The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
teachforamerica.org
teachforamerica.org
I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do, but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer either. Everybody knows someone else that is better at math than they are, and someone who is not as good. It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them. Some of them have doubled down on woke-speak around "equity" for so long, that they cannot backtrack and accept that merit and performance exist. Doing this would put them at odds with their current in-group and likely their only source of meaning and "friendship" with anyone.
It's the same crowd of people who just lost their very progressive DA in San Francisco during last night's recall election outcome. They keep doubling down on their policing strategy (see: no policing strategy) and being soft on crime and consequently crime has increased significantly. The same group of people that plugs their ears to reason and reality on why policing is necessary are the same group of people that are always trying to drag everyone down to their same floor level.
There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?
It has not. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...
Consider why you think that it has, and whether you are also getting your information from an in-group that is primarily motivated by ideology and not reality. (Just a different one from the one you criticise)
A more reasonable school, after the elementary level, should mix and match kids, so that older kids with more advanced skills could help those who hasn't still advanced as much. It should allow to take courses, much like a college does, in whatever order a kid (and their parents) find most beneficial, independent of the age, with the goal to pass a GED test by the end of the school. Even better, it should be possible to pass a basic or an advanced level of a test for a subject, independent of the age. The presence of several parallel tracks for a subject solves the issue with gifted kids and struggling kids alike.
I don't think I have all the answers, but the standard school education system was invented in Prussia in the middle of 18th century, and is pretty obviously inadequate for today; ask teachers, students, or parents. Though maybe for some parents it looks adequate because it functions as a storage facility for kids for the day. But kids could spend their time much better than that.
"Zone of Proximal Development" [1]
Montessori schools do this.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
Somehow, though, I passed a test in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. Suddenly stuff started making sense, and I could see a point to it. You could actually solve an interesting problem. It wasn't just regurgitation of facts. It became more about thinking and connecting concepts and even being creative. I started getting As in math, and continue to do well in High School with geometry, trig, and calculus, but up until algebra was introduced I would certainly not have demonstrated a gifted ability in "math".
This is why equity is a bullshit goal.
You just can't do that, no matter how much you want it. Some teachers are better than others, they can't all be elite. The teachers union wouldn't let you sack all the mediocre teachers, and even if you somehow could fire them, where would all the new elite teachers to replace the mediocre ones come from? If you just sacked the bottom 50% of teachers and doubled the class size of the better half, I think classroom conditions would certainly deteriorate.
That is not obvious to me. It is a known psychological phenomenon that children will meet external expectations, high or low. In sports it's commonly referred to as playing up or down to your opponent. Other countries have much higher standards and have not seen an explosion in children struggling. What is most likely to happen is... nothing. The percentage of kids exceeding and struggling will stay largely the same.
This doesn't seem to be much of a problem in countries like Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, etc. which have much tougher cirricula for their average students than the average American public school. And before someone makes the funding argument, the US pays about double the cost of education that Japan does for dismal results.
As is typical, the concept get confused because one assumes that gifted programs correctly track students based primarily on ability, whereas in my personal experience and looking at the data, they primarily track students based on socioeconomic status.
It’s not about denying that some students have the ability to excel in subjects in comparison to their peers. The question is whether or not the current system actually achieves it’s stated goals.
My daughter is in the high school math club, so she frequently talks with math teachers and they reveal what state or county school districts are intending for future high school students. Earlier this week, a teacher was ranting to the club about new guideline goals that either the state/county was pushing, that all (most) incoming 9th graders take Algebra 1.
I understand they're attempting to narrow the achievement bandwidth in public schools on the basis of race, but this appears to be creating societal inefficiencies and decreasing equity overall. Sort of like, how someone could have a PhD in physics and working as a middle school science teacher, they'd effectively be underemployed or underutilized in society due to lack of demand for particle physicists; however, unlike limited particle physicist positions, in the students case, they don't have to be limited or underachieving in classes. Further, the additional problem this push for public school equity is decreasing equity, without imposing the same limitations on private school, homeschool, or charter school students, this mechanism is increasing the divide between the haves and have-nots. Either lens you evaluate this from, either equity or utilitarian perspective, this is a poorly executed plan that isn't going to achieve success in equity; unless, equity strictly means racial categories and doesn't include wealth/income inequality.
I hate to say it, but Algebra 1 by 9th grade is NOT a very high bar. In my area, the majority of students should be studying algebra no later than this. IMO, if most of the students aren't making it this far, something is wrong in the system.
Maybe the bottom 20% shouldn't, but talking about algebra 1 in 9th grade like it's a stretch goal is a danger sign to me.
America keeps conflating equity for equality.
The most advanced students will find one way or another to educate themselves. I think our school systems should focus on the middle: the students who could realize their full potential if they are sufficiently challenged. They are the group that do not always get STEM naturally but can eventually get it if pushed enough with the right material and exercises. Watering down curriculum means the students in the middle would lose the chance to truly grow, or their parents resort to tutoring and we get back to the discussion of how social-economic status matters in education.
If schooling doesn't matter for the brightest students, why does everyone think Caltech is such a great school?
The other thing is related to tracking. That is where Algebra comes in. Not all students will take it at the same time. Instead, students are segregated into separate tracks, one of which will start with Algebra in middle school and eventually end up taking Calculus by the end of high school. The other won't get to Algebra until high school and will never take Calculus at all.
These are separate phenomena, but the author here is drawing an analogy between the reasons given for eliminating both GATE programs and educational tracking systems (as in, both are seen as being racially biased).
The alternate view is that we should very much do this as a meaningful challenge to K-12 math teachers. People throughout the Western world, at all levels of underlying aptitude (whatever might be meant by that), manage to learn their basic intro to algebra in junior high. It's not rocket surgery, FFS!
I disagree with this statement, especially at the level of arithmetic and basic algebra. While math "ability" is likely a bell curve I would wager that it is centered well above Algebra I, and whether a kid at that age is "Good" or "Bad" at math is much more mindset/perception.
Because this sentiment is exactly opposed to a dominant philosophical framework built upon the axiom that, because all people are exactly identical, any difference in outcome is necessarily the result of hidden power structures.
The replacement of “equality” with “equity” is a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with Marxism. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are American principles, but they are fading as equality of outcome is held up as the only acceptable standard.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an outspoken Soviet dissident, famously wrote: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
Much greater energy and intelligence is required to advocate for equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes, and much greater worldly experience is required to value equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes. It will always be easy for politicians to set people against each other and dilute the common good by pushing Marxism. It is the path of least effort and greatest personal return for low quality leaders.
I went to school in Eastern Europe in the eighties. We had algebra (and separately geometry) since 7-th grade. Also physics, chemistry and biology. And it was an ordinary secondary school. Some kids were struggling, also depends on how good/bad the teacher was. But majority was coping with the load alright.
> My greatest concern? The admirable but demonstrably false notion that school systems can fully implement an “all kids are gifted” framework that attempts to address the issue of eliminating the need for specialized gifted programming.
When I went to high school, the expected path from Freshman year (9th grade) to Senior year (12th grade) was Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, MATH ELECTIVE (IIRC, that last could have been Trigonometry).
My middle school didn't have 8th grade Algebra I. But another middle school that fed the high school I went to did have it. And from what I remember, it was available to honor students as well as those in gifted programs.
So I don't agree that it should be mandated, that seems a step too far, but it's probably a good option to have for those who can handle it. And the number of students who can handle it is probably greater than the number who it is being offered to currently. So I don't agree with removing it entirely either.
In my experience tutoring remedial math students just had a hole somewhere or never practiced. Once both of those were addressed (with lots of hard work) they passed just fine.
Because that would be an admission that we can't just pile 30 students in the same class and in doing so would mean that we need more teachers and nobody wants to spend the money to do that.
a definition of exclude is “deny (someone) access to or bar (someone) from a place, group, or privilege.”
no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that? “sorry, you’re not allowed to take this class; you’re black.” it’s like everyone who writes this lives in their mom’s basement and has never gone outside and thinks if they just make the boring and tired declaration that non-black/non-brown people are evil/racist, that it absolves them of every other sin they commit, like not caring about homeless people or the fact that everything they own is made by chinese children. in reality it accomplishes nothing except complacency and it helps the people raping the world continue their work of exploiting everyone.
