work you will be qualified for if you don't get a good education."
I got a call from her teacher a few weeks later telling me how they couldn't believe the complete 180 she had made at school and that she had never seen anything like it. She wanted to know what I had done. When I told her the teacher was amazed at what a harsh yet unique "punishment" it was, but said that "maybe more kids should be made to dig ditches".
I love this story. Thanks for sharing. I'm curious though, did you try this with your other kid? The one who's presumably not having any problems? I'm curious if your method would further strengthen their resolve.
While I haven't tried that particular thing on the other two kids I have used equally unique/creative "punishments" on all of the children.
I set strong boundaries and consistent enforcement for all of them. For minor infractions, my go to punishment is to make them do a plank while we "discuss" what they did wrong. If you have ever done planks you know the agony of holding a plank for long enough. The great thing about this as a disciplinary technique is that it is good for them physically; they are building core muscles so the older the kids is the longer they can hold the plank.
For serious offenses, I always like to come up with something more unique and memorable so it really sinks in.
What a great way to make them hate physical exercise for the rest of their lives. Also, agony and humiliation ("discussing") is apparently only for minor infractions - major ones need something more!
Contrary to your judgements, they have all grown a healthy love and competitive spirit regarding athletics. My 7 year old has six pack abs which she loves showing off and she was swimming before her 5th birthday. Her and my son are both enthusiastic gymnastics. My son also races BMX, which is a draining year round sport. Meanwhile my oldest competes in swimming, volleyball, dance, and as of late has been begging me to let her join a mixed martial art.
Even among the tracked schools there is sometimes a problem with gifted students being held back by the rest. I had to transfer to a public school for 7th & 8th grade (ages 12-13). They were so behind it was unreal.
After learning basic fractions for 4 years in the public school system, a friend and I made a chess set out of paper scraps. Our typical day involved doing the day's classwork and homework in an hour while the teacher lectured and then playing chess for the rest of the day. We played chess for several months until near the end of the year when a substitute confiscated our set and threw it away.
This article frames the question rhetorically. Of course we should not disadvantage gifted children by depriving them of tailored learning strategies etc. Why on earth would we even consider it?
But it's not so easy to define what this means in practice, particularly in the UK where the debate over selective schooling is bound up with issues related to class and wealth.
Alternatively, why not just allow advanced students to graduate and start college/career early, if they so desire. I know this happens in exceptional cases, but why force a kid to just load up with AP classes (which may - but probably do not - match college level rigor) rather than simply taking college courses? If they're past what high school can offer then let them finish and leave. We keep far too many students in high school longer than they want/need to be. Most - in my experience - just start to coast at that point.
A separate school for "advanced" students doesn't outright bother me; however, I think defining "advanced" is more challenging than most would initially consider. There are many reasons that a student may be ahead/behind at any point in their education.
College courses are a great option too (my school district allowed "dual enrollment" where you could take anywhere from one to all of your classes at one of the local community or state colleges). There are definitely some cases where the AP equivalent is "harder", better taught, or better suited to high-school age students, though.
I agree that defining "advanced" is very challenging, and goes beyond just the academic as well. There's also something to be said for being academically engaged with people similar to you (ie - some (most?) high school kids may learn more from peers in a self-selected AP Calculus class than they would from a Calc 1 class at the local college taken by kids looking to fill a requirement).
It seemed to me that if I took the dual/early enrollment college course that I would definitely get the credit, whereas the AP course would actually require far more repetitive homework, lots more class time (which I didn't want to do), and only then would I have a chance to qualify for college credit.
That's a no-brainer, in my book, but so many of my peers refused to follow my lead to the University when I tried to persuade them.
In spite of lots of sales training, I've never been a good salesman.
I know in California when I was in high school, it was free for high school kids to take community college courses. It was cheaper to take calculus at a community college because I didn't have to pay for the AP test. In addition, I knew it would automatically count as college credit, instead of the pseudo-credit you get for AP test results.
As an added bonus, I could compete calculus in a semester instead of a full year. It was way better for me.
I remember mine - I knew university was possible, but I had no idea how to get into the program. Latter it was explained to me that the school had to may for my classes so they would do everything they could to discourage students from taking that track without being obvious about it. They didn't allow any information to be in school, the guidance consular never mentioned it (not that I saw them).
By contrast AP was just a choice I could sign up for when choosing classes.
Exactly, they (the guidance counselors) did everything they could to persuade me not to do what was clearly, to me, in my best interests.
I do not have good feelings towards those people still to this day.
Of course, now I realize why when I asked him why he would discourage me, he repeated my question loudly for the rest of the guidance department to hear - he was covering his butt on the matter.
This is currently the approach used by my daughter's school (and a lot of others in Tennessee), dual enrollment. She has some high school classes and takes a few others at the local community college.
Next year she will be a senior and have one morning class at her high school, and the rest will be college. She should finish her Associate's (2 year) degree two semesters after graduating high school.
Some more academically gifted students have managed to graduate high school and finish their two year degree simultaneously.
1) Pointless if you want to go to a top school. I don't go to one, so
2) Most dual enrollment programs restrict what coursework you can take. Near zero intersection with my CS coursework, though I did get my general ed requirements done.
3) It's community college, it's not something you can put on a resume.
With the credits I got I'd need to do a heavy schedule to graduate even in 3.
I agree with @akhilcacharya and had the same reasoning (ended up not doing the AA in high school for the same reason).
More restrictive set of courses for the AA means you're taking classes you don't enjoy for a requirement you don't need. The "name value" of a community college AA also isn't as great, particularly for kids who want to go to a higher-ranked public or top private university for undergrad.
That being said, if you know you want to go to a local/state school where the credits will transfer easily, getting the AA early can be great. I know people who graduated early but still received all 4 years of scholarship money (direct deposited in their bank).
At least in my case, the time to mature was necessary. While I could have passed most of my college classes as a freshman in high school (at least the ones I took freshman year in college, unsure that I could have passed the higher maths I took with just an understanding of basic algebra/geometry), there were a lot of social lessons that I desperately needed. I can think of specific experiences throughout my high school that taught me how to (not) interact in various situations.
The government should not be running any schools at all. They can impose taxes to fund them, but everyone should go to private schools that operate on the free market. Then you wouldn't need to ask the government to build another school; you could just do it.
The government would still have to operate schools, because of two failure modes:
1. Lack of capacity: Families that can't find schools for their kids, or entire regions that are "school deserts."
2. Schools that fail or go bankrupt.
Both are cases of private businesses pocketing public money while externalizing their risks and leaving the government with the cost of bailing them out.
I speculate that a law of economics or politics is: If something requires universal access for everybody, then it will be effectively supported by the government, even if the mechanism is not obvious.
In order to keep students motivated, they should have opportunities to work at their best pace (i.e. let them work with other “gifted” students on interesting projects from time to time). On the other hand, learning how to interact with everyone is important and that will matter when it comes to functioning in society as an adult. It will also ensure that gifted people remain aware of and interested in all of society’s problems and not just whatever is happening in their silo.
I doubt it will matter very much. Smart kids will grow up to be employed in intellectually stimulating knowledge based work. They will be likely be surrounded by people with similar intellectual capabilities. I know that "learning how to interact with everyone" gives people a warm fuzzy feeling but the lack of it is unlikely to be a serious handicap.
there are lots of people who have a knack for things that don't fall into the traditional Stanford-Binet definition of "gifted". Nor does it account for a person who matures in their teens or 20s or beyond.
I am also somewhat nervous of bias in the definition of "gifted", which may have things build into it which are correlated with race or culture. Put simply, there are really bright people that the system never catches, at any stage.
When I was in high school you could elect to take a more or less challenging course load. I effective did go to a different school than many of my peers simply by taking different classes.
Hell ya. I was utterly bored in most classes at school since most of the stuff they covered I have done a few years ago. This was true not only of science and math but humanities subjects like history as well. Not to mention that many teachers couldn't handle the fact that a student was smarter than them. In addition, it was very hard to find intellectual peers at an average school.
If parents perceive the public school is not providing suitable services, and the private school is, then the public school finds reason to correct the deficiency - competition works.
And if the private school can't handle the inundation, then there's incentive to either expand capacity and/or another school adapt/open to share the load.
In the US. Our school does one day a week for the gifted kids. I have volunteered at the school and love the program. Only issue is it fair to the other kids? You get in based an IQ test.
Honestly I think that school is state sponsored babysitting. Once you understand that, the rhetoric teachers are often spouting about "misbehavior" "defiance" and "insubordination" all makes sense. At school a child's job is to not make a stir.
I also think free public school is critical to having an educated productive populace.
There's an apparent disconnect between my first opinion and the second. That disconnect is, and I know this will sound trite, questioning authority and facts. It's a critically important practice that schools actively discourage.
What do you mean by gifted students? How you define them? Are you speaking about extraordinary brains and high QI?
In a normal basis, my answer is no, no and no.
In Germany some schools start to separate kids when they have 10 years old. Is too soon. Intelligence it's not only about to be good at school - look at Einstein.
I suspect that some gifted kids would benefit from it and others would not and that whether or not a child should go to a separate school should be determined on an individual basis.
What do you mean by gifted?
QI? Or just kids with better results at the exams?
In Germany, some schools, start to do the separation when kids have only 10 years old. It seems to me too much stress and it's not even effective, bc you do it having an exam in consideration. School is not everything, look at Einstein :)
As a gifted student who took gifted and accelerated classes from grade school through high school, including several classes at another school, emphatically no.
The article reminds me a bit of the Maine School for Science and Mathematics (http://www.mssm.org/). It is a free boarding school run by the state of Maine to support those kids who don't have a school district where they can really get into STEM. Tuition is free if you're from Maine, which is really cool. A great way to support kids in rural areas. It is usually rated one of the top high schools in the country.
I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question.
In practice, separating gifted students does two things:
1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students)
2. Remove equality of opportunity.
What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular students?
- Small classes? Help regular students to extent.
- Better curriculum? Hey! Helps regular students.
- More practical education? Also helps regular students
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I'm not against segregation in theory. However, in practice there's very little evidence that the gifted schools would NOT benefit regular students. If you believe that gifted students should receive more education than regular students, then that's an entirely separate discussion.
If you have evidence, I'd love to see it (I'm very interested in education, in particular).
1. Who cares? This is not an argument for or against this. It's totally inappropriate to decide the best way to educate a child based on your personal theories about how wealth should be distributed, and your untested wild ass guess about what effect some educational policy would have on that theory.
2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging.
- Small classes: maybe, it's not necessary at all.
- better curriculum: well, yes, smarter kids can cover a topic more quickly and in more depth. The less smart kids can't keep up, so they have to skim less deeply and/or cover less material.
- more practical: ??? did you feel like you needed 3 bullets or something?
You should have separate schools because there aren't enough gifted kids in one regular school to even fill one class. This comes directly from the definition of gifted, if gifted is say the top 1% of students, a large high-school with 1500
kids would only have 15 of them across 4 grades. You have to do something like a magnet school to have enough kids at the same level in the same room for it to work at all.
Ok, I will bet that you don't even believe that there are intelligence differences between people, right? Every person is equally capable and it all comes down to whether you give them enough opportunities and resources?
EDIT: I'm saying 'who cares' in the context of deciding whether to set up a gifted magnet school or not. You shouldn't decide what is good for a child based on your pet theories about who should or should not have a yacht.
What is there in your main point that needs "refuting"? Putting ordinary students in schools optimized for the gifted is no better than demolishing schools for special needs students and sending the children to regular schools regardless of the consequences.
In what way would it possibly benefit a typical student to be placed in a school where they can't keep up? How would it feel for that child to be in an environment where it's normal for their peers to take college courses before reaching high school age? In my experience, it's extremely demotivating and leads to a lot of pain for the child, no matter how wealthy his or her parents may be.
As justin_vanw pointed out (in an undeservedly flagged sibling post), it seems an awful lot like you deny the existence of gifted children to begin with.
I don't think complete segregation is the answer, but within a given school, I believe there can be more malleability. In general, the idea of which class you end up in being more skill based than age based. And not everyone is better at every subject. Having it per subject allows someone to go further in math even if they struggle with some other subject.
Gifted kids flourish when other kids have interesting conversations with them instead of beating them up. If you know how to make that happen in a regular school, I'm all ears. But in my experience that's impossible and segregation is the only answer.
