As someone who was put in a reading class five grades above my actual grade, I disagree with the idea that acceleration should be the primary benefit of gifted education.
What I needed was not just higher level reading, but content catered to someone 5 years younger than the usual age group for that reading. I needed help writing fast enough to keep up.
Because grade school curriculum came easily and I could ‘figure out’ everything, I hit a wall when stuff got genuinely difficult or required significant work.
What I needed was to learn how to put forth effort to do things that were hard or required work for desired output. I needed help socializing because I didn’t relate to people my age and was too inexperienced to engage people who were on my intellectual level as peers.
I needed help creating because the standards for myself were so high. Not exceeding those standards always felt like failure
> I hit a wall when stuff got genuinely difficult or required significant work.
I hit that wall my freshman year at Caltech. What a disaster. All my strategies of effortless A's blew up in my face. I'd get comments like "I really should fail you, but I'm going to give you a break." At the end of first semester of sophomore year, I had to come to grips with solving this or leaving.
After that, each semester came easier and easier, as I learned how to learn.
I'm so glad freshman year was pass/fail, as my execrable performance that year did not affect my final GPA. I also am indebted to several people who freely gave the gift of their time to help me out.
(I never would have succeeded with remote learning.)
I hit that wall at U.C. Berkeley over the English requirement. I didn't know how to write an essay on "Odysseus" and "The Iliad" and say something intelligent about them. I was doing fine in math and physics. In retrospect, my high school English teachers focused on doing well on SAT's, not teaching me how to write.
Parents: Make sure you're kids can write before they get out of high school because it's a crucial skill
Perhaps the most valuable classes I took were high school English. I'd never thought that writing weekly essays, compositions, and book reports would prepare me to write a book about computing. After seeing it on several best-seller lists, I called my high school English teacher and thanked him for all his time and encouragement.
And not just writing: he made us perform Shakespeare. Really handy when you're interviewed on TV and have two minutes to summarize your book. Or when you're invited to do a keynote speech at a conference.
Yep, I learned to code in 1965 (assembler & Fortran II on our high school's IBM-1620). Learned calculus, organic chem, and basic electronics as well. But nothing came close to three years of terrific (and challenging) high school English classes.
I thank your English teachers too because your book is one of my favorite books and an example for me of excellent writing. You told a good story and to me that is the most important thing.
A better curriculum would meet you halfway. Write about physics or math, not about ancient classics.
I remember kids in school complaining about math, "we're never going to use this!" Analyzing ancient literature is something you're actually never going to use.
> I remember kids in school complaining about math, "we're never going to use this!"
They probably aren't going to use it, which is why their investments in lottery tickets don't turn out well :-(
I remember hiring a contractor to build an elliptical patio of a certain size. He staked it out, and soon a couple pallets of pavers appeared on the driveway. Something didn't look right. So I measured the major and minor axis of the ellipse, and computed the area. It was 30% smaller than the contracted amount. I then did a little math on the pavers. 30% fewer than was needed.
So I was being overbilled by nearly half.
I asked the contractor about the discrepancy, and he apologized for the "mistake" (ya right) and the bill was adjusted.
I bet the contractor noticed over time that he could shrink the size of the work, and the customer wouldn't notice. So he'd shrink it more for the next customer, and so on, till it got to a whopping 30%.
But if I didn't know high school math, I would never have determined I was being way overbilled.
> I remember kids in school complaining about math, "we're never going to use this!" Analyzing ancient literature is something you're actually never going to use.
Just like any particular math course, you probably won't use your analysis of ancient literature directly. But school isn't training; it's not about learning direct skills, like a training course in a new application at work. It's about learning how to think critically, using may different tools, and about learning about the world.
By analyzing ancient literature, you gain several things: You gain ability in thinking critically about texts - possibly the most essential skill in a post-truth Internet world where we are deluged by texts of varying intentions and truth. You gain skill in writing, by studying how the best authors before you wrote. And not least, you gain exposure to a culture and ideas far outside your own, giving you context and perspective on humanity and on your own culture and ideas.
> Analyzing ancient literature is something you're actually never going to use.
Ancient literature, yes, but there are a frightening amount of people who could deal with a reintroduction to ideas like 'unreliable narrators' in the age of social media.
You just gave me an idea because I like ancient history. I'll pretend I'm a freshman and actually write an essay on one of those books. I was never able to do it and failed the class. I've always felt bad about it. Actually writing the essay might be a cathartic experience! I'm retired, I have the time.
MIT had the same policy when I was there, and I felt the same way about it: I needed that year to at least get started developing the study habits I didn't have to develop in high school.
I think this makes a lot of sense for a place like MIT. Unfortunately we didn’t have this at UCSD, despite the incoming class having an average 4.1 GPA (and this was a while ago). I think I got an F or a D on my first exam and I freaked out. Had never gotten that my entire life and was used to getting good grades without studying. Was a wake up call. In retrospect, I’m glad that exam was very early on in the quarter.
I'd argue this is why many kids are successful when home schooled.
The idea that you should interact so much with your peers is kind of strange to be honest. Is it really healthy for kids to interact regularly with their peers? I'd argue it's much better for children to interact with adults. Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
> Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
They’d also have a fair amount of siblings and cousins, the children of hired help, and entire village’s worth of other children to interact with. And depending on the era, a fair amount of absenteeism when it comes to actual parenting. So having peers of your age was both common, historically encouraged (stories of childhood friends abound), and important in establishing your place inside your community.
That being said, they were exposed to more adults on a daily basis, and integrated more into the life of adults.
Particularly, they were exposed to the daily lives of adults at work. Which I think is a large part of helping to influence a child’s growth.
Childhood as we know it now is also a modern concept — the switch from childhood to adult was more child > young adult who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, rather than our modern child > adolescent > young adult path. (Edit because I hit submit too early). Childhood as also being an experience of being sequestered from the outside world is also modern.
When I was a kid, one's first job was as a teenager. Today, one's first job is as a college graduate. I sometimes read accounts of what a shock it is to make that transition.
>> Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm ...
> They’d also have a fair amount of siblings and cousins, the children of hired help, and entire village’s worth of other children to interact with.
There's no reason to think that what we did historically is somehow better. We've made many changes for very good reasons - apropos to our conversation, universal schooling and literacy - and I hope to keep moving forward!
If we mean it as evidence of how we evolved, then working on farms certainly isn't it. We evolved as nomadic hunter-gatherers, over ~200,000 years as homo sapiens, and over millions of years as our homo ancestors (I believe our line separated from chimps about 7 million years ago). Farming is a recent hack!
Ben Sasse covers this extensively in “the Vanishing American Adult.” In particular the artificiality of the highly age-segregated nature of modern schools. Kids have always hung out with kids, but those kids had a wide range of ages and older kids taught younger kids.
We found that homeschooled kids were able to play with kids of a wide range of ages, while kids in formal schools quickly separated themselves into age groups, often to the detriment of the younger kids.
I've known a bunch of homeschooled folks, and I know this is definitely coming from a place of confirmation bias, but...all of them were especially bad at code-switching. I think there's plenty of ways one could have wider socialization as a kid among adults, but it's much easier to imagine it coming to fruition in play with peers. I don't think exact age-matching is really necessary, but being around people that are at a similar life-stage certainly can't hurt in establishing "peering" where it matters.
Was homeschooled, can confirm that I am terrible at code switching.
Although it seems to have stopped mattering once I got to the "adult" world, where whether one is 30 or 80, there is a fairly standard template for treating and dealing with people.
It was a relief to stop being in a stratified age driven hierarchy.
I was public schooled k-9th grade, homeschooled 10-12th (though doing college courses, some in person at colleges).
I am also terrible at code switching (I fit in better in the college classes while homeschooled than I ever did in public school, for whatever that is worth). And always have been. And I don't see it as a problem, since the implication that it's beneficial in a given context implies that context isn't diverse or inclusive, and thus I want out of it, not to conform to it.
The rules of interaction depending on context and demographics, to put it roughly.
Youth examples:
- You may swear in conversations with peers, but you should not in conversations with people higher in the hierarchy.
- When people ask "how are you?", they are not genuinely asking in most cases. It is just a greeting. But there are exceptions like your grandmother and a teacher you have not seen in years, but are close to.
Adult examples:
- You can tell a rich person about your great vacation, but not a poor person. If you have a high paying job, you are expected to be happy when talking to a person who earns less than you do.
- Random men (I am also a man) will find it completely appropriate to start a conversation with you discussing the body parts of a nearby woman. It has happened enough times that otherwise successful people view it as an appropriate way to start a conversation on a train. Pretty sure they do not do that with non-peers/women as it is pretty creepy.
- For a more comic take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tms0yk9kqVM. Basically the war should not be mentioned by a Brit to a German, but you can mention the war to another Brit.
Changing how you present yourself to match the social environment you're in. Formal vs informal speech, mannerisms, what is appropriate behavior in context, all of that sort of thing.
Code-switching is the way people act differently in different contexts. So you're more likely to be formal and polite with your boss or grandparents and around your friend group you'll be more casual, maybe swear more.
Code switching originally was a term in linguistics to refer to the same speakers using multiple languages (or multiple registers of the same language, etc.) in a single conversation, which is probably why imbnwa is confused about the application here. In the last few years it's been picked up by the broader social science world to describe people using different modes of speech in different situations, which is how you're using the term--e.g., using a "white" voice, using a "straight" voice, etc.
You can call it disingenuous if you want, but it's just the reality that different behavior is appropriate in different contexts, and different relationships have different expectations.
As someone who interacted mainly with adults growing up, I’d disagree. Being an adult isn’t a great filter of good character. As a kid I was exposed to some backwords ideologies and toxic attitudes from adults, exasterbated by the fact that since they were adults they came with a position of authority. This also made it difficult to make friends and socialize with peers when I got into my teens, I felt like I missed out on a lot by not smoothly integrating into teen culture.
Having a handful of solid adult role models is key, but a lot of social skills are learned by trial and error, and it’s way more helpful when you’re learning those alongside others who are also figuring it out, that’s also how new ideas and new cultural zeitgeists are created, by challenging old concepts and not having the baggage of the old way of doing things.
Obviously there’s pitfalls with taking all your social cues from hormone riddled peers, but it’s a trial I think everyone needs to go through to prepare them on how to socialize with the world at large.
Ideally, the basics ( reading, writing, arithmetic, etc ) should all be done at home with their stay at home moms ( or dads ). Once they reach a certain level, then schooling should start ( maybe 7th grade or high school even ). Not only would that be better for the kids, it would be better for family bonding and community building.
But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.