> no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that?
A test for a gifted class that measures _knowledge_ rather than the _ability to learn_ will create an "elite" class full of students whose parents had them study the advanced topics. Even if they were not "good" at it. In this case high SES -> advanced knowledge -> good test scores -> elite class that excludes Black students primarily because the entrance test results are predicted by SES.
There a number of large benefits to gifted, not the least of which is it changes the character of a program/school. If you are surrounded by bright students with nerdy academic interests it's suddenly acceptable to nerd out on things. This single fact may be more valuable to the development of the student than the entire program itself. Outside of gifted, schools have substantial challenges with creating environments where academic excellence is encouraged and rewarded not only by the schools grading system but also by social behaviour of peers. While bullying has gone down, and acceptability of geeky interests have improved in the past 30 years there is still nothing close to a gifted program from encouraging and accepting academic excellence.
As someone who just barely missed the gifted cutoff, my schooling was much too easy and I basically never had to study for tests or exams. I ended up developing poor academic habits that ultimately hurt me when the difficulty got hard enough that intellectual horsepower needed to be combined with hard work. I think being challenged early and often would have changed this behaviour substantially. Even creating an environment where I wanted to be around other students enough to participate in more extra-curriculars could have helped. I worry that we are going to create a lot of bright but unmotivated students by offering years of programs that are too easy for them. There are consequences far beyond just having these students occasionally act out out of boredom and I think it's a very bad idea to create an educational culture that suggests bright people should be lazy. This is ultimately what the removal of gifted programs do because classroom teachers generally aren't given adequate prep time or other resources to properly offer enrichment. I've even known some principals who encouraged their teachers to not offer enrichment as it created problems in later grades when other teachers didn't offer similar enrichment and parents expected it.
When you're little, you self-learn that if it's easy, it's not worth doing. If it's hard, it's probably impossible anyway. Your life is good and filled with fun. As you get older, when things get hard in school, you avoid or fail them with no strategies or habits around completing difficult schoolwork (which often feels as rewarding as easy schoolwork). Who would want to stop having fun? This is sometimes referred to as, the curse of the gifted.
I was randomly pulled from normal classes in order to hang out with a few other gifted students and do weird puzzles or whatever. Then later I’d have to figure out from classmates what I missed, including what homework to do etc. My social skills already sucked, and being labeled as special to the classmates whom I’d have to spend most of the day with certainly didn’t help.
I’m sure there a ways to do it better, but having no gifted program is better than a bad gifted program.
Well, yes, if by equity you mean the race composition of every class equals the race composition of the school as a whole. But shouldn't equity in education mean that every student gets the instruction and support they need to achieve their potential, insofar as the school is able to provide it, without respect to their race, class or sex?
There were no gifted programs or classes when and where I attended school (6 decades back, in a very rural part of the Great Plains). But there was a teacher in my school who took it upon herself to run a reading lab that you could get into with the blessing of the school principal. Mostly she taught remedial reading to those who needed extra help, but one of her 5 periods each day was called "advanced reading lab" and into that group she took students who showed exceptional or nascent exceptional intellectual capability. In the guise of teaching us to read better and faster, she exercised our brains with science, history, and even math. She's the only teacher I remember by name, and she did more to launch my success in life than any 5 other teachers combined, behind only my parents. Because she made going to school worthwhile - interesting, exciting, and mind-expanding. (She also taught me to read 2000 words per minute with retention, which was a hell of a useful skill, but only a skill - the world of knowledge and thinking was her real gift).
You’re taking about equality. Equity is always just a euphemism for equality of outcome. Which can only ever be achieved by lowering the outcomes of top performs to the same level as the lowest performers.
Can you expand upon this and/or link to any resources related to the method?
So, I can tell you a little about the methods, but that's all. First, we spent a small, but meaningful amount of time each day in drills to train our eyes and brains to rapidly recognize and interpret increasingly longer strings of symbols. This was done by flashing a sequence of numbers (first) or letters (as we got better) on a screen for a set period of time, and having students transcribe them onto paper. As we achieved accuracy for a given flash (say 5 numbers for .1 second), the flash interval was incrementally reduced, and the length of sequence increased. I don't recall the flash intervals, but I do recall that at the end of a year of doing these exercises for a few minutes each school day, I was routinely reading 15 or more digit sequences accurately in a single, very short glance.
We also used machines (entirely mechanical) that built on that ability by scanning lines of text we were to read in multi-word chunks on a timed basis. The idea was to take the sight interpretation skill and extend it to reading phrases in a single glance, rather than reading and interpreting single words.
And finally, there was application of these skills to real texts, for comprehension. Comprehension was of course focused on getting the meaning of a text, but also on vocabulary. New vocabulary was introduced in relatively simple texts, and re-enforced over time.
I have no idea how well all this worked for average students. It worked beautifully for me, though.
Gifted programs are used to advance and maintain the status-quo of segregation in our schools. The correlation between medium household (of which Black americans are at a disadvantage) and acceptance into the gifted program is much stronger than the correlation between merit and acceptance. I've spent my life in this system and I can tell you with one hundred percent confidence that the reason many if not most of my black peers don't get into these programs is not due to any lack of merit or intelligence.
Now lets look at the second assumption, that the gifted programs provide a higher level of education. This is not true. What happens is that gifted programs get significantly higher funding than other schools and so the gifted programs can afford to give a good well rounded education, which is a good thing! The problem is that so many of our schools, especially in Brown and Black neighborhoods) are completely underfunded, without enough teachers or resources. This of course perpetuates the systemic inequities that begun this cycle in the first place thus repeating the whole cycle.
When we are calling for an end to "gifted" programs in New York, it is not because we "hate smart kids" but because we want resources to be evenly divided so that everyone can get a well funded well rounded education, not just the rich kids in gifted classes. This is not a single issue but is a larger component of an attempt to dismantle segregation in public schools. It drives me crazy to no end to see smart people fall into the ideological trap of believing gifted programs are something they aren't.
Ok, then that's what you should ask for. Ask for a more even distribution of resources.
If you single out the elimination of a specific program as a proxy for what you really want, you shouldn't be surprised when the discourse fixates on your targeting that program -- especially when it's a program for gifted students. By doing that you've made it very easy for your opponents to portray you as someone who would rather bring all students down to the same level than allow differences in ability to be cultivated.
The problem is that in New York at least the gifted programs are the direct mechanism by which rich parents uphold the status quo of segregation. The gifted prgrams are not a proxy, they are a symptom. As I said elsewhere in this thread: we are looking for a fair allocation of resources to actually give schools the ability to meet every student where they are and to engage them wherever that is.
The fact that gifted programs would be needed at all is a failure of our public school system. Every school should have the resources to adequately engage and educate every student regardless of their academic starting point.
This means if you hear "eliminate this program because equity," and you grew up in the midwest where the gifted program didn't function at all like you describe or require much funding at all, this sounds completely nonsensical because we're not talking about the same thing.
I don't have an answer to this except that it's best discussed on a local case by case basis.
I later found out that test scores didn't entirely determine placement. Many of my peers were put in the gifted program after a parent advocated for them.
So yes, I appreciate these efforts to equalize opportunity. I'd like that the lessons offered in gifted programs can be offered to all students
And when gifted programs become screeners of affluence then there are going to be financially involved parents in the PTA which benefits the whole school. But if all of those parents end up at the "good" schools then those schools have considerably more funding (on top of the additional funding from the DOE) to allow them to actually educate their students. It is all a self reinforcing cycle that benefits a few and disadvantages many.
>Now lets look at the second assumption, that the gifted programs provide a higher level of education. This is not true. What happens is that gifted programs get significantly higher funding than other schools and so the gifted programs can afford to give a good well rounded education, which is a good thing!
You can't have it both ways. Is the education better or not?
I am saying that. "Gifted" programs and the schools that house them eat up a sizable chunk of funding.
