[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-20/californ...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-18/uc-slams...
If parents had a way of avoiding government schools, it would be far less enticing for those with an agenda to capture them.
On some level it’s positively shocking that gifted classes have lasted as long as they have. Looked at from a thousand mile out view a TON of the woke agenda is direct and indirect attacks on those that perform well on standardized tests.
Once you do that less "privileged" students also benefit, since the teaching resources being spent on that bored student will be freed up to focus on the smaller class of students that need more assistance.
I don't see why it's a given that this is guaranteed to result in worse outcomes by any measure, even "woke" ones that might consider it a loss if OP's daughter pulls ahead further from the median grade, even if the median also goes up as a result of better spent teaching resources.
Note that I am a fan of gifted classes, but to answer your question:
1. If you pull out gifted kids from classes with simply “above average” kids, you lower the ceiling of what it means to be “the best”. As a result, the above average kids may not push themselves as hard/far. This concept is common in sports as well — the competition yields higher results.
2. The class that is left, usually an honors class, ends up moving much more slowly. A dirty little secret of teaching is that the pace of a class is limited to roughly the ability level of the bottom third of the class. Any faster, and you have lost so many people that the class can’t self-correct via peer interaction. Any slower, and you cause so many of the high performers to lose interest that motivation becomes an issue. When you pull the gifted kids out of, for example, an honors class, the level of the bottom third of that class often drops precipitously.
I personally don’t think that these are good reasons to eliminate gifted classes. I think it points to the need for more effective/efficient differentiated instruction. But that would require good teachers and good administration, and imho those things are extremely difficult to have at scale.
What usually happens, due to student teacher ratios being a thing, is that the honors class is replenished with lower ability students from the “regular” (i.e., non-honors) class, so the average is brought down fairly substantially.
Note that all of this is a non-issue if you are only pulling a few kids out of a school to go to a magnet high school or something similar.
An example of this can be seen in Japan where the gifted and motivated students are moved into magnet schools for high school, but there is relatively little negative impact on the regular high school, while the magnet high school students get an eduction that pushes their intellectual boundaries.
The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers. Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.
You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job - somehow, it is a given that both students and teachers should always be left to "discover things by themselves".
I think you’re talking in theory and not practice.
In reality, one of two things (or both) happens.
1. They pull from the “slow” class. Different places call it different things, and it’s not special ed, but it’s distinctly low levels of education. The “slow” class doesn’t benefit due to it basically serving the role of child care rather than education.
2. The “regular” class is effectively a slow class, so same as above, there is very little educating happening, just child care.
Ah, but the people getting moved into the slowest actual education benefit because they go from no education to some education, right?
No again. The modal outcome is that these threshold folks are given passing grades while learning very little, all while making the experience frustrating for the student and the teacher.
> You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job
I have seen these teachers and its potential effectiveness, but only in special ed. The biggest pay offs seem to be in elementary school with basic/fundamental literacy and numeracy.
As grade level increases, the impact of this instruction decreases substantially in terms of impressiveness largely due to limited scope.
> The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers.
I agree with this, but not for the reasons you give.
> Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.
First, classes with highly skilled students are not necessarily easier. They are only easier if the teacher makes few changes to the curriculum to adjust to the class (basically lack of time or teacher laziness). Gifted classes in particular can be challenging for teachers who think that they want to teach the smartest kids because often some of the students will know more (sometimes a lot more) than the teacher about the subject. This can create very awkward moments (note that this phenomenon can also be seen at universities with students and adjuncts, sometimes even at elite schools).
Second — this is another “secret” that I think covid made less of a secret — the main function of most lower level classes beyond basic literacy and numeracy in elementary school is state-supported child care.
In reality, especially in high school, there is very little learning going on in the lower end classes. The students don’t care about the content, the students’ parents don’t care about it, and their peer groups don’t care about it. The only people who care are the teachers and admins due to standards states have set and funding tied to testing to those standards. There is essentially no product-market fit to use terms that most HNers might understand. The important thing is that the kids have a place to go while the parents work. These are terrible classes to teach.
The actual way to fix this, imho, is to meet the students and their families where they are at. Specifically, introduce them to skill sets that they may actually find useful and/or interesting. It would be ideal to pair this up with co-op working opportunities. Note that this system largely exists in Japan (where they do tracking), so this is not all just theoretical conjecture.