I was homeschooled until 7th grade. If your parents aren't monsters maybe it can be good. But many if not most parents who choose to homeschool their kids are zealots of some kind or another, or have serious control/paranoia/narcissim issues. Exposure to people outside the home, who aren't hand-picked by the child's parents can go a long way towards teaching the child that there are people in the world who are different from their parents. I think that would have helped me a lot.
> Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.
When the word "resource" gets thrown around at companies and they obviously mean a human being, it peeves me. I will never use that word when referring to a person. When I'm involved in a conversation where someone uses it, I always ask for clarity that they mean a person, employee, contractor, candidate, etc.
I know it's just a word, but calling people resources makes it seem like they are nothing more than something to be expended and used. And maybe that is the case, but I don't think it should be encouraged and perpetuated.
I agree with you but in this case I think the word choice fir the tenor of that parent's comment well--whether you agree or not is a different story but children as "resource" makes sense in the factory metaphor.
>But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.
I always see takes like this but it just strikes me as a Conspiracy theory. We can easily get to the modern US education system via poorly thought out incentives and incompetence. You don't need malicious actors to get there. I would be curious if you had evidence to support a claim like this?
To the downvoters: Do you honestly believe there is a Cabal in the US Government who sit in a room and say "Yes we must crush gifted students and make sure our education system is terrible so we have more drones for the factory/work force/military??
I think this is a claim about emergent effects of the interaction between education and the wider economic system rather than the intent of a particular group of people. In practice I don't think it makes much difference if a system is accidentally having a particular effect or having the same effect with some particular group of people's intent. It's similar to how I don't think it's too misleading to talk about evolution creating species, there is an underlying level it helps to keep in mind, but talking without the abstraction would make things too verbose
>In practice I don't think it makes much difference if a system is accidentally having a particular effect or having the same effect with some particular group of people's intent.
Of course intent matters which is why we make distinctions between things like Manslaughter and Murder, and OP was explicitly stating that this system was very much intentionally built to have the outcomes they described.
> Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.
I see that claim often, but never any evidence of it. I do see a lot of evidence of imposing political and/or religious views on the students. Everybody wants to shape the students into their own image. Hence all the fights over the curriculum.
I found a good balance by starting with a preschool that had a proper teacher but also parent involvement as part of the curriculum. In public elementary I volunteered whenever I could (field trips and occasional classroom assistance) as well as after-school activities. By late middle school and high school I could step back and volunteered in support roles that didn't involve much student interaction but still supported his interests (PTA, Band Booster Leadership).
Obviously, every kid has different needs and every parent has limits on how much they can be present during school hours but putting kids in traditional public school doesn't have to be a passive experience of surrender to the state.
This only work if the parents are skilled in teaching young children. But we don't have that much people with those skills. So if they are capable of doing this, they should be teaching at schools instead!
Unless you want to say that this isn't skilled work and it can be done by anyone with no training. In this case: why do you think that?
This is a good point. Children from large families have the opposite problem of being lonely or needing socialization. They struggle to find time to themselves. And then all the siblings often have friends, so your actual socialization group ends up quite huge.
Can't agree. Unless parents make a specific effort to get them out with other similar aged group of kids (maybe other home schoolers) then the kid is going to most likely have stunted social and emotional intelligence even if their academic intelligence is off the chart. Even as a kid who spent most breaks reading something several grade levels higher than my current one, I still liked to wander off and hang with the other kids in public school. I still enjoyed comic books, flag football at recess, and cartoons.
> the kid is going to most likely have stunted social and emotional intelligence
You're either ignoring history, or assume that people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way... Sure kids can learn from each other, and in a healthy way, but the structures that we have in place to foster that (universal public school) are fairly new in the grand scheme of things...
For context, I'm a former educator with a lot of experience with homeschooled kids. I've also read a lot of literature on early childhood development and socialization.
I think the phrase "[the kid has] stunted social and emotional intelligence" hides a lot of nuance. The more useful rephrasing might be: "this person's ability to relate to people and navigate complex social interactions, particularly in the culture in which they were raised, is below average".
The important takeaway is what matters most is your ability to handle social interactions with peers.
> people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way
"Emotionally damaged" is a very culturally relative term. If you transported people from 150 years ago to the present day many would be considered "emotionally damaged" by modern standards even though they were functional people in their own time. This is because social intelligence is measured against a person's lived context.
Coming back to homeschool - many home schooled kids have not had the same level of socialization as their peers in schools. That lack of socialization causes a negative feedback loop where more socialized kids don't want to interact with the homeschooled kids leading to the homeschooled kid being even more under socialized. The window of opportunity to effectively intervene when this process starts is short and when parents fail to act I have seen it cause decades of suffering for their kids.
The "socialization" kids get in the American school system through their peers is something that people in most of the world would consider utterly dysfunctional. And the fact that educators haven't realized that they've helped create a completely non-functional generation of kids is a damning indictment of the field.
Is it better for the first bully a person encounters to be in the 3rd grade or as an adult with an unreasonable boss or a peer who dishes out emotional abuse on the side? American schools can be brutal but so is the world at large.
I think we need to teach kids that this behavior is not appropriate and to teach them skills to handle it and seek out others to help them if they need it. Otherwise you end up long term with people like Putin in charge.
The window is not an age range exactly, but a window of time determined by:
1. The current age of your child
2. How much less socialization they're getting than their peers
3. Their natural proclivities towards socialization
Socialization starts becoming important around ages 2-3. Points 2 and 3 being equal, the size of window expands as children age. Isolating your child about 6 months between 3.5 and 4 could cause a potentially permanent setback if not actively addressed. By age 12 a year of isolation is probably around the limit before rapid action is necessary.
A major caveat to these guidelines is they don't really apply during COVID. While the reduced socialization for children is probably not good for them, lots of children are being under socialized and so your child can likely still find peers at similar socialization levels to interact with and not fall into the feedback cycle.
Perhaps, but I think under-socialization will be less of a problem than many fear because most kids were under-socialized. The fact it's happening to most kids and not one or two eliminates the feedback loop.
I would argue that it's most teenagers and young adults today whose development is "stunted." They spend all their time with their peers and have a hard time acting like something other than children.
Yes it absolutely is. I'm done shaking my head at the number of people I've known who have grown up with ridiculous IQS or magnet backgrounds just to do 0 with their life and be generally miserable.
The average honors students have grown up the happiest by far. They got great jobs, cheated on exams, got drunk on weekends. Personally, I should have studied less I think and been a little more dishonest like them.
All this bullshit over education - what a waste.
Tiger parents excel at raising miserable soulless kids. It's no wonder they grow up angry, resentful, or just fail out and become the black sheep of the family.
Tired of reading articles like this and the corresponding threads.
> The idea that you should interact so much with your peers is kind of strange to be honest. Is it really healthy for kids to interact regularly with their peers?
Oh yes. Social skills are vitally important. You have to learn those by doing.
> Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
I don't think that's even true. I think historically kids were told to go away/be quiet until they were old enough to be productive.
I also think that we're producing better socialized kids these days.
But there's no reason to restrict the peers to kids their age, which is somewhat unnatural. They need socialization, but with a mix of ages. Not just other 7th graders.
Historically, kids played with other kids and families didn't generally live far from others. On farms, families are larger so it's a moot point.
Infrequent contact with other kids can open the door to social anxiety and awkwardness as they grow. Not to mention, it's cruel. Kids are social beings too and they don't get their rocks off listening to adults talk down to them.
In what way? Most homeschooled kids that I've met have been painfully unaware of how the world actually works. They're slightly better at trivia because their parents try to surround them with "fun" things that they also like, but they're way worse at understanding advanced concepts. They also tend to be poor at behavioral adaptation.
In old times, kids would be growing in villages. There will be other kids from the neighborhood and family. Now it's replaced by friend groups in schools. I don't see much difference. They might have interacted more with adults than now, though.
> I hit a wall when stuff got genuinely difficult or required significant work.
This was, to me, the greatest benefit of being put in a gifted program in 3rd grade. I was so used to everything being easy that I cried at home that I had homework taking longer than 10 minutes that I actually had to concentrate on. I asked my dad to go back to the regular program, and he said I should stick it out for at least another month. I did, and learned how to work through things that seemed challenging at first.
The experience of having to put forth effort early(ish) in my life set me up far better for dealing with life later, because I learned how to push past things that were uncomfortable instead of giving up (i.e. "grit" became a part of my psyche when it was still pretty flexible).
I probably could have learned this lesson in other ways, but the fact that it's one of my clearest childhood memories certainly speaks to the impact it had on my life. And I know plenty of friends whose first experience needing to put effort happened in college, and things seemed a lot harder for them emotionally.
This is where my 8yo is at now and it’s infuriating. He is in class all day at 2nd grade level and is given homework at 4th+ grade level but that means we our effectively his actual teachers. This also results in, as you say, everything is trivially easy or all of a sudden hard which has in general given him a complex around mildly difficult things and practice in general.
For kids who are behind, they solve this by throwing a lot more personnel at the problem, to the point that some kids have one-on-one assistants/tutors follow them around all day. Good luck getting budgets increased enough to do the same for gifted kids, though.
This is why many parents enroll their kids to Kumon. Kumon gives kids the about of work for their right level - whether that's a 2nd grader is ahead and at a 4th grade level, or a 2nd grader who is behind and starts at a 1st grade level. At the same time just because a kid is at the 4th grade level in math...maybe their reading is in 2nd grade.
With traditional schools all the kids are throw together. This results in kids who lag behind to further lag behind because they can't keep up with the class and lose confidence in themselves. A kid who is ahead gets bored and lose interest in school and never gets challenged to maintain that independence.
My 7th grader is in 9th grade math and I feel this. The homework load is the killer and I end up being the teacher. I like the teaching part but it’s still exhausting.
I guess it depends upon exactly what you mean. But based upon my 2nd grader, and from what I've heard from other 2nd grade parents, this is pretty normal for a 2nd grader, regardless of how gifted they are or aren't.
My 2nd grader can burn through material from the first half of the year. But current material... good luck getting her to do it. Difficult work makes people uncomfortable, and most young kids don't like being uncomfortable.
> I hit a wall when stuff got genuinely difficult or required significant work.
The thing is that everyone hits that wall at some point. Some just hit it later than others. But I agree that acceleration should only ever occur in a context of learning for mastery - if complete mastery is not attained in the "easy" subjects, pushing through the 'wall' of the actually challenging ones is way too difficult.
It’s better to hit a wall earlier, when teachers actually care how well you’re doing and the stakes are lower. Then, you can get guidance on how to start climbing that wall.
If you're learning for mastery, that implies that whoever's teaching or tutoring you will care how well you're doing. No matter what your level is, i.e. even if you need to be "held back" from acceleration because you've yet to achieve mastery of your current curriculum.