I was wondering why it seems to be such a big topic for the US. Where I’m from, gifted classes are for 1% of the kids and about socializing and keeping them engaged - their life outcomes are not statistically likely to be better than the “normal” children either way.
When I read "gifted programs" I certainly would think that race or social background has zero influence on acceptance (even though they do influence kids access to education before getting there).
Reading what you said it seems logical that removing these programs is overall a good thing. But the way I see it the discussion about supporting kids that are truly gifted shouldn't be dismissed.
Maybe the solution would be to actually replace that program with something that's not perpetuating this segregation.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, so take it with a big grain of salt :)
Sure! Yes! We are looking for a fair allocation of resources to actually give schools the ability to meet every student where they are and to engage them wherever that is. All teachers want to be able to meet kids where they are, wherever they are, but they don't have the resources to.
You assert that the programs exist to segregate the school, with no evidence.
You assert that more resources are spent on gifted programs without any evidence.
You assert that gifted program both do and do not provide better outcomes. Evidence is not needed here since these statements oppose each other.
The only "evidence" you present is your opinion, anecdotal evidence of what you believe you saw in attending a NYC school.
Why should I have a worse outcome just to raise the mean scores in a place where everyone else isn't capable (due to harsh environment) or willing to learn? In addition, I think it hurts arguments for affirmative action. When people think of affirmative action / need-based approaches, they think of these other kids and not me. (You wouldn't be able to tell that I benefitted from those programs if you met me given my high school achievements from over a decade ago).
Russia, 1917. A commotion on the street. A lady asks a servant to find out what's going on. The servant returns:
- Revolution!
- That's fabulous. My grandfather was a revolutionary too. What do they wish to achieve?
- They want to make sure nobody is rich!
- That's odd... My grandfather wanted to make sure nobody is poor.
P.S: A sad irony is that Soviet education system was pretty good at maintaining gifted programs.
(edit: formatting)
Unfortunately, in Oregon, Kate Brown and her acolytes think that it is "equitable" to get rid of all basic learning requirements for high school graduation, because they are "white supremacy" or something.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dumbing-oregon-down-kate-brown-...
Were most of my gifted classmates wealthy? Yes. But being among them did more for my social mobility than anything else the school ever did.
To enforce this, you need to do two things: fire underperforming teachers, and their administrative overseers if the problem is pervasive, and pay teachers competitive salaries to attract the best talent to the job. Teaching is a skill, and highly skilled people should be well-compensated for their work. This is just labor market 101. If you don't value education, you pay low salaries to educators and you scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. If you do value education, then you make the job competitive by offering high salaries and eliminating underperformers.
Of course, maybe the politicians and bureaucrats and corporate executives don't actually want a highly educated competent population? Perhaps they'd prefer dumb sheep who believe whatever propaganda they're fed and whose consumption habits can be easily directed by skilled advertisers and marketers. Herds of compliant consumers who do as they're told, that's perhaps what elite leadership is after. Might be a conspiracy theory but there's some truth to it I think.
What it really looks like is one set of schools for the aristocrats, and another set of schools for the serfs, and it's more about maintaining a certain class structure, just as in late 19th / early 20th century British schooling systems.
"unacceptably white" is probably the most triggering thing in here but it actually represents the core of this conflict. The people trying to eliminate gifted programs are recognizing that many forms of power in society are zero sum. There are plenty of ways to get a great education but there is only one Harvard. Access to higher education opportunities is not only a pathway out of poverty but also to power within the institutions that hire grads.
The supporters of this form of affirmative action recognize that in a system where black/latino/indigenous students have structural disadvantages (poverty, prejudice, health, etc) but also operates as a pure meritocracy leads to a system where their racial group possesses disproportionately less power vs their population. Less kids in these groups in gifted programs means less of these kids going to top universities and on to top positions in government and business.
Many of you may see this as tribal or even perpetuating divides on race. But I'd respond that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. I'll use the black community because I'm a member of it. There is very little trust (myself included) that the white individuals who attend these programs and (hopefully) go on to succeed in higher education will use their influence for the benefit of blacks. I don't believe that because I think white people are racist, just self interested (like most people). That thinking extends to other groups like east and south Asians.
Personally my views on this are not to eliminate gifted programs, I benefited from one myself and know how important they are. Ideally we'd do what many others here suggested and just build more programs. If there is this much of a fight about it obviously there is a lot of demand for schools where Algebra I is taught in the 8th grade. So let's make more of those. That won't solve the issue at the college level though. There is a reason there are not 50 Harvards and its because the access/power/influence that degree offers is zero sum. Until we figure out a way to ration out that power in a way that people think is fair we're going to see constant contention over it.
I would wholeheartedly support removing limits on high school sports participation. The free market can suck away the elite athletes if they don't feel that high school sports are adequate for their professional development - that's fine, high school should cater to the majority, not an infinitesimal minority.
The absence of "Black and brown children" doesn't mean they were _excluded_, it means they weren't _selected_, or never applied in the first place.
If they were deliberately not selected because of their race, that's wrong and should be fixed pronto. And what are the odds of that? If they were not selected because they didn't meet the qualifications, well, that isn't the fault of the gifted program.
But it could be the fault of the government, the school administration, and an entire culture of systemic racism.
And so there could be several problems to address.
Does removing the gifted program solve any of the problems? No. Does it make some people feel as though they're doing good by equalizing everything? Yes.
Emphasis mine. The likely thing going on is something subconscious or unintentionally discriminatory, or somehow related to the home family life.
They also only placed me in the math/science gifted sections and would only be placed in the english/social studies gifted sections after much arguing as well.
Guess what? I excelled there too. Now to get away from anecdotes:
> If they were deliberately not selected because of their race, that's wrong and should be fixed pronto. And what are the odds of that?
between 50 to 70% on an individual basis if some studies are to be believed.
The New town we moved to is great. Oldest kid in accelerated programs, accelerating. Younger kid got the support she needed to catch up. :chefs_kiss:
Taking a step back, I don’t know how ‘equity’ got twisted into creating a lowering tide for all vs. a rising tide for all. So confusing.
This stratified structure also impacts how students view social interaction. Each grade is separate and therefore a different social entity. Sure, there are interactions across grades but it's still quite funny to see a sophomore make fun of a freshman when they're 15 and 14 years old respectively. To this day I know people who find it weird that I'm friends with someone who's 18 when I'm 23. I don't see why. We have the same interests and similar personalities. A few years difference doesn't matter.
Another is that equality is more important than progress. “Take from the rich and give to the poor.”
It seems mostly universal that we really want to raise the floor, not lower the ceiling. But so far history suggests that lowering the ceiling is easier.
Since the decision to value progress or equality higher is ultimately a personal moral choice, I don’t see this debate ever being resolved.
Happily, we don't live in a "one world government". So, if a society insists too much on silly ideas, it will be left in the dust by others.
There's a degree of nobility in the ideal of "no child left behind" - but childhood potential is not democratically distributed.
The smartest kids in schools should not be left to flounder on account of those who can't keep up.
A typical IQ threshold for a gifted program is 130. The average IQ overall is 100 with standard deviation 15. For black Americans the average score on IQ tests is about 85, which explains why blacks will be under-represented in gifted programs unless racial preferences are used. The makers of IQ tests would like to reduce racial differentials while maintaining the predictive abilities of their tests, but they have not been able to.
Additionally it identified that 83% of black students had access to a gifted program as opposed to 91% or something of white students.
Additionally the study cited says that they had several gaps in their data and used some statistical regressions to fill in those gaps. All this leads me to believe that we need to provide more access to gifted programs, and the problem isn't that we have a herd of racist teachers on the loose.
Those have very different solutions.
Just "make" everyone qualified / good at algebra?
I feel like that glosses over the ALL the challenges with education ...
Kids should be placed in the gifted/magnet track because of performance, and performance alone. I don't believe that a meritocracy is racist, sexist, or biased in an unfair way. Placing students in classes where they may under perform, and excluding kids who would perform well in an accelerated program are unfair, and a meritocracy mitigates both of these problems.
The article raised a good point about schools that marginalized groups would attend don't have a gifted program, precluding them from even participating. That can be addressed a couple different ways. Either redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present, or mandate the presence of a gifted program in all schools. There will, of course, be differing quality of the program from school to school, which would favor the former course of action.
