"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I will refrain from this sort of comment in the future though. Sorry dang!

The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be.

This is pretty vanilla, nearly tautological stuff unless you believe academic talent is some sort of inherent property of wealth or whiteness.

> 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.

BTW, I realize he is arguing for the opposite of this.

edit: If you think I am racist or something let me spell it out as I did in another comment: It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.

Whether the NBA is unacceptably racially biased is a problem so tiny that it is not worth spending any societal attention solving. That is not true of public schools.

The ultimate goal should be to provide better education for everyone so that all students have as many available options by the time they're ready to pick a career path.

Also, I hate these comments from white collar folks about blue collar jobs being the answer to everything. Yes we need them, but we also need to be honest that the average plumber is going to have a harder time working until 65 than an office worker.

I don't want to spend my tax money educating future bankers.

Most of those future executives are probably in private schools right now anyway.

As well, by definition, to be gifted you need to be an outlier. Most people get by and live a decent, if stressful, life.

So to me, many and not only equate.

This statement is a textbook syllogistic fallacy.

It ignores the qualification context for being gifted vs. being in the NBA. There are a number of historically exclusive systems, prejudiced on socioeconomic and racial standards, that are required prerequisites for being in a gifted school, which do not exist for being in the NBA.

Put in simpler terms: open basketball courts != gatekeeping gifted schools

EDIT: Nobody here is calling you a racist. Your edit above reads like, "I'm not a racist, but..."

1. Make sure everyone has access to opportunities.

2. Get rid of all opportunities

People are going for the second one despite the fact that it doesn’t actually improve anyone’s life. Its like solving homelessness by burning down all houses.

It's like countering homelessness by enforcing that a portion of housing is accessible, affordable low-income housing. People sitting in high-income housing then make frivolous statements about all the houses being burnt down, or how we should also remove public basketball courts because of the NBA.

If you see a program that doesn’t have equal access, and instead of doing the hard work to get to equal access, you just get rid of the program… that’s the #2 option, the one I’m referring to, which is worse for everyone.

Those white kids will get other opportunities to be successful, and the non-white kids will get fewer of those opportunities, because society is racist as hell. Therefore, when you have a chance to give a non-white kid a shot at excellence, and they're qualified, give it to them.

For example, there is no test in existence that accurately measures "giftedness" in children.

Is there no adjustment whatsoever possible to that process? If the people running that process had had a slightly tighter set of criteria, would the outward appearance be dramatically different than the path they took to get to the "slightly too many qualified" condition?

Simply "tightening" the existing fuzzy criteria will only further arbitrarily limit qualified students.

Instead, accept they're all qualified insofar as they would maximally benefit from advanced lessons, and favor students for whom this may be their only opportunity to get ahead.

- Resource constraints (e.g. can only afford to teach sixty students)

- "catching up"; entering an existing gifted class stream after missing the first few years

- You'd want to select early in the school year. Joining a gifted class in the last few weeks of the year is pointless

- Kids in gifted streams want or are pressured to remain there

Modifications of the current distribution outside of the source and those factors above can result in zero sum outcomes. It's rhetorically useful to wave this off but still a practical concern.

In which case, the solution is "fund more gifted programs in schools that lack them", not "defund existing gifted programs".

Which is kinda what the article's author started to argue but never quite got there in the end.

What's interesting that is not mentioned is page 15: a black student with a black teacher is still much less likely to be identified as gifted. even less than a white student with a non-white teacher. internalized racism?

There's a lot of value in having a gifted track in schooling. Throwing that away because it is currently inaccurate at identifying students that are best suited to it is a stupid idea. Make it accurate at identifying the students that are best suited to it instead.

You can't self-select to be evaluated. Your parents can advocate, but they ultimately don't decide either. Although I think they can turn down the evaluation, I'm unclear on that though.

The first hurdle is getting the teacher to not only recognize that the child may be gifted, but to make the recommendation to administration. Then it is administration who ultimately makes the call on whether or not to evaluate the kid.

And teachers are more likely to recommend white students than black students.