Even worse when you know you were on easy mode in HS, and no one tells you about the first couple weeks at university being anti-scare easy mode, leading you to calibrate a work/life balance target too far towards life with all the expected issues from that.
Btw, any tips for how to learn how to put forth effort to do things that require work for desired output? If they're "just" hard, curiosity tends to do well, but effort other than trying to grasp new concepts is surprisingly hard to bring forth...
Agree with your point. I also want to mention that knowing how to adjust yourself when you hit the wall is important. Because "gifted" people always has his/her limit and is doomed to be failed at some time, he/she may not know how to handle this failure. One may drive himself/herself to a dead corner, don't know this is a normal thing and don't know how to get out. Early failure should be considered as a good method.
Personally, that's why I liked AP courses in high school. After my AP Chem class, most of my college courses were straight forward, because my AP Chem class established and pushed good study and work habits because you needed those to do well and my teacher designed our course to help build them. Maybe in this case acceleration should mean challenging and building up students without overwhelming them?
I failed a semester of AP english because I didn’t do weekly homework. I never really had to bother with homework before as a pass/fail requirement.
I had to drop AP Calc for another class to get my required English credit that semester. It was astoundingly basic. “Circle the right word” worksheets with “Joe [is/are] an astronaut.” I would do the work and pass out at my desk. The other students would slide the paper out from under my arm and copy my answers.
Speaking as a former "gifted" kid, acceleration is a horrible idea.
I skipped a bunch of grades, got into MIT but went to a local college at 13 (who lets their 13-year-old live in a college dorm?), ended up working for a bit then going back to school with my peers.
If I could do it again I'd have taken _breadth_ instead of depth. Finished high school math? Good for me, now grab a third language. Bored in school? Off to a foreign country to learn by immersion. No courses left undone? Take six months and see if I can realize my dream of making the national team in my sport, etc.
Going deep is very risky. Eventually you end up at the end of the easy path of coursework and classes and are in the same place as everyone else (just a year or two earlier). Unless you're absolutely, positively sure that that specific area is where you want to spend the rest of your life, that head start wins nothing enduring.
You've given an argument for more gifted education, not less.
The fundamental issue is that some kids learn faster than others, so that if you want gifted kids to be around other kids their own age while still being challenged, you need to draw from a large region and cluster them together in one place. The most gifted children will have to be the most clustered. If you needed to go to MIT to be challenged, that is because of a lack of gifted education.
Separately, I think we should be very skeptical of the idea that a good default path for kids is to spend most days surrounded by kids within 12 months of their age. This sort of schooling has only been widespread for roughly a century; for the vast majority of history kids grew up with a much broader range of ages around them. I agree that getting thrown into a college dorm at 13 might be very bad, but I find spending all day with other 13 year olds to also be very bad.
There are lots of stories of kids failing socially when they are not with kids with similar emotional intelligence. I know people who have skipped only two grades who are brilliant, but socially off.
It is likely to depend on the child and what they would do well in.
As a fairly clever and socially off person who wasn't allowed to do any kind of accelrated program, I want to ask how sure you the acceleration is the casual factor, rather than say some underlying biological thing?
There are also uncountable stories of people hating school and finding relief upon graduating, and this is plausibly because it's a bizarre environment composed almost exclusively of kids. Personally, if I was gifted enough to go to MIT at age 13, I'd much rather do that than go to a typical middle school, the OP's experience notwithstanding.
I did not have this experience; a commenter upthread did. I was very lucky and had the opportunity to go to a good middle school and highly accelerated high school (Thomas Jefferson HSST in Virginia). But, knowing what I know about normal middle/high schools and MIT dorms, I would have rather gone to the latter than the former if those were my options.
There’s also a lot more to life than studying. But the argument is that you and other kids on that path will maybe someday be exceptionally productive to society in some field.
I only skipped one grade and still felt isolated from other kids sometimes. I can’t imagine how you’d feel! As a parent I’d personally rather let my kid have a somewhat normal childhood than maximize their intellectual potential if that meant sending a 13yr old to college.
Just out of curiosity, did you live in the Philadelphia area?
I knew a 13 year old going to a local college in Bryn Mawr/Haverford, but I don't think he was attending either of those prestigious colleges.
I don't recall his name (this was nearly 30 years ago) and I wondered what happened to him.
Reading these comments it sounds like a lot of people feel like you do about acceleration being an issue.
For me, I was both Gifted and Learning Disabled, and both programs were unprepared for the issues of someone who was both very smart but also had significant learning issues.
I was also both Gifted and Learning Disabled (although I prefer to list them in the opposite order). I think it's likely that there's a lot more neurodiversity than acknowledged generally, but we're just sort of stuck with the very human condition of balancing the needs of the group with the needs of the individual.
Honestly I don't think any "program" is truly prepared to meet the needs of anybody at all. It was difficult for me, too, but I think striving, suffering, etc are all human conditions that we all experience regardless of how we get there. "Gifted" and "Learning Disabled" programs exist for the benefit of normalizing behavior and capabilities that are farther outside the curve. That they existed when we were young is merely a testament to a collective desire for general cohesiveness.
Yes, I would normally write it as LD/Gifted, or "Twice Exceptional" but I changed the order to fit with the conversation.
I was extremely lucky and privileged to go to school that catered to LD and LD/Gifted students. Sadly while the school is still there, they've changed focus to other types of students, namely Autistic students.
While Autistic students are certainly important, seeing the niche I was in having one less resource makes me sad.
There are a handful of studies I am aware of. Acceleration of 1-2 years among gifted students is correlated with a lack of negative outcome, i.e., not accelerating them is correlated with depression, drug abuse, and mental health crises. But acceleration beyond that sees no marked improvement or detriment. Child prodigies tend to become very normal career scientists or engineers.
It is really strange to me that we can't figure this out.
I almost think it is because our entire view of education is conflated with a type of sporting event. You were one of the grand champions of this sporting event even though obviously it would have just made sense to learn more. Instead it is this weird sporting event race and the concept of learning more just isn't part of objective of the game.
Leaning on the sporting event analogy, the goal is cohesiveness. You value your star players, but you also need to be a part of the team. We're not sure what the game is, but we're a social species.
I was in a very similar situation. At 11 I started attending to local state college during the summers. At the end of the second summer they offered us all the chance to attend full time. My parents opted to let me continue in regular high school, some of the other kids started full time at state school (I kept going during summers).
One of the kids who attended full time tried to transfer to CalTech after two years, and they rejected him, told him he wasn't well rounded enough. So he joined every club on campus and ran for President of every single one. Most did not let him because he was only 15, a few did. CalTech still rejected him. He ended up graduating from state school and going to grad school a few years later at an Ivy League school, having basically missed out on the entire undergrad experience.
I on the other hand got to do all the normal "high school" stuff while I was mostly bored in my high school classes, but then I got into Berkeley and went there with my peers. I feel like I had the better experience.
This has been a big change in thinking for me as well. You might be able to impress some folks with your graduation year, but otherwise you are just another graduate.
You might enjoy the movie "Real Genius", where one of the main characters is a early high school graduate, accepted into "Pacific Tech", and struggling to adapt to the different social expectations. Amid the standard shenanigans, there are several conversations on how being smart isn't everything, and how there is a social responsibility to use your intelligence responsibly.
I see two issues with "gifted students" in modern education:
1) some school systems see them as critical to "raising up" other students around them, but I never see any analyses as to if this "holds down" the gifted student's development.
2) I've read that students learn a huge proportion of things from their peers. That implies that true gifted education involves comingling a sufficient population of gifted students of the same rough age range among each other.
3) gifted students really benefit from "gifted" teachers. They don't necessarily need deep PhDs in academic subjects, more they just need to be "broadly smart".
#1 sounds like it sucks for the gifted, especially with the substantial undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American education and the specter of bullying. Maybe in a day of 7-8 classes you do gifted + nongifted intermixing for 1-2 classes at once.
#2 needs a sufficient population of gifted students
#3 is really hit or miss in schools
All three of those are why class conscious parents pay a lot of attention to the school district of a school, and are defensive of other students coming into "good" school districts. Also, per "The Bell Curve", smart people tend to be well-off, and so the specter of NIMBYism and housing exclusion rears its head over education.
Deep learning in traditional subjects is the default of gifted, but I agree that what is needed (as hinted at in breadth-smart teachers) is breadth-first learning. Because unfortunately gifted students have their passions decided for them: You're going to get good grades!
If my kid is gifted, and based on the inheritability of IQ, he probably will be, I'm not subjecting him to acceleration. It'll probably take some degree of home schooling instead.
The only acceleration I'd be in favor of is skipping Junior/Senior high school years and going part time to local colleges. Accelerate maybe 1-2 grades tops in specific things.
I think there is some evidence for the benefits of acceleration that comes from an Australian study of gifted students that you may be interested in investigating. (By no means am I gifted, and it's entirely possible that I'm mischaracterizing or misunderstanding the results.) The book is Exceptionally Gifted Children", 2nd edition, by Miraca Gross. An excerpt can be found at [1].
There are some previous HN comments that discuss this including [2], which names Terrence Tao, UCLA math prof, as one of the participants in the study.
Two passages that I think highlight the extremes both in acceleration and outcome are:
“… 17 of the 60 young people were radically accelerated. None has regrets. Indeed, several say they would probably have preferred to accelerate still further or to have started earlier…. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universi- ties in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achieve- ment. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.”
“The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling,… Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficul- ties at university,…”
We had a 15 year old who lived in the dorms with us when I was at undergrad. He had already finished his BS and was in grad school. Looking back, so many things we all did together were probably not great for a 15 year old.
I can believe it. We let our kid skip 4th grade. It was absolutely the right thing for him at the time. He's now a college freshman and first term was a mess. Being under 18, he needed his parents to sign off on a bunch of things no other student had to even think about. Thankfully, he's turned 18 now.
He took a band trip to Vegas this week but got left behind last night because he was the only under 21 on this trip. Part of me is annoyed that no one was willing to skip the clubs and tables to not leave him hanging alone. But I remember back to that age and there's no way I would have done that at 21 with a per diem. He made the best of it and had a really good meal and explored the Strip but the age difference matters a lot in the college years.
You could also argue that your jurisdiction is the problem. In several European countries there'd only be a problem if someone is under 16, or if the people actually NEED to go to a night club or casino straight away (and not just late rin the evening), but every bar and retaurant would be open at 18 and 16-18 should be ok until 10pm or midnight.