Having gone through the "gifted program" through elementary and middle school, I can say that the only real differences I felt weren't related to curriculum, we were taught essentially the same things, with slight differences.
1. Smaller class size. In a class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, there was maybe 25 kids. 2. Less rowdy/troublemaking classmates. Made for less distractions. 3. Less busywork. The routine of getting a packet every night for homework was not something I had to suffer through like many friends I had that weren't in an accelerated program.
I don't believe you will ever truly eradicate inequities within public services, and the cost of private services, especially in education, preclude many from participating. That said, we should strive to mitigate them. My fear is that the steps taken to mitigate inequity will just move the availability of opportunity from one group to another, where the true solution is increasing the availability for all groups, and let performance be the selector of who is admitted to gifted/accelerated programs.
I am a bit hesitant of this. One valuable thing you get by having geographical schools is the same friends in and out of school. If you have friends at school but they are too far to hang out with or do homework with it can be bad for the kid learning social skills.
Mandating gifted classes as you mentioned seems better.
It's hard to take anyone who uses this term seriously. Latinos can't even pronounce it or care for it.
The broader issue is that having grammatical noun classes/gender serves an important purpose: not enforcing the patriarchy, but instead disambiguating different words and antecedents (basically adding an extra bit or two of information to a word).
I guess Teach for America assumes their readers are too dumb to notice?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001698629303700...
> Results indicated that parents perceived that their children were experiencing a decline in energy, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation to achieve at high levels and were beginning to disengage from the traditional curriculum [after elimination of the gifted programs].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...
> This review also found that the needs of many gifted and talented students are not addressed in many regular classroom settings across our country... A large body of research supports the finding that various forms of acceleration result in higher achievement for gifted and talented learners.
They are different concepts.
Equal Opportunity is a universal goal that as a society we continue to strive towards even though is impossible to fully achieve.
Equalized Outcomes (Equity) Is a dystopian nightmare.
The idea that all possible differentials between humans can and should have the same outcomes is ludicrous.
I work in education and will give you an example of this nonsense. In a well to do district in Chicago they found that Black students do not do as well in AP Calculus. After years of intervention the district achieved growth and had a record number of black student now enrolled in AP Calculus. However after five years and despite the increase of black students it was still found that white and asian students got higher scores on the AP exam.
The district solution was to cancel AP Calculus and now it is only offered as a third party online course not taught by the school district.
Why was the goal for all groups to have the same test scores? Just absolute rubbish.
I do. Or rather, I doubt the good intentions of the decision makers. I don't think educators are making these decisions. The more I experience the public education system through my child (I did not experience it myself, as I was homeschooled), and the more stories I hear from parents, the more it looks like school administrators are politicians looking to cut costs and get on a track to end up in city council. The actual welfare of the children doesn't really look like it ends up a part of the equation.
By high school I'd learned to read the textbook, ace the tests and do fuck-all for homework to the frustration of every educator at the school trying to teach me hard work alongside the actual material. There were actually AP classes in high school that I never qualified for because I never learned to actually work at school, and by high school I didn't really care. I was completely unprepared when Junior year in college, it actually got so hard that I had to study. I almost flunked out.
I can empathize with the gifted kids that are just a different shade, not getting challenged, basically getting the small town experience I got. It is a ton of potential being wasted. I agree with the article, throwing away gifted programs and just lowering the bar is a mistake, but raising everyones bar to the gifted level... that's going to leave some of the most vulnerable behind which I don't think should be done either.
Maybe working to shore up the problem of black/brown kids having equal test scores and not getting into a gifted program is the first hurdle, and then we can look around and see what to do next.
The IQ distribution is different across race groups, therefore you expect to have more representation of certain groups relative to others.
It's obvious that Asians --I am not Asian-- perform extremely well in IQ tests compared to other groups. Same with Ashkenazi Jews. These groups would have, relatively speaking, a higher representation. It would also be more male than your typical classroom.
Just like we have "physically gifted programs" in sports, and in some Blacks are overly represented. People don't seem to bat an eye for such "inequity", because it is understood that, on average, Blacks have superior athletic ability in some sports.
People really have a hard time understanding basic statistical facts, and they take these things personally. When we compare average heights across countries, nobody gets offended because everybody is aware of their own height. A 6'4 American is just as tall as a 6'4 Indonesian, so people don't take personally. Somehow average IQ is this thing that people take personally as if it was an indictment on their intelligence.
Besides, there is much more than IQ. Plenty of people with average IQs are successful. Sure, the premium on IQ increased in our society, but there is so much variance in activities and other inherent or acquired characteristics, it is really not that big of a deal.
With that being said, it is important for a nation to identify exceptional talents --including intelligence-- and nurture these individuals so they maximize their potential. It's good for them, it's good for society as well. Recognizing that people should have different educational experiences is the right thing to do.
When different groups have different home and social environments, it is expected that there will be IQ differences.
It is strange that people can be vocal about the harsh conditions difference groups are subjected to, but in denial about the damage done by those conditions.
Basically if only 2% of student taking algebra 1 are black then the solution is : 1- not to Remove algebra 1 completely. 2- not to force a % of the algebra 1 student to be black by accepting student that are not ready for this level of Math 3- not too invent a new (non-racist) version of algebra 1 that is easier to understand .
The solution is simply to embrace asynchronous development!
If one student test score below average in English and Geography but above average in math. He should still be allowed to take Algebra 1.
Also algebra 1 should be offered as an option in all neighborhood (including poor one) even if only a single student in that neighborhood would like to take it.
I see being allowed to take the class if you qualify as a Right similar to the right to Vote. So the parent should not be forced to drive the student to another school because the local school prefer to not offer the class.
When I was growing up in NYC I was in a gifted program, and the average family was donating several thousand dollars a year per child. There were benefits such that if one child was in the program, other siblings automatically got in. This allowed us to have privately funded music program alongside privately funded teaching assistants in every classroom.
Source? It's certainly not the case for me individually, having been an immigrant child who got through on my own since my parents didn't know enough English to help me on homework and we were too poor to afford tutoring.
According to several studies, the greatest predictor of early academic advancement is the financial status of the parents. While scientific hubris and narcissism tend to quickly dominate competitive environments in colleges, the irrational pretense of a meritocracy quickly degenerates when you enter the faculty area. Note that most academically successful students will do well regardless of the curriculum or instructor, and the funding they bring in later makes anyone popular with staff.
I speculate one could likely outrun a one-legged physicist or a one-legged golden retriever just as quickly… but not escape their own cognitive biases.
Each of us was born into this world through a randomized process that was not created by humankind: the genes you were born with, the environment you were given before you could manage your own affairs, the accumulation of genetic mutations over the course of countless millennia that resulted in who you are today. This is the opportunity you were born with.
To think that we can compensate for this random process with any level of precision is to wage war with nature, and I'd bet that nature will win.
It is an admirable goal, and certainly we can take steps to reduce inequality of opportunity. But true equality of opportunity, or anything close to it, is unattainable in this universe.
Your next paragraph focuses on inevitable natural inequalities. Fine. Not everyone is Einstein, Picasso, or Jordan.
But what about SOCIETY is natural? Is society itself fair? Or does it include inevitable unfairnesses created to perpetuate "natural inequalities"?
I think this is the key. Obviously eliminating gifted programs and just tossing those resources into the wind is bad. But if instead we eliminated gifted programs, shifting those resources into remedial programs and then made the normal classes more difficult that seems like a solution that would satisfy almost everyone.
I pity the actual researchers in these fields. Must be tough to work in an area that everyone has an opinion on.
- former children
- attended public education
- hated or loved aspects of that education
Of course they're going to discuss ideas.
The teachers at the well-funded, near-apex "Magnet" school in North Carolina were generally better and had more time with students... especially in Science/Math. Teachers had more adult expectations of kids, but most importantly they were _consistent_ with their expectations and cadence of material presented.