There are a few problems with this system.
One issue is that this type of education can be difficult to create and maintain, because the content could vary widely from school to school — a school in rural Iowa would probably focus on different skills than a school in Brooklyn. This also would make it difficult to measure, so only the local community would really know if it was working (that’s ok, imho).
Another issue is that this type of education done properly is rife with socioeconomic and race issues. For example, if you are teaching a student sales in a coop environment where they actually do sales, it’s probably prudent to teach them something like register shifting so that they can adjust their language to their audience. I will leave it to the reader to figure out why that is a minefield in the US (but probably shouldn’t be).
Apologies for the wall of text, but I think that this is an interesting topic that is poorly understood by many/most highly educated Americans. This is especially true of a lot of HNers who seem to have largely experienced schooling from a middle/upper-middle class perspective (specifically, a largely college-bound school/community).
I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with. So the incentives I pointed to in my previous comment are fully at work, and all the more so if you make the tracking more fine grained. Special ed actually helps by bringing better-trained (and more highly-paid) teachers into the picture in a way that's institutionally provided for.
You're right that a more vocational curriculum would also help some students, but that's hard to implement for the reasons you point out, and still doesn't address the underlying issues wrt. more "academic" subjects, which tend to suffer.
I guess this is a chicken-and-egg problem. The best teachers don’t want to be there because there are few opportunities to teach, again mostly due to student and community ambivalence. There are positive examples like those seen in the movie Stand and Deliver, but those kinds of teachers are super rare, and often the powers-that-be stack the deck against them (administrators, community, peers, etc.).
Fwiw, one can see expert teaching in low-level non-special ed classes by looking at folks researching low SES education. Most of the outcomes are basically one level of classroom failure improving to a slightly different level of classroom failure (mostly due to relatively low time on task and general ambivalence in the student and community populations).
In general, the scope of what a good teacher can do is relatively limited unless a few conditions exist:
1. Students are relatively similar in terms of ability level — that is, no wide outliers. This is not an issue if each teacher has only 3-4 students, so basically each student will get tailored instruction.
2. The students and their communities value education.
3. Relatively low student-teacher ratios. Note that good teachers get better outcomes than bad teachers even when the student-teacher ratio is bad, but the overall impact is often significantly less.
Anyway, thanks for the comments. I haven’t stretched my mental legs on this topic in a while.
Fairness (in the sense of trying to create a level playing field and make sure nobody has unfair advantages) is important to the extent that something is a competition.
This means people who see education as competition will care about fairness - either they will want things to be truly fair or they will want any unfairness to be in their favor.
So from this point of view, special classes for kids who are already doing better can be seen as an unfair advantage (especially because there's plenty of real bias involved in determining which kids actually end up on those classes).
I think we need to fix the biased selection process and make it more possible for more kids to benefit from advanced learning opportunities, especially kids whose parents don't have the resources to take them out of public school to do something more individualized.
Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.
Of course the idea that this is a bad thing (as opposed to being exactly how a merit-based system is supposed to work) is based on presupposing that higher performance was the result of unfair discrimination in the first place.
It's clear that diversity programs lead to the intake of those who are worse test takers. Yet companies who hire more diverse people correlate to companies which have better financial outcomes for investors. Yet school systems systemically put certain students who cover lots of material and do well on tests into special classes, put them in the best schools, put them into the best jobs, in spite of this observation. These students, so the idea of merit goes, will be more productive and the benefits they have to society will trickle down to the rest, yet in practice what we see in society is a society stratified where those who are part of communities where there are fewer good test takers are disadvantaged.
My contention is more fundamental, it's an attack on the very validity of the testing itself, and testing determines who gets into programs like gifted classes. Testing in practice has the purpose of discrimination in favour of an elite few, is inherently contentious and ripe for political assault.
This is largely untrue unless one defines quality of life with a very narrow set of criteria and/or lives in a relatively small echo chamber.
I know tons of people with very high scores who have very low QoL, and I know many multiples of that with mediocre scores who have very high QoL.
The skill (or maybe luck) to find a way to use the abilities one does have in order to provide high utility seems to be the common thread in the high QoL folks.