A Modest Proposal: Replace some of the "Gifted" schools with "Mature" schools. The former implies higher-than-average per-pupil spending. For the Mature schools, spend substantially below average per pupil. Only admit students who rate well in some combination of maturity, self-motivation, good behavior, etc. Increase the student/teacher ratio, and expect the brighter ones (in a given subject) to spend part of their time tutoring the less-bright. Have student government play a non-token role in running the school.
In other words, set up a new sort of school - which tags its graduates as mature, responsible adults. Not top-percentile test-takers, nor elite pampered princelings. Then see which type of graduate is preferred by colleges and employers.
At the age where my, and my friends' kids are in schools, I've discovered that a big advantage that private schools have is that they educate the kids "at will."
Many private schools make it very clear to the parents, as well as the kids, that there are plenty of other students that want the slot the child has, which gives them leverage to educate how they want.
Public schools, at least in California, are beholden to the loudest, worst-behaved parents. There was a serious disciplinary issue recently at a local school that resulted in a multi-day suspension, which pretty much everybody involved agreed probably wasn't going to change the behavior. After digging a bit and having some frank conversations, the administration wouldn't pursue any other form of consequence because of fear of being sued by the parents. If expulsion were a legitimate option it would have given the administration bargaining power, but for anything which defending an expulsion is not a slam-dunk win in court, the only 3 "safe" options for teachers and administrators are:
1. Loss of playtime during recess/lunch
2. Detention
3. Suspension
I don't know how big of an actual problem torts are, but I see a lot of bad policies (in education and elsewhere) enacted due to fear of torts.
Public schools are also bound to serve special needs kids, which is incredibly expensive. Private schools don't have the same responsibility (even if they're under any similar legal obligation, they can and surely do try to minimize that through various means)
That's part (part!) of why per-pupil spending in public schools seems so high for the outcomes they produce, and part of why private schools have an advantage.
Even when they separate the special education vs regular spending it's still expensive in my opinion.
At least in my area there seems to be a huge preference for new or fancy infrastructure. Many of the buildings are only built to last 20 years or so. The new middle school around here has a 2 story by 100 foot glass front to it. The glass panes are massive. Who thought that was a good idea (hearing/cooling, cost, possibly safety)?
I went to school in buildings that were 50+ years old and made out of cinder block. No artificial turf fields or fancy stuff.
Turf fields are more than "fancy". They allow unlimited traffic, as opposed to grass which gets a low, set number of hours-of-use. At my old high school, only the varsity football team got to use the stadium. Then they put turf in and everyone got to use the stadium - even community sports - as the turf wouldn't turn to mud.
True. It depends on the area. That might make sense in higher density areas, or overy arid/wet areas. In more rural areas it's easier/cheaper to have one stadium field for games and a couple of practice fields to spread the traffic around. Either way, it's like $.75M-1.5M with about a 20 year lifespan ($50k per year). That's a good bit of money for something that has limited academic application.
Right. Public schools are chartered to provide "Universal compulsory education" private schools only have to worry about the last word in that phrase. There's a patchwork of laws that try to ensure private schools provide some sort of equal-opportunity, but the success of that is very hit-or-miss.
There's paying, and then there's "paying... and a donor". They absolutely kick out the former if they feel like it, or, in lesser cases, simply fail to invite them back. The latter, I dunno, maybe not.
This is quite true; I was also speaking to selective private schools. Around here the admissions ratio for many private schools is crazy low, indicating that they are turning away plenty of qualified students and that they can recoup the lost tuition by admitting another pupil at will.
In that situation it starts to approach "is there something on campus with your last name on it" levels of donations if you want to avoid getting kicked out...
Yeah, the ones around here have wait lists, and they're not impressed by daddy and mommy Mr. and Mrs. VP and MD, paying list tuition price. There are a dozen more where they came from. If they think a kid might make a few other families think twice about enrolling next year, and some reasonable attempt to make things work out falls through, that kid's gone. Maybe not immediately (though, sometimes), but they won't be back next Fall.
Can confirm, went to a school like that but without a namesake building. They can either always admit someone else, or more often, just not bother because educating kids is an expensive loss leader for the endowment even with full tuition. It definitely seemed like there needed to have already been a family building or two before you got to campus if you expected much immunity because of that...
Sufficiently misbehaving kids, not being properly handled, will drive away paying customers when their peers want to transfer out - or if they stop short of transfering out, merely shit talk the institution and it's failures, driving down it's reputation and turning away future business.
If you think private schools won't act on those pressures - either by getting the kids the help they need, or by kicking them out - I have a tunnel to sell you.
From my experience, they would still punish sufficiently disruptive misbehavior. But they would let minor things slide like ignoring uniform policy or poor grades if you were a high donator. One incident I remember was someone bringing a camera in to the change rooms which resulted in the student being immediately expelled. That kind of stuff they still punish because its harmful enough to outweigh the benefits of the donations.
It depends. They have more discretion in most cases. The public schools are stuck with more stringent adherence to procedures, specifically about getting police involved.
One of the most prestigious private all boys schools in the country asked my cousin to leave because he was causing too many discipline problems. His classmates were bullying him because he's gay.
Are you really going to get maturity or just superficial signs of maturity from immature kids? I think kids that more boldly explore social interactions (ie. naughty) at a young age may end up more mature as adults. Someone who's polite and well-behaved may doing that because they're too emotionally immature to know how to do anything more risky and are just performing "professional behavior" which is a kind of lowest-common-denominator for getting along with others.
In practice, I feel you're right. It will simply devolve into a superficial display of maturity being used as the right metric while real, deeper signals are buried or ignored in the face of superficial counter-signal.
Worked as something of a TA in several high school computer courses (MS Business Applications, Programming (Basic), Programming (Java)) with many students of varying levels and competencies. Was quite a fond memory in quite a lot of ways. Schools should encourage more of that sort of thing and less batshit test prep. Unfortunately, true well-rounded human beings don't solicit eyeballs and award shows and budget dollars.
We used to have such a concept in my school system, it was called "tracking." Sadly, they did away with it midway through my sentence. We had AP / IB track courses, but also so many students that we had a second, more mature level in terms of both behavior and intellectual pursuit (at least for AP, I only took one IB course).
This track was cancelled (10+ years ago) in the modern progressive fashion, being derided as some blend of discrimination. The end-result was students who were into school being put into the same pot of students in the rest of the courses (non-AP, AP - your choice). Unfortunately for the tracked students, we were hit with a one-two punch of the end of tracking and the administration's pursuit of glory and State recognition. Our guidance counselors aggressively recommended or, in some cases, forcibly placed students in AP courses for which they had neither the interest nor the proclivity.
Personally, I was forced into a high-tier Spanish course my third (and final) year of high-school, despite having no aptitude and lower-end grades (80-85%) for the language despite three years of study. Resulted in my skipping all courses and writing my "Kiss My Ass" in another foreign language I pursued during my free time. I rode into the sunset with a grade of 30% or so, a job waiting for me in the city as an apprentice software engineer and a full-ride to university.
Frankly, schools in the US just don't seem to exist to put out good, well educated thinkers but like many government institutions (and I say this as a former government worker) - to continue their own existence, find glory for those at the top, and if good things happen for the citizens this is a nice side-effect and typically at the expense of the soldiers in the trench rather than good, altruistic stewardship.
> For the Mature schools, spend substantially below average per pupil
This is already the case for gifted schools, though the critics may not say it out loud. Stuyvesant High School has a lower budget per student than the average NYC high school, and Lowell High School has a lower budget per student than the average San Francisco high school.
> In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.
Opening with that title, complete with correct capitalization, reads like an allusion. It's enough to make me think exceptionally skeptically about a proposal to turn gifted students into what is sometimes euphemistically termed peer educators.
What would this select for? All you would be doing is establishing a poor proxy for general intelligence though you would likely select for general intelligence on the whole by grading "maturity".
Funding doesn't seem to do much to make a school desirable. By far and away the biggest factor that determines how good a school is is the socioeconomic status of the parents. A school doesn't need more money to be better at educating, it just needs better students. If they happen to form a critical mass at a low-funded school, then that'll become an elite school.
I meant to be ambiguous, and start an interesting and wider-ranging discussion. I was, at best, modestly successful
No one seemed interested in the "what might be done, within existing resources and sensitivities, for the more promising poor & unwanted children?" angle. Admittedly, few folks on HN are likely to recall Dr. Swift's subtitle, or care much about helping the poor & huddle masses, yearning...
I see a lot of comments on the outcomes of gifted kids and others in their cohorts depending on whether or not the gifted kids are separated out. I'd like to add a dose of Realpolitik:
Already a disproportionate number of gifted kids are from wealthy families, and if gifted education goes away, those kids aren't going to be in the "regular" public classes, they are going to private school. The clear losers in that situation seems to be the remaining gifted kids from less wealthy backgrounds.
'those kids aren't going to be in the "regular" public classes, they are going to private school'
Most private schools aren't set up to cater to gifted kids. If you don't believe me, ask the folks running a private school how they deal with kids who are 2-3 grade levels ahead in math.
Then ask them for concrete examplea of what they actually mean. And concrete examples of the outcomes this differentiated instruction has achieved for those kids.
Private schools often have smaller class sizes, nicer physical environment, better equipment and higher expectations. But the curriculum is still aimed at the average kid in that school, with little consideration for the outliers.
EDIT: I should have mentioned, that I interpret 'gifted' to mean something like top 3% by ability (corresponding to an IQ of about 130). Back when SFUSD used to identify kids at gifted and talented, they were talking about the top ~30%, which is totally different.
Nobody claims that most private schools are set up to cater to gifted kids: What you get is a whole lot of different schools, catering to different backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses, some of which will cater mostly to gifted kids.
This is easy to see in metro areas with a balkanized public education system, like Saint Louis. Your typical child has access to one public school, which could be quite good, or horrible, depending on where it is: The better the school, the more expensive it is to get a house that can sends kids to it. If you don't want to move for your favorite school, you go into one of hundreds of private schools. The differences amongst them are so wide, locals ask others where they went to high school as a shortcut to get a lot of information about them. On the gifted end, you will find private schools where less than 15% of the class is stuck "only" at grade level in math, and that's probably because they are way ahead somewhere else. Those schools tend to be so interested in high performers that there's a great chance there's quite a bit of financial aid for those with blue collar parents.
So yes, most private schools are definitely not better: Hell, I'd argue that in a city like this, most private schools are worse academically. But when there are enough private schools, self-assortment surrounds kids with others that are more like them, whether it's athletic focus, qualifying as gifted, following Christian Science, or making sure most girls are rich enough to own horses. Whether this is good or bad for the city is a different story, but I suspect the gifted kids come out ahead.