Teachers at the under-funded, near-loss of state funding school in Tennessee were kind, "normal" people who happened to go to college at some point in the past. Primary detractors from the classroom were that student's low-expectations often led to large portions of uncontrolled "worksheet" tasks. Work was not graded well, inspected well or feedback given in a timely manner. I personally graded all the science teacher's Junior level homework as a Senior. She often didn't appear to understand the subject and was doing her best to not let the bottom students fall through the cracks.
Elimination of gifted programs, in my opinion, is the best option. The best students will learn what they need to, their parents will make sure of it, and the best teachers need to work with the worst students at this age group.
A very similar debate can be in sports. Should we have a single league or a tiered league?
I've seen siblings with very different performance and outcome from the young age. Obviously they are both genetically close and were raised by the same parents.
There are certainly differences in people but the reason might not always be some "genius" gene. It could be very circumstantial. For example they were grouped with people who happened to do poorly in whatever was being measured so they were always the top of their group (academically or athletically) in their formative years. That provided them with a lot of self confidence throughout childhood which led them to believe they can achieve anything and always spent countless hours making sure that's true unlike their sibling who never developed the self esteem and settled for less all their lives. Maybe they didn't get too stressed when faced with challenges due to genetic or childhood differences.
So IMO there should be separate leagues (just like sports teams) but also some mobility across these clubs in case someone possesses the skills and has the motivation to compete at the higher level.
I've heard this a lot - it's always someone else's fault. In my experience in school, the disruptive students were not the gifted ones. They were the ones who never experienced negative consequences for their disruptive behavior. Neither the teachers, administration, nor parents ever disciplined them.
The unchallenged gifted students would read a book during class, or draw art in their notebooks, etc.
This essentially creates a two-tiered schooling system, and since it's very tightly tied to income, this further exaggerates economic disparity, which is closely tied to race.
My city's school system is comprised mostly of minorities (~80% black, hispanic, and asian) and the gifted programs are predominantly serving wealthy white kids (~50%).
We also have exam schools. The most popular exam school in my area receives tens of millions of dollars in private donations. If you combined the private fundraising of the bottom 90% of schools in the district, it's still less than this one school. This school is also 50% white in a school system where only 15% of the kids are white. So we've essentially created a private school in a public system.
I understand why people don't want to eliminate gifted programs, but they are further exaggerating economic (and racial) disparities. I have not seen any good solutions for this, but it does feel incredibly unfair.
Having been someone who was poor and happened to be in a gifted program, I personally don't think the benefit is worth the divide.
Of course, the shell game has continued. Recall how often you used to hear about equality and not equity, and yet somehow those goalposts have shifted in the last five years. Equity has somehow come to mean that you'll get "your share" of the pie even if you haven't contributed, or despite being completely untalented.
We should sort (not segregate, never that) students by race (self-reported, of course), and then grade such that only a certain percentage in each bucket get As, a few more get Bs, and so on. This ensures a perfect equity balance. If we do this for each grade and each subject within a grade, well, we ought to have very equitable outcomes. Diana Moon Glampers will shotgun down the grades of the Asian "Schroedinger's Minority" group to be in line with everyone else's.
Can't imagine that this won't work out.
This is why equity programs are controversial. When skeptical people hear "equity," they think of the allegory about crabs in a bucket. Too often, instead of helping more crabs escape the bucket, our society creates policies that make it harder for any of them to escape the bucket, or pick and choose which crabs get to escape the bucket.
Just black and brown, the rest of children are on their own, right?
1. Students identified as gifted who do well because of their gifted program/who would have done well if they were in a gifted program. 2. Students identified as gifted who would do well regardless of whether they had a gifted program, even if they might do marginally better in a gifted program. 3. Students not identified as gifted who would benefit from additional resources/gifted peers in their non-gifted program 4. Students not identified as gifted who would not particularly benefit from gifted peers/already have adequately resourced classrooms.
I would have a hard time believing that the number of students in any of those categories is negligibly small. So then the question becomes how do we, as a society, best balance the tradeoffs between them. For any given student, we don't generally have the ability to try it both ways and see what would have been better, and of course any given parent will tend to prefer to take any tiny marginal improvement in opportunity for their children, regardless of whether it's net beneficial for society. But some of the role of society is to not allow people to take actions with mismatched externalities.
If there are more #3 students than #1 students (and/or the benefits to society are larger), and if we cannot distinguish between #2 students and #1 students, then yeah, let's get rid of gifted programs.
For myself, I think I was probably a #2—I had affluent, educated parents, benefited from significant extra-curricular enrichment, and could probably have had more enrichment with several tens of thousands of extra dollars per year of saved tuition. At what point could my parents have known that I was a #2?
This doesn't seem logical at all. It sounds like sweeping under the rug. I'm assuming that what is obvious here is that these programs reproduce inequity, and are not a cause of it.
[...] As these scholars argue shutting down gifted programs only deepens the inequities for brilliant, underrepresented students of color and adds another barrier to unlocking their genius.
Does one really need scholars for this?
Its antithetical to the American dream (i.e. an equal starting point for everyone) but we must provide different paths better suited to acknowledging reality and providing reasonable outcomes. Staff them with job descriptions fitting the actual need, and work from there.
It's rare that a Gifted Program simply gets eliminated due to inequity with no replacement. The school district almost always proposes an alternate program to replace it. (The author is the CEO and Founder of one, though he does acknowledge this near the end.)
The author also links to two examples of districts with reduced or eliminated Gifted Programs. But one article says the Anchorage program was cut because of a budget shortfall, and the other (Boston) said they suspended their advanced learning program only at the city-wide level mainly because COVID made it hard to administer!
OTOH I have seen students unwilling to attend a particular school b/c it has a reputation for behavioral problems and also low testing scores. So best spend money on improving education for all.
I would like to see more usage of an old tradition: better students helping others during class. This promotes cameraderie and provides different perspectives for both parties. It always helps to "stand in another man's shoes" and see the world from that new perspective.
Promote that camaraderie all the way down. Let them see what it's like in another's shoes. Etc. All of your arguments for putting the gifted in normal classes, but applied to normal students and children with learning dysfunctions.
Gifted students are special needs students. They exist on the entire other end of the spectrum than those with learning dysfunctions.
Sure, that's fine.
>"Gifted students are special needs students. "<
Gifted students can usually take care of themselves.
Kids should be able to form friendships with those at different levels and help their friends, but shouldn't be asked to be their teachers or mentors. it's incredibly unfair to require students in the class to function as teachers. They are there to learn, and if they've learned everything on the curriculum, they should be able to learn more.
Teachers used to handle this by letting the kids have 'free time' after assignments to go to the library, or whatever. Gifted programs do this even better by putting them in a class with kids at a similar level so they are less likely to need special treatment or to be called 'smart'. This can actually help them realize early in life that they aren't automatically special because they're at the top of their class.
I think people hear "gifted" and think they are being left out, but that's not supposed to be the case. Sort of the difference between classroom and home school, sometimes one works better for a kid than the other, not that one is necessarily better than the other.
This sums up my concerns with detracking.
I'm hoping the SF DA recall election is a sign that we're going to see the pendulum swing in the other direction as more people realize that the progressive platform is toxic trash.
Anecdotes, I know, but I was terrible at math compared to the kids in high school who could all just memorize and regurgitate (I have ADHD & very poor working memory, and no random-access). These kids also regularly looked up answers to future quizzes they found online and bsed their way through. But, in college, which involves a more abstract and rigorous (and dare I say meaningful) understanding of the material, I excelled while many of my former colleagues fell behind as these were 'new problems' they couldn't just look up because they didn't have answers.
My point is intelligence is not a scalar axis in which some people are 'gifted' and some people are not, it's a multidimensional series of mental configurations that must be adapted to in the classroom and outside. Hire better teachers and pay them more is the only concrete thing I can think of. Gifted programs aren't the way as they're entirely arbitrary to a specific environment. The wrong teacher for the right student will ultimately make the student worse for it, and these programs don't account for how truly uninspired some teachers can be. Not to mention parents, or availability of learning materials, quality of libraries, etc etc.
That said, HN has historically done a very good job in policing this through the vigilance of its admin team. I wouldn't be surprised if this discussion pales in comparison to the stuff they've axed.