Of course there are lots of layers of laws and bureaucracies above school districts that can apply curricula or regulations to temper this, but unlike state governments, where representatives are elected on a slate of issues and tied to political parties, school boards are elected on just 1 issue: how are they going to run the schools.
Find 10 people opposed to “woke” and you’ll get 12 or 13 distinct explanations/criteria for the term.
If you substitute “poopyhead” for “woke” across the internet it won’t substantively change the meaning of anything you read.
If you want a more detailed analysis of current usage, https://ctrlzmag.com/series-what-is-woke-4-the-decline/
You gave a different definition to upthread.
It is used to elide facts and specifics, like measurable and persistent racial disparities in social outcomes including education. Instead we are invited to consider whether a given person or policy is “woke”, which is not objectively measurable in any way.
Woke policies have a societal/political agenda in terms of ethnic and other favored groups. That is by definition tribal thinking.
All policies represent agendas and have implications for groups within society, including policies implemented in the past that we live under today. To different perspectives, any given policy will have different upsides and downsides. Moving forward is about finding balance, consensus, or compromise among these perspectives.
Applying a simple label like “woke” is an invitation to ignore this complexity in favor of binary (“is this woke or not”) or linear (“how woke is this”) modes of thought. It’s also an invitation to prejudge the merit based on a sense of whether an idea comes from inside or outside the tribe.
It’s like trying to troubleshoot a space station by focusing on whether solutions seem “cool” or not.
Example of 'Woke', non race, non class issue: Relative Age Effect.
If you are born in November you have almost no chance of becoming a star athlete, if you are born in January your chances are triple.
Noone designed the system to be unjust, but noone throught about ensuring it's fair either, and for decades noone questioned it.
That's what 'Woke' people claim to 'detect'. Sometines it's right, sometimes it's wrong.
They had great propaganda, which is not the same thing.
The counter argument would go something like this:
Structural racism and sexism are so deeply embedded in society that it's hopeless to try to eliminate these tendencies directly. Not only are these tendencies complex, systematic, and often unconscious, they are also difficult to impossible to measure. Outcome on the other hand is easy to measure.
If you start with the hypothesis that at least a large chunk of differences in outcome are a result of differences in opportunity (including hidden ones), then addressing outcome directly is the most effective way to try to combat bias. One way to do this is to eliminate societal systems and programs that seem to lead to outcomes (either positive or negative) that differ statistically from the baseline race and sex distribution in society.
The root of this debate seems to be biological determinism. The "right" (loosely defined) side of this debate argues that once overt racism and sexism are removed most of the remaining differences in ability and outcome that manifest are biologically innate. The "left" (again loosely defined) argues that this is at best unproven and point to the reported subjective experiences of women and minorities in which they report continuous low-grade racism and sexism that remains even after racism and sexism of the overt codified variety are removed.
"Biological determinism" is a huge red herring here. There are lots of causally-relevant factors wrt. social outcomes that have nothing to do with either biology or perceived prejudice/discrimination (however defined). Biological differences might explain some of the different preferences across genders (the broad 'people vs. things' orientation that even seems to show up in experiments with infants), but they're realistically irrelevant to anything else that the "woke" actually care about.
Who lives in a country where three white men can murder a black jogger, and it requires a international outcry for the police to prosecute?
As I understand "woke", it does mean trying to equalise "opportunity"; it just recognises that "opportunity" in the sense of "something offered" is not the same as "opportunity" in the sense of "the chance to do well", and tries to correct that.
In this particular case, does it make sense to take away gifted and talented programmes? There is clearly equality of opportunity offered. But a woke response might be to also identify individuals in disadvantaged groups who would be at that level were it not for their disadvantage and help them get there.
Much of this applies almost equally to Slav kids in America (when you account for what their origin countries were like) yet they seem to do pretty well compared to Blacks. So I think there's reason to be skeptical about your claim that "we've offered plenty enough to the Black community and it hasn't helped, so equality of opportunity itself must be the problem". We haven't done nearly enough for true equal opportunity to be achieved, and this goes equally for both mainstream society as a whole and the Black community itself which has often pushed in counterproductive directions.
"Woke is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.[0,1]"
[1]https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
Unfortunately like most terms associated with progressivism, feminism or race, almost no one here ever uses the term in good faith, understanding either its history or taking its purpose at face value, and it's simply become another anti-leftist pejorative.