1. Gifted children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take the brightest students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential.
2. The alternative is equality of outcome, i.e. cut down the tall poppies. This isn't a solution. Keeping gifted children lockstep with their age-mates does them serious damage that can last a lifetime.
Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum into two or three years, whereas the gifted can. The reality is that these kids need to be surrounded by their ability peers if they are going to reach their potential.
For evidence, check out the work of Miraca Gross, who did her work in Australia. She has a book called Exceptionally Gifted Children, where she details the lives of several of these kids and shows how devastating the school system can be to them if extra accommodations are not made.
1. Children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential.
2. False dichotomy.
I've read the book you're referring to. It doesn't make any of the claims you're making, in particular:
> Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum.
If I'm wrong (and I may, it's been a while), feel free to reply with a quote and a page number. I have the book.
In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.
The reality is this: schools for "gifted" children just tend to be better schools. The same better schools that would lead to better outcomes, for everyone. Mind you, this isn't the same as putting, for example "special-ed" students in separate classrooms.
Case and point:
> The major finding of this study is that third and fourth grade classroom teachers make only minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students. This result holds for all types of schools sampled. It also holds for classrooms in different parts of the country and for different types of communities. Implications of these findings for researchers and gifted education specialists are discussed. [1]
Ok, I better understand the point you're making. You're not arguing against special treatment for the gifted; you're saying that, in practice, we should raise the standards of regular students to what is normally provided to the gifted, since the gifted have better education provided to them. Then we'll see improvements across the board. Sure.
My point about regular students not being able to benefit from a compacted K-5 curriculum in two or three years comes from the fact that gifted student can move through academic material faster than a regular student. A regular student may be able to move faster than is currently being done, but not as fast as a gifted student.
> In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.
So ability grouping as opposed to age grouping? Yes, I agree it would help a lot, though as I'm sure you know, the gifted prefer to be around themselves rather than older regular children. Gross' book shows a trend that the more satisfied the kids are with their education, the better they do in life, which is why a separate school makes sense to me. The gifted population is small enough and funding is small enough that I think it will make a much greater positive impact on gifted students than a negative impact on regular students.
>1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students)
While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system.
>2. Remove equality of opportunity.
That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it.
To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.
I won't address your second point, as the problem we'd then be discussing is completely different (i.e. we're now discussing resource allocation).
However, in regards to your first point: I said nothing about crippling those ahead. I'm curious what makes you say that honestly. Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. Regression to the mean, would be putting gifted students in an environment where they wouldn't thrive. However, this said environment would also cripple regular students. So the solution, as I've said, and you agree with is to make education better, more generally.
> Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean.
How is it not? "Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school where they're already ahead. "Gifted" students aren't different from other children, they're responsive to the same social pressures all students face, and placing them with a "gifted" peer group allows them to thrive. Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
I don't understand your argument at all. It seems to hinge on some arbitrary obsession with gifted students. Your entire argument could be applied to at-risk students, who arguably need the help even more than gifted students and would see greater percentage gains as a result. Rather than discuss endlessly who should get what, we should rise the tide that raises all ships, no?
>"Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school...
"Regular" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school... I'll even humor you and apply this argument for "at risk" students. They, too, require pressure and engagement to excel. [1]
> Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
Indeed. Some gifted program curricula are simply minor modifications to standard ones, begging the question, why waste all of that money trying to barely change the curriculum? It would be better spent making school better in general. See my other sibling posts for citations.
Do you believe that it's feasible to improve schools holistically? Because I think that's the major disagreement between you and I. I think the idea we can one day improve schools as a whole, for every student, is a goal worth striving for, but I do not think it's realistic nor feasible in the current education system.
This problem of cooperative education (wherein we separate students with similar features) is well studied, for both "at-risk" and "gifted" students, and it's been show that regular classroom practices do not benefit either group [1].
Here's some information that supports your argument...
> It is clear from the results that teachers in regular third and fourth grade classrooms make only minor modifications in the curriculum and their instruction to meet the needs of gifted students. (pg 125)
...however.
> 61% of the responding teachers have received no staff development in the area of gifted education (pg 125)
> gifted resource teachers have little effect on what classroom teachers do to meet the needs of the gifted (pg 127)
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In any case, your citation agrees with the holistic in practice.
> "...efforts must certainly must certainly include the selection or development of curriculum materials specifically design for classroom teacher use. They should also compact the regular curriculum, and to become more flexible in meeting the needs of all students, including gifted students." (pg 126)
P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.
Also, yes, I do believe it's possible to improve schools holistically.
> Also, yes, I do believe it's possible to improve schools holistically.
Then I doubt I'll convince you through internet comments, but I think our goals are aligned (better education for all). However, we want to take different approaches to achieve it. The source I cited agrees that we should create an environment in which teachers are flexible, but my point in citing is that despite the comprehensive research that's been done on this topic, we've made very few steps towards actually accomplishing it, so I think it's time to give up that line of thought and try another, which is to separate students.
Separated schooling does have advantages, such as challenging gifted students ("A troubling finding that emerged was the preference of a few of the [gifted] students for heterogeneous classes because they were easier and enabled them to attain a high class ranking with little work")[1] and separation of children enable them to grow at a faster pace ("After 2 years, academically handicapped students in cooperative elementary schools had significantly higher achievement in reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, language expression, math computation, and math application in comparison with similar students in comparison schools") [2].
> P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.
Likewise, thank you for being a good discussion partner as well.
What will help gifted students and not regular students: faster curriculum, with less practice and review
So you put a regular student there. Pretty soon, they miss some key bit of understanding. Class doesn't pause and replay. Class moves on. Very quickly, the situation becomes hopeless. Why pay attention to calculus when you don't understand negative numbers or fractions? Why attempt Hamlet when you can't read words with more than one syllable?
How can you argue pt.1 when the kids of high income parents already receive, at great expense but to great personal benefit, the kind of academically segregated education you are arguing against? How is a smart kid from Detroit or Camden supposed to catch up to his intellectual peer who is learning calculus while he/she is stuck in a school right out of Stand and Deliver? Without help one of them is going to Harvard and the other Community College, maybe, and quite frankly that is a waste of potential.
Sometimes the problem with education isn't the building, or the teachers, or the administration: it's the students (and by extension their parents) and if we can't fix them at least we can teach everyone according to their ability.
I can relate to the situations you describe, but they're not going to happen. The link we're all discussing is not talking about making these schools public, free or even accessible. It talks about, more generally, whether segregation should exist.
As for Detroit. Most of Michigan's "gifted" schools are private and NOT free [1] [2].
So you advocate mandatory public education? In fact mandatory boarding public education? -- I can think of no other way to avoid intellectual segregation as surely their are more 'gifted' children in Berkeley than Compton.
So much for the land of the free...
To the point: you are arguing that segregating students by capability increases income inequality - which is false to disingenuous over generations.
It does accelerate inequality. The answer is to make sure we are all equal.
To solve this problem, we should not allow the special Nike sports camps because I do not make as much as a basketball player as an NBA player. We need to equalize all opportunity at the lowest common denominator. Of course the US would never see another gold medal in the Olympics.
Gifted students do not require you to repeat the same things as often. By forcing them to go at the same pace as other students, you bore them and stunt their growth.
A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator".
This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head:
1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? This will be highly correlated with race and socioeconomic status since we know that poor / minority communities don't have the best resources / results for early childhood development.
2. What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? "Smart" kids who never have to interact with anyone "below" them or "dumb" kids who never have to interact with anyone "above" them will have trouble navigating many social and professional situations.
3. "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. These parents are often the best advocates for positive change in their community. The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots.
We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'
> We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If we're smart, we set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students and 'smart' students gain from theirs.
So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
Even if you were to create a special "school for smart people only" and magically teleport all geeks there, I wouldn't be sure it would eliminate the problem of geeks being bullied. Bullying seems to be an emergent thing that comes up naturally in the sort of environment a school is - as long as kids have a "hierarchy of popularity", there will be some people at the bottom of it, and those are your bullying targets.
Being a geek is a reason to find yourself at the bottom of the hierarchy, but so is being overweight, wearing glasses, being shy, being in a religious minority, etc. The particular reason doesn't matter to the bullying process, it's a free variable. I'm pretty sure that a school full of geek kids will find their own reasons to bully some of its students.
I don't disagree per se, but instead of this happening, it frequently does not. I suspect it is because we are massively under-serving these kids, and they are all essentially bullying refugees. They know exactly how bad it is. Maybe if the torturous experiences were less universal they'd fall into those patterns much quicker.
> Even if you were to create a special "school for smart people only" and magically teleport all geeks there, I wouldn't be sure it would eliminate the problem of geeks being bullied.
First, note that the standard the school has to meet isn't "no bullying", but rather "significantly less bullying". I presume this is what you mean.
Anyway: What is your evidence for this claim? Have you ever spent time in such a school and compared it to a regular school?
Data point of N=1. I went to a special "school for smart people only". There was dramatically less bullying than the regular-people school I came from.
But anyway the researchers are providing actual scientific evidence of this effect, and you appear to be arguing against it using, apparently, intuition based on no evidence whatsoever. "Yes, these experts say X, but that sounds unbelievable to me; therefore they must be wrong."
I went to a "double academically talented" middle school, and got bullied there, more than in my elementary school. Nothing to do with "smartness" or "geekiness" - middle school kids are just horrible lol
Intellectual bullying is also a thing. Having the social intelligence not to be bullied or to form strategic alliances with bullies is useful and less likely to happen for these precious gifted geeks if they are placed together in an unrealistic safe haven. We are all in this world together. If anyone on this thread believes IQ determines social value they need to be bullied a bit more.
Because bullying kids boosts their social intelligence and learns them important lessons ? Bullying had a far greater impact on me then any class in those elementary school years, but i can tell you it has the inverse effect you suggest.
Have you ever been inside a school? The stupid kids don't gather around to bask in the glow of the gifted kids. They DO gather around them and call them 'faggot' and trip them in the hallway, especially if they are smart but not athletic.
That's a failure of the school administration and disciplinary processes, and separating kids from each other based on perceived or measured intelligence is not going to solve it. Bullies are going to find a target whether there's a geek there or not. This is an argument for strict enforcement of anti-bullying policies, not isolating groups of kids from each other.
As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
Yet another reason to concentrate those smarter kids so that the people with the most potential don't have it wasted by being forced to go to a school with a failed administration.
In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
What stops the "smart kid school" from developing the same administrative problems as regular ones? Are "smart teachers" actually better at managing behaviour of pupils? Personally, I feel that the bullying problem might be less about individual teachers, and more about how the whole system is constructed.
There's simply much fewer bullies and problematic behavior in smart schools. It's not that the administration is better, it's that the administration doesn't have to be.
Imagine you are a great principle/counselor/teacher. You can work anywhere, because you are great at your job. Do you choose to go to the school with the superintendent that is nearly illiterate and completely incompetent at the district where the kids regularly assault each other and the staff? Or do you choose to go to the school where the kids love to learn, love to read, love to study, and respect their teachers and their school?
Only if you confound "dumb kid" and "problem kid". Certainly, get problem kids out of the equation, but that doesn't mean there isn't some benefit to different cognitive classes coming into contact with one another.
If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.
Have you ever been to the DMV? The next time you go, look around at the other people you are in line with. That is 'the rest of the country' that you are talking about. They aren't especially functional or reasonable.
And what exactly about them isn't functional or reasonable? I was at the DMV the other day; there were people from all walks of life and they all looked functional and reasonable.
You are getting dangerously close to personal attacks, which I believe will detract from your otherwise reasonable points. I think the discussion on HN is one of a few places where you could get appreciation for the problems in the educatiom system and it would be a waste to end it in heated emotional attacks.
Do you think bullies are limited to the "stupid" kids? Let me tell you something - that's not the case at all. There is a good distribution of smart kids who just like to mess with others as well.
This is unadulterated bullshit. The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction that you just made up.
We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve.
This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.
> The idea that we are supposed to teach each other is science fiction
In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject.
> We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids
This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.
When I was a kid, I would happily teach another kid something if that kid was generally smart. It was an investment of time. There was the possibility that they could teach me things.
For a given pair of students X and Y, it may be a poor investment for X to teach Y anything, if X will almost surely dominate Y within the problem domain. It would be stupid to force X to teach Y in this setting.