And yes, all of this will only happen in large enough metros with enough children. A gifted child in a small town is probably served more or less equally badly by public and private schools.
"And yes, all of this will only happen in large enough metros with enough children."
Yes. I should explain my perspective. I live in San Francisco, which has ~900k people, and maybe 80k school-age children.
So perhaps 180 (80000/13*0.03) kids per grade are gifted. Enough to fill 7 to 10 classrooms.
Even so, as far as I'm aware, San Francisco has no elementary schools focused on gifted kids. The nearest gifted-only elementary school is private, pricey, a 30+ min drive away, and has way more qualified applicants than places.
How do elementary schools determine whether someone is gifted?
Also, SF has some elementary schools that are considered much better than others. Rooftop, for instance. If it isn't the student body or budget, what makes Rooftop better?
"How do elementary schools determine whether someone is gifted?"
Public schools in SF? They don't.
Private gifted schools? Using psychologist-administered tests.
"If it isn't the student body or budget, what makes Rooftop better?"
During the most recent year for which data are available (2019) half of Rooftop 3rd graders were not meeting state standards in math. 45% were not meeting state standards in ELA (English Language Arts).
>Most private schools aren't set up to cater to gifted kids.
Just by filtering out the most disruptive kids, having small class sizes, and teachers aligned with the school, kids, and parents, you are catering to the gifted and the rest of the students as well.
For a school to be "catering to the gifted", they'd need to be providing challenging material at the level and the pace of gifted (top ~3%) kids. The conditions you describe are not sufficient.
I tested at the top ~0.1% back in the day and, digging out the old recommendations my parents were given, it was recommended I skip several grades, be given private tutoring, and have access to additional programs with my peers.
Top 3%-1%, they recommended skipping grades + specialized instruction in areas of strength and additional programs.
(They also had recommendations for the actual Einsteins/Michelangelos/Mozarts, which amounted to "there is no reason for this child to be in the K-12 education system"; I always wondered what their experiences were like.)
I was a six year old whose main interests were astronomy (particularly the stellar lifecycle and black holes), PARENTING (as in I was a six year old with an interest in child psychology), and web development. At that level, you have to personalize it, or at the very least give the child unorthodox information resources.
It is sufficient because when classes are small enough and teachers care, gifted kids get the challenging material and attention they need. They don’t need to be in a gifted bubble, then need obstacles removed, and some encouragement.
I recently toured some private elementary schools in San Francisco (and researched others) and my impression is that differentiated instruction is pretty limited for core subjects like math.
One thing to consider is that the average at academic private schools is probably better to begin with. So all the kids might be 1-2 years ahead of the average student overall.
In some places gifted programs are put at the distressed schools under the theory that it will improve the situation for the other students at the school, ... or at least under the fact that it will improve the schools average test scores.
I can see how what I said might be used to justify that. However, I was just pointing out two things that I believe will happen when you halt publicly funded gifted programs:
- You'll lose all of the gifted children of the wealthy and upper-middle class anyways
In Germany they have a three track school system which is great:
- The first track is the high school degree that includes 13 years of school and afterwards allows people to attend university. Generally the students with the best grades attend this track. Everybody learns English as a first foreign language starting grade 3 nowadays in all tracks, but starting grade 7 students in this track have to pick either French or Latin as their second (and then in 9th grade have the choice to pick the other one as a third language). Further, math and science education are much faster and better compared to the other tracks.
- The middle track starts learning French as a second foreign language in grade 9 and the whole track only includes 10 years. It is geared towards people that will do an apprenticeship afterwards, for example in business or some other non-university subjects.
- The third track is the lowest track for the worst performing students and does not include any second foreign languages. It's only 9 years of school and these are the people that often go into trades jobs like car mechanics, contractors, etc.
Personally I think this is a great systems. Students that can learn more and faster get to learn with students similar to them and are not slowed down by students that can't keep up. Students in the other tracks afterwards can continue on to eventually get the higher degrees through various different ways if they want and are able to.
I think you're painting it in an overly positive picture, because in theory it should work that way but in practice too many students are sent to the highest tier because of parental/societal pressure, even if not technically on the same level (so they're holding back the other), and on the other end the lowest tier is so riddled with kids that have bigger problems than lack of good grades so if you end up there it's also a problem.
Also I'm actually not sure I wouldn't have preferred to have a wider range of people in the school, especially because I also saw problems with wide gaps in progression in normal class. Not an expert but I'd hazard a guess that for every main subject out of 30 people you could have easily moved 10 up one class and 10 down one class and then the result wouldn't have been worse than repeating the same things 10 times, per subject, and not to the same people.. (Spoiler alert: I hated school, I wasn't a really good student, my main motivation for staying and not slacking off completely was that I needed to graduate in order to be able to study CS, but I would have loved to focus on some subjects and ignore others)
My daughter goes to accelerated high school. Its great for her and her friends.
The main problem for society is that 50 years ago you didn't need to have great grades to get into great courses, or colleges. Now you have to be in the top 5-10% whatever. There are lots of people who are in the regular schools that could be doctors/engineers/lawyers but wont get in because its an arms race. If you have to be in the right elementary/middle/high school to be a doctor its too hard for regular people.
We have too few great colleges around for the potential population. Should really be building more colleges and expanding the existing ones. MOOC's and open educational content are an inefficient band-aid, in-person instruction should always be preferred.
The colleges we have are too expensive. They tend to bundle up sports/research/culture/medicine/whatever/education. Students have to pay tuition to support all that. If you're strapped for cash, there's not really a way to opt out of all the bonus content and just get the education.
Artificial constraint of supply by elite colleges.
With Endowments well into the tens of $Billions there is no reason schools like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Etc. can't have freshman classes of 10,000 instead of 2,000.
They don't have to go to "great" colleges that highly restrict admissions. You can be a lawyer, engineer, pre-med or nursing at state schools which are much easier to get into. Med school itself has some issues around things like residency programs, which are more a healthcare system and policy issue than a prerequisite education issue.
Both Law and Medicine are famously exclusive to "great" colleges. Like you mentioned, it's already tough as it is it to complete residency even if you attended a good school, but Law has revolved around the T14 for a while now.
It depends on what you want to do with the law degree. If you want to be in some highly coveted position, then you need a big name. Otherwise, there are plenty of state schools.
We moved a lot when I was a kid in the 70s. Most places seemed to have a 3-tiered system then: TAG (talented and gifted), the middle track, and the remedial track. In one state (CA) I'd be in the talented-and-gifted classes for pretty much every subject. Then we moved to TX and I was in the middle track for most subjects and even in a remedial track for some. We moved between the two states a couple of times as my dad would be transferred. I preferred CA because of the prestige, but then get to TX and find myself behind in certain subjects - it was kind of confusing.
I switched from a normal school to a gifted school at age 12. The biggest plus was that when all your peers have measured iq 130 or more, you do not have to feel ashamed to be "just curious" - which I believe most kids there were, albeit on very different levels.
People there really hacked themselves into all kinds of things, be it making your own PCB, learning six different languages, caring for paedomorphic salamanders, writing lyric, or building your "own" copies of popular software products. None of that seemed particularly strange to us young teenagers.
Establish cohorts in schools by academic ability. People want to be grouped with peers and they are more successful when doing so.
We shouldn't have children at vastly different ability levels in the same classroom. Struggling kids are made no better, and the exceptional are dragged down.
The reason why this is a really bad idea from an efficiency and an equity POV is that it leads to royally screwed-up incentives for teachers. No self-respecting teacher really wants to teach a class of "struggling, low-achieving" students. So the lowest quality teachers end up teaching those classes, and the struggling students are basically trapped with no prospect for real improvement. It's awful.
It would be very different if teachers could meaningfully specialize towards providing effective instruction for these lower-achieving students. But we barely manage to do this for actual "special" ed, and then only at huge cost.
An alternative perspective is that the lower performing teachers will relate more to the lower performing students, and the higher performing teachers will relate more to the higher performing students.
And, from a pure efficiency standpoint, we should absolutely seek to give every possible opportunity to those gifted students. For the lower performing kids, focus on teaching values and ethics, along with realistic and practical goals, to make up for any issues in their upbringing. I think attitude is as important as aptitude for the middle and lower end spectrum kids.
> No self-respecting teacher really wants to teach a class of "struggling, low-achieving" students.
That doesn't ring true to me. Why wouldn't a good teacher take pride in taking kids below the curve up to Average? I would wager that this probably has a better net impact than pushing the elite kids that much further.
Partly it's because their own educational background doesn't let them develop this kind of pride in their work. Modern education schools' doctrine is that kids don't even need to be taught anything because they can simply "learn everything by themselves" with just a few hints about what sort of 'inquiry' they should undertake. This can seem to "work" well enough for high-achieving students who can always rely on someone (either themselves or family) to pick up the slack; it's invariably a dismal failure for everyone else.
What seems to happen from what I've seen is not quite that. Junior teachers work in low-performing schools and classes, while experienced teachers are are the better ones. But, and this is a big bug, unlike many professions, seniority doesn't reliably correspond to performance and may in fact be negatively correlated! Young teachers are often more enthusiastic and capable of engaging easily-distracted kids while experienced teachers have a clearer understanding of the syllabus and content so it actually seems like a good fit for everyone.
I wonder if this system might ameliorate that negative correlation, if junior teachers are assigned the worst students (not schools). I would think the enthusiasm and engagement dissipate after years of fruitless struggling with bad pupils. If you give the low achieving students exclusively to the young teachers, their wide-eyed passion for the youth of tomorrow or whatever can carry them through the first few years - offering the best to students who won't be able to make much with it (and offering the best to the late bloomers who were miscategorized who will). From there they slowly matriculate up the ranks, teaching students who are more and more capable of and receptive to learning. I bet their enthusiasm weathers the years better overall as they always have the next step of better students to look forward to, and their job becomes easier in a sense as time goes on.
I agree with your concerns but we already do this somewhat informally with public education in much of the country with college prep, advanced, honors, and AP courses.
I'm just advocating we act with more purpose and honest intention about what we're already doing.
>Struggling kids are made no better, and the exceptional are dragged down.
I disagree
I've been terrible student (think of passing subjects, but pretty close to the "edge") until last two years of HS
where I actually started putting effort into math/english and then I looked at the best students after working with them for a while and I was like "why can't you do better, just like them? are you worse or something?"
that was huge motivation, just awarness that you could do better itself
it works in other things in life too - internet, programming, hackernews.
If I were in a group with people similar to me, then I don't know how it'd end, honestly and it pretty scares me to think where I'd be now in life
With IQ tests identifying you as intelligent, you could be in a small class with other terrible students and a teacher who knows how to reach and motivate you. After some weeks you could rejoin the best students and learn at a much higher pace.