> the left’s insecurity about genetics is partly why so many have fallen completely for the critical theory cult, leaving reality far behind, and sustaining this new (and false) consensus at this point solely by punishment of dissent
That's pretty much the summary of wokeness.
Source: Am leftist who is secure about genetics, though would prefer less methylation of my particular genes.
SAT similarly is a pretty bad indicator of intelligence because there’s a pipeline of gaming them.
Menlo Park and Palo Alto school districts are overrun with parents who want to push their child into advanced classes from the moment they can put sentences together. Having talked to many friends over the years who work in tech with me who grew up in these school districts (I didn't, my experience was very different), their parents constantly applied pressure to school administrators and counselors to push their child into advanced instruction. I know parents that would spend hours a day trying to pressure school administration to push their child along. I can only imagine this form of sandbagging is just to put the brakes on you and every other parent who wants to push their child as much as possible. You're competing against every other wealthy, pushy parent trying to push their children into advanced classes as well.
Palo Alto parents recently filed a lawsuit [1] claiming that PAUSD's system for offering advanced math unfairly discriminates against girls (who make up just 35 of the 162 students receiving advanced placement in middle school). Apparently the process involves an objective test and a subjective test, and you have to pass both in order to qualify.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2021/11/04/lawsuit-claim...
probably because a fair chunk of the kids aren't actually gifted, and if you cave to the parent's demands then you end up with a "if everyone is gifted, then no one is gifted" situation.
That doesn't mean that the dilemma you mention wouldn't arise, but presumably there are objective tests that could be used to make determinations. It wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better than ignoring advanced students like they're doing now.
So if the school’s student body as whole outperforms the national average, then that school’s curriculum is enriched to meet the students where they are. State standards are a floor, not a ceiling.
This is good for the kids but not easily visible to the parents the way that placement in a gifted program is. Unfortunately, for families interested in markers of achievement, sometimes they will be unsatisfied with anything short of that letter that their child has been placed in the gifted program.
see https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/03/cdc-report-youth-suic...
https://nextshark.com/children-of-affluent-parents-in-palo-a...
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
Consider that a gifted and talented program is maybe not the best option for your daughter. Not because she isn't capable. Because gifted and talented programs, especially for the very young (which it sounds like your daughter is), trade improvements in your child's strengths for exacerbating their weaknesses. Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
The benefit of course is that students in gifted and talented programs get inordinate amounts of money spent on them compared to their peers (class sizes of 10-15!! Individual attention from the best and most accomplished teachers!). This is an extremely hard benefit to pass up, and I don't envy you making that decision if you buy in to above (although I expect you won't, very few people I have this conversation with agree with me).
Food for thought anyways
So is your opinion that such a program is not a good option for any student? Why not conclude instead that there should be good advanced programs, not like the ones you've seen?
> Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates. Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything. IMO, that's worse than the picture you paint.
FWIW, I'm not looking for smaller classes at all. Her current class is 15 or 16. I'm looking for instruction that is at an appropriate level. It could be with her own class, or by having her sit with another class for math or reading. Class size is not the point; it's all about having appropriate instruction.
Welcome to the “parents of gifted children” club. I agree with the previous commenter that G&T probably isn’t the right place for your kid, at least not for now, although you might not have any practical alternatives.
Let’s be real though: one need not invoke resentment-laced arguments about fairness to see that public schools just do not have the resources to properly educate (upper) outliers. Pretend you had a child whose growth curve put him on track to be a future 7-footer—you might consider investing in some private basketball coaching. Different gift, same idea.
Let's also be real though. This was a conscious policy decision made by school boards across the country.
G&T programs used to be what school's public and private marketed. Now the public schools where I grew up don't even offer AP classes, and a huge portion of their budget now goes to special education.
Why did we decide we have the resources to spend on the lower end of "special" scale but not the upper?
Anyway, to answer your query, my belief after decades of observing the education system here (BC, Canada) is, politicians and decision-makers basically feel that smart kids have a huge advantage and they don't need the help. They will succeed and be useful members of society whether we leave them for dead or help them thrive. So... the dollars can be allocated to "those who really need it". I have heard this overall sentiment shared over and over and over, as far back as when my parents and I attended city council meetings appealing for ANY sort of "gifted" program implementation, even a tiny hint of one. The answer was always "find a private school", "I heard there's this virtual school you can attend on the computer", "we'll think about it", etc. I honestly don't see this changing anytime soon.