I think the general argument is that attempting to teach something, forces you to work with the material in your own head in a way that improves your own understanding. This is similar to "rubber duck debugging" where explaining a problem to an inanimate object leads you to the solution. But interacting with an actual human being often helps too.
Smart kids are not more important than other kids. And where did you get the idea that default-smart kids will benefit the society more than dumber kids given a chance to become smarter? Lots of examples of smart kids becoming dangerous a-holes, especially when they grow up in environments that completely exclude mid and low level kids.
Funny, because as I remember it the dumb kids just devoted their efforts to beating the shit out of everyone else, and disrupting the class as much as possible. No amount of punishment would change their behaviour.
20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p
I watched a lawyer from Texas talking about how he was trying to save people on death row. And he realised that to actually achive that goal, he needed to go back and stop them from committing the crime in the first place, and to do that he needed to fix the circumnstances that led them into crime. Basically, a texan lawyer re-inventing the northern european walfare state from first principles.
" But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.
16:09
I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive.
16:36
And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you."
16:57
And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." "
Perhaps it would be worthwhile for you to engage with the scientific literature cited in this article? These arguments are considered.
Indeed, even in TFA:
> Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, developing behavioural problems both at school and at home, leading to disengagement and dropping out of school.
> When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance by their peers and minimise the risk of bullying and social isolation.
We can disagree about these conclusions, but I hope we agree that if they're right, it's not morally right to send a gifted kid to a regular school on the theory that they'll set an example for those around them if the above is the cost to the kid.
These arguments seem to be true, but I'm sure there are similar facts telling us that without smart kids around other kids can be harmed in similar ways. So it is kind of smart kids well being against other kids well being. So why smart kids well being should be more important than others? Especially taking into account that smart kids tend to have better families and opportunities to get what they need without going to special schools, while "dumb" kids are often "dumb" because they have no choice and their need for support is more urgent.
> I'm sure there are similar facts telling us that without smart kids around other kids can be harmed in similar ways
My point is that rather than assuming things we think are probably are true, we should try to argue from data. Especially since people have studied this, both professionally and experimentally.
I can think of plenty of ways that your argument might not be true. For example, per TFA, if gifted kids act up or intentionally tank themselves in "regular school", then maybe it's worse for everyone for the gifted kids to be in "regular school".
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But rather than making guesses based on nothing but our gut, why don't we consider the experts' studies and opinions?
N=1 anecdote, but I'd say your thesis is not only wrong, it is diametrically opposed to reality. Having seen both, crumbling local public school[0] and gifted state run boarding school[1] your story of the 'smart' kids setting an example never happened. Mostly, I think, because you underestimate just how far ahead they are. It's not a case of "things come easier"; it's "skip every class and show up on the last day and still out perform everyone else". As an aside, I learned more from my peers and participated more in the community when we had a shared foundation to work with.
What you're advocating is a deeply lonely (and I'd argue psychologically damaging) experience and it really bothers me to see so many people in this thread want more people to experience it.
You're asking parents to sacrifice the mental health (via bullying and social issues) (and thus physical issues likely stemming from mental health problems), intellectual development, future earning power, etc. of their gifted children to benefit others. Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea of sacrificing my children to a utopian project. These children also often develop social issues, as different IQ buckets have very different social norms (imagine how a 100iq normal person forced to socialize only with <65iq disabled folks would be affected).
A lot of vitriol in response to this (specifically, the uncritical accusation that this is "bullshit"). But you're right on.
The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other.
To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments.
Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success):
* Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels.
* Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc.
* Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item.
* Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do.
* Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be.
* Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching.
* Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.
I agree with the second especially. The whole point of School is to prepare you for the world we live in (it's effectiveness in many aspects is highly up for debate, but that's another discussion) and you will frequently find yourself in Real Life having to deal with people not necessarily like you. Further isolating people into given groups is only going to increase the social fracturing we already see taking place.
Not to mention organizing people by intelligence is a shaky proposition at best, given our current best assessment, the IQ rating, is already proving to be inadequate as an objective measurement.
It's pretty crazy. I'm a Canadian and went to public schools through school, now I'm doing my PhD. When I'm at summer schools or conferences with Americans, it's like half of those students had only ever interacted with other people in gifted programs at private schools.
Except not. You do have to deal with people not like you in 'real life', but the conditions are nothing like school, wherein you are forced to do so under disadvantageous conditions.
Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.
On any given software team of more than 10 people, I can promise you at least 1 of them is regarded by the others as less skilled. The truth of that isn't relevant, the fact is even competent or highly skilled people may have a hard time presenting that skill verbally and/or in writing.
And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
> I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
You might also have failed to see all the bright kids who dumbed themselves down and achieved a lot less than they could have in order to attain popularity and avoid bullying. I'll take "well rounded" to mean "not really excelling in anything".
my mom would always tell me the same thing every time I came home from being bullied. That I needed to learn to deal with dumber people who might not like me.
She was wrong. Almost everyone I work with is of above average intelligent. That's the nature of a professional career: you're not randomly paired up with some doofus who just happens to share your zip code.
Even in the cases where I do interact with people of below average intelligence, it's perfectly fine and pleasant because adults are generally speaking not assholes to each other. Part of growing up is learning some social graces.
In retrospect, I have no idea where this idea comes from. Do people think that the idiot bully is going to magically get into Harvard and get a professional job?
There's a wide gulf between idiot bullying and just the behavior of people less educated/refined than you. No, you're not likely to have a white collar coworker give you a wedgie (at least, not without swift comeuppance from HR) but especially if you work in IT and have to support users, users who are often not nearly as tech savvy and occasionally can get frustrating, communication with people not on your wavelength is essential.
This goes doubly for high end sales, BTB work, dozens of other professional environments. Maybe you work in a place where the only other people you see every day are coworkers that you like, but in my experience that isn't very commonplace.
> There's a wide gulf between idiot bullying and just the behavior of people less educated/refined than you.
Sure. I'm not claiming that everyone I interact with is as educated or intelligent as me.
But it's not like an alternative education would have zero diversity. When I went to boarding school, the average IQ went way up—but there was still plenty of variation. Plus, I had the whole new challenge of learning to interact with people from different cultures—some of whom had very limited English.
I'm not claiming everyone I work with is tech-savvy or even equally intelligent. What I'm disputing is the claim that being forced to undergo years of bullying and unchallenging instruction is somehow educational.
1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they would be disadvantaged because they would be more sickly and weak compared to the people we fed."
2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do.
3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.
1. You didn't respond to his point. How do you decide who is "gifted?" How do you untangle that from race and economic class?
2. How do you untangle race and economic class from the sort of segregation you are proposing is okay here?
3. I don't think that this is really a response to the point. You're just saying it's unfair to the families who would rather their kids go to a good school instead of needing to fight for their kids to go to a good school. Which ... something something "government handouts." Also: private school vouchers to take "smart kids" to "good schools" aren't social engineering either? This isn't a coherent point.
You sound very frustrated. I'd be interested in reading attempts to debate the points themselves instead of appeals to emotion.
RE 1., your analogy to food is both misapplied and unhelpful. The choice here is between "better education" and "standard education", not between "better education" and "no education at all". You can't test the logic of that argument by applying it to the food case and expect a sensible result.
Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.
I think you're applying a very ungenerous reading to the parent.
The parent's argument is exactly the same if we change "giving people food" to "giving people who have food that isn't suitable for them food that's more suitable for them".
Maybe you think that the parent's argument is flawed because you think that all people have the same basic educational needs. That's what TFA is arguing is not true, but maybe it's wrong; you could make that case. But quibbling over the exact formulation of an analogy is not the kind of concrete thinking that you're asking for.
This point needs to get more attention, anyone who is boiling this down to a simple black/white situation is oversimplifying the issue.
Determining the value in integrating "gifted" kids with "non-gifted" kids is in effect the same argument that is held with regard to determining the affect that charter schools have on our school system, simply change the modifier from gifted/non-gifted to interested/uninterested in school and we are having the same debate.
There are pros and cons to both models and people have to admit to both sides of it, otherwise they are being disingenuous with their analysis.
I never said 'better' vs 'none'. I said should you give some resource to someone who could benefit from it when there are other people who also would benefit that you will fail to identify.
Presumably even in my analogy the people not given food had some food, since they were merely weak and not starved to death.
But that ignores my argument anyway! My point is that you should do what you can do, even if it's imperfect. The food analogy was to show that the argument 'don't help some people because it's unfair to the people you don't help' is extremely stupid.
> The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do.
This is quite an anecdote you've got there ... cause in my experience (gifted, and in gifted classes with many much brighter than me), all of us kept a pretty diverse (academically) social group.
But that's _my_ anecdote ... surely people will exist on the entire spectrum between self-seclusion to social butterfly.
My anecdote matches yours. In highschool I was one of the higher-ranked people in my class, but I got along better with guys on the lower-end of the scale. Despite getting terrible grades, they often had a surprisingly quick wit that made them a pleasure to be around. Probably because they cared more about being funny than getting good grades. I sometimes wonder if it was motivation more than actual capacity that made the difference.
My anecdote conflicts. I found that being in an institution, following a learning path, designed for the average child, meant I progressed less than I could and had my potential wasted. Poorly behaved children or those who aren't academically minded will have one teacher each, trying to force them to climb that academic tree, while high-potential children will be left to rot and told off for wanting to do more.
My anecdote conflicts. I found that being in an institution, following a learning path, designed for the average child, meant I progressed less than I could and had my potential wasted. Poorly behaved children or those who aren't academically minded will have one teacher each, trying to force them to climb that academic tree, while high-potential children will be left to rot and told off for wanting to do more.
RE 1. It has already been mentioned that food analogy is not a good one, since we are not talking of not providing education to smarter kids. And, this is not a binary issue, there is a whole spectrum of intelligence.
RE 2. The previous post does not say "every kind of diversity is automatically good". But I certainly agree that social and intellectual diversity has benefits for all parties.
RE 3. "Smart people do well and often have smart children", well it is not genetic though. While often "smart" parents have "smart" kids because they value education and know what to push. It is an oversimplification to say that education is equal to "smart". And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet. Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good. I believe that the whole intellectual spectrum of kids can learn from each other and together. I believe that smarter kids should be able to learn more if they want to, but I strongly believe in the benefits of having all kids together in the same school, from kindergarten to university. Some kids might need more time, some could learn more and/or go faster, but they will still benefit from each other.
> And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet
Have you been around children? While there are few exceptions that shine no matter the environment, there are far more who excel with a better peer group. This idea that "smart kids are always going to be intrinsically motivated" is just as bogus as "smart people do well and have smart children". What happens in those situations is that the smarter children usually wind up coasting through, simply because they find it so easy to stay ahead of the mean.
> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.
And yet people do every minute, "smart" or not. Being a free country does allow people the freedom to search for the best possible opportunity given their resources, and not be forced into regressing into the mean.
What happens in those situations is that the smarter children usually wind up coasting through, simply because they find it so easy to stay ahead of the mean.
For the early part of my life, that was me.
Working 10 years of jobs that I hated were my big motivator to resume my education with a renewed vigor. It has worked out well for me since but I would have been much better off if I had not been in that sea of mediocrity during my formative years.
> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.
Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that I can ignore your theory about what is 'collective good' because it is stupid and will do me and my family irreparable harm, and I can substitute my own theory of what is actually going to move us towards more 'collective good' and act according to that. That is what being free means.
A whole raft of opinions that have no backing, in fact, I can provide a lot of evidence that counterargues your points.
> Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids.
Let's not use the words dumb but lets say, "less smart". If this were the case, why would parents fight to get their kids into magnet and charter schools? Also special needs kids benefit from mainstreaming. Evidence > Unsubstantiated opinion.
> The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can
[cite needed]
> They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad.
[cite needed] - in fact, as a "gifted" kid, I often felt ostracized because of being selected (nerd).
> I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering
[cite needed]
>> I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering [cite needed]
How can I find a citation for a my own statement that I believe something?
Are you under the impression that the comments section of HN is a scholarly journal where all claims are documented? I notice that you don't ask for citations for any of the claims in this thread that you agree with, so your demands for citations are really just an obnoxious lack of argument.
Point 1 presents a false dichotomy. We can absolutely let kids move at different speeds while keeping them within the same school. And we can ensure that there are still shared classes and opportunities for students with different skills and abilities to interact.
