> Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it.
Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.
If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".
> There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".
The CA Dept of Education used to require GATE programs. In 2014, they made them optional, so schools stopped offering them. What's shocking to me is that this happened even in districts where there are lots of high-performing kids, with families that care about advanced learning. When we moved to Menlo Park, we were surprised that our highly-rated school doesn't have any programs for kids who are advanced in learning. They just talk about how all their lessons have a "low floor and high ceiling" which sounds nice in theory but doesn't work very well in practice (at least when you have a mix of kids who range from 1-2 grades below grade level to 2-3 grades above grade level).
I don't understand why there would need to be separate advanced learning programs in schools.
In fact, every school already has an advanced learning program. It's called the next grade!
Not only are there social benefits from having mixed age groups of children (younger ones learn by observing the older ones), but they could also each learn at their own level. There's absolutely no reason for age-separated schooling.
Eh, there are a lot of different things you learn in school. For example, I was doing algebra at home with my mom (which I would ultimately do in school in 6th grade) in 2nd grade when I was still having trouble putting spaces in between my words with my handwriting. LikeIwouldwriteallmyhandwrittenwordslikethis. It was a big struggle for me to start adding spaces between words. and don't even start on my spelling. I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject. But yes, I needed advanced math.
When I was in 4th grade (and maybe other grades too, I don't really remember), a friend and I were sent off to a 5th grade class specifically for math. I don't know how practical this is in general; I was lucky to get a lot of accommodations when I had teachers that were willing or able to do so, and this was also the 90s, which presumably changes things in all sorts of ways I can't even imagine. But it did work back then.
Ha, when i was too far ahead (around 11yo), I got put in a separate room with two girls with a similar "problem", no teacher.
Nice girls, very innocent. Eventually the rest of the class started catching up with our math progress and by the end of the school year we were let out of the cage.
It was a fond memory, I am not bitter about it, still remember some of the gags.
I dont think i lost that much, my math interest was more of a natural force rather than whatever i did in a repetetive schoolbook. And maybe I gained some social skills instead?
> Ha, when i was too far ahead (around 11yo), I got put in a separate room with two girls with a similar "problem", no teacher.
I had the same experience in 1st-2nd grade (in foreign language class, not math). Three of us were deemed too advanced for the grade so the teacher sent us out to the playground unsupervised with instructions to speak in the foreign language and correct each other.
I don't remember us speaking in that language too much but we played lots of games and it was fun.
> I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject.
It's possible to go to a higher grade just on some subjects though. In our (my child's) elementary, kids could go up a grade on math only if that suited them better. They stay in their grade but during math hour go to the classroom of a higher grade.
It worked reasonably well but there's some limits since it is only an elementary school so beyond a certain point there are no higher grades available on campus.
No, an advanced learning program is not called the next grade. There are two problems with putting kids in higher grades:
1. Outside of academics, the younger children are not at the same level of emotional, mental, and physical development. This prevents the two age groups from building substantive social connections.
2. There is a Donny Dumbass in every grade. So even if you go to the next grade up, there is still a Donny Dumbass taking all of the teacher’s attention.
I have first hand experience with this. My school had two advanced levels. The most advanced was all kids from the same grade. The intermediate level was taking the normal class with the grade above. I took the intermediate class. I sat in the back and the girl next to me offered me mushrooms. I had not yet reached the point in my development where I would have regular exposure to drug users, so this was a shock for me. This girl also wasn’t the most enlightened study partner.
We’re still in the district, and have finally pushed hard enough that they let our kid take a diagnostic test and move ahead independently. But that literally took 3 years to accomplish, during which time zero math learning happened at school.
To clarify, this is the Las Lomitas district, which is west Menlo Park, not MPCSD, which covers downtown and the rest of MP.
If you want a magnet program, go to Redwood City — it has one. Even the privates are generally not great on math acceleration. I hear Menlo School doesn’t allow early acceleration either, and they’re one of the more academic private schools.