I could say way more on the subject but didn't feel like posting much more of such a personal topic. Happy to chat about it more with whoever, though.
If one goes through life expecting people they encounter to care about them, they'll be bitterly disappointed. Some of my teachers were nice to me, and would go out of their way to help if I asked. Did they really care about me? I doubt it. They were just good people. The rest of of my teachers were pretty indifferent. A couple actively disliked me (my own fault).
But what I wanted was not caring, but for them to do their job.
So, she's starting to unschool herself (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling ). Perhaps she could use some help in that process, but it's not inherently a bad thing.
She's getting good grades. They have other students who aren't. She's not in their top twenty list of priorities. That's school.
It also doesn’t explain why she can only use the math app at her grade level or one above. They are rate limiting her.
1. The material wasn't challenging; I didn't grasp what the point of "proving" a bunch of obvious stuff was, although I was willing to go through the motions. So I was an 11-year-old smart aleck in a room filled with 14 year olds who found me annoying (because, truthfully, I was super annoying at that age!). This contributed to:
2. The 14 year olds were super mean to me, AND they basically revolted against the teacher when I was in the classroom
In the end the teacher was happy to just privately tutor me, which was kind of her, but I have to acknowledge that I was genuinely disruptive to her class.
So I think there are real repercussions to allowing socially undeveloped kids into a classroom filled with kids at a very different (social) level.
There might have been a different outcome if I'd been in a school with a larger pool of moderately-to-very-gifted-at-math kids.
The next year my parents sent me to a school that had an agreement with the local university to send kids gifted at math to take university classes. The college kids were much more tolerant of me as a curiosity (and I was actually challenged, so I didn't spend my time annoying anyone, which probably helped, too).
Education schools have been very clear for decades that acceleration and other accomodations for gifted students are wrong and evil.
If you want to be a tiger parent, do what the tiger parents do and send them to afterschool programs. (well that's what I think they do anyway.)
Schools could be like other institutions which focus their attention and assess themselves based on the best they produce. Even some schools are like this (or American schools anyway) with sports. Is Coach worrying about how good the average student is at basketball, or the lowest quartile? I think not.
We have decided that it is essential that everyone reaches a minimum level, that the average performance should reach a certain level and that these two things are very important and much more so than making sure that the very best students can reach their maximum level.
Again, I'm not saying I think that is wrong. In a democracy, it has a lot going for it, but it isn't the only way to run a society either.
Both of those things are objectively true, so this is a fine conclusion.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything.
This is also true.
Perhaps you could look at getting her private tutoring and making peace with the fact that school is mostly for socialising. Modern schooling is primarily about beating you into the shape that bureaucratic life demands of you, so in essence the impression she is getting now is one she will probably have her entire life.
The trade-off was worth it. But my teachers did care, they campaigned for some solution to what they saw as bad behavior from being bored and unchallenged. It did create authority problems to see the Teachers one was supposed to respect stutter on with easy problems and to see your peers having trouble spelling basic words, it was ok to be "other" from that. Early social life doesn't have to be tied to a classroom, I got that from neighborhood friends, athletics church and family. There is no excuse to having your young child wasting the opportunity of her headstart by following the same path as the other kids.
Once you are out of early ed, the honors and AP classes should provide enough challenges, it would be unusual for her to excel in every topic.
I didn't have any particular academic or career excellence other than the path I described there, turns out I just read fast and had tested out of standardized reading levels by the "third" grade but if someone hadn't intervened and noticed that I wasn't mean spirited, I just had read the whole book in the time the rest were reading three pages and now had nothing to do, I would have had a way different feeling about learning and likely would have ended up in alternative schools for being an authority issue.
Most kids in G&T programs even out with others academically over time, there is no reason to waste the younger years where she is showing advanced aptitude
It is extremely hard to draw such broad conclusions. I do think on the whole G&T programs are a net negative- if only because they have drained so many resources from the vast majority of students. I think there is a reasonable middle ground to be had somewhere.
> Why not conclude instead that there should be good advanced programs, not like the ones you've seen?