Frankly the tone of your comment troubles me. None of these students are more or less "deserving"; the goal is to help every student reach their potential.
Not if the teachers aren't adequately able to teach the gifted children. All you then end up with is a child with a lot of wasted potential and a teacher losing patience with a bored child.
As for me, programming since the age of about 10, when I went into secondary school (age 13), the level of IT (in)competency amazed me. I was reprimanded for finishing assigned work quickly and studying independently. I was kicked off the network for writing code because it wasn't understood. Nothing got better, yet I was forced to waste 5 years of my ~81.5 years on Earth (~6.13%) of my ALE, getting a pointless state education that from that day on has not once helped me.
Further education wasn't any better. I joined a course at a local vocational college, one with certificates of excellency, with the prospectus stating it would teach the fundamentals of computing; data structures, networking, algorithms, through to applied computing including ASM, C, C++, et al. In my three weeks there, they taught (very poorly) VB.NET and had students design flyers in Publisher. I was refused entry to the one-year pre-university course as I didn't have the correct number of education goody points. The response I got to quitting was that you can't always have everything you want in life.
This is why education in the UK sucks.
I think if you see a child who has potential, let them explore that potential. There are hundreds of other children who will go through the standard educational system, get their GCSEs and A Levels and useless degrees, before getting ordinary jobs. Let the ones with potential do something different.
Reminds me of the kid recently whose school refused to let them take the time out to work on an acting opportunity, due to the loss of education that a week would present. I'm sure the child would have learnt a lot more about their most likely future career in that week than they did in the classroom.
Why is it the goal to help every student reach their potential? Who decided this, and what authority did they have to decide for us what the goal of all schools everywhere automatically must be?
Also, you absolutely can't 'let' kids move at different speeds in the same school. You can let kids move at speeds where you enough kids at that speed. For a 90th percentile kid that is fine, there are roughly 10% of the students that share their speed (or nearly do) so you can form a class of them. For the top 1% or top .1% you just can't, and the 99.9th percentile kid can learn much, much, much faster than the 90th percentile kid, and can immediately understand concepts that the 90th percentile kid won't be able to grasp until they are years older (if ever). Putting those kids in the same class means one will be impossibly behind or the other will be incredibly bored.
I attended a public school in a Minneapolis / St. Paul suburb. Nothing particularly special about the school that I can recall today, although it was in a school district that included grad student housing for University of Minnesota so maybe the student body, as a whole, was more motivated than you may have found elsewhere.
Classes were tiered into ability, even at this age (I do not remember what the rubric was for deciding your tier) and for math classes I was pulled in to a self-study course along with 2 or 3 other students. There was no 'formal' class and instead the teacher would spend varying amounts of time with each student as they worked through the material on their own. Each student would work at his or her own pace.
I think this sort of system would do wonders for those both at the very top and at the very bottom. In college, I found office hours were somewhat similar in that students both behind and in front could get focused time with a professor to either catch up or advance even further ahead.
This is ignoring any budget and teacher constraints, but this seems like a real issue for both the 'top' and 'bottom' students.
Gifted means generally high IQ. While one can trained and raise its IQ, from my understanding, it can help just for a few points.
I can relate to the IQ wall in communication, I can relate to fail education, I can relate to stupid people with great education, I am lucky to have a good paying job considering my lack of formal education.
If not properly handled, above than average IQ is actually more a problem than a great asset in western system (I won't talk about Asian countries, as I don't have first hand experience but the competition mindset should help)
That gifted students will be bored and not develop to their fullest extent, and perhaps more importantly, not develop the discipline to work hard in their formative years, is an argument for tailoring education to the student's ability. Asserting the opposite doesn't make it so. You argument comes down to impairing the education of gifted children in favour of improving the education of ungifted children. That is an argument if your top priority is equality of outcome, but one can question how wise that is if you care about the well being of all of humanity given the fact that it was a handful of geniuses who were responsible for a hugely outsized amount of progress.
> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity?
It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track.
> What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
> "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
"gifted track" is rarely a set program. It's usually a mechanism for providing individually paced opportunities and resources [edit: added this phrase] _at a different/specific school_.
Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'.
A studious freshman is usually on par with his calculus instructor (Math PhD) in the domain of textbook college calculus.
Being advanced(PhD) or gifted usually means pursuing more open-ended type interests and research. The foundational skills, which form the majority of K-12 curriculum, won't be out of reach for someone keeping pace in non advanced tracks.
I think your point here should resonate louder (at least where I live in the USA).
Jumping in and out of the "gifted" track should be possible if such a thing exists; however to your point, how would the track be defined and what should it contain? Would there be a list of items that need to be mastered? What evaluations determine if you can jump in... or when you need to "jump out"? Would the "gifted" track be age based the way it is currently or could the contents be tailored to fit the needs of the individual students?
Following that line of thinking, at what point do you qualify for a job? Also, what social stigmas would we attach to "jumping out"?
I don't have answers, but your point led me to some very interesting questions. Thank you!
You ignore the fact most "gifted" students come from higher income families. There are "gifted" children from lower income families that would be misidentified due to underexposure of educational resources.
High income families already send their children to "smart" private schools; why not allow gifted children on the public school track to enjoy similar opportunities?
Why not just make schools better for all, rather than replicating the educational resource hoarding that takes place in private schools?
Because we have working models for high performing specialty schools.
We already have endless infighting about improving every school.
And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?
I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school.
I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason.
> Because we have working models for high performing specialty schools.
So just because?
>"And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?"
There is no "better" for everyone. Rather than just segregating students (and requiring more teachers resources etc.), work to made education better for your students. Have different classes at different speeds.
>"I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school.
I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason."
That's fine, and that's your prerogative as a parent. However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
Sure, we all know the historical connotations, but we also all know the actual definition of the word. Though I will say, given the correlation between educational resources and race, the historical connotation may be appropriate in some of these gifted vs non gifted situations.
> However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous.
Who said anything about segregation? I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely. The only way to get forced out of "advanced school" should be failing out.
Saying that student A must attend school B because of trait C and student X must attend school Y because of trait Z, is segregation. It just so happens to be based upon you deemed "educational qualities" rather than what we normally think about, race. Or more economic status.
> I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely.
We already have free choice. There are a myriad of private schools you can choose to send your children to. Pay the fees and send them.
You are missing the other half of the problem: what about the non-gifted. The majority of kids are average: they didn't get whatever it is that makes some people above average. They need the slower pace of school to learn, otherwise they won't learn.
The right thing for an average student is not the same as what is right for either the gifted, or the "retarded" (I forget what the correct term is.
Resources don't cut it, the best students learn more from reading a text book than the average students learn from the best classes. There are a lot of fads in education, but elite schools mostly maintain their status by having elite students not elite instructors.
You missed the part where I said they are underexposed to educational resources. These "objective measures" would be biased against low income students that aren't taught the material.
If you truly value your second point, then collecting outliers (at either end) into special schools is the way to go. This way, even exceptional students will regularly encounter peers who struggle more or less with various work than they do.
If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.
> The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".
If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. Leaders usually spend all their resources reinforcing hegemony. And many of the people having the most positive effect on society will do it in a totally inconspicuous way. And many of those folks will come from bad schools, succeeding despite lack of institutional support. I suspect interpersonal support is a better predictor of positive contribution than institutional support.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society.
It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention.
You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else.
If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
> It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously.
Feel free to browse my comment history if you suspect I am trolling.
> You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people.
No, I think we should prepare them just like we prepare everyone else. And I think many of them will make valuable contributions. I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
> Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
I didn't say anything like that. I think you assumed that because I disagree with your premise (only the education of the elites matters) that I must therefore believe in the opposite conclusion (we should only educate non-elites). But I believe in universal education.
I don't mind correcting you, but this conversation would go a lot faster if you responded to my actual words rather than what you assume I must think because I am disagreeing with you.
> Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Neither of us. I was saying teenagers who are already destined to be given hard power, because their parents have it, will tend to get into good schools, and will also tend to reinforce hegemony, which I consider a negative thing.
> I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
Wrong. I did not assert this. I asserted that resources should be focused on improving the abilities of the group most likely to be in key positions in the future.
But schools are made up of the children that attend them.. If a gifted child ends up in a bad school, he can certainly boost their esteem and encourage competition among intellectual thoughts.
One good seed can really foster a lot of inspiration.
These are all legitimate concerns. In my experience, growing up in South Carolina (some of the worst public schools in the US) the opportunity to go to a "gifted" (I hate that word, takes all of the emphasis off of effort or any actionable quantity) school for high school probably saved my life [0].
What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks.
Segregating gifted children in with the regular population will one day soon be seen as child abuse.
It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism.
We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom.
It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.
Segregating gifted children in with the regular population
Do you mean desegredating, that is, keeping them in? If so, I agree, it may be bordering on abuse. I have only anecdotal evidence to support it, but I suspect there may have been studies.
No, it is not sufficient to make a policy decision, for instance. But if I have to go and vote on this issue, it is at least something I could base my judgment on.
I think resentment of this kind of social engineering is a major key in recent US political shifts. Let's talk about the basics. If a kid can learn more difficult material and the kid wants to, most reasonable people would agree that the kid should go where that is an option. This basic sense of the world is blocked by social engineers obsessed with n-th order effects who ignore the fundamental issue. Let's do the basics, folks.
I've unfortunately been on all ends of this -- in gifted programs throughout grade school, until high school, where I missed out because my parents (and myself) didn't know there was an application process.
Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people.
I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.
>What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
I'm wondering how you feel about "smart" kids like Terence Tao.[1][2]
At age 14, he was in enrolled in college instead of attending high school with his "less smart" peers. At age 17, he was a graduate student at Princeton instead of being a senior at high school with other kids his age. (And working backwards from those 2 points in his timeline, he was in highschool when he should have been in middle school, etc.)
Should the young Terence Tao regardless of intelligence be denied the ability to "remove" himself from the school he is "supposed" to go so that other kids can benefit from his intellect? If at age 8, he's pulled from regular school to attend high school instead, are his parents selfish?
Is there a political movement to force all geniuses to stay with their age group and normally assigned school to fulfill a societal goal?
* On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education.
* On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split the class into two for that section. Once I slipped into this lesser "higher" class, I felt I could never move up to the higher/higher class because I never learned ahead enough to meet the needs of the next pre-test. (It never occurred to younger me to read ahead in the book. So much for being gifted.)
So I think the arguments you list ALL have validity and should absolutely be taken seriously. OTOH, I think current schools do a poor job of keeping talented or more educated students engaged, which can drag down things for everyone. I don't know what the answer is - you've done a good job of talking about why separate schooling is a bad solution - but I think the status quo is also a bad solution.
(that said, I'm in favor of raising educational opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged first, because I'd rather have talented-but-only-adequately-taught people in a world of adequately taught people than I would have a world of poorly taught people save for a few bright stars)
1. There are standard tests and evaluations for giftedness, these can be given at any time past age 4. They are about thinking and behavior, not achievement. Years of study shows that these traits don't generally change much with age. So called "late bloomers", if they are gifted, would almost certainly have been gifted much earlier in life but maybe not identified.
2. I think this is a valid point, but I'd propose that this be addressed more by making sure that kids are interacting with peers outside the academic context. Putting kids in the same classroom where they are underserved on either extreme simply because it's good to socialize seems like the wrong priority to me.
3. This is an artifact of how we identify giftedness today. Giftedness exists in all cultures and socioeconomic groups. Today, only the most motivated parents get their gifted kids identified. We could fix that with a national initiative to identify gifted students. Additionally. Not that this is necessarily your argument, but motivated parents do not make children gifted. No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically. Likewise,profoundly gifted kids given very few opportunities can be and are still gifted.
As someone who was classified as "gifted" and went to one of these special programs, your third point is a common occurrence.
All that aside though, I think the very notion of gifted-ness is harmful (in a labelling sense) to both the are's and the are-not's. Your first two points are relevant on this. For that reason, I'm not sure we should even discuss/judge gifted-ness, regardless of whether it even exists.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadI'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school.
This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the children who had difficulties learning or even the opposite- elevating children who were learning well; instead the entire class would slow to a crawl when it came time to do some form of verification that we're actually learning.
In many cases 'tests' would stop any possibility of new content being added to the class for months.