As a father of a decently-gifted son who gets bored to death at school and who's bombarded with brainless homework to stay "out of trouble" when not in school, I can tell the California education is the worst I can imagine in a civilized country!
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores
But even if we supposed that the top 10% of Black students were slightly less qualified than the top 10% of White students (say, due to socioeconomic factors), the program would simply adjust towards the mean student. So maybe the program slows down a bit, but it's still an accelerated program, and now it's helping to correct those socioeconomic disparities.
The only case where this argument would break down is if the top 10% of Black students were _severely_ less qualified than the top 10% of White students, in which case the program would likely fail. But it seems pretty clear that this isn't the case.
That gifted students are disproportionately white or Asian reflects the value placed on education not racism. Outcomes will never be equal in a fair society. Provide equal opportunity. Those that take advantage will thrive. Those that don't, will not.
I think it’s grotesque how many privileged people are happily destroying the lives of others (often, those they pretend to care about) so they don’t have to think critically about or be uncomfortable thinking about race.
Seattle is the epitome of “privileged White liberals hurt everyone for their comfort”:
The bourgeois have become the baizuo.
It's very tempting (edit: for me) to lazily rest on the caricature, "I don't care how many people I hurt, as long as I can help just one!"
Despite that, or maybe because of that, I make a conscious effort to understand where the other side is coming from. I figure there's little chance of finding a compromise if I can't even comprehend their viewpoint.
So far I haven't been very successful. Maybe it's because the chasm is so large regarding values, understandings of human nature, predictions about how things will play out, etc. Or maybe I have blind spots that get in the way.
I wish I were better at this. It seems like at a very zoomed-out level we want similar things.
I understand it just fine, but there’s a fundamental disagreement, in that I don’t support racism nor view people in terms of “racial tribes” — while proponents of equity do. That’s the frame they’re working from when they say denying an Asian student a place at Harvard in favor of a less qualified black applicant is “good”: that it’s okay to harm that person because they’re yellow and we need to balance between yellows and blacks — to accomplish their Utopian vision. Collectivism when applied to race inevitably leads to institutional racism.
I don’t believe that’s something we need to “compromise” on: institutional racism was a disaster when we tried it before and modern attempts (eg, Netflix and Disney catering to those views) show that bigotry is widely unpopular and a poor way to run a company.
Sometimes you just have to say “bigotry is wrong and we’re not trying it again — no matter how you dress it up in the language of civil rights or how righteous you feel about being a bigot”.
Maybe more effort needs to go towards identifying these children earlier. A bright child is obvious, regardless of race.
That's a bit annoying since it doesn't take me directly to the source, but that's fine. Then I read the article and it says: "...found black students were 66 percent less likely to be assigned to a gifted program as white students. A black student whose test scores were on par with a white peer was still half as likely to be assigned to a gifted classroom." So, immediately the author of this original article saw the statistic 66% and the phrase "on par with test scores", and immediately conflated the two. According to this statement, it sounds like black students are actually 50% less likely to be identified as gifted with similar test scores.
I'm going to assume that's just an artifact of non-diligent research and not a blatant lie. Well, I'm still curious where these stats come from, so let's see where this article in the Tennesseean is sourcing this stuff from. They've got several links on this article and... every single link, with the exception of the link to a randomly named professor at Vanderbilt, lead to other articles on the Tennessean. Let's see if we can find where they obtained these stats from.
Alright, it looks like this is where they got it from[1], but I can't be 100% sure. This actually has a link to the paper as well[2]. It also has a nice disclaimer at the bottom of the article:
> One such additional factor impacting minority assignment to gifted programs is the availability of these programs in schools attended by minority students. Black students are less likely overall to attend schools that provide gifted programs. Ninety percent of white, 93 percent of Hispanic, and 91 percent of Asian elementary students attend schools with gifted programs, while only 83 percent of African American students do.
In other words, when the researchers took test scores into account for Hispanic students vs white students, the differences in the probability of being selected for a gifted program based on race reduced to 0%. With black students, they (seemingly) did not take into account whether a school even offered a gifted program. So they lumped together all the students who may not have had access to a gifted program, and then used that to conclude that teachers are racist and ignoring test scores.
Right off the bat I'm done with this article. If you're going to cite research, then cite the actual paper first of all. Second, look at how they gathered the data. Once you take the anomalies into account, it looks like we may not have racist teachers, but rather incomplete data. I wish we could just have an honest conversation about this stuff instead of all this stupid indirection and trying to hide the actual research being done because it doesn't fully support your claims.
The big issue here is a lot of black students don't have access to gifted programs, but instead we're fighting "racist" teachers that don't exist.
[0]: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2016/01/19/v...
[1]: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...
[2]: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
... Which would indeed be explained by the lack of gifted program at schools (can't assign a kid to a class that doesn't exists).
But there's also something the authors are omitting here: parental involvement. It's still the parent's decision to place their kid in a gifted program. And if there's no gifted program at the child's current school the parent will have to take the initiative to transfer his child to another school (and the child will probably object to it seeing as it means losing all his friends).
Parental involvement seems to be a large problem, as well as the lack of access to gifted programs in this case.
I suspect some of the students who weren't "getting it" were sandbagging it so they wouldn't be taught new material.
Uplift the individual first, trying to tweak things just to pump your numbers up seems like missing the point. I would rather treat education on a more personal outcome level than to treat it like a retail shop where I’m just trying to boost sales to meet some number/category goals.
(I think something similar can be said about this concept when it comes to politicians on TV recommending medical treatments or vaccines “for everyone” which I think is worth mentioning to help frame what I am getting at here but that’s another story.)
https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...
Boing Boing never ended up importing the comments from back then, and when I reached out to a contact about writing a follow up, the entire site was DDOSed.
Too many teachers purposefully abuse the gifted, then react irrationally to perfectly reasonable responses.
(I wasn't paid, and they put it out without my opt in, though to be fair, the editor did quite a bit of editing and free graphics work when they could have thrown the text up as is - a few of the wording changes were probably a good thing, looking back with the wisdom of a 30 something.)
On the other hand, never once have the folks who abused me ever apologized, and they continue to gaslight me and obstruct me to the point I'm considering moving to Italy.
I'm really sick of rude people, and I know it's hypocritical given some of the comments I make on the internet, but from early on in life I've had perpetual issues with folks who have a very high standard for my behavior, but not their own.
I have literal scars from some of what they did, but I also have enemies in the education and medical community who continue to engage in illegal, retaliatory behavior for my first amendment protected free speech.
I cannot emphasize enough how badly it backfired that neoliberals engineered society around the idea that you can't interact with people without permission, then melted down when my response, due to COVID, was basically "Fine, you're right, I have anger issues. I'm also not your caregiver, so keep back six feet."
I live in one of those top 100 zipcodes of USA with very small school district. It's plenty diverse racially but completely homogenous financially (i.e. pretty much everyone is rich). I have two kids just a year apart. One just barely didn't make it into gifted & talented program at grade 3, and another one definitely did, and has been in one since then. [Edit] oh and I was in gifted/advanced class myself from grade 7 on, but not here, but in Russia.
Plenty of parents pushed very hard for the kids to test into the gifted program, getting kids tutors and repeatedly testing in. There was one kid I remember who was bright as all get out but a complete asshole in social circumstances that apparently tested 3 times by his parents until he made it (2 highly focused doctors). My kid that tested in actually didn't start in it, but then about a month into 3rd grade complained that he was bored and we were able to move him in.
We've been involved with the teachers on both regular and gifted track. We - and every parent with child in gifted class - are not happy about our school sunsetting it for the district. No teachers - certainly no teachers of advanced classes - were consulted on this effort. None of them are getting any additional help in now trying to teach to all levels, and result will be (already is) a dilution of quality all around.
As with many schools everywhere, and with covid helping, there are some kids departing towards private education where your money talks and you do whatever. Where I live is increasingly unaffordable, too, so we have reduced enrollment because there are just less kids. I do fine but am not at economic place to afford private education, my offer to kids is where I live, which even with the dilution is still excellent education.