And this may not even be something they're consciously aware of doing. Because a lot of this is based on the teachers' perceptions of students. If you have a good rapport with a student, you're more likely to recommend them to be evaluated. If you are constantly butting heads with a kid, or if the kid is just quietly doing their work, you're not going to be inclined to recommend them. Regardless of how well they are doing in class.

I was not evaluated until partway through my freshman year of high school and the only reason I was was because the teacher who ran the Quiz Bowl team got everyone who made it on the team who wasn't already in the gifted program evaluated.

Otherwise, I probably would not have been evaluated at all.

Perhaps "unacceptably lacking in Black students" is a less divisive way to say this, unless the decisiveness were intended and surely that's not the case.

The author's focus on a particular racial classification seems incongruent with facts, given that students with another racial group are also over-represented in "Gifted Programs."

Trying to chase it down just got me to this: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...

Which seems like it just is saying that the proportion assigned to gifted programs was lower than what the average test score would suggest (notable when compared to hispanics), but hispanics could have a wider distribution (or a bimodal one), so this seems like a shoddy test. The correct check of the hypothesis would be to find the test score threshhold above which 50% of students get into the gifted program and see if this threshhold varies by race... but I can't find anywhere this is done.

I'll give an example. I attended a gifted program starting in 3rd grade. I went to an elementary school for 1st and 2nd grade that was almost entirely white with some asian kids. Part of the mechanism for selecting students for the gifted program was a letter from the student's counselor, teacher, and principal.

My mom noticed that some schools were sending way more kids to the GT program than others. Several schools basically never sent any kids. No surprise, there were more black and hispanic kids at the schools. BUT these schools did not have a lack of students with high SOL scores or grades. It turned out that the process of identifying students and writing letters was letting these kids down. A few years of local activism to adjust the process and suddenly a bunch of kids from these other schools were being admitted to the GT program and succeeding.

Activists recently tried to adjust the admissions criteria for TJHSST, a magnet school in the area, to be a "merit lottery." This says that you set some minimum qualification (minimum GPA and accelerated math coursework) and then select students at random from that pool. This proposal was called racist against south and east asian students and activists were called enemies of excellence by various people like Scott Aaronson.

I was personally identified as having potential for going to TJ at age four. My parents paid a lot of money for me to have tutoring specifically for the admissions test.

In the above example, black and hispanic students with similar qualifications (test scores) are not receiving the same access to accelerated programs.

The point is that the mechanisms by which we define qualifications and select students really really matters and can encode all sorts of inequities.

This is, of course, far more complicated, and involves difficult problems. Far easier to sweep it all under the rug by calling attention to qualifications "unacceptable".

And in the example I listed for early GT admissions, there was no need for developing "underdeveloped" students. They were already developed. They just had systems that didn't enable them to get through the gate to the GT program.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979

> In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small.

From class of 2024 to class of 2025.

* Economically disadvantaged students: 0.62% to 25.09%

* Black students: 1.23% to 7.09%

* Hispanic students: 3.29% to 11.27%

* White students: 17.70% to 22.36%

* Asian students: 73.05% to 54.36%

The raw increase in black students is larger than the raw increase in white students. But Aaronson predicted a "drastic increase" in white students and for the number of black students to increase by "a bit." Oops.

You can slice stats further. The number of asian students who are also on free and reduced lunch increased between years.

We will obviously have to wait a few years to see how college admissions turn out and then we'll need to wait longer than that to see how their lives turn out. But early concerns about the students being "lower quality" are not panning out.

There is also the question of what "elite" means. Should TJ select for people that are extremely good at taking tests so they can have students take a mountain of AP classes and score a lot of 5s? Or is that not actually the best kind of education for gifted students? The most valuable material when I attended was not the testing but building weird software in the syslab. This value isn't encoded in grades and test scores.

This confuses me greatly. Are they using more generous grading for pandemic reasons? I've observed a noticeable difference between a top 5% student and a top 1% student, so the fact they're getting the same scores is odd... Wass the material/pace much lower than what the student body could cope with?