I was bored out of my mind and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. School is an absolute torturous prison when there's no stimulation of any kind; and they also wonder why you seek fulfillment by acting out.
Conversely, before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with, those output the most well educated people and were free for the public too. They just had very strict requirements for entry and you could be expelled for not keeping up. A stark contrast to the kids in my class who were unwilling or unable to allow the class to move forward as a unit.
Gah. I hated my childhood and I absolutely hated formal education because of this.
[0] https://youtu.be/kz2ENxjJxFw
I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how to bubble in a multiple choice answer sheet. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for weeks on end having the fact we need a #2 pencil and that you shouldn't fill outside the bubble when answering the scantron on the TAAS test.
My original school system was always trying to push me forward; they placed me in gifted programs, encouraged me to compete in academic competitions (you know the ones I'm talking about), and often recommended to my parents that I should be allowed to skip a couple of grades.
Conversely, my latter school system, in an attempt to meet standards and retain order (I assume), simply taught down to the lowest denominator. As a result, I lost a lot of the drive and motivation previously impressed upon me. It's only after growing up that I've gotten some of that back, however, I doubt it will ever reach its previous high.
So, as unemotional as it may seem, there should be a mechanism for either removing those at the bottom in order to accelerate their learning and return them back to the general population, or a similar mechanism to allow the higher levels to avoid decline.
The #2 pencil is spot on. I carried an entire box of pencils and would trade them for a slice of pizza at lunch.
For those not from Texas or too young to have experienced it, TAAS was horrible even compared to other standardized tests.
Other standardized tests at least pretend to assess a student's learning. TAAS assessed a students ability to parse octuple negatives and poorly typeset mathematics.
So, there were three portions: reading comprehension, math, grammar, and persuasive writing. The maximum score for any of the TAAS portions is a 4, with 3 as the minimum passing grade. The first three were ridiculously easy, but the writing portion was a nightmare.
I don't remember all the details anymore, but IIRC you were expected to include a statistic and a quote from an expert in your paper. The kicker? You weren't allowed any outside materials, and you were expected to make up the statistic and the quote. That's right: the assignment was to write something that would be considered fake news nowadays.
I got a 2. I only passed because I got a 4 on the grammar portion, because for some reason the persuasive writing portion and the grammar portion were averaged together to form what they called the "writing" portion.
My year (10th grade 2000-2001) was the second-last to take the TAAS, and we were the last to take only the TAAS, as it was being phased out in favor of the TAKS. The year behind me took both the TAAS and the TAKS, with only the TAAS counting for graduation requirements (they only had to take the TAKS because the state wanted to do a dry run before switching over), and the people two years behind me only took the TAKS. The timeline went like:
* 2000-2001: 10th grade takes the TAAS (my class)
* 2001-2002: 10th grade takes the TAAS
* 2002-2003: 11th grade takes the TAKS (dry run, same class as above)
* 2003-2004: 11th grade takes the TAKS (for real)
This goes to show that the problem is more localized than state level, it is a municipal and district-level choice so long as you meet minimum testing requirements. Now when students don't meet minimum testing requirements, most districts unfortunately fall into the trap of teaching to test as opposed to teach.
Exact same situation here, but Florida. Elementary school was alright, but middle school became pure FCAT preparation and nothing else. My parents withdrew me from them at that point and put me back into regular classes.
They also used a "block schedule", where each day, you would only attend half your classes, but for twice as long, alternating which classes on which days, and then rotating the order of the classes. (So of your 6 classes, you attended daily: 1,3,5 then 2,4,6, then 3,5,1, then 4,6,2, then 5,3,1...).
Here's an calendar I found of a school currently doing this, tell me this isn't confusing as hell:
http://ponce.dadeschools.net/blockschedule.asp
In any case, I'll share another funny anecdote: I took a reading comprehension test in 3rd grade. It said I was reading a college level. I'm not really sure what that meant then, but in any case it was as high as the system went. Not only did I have to take the same test in 4th grade again, my parents were sent a letter with a very concerned tone. It said I was not making progress on my reading skills and that soon I would fall behind the other children. It recommended I be placed in a remedial comprehension course so I could catch up.
Sure you need to be able to talk to other groups of people but not to the extent that you require 35 hours a week of education along side them for years. Additionally I'm not sure being educated alongside them actually helps. There are a a hell of a lot of intelligent people who become resentful of that situation and that attitude can take years to mature out of, if they ever do.
Honestly I think the worst part is when teachers would get annoyed that you weren't 'paying attention' and force you to stop doing the crap that's keeping your mind busy and 'focus on school', even though you already get pretty much straight A's.
I ended up teaching my AP Statistics course. It was ludicrous: as a junior I somehow understood the material better than the teacher and was expected to teach a class full of seniors.
Yes, it was more educational than the alternative (sitting in a corner reading a book while totally phoning it in) but I also have no doubt that I would've learned far more in a course which actually challenged me.
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Also, this notion that our real world experiences are anywhere near as heterogeneous as public schools is downright ludicrous. It's not like we hire random people off the street to be software engineers. The average IQ of everyone I interact with is well the national average.
I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and forth on whether that is a good idea. The biggest issue is that the amount of pressure placed on 10/11 year olds to pass that exam and get into a grammar school, not to mention the 18 months or so of preparation is very high. Too high arguably. It also fails children who don't do well with standardised exams. I know people who failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well.
A better system may be having one school with optional advanced classes (we even had this for GCSE Maths/Advanced Maths in out grammar school). That way people can take advanced courses in the areas they naturally excel at rather than hindering their entire education by denying them the higher quality teaching at a grammar school.
Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?
Is streaming out of fashion in state schools these days? I know its alive and well in public schools as my son was streamed.
Edit: For those outside the UK: public schools are a type of private school.
You break kids up by test score and then put all the top kids together, all the middle kids together, and all the bottom kids together. My public school experimented with it for one year, but reverted. Rumor was, parents felt like their kids were being written off in the 6th grade.
You ideally need to be able to promote and demote, which means having at least one subject teacher per stream per year, so that pupils can shift between streams without timetable changes, and having small enough class sizes that the teachers can all cope with a few more being added (as well as possibly doing a bit of extra coaching to get a promoted pupil up to the level of the rest of the class).
Selective schooling as a norm can write talented kids off at age 11 if their talents aren't broad enough. Streaming means that children can still excel in their best disciplines even if they are lacking in others.
People were moved between streams fairly frequently.
I didn't find that at all. There is more to school than classes, and we did have a bunch of classes that weren't segregated by ability (history, geography, religious studies, shop classes, sometimes PE, etc.) Plus we had lunch and all breaks together. My friends where absolutely not all in the same math set as me.
I definitely believe that they work, it's a shame they don't have them in England.
For example, if they made half the kids do better, and half the kids do worse, does that count as working? While you sometimes get claims that it's for their own good that less academically inclined pupils are sent to the non-grammar schools, I'd guess the same people who say this would freak right the hell out if their own kid failed the exam and didn't get in, which kind of undermines that argument.
I take your point about the wider ramifications, but I feel as though I got a good education, and if I ever have kids, I would want them to go to a grammar school too.
Source: Personal experience. I went a grammar school in the UK. I also taught in a top UK grammar school and a not-very-good comprehensive school. I've seen it happen numerous times.
EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.
It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society, it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices.
Whether or not options should be restricted in schooling is a topic for cost/benefit analysis, but as a general point, I don't see anything mind-boggling about this perspective.
My point, as applied to this case, is that giving the option of "smart-only schools" will predictably lead to people taking it, which may lead to issues described by 'habosa here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591. It's a reasonable question to ask if this is what is beneficial to the society (including its economy), and if the answer is no, then not giving such an option in a first place is an entirely logical approach.
EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.
IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.
I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club activities, hikes, music lessons and just hangout. As a bonus, the people in these areas DON'T need a masters degree to do their job as we separate educational aspects of schools from social aspects.
Dozens of small schools could easily work together in a community under this model with changes in the classroom schools having no impact on the activity centers. You could even go to certain schools on different days for areas of specialization/interest being taught.
There are a whole world of possible options that open up if we don't lock in the model that we have today. IMO, it's not about defunding the schools. It's about WANTING to fund them.
Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.
The recent fraud investigations in the USA for-profit college market (eg where several scam-ish type outfits churned out expensive but useless degrees to people lured in by slick marketing) absolutely shows that, sometimes, more options can be worse.
I agree that for-profit institutions have no place in education.
Until I eventually got into private school for the last 2 years of high school, I had never had to work to get straight As. I could often complete homework assignments before class was even over.
Unfortunately, this conditioned me to be incredibly lazy. As I never developed a strong work ethic, in college I continued to put in a minimum of effort though that wasn't enough for straight As.
I've never really had the experience of consistently trying to do something hard. Even though I'm trying to force myself to do it now (setting ambitious fitness goals and taking advanced online classes), I can't help but feel that it would've been a lot easier to develop this grit when motivation didn't entirely depend on me.
You have to sit an exam called the 11+ to enter which is much more like an IQ test than a standard subject based exam.
The most comman argument against them is that privelleged families can afford to tutor their kids specifically to pass this exam.
I was lucky enough to pass the exam, and while there definitely were instances of well off kids who had massive amounts of tutoring, the vast majority were from all kinds of different backgrounds, and levels of education.
For me it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, but I completely understand both sides of the argument.
And I would think that if you're OK with multi-track education, it would seem like having a separate school for gifted students is just an extension of that.
That said, in my own experience, although there were down sides to having some single-track subjects (e.g. physical education), one benefit of attending a school with children of all ability levels was that you were exposed to children from all walks of life.
I would imagine that a school for gifted students would have skewed socioeconomic demographics compared to a school for students of all ability levels, and in many places, that might also mean less racial diversity.
At my public high school, we had a program where students at standard-level or above would assist special-education students. That type of opportunity would probably be missing from a school for only gifted students. You would be less likely to come into contact with (and befriend) people with intellectual disabilities, or even people with average intelligence.
Edit: One other point. Academic giftedness is often thought of as one monolithic thing, but I know several people whose giftedness varies wildly by subject. If you attend a school for gifted students, would there be an expectation that you would be gifted in all subject areas? Would it be more difficult for you to get help in the subjects where you struggle?
Funny enough, I just finished reading the article and comments from the story on what it's like to be poor at an Ivy League (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480802). Personally, I thought that I never really felt disparate enough where I actually stuck out to my peers, and that the thoughts everyone had were more akin to class anxiety. It seems that the thoughts are not always unfounded I guess. Oh well.
I tried to empathize, but since I didn't value going along to get along, I didn't play along, and I didn't earn a lot of loyal friends that way.
It's not about class so much as values, and it wasn't my parent's values so much as it was my identity and valuing intelligence (although no adults I ever met devalued intelligence).
I think the ideal is a little bit of both: strong multi-track curricula with common social ground + experiences.
It's not just curriculum, though. The whole structure of the school is usually oriented toward "managing the lowest common denominator." Grade schools have more in common with prisons than they do with any other societal institution.
Imagine a school with a few fixed lectures during the day, self-directed study time built in, and the ability to take a break or get a snack at the student's convenience. That's basically college for most people, but a lot of kids are mature enough to handle something like that at a much younger age.
200 years ago, the smartest and dumbest person both probably lived and died on the same farm. 100 years ago, it wasn't noticeably different. Around the 1920s/30s, society started segmenting the higher end out into higher education and then completely different career/life paths. Fast forward another 50 years and people on the higher and lower ends of intellect rarely meet.
Think of the people you interact with on a daily basis - unless you're doing things completely outside the realm of intellect - and you'll start to realize that the vast majority of them aren't far off from you intellectually. This applies at the top and bottom.
Also a significant amount of the school's resources went to these kids who just didn't want to be there. They had to pay for two security guards, overtime pay for the teachers who did detention/Sunday school, etc. They only offered 4 AP classes each of which had ~50 students because they were the ones who wouldn't get into fights if you just stuffed them into a room with some books.
I think a superschool should allow each student to be ordinary in X subjects. In other words, two levels of acceptable marks depending on the student.
Splitting a student's school life between two schools cannot be an option, it also doubles administration.
I think this is a big leap. I went to a large public high school (~2500 students total) with 3 tracks for each subject. I was in the highest track the whole time, but I would not support physically segregating students like me into a separate school. There are a number of benefits to keeping people in the same school:
1. It's socially beneficial to have high school friends who are different than you are. Many of my best friends were not in my classes but we hung out at lunch time and in after school activities. I think we learned a lot of intangible things from each other.