>With IQ tests identifying you as intelligent, you could be in a small class with other terrible students and a teacher who knows how to reach and motivate you.
Actually I've been in such a class in elementary school for students that performed worse. For me, they focused mostly on improving writing and probably something else that I don't remember
I'm unable to say now how much it actually gave me, I still cannot write (handwriting), but that's mostly because I never care about that, I felt like that was useless skill and nowadays I rarely use pen.
>Where would you be if you had the best education?
That's hard to answer, I don't know, especially that "best education" varies by person, but assuming the one that fits my preferences, then probably... I don't know.
The only thing that I still haven't done in my career that I find really interesting is going for a year or two to US and working in CPU Fab or some compilers job, but I'm not sure whether with better edu I'd have it already done, especially that those require a lot of "non-school" effort
That's how my high school (in New Zealand) did things. We were separated into 3 bands, the first band for high achieving students, the second band for average students, and the third band for learning support. From memory, there were ~5 classes in the first band, 10 in the second, and 3 in the third.
It was a great system for both teachers and students. Everyone in a class would be learning at roughly the same rate, and the school was able to allocate resources, such teachers aides, more efficiently.
I was a kid who coasted through school and got by on smarts alone. I don't care how we push kids, we just need to not let them coast too long. If that means enrichment or acceleration or whatever else the comments are debating, it's pretty much all better than the status quo.
Public school was the same for me. It wasn't until doing poorly in college that I realized that I actually needed to study to do well. Unfortunately, I had never developed study habits as I hardly had to crack a book to do well before. It was quite a struggle for me to teach myself how to learn when I couldn't just pick up the material from class.
To me that illustrates the general failure of public school is not teaching children how to learn.
i went to a small HS out in the backwoods of North Texas ( graduating class had 20 people in it). I was told how smart i was over and over and started to believe it. Then went to college and found out exactly how much BS was fed to me the previous 4 years. I really suffered for it taking a long time to graduate and almost getting kicked out a couple times.
Now I have two kids and prioritize learning how to learn with them. If you can develop the skills in a child required to work hard, find the answers, find the understanding, and teach themself then you've put them in a good spot to have at least a fighting chance when faced with the unknown.
I went to the best high school in Australia, James Ruse. At that level gifted education is not really a question of 'gift' anymore but a question of outside tutoring. I was pretty much the only person in my grade that did not do tutoring. Some of my friends essentially had a second school that they would attend for the same length of time as actual school. This is also the reason that Ruse is 99% Asian and selective schools more generally overrepresent Asians; it seems like it's much more likely, culturally, for Asians to send their kids to tutoring than other groups. That's why can't I take seriously any of the hysteria about China taking over because of their 'superior work ethic' that you sometimes see; I've seen these kids, and a) they all did their assignments at the last minute and b) it wouldn't be that bad if they did take over because they are all perfectly normal people, not robots. Their parents just pay a man to lock them in a dungeon until they're able to integrate by parts at age 13.
Polemics gonna polemic. Yes, we should invest in gifted students. But, ignoring the larger context of how public education is funded in the United States and the consequential giant gaps between school districts, where many poor ones don't even competently provide fundamental baseline services to their students, is not going to elevate the discourse.
the ultra-ghetto urban public schools here have money upon money, and yet the teachers do not get funds directly. I have seen piles of new computers in a locked room with my own eyes, assisting a well-meaning engineer who placed the equipment. Meanwhile, I heard two middle-aged men talking on the bus alone at night, one was the driver. They both gave up as public school teachers due to lack of effort and interest by the students, year after year. The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.
The very worst schools in my city pay significantly better than the ones out in the "good" districts. They can do that because they get a ton of extra funding from the state and (I think) feds. I think the only schools that pay better than them are a small minority of the private schools.
It doesn't help much, because working conditions are so bad that anyone with options still doesn't want to work there. More funerals for kids. More 2nd-graders threatening teachers. More lockdowns over gun threats and such. More drug problems. More chronically-absent kids. More turnover among students. More horror-stories about home life. Most teachers who can afford to turn it down decide that their sanity & safety is worth more than an extra $8-12k/yr. Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast. It's brutal, and money—at least, money spent on education per se—does not seem to be the solution.
> The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.
Heh, yeah, and that's in most districts, not just the poor ones :-(
"Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast."
I have a friend who completed his teaching degree. He said the policies at the school where he student-taught were so bad that he decided not to apply to teaching jobs. Stuff like you weren't allowed to give less than a 50% as long as they put their name on the paper, and ineffective discipline options. Basically, the school was just passing kids through the grades without the kids really learning and some kids wouldn't even try. I guess if you just graduate them, they're no longer the school's problem...
Yeah, kids don't fail grades anymore but are just passed ever upward, and many schools have incompetent admin (of all the things I was wrong about as a kid, turns out school administrators are, on average, even dumber than I thought they were back then—it's shocking, really) who insist on completely worthless discipline schemes, among other bad ideas. Can confirm all that's true.
So then you're a teacher with a bunch of 6th graders, say, 2/3 of whom are one or more grade levels behind on at least one subject, but that material's not what will be on the test that'll be used to evaluate your performance. The right thing to do is to go back and fill in the gaps for those kids, but you don't have the time, and showing them enough of this year's material that they might at least get a few answers on the standardized test correct is safer for your career anyway.
This is because it’s really about the parents. Everything hinges on the parents. No amount of money will enable a school system to completely compensate for poor parenting (whatever the reason is). I don’t understand why it’s not openly discussed.
I think it's just an uncomfortable discussion to have. No amount of social engineering will fix this. As a group, children who come from good home with a mother and a father - who have jobs and aren't on public assistance - are better prepared for many aspects of life including education. There's no shortage of talent and intelligence that will go wasted because of this fact and that is sad and it makes us feel bad. San Francisco's efforts here are meaningless sacrifices to the altar of equity that bring us one step closer to a Harrison Bergeron style dystopia that makes the problem (of wasted talent and education) much worse. But doing _something_ feels better than doing nothing, so I'm not expecting the situation to improve.
For the absolute worst of schools, perhaps extending online learning might be best. That way disruptive students can just be muted. And then provide some physical location where students can do online classes when they don't have a suitable home environment.
It's because there is almost nothing that can be done. IQ is largely genetic, with a few social levers that can be pulled. We shouldn't expect from people what they are not capable of doing.
The rationalist gwern-types once again overestimating the predictive power of IQ. Also coming in with assumptions that people in poorer districts cannot have members of "remarkable enough" IQ that warrant distinction and treatment.
Disappointing thread all around. Enough HN for today.
You aren't trying. We know IQ is predictive of success. No one is saying an individual from a poorer community can't be intelligent/academically successful.
What we're saying is that we shouldn't hold someone born without the ability to be academically successful to unreasonable standards.
> What we're saying is that we shouldn't hold someone born without the ability to be academically successful to unreasonable standards.
How does this relate to improving performance at schools in poor or de-stabilized districts? There are "high IQ" individuals there that merit attention.
Yes we should address the amount of waste that these poor performing districts generate, but there is idea of a zero sum game in this thread between poorer and richer districts that encourages dismissal of solutions.
Nobody has talked about intergenerational poverty yet in this thread. Just wild.
IQ is probably the most predictive factor of success in our knowledge-first society. The catch is that IQ is a fuzzy variable: its measurements heavily depend on one's mood, the particular IQ test, the food one's eaten that day, hours slept and so on. However the highest measured IQ in ideal conditions is pretty stable.
I don't think people are advocating that education itself is just a signaling of inherent ability. This would be like saying it's pointless for an athlete to train because their maximum athletic ability is pretty much determined.
The context of this discussion was kids in "ultra ghetto urban districts"
Not sure why we are talking about intellectually disabled kids. Someone else did this juxtaposition, and it is quite concerning that people tie poverty with lack of ability in this thread.
That reason is largely the euphemism treadmill, but I would grant that saying "ultra ghetto" is deliberately insensitive and no professional would use it to describe impoverished areas.
Origin was 1788 from my little research. Point is that all of these words start out as high-minded words from well-meaning people and then some ninny comes along and tries to change the word, telling everyone that their words are bad instead of looking at the problem square in the face, however ugly or bad the problem may seem.
> the ultra-ghetto urban public schools here have money upon money, and yet the teachers do not get funds directly
Any statistics or citations to back this up? In my experience, one cannot characterize thousands of schools this way because they have different governance and spending formulas across states, county lines, city limits, and even multiple districts within cities (which is especially true in urban cities).
It is always disappointing, to come from one of these districts and then having obtained social mobility through talent and luck, to see what my new peers (since I assume most of us here have gone to a top tier school and work somewhere in tech/finance) think of my neighborhood. No care for how these situations happened.
my advanced placement programs were evaporated and replaced with "no child left behind".. there were more than forty languages spoken at home in this school district. You can read for yourself the other parents' comments about the results. Good on you for getting the benefits of this society and escaping the slums and their ways.
I can see that. The language choice is certainly distracting and inappropriate.
I would hope that people discussing the issues in education would be some evidence that they do care. Maybe misguided in some instances, but at least trying to identify root causes and solutions. If we don't talk about the problems, then they won't get fixed.
my language choice is specific and well-earned; the city I am describing is consistently top ten in murder rates in the general population, and has some of the lowest graduation rates in the USA.
It is always disappointing, to go into any thread anywhere on the internet, and have some language police clutch his pearls and feign offense where clearly none exists.
Regressing the mean and shrinking the margins between high performers and low performers doesn't elevate the performance of the bottom. It just lowers the performance of the entire system. You could even argue it disenfranchises the lower but forcing more top tier talent into their employment tiers.
Yes! 100%. The argument in the article isn't wrong, but the way it's made is highly unlikely to win people over to the cause (and could actually deepen the disagreement).
In most places, the majority of the funding is at the state and federal level. And that generally uses policies that give a larger share of funds to underserved schools.
If I hadn't been able to attend a "gifted" program, which has since been shut down, I would have been stuck in a rural D-class system that would not have served me at all. Instead I was able to be around peers with my interests and comparable learning abilities. It was a big early and positive influence on my life.
Honestly I just wish I had classes which only allowed students who wanted to be there.
So much of my public school education was wasted on teachers having to deal with some subset of students who wanted to do nothing but disrupt everyone else.
It got better when I could choose AP classes since generally by that point everyone wanted to be in those classes.
The bigger problem at SFUSD, and public schools in general, is being unable to expel or suspend kids, mostly due to fear of lawsuits.