Feel free to email me (contact in profile) if you want more details.
You're right: low performing kids get the attention and resources. The kids doing well "don't need help."
Which is just wrong. The gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future. Boring them, stunting their potential, ruining their education is the worst thing schools can do.
Kids need to be in different tracks. You need at least three tracks. Obviously, it should be possible to move between them as appropriate.
This is an interesting example of reaching the right answer for atrociously bad reasons.
i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.
Of course kids who are struggling might really just be stuck on one issue, and once they get past it they'll be fine - i.e. when I was in around Year 2, for whatever reason my reading-level reports for somewhat low. Post that of course, I shot ahead (I have no idea why or how, in that case the metric probably just was mis-measuring whatever my interest was at the time).
Which is an example of exactly the issue with the idea of "gifted kids" - they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults.
After all: plenty of gifted mathematicians, certainly people smarter then me. If they're working as mathematicians though, the lifetime earning potential of my average career in IT is going to be higher though.
>>> they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults
That's a shocking claim to make. Feynman, Von Neumann, Turing, Einstein, Gauss...I think I could go on all day naming people whose contribution to society was outrageously disproportionate and who were all stereotypical "gifted children".
Of course they exist. You wouldn't be having this conversation on a computer on the Internet if they didn't.
> i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.
Can sooo relate to that... That's essentially the thing where I took my top-3% highschool-degree (spending presence-hours+30min/day on school - the day I grade-overtook a person spending 4h/day by final results was fun) to a "mediocre" uni degree.
EDIT: back then, around 30% of people attended that kind of highschool.
What did I do with time: read prose of my native language and America (leading me to optimize highschool finals by dropping english for even less work old greek...) - I guess someone making me learn for 2h/day would have not really hurt my (very underused) culture knowledge and helped me a lot the uni years.
Idk man my public elementary school gifted peers all went on to be pretty successful - head dramaturge at a Broadway playhouse, doctors, poker champion, etc. I manage software developers at a dev shop with a bunch of ivy and prestigious euro university grads.
Some people are smarter than other people, and being smart gives you myriad advantages in navigating the world. This seems pretty uncontroversial.
The assumption is that the smart kids will find the resources they need to be successful, and will be successful regardless. It's the ones that are behind that need the help.
It's a blatantly false assumption, but one that persists in popularity among policy makers. The skills needed to be a zero-effort straight-A student are not necessarily the skills needed to make positive impacts on the world.
What you are talking about is a political decision, therefore there is no rational way to discuss it.
In most western government leadership now supporting smart people is basically elitism which is evil.
Despite the fact that practically it’s what needs to be done and what leads to a better society for everyone not. Not to mention most of Asia IS doing this and seem to be doing much better.
The problem here is that the specific statement in question is hard to come up with a citation for, but rests on a chain of reasoning for well-known statements that do have a lot of evidence.
And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think.
One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are:
Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology.
The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement.
And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road.
Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?"
And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you.
On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?
There’s also plenty of evidence that improving educational outcomes for low performing students has an outsized impact. “Decreasing the number of high school dropouts by half would nationally produce $45 billion per year in net economic benefit to society … Improved education and more stable employment greatly increase tax revenue, such as a return of at least 7 dollars for every dollar invested in pre-kindergarten education … National savings in public health costs would exceed $40 billion if every high school dropout in just a single year would graduate”. [1] These show pretty clear economic benefits to improving outcomes for the average student.
But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both.
However I think that simply dumping money into education as it is is more likely to produce bad results than good ones. That's because the current education system is driven more by ideology than pseudoscience than by anything resembling an effective methodology. Given the "citation needed" atmosphere, I'll offer https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm as an argument. We have lots of changes being made educationally which are promised to produce better results over time. And, time and again, they don't. As Feynman said, the planes aren't landing.