2. Parental involvement. Parents of kids who are high achievers are more likely to want to see the school go in the right direction. Having involved parents keeps the whole school administration on their toes and brings the general standard of the school up for everyone. If the high achievers had their own school the other students would have fewer advocates.
When American schools were racially desegregated we saw gains across the board: https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica...
While separating gifted students is not the same as separating by race, I think a lot of lessons can be learned from that previous experience.
I attended the long-running #1 public school in the nation. The School for the Talented and Gifted Magnet High School in Dallas, TX. The environment fostered creativity and learning. There were no distractions or negative pressures or stressors. Being smart didn't result in being bullied, it resulted in being respected.
The question is whether it's good for society as other schools may suffer
In a meritocratic society, the smartest kids go to the best schools, then to the best colleges, then the most elite companies, then likely marry someone from school or work, and then have the smartest kids.
Socioeconomic classes become set due the stability of cognitive function across generations.
Is it ideal to have a cognitively and economically stratified america with a cognitive elite and cognitive under-class?
Is it ideal that this cognitive elite has little to no interaction with the rest of America, and little understanding of how the rest of the country lives?
Being smart is not a guarantee of success so we should make it harder so the less intelligent do not suffer any disadvantage.
1 million goes to 100+ "regular schools"
The circlejerk here is that it would "help immensely" and "move the needle forward" but it would just result in further deepening the gap between rich and poor. The mindset of this sub is deeply anti-Communist and you can see it in the replies.
Separating class from this issue is absolutely impossible.
Given the strong correlation between academic aptitude and economic success, removing the smart students also remove the wealthy students. The funding model falls apart, and the students who remain get even less extracurricular enrichment.
Granted, we could design programs that mostly avoid the problem. In my county, the gifted high school (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) only takes absolutely brilliant students. Many of whom truly fit the "too smart to fit in" stereotype. Across a large county, that still leaves plenty of gifted/wealthy students in the normal schools, which offer a broad selection of AP/IB/dual-enrollment options.
But it does mean you can pay to get them tutored to jump through hoops, and generally push them harder. There's a very strong relationship between wealth and elite college admission for example. Which is down to culture and opportunity as much as gifts and talents.
If being selective means controlling for socioeconomic background when assessing potential - then I'd be more of a cheerleader for it.
So...affirmative action like in colleges but for earlier forms of education?
To be fair, the TAG Magnet did have race-based quotas until very recently. Let's just say that the school is now ... less diverse. Although, the 1% "other", which encompassed all East and West Asian, has now makes up roughly one-third of the enrollment. The former court ordered 33/33/33/1 resulted in rejecting some of the most meritorious students.
That's a very broad generalization. Yes, there are areas where education is not seen as a positive.
But, looking at trends in our major suburban areas, I think you're way off base. It is increasingly difficult to gain admission to the top state colleges in many areas of the nation because of overwhelming demand. This in turn has led to a massive increase in the number of after-school tutoring programs, math enrichment programs, expansion of AP/honors course availability, etc.
I think these are great benefits and we should focus on making them available for all students, regardless of whether or not they're "gifted".
Glad to see another Townview graduate representing us well. :)
The end result was just that-- all of the attention was given to the students who needed it. The cirriculum was dumbed down, and the "gifted" students didn't learn almost anything.
It was better for the students who needed help, and much worse for the students that didn't.
I view the end result akin to eliminating salary negotiations to help those who are too afraid to negotiate.
This is an incredibly disorienting sentence for one not familiar with where The Conversation is based! (Australia, I suppose, having had a few needed minutes!)
I have heard of lots of anecdotes of this occurring. I can believe it takes place. IMO this reason is exceptional and should get special attention.
The article is fairly Aussie-specific. In the US we have an education system which has a lot of opportunity for improvement. But the metrics focus on either the median student performance against milestones/proficiency or the median student progress. As long as this is the way they're measured, the outliers will not get special attention. As a result, parents should be prepared to spend time and money educating their gifted children above and beyond the school curriculum.
Overall, this seems like an unhelpful place to invest compared to more fundamental educational issues (and, pragmatically, I can see many areas where this goes awry, ie many aptitude tests for kids being biased for socioeconomic reaosns).
(It's entirely possible that I'm overlooking some nuances in how education budgets work, but I'm talking more in the macro sense.)
(Our high school's approach to that was just offering "study hall" as an elective, with the implication that you could just skip study hall and nobody cared.)
When I was a kid, I had to slop pigs, and shovel the shit out of the pen. My dad would say to me as we were shoveling pig shit or doing some other awful work, "This is why you get good grades. Some day you are going to college so you don't end up like your old man."
I had issues with my oldest kid taking a bad attitude at school and not caring about her education. I thought back to my childhood, then I took my daughter out and gave her a shovel. When she asked what she was supposed to do with it, I told her, "You are going to dig so you can practice up on how to be good at digging ditches, since that is the type of work you will be qualified for if you don't get a good education."
I got a call from her teacher a few weeks later telling me how they couldn't believe the complete 180 she had made at school and that she had never seen anything like it. She wanted to know what I had done. When I told her the teacher was amazed at what a harsh yet unique "punishment" it was, but said that "maybe more kids should be made to dig ditches".
I set strong boundaries and consistent enforcement for all of them. For minor infractions, my go to punishment is to make them do a plank while we "discuss" what they did wrong. If you have ever done planks you know the agony of holding a plank for long enough. The great thing about this as a disciplinary technique is that it is good for them physically; they are building core muscles so the older the kids is the longer they can hold the plank.
For serious offenses, I always like to come up with something more unique and memorable so it really sinks in.
After learning basic fractions for 4 years in the public school system, a friend and I made a chess set out of paper scraps. Our typical day involved doing the day's classwork and homework in an hour while the teacher lectured and then playing chess for the rest of the day. We played chess for several months until near the end of the year when a substitute confiscated our set and threw it away.
But it's not so easy to define what this means in practice, particularly in the UK where the debate over selective schooling is bound up with issues related to class and wealth.
A separate school for "advanced" students doesn't outright bother me; however, I think defining "advanced" is more challenging than most would initially consider. There are many reasons that a student may be ahead/behind at any point in their education.
I agree that defining "advanced" is very challenging, and goes beyond just the academic as well. There's also something to be said for being academically engaged with people similar to you (ie - some (most?) high school kids may learn more from peers in a self-selected AP Calculus class than they would from a Calc 1 class at the local college taken by kids looking to fill a requirement).
It seemed to me that if I took the dual/early enrollment college course that I would definitely get the credit, whereas the AP course would actually require far more repetitive homework, lots more class time (which I didn't want to do), and only then would I have a chance to qualify for college credit.
That's a no-brainer, in my book, but so many of my peers refused to follow my lead to the University when I tried to persuade them.
In spite of lots of sales training, I've never been a good salesman.
As an added bonus, I could compete calculus in a semester instead of a full year. It was way better for me.
By contrast AP was just a choice I could sign up for when choosing classes.
I do not have good feelings towards those people still to this day.
Of course, now I realize why when I asked him why he would discourage me, he repeated my question loudly for the rest of the guidance department to hear - he was covering his butt on the matter.
Next year she will be a senior and have one morning class at her high school, and the rest will be college. She should finish her Associate's (2 year) degree two semesters after graduating high school.
Some more academically gifted students have managed to graduate high school and finish their two year degree simultaneously.
I did that, it's not as useful as it seems.
What did you find non-useful about it? Did you end up having to take just as much undergraduate coursework to make up for some perceived deficiency?
I'm genuinely curious.
2) Most dual enrollment programs restrict what coursework you can take. Near zero intersection with my CS coursework, though I did get my general ed requirements done.
3) It's community college, it's not something you can put on a resume.
With the credits I got I'd need to do a heavy schedule to graduate even in 3.
More restrictive set of courses for the AA means you're taking classes you don't enjoy for a requirement you don't need. The "name value" of a community college AA also isn't as great, particularly for kids who want to go to a higher-ranked public or top private university for undergrad.
That being said, if you know you want to go to a local/state school where the credits will transfer easily, getting the AA early can be great. I know people who graduated early but still received all 4 years of scholarship money (direct deposited in their bank).
1. Lack of capacity: Families that can't find schools for their kids, or entire regions that are "school deserts."
2. Schools that fail or go bankrupt.
Both are cases of private businesses pocketing public money while externalizing their risks and leaving the government with the cost of bailing them out.
I speculate that a law of economics or politics is: If something requires universal access for everybody, then it will be effectively supported by the government, even if the mechanism is not obvious.
I am also somewhat nervous of bias in the definition of "gifted", which may have things build into it which are correlated with race or culture. Put simply, there are really bright people that the system never catches, at any stage.
When I was in high school you could elect to take a more or less challenging course load. I effective did go to a different school than many of my peers simply by taking different classes.
And if the private school can't handle the inundation, then there's incentive to either expand capacity and/or another school adapt/open to share the load.
I also think free public school is critical to having an educated productive populace.
There's an apparent disconnect between my first opinion and the second. That disconnect is, and I know this will sound trite, questioning authority and facts. It's a critically important practice that schools actively discourage.
In a normal basis, my answer is no, no and no. In Germany some schools start to separate kids when they have 10 years old. Is too soon. Intelligence it's not only about to be good at school - look at Einstein.
In Germany, some schools, start to do the separation when kids have only 10 years old. It seems to me too much stress and it's not even effective, bc you do it having an exam in consideration. School is not everything, look at Einstein :)
In practice, separating gifted students does two things:
1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students)
2. Remove equality of opportunity.
What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular students?
- Small classes? Help regular students to extent.
- Better curriculum? Hey! Helps regular students.
- More practical education? Also helps regular students
---
I'm not against segregation in theory. However, in practice there's very little evidence that the gifted schools would NOT benefit regular students. If you believe that gifted students should receive more education than regular students, then that's an entirely separate discussion.
If you have evidence, I'd love to see it (I'm very interested in education, in particular).
2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging.
- Small classes: maybe, it's not necessary at all.
- better curriculum: well, yes, smarter kids can cover a topic more quickly and in more depth. The less smart kids can't keep up, so they have to skim less deeply and/or cover less material.
- more practical: ??? did you feel like you needed 3 bullets or something?
You should have separate schools because there aren't enough gifted kids in one regular school to even fill one class. This comes directly from the definition of gifted, if gifted is say the top 1% of students, a large high-school with 1500 kids would only have 15 of them across 4 grades. You have to do something like a magnet school to have enough kids at the same level in the same room for it to work at all.
In any case, you didn't seem to refute my main point that gifted schools would also benefit regular students.
EDIT: I'm saying 'who cares' in the context of deciding whether to set up a gifted magnet school or not. You shouldn't decide what is good for a child based on your pet theories about who should or should not have a yacht.
In what way would it possibly benefit a typical student to be placed in a school where they can't keep up? How would it feel for that child to be in an environment where it's normal for their peers to take college courses before reaching high school age? In my experience, it's extremely demotivating and leads to a lot of pain for the child, no matter how wealthy his or her parents may be.
As justin_vanw pointed out (in an undeservedly flagged sibling post), it seems an awful lot like you deny the existence of gifted children to begin with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472276
2. The alternative is equality of outcome, i.e. cut down the tall poppies. This isn't a solution. Keeping gifted children lockstep with their age-mates does them serious damage that can last a lifetime.
Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum into two or three years, whereas the gifted can. The reality is that these kids need to be surrounded by their ability peers if they are going to reach their potential.
For evidence, check out the work of Miraca Gross, who did her work in Australia. She has a book called Exceptionally Gifted Children, where she details the lives of several of these kids and shows how devastating the school system can be to them if extra accommodations are not made.
2. False dichotomy.
I've read the book you're referring to. It doesn't make any of the claims you're making, in particular:
> Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum.
If I'm wrong (and I may, it's been a while), feel free to reply with a quote and a page number. I have the book.
In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.
The reality is this: schools for "gifted" children just tend to be better schools. The same better schools that would lead to better outcomes, for everyone. Mind you, this isn't the same as putting, for example "special-ed" students in separate classrooms.