We (and almost every parent around us) are very engaged with schools with volunteering and additional funding. In fact I am a treasurer of the schools foundation that donates up to a $1 million/year to school for all kinds of things, mostly general funding. That tends to help but really, even our little district needs like extra ~$20mil to fund what we're supposed to.
Anyhow, on cleverness nd equity, what it boils down to me is that the world is becoming just one big lake now with talent being increasingly able to accrue huge benefits. This talent needs education and people who want best for their kids (including me) will do whatever is necessary to get that. This is why there is extra tutoring in china and private schools in USA and fancy boarding schools in UK for $$$. If public schools do remove this equity stuff, it'll just float via money to those other areas. It isn't bad/good, it just is.
Anyhow, a bit of a rant/laundry list, but here you have it.
For the benefit of non-US readers, know that how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property.
But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on. I say "vicious" because it is absolutely exclusionary to lower-income people who cannot possibly afford to live in these areas. And that's by design.
Twenty years ago Bush (43) passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which many dubbed the No Child Gets Ahead Act. A lot of this was also in the name of "equity".
I know people who send their children to public schools in NYC. NYC seems to be in the mood to eliminate these "gifted" programs because of "equity" too. The result? Those who can afford to send their children to private schools will. For those who are left, there are no more gifted programs.
How does that help anyone?
This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible:
on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
That's a ~$200 difference compared to $6000 per pupil, the 4th highest in the world: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Sp...
1) Public school 1. Covers most of the black and brown students of the area.
2) Public school 2. Covers most of the lower to middle class white students of the area.
3) Public school 3. Covers most of the higher class white students, especially families of a local high ranking private college.
4) Various private schools.
Options 1-2-3 have pretty much open enrollment, you can send your kid to any of them even if they are out of district, it just means you need to drive them (they won't qualify for bussing service).
If you look at public school 1, 2, and 3 - they have near identical spending per pupil. yes property taxes differ a little, but at the end of the day they are spending the same $ per pupil. However the test scores are vastly different. Test scores highly corelate with the % of students receiving free lunch, a fairly accurate proxy for poverty. The more kids in poverty, the worse test scores.
But because of this, many high achieving students that have money, are sent to option 4. Since this is the best education, if you can choose anything - you do this.
The next bucket of high achieving but wanting to save money send their kids to public school 3. It's reguarded as a "very good" free education. But this means the best kids are pulled out of the disticts for schools 1 and 2.
Schools 1 and 2 mostly just the people who are "left" in the district, without the inclination or money to go to choise 3 or 4.
Also you nailed it on the property tax point. Often overlooked as the biggest issue with education. A similar sized home in a good school district can be 2 or 3x as expensive as one in a mediocre school district.
Edit: when talking about property tax, I am referring to most suburbs, not NYC.
Seems like a lot of people are posting evidence that the property tax point is correlated with better schools but the funding difference is made up for by the stare and federal government. Interesting.
This is widely believed but no longer true. Federal and state funding have eclipsed local funding[0], and those funds are highly progressive. As a result, the highest-spending per capita schools are a mix of wealthy suburbs and failing urban districts. See this map[1] for examples, like the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion and the NJ city of Camden.
0: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/an-overview-of-the-f... 1: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/school-districts-ranked-by-th...
There's been zero change in results.
Yes, there are correlation between academic success and living in a rich neighborhood. Because yes, rich successful people often pass on their success to their children. But it's not solved by just dumping money on poor schools and hoping that would solve everything. It has been tried. Unions love it. Kids don't get any better. In fact, the whole "structural inequality" thing was roped in to explain this phenomenon - why tons of money are being spent with no observable result? Oh, it must be the invisible and immeasurable "structural inequality"! Which means we should shut down the gifted programs (so rare students that manage to overcome the awfulness of their schools have no recourse now), introduce race-based school policies and let students that barely can (and sometimes can't) read graduate. That surely will make them successful.
For extreme examples the PTA at PS 87, an elementary school in the Upper West Side raised 2 million dollars in 2019 (the last number I could find numbers for) [1]; our son's school (also in the UWS, where we live) raised a little shy of 1 million that same year, via an annual campaign, auction fund-raiser, and a few other events.
This money is used for many things, like capital improvements and enhanced services. At our son's school this was used to upgrade air conditioning in the building, pay for extra teaching assistants, and fund a library and librarian, amongst other things.
Numerous schools have no PTA fund-raising at all or raise a few thousand dollars, because they serve less-affluent areas. This kind of inequality is vexing because there isn't any taxing going on, just very active parent bases with money to give.
--
[1] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/12/2/21113658/find-out-how-muc...
Intelligence as tested by IQ by several govts and organizations is mostly genetic[1].
It means that the "nurture" part is not so much important as people think.
Heck you can even see with brothers / cousins the differences.
When we say "gifted" it means we are selecting and optimizing for IQ. Thus the "inequality". You will always see more Asians.
To make more equal we need to remove/disqualify asians.
If a profession/skill is very related to a characteristic/feature as IQ then I want the best there.
Not everyone is equal and not everyone has the same skills. If you check [1] you will see they studied TWINS adopted in families. There is no better "social intervention" than adopting someone, provide the same food/structure that all on family have.
Then you can see here the confirmation in a soft way [2] and [3].
"and we consistently find that considering performance on the SAT/ACT, particularly the math section, substantially improves the predictive validity of our decisions with respect to subsequent student success at the Institute."
I am not gifted but I do benefit from gifted people work.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[2] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-...
[3] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
I suppose everyone says that since politics exist. Life in a society is politics, that's the very definition of the word. Politics is not a bad word or something to avoid, stop being afraid talking politics. The less you talk about politics, the more others do it for you.
But it's correlation, not causation.
There was a complete test case of this in NJ a few years ago where a poorly funded school got a huge amount of extra funding as a result of a lawsuit, and it made 0 statistical difference to outcomes years down the line. They did a study on it. https://edlawcenter.org/litigation/abbott-v-burke/abbott-his...
If you're surrounded by people who care and aim to excel, you'll probably care. And vice versa.
In that sense, forced integration is an unethical but probably effective way of homogenizing educational results. I think Singapore actually forces some cultural integration like this with demographic requirements per neighborhood block/district.
New York somewhat achieves this incidentally via their "affordable housing" being attached to expensive unit buildings, but most wealthy new yorkers send to private, so doesn't fix the cultural balance in public system.
No. This is a complete red-herring. Every school in the US is good enough to provide quality education. Every school in the US is staffed by good, well-trained teachers. Every child gets free textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, paper, etc (which isn't as common in the world as you'd think). Sometimes free breakfast or lunch is provided as well.
That some school district provides high-end iPads and another doesn't makes no material difference to a quality education. That some parents want to optimize their child's education by sending them to another district, makes no material difference to a quality education. Put another way, we're dealing with kids graduating being functionally illiterate - and that problem does not stem from school or teacher quality. That's a parent problem (as in, what kind of a parent allows their child to not be able to read by the time they are ready to graduate).
So the disadvantaged area schools get 35%+ more money per pupil, and the outcomes keep getting worse. And the politicians keep doubling down on the same policies and wonder why things aren't changing. Money isn't everything, or apparently even most things. What a mess.
That was a very bipartisan bill. It was coauthored by Ted Kennedy, passed in the House 381-41, and passed in the Senate 87-10.
Poorer districts tend to have more industrial properties, so they are often better funded than wealthier districts. Especially since most state funding is distributed based on pupil units rather than pupils, and a low-SES student might count as something like 1.5 pupil units. (And a disabled student might count as 2.0 pupil units, etc.)
That's not really true. You can look at the per pupil spending in places like Washington, D.C. or Baltimore and they're well above the U.S. average (D.C. is one of the top spenders in the nation). A city's public school system sometimes largely serves lower income students even if it has a number of high earners in its tax base (urban yuppies with no kids, wealthy people who send their kids to private schools, etc. all paying into the system without adding to the load).
If we look at funding levels vs. outcomes, we can see many of the best funded school systems struggling. That's because school is a complex problem that doesn't simply get solved by more funding.