But if we can invest, I also question the promised savings in the article. It does not distinguish between increase in income due to having the characteristics that help one get a degree, versus increase in income due to what is taught in a degree. This can be a very large difference. If you have a subscription to The Economist, read https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... for how much college rankings and benefits change when you try to measure universities by estimates of value added.
That isn't to say that there is a better figure available for education. But it does not speak well to their intellectual integrity that they failed to point out this major shortcoming in their own data.
The paper you linked is based on reasoning like: "high school dropouts are way more likely to be unemployed therefore if we reduce rates of people dropping out of high school there will be more employed ones".
That's also a problem with "citation needed" argument - people who are in position to publish papers are often motivated politically or just bad at thinking and logic.
ah yes scientists, people known to be bad at logic and thinking... I guess you meant policy makers or people who implements those but whatever, what i know right...
Your observation that they contribute more visibly is maybe the most important part.
If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.
Touché - “Science has widely come to be understood as a systematic assault on common sense. Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false. Common sense said matter was solid; science has shown this to be false”
Citation needed that those things were, in fact, common sense. The earth being the center of the universe comes from ancient philosophers, not commoners (there's a reason the geocentric model is also called the Ptolemaic model). Those same philosophers also usually said the earth was round, not flat.
Isn't that then wasted talent? AIUI, upthread comments were about putting more resources into the gifted children precisely because we don't want to waste their talent.
that doesn't refute that the progress that we've made has come from gifted kids. Not all the gifted salmon make it to swim all the way back up the stream.
> I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university.
Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers.
The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.
> "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future"
didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling".
In a way, yes, citation is needed for the claim. But citation is not needed for policy. Predicting individual's "value" to society and granting/restricting opportunity based on that is not only hell of a slippery slope, but absolutely anti-thetical to democratic civilization. It's quite literally what both the fascists and the nazis did deliberately.
Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.
The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in.
On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?
Exactly. However... The gifted people are the ones that discover electricity, That found the transistor, that allow is to build Integrated circuits at the nanometer scale, that found antibiotics that save millions of lives. Each of the people that made such strides are gifted. They saved millions/billions of people. A non-gifted nurse/train driver, garage handler etc simply can't even begin to compete. Not even if they had ten thousand hours per day.
Now take away all the nurses and every "non-gifted" contributer to society and see how much the gifted achieve. When you're spending half your time building and maintaining shelter, growing food, cooking, defending yourself from enemies, etc, how much time will you have left to innovate? We are social animals and it takes all of us to be as successful as we are.
No one is saying they aren't important or not needed. The point here is that there is a very large disproportionate focus on "not leaving children behind" while the gifted children are left to suffer. We just want gifted children to get the get just a little sliver of the same attention as badly performing students.
How are you measuring the proportions and then outcomes for society? I'm also not convinced the gifted children are left behind. Many brilliant contributors to society had a less than ideal education.
I agree that publicly funded schools should cater to as wide a range of needs as possible. And at a certain point it becomes the parents' responsibility. If your child is highly gifted you may need to invest your own time and money beyond the basic education provided by the state. Another preferable option is to invest far more money in public education. That is difficult to get widespread support for.
> How are you measuring the proportions and then outcomes for society?
You know damn well these metrics don't exist today. You yourself do not include any measurements in your logic. But still require it of others. I don't think you are participating in this discussion in good faith at all.
I didn't know those metrics don't exist. There are seemingly endless studies out there. You are of course free to ask me for supporting sources for any of my claims and I have no problem saying when I do and do not have sources and metrics.
Oke then, where is the source for your claim that the average non-gifted person contributes equal or more more to society then the average gifted person if the gifted person was as supported as the non-gifted person?
Or rather the core of the argument: Why is a single dollar better spend on a non-gifted kid rather then a gifted kid in terms of societal outcomes.
Non-gifted meaning in this case someone who get's a lot of support through government intervention like for example no child left behind.
I don't think I made that claim? But feel free to quote me if you think I did.