Case and point:
> The major finding of this study is that third and fourth grade classroom teachers make only minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students. This result holds for all types of schools sampled. It also holds for classrooms in different parts of the country and for different types of communities. Implications of these findings for researchers and gifted education specialists are discussed. [1]
[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0162353293016002...
My point about regular students not being able to benefit from a compacted K-5 curriculum in two or three years comes from the fact that gifted student can move through academic material faster than a regular student. A regular student may be able to move faster than is currently being done, but not as fast as a gifted student.
> In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.
So ability grouping as opposed to age grouping? Yes, I agree it would help a lot, though as I'm sure you know, the gifted prefer to be around themselves rather than older regular children. Gross' book shows a trend that the more satisfied the kids are with their education, the better they do in life, which is why a separate school makes sense to me. The gifted population is small enough and funding is small enough that I think it will make a much greater positive impact on gifted students than a negative impact on regular students.
While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system.
>2. Remove equality of opportunity. That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it.
To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.
However, in regards to your first point: I said nothing about crippling those ahead. I'm curious what makes you say that honestly. Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. Regression to the mean, would be putting gifted students in an environment where they wouldn't thrive. However, this said environment would also cripple regular students. So the solution, as I've said, and you agree with is to make education better, more generally.
How is it not? "Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school where they're already ahead. "Gifted" students aren't different from other children, they're responsive to the same social pressures all students face, and placing them with a "gifted" peer group allows them to thrive. Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
>"Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school...
"Regular" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school... I'll even humor you and apply this argument for "at risk" students. They, too, require pressure and engagement to excel. [1]
> Gifted students are among the most challenging for teachers to serve, as their needs lie outside the standard curriculum.
Indeed. Some gifted program curricula are simply minor modifications to standard ones, begging the question, why waste all of that money trying to barely change the curriculum? It would be better spent making school better in general. See my other sibling posts for citations.
[1] http://www.viriya.net/jabref/Academic_success_among_students...
This problem of cooperative education (wherein we separate students with similar features) is well studied, for both "at-risk" and "gifted" students, and it's been show that regular classroom practices do not benefit either group [1].
[1]: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED379845.pdf
Here's some information that supports your argument...
> It is clear from the results that teachers in regular third and fourth grade classrooms make only minor modifications in the curriculum and their instruction to meet the needs of gifted students. (pg 125)
...however.
> 61% of the responding teachers have received no staff development in the area of gifted education (pg 125)
> gifted resource teachers have little effect on what classroom teachers do to meet the needs of the gifted (pg 127)
---
In any case, your citation agrees with the holistic in practice.
> "...efforts must certainly must certainly include the selection or development of curriculum materials specifically design for classroom teacher use. They should also compact the regular curriculum, and to become more flexible in meeting the needs of all students, including gifted students." (pg 126)
P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.
Also, yes, I do believe it's possible to improve schools holistically.
Then I doubt I'll convince you through internet comments, but I think our goals are aligned (better education for all). However, we want to take different approaches to achieve it. The source I cited agrees that we should create an environment in which teachers are flexible, but my point in citing is that despite the comprehensive research that's been done on this topic, we've made very few steps towards actually accomplishing it, so I think it's time to give up that line of thought and try another, which is to separate students.
Separated schooling does have advantages, such as challenging gifted students ("A troubling finding that emerged was the preference of a few of the [gifted] students for heterogeneous classes because they were easier and enabled them to attain a high class ranking with little work")[1] and separation of children enable them to grow at a faster pace ("After 2 years, academically handicapped students in cooperative elementary schools had significantly higher achievement in reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, language expression, math computation, and math application in comparison with similar students in comparison schools") [2].
> P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.
Likewise, thank you for being a good discussion partner as well.
[1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0016986204048001... [2]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0002831203200232...
So you put a regular student there. Pretty soon, they miss some key bit of understanding. Class doesn't pause and replay. Class moves on. Very quickly, the situation becomes hopeless. Why pay attention to calculus when you don't understand negative numbers or fractions? Why attempt Hamlet when you can't read words with more than one syllable?
Sometimes the problem with education isn't the building, or the teachers, or the administration: it's the students (and by extension their parents) and if we can't fix them at least we can teach everyone according to their ability.
As for Detroit. Most of Michigan's "gifted" schools are private and NOT free [1] [2].
[1] http://migiftedchild.org/faq/#zero
[2] http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/sites/default/files/Nationa...
So much for the land of the free...
To the point: you are arguing that segregating students by capability increases income inequality - which is false to disingenuous over generations.
To solve this problem, we should not allow the special Nike sports camps because I do not make as much as a basketball player as an NBA player. We need to equalize all opportunity at the lowest common denominator. Of course the US would never see another gold medal in the Olympics.
Gifted students do not require you to repeat the same things as often. By forcing them to go at the same pace as other students, you bore them and stunt their growth.
This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head:
1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? This will be highly correlated with race and socioeconomic status since we know that poor / minority communities don't have the best resources / results for early childhood development.
2. What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? "Smart" kids who never have to interact with anyone "below" them or "dumb" kids who never have to interact with anyone "above" them will have trouble navigating many social and professional situations.
3. "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. These parents are often the best advocates for positive change in their community. The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from the presence of 'smart' students just as 'smart' students gain from presence of kids who aren't labelled 'smart.'
So, if we trap the geeks where they can be bullied and beaten, they'll understand what the real world is like better? I'll be real with you, I've never been hated for expertise or diligence in real life, not like the way bullies work today, which is way worse than it was for me. And I know where some of those bullies end up. They did not benefit from their jeering and hatred. Can we stop using this to justify the torture of society's most promising youths?
Being a geek is a reason to find yourself at the bottom of the hierarchy, but so is being overweight, wearing glasses, being shy, being in a religious minority, etc. The particular reason doesn't matter to the bullying process, it's a free variable. I'm pretty sure that a school full of geek kids will find their own reasons to bully some of its students.
First, note that the standard the school has to meet isn't "no bullying", but rather "significantly less bullying". I presume this is what you mean.
Anyway: What is your evidence for this claim? Have you ever spent time in such a school and compared it to a regular school?
Data point of N=1. I went to a special "school for smart people only". There was dramatically less bullying than the regular-people school I came from.
But anyway the researchers are providing actual scientific evidence of this effect, and you appear to be arguing against it using, apparently, intuition based on no evidence whatsoever. "Yes, these experts say X, but that sounds unbelievable to me; therefore they must be wrong."
Surely you do not endorse this sort of reasoning.
As someone who has been bullied in the past, I never thought the solution was avoidance. Our schools have to improve on all counts. Segregating students on any criteria is the opposite of the solution.
In a perfect world we would make all our schools great, but I think you'll find that this is harder to actually do than it is to say, and in the meantime it is very easy to get great teachers to work with gifted students.
Imagine you are a great principle/counselor/teacher. You can work anywhere, because you are great at your job. Do you choose to go to the school with the superintendent that is nearly illiterate and completely incompetent at the district where the kids regularly assault each other and the staff? Or do you choose to go to the school where the kids love to learn, love to read, love to study, and respect their teachers and their school?
If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.
We need smart people in society so that we can advance. They are the leaders that will help move the needle. If we burden our best and brightest young people with "educating" their peers then we as a society lose out. The gifted children should be free to learn at their own pace so that as they get older they have developed expertise that the regular people will never achieve.
This isn't communist Russia. We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids except making the regular kids feel better about themselves.
In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject.
> We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids
This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.
For a given pair of students X and Y, it may be a poor investment for X to teach Y anything, if X will almost surely dominate Y within the problem domain. It would be stupid to force X to teach Y in this setting.
20 years later some of them are now labelled as 'criminals' and they attend a different kind of selective institution. Maybe we should see what our kids can gain from spending time in their presence? :p
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row...
" But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.
16:09 I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive.
16:36 And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you."
16:57 And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." "
Indeed, even in TFA:
> Failing to provide an appropriate education for students who are gifted increases the risk of mental health issues, boredom, frustration, developing behavioural problems both at school and at home, leading to disengagement and dropping out of school.
> When these students are academically isolated in a non-selective school, they can “dumb down” and underachieve to improve social acceptance by their peers and minimise the risk of bullying and social isolation.
We can disagree about these conclusions, but I hope we agree that if they're right, it's not morally right to send a gifted kid to a regular school on the theory that they'll set an example for those around them if the above is the cost to the kid.
My point is that rather than assuming things we think are probably are true, we should try to argue from data. Especially since people have studied this, both professionally and experimentally.
I can think of plenty of ways that your argument might not be true. For example, per TFA, if gifted kids act up or intentionally tank themselves in "regular school", then maybe it's worse for everyone for the gifted kids to be in "regular school".
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. But rather than making guesses based on nothing but our gut, why don't we consider the experts' studies and opinions?
What you're advocating is a deeply lonely (and I'd argue psychologically damaging) experience and it really bothers me to see so many people in this thread want more people to experience it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_High_School_(Florence,_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other.
To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments.
Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success):
* Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels.
* Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc.
* Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item.
* Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do.
* Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be.
* Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching.
* Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.
Have you heard the phrase, "Du bist nichts, das volk ist alles!" It's the tl;dr version of what you said.
Not to mention organizing people by intelligence is a shaky proposition at best, given our current best assessment, the IQ rating, is already proving to be inadequate as an objective measurement.
Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.
And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.
You might also have failed to see all the bright kids who dumbed themselves down and achieved a lot less than they could have in order to attain popularity and avoid bullying. I'll take "well rounded" to mean "not really excelling in anything".
She was wrong. Almost everyone I work with is of above average intelligent. That's the nature of a professional career: you're not randomly paired up with some doofus who just happens to share your zip code.
Even in the cases where I do interact with people of below average intelligence, it's perfectly fine and pleasant because adults are generally speaking not assholes to each other. Part of growing up is learning some social graces.
In retrospect, I have no idea where this idea comes from. Do people think that the idiot bully is going to magically get into Harvard and get a professional job?
This goes doubly for high end sales, BTB work, dozens of other professional environments. Maybe you work in a place where the only other people you see every day are coworkers that you like, but in my experience that isn't very commonplace.
Sure. I'm not claiming that everyone I interact with is as educated or intelligent as me.
But it's not like an alternative education would have zero diversity. When I went to boarding school, the average IQ went way up—but there was still plenty of variation. Plus, I had the whole new challenge of learning to interact with people from different cultures—some of whom had very limited English.
I'm not claiming everyone I work with is tech-savvy or even equally intelligent. What I'm disputing is the claim that being forced to undergo years of bullying and unchallenging instruction is somehow educational.
2. This is an argument that basically 'every kind of diversity is automatically good' or something. Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can as soon as they can no matter what you do.
3. Smart people do well and often have smart children. They understand education because they have greater than average experience with education and a better ability to apply that knowledge. They will not stick around 'the worst schools' no matter how much you try to force them by handicapping smart kids. It's a free country, they will pull their kids out of bad schools. I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering and much more interested in making sure their kids are given everything they need.
2. How do you untangle race and economic class from the sort of segregation you are proposing is okay here?
3. I don't think that this is really a response to the point. You're just saying it's unfair to the families who would rather their kids go to a good school instead of needing to fight for their kids to go to a good school. Which ... something something "government handouts." Also: private school vouchers to take "smart kids" to "good schools" aren't social engineering either? This isn't a coherent point.
You sound very frustrated. I'd be interested in reading attempts to debate the points themselves instead of appeals to emotion.
Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off. Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics and ideology but by a careful cost-benefit analysis.
The parent's argument is exactly the same if we change "giving people food" to "giving people who have food that isn't suitable for them food that's more suitable for them".
Maybe you think that the parent's argument is flawed because you think that all people have the same basic educational needs. That's what TFA is arguing is not true, but maybe it's wrong; you could make that case. But quibbling over the exact formulation of an analogy is not the kind of concrete thinking that you're asking for.
Determining the value in integrating "gifted" kids with "non-gifted" kids is in effect the same argument that is held with regard to determining the affect that charter schools have on our school system, simply change the modifier from gifted/non-gifted to interested/uninterested in school and we are having the same debate.
There are pros and cons to both models and people have to admit to both sides of it, otherwise they are being disingenuous with their analysis.
Presumably even in my analogy the people not given food had some food, since they were merely weak and not starved to death.
But that ignores my argument anyway! My point is that you should do what you can do, even if it's imperfect. The food analogy was to show that the argument 'don't help some people because it's unfair to the people you don't help' is extremely stupid.