I have seen quite a few advanced programs and I can attach various adjectives to them, and I think some were objectively good from the standard measure. I think the entire concept is flawed in a fundamental way though. All children will benefit from small class sizes, individualized lesson plans, encouragement to pursue their passions, etc etc. Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
> As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates
This is certainly a struggle. Do keep in mind that your daughter will take your cues to heart in how you interact with her schooling. Finding the challenge in the mundane is a skill I did not develop until I was much too old to take advantage of it.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything. IMO, that's worse than the picture you paint.
Thats certainly not a good situation. I wish you the best of luck in addressing it however you deem best. As I concede above, its hard to paint with broad strokes; every child is different and will respond differently to identical situations.
Class size has nothing to do with it. As I've mentioned above multiple times, this is not what we are after. It is also not necessarily something that these programs offer; the program I was in 30 years ago did not have small class sizes.
Equally important, evidence does not strongly support the theory that smaller class sizes improve performance. Most of the studies show no benefit or a small benefit but only for certain types of students (white/Asian, not URM).
Similarly, we're not looking for individualized lesson plans. Just let her do the regular math for a different grade level. No customization needed. I realize that would require matching up 'math time' for her class and another class, but this is a school with 7 classes per grade. There are many ways to make this happen (for her and for other students who could also benefit from above-grade-level instruction).
> I do think on the whole G&T programs are a net negative- if only because they have drained so many resources from the vast majority of students.
> Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
I'm curious where you're getting your numbers from. I work in education technology, and the common wisdom is that tons of money is spent on Title I schools and special education. I have literally never heard anyone claim that GATE is a lucrative market.
1) a lower student to teacher ratio 2) better, newer equipment 3) better, more experienced teachers
I've never talked to someone who didn't admit to those advantages, only argued about how important they were or how expensive they might be. I can imagine it isn't a cash cow for the industry because the number of students is small and most of the difference is in teacher pay per child.
Re snap class sizes having an effect on outcomes. This is extremely surprising to me. The last I looked (admittedly quite some time ago) it was essentially the only factor that has significant weight and was reproducible.
Well, you will need teachers who have mastered algebra themselves. Other than that, I don't see why they need to be better or more experienced.
The profs I had in college were never trained as teachers, nor were they particularly experienced at it. But they knew the material to the point that it was trivial for them.
On the flipside this can make it harder for the teacher to relate to the students. In a university context of course, students have each other as equals.
I went to a magnet school for high school. While we did have a decent amount of swanky equipment for labs, that was pretty much all donated or begged off of companies. That does comport with your tales that GT isn't particularly graced with extra funding.
It is far more heartbreaking seeing those resources wasted on the comparatively incapable. You can bring a student to math, but you can't make him/her learn. Moreover it guts both our national competitiveness and eschews meritocracy in favor of classism, where the have's can privately acquire those services.
I understand that as a parent you’d want to do what you can for your child to give them a normal experience. I’d probably do the same in their shoes. As a society we should probably place limits on that. As far as I could tell he was one step above “vegetable” and gained nothing from the experience and it took an insane amount of potential resources away from the rest of the students.
You don't need any of that for a gifted program. You just need to teach more advanced material, and at a faster pace. There's no reason whatsoever it should cost more.
Heck, my freshman physics class in college had 150 students in it. It blew by high school honors physics in 3 or 4 lectures. I learned a crap ton in it. It was terrifying, but also exhilarating.
Edit: I can think of a situation where I attended a different grade's math class. That was completely separate from the g&t program at the school, and I simply haven't considered it as part of that.
I also doubt that it is even possible to reliably detect a gifted student before 3rd grade.
And lastly, a gifted program can be little more than just giving the 3rd grade gifted students the 4th grade curriculum. No extra money required. No magical teaching required.
I don't recall we even needed a lot of resources or personal attention or special student/teacher ratios in gifted class--they just set us loose with computers and told us to write logo programs (it was the early 90s), instead of being stuck in regular class trying to figure out how to cut myself so I could feel something other than bored.
I would've ended up getting a phd with or without gifted classes--I didn't need it to get a jump start on career success or something like that. I needed it to keep me sane.
And she may feel that way even in gifted classes, I know I did. There's only so much that teachers can do. If it's so easy then she can spend her time doing/studying other things that she likes.
I read all the feynman lectures in middle school classes (ymmv with teachers). Later I got into quantem mechanics and advanced math, all on my own and because I had a bunch of free time..