My claim is that we all depend on each other and that if you dropped a gifted person in the woods and isolated them they wouldn't achieve much useful. They might not even survive. It's this interdependencey that gets ignored when we idolize one of the societal roles too much. People smart at math are important. But so are the people who give them the free time to do that by building highways, serving them food, or making the computer they use. In a market economy those folks are valued less and I'm not here to debate economic systems and the morality of that. Just that if we do not make an initial investment in those folks, the gifted folks won't have as much time to make their contributions to society. So there is actually an important balance to seek when trying to optimize for the greatest benefit to society. Also keep in mind that societies have executed the elite when things get too unbalanced.
I already mentioned in another comment that the ideal would be that everyone gets the education investment that challenges them to learn as much as they can. Since we aren't there yet I don't think it's unfair to give an average and basic education and to let parents of gifted children take on some of the educational responsibilities. The state can only do so much.
As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?
As far as metrics or sources, no I don't have any. My argument is mostly persuasive, but I hope based on basic things we can all observe or repeated chapters from human history. However that doesn't exclude me from curiously asking for sources for claims from others. Sources are an opportunity for me to learn more than fits in an HN comment.
> As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?
This is precisely the problem: making it seem like everything is "fair" because all kids get the same lowest-common-denominator/no-child-left-behind education system. Every child deserves to have the opportunity to learn, which is why the special education system (which receives enormous resources, far beyond the proportion of students who receive SPED services) exists. According to your logic, we could just get rid of SPED and say "it's all fine because all children have access to the same public education". But that misses the point, which is that different children need different resources to learn. Some need remedial support, and some need more advanced learning.
And as mentioned upthread, since CA got rid of the requirement for GATE education, schools (including those in incredibly well-heeled districts) have gotten rid of advanced learning options for students. The result is that kids with involved parents procure outside resources, while their peers whose parents are not involved/as well-off are robbed of the chance to learn.
That's a fair point and I agree that should be the ideal. I even mentioned it myself twice.
Looking back on the thread the more important point I wanted to make was in reaction to the claim that gifted children are far more valuable to society than let's say a nurse. Since my claim is that we all play an important role then I do agree now that resources should be spent in a way that allows each student to learn the most.
> My claim is that we all depend on each other and that if you dropped a gifted person in the woods and isolated them they wouldn't achieve much useful. They might not even survive.
No one is arguing against this, no one. You seemingly joined this discussion out of nowhere. Made this point which is completely unrelated to what we are talking about and are arguing with multiple people.
> As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?
No child left behind is exactly this. The non-gifted children get disproportionate amounts of attention.
> As far as metrics or sources, no I don't have any.
If you follow the thread back you can see exactly what I was initially responding to and you were indeed arguing that gifted people are more important to society than nurses. My claim directly disputed that by pointing out just how dependent that gifted person is on everyone else.
Yes you did say that I don't have sources or metrics. However unlike you I didn't call your question unfair or hypocritical. It's always a fair question and one that anyone can ask out of curiosity so they can learn more if there are indeed sources that the commenter previously learned from and can easily share. In fact I demonstrated how one can respond to such a question with honesty and without getting defensive and making accusations of arguing in bad faith, like you did.
You should review HN guidelines. Twice now you've responded in a way that is not welcome here.
Based on the kind words of another commenter I can now better see how gifted children could be better served within current budgets. I don't think gifted children are being left behind but they possibly could learn more in an improved system. However that shouldn't be done with the false motivation that was initially claimed: that they are more important to society.
Equally important is more accurate and enough.
However the ideal that I already mentioned - and that you seemingly missed in your enthusiasm for attacking me and my motivations - is that we should simply invest far more in education so everyone gets the best possible education catered to their needs. Do you disagree with that suggestion I made very early on? Would it solve the problem you are complaining about?
> the ideal that I already mentioned - and that you seemingly missed in your enthusiasm for attacking me and my motivations - is that we should simply invest far more in education so everyone gets the best possible education catered to their needs.