Unintended consequence: kids have no fear of repercussions, teachers have no real authority and everyone ends up arguing about vagueries like "equity" and "giftedness" instead the actual work of education (which is increasingly left to parents and tutors).
> When California’s Instructional Quality Commission adopted a new mathematics framework in 2021 that urged schools to do away with accelerated math in grades one through 10, it explained the move this way: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”
I clicked the link and could find no such language or even any suggestion that high achieving students don't exist, and it had a lot of verbiage discussing the need for "high achieving" students to be challenged more than others. How a student became "high achieving", like if they were somehow born that way or otherwise gained such skills in early development, was not discussed, nor does it make much difference.
therefore I dont understand the point of this article if it's going to start out with claims that dont seem to be true.
It's right in the introduction [0]: "All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents (Cimpian et al, 2015; Boaler, 2019) and the “cult of the genius” (Ellenberg, 2015)."
but in any case, now I can see the context, and my point stands, the author quoted this entirely out of context in order to conclude erroneously that the authors of this document don't believe that some students are more capable than others:
> Anyone watching the Olympics right now would reject that reasoning. So would most parents watching their children age and develop. Kids with exceptional abilities in chess, basketball, piano, or ballet stand to benefit from exceptionally challenging instruction. And the same goes for kids with exceptional abilities in poetry, calculus, or chemistry. Finding and nurturing the academically gifted should not be controversial.
The reasoning in no way states that students and individuals don't have varying degrees of abilities. The notion of "natural talent" in its most raw form indicates that some students were *born* with exceptional abilities that cannot be approached by those were were not born with such abilities. It therefore implies that talent and ability is determined at birth and that no attention need be given to students that don't appear to have such talents. that's the notion being rejected.
Perhaps not a popular opinion, but the overwhelming majority of "gifted" kids seem to be near the middle of the bell curve with parents that are convinced little George is the next Einstein.
It is kind of fascinating since it does seem plausible that treating a child as gifted with high expectations and then providing focused, advanced instruction may be a self-fulfilling sort of situation.
I used to think "gifted" implies there is some natural high intelligence, where in reality its the children of well educated and/or motivated parents. Honestly now I think both benefits from segregated education so I dont really care about the distinction.
I have thought that selection for "giftedness" in young children is multi-factored with a combination of "exposure" and innate aptitude and curiosity of the child at the very least.
If you take "exposure" to mean the child has been introduced to a multitude of concepts and experiences both at their age-appropriate levels and grades above, the conjectured distribution starts to make sense. Wealthy children or those of highly educated parents tend to have incredibly high "exposure" increasing their representation in gifted programs. Those not from such a background will necessarily need to be highly curious and/or have high innate aptitude.
For the lower grades, gifted kids regardless of background will be in the upper decile of scores. As they grow older and "exposure" differences across the entire population minimize, those who were gifted only due to "exposure" will fall to the middle of the curve. Those with high curiosity/aptitude will continue to be in the upper decile, with those who had early and continued high exposure (usually a result of wealth or parent motivation) in the top percentile.
To your point, if you believe the goal should be to meet children where they are and advance them, this model isn't horrible. What it does point out is that there may be a fair amount of top percentile talent that is unrealized due to lack of "exposure" and resources.
"The problem of educating the educators is a problem which the democrat forgets in his enthusiasm for educating the pupils."
When's the last time a single person on hn dared to look at the curriculum of the average degree in education? It consists of courses that any person with the slightest degree of intelligence would run from screaming. I'm interested in education but you couldn't pay me to attend one - it's 99% fluff and nonsense.
Because the bigger problem is not the existence or nonexistence of exclusive institutions but of the kind of people that would render such an education educational. Because neither the gifted nor the wise - particularly if male - go into education today.
Perhaps a reason for the poor track record of modern education in producing any geniuses on par with those of the past and the long-standing dry spell of great works. And the larger trend of exclusive education producing little but "really excellent sheep".
"Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it."
In which case perhaps it's best it's done away with. It appears past fixing, the rot infiltrating to the core of the bureaucratic machinery.
Exactly. All that energy and time and money to "cultivate" gifted individuals only for them to crawl into that black pit. And the irony is that this education only helps them make that choice with self-awareness of how absurd and culturally destructive it is. But it is where the rewards are, and so that's where they go.
To quote Colacho again "Reeducating man will consist of teaching him once again to value objects correctly: that is, to need few." Then perhaps we might have some hope.
Where have you been the last 20 plus years? This is a subject that's been wrestled with in many high profile books and articles over that period and beyond, and how this is not self-evident to anyone who reads is beyond me.
My big problem with GATE programs, as they were implemented at SFUSD, is the question of what happens to the kid at the 89%ile.
I am not at all against elite education, nor do I believe everyone should proceed roughly at the same pace. But I am very wary of an approach that imposes a bimodal solution onto what is almost certainly a more normally distributed population.
There are various ways this was implemented over the last 50 years. When I was in the SFUSD gifted program in the late 1970s, I believe it was done by some kind of IQ assessment. When my own kids were in SFUSD in the late 2000s, they took the top 10% of each class, as defined by test scores on the STAR test, which is an academic test. There were a few ways to test in (both verbal and reading in the top 10%, or one or the other in the top 10% two years in a row, or nominated by a teacher - there may have been a few others).
Ok, but then what happens to the kid who scored 89%ile consistently? Are we getting behind a solution that takes the top 10% off into a class which is taught at the 95%ile, and then leaves the 89%ile student to now be taught at the 45%ile?
Even people who support more advanced learning for more advanced students must see a problem here. Seems like we need a better solution. The top 10% isn't the only group that may benefit from a specifically tailored curriculum.
I skipped second grade and was still bored out of my skull, and became the class clown. Teachers got fed up and in sixth they put me in with the Sweathogs. The bullying went to 11 and it broke me. So yeah, I'd say it's OK for a kid to skip grades in particular subjects, but to skip a whole grade in toto puts a target on a kid. My 0,02€, YMMV.
A discussion about gifted classes and acceleration will obviously swamp this thread, but I want to take issue with the premise of the actual article. I think everyone sees in the San Francisco recall what they want to. The idea that it was a backlash against changing admission policies at schools like Lowell seems like the flimsiest of the arguments; Lowell admits students from just a tiny fraction of the households that voted to recall these board members.
I don't have an opinion about magnet schools and admission policies, and I'm sure, like everyone else is, that Lowell was a factor for some recall voters, but if it was the only issue, it seems likely that the board members would have survived the vote. The arguments about school closures and the renaming debacle seem much more plausible.
This is correct. My vote in favor of the recall was about Collins' lawsuit abuse, the school closures, the nationwide embarrassment that the renaming debacle made of our school district, and general discontent with the abuse of the SF school board as a training ground for future Prog candidates instead of a body focused on serious public service. Lowell wasn't even on my mind.
I think lotteries are a useful tool to increase meritocracy, did this blogger ever expand elsewhere on why they think they are part of a 'war' on it?
I couldn't really discern any actual argument in this. From the blog title onwards it felt like it was aimed at an audience that already agreed and so didn't need to actually present any arguments. But I'd be interested if they actually have any as lotteries have a lot of useful applications but some people are wary of them.
Think of the time and energy we'd save if we just chose some smart people for a task rather than waste their time writing essays about their extracurriculars.
Then we could treat the people who don't make it as smart but unlucky and actually have a plan for them too, rather than discard them as stupid and further increase the competition for the few slots at the top.
I expect most of the criticism of "gifted" programs is embarrassment that the education system does such an awful job with most students. Many would prefer to do away with anything that exposes that problem.
Detailing the problems of the "education system" would be very controversial, as the schools have become political entities in their own right, parents are major contributors to the problems, and the culture we present our kids is a problem. For many it is better, read easier, to pretend those problems don't exist, and to do away with anything that highlights them. But that doesn't improve anything, and actually makes the schools worse.
Education in this country is sad we can do better. I don't have a great solution.
Money doesn't seem to be a panacea; except wealthier parents and parents who care, which seems to be by far the biggest driver of good outcomes (and the opposite poor).
But a good gifted program usually has other support beyond just curriculum. It's not just because the other classes have to be dumbed down so much.
Maybe my experience isn't universal. I was in the gifted program. I was ahead in math (not by as much as many here) and very gifted at music. But was in basic english lol. Completely lazy i never did homework and just got along by being smart. So for me it wasn't totally about just being in advanced classes.
It was more the extra support we had and the benefit of grouping those like minded students together. Just as friends, being able to grow help each other, etc. Had weekly small group meetings too. Kind of like counseling and guidance other students did not get.
More hands on learning. Which was the only time I paid attention or put in actual work.
Got special permissions, like I got to skip classes to do music. Access to more resources and connections to summer activities or outside education.
We had a dedicated gifted staff person who doesn't teach, just facilitates.
Their program was super valuable to me and pretty well known. I think a big draw for the school
I think kids need to be kids but there should be accelerated classes at least a portion of the day to satisfy them intellectually (math, science, literature). They are (most likely) still mentally the same age and enjoy most of the same playtime activities as other kids. It's not likely that an 8year old is gonna have a good time hanging with a clique of 12 year olds and vice versa.
I read an interesting book a long time ago. The crux of it was, "We spend a huge amount of money on the students with the bottom 2% of IQ, why don't we spend just as much on the top 2%". The standard argument was that the top 2% will find their own way and be just fine. I suppose that is true, but I don't think there were any studies to back that up.
> meritocracy...children compete to get into the best nursery school
If the round hole is the mythical meritocracy, the comical square peg is wealthy parents having their kids "compete" to get into a nursery school and declare the entrants got in by "merit". What a farce.
It's very frustrating trying to get good information about education. My kid is going into kindergarten this fall, and... its very hard to understand what is a good district and what's not. There's a thousand metrics, most seem to be... gamed to not get the administration fired for not following the current fad. I've resorted to using "average SAT score" as a proxy.
My kid might (or might not) be gifted; but he has highly educated parents; he's being exposed to concepts that might not be aligned with average educated parents. He's bright enough. I'm concerned that there won't be adequate content for him in the school district due to some concern that smart people demonstrate inequality or something.
Excessive acceleration can be an issue for students. Being in a class with only people much older than you can be very challenging. Accelerating 1 or 2 years ahead (over the entirety of schooling) of the rest of the students is probably better than what enrichment can do. However, accelerating 5 years is probably worse than accelerating 2 years and doing a lot of enrichment.
Additionally, I think that jumping past a grade and succeeding in the higher one is rather difficult unless you are very gifted. Enrichment can make the eventual acceleration easier.
Disclaimer: I am not an education professional though; just someone who once was a gifted student.