Those were some of my favorite years and shaped who I am today. There's plenty to learn beyond the school curriculum and your child can self direct it
The idea that G&T programmes get inordinate resources doesn't bear any relationship to reality. Most school dsitricts don't have such programmes at all. Every single school district in the US has special needs teachers, assistants and ELL support. Most of them have no support of any kind for gifted students.
None at all other than anecdotal.
> Most school dsitricts don't have such programmes at all
This doesn't jive with my experience where literally every school I attended had some sort of program (and I attended quite a few schools growing up- more than grades). Often in single district areas too where it wasn't possible for my parents to have chosen the right school. A quick google search reveals 6% of schools are enrolled in the national gifted and talented program. Perhaps that is your definition? I imagine it is far too narrow a criteria and that plenty of schools offer special classes for a small minority of their students.
Unless you count AP or honors programmes as G&T this isn't remotely close to being true.
I doubt you even have anecdotal evidence.
It's been well over two decades, and for almost all of that I've regretted the choice.
In addition to not getting the academic boost the gifted program might've given me, socialization with general-age peers didn't really help; I remained the odd one out for pretty much all of my school years, it was only come college that that really changed.
Even as far as US College teams the team shouldn't just be composed of really good players. There should also be randomly selected college students in the team.
It's probably a good idea for music too. Too many bands are composed of just talented musicians and very attractive people. It should be blended.
> Even as far as US College teams the team shouldn't just be composed of really good players. There should also be randomly selected college students in the team.
This depends on your goals. Are you trying to build the best single team you can? Or are you trying to build the best repository of skill in that sport in the population at large? Or maybe something else? I bet you'd construct different team compositions depending on how you answer those questions. Ditto for the musicians.
How often do you think the weak player will receive a pass in the sports team?
How do you think it feels for the weaker members to be always holding up the others? What does that do for their self confidence, or their long term development of skills?
No, wait. It's the other way around. Her peers are in the gifted and talented program, not outside it.
When I was a kid I was pretty far ahead in some areas, but behind socially, and participated in some programs and activities for gifted kids. The kids in those programs were some of the most socially and emotionally maladjusted people I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. Maybe I was just in those places because I was also maladjusted, and other gifted programs aren't like that.
Here's hoping.
I'm not sure that's the fault of such programs, I had that label applied without needing a special program.
But are you saying they don't even want to offer calculus in high school now? Holy crap, that is also horrifying.
We eventually home-schooled. At some point, you look at all the time you spend lobbying school administrators and selling band candy, and decide it takes less time to just home school.
They offered a summer academy that hopefully will start back up again after covid and also have an online program that may be a good alternative to full home-schooling if you were considering going that route.
Update: Beast Academy is wonderful. AOPS is great too. Both very good suggestions. Your daughter may also like the math content produced by Poh Shen Loh [1].
A gifted and talented program generally just accelerates the core curriculum (i.e. teaches a grade ahead). Art of Problem Solving [2] has a compelling argument [3] against acceleration:
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“For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. That student who breezed unchallenged through algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, will breeze through calculus, too. This is not to say that high school students should not learn calculus—they should. But more importantly, the gifted, interested student should be exposed to mathematics outside the core curriculum, because the standard curriculum is not designed for the top students. This is even, if not especially, true for the core calculus curriculum found at most high schools, community colleges, and universities.
Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Curricular classes do not prepare students for the leap from the usual one-step-and-done problems to the multi-step, multi-discipline problems they will face later on. That transition is smoothed by exposing students to complex problems in simpler areas of study, such as basic number theory or geometry, rather than giving them their first taste of complicated arguments when they’re learning a more advanced subject like group -theory or the calculus of complex variables.”
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[1] https://www.singaporemath.com/
[2] https://artofproblemsolving.com/
[3] https://artofproblemsolving.com/news/articles/avoid-the-calc...
But the excitement didn't die off. I had a great 8th grade math teacher who noticed that I did all of the exercises in the book during the first two weeks of class and diverted me into a more advanced class (algebra) and eventually got me into correspondence courses (trig and geometry) and late in the same year into the high school calculus class. By finishing calculus that year, I was able to branch into languages and other topics.