In our very well-heeled district, the administration resists calls for offering options for advanced learners. It has nothing to do with resources, so adding more resources would not result in more learning for advanced students. The constraint is ideological, not financial.
That's good to hear you have all the resources you need.
I would support you in administrative changes if I were in your area. The area I'm in at the moment barely invests in a sub-standard education because anyone with even a little money uses private schooling.
We’re not talking about nurses train drivers or anyone capable of holding a job with post secondary education. A large chunk of educational resources go towards making sure your parking lot attendant can make change or you McDonald’s worker can read signs. Most of those industries already know their workers can’t do that well so they have used technology to automate it away.
We all create tomorrow's society. Every individual is hugely dependent on other humans. And many of the people we are dependent on have quite mundane jobs. Devalue these folks enough and they will no longer do work and society will collapse. History shows us this and the result is the opposite of progress.
I think the argument is that improving the train drivers maths skills by 10% has little to no return for society, while the same cannot be said of the mathematician.
I disagree. I highly value a society of people with basic education. I think a lot of people do. It's one of the things most people are happy to pay taxes for.
Train drivers will then move on to do more important work. You're always going to need other people if you want to progress at the fastest rate possible. Humans are social animals and all the great things we achieve are as a unit. An independent ant will never be able to compete with a colony.
They won’t though because there are only so many spots in higher educated fields. So you have the problem of baristas with phds and train drivers with advanced math degrees
Humans have never run out of work. By your reasoning trains themselves should have caused mass unemployment. With better tools we just do bigger stuff. This has been true for all of human history.
right or wrong, resources are often limited. when you have to choose between helping the strugglers catch up or preventing the gifted onces from getting bored then the strugglers are more important.
What makes them more important? I agree that in the short term it’s an allocation of resources problem, but the framework and criteria for the resource allocation model doesn’t seem clear to me, and I suspect is far from optimal.
The idea that we have to choose between helping struggler or gifted students is a false dilemma. Instead we should be asking why we aren’t allocating enough resources to education.
well, yes, obviously, but that is not in the power of those who have to make due with the resources currently available.
of course we should put more resources into education. worldwide, education is the primary tool to improve everyones life. and with that i don't mean just science and general knowledge, but also moral education that teaches us how to care for each other and for the world.
we need to learn not only how to make the world a better place, but also why. and we need to understand that it takes the contribution of everyone to achieve that. not just the gifted ones, which is why i believe that helping strugglers is more important right now, in order to reach a critical mass of people that understand this and sway public opinion towards more resouces in education, at which point we will be able to help everyone, gifted or not, to develop their full potential
There are social pressures why a kid wouldn't want to move between tracks. All their friends are there.
They may also want to avoid moving to a higher track to avoid teasing from colleagues for being a "smarty-pants" or perceived as too good for the friend group.
anecdata of one, but I was pretty far ahead of my class early on and as a result, I learned to behave like an idiot as a way to gain social acceptance. This culminated in resentment and general failure to socialize properly. It wasn't until 11th/12th grade that it clicked with me that I really ought to stop expending so much energy trying to maintain early childhood relationships and should instead try to make better friendships with my peers in advanced classes.
"too good" is elitist language, but I was clearly differently minded from my peers in early grade school and I think it harmed a lot more than it helped.
Pretty much it was that way in the late 1960s... until... we got a computer programming class, but this is about math: In Berkeley, they had a program called 'Seed' that had a great idea, give middle school students access to PhD math students. It was going fairly well, until Dr Steven Giavant stepped into a classroom and wanted to teach the students the frontiers and history of math. ( look this guy up! Genius at Math, Super genius at education. ) I know that besides me, 6 other students got degrees in math, and we suspect 2 more. Absurd. The norm was 1.2, even for Berkeley. He shared his enthusiasm for math, and the children got it. We only found out about it by accident, when my Abstract Algebra professor said that they were in Berkeley Math at that time. ( 15+ years later ). And the second influence was Michael Griffin, who taught computer programming, when I asked him "How do I get to actually learn Calculus?" he basically laid out the curriculum that led to my degree. With two more break throughs, I now can use this to inspire sucess in math. Thanks Steven, and thanks Mike. https://www.facebook.com/MillsMCS/posts/1920193231575804
>It was going fairly well, until Dr Steven Giavant stepped into a classroom and wanted to teach the students the frontiers and history of math.