> Central to that cultural history has also been the notion of meritocracy, going back to the Mandarin bureaucrat-scholars who obtained their positions through the imperial examination system. More recently, China’s communists have attempted to run a more vibrant economy by reintroducing meritocracy — and not just in government.
I want to point out that the "notion of meritocracy" in the Chinese imperial examination system was a myth. The amount of time and energy required to study for these examinations, the resources required to acquire the knowledge necessary to pass them, and the myriad ways that connections could help one bypass various steps of the process all added up to a system which heavily favored the elite while nominally remaining open to all. Needless to say there are some strong parallels to the state of education in the United States in the 21st century...
There are going to be a lot of people in this self-selected group who will have had experiences with gifted education or, like myself, felt the distinct lack of those opportunities.
In my own case, I grew up in a rural area with very small schools and limited resources, what was available for enrichment was likewise limited but thankfully included at least libraries and access to computers and eventually the pre-Internet network community.
I don't believe in meritocracy in education--I saw enough inequality of opportunity to disabuse me of the notion that achievement in education at every stage was simply because the cream rose to the top. The best student of mathematics I ever knew became a surveyor because that was the career available to him--he HAD to be earning a living within three months of graduation. Exceptional ability, for him, meant only that he had the option of a less physically demanding job. Regarding real meritocracy on the achievement side there are enough stories like https://twitter.com/cesifoti/status/1494369809538195456 or almost any female PhD can relate if you care to listen to hopefully convince anyone that meritocracy is certainly suspect if not absent in education.
If it is not a meritocracy then what is the purpose of the highly competitive educational system including gifted programs? There is almost always some element of talent to be sure but there is also the luxury to pursue the opportunity, willingness or eagerness to compete, additional resources spent in preparing for admission and even just motivation or focus on the opportunity. Not all of this is dependent upon the individual, as others have pointed out, but also on parents who try get the best for their child. Perhaps the competitive system exists to make it easier for resourceful competitors to apply influence to get the result they desire.
I would prefer to see efforts which reduce the value of pursuing the competitive game. Why not self-paced programs available to anyone? Why not MOOCs? The self-selective participation even in high profile MOOCs like Sebastian Thrune's Stanford robotics MOOC points towards interest and self-motivation being the most important determiners. This seems like something we should want to reward. Maybe the reward for completion of MOOCs should be more individual attention up to and including enrolment. Perhaps there were even those who thought that self-enrichment was an inferior choice to more traditional approaches for optimizing educational competitiveness. Should we really reward that?
The threshold problem of competitive programs has always bothered me as well. Rather than a bright line threshold maybe we should be using chance to select amongst candidates; the higher the competitive score, the more likely your admission, but near the "solely by ranking" threshold choose among those above and below it with some degree of randomness. Why? Not just because it is unreasonable to regard the ranking criteria as infallible, but because selection on a narrow criteria is an imperfect determinant of outcome. Increasing the breadth of people who can enter the program will improve the selection of people who are motivated to apply and encourage applicants to try again. (Certainly I am only suggesting that programs only accept people which a high chance of completion in the program). Again, self-selection will drive those who really want it versus those who might be "qualified" on a competitive basis but actually disinterested. It grieves me when I hear of people graduating from highly competitive research physics programs or similar to go off and be a quant at some bank. Not because of my hatred of banks but because producing a quant is a wrong outcome for a competitive physics program; what the hell is the point if it doesn't make research physicists as promised?
The author cites Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve (1994), but does not really address the elephant in the room: why are so few blacks in gifted programs and selective schools that admit based on IQ tests or other exams?
The standard deviation of IQ is 15, and a typical IQ threshold for a gifted program is 130, about 2 SD above the mean. Given that average IQs for whites and blacks in the U.S. are about 100 and 85, blacks will be quite under-represented in any merit-based admissions system. Similar white-black gaps are found in other tests such as SAT, ACT, and NAEP. Do we ignore that fact or give up on merit whenever it causes unequal outcomes?
Smart kids mean smart adults, thus a threat to people in power. That is why education in the US is failing people. I think this has been going of for over 40 years with public school funding being cut over and over. Now people with some means are getting to see what inner city schools have been like for well over 40 years.
This only helps people who can afford sending their kids to exclusive private schools. Thus in a way, increasing racism because most of the rich are in a specific race.
You’re only half right. Public school funding has not been cut over and over. We spend more and more to achieve less and less, while the curriculum is destroyed, and teaching methods degrade.
The goal has shifted to equality of outcomes, not equality in inputs / resources. The least capable are lavished with the greatest resources while the most capable are ignored and held back.
I think this is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that every human is equally capable given the same opportunities and resources, and somehow the school district is the place to compensate for perceived “equity” gaps.
I’d expect the macro level effect is a dumbing down of society to the least common denominator. Or to put it another way, the bottom half of IQ adolescents may do marginally better in the next 30 years in terms of quantifiable contributions to society such as lifetime earnings or degrees obtained or patents filed, etc., whereas the top half of IQ adolescents will do dramatically worse.
You're arguing that 60 year old politicians are intentionally keeping 10 year olds dumb so they don't replace them in the power structure 20+ years later?
I still don't buy it. I've interacted with people with (lots of) money. Their viewpoint on education is that they want highly-educated people who know how to do math and program computers and design rockets to mars that they can pay to work in their factories. They're not "afraid" of an educated populace, but they don't want to pay for one either.
I’ll confirm part of this. I have some means, and am seeing signs of my school district reducing investment in accelerated/gifted programs in favor of more “inclusion”. When it comes time to choose a school for my kids, I may opt to send them to private schools. Not everyone has this option. I’d much rather public schools provide this for everyone, but if they choose not to I will simply pay to get it just for my kids.
My impression of what makes the debate about gifted education and (to an extent) the new California math standards is the issue of the negative externalities in the decision to segregate high achieving students from the general population of students.
The linked articles cites some evidence that moving high achieving/gifted students have a positive effect on their math and ELA achievement. I don't believe that anyone is contesting that having a classroom for gifted students has a positive effect on their learning.
On the other hand, there is a growing concern of the negative externality of this decision on the other students in the larger school community. In other words, we know that having high performing peers have a positive effect on students learning (this is a positive externality of having a desk mate that is gifted). The theory goes that removing these gifted students from regular classrooms has a negative effect on everyone else that remains. Again, this is a process that makes intuitive sense.
The tough sell in this argument is that, at the end of the day, this remains an externality for gifted students. Helping your desk mate does not directly impact you and, in all honesty, might even hurt your chances for a perfect SAT score or of admission at a top university because you took a lower division courses than your peers that were scooped away to a gifted classroom. Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.
No. The better students are not some resource to be used for the benefit of the other students. They are clients in their own right and should be developed to the best of their abilities.
Regarding children as some kind of state resource is just wrong.
> Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
We know a big part of education success is home environment. You can surround a kid with Einstein schoolmates but if he's getting beat daily and not getting fed, it doesn't matter. Add in unsafe living conditions and no access to books and you have a disaster nobody but the kids parents can solve.
Why then should we harm the gifted? Why should we allow them worse outcomes because someone's parents are garbage? You aren't going to make a shitty parent into a capable one when they fundamentally don't care to begin with, no matter how many high performing students you drag down in the process.
On an individual basis my duty is to do the best I can do for my kids, and that is all I can do.
>Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.
It's a hard, if not impossible, sell to ask any parent to sacrifice their child on that altar no matter how competitive they are.
Even though I am ambivalent about gifted programs, when you consider the difference between an average person and someone who for various reasons is one sigma below average intelligence, and then consider the difference between someone who is two or three sigmas above average and the majority of people near the average, it makes sense to separate them somehow.
As a thought experiment, if your IQ were measured at above two standard deviations from the average (~100), it may be worth asking whether meeting someone with an IQ below 110-115 on Tinder could raise ethical questions because of the relative intelligence differences.
It's provocative, but when groups of outlier intelligence people can now find each other and co-ordinate online, you're into mutant powers risk, where someone could, for example, create a new world currency they alone controlled the value of out from under central banks, build a total surveillance panopticon in their dorm room, forge a conspiracy that infiltrated the cabinets of world governments and subordinate them to a single agenda, encircle the planet with a million cryptographically sovereign network nodes in space, enslave millions using a credit system, etc. We should have gifted programs to integrate these people socially and elevate the people around them, because otherwise you're just going to get super villains.
Gifted kids are a myth. Overwhelmingly, these kids are just privileged.
Privileged to grow up in an educated family, privileged to not have to help out at home, privileged to not have to take a job in high school to support a struggling family, privileged to be afforded extra tutoring specifically designed to jump through all the hoops in the system. (which don't measure talent or giftedness, just familiarity with and ability to jump through the hoops) (if you can even call tutoring a privilege - I know I would prefer if kids were allowed to be kids and not shut into a room with a tutor when they're already done with school for the day)
etc etc
and before anyone starts to reply "aKsHullY..." YES of course there's the odd legitimately GIFTED child out there, but they're a rare exception and even in the proposed system, if they're not from the right family, they wouldn't be picked up - other, rich, ungifted kids would take their place. Let alone that if you look at biographies of legitimately GIFTED kids, they often don't do well in or take well to school in the first place.
Basically to me this whole thing reeks of disingenuous masking of privilege as "giftedness" and completely misguided and mistaken ideas about actually gifted kids.
EDIT I should add that to really bring progress across the board, the focus should be on the bringing the bulk of the kids to the highest possible levels, and the most support focused on the kids who struggle the most. Privileged kids already have privilege - they will develop anyway don't need public support. Non-privileged kids do.
This is quite simply factually false. Socioeconomic status (so-called "privilege") has some correlations with outcomes, but there's wide variation in abilities even once you account for socioeconomic status.
Every kid is unique, and pretending that the top 5% of learners should be in the same classroom as the bottom 5% of learners does a disservice to both.
I think in any school system you'll see some kids pick up the material, remember it, talk about it. Other kids won't. Blaming it on their parents doesn't really point to a solution either.
No, that's completely orthogonal to all this. I'm simply pointing out the author is calling for entrenching a system where privilege is rewarded and exacerbated irrespective of actual giftedness, or whether any actual giftedness is a result of nurture or nature.
What I needed was not just higher level reading, but content catered to someone 5 years younger than the usual age group for that reading. I needed help writing fast enough to keep up.
Because grade school curriculum came easily and I could ‘figure out’ everything, I hit a wall when stuff got genuinely difficult or required significant work. What I needed was to learn how to put forth effort to do things that were hard or required work for desired output. I needed help socializing because I didn’t relate to people my age and was too inexperienced to engage people who were on my intellectual level as peers.
I needed help creating because the standards for myself were so high. Not exceeding those standards always felt like failure