That's a moral argument, and my reply was a moral argument.
This is quite an anecdote you've got there ... cause in my experience (gifted, and in gifted classes with many much brighter than me), all of us kept a pretty diverse (academically) social group.
But that's _my_ anecdote ... surely people will exist on the entire spectrum between self-seclusion to social butterfly.
RE 2. The previous post does not say "every kind of diversity is automatically good". But I certainly agree that social and intellectual diversity has benefits for all parties.
RE 3. "Smart people do well and often have smart children", well it is not genetic though. While often "smart" parents have "smart" kids because they value education and know what to push. It is an oversimplification to say that education is equal to "smart". And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet. Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good. I believe that the whole intellectual spectrum of kids can learn from each other and together. I believe that smarter kids should be able to learn more if they want to, but I strongly believe in the benefits of having all kids together in the same school, from kindergarten to university. Some kids might need more time, some could learn more and/or go faster, but they will still benefit from each other.
Have you been around children? While there are few exceptions that shine no matter the environment, there are far more who excel with a better peer group. This idea that "smart kids are always going to be intrinsically motivated" is just as bogus as "smart people do well and have smart children". What happens in those situations is that the smarter children usually wind up coasting through, simply because they find it so easy to stay ahead of the mean.
> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.
And yet people do every minute, "smart" or not. Being a free country does allow people the freedom to search for the best possible opportunity given their resources, and not be forced into regressing into the mean.
For the early part of my life, that was me.
Working 10 years of jobs that I hated were my big motivator to resume my education with a renewed vigor. It has worked out well for me since but I would have been much better off if I had not been in that sea of mediocrity during my formative years.
Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that I can ignore your theory about what is 'collective good' because it is stupid and will do me and my family irreparable harm, and I can substitute my own theory of what is actually going to move us towards more 'collective good' and act according to that. That is what being free means.
Yes. That's precisely what it means.
Serving the collective good is a fine ideal but for me to pursue my own interests before yours (and for you to pursue yours before mine) is a mandate.
Once you mandate the good of the state over the good of your own children, you are no longer a free society.
> Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. Let's not use the words dumb but lets say, "less smart". If this were the case, why would parents fight to get their kids into magnet and charter schools? Also special needs kids benefit from mainstreaming. Evidence > Unsubstantiated opinion.
> The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can [cite needed]
> They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. [cite needed] - in fact, as a "gifted" kid, I often felt ostracized because of being selected (nerd).
> I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering [cite needed]
How can I find a citation for a my own statement that I believe something?
Are you under the impression that the comments section of HN is a scholarly journal where all claims are documented? I notice that you don't ask for citations for any of the claims in this thread that you agree with, so your demands for citations are really just an obnoxious lack of argument.
Frankly the tone of your comment troubles me. None of these students are more or less "deserving"; the goal is to help every student reach their potential.
As for me, programming since the age of about 10, when I went into secondary school (age 13), the level of IT (in)competency amazed me. I was reprimanded for finishing assigned work quickly and studying independently. I was kicked off the network for writing code because it wasn't understood. Nothing got better, yet I was forced to waste 5 years of my ~81.5 years on Earth (~6.13%) of my ALE, getting a pointless state education that from that day on has not once helped me.
Further education wasn't any better. I joined a course at a local vocational college, one with certificates of excellency, with the prospectus stating it would teach the fundamentals of computing; data structures, networking, algorithms, through to applied computing including ASM, C, C++, et al. In my three weeks there, they taught (very poorly) VB.NET and had students design flyers in Publisher. I was refused entry to the one-year pre-university course as I didn't have the correct number of education goody points. The response I got to quitting was that you can't always have everything you want in life.
This is why education in the UK sucks.
I think if you see a child who has potential, let them explore that potential. There are hundreds of other children who will go through the standard educational system, get their GCSEs and A Levels and useless degrees, before getting ordinary jobs. Let the ones with potential do something different.
Reminds me of the kid recently whose school refused to let them take the time out to work on an acting opportunity, due to the loss of education that a week would present. I'm sure the child would have learnt a lot more about their most likely future career in that week than they did in the classroom.
Anyway, rant over. Standardised education sucks.
Also, you absolutely can't 'let' kids move at different speeds in the same school. You can let kids move at speeds where you enough kids at that speed. For a 90th percentile kid that is fine, there are roughly 10% of the students that share their speed (or nearly do) so you can form a class of them. For the top 1% or top .1% you just can't, and the 99.9th percentile kid can learn much, much, much faster than the 90th percentile kid, and can immediately understand concepts that the 90th percentile kid won't be able to grasp until they are years older (if ever). Putting those kids in the same class means one will be impossibly behind or the other will be incredibly bored.
Classes were tiered into ability, even at this age (I do not remember what the rubric was for deciding your tier) and for math classes I was pulled in to a self-study course along with 2 or 3 other students. There was no 'formal' class and instead the teacher would spend varying amounts of time with each student as they worked through the material on their own. Each student would work at his or her own pace.
I think this sort of system would do wonders for those both at the very top and at the very bottom. In college, I found office hours were somewhat similar in that students both behind and in front could get focused time with a professor to either catch up or advance even further ahead.
This is ignoring any budget and teacher constraints, but this seems like a real issue for both the 'top' and 'bottom' students.
I can relate to the IQ wall in communication, I can relate to fail education, I can relate to stupid people with great education, I am lucky to have a good paying job considering my lack of formal education.
If not properly handled, above than average IQ is actually more a problem than a great asset in western system (I won't talk about Asian countries, as I don't have first hand experience but the competition mindset should help)
It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track.
> What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?
> "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.
Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'.
_edited for clarity_
...which doesn't apply when the "track" is a set program at a different school.
Being advanced(PhD) or gifted usually means pursuing more open-ended type interests and research. The foundational skills, which form the majority of K-12 curriculum, won't be out of reach for someone keeping pace in non advanced tracks.
Jumping in and out of the "gifted" track should be possible if such a thing exists; however to your point, how would the track be defined and what should it contain? Would there be a list of items that need to be mastered? What evaluations determine if you can jump in... or when you need to "jump out"? Would the "gifted" track be age based the way it is currently or could the contents be tailored to fit the needs of the individual students?
Following that line of thinking, at what point do you qualify for a job? Also, what social stigmas would we attach to "jumping out"?
I don't have answers, but your point led me to some very interesting questions. Thank you!
Because we have working models for high performing specialty schools.
We already have endless infighting about improving every school.
And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?
I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school.
I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason.
So just because?
>"And how do you define "better"? Is it a lower teacher to student ratio? Higher average test scores? Graduation percentage? Percentage of graduating seniors accepted at 4 year colleges? Some other measure?"
There is no "better" for everyone. Rather than just segregating students (and requiring more teachers resources etc.), work to made education better for your students. Have different classes at different speeds.
>"I believe that I would have been better off in a separate school. I have chosen to send my children to a charter school for that reason."
That's fine, and that's your prerogative as a parent. However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
Because we know it can be done and how to do it.
Have different classes at different speeds.
We already have that. Education is more than a series of classes. It's the social interactions too.
However, to say that segregation of kids should be the norm is a dangerous. IMO reckless.
I find it dangerous, reckless and disingenuous for you to use a loaded term like "segregation".
Sure, we all know the historical connotations, but we also all know the actual definition of the word. Though I will say, given the correlation between educational resources and race, the historical connotation may be appropriate in some of these gifted vs non gifted situations.
Who said anything about segregation? I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely. The only way to get forced out of "advanced school" should be failing out.
Saying that student A must attend school B because of trait C and student X must attend school Y because of trait Z, is segregation. It just so happens to be based upon you deemed "educational qualities" rather than what we normally think about, race. Or more economic status.
> I think kids/parents should have free choice about which school to go to: advanced/normal, where the school just makes suggestions and the parents can opt-out or in freely.
We already have free choice. There are a myriad of private schools you can choose to send your children to. Pay the fees and send them.
The right thing for an average student is not the same as what is right for either the gifted, or the "retarded" (I forget what the correct term is.
Resources don't cut it, the best students learn more from reading a text book than the average students learn from the best classes. There are a lot of fads in education, but elite schools mostly maintain their status by having elite students not elite instructors.
If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.
You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention.
You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else.
If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Feel free to browse my comment history if you suspect I am trolling.
> You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people.
No, I think we should prepare them just like we prepare everyone else. And I think many of them will make valuable contributions. I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
> Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
I didn't say anything like that. I think you assumed that because I disagree with your premise (only the education of the elites matters) that I must therefore believe in the opposite conclusion (we should only educate non-elites). But I believe in universal education.
I don't mind correcting you, but this conversation would go a lot faster if you responded to my actual words rather than what you assume I must think because I am disagreeing with you.
> Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Neither of us. I was saying teenagers who are already destined to be given hard power, because their parents have it, will tend to get into good schools, and will also tend to reinforce hegemony, which I consider a negative thing.
Wrong. I did not assert this. I asserted that resources should be focused on improving the abilities of the group most likely to be in key positions in the future.
One good seed can really foster a lot of inspiration.
What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...
It has profound negative effects on the child, and leads to really terrible outcomes like drug abuse and absenteeism.
We have a lot of evidence that shows this. What you posit above amounts to exploiting the gifted child to benefit the needs of the other children. Gifted children are very open to being exploited by peers and teachers in the regular classroom.
It's wrong, and a detriment to the children and society.
No, it is not sufficient to make a policy decision, for instance. But if I have to go and vote on this issue, it is at least something I could base my judgment on.
Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people.
I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.
I'm wondering how you feel about "smart" kids like Terence Tao.[1][2]
At age 14, he was in enrolled in college instead of attending high school with his "less smart" peers. At age 17, he was a graduate student at Princeton instead of being a senior at high school with other kids his age. (And working backwards from those 2 points in his timeline, he was in highschool when he should have been in middle school, etc.)
Should the young Terence Tao regardless of intelligence be denied the ability to "remove" himself from the school he is "supposed" to go so that other kids can benefit from his intellect? If at age 8, he's pulled from regular school to attend high school instead, are his parents selfish?
Is there a political movement to force all geniuses to stay with their age group and normally assigned school to fulfill a societal goal?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao
[2] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Tao.h...
* On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education.
* On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split the class into two for that section. Once I slipped into this lesser "higher" class, I felt I could never move up to the higher/higher class because I never learned ahead enough to meet the needs of the next pre-test. (It never occurred to younger me to read ahead in the book. So much for being gifted.)
So I think the arguments you list ALL have validity and should absolutely be taken seriously. OTOH, I think current schools do a poor job of keeping talented or more educated students engaged, which can drag down things for everyone. I don't know what the answer is - you've done a good job of talking about why separate schooling is a bad solution - but I think the status quo is also a bad solution.
(that said, I'm in favor of raising educational opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged first, because I'd rather have talented-but-only-adequately-taught people in a world of adequately taught people than I would have a world of poorly taught people save for a few bright stars)
1. There are standard tests and evaluations for giftedness, these can be given at any time past age 4. They are about thinking and behavior, not achievement. Years of study shows that these traits don't generally change much with age. So called "late bloomers", if they are gifted, would almost certainly have been gifted much earlier in life but maybe not identified.
2. I think this is a valid point, but I'd propose that this be addressed more by making sure that kids are interacting with peers outside the academic context. Putting kids in the same classroom where they are underserved on either extreme simply because it's good to socialize seems like the wrong priority to me.
3. This is an artifact of how we identify giftedness today. Giftedness exists in all cultures and socioeconomic groups. Today, only the most motivated parents get their gifted kids identified. We could fix that with a national initiative to identify gifted students. Additionally. Not that this is necessarily your argument, but motivated parents do not make children gifted. No amount of Baby Einstein or aggressive pre-schooling is going to change a kid's IQ dramatically. Likewise,profoundly gifted kids given very few opportunities can be and are still gifted.
Proper early nutrition will. There's no bottom for parents' motivations, nor to their capacity, unfortunately.
As someone who was classified as "gifted" and went to one of these special programs, your third point is a common occurrence.
All that aside though, I think the very notion of gifted-ness is harmful (in a labelling sense) to both the are's and the are-not's. Your first two points are relevant on this. For that reason, I'm not sure we should even discuss/judge gifted-ness, regardless of whether it even exists.