The way you wrote this it feels like you're about to say that Giavant tanked the program, and your parenthetical is sarcasm. I don't think that was your intent, but you may want to be aware in the future (and it could be an issue with the reader, of course.)
> Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.
This is basically the education reform movement of the 90s and aughts getting their wish via the monkey-paw. Schools and teachers are measured and judged on how kids perform on standardized tests. Your kid is likely in the 95%+ percentile so there’s not much room for “growth” as far as the metrics are concerned. So their efforts are on pulling up kids from the 5th percentile up closer to the median.
Also, it’s not uncommon for low performing students parents to sometimes freak out at the school if their kid starts falling behind, so everyone scrambles to get these kids back on track so the parents don’t pull their kids from school (which will only make things worse for the kids academics)
But won't it make it better for everyone else? Not even sure that bottom 5% should be in school. Just train them for a role that they can be competent in or decide that they will be a future ward of the state.
The bottom 5% is hopeless. Yeah it would be better if we did that, but people think about education as a means to provide the individual the chance for success in life rather than thinking about the broader impact of individuals on society and the disproportionate effect that the top has.
As far as most people are concerned, a kid that is acing everything is going to be fine in life and they don't worry about anything that could be going wrong there.
My parents were both [retired] teachers, and sadly this is the truth. Some bottom N%, I don’t know if it’s 1 or 5 or 10 or whatever, but they are absolutely beyond anyone’s ability to rehab, let alone educate. Often no fault of their own. Broken families, parents don’t care, gangs, lots of reasons. Any effort spent on them is wasted. They are inevitably fucked, and will end up in some kind of institution (prison, mental health) or unemployable, by age 25. It’s a sad reality and not something politicians like to talk about. We pretend that if we just whip the teachers so they teach harder, these people will miraculously grow up to be functional adults. It’s not going to happen.
I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.
> I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.
What year and what school district did this happen in?
I mean I'm curious because that's violent assault, of the sort that generally makes the local papers.
"I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw."
Citation needed!8-))
Sounds like an urban myth (a good one)! Also, it is unclear that the story is relevant to this discussion. That is, one might say that grinding another's teeth with a shop band saw is quite clever, albeit an extremely unsociable (if not psychopathological)
act."
Well, I was in Junior High at the time. It could have been exaggerated, but we all saw the ambulance. Both students were never seen around school again. The 80s were wild!
You make what you measure. We aren’t measuring whether gifted kids are challenged. That’ll never show up in data. But a kid who’s falling behind in reading who later catches up? That will.
That’s the reasoning anyway. It’s not like teachers are maniacally cackling over this situation - there’s significant turn-over. You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.
> You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.
IME the teacher unions are also opposed to advanced learning. It requires teachers to do more work if classes are heterogeneous, since they would need to make up more lesson plans and assignments. And the teacher unions are opposed to tracking because then teachers don’t all have the same mix of students, which leads to member complaints. At least this is what we’ve been told.
It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but that's some of it.
First, creating lesson plans/assignments (and grading them) is extremely time consuming. So it's completely reasonable for teachers protest having their workload increased.
Second, things like gifted classes and magnet schools create a "creaming" effect, where the best students are pulled from regular classes and either sent to a separate school or in separate classes with high performers. If you're a math or English teacher that's getting professionally evaluated based on your students' performance on standardized tests, you are strongly incentivized to keep any high performing student in your class - the existence of gifted classes and magnets hurts you.