Branching out early is a great motivator for the right kids. More interesting material can lead to explosive levels of interest in kids.
In fact, even if you do not have a "gifted" youngster, learning to work on harder problems is so much better than learning to follow instructions by rote. Not to say all teaching is that way, but it seems like a majority.
Another resource is MOEMS, the Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools. They are totally reasonable and also fascinating problems. Get one of the books and check it out if you are working with someone in the late elementary.
The moment you introduce gifted program magic disappears and all “dumb” kids are in non gifted program with ambitious parents worrying about tests, everyone prepping for tests for 5 year old kids, etc.
District like Redwood City has much broader range of kids (from working class to rich techies) and gifted program is the only way to accommodate the range of abilities. In many districts gifted programs are very comparable to regular programs in good schools districts and is veiled attempt to keep white parents send kids to otherwise failing school.
And the 'common wisdom' that was passed to me by many other parents and district leaders is that advanced kids should maybe go to private schools. This is not the sign of a district that embraces a student body that skews advanced.
When I was in first grade, the public school I was attending told my parents they didn't have the resources to teach me at the pace I was learning and recommended that my parents tried to enroll me in a private school.
The private school I ended up attending had me go through an assortment of tests and at the end I placed well enough on them that my parents were given significant financial aid.
The fact is, it's extremely difficult to find people who are cutting edge teachers of young minds. You can get them advanced course material and work with your child as long as your mind can keep up, but when it comes to outsourcing it or finding a mentor for pedagogy, if you don't know somebody, all you can really do is do the footwork, network, and pray to cross paths with someone who fits the bill.
The curse of course being that someone with advanced understanding isn't actually who you are looking for, but someone exceptionally good at teaching how to build understanding of complex topics. Those people will be in high demand, everyone will claim to be one, and a bad choice on your part distinguishing the frauds from the real thing could do much more harm than good.
Good luck. If it were me, I'd just try to get in as much extracurricular time as possible, or network with the type of people who could help, which you're already doing; so...
We'll find other ways to challenge him.
Shouldn't be too hard to find someone wanting to teach an advanced kid.
Closed-ended testing is standard for Gifted and Talented programs throughout the country. Are you saying that she did not meet the requirements using those tests?
To make matters worse, it's quite common for very gifted students to also have issues like ADHD or OCD, which qualifies them for a label of twice exceptional. When I was raising my now adult sons, schools typically wanted to label a child either gifted or special needs and often seemed incapable of comprehending that a child could be both.
I ended up homeschooling and as a consequence I was involved with an online voluntary health and welfare organization for the gifted. My impression was that it was pretty common for people with very gifted or twice exceptional children to homeschool due to frustration with how schools handle such students.
They need custom help that few people are qualified to adequately provide.
Edited because: autocorrupt.
I'm going to have to steal this one. It gave me a big chuckle!
They did the same thing with reading: don't give a student the chance to show higher proficiency, and you effectively cap the level a student can be 'assessed' at.
We took our kiddo on a trip to Colorado to the Gifted Development Center which was a good helpful first step (and connected a lot of dots for us). More than happy to share experiences at matt at mindvault dot com.
'A' people teach 'A' people, 'B' people teach 'C' people. 'D' people teach 'F' people. Just do the math.
This seems like bad news for the concept of sports coaching.
The school started off saying they don't offer advanced instruction, then grudgingly agreed to assess our child to see if she even would require it. But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level.
Even when faced with her clearly advanced abilities (3.5 grades ahead in math, according to the diagnostic from the online math platform they use), they are still doing their best to hold her back. Their rallying cry? "Even Steph Curry practices dribbling".
After hearing this for the third time, I finally pointed out that Steph Curry wouldn't have become who he is if he were never allowed to practice anything but dribbling. The school has continued dragging their feet.
The unsurprising result is that advanced students leave for private schools. We never would have bought a home in an expensive district had we anticipated departing for a private. I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive.
This whole process has been very disappointing (and surprising) for me, since I had a very different experience growing up. I went to public schools in Sacramento, where magnet programs were freely available and students could open enroll from anywhere in the region. We had classmates who lived halfway to Tahoe. It was great. I understand their programs are still up and running, and it's shocking that the well-heeled districts around here are so hostile to advanced instruction.
Happy to connect with other nearby parents of young kids. Contact info is in profile.