I really don't need a study telling me my child won't benefit from a gifted program. It's a parent's right to decide for themselves. I personally know many people that have benefitted and it made their childhood bearable.
Barring a time machine or the discovery of a way to skip across a multiverse, this is an assertion without much of a control group.
That’s why we need studies.
In elementary school gifted programs are often tracking people into advanced math, reading, and other subjects all at once. Plus teaching them extra stuff.
At higher grades, if it exists at all, its often tracking them into a different school that has both more advanced and more diverse classes.
> A gifted program is where you take some kids aside and teach them some random extra stuff, at the end of the day they're still in the regular classes with the other kids also and don't really have a chance to go any faster.
I’ve heard of lots of different gifted programs, and most don't fit that description.
My kid's school did exactly this for "gifted" elementary school kids. What saved him was being in split grade classes in 2nd and 3rd grades where he could move to the older student's side of the room for math and reading instruction. Eventually, he skipped 4th grade altogether and ended up with the peer group he was already spending much of his day with.
In middle school, the gifted kids got to go on one special field trip each year. By HS, there was a gifted program in name only. We paid someone to run the "gifted" program but I have no idea what she actually did. She wasn't even available to assist in college apps and there weren't any special programs that I ever saw. My kid, and his most motivated peers, all ended up at very good universities in spite of the lack of support from the school.
Those are modern cut rate gifted programs.
The 90s had gifted programs where students who tested well got placed into a separate cohort for core classes (English, History, Math) in Middle and High School, or were in a dedicated classroom for elementary school.
The only educational purpose served was getting them out of the classroom so that more attention could be given to the dumber kids.
So much more was expected of us, that of course we came out learning more. 8th grade was a 20 page research project. 6th grade math was algebra, in 7th grade we learned logarithms and binary math.
When I went back to mainstream academics in high school, the difference was stark. In one of my city's top schools, students were still reading books out loud during class. Expected reading assignments were around a couple dozen pages a week. Math was all repeating what I had learned in middle school. Essays were a fraction the length and difficulty.
And in high school I knew plenty of smart kids who were bored to tears and misbehaved. Hell I watched one kid in Latin class piece his own nipple. (The teacher did nothing, possibly because said student was also pretty darn good at Latin...)
I wonder how a study is going to account for "smart kids who dropped out of school from sheer boredom".
Another aspect to examine is that behavior problems in gifted programs were, IMHO, much less than in mainstream classrooms. When all the students in the classroom are there to learn, no big surprise, learning gets done. Students turn in HW on time, listen when the teacher talks, and have expectations of not only themselves, but of each other.
Yes, gifted programs need to be accessible across socio-economic levels. The fact that I had to be bused to the rich part of town to go to a gifted program is a great example of classist and racist policies in action.
> while being fairly expensive.
I fail to see how gifted programs cost any more than regular programs. You are literally taking the highest achievers and placing them in a separate classroom for a few core subjects. For middle school and high school, there are no additional teachers, no additional programs in place, it is purely a cohort.
> and they don’t appear to make any meaningful difference in student engagement or motivation.
As someone from a poor working class family, gifted programs gave me the opportunity to rise up out of generations of being poor.
Gifted programs need to be made available to everyone who qualifies.
The fact is, one college graduate can help elevate an entire family. Every student needs to be given the chance to reach their full potential, and for some, that means placing them in an environment which has an expectation of academic excellence and lifelong achievement.
Edit: I just reviewed the study my local school district did to justify shutting down their spectrum program. None of the reasons (!!!) had to do with student outcomes.
I would suggest that your experiences may not have been the norm. Anecdotally - I was also in a gifted program, and it was essentially a waste of the school’s money. We had an designated educator for the gifted program, and we mostly did things that were interesting… but didn’t really advance our education a lot. Even when we did cover advanced material, it didn’t really make a difference because we would have learned it in a year or two anyways. That assigned educator would have made a bigger difference helping struggling students rather than us.
It sounds like your program was maybe better targeted than ours, or you were a better fit for the model than me and my cohort. But on average, the data seems to suggest that most students are not significantly changed by gifted programs.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/01623737211008919
https://www.nber.org/papers/w17089
These programs are relatively expensive, and there’s a strong argument the gifted programs should be overhauled, or that the money could be better spent elsewhere.