In the tech world, we sort of had a version of this during the Ballmer era of Microsoft, where engineering managers were sometimes reluctant to grade top performers too highly in fear their best developers will get reallocated. Some managers would give elite team members bad rankings just to keep them captive.
I agree that it's reasonable for teachers to not want to do more work. And I understand that creating tracks will separate students — but that doesn't require creating the perverse incentives you describe.
Teachers can simply be evaluated based on how their students do, relative to the students' prior performance. This wasn't a problem before 2014, when CA made GATE optional. Everyone understood that different teachers had different cohorts with different average abilities.
The teachers with lower-performing students weren't dinged because their students scored lower than the students in advanced classes. Instead, teachers could specialize in remedial, typical, or advanced learning.
It's partially babysitting. But also waiting for them to mature. They might make a great mechanic, truck driver or factory worker, all valid good and required jobs, but at 13-14 it is unsafe or they're not mature enough to drive or operate heavy machinery.
Slow walking someone through learning a vocation over 2-4 years while sprinkling in some academic outcomes is a good option.
> Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.
This is largely a legacy of state testing and “accountability” regimes which were accelerated by national policy like NCLB and focus intense pressure on minimizing the number of students testing below grade level.
> If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".
Maybe, but at the same time it's OK if your gifted kid only has a PhD and a high paying job but not a Nobel prize. Whereas it's a bit problematic for society if Donny Dumbass spends his life being a burden to everyone because he remains problematic...
Humanity itself is at risk from various extinction level events.
If you insist that it's okay for all gifted students to never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries, we're likely extinct sooner rather than later.
The nongifted people, even if all completely stop contributing to society, would not result in an extinction.
IOW, we are all relying on the gifted people to save us. Hobbling gifted people even slightly has a far worse impact than not helping non gifted people.
Considering humans evolved here I doubt it's possible to reach a compatible, alternative planet. And even if we could how likely are humans to survive there if they cannot live sustainably on their home planet?
I believe we are facing a strong case of naive techno-optimism. I'll give it a go: a 19 yo genius may find a way to capture kilograms of carbons in each leaf of peppermint through a new kind of photosynthesis, and by showing it to the world, we'll all be able to reproduce it and meet our carbon neutrality by 2050. And my uncle Joe, enlightened, will start spending his days drinking peppermint tea instead of making millions trading disposable plastic products from East Asia.
Modern life, seems to me, a product of many ungifted people and a few gifted folks toiling for centuries. That includes relatively unskilled workers and those with decades of education.
Gifted people only ever educated and working in ivory towers would starve long before enhancing life for anyone, except for the efforts of their 'lessers'.
"You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government.
The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.
Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones.
The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks."
- C.S. Lewis (in the voice of screwtape), almost 80 years ago.
> to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons
Less developed children are challenging to the system, but it gets worse: there are children who are so violent that they essentially attend prison schools. Since this is CA, they are obviously not called that. Pretty sure that this is a massive drain on the educational budget.
> leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged.
At my childrens school, as work is often online they allow them to go ahead in modules. The teacher mist open it for them though to have some control.
Some people in year 7 are doing year 9 work. Great for challenging them but it will be curious where this goes as you might get some people finishing all of highschool classes for a particular subject quite early and need to keep educating and challenging them.
For english they have a program where you can finish your end of school exams for this subject the year early, freeing time for other subjects.
Grade school is less a place for learning as it is a socialization experiment. Did you actually advance your level in any subject during grade school? Did your kid advance above their grade because of the grades that came before it? What's the utility in the school servicing your special child's aptitude when the school had nothing to do with either their current level or the lack of others'? But there are advanced level classes in some cases
If grade school is for socialization than it should be focused on socialization. Group activities, athletic competitions, creative projects, theater performances, etc.
Well, in many cases, it is. If the opposite of socialization is exclusively grinding problems, grade school is often quite closer to what you mention unless you deliberately seek a different style.
Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.
If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".