We still have so much culturally ingrained bias that we can't update policy to set the stage for even the next few generations to close these gaps. And it's compounded by the current generation being asked to pay an unreasonable price (ie disappearing gifted classes) to put a band-aid on this gunshot wound of a problem which breeds resentment which sets progress back even further.
The government also tries to help poor students by boosting funding for schools that have poor parents. Schools are ranked into 10 deciles[3] depending on the income of the parents, with an equal number of schools in each decile. The government gives out more funding to schools with poor parents (decile 1), and less funding to schools with rich parents (decile 10).
The academic results of students are strongly correlated with how well-off their parents are[1]. Attendance and other factors are correlated as well[2].
[1] https://keithwoodford.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/socio-economi...
[2] https://figure.nz/search/?query=Deciles
[3] https://www.education.govt.nz/school/funding-and-financials/...
This is not the issue. The real issue is that some wealthier localities defund their public school system through anti-taxation measures and the wealthy send their kids to thriving (well funded, large student population) private schools and those who can't afford the private school tuition (rivals private college tuition) are stuck with either parochial schools (middle class families, associated with their church) or public schools (poor kids, who graduate functionally illiterate if at all).
Tier 1: private school kids, whose parents control the local government and economy
Tier 2: middle class sending their kids to Christian schools where they can learn why the order of things is the way it is through divine writ
Tier 3: public schools, radically underfunded, basically holding cells.
It doesn't, in ways which are eerily reminiscent of America's falling out of love with public parks and pools. Which completely coincidentally followed their desegregation.
This is largely a lie. It works like this in some states but not most. Most states, and the federal government allocate their funds in a way that balances that out by allocating more money to the poorer districts. In my state, the various quartiles recieve essentially the same overall funding (19k-20k per student).
This is a good example of why Wikipedia doesn't allow this kind of statement.
If you google this phrase, "No Child Gets Ahead Act", you get 4 pages of results ("About 84 results", which I don't know if I would call "many" in a country of 300 million plus people.
My experience with public school gifted programs was simple. The gifted program was not significantly better in what they taught, or how they taught it. The gifted programs only major advantage was that the people who were there wanted to be there, and worked to do well. This allowed us to move faster, and go deeper into topics. In non-gifted classes, students could not care less about what the class was doing that day and hated that they were trapped there. Some students definitely worked hard in non-gifted classes, but in my experience, that was the exception.
What do you want the world to look like 10, 20, 50 years from now, and how would the changes you're pushing for making immediately get us all closer to that?
But there are two issues that make those classes terrible:
1) Teachers dedicate 80% of their instructional time to the 20% worst performers, and every incentive pushes them in that direction.
2) More than that, it only takes one or two kids with behavioral issues to reduce teachers' instructional time from near 100% to near 0%, and there's no way to move them out of regular classrooms to classrooms focused on their needs. So if you're a regular student in a cohort with a couple students with behavioral issues, you're pretty much screwed.
It's debatable (at least) whether that's a good thing... if you consider the dominant culture racist (or bad in some other way) then it's natural to consider the merit-based programs that support that culture a form a systemic racism.
This suggests to me that the advantage of the program could be conferred to students who score low on IQ tests but are nevertheless behaved in class. A better gifted program would be one that differentiates on the basis of civility, not IQ. Of course, deferring measurement of IQ to some licensed professionals is easier than objectively quantifying a student's civility, so I don't know how this would actually be implemented.
Not great attributes to select for in a world where we desperately need independent thinking and problem solving.
For me, it made a big difference in being engaged in schoolwork when every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes.
Edit: I removed "I don't see what race has to do with it." I do see how race can affect this when the gatekeeper is a teacher with biases choosing who takes the test to be in the program. This does not however make it ok to say "unacceptably white"
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program.
Curious if they're also "unacceptably asian" - the author doesn't seem to think so, or at least didn't feel the need to say so.
You are only scratching the surface here. Some places had a hard time "proving" their gifted programs were "too white" so they started using the term "white and white-adjacent" to include Asian kids as well (often from impoverished background but that's another issue) in these stats [0].
> I don't see why race has anything to do with it.
Buckle up. The SF school district is trying to include a lot more racial content at school [1]. Now even math is considered racist [2]. I wish I was making this up.
[0] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa...
[2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
I am certain that if every student had been tested, the composition of the gifted classes would have been very different. Many students who fell through the cracks would have been put in the higher level classes and many at the lower end of the gifted program would not have made the cut (given fixed class sizes for the gifted program).
We should test every student.
literally the same experience for me; many people in urban school never became literate in their entire adult lives, let alone math.
Not everyone is as well-positioned as you might have been to excel at an IQ test. And to the extent that someone is disadvantaged, their race may indeed be an indirect cause.
It has become acceptable in society these days for people to bring down the white race any way they can through these sort of micro aggressions.
As a white person any success or benefit you enjoy can never be truly legitimate, it will always be stained by the original sin of your white ancestors. And if you happen to be straight, or male, or both you are even more guilty. The message is that the white race must not be allowed to progress any further than it has until all other races have caught up or even surpassed it. In the mean time, individuals suffer.
The only time you can be truly understood and seen as a unique individual and not a stereotype is amongst other whites.
IQ tests are notoriously and historically pretty racist.
They can be useful in certain contexts but they aren't very good as an academic gatekeeper or a measure of individual intelligence.
philly school district is in a bad place financially. https://www.inquirer.com/news/pa-school-funding-trial-philad.... A district with more money will have more resources for gifted programs.
I imagine this has it's roots in the demographic and population shift the city has seen starting in the 50s. Philly's population in 1990 was 75% of what it was in the 50s. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm sure there was overhead in maintaining infrastructure, paying pensions, etc as the population shrunk.
At this point, maybe the federal government should just bail out city school districts in this situation. Why should an underfunded school district be paying a chunk of its budget on debts?
Simply put, we don't know how to make objective IQ tests yet.
The questions in IQ tests tend to bake in a bunch of cultural assumptions, often in ways you don't expect. So the test measures a combination of IQ, and affinity with a specific cultural background.
First, let me be clear about this: The issue is friction. Even at the same difficulty, a question that's more accessible is less stressful and less mentally taxing. Especially when you're dealing with kids. This matters more at the cut-off than the extremes of the bell-curve, but has statistical impacts.
I just searched for "Fourth Grade IQ Test" and clicked a random link. Four of the ten questions are about sharing cookies. Baking cookies and sharing cookies are typical middle-class-white activity, but I don't know how that shakes out in other cultures. Maybe they share other foods? Maybe sharing food is offensive because it implies the other kids' parents can't provide for themselves? Maybe the kids aren't in charge of food division? The underlying math is, of course, objective. But the math is being framed through a perspective which is more or less familiar to different backgrounds.
My hunch is that the typical school district is looking for a palatable excuse to reduce funding needs.
Project based learning.
Being with other students that actually gave a shit.
But at the same time, they gave me a broader education and I learned more than I would have otherwise.
At my elementary school, you were taken out of normal classes 1 day per week. You still had to do all the work from that day, but you didn't actually attend those sessions for those classes. Instead, you spent the whole day in a different classroom that was solely for "gifted" students.
Of course, this meant that it really was only the top students that could handle it.
Prior to being tested and accepted into Gifted, I was a pretty constant disruption in my normal classes. I would finish all the work in class, even the stuff that everyone else had to take home because it took them so long. That left me constantly bored, and clued them in that I needed more.
TBH, I probably would have said I preferred being given a book and let sit in a corner and learned or just read fiction. But instead I was forced to be social and learn about things not usually taught in school, such as puzzle solving. I'm still very much an introvert, but I have to wonder how much more introverted I'd be if it weren't for that? Perhaps cripplingly so.
I'm a huge fan of gifted classes for obvious reasons, but not at the expense of other students. If there isn't enough budget to teach everyone to a basic level, gifted classes are not a great idea.
In fact, we should probably restructure everything so that everyone who isn't being taught at their full potential can learn more in school. I'm sure there were students around me that were almost in my same situation, but they weren't in Gifted. They were probably also bored and could have been both educated and entertained during those times, if we had the programs for it.