Middle school GPA of the admits. Not their GPA in their freshmen year at TJ. I don't believe that TJ publishes this information. In a few years you'll be able to get a few proxies in average AP scores and college admissions information (though these metrics are flawed in their own ways).

But more and more evidence is stacking up that maybe your core assumption (the new class is full of worse students so that more white people get admitted) might not be true. Continuing to grasp for possible other explanations that allow you to keep holding this belief isn't good science. There are more than 500 very smart 8th graders in fairfax county (and prince william and fauquier counties) each year. Changing the testing procedure doesn't mean that less smart students are being admitted.

> with similar test scores

> WITH SIMILAR TEST SCORES

What I found: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...

and of course the link to the gov data source in that article is broken: http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/

Edit: I see where they pulled the line from. Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.

> However, controlling for math and reading scores did not have the same effect for black students. In fact, black students continued to be assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical math and reading achievement.

If you read to the end, the paper is literally linked: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...

I find this to be frustrating. How many times have we heard from people defending the existing systems that standardized testing is an appropriate method of stratifying people. When universities decide to minimize the relevance of the SATs we see howls of complaints. Now suddenly these tests are of minimal utility if they demonstrate that qualified black and hispanic students are being turned away?

Yes, a student who studies hard may get good academic test scores, but may do poorly on gifted admittance tests. They're testing two different things. The former tests ability to understand class content, the other tests the ability to solve problems which are not part of school curriculum.

Having the raw data matters.

Cited statements also need double checking. Frequently there's a game of telephone going on and the original research has been distorted.

This is not just a left wing phenomena, it's a phenomena anywhere you get people who aren't completely dispassionate observers (this excludes all advertiser funded media as they are incentivized to make things interesting and engaging).

As I said in my other post, in my school you were taken out of regularly classes, but still had to learn those things and do that work. That means the student has to agree to work 20% harder, usually at home, where they may not have that luxury. There are probably other considerations that aren't coming to mind at the moment, too, that also affect the number of children in Gifted programs.

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...

There are even more radical proposals [0] they are trying to introduce in High School classes.

It's hard not to see the real agenda past the shallow arguments against gifted programs [1]. This was an enlightening read to say the least.

[0] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/

[1] https://unherd.com/2022/02/anti-racism-betrays-asian-student...

They know adults will be skeptical of what they teach (with reason). So they try to jam it down children’s throats where there’s little parental oversight. Disagree with it? Enjoy failing the class and the hit it will have on your GPA for college. And they aren’t even trying to hide it.

> Often the emphasis is placed on learning math in the “real world,” as if our classrooms are not a part of the real world. This reinforces notions of either/or thinking because math is only seen as useful when it is in a particular context. However, this can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings of the world.

Repeat that for 83 pages. It's utterly surreal.

This explains why soviet mathematicians were (and still are) considered among the best in the world.

The way math is taught is quite often racist. I've seen entire math textbooks based around examples featuring American sports. If you don't know the rules of American football, you are not going to understand any of the examples in the book. I spent a lot of time in school and college explaining various American sports rules to friends.

That is the most trivial of examples, but it is a hugely impactful one for a lot of people. I have seen large amounts of frustration because some math book author couldn't keep his favorite sports jargon from littering the entire book.

You have other biases as well that can make students feel like shit. Story problems about a working father and a stay at home mother, sounds like nothing for many people, but for quite a few kids being reminded again and again that "not having a dad" is unusual, well, why the hell is the math book doing that? Just stick to problems involving trains.

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.

But to your point, I was not able to take algebra until 9th grade due to reasons that felt a bit discriminatory as you'd described, but my mother was a maniac and no one liked her, so hard to say if that didn't add weight.

Consider a toy admissions criteria where students go through the same process as today but students with black hair have to also win a game of rock paper scissors. There will surely be a large number of kids with black hair who are admitted and succeed. But the system would be plainly unfair and deserve to be fixed, despite many individual students with black hair being able to say "well I was admitted."

I was well-behaved and bright, but coarse I suppose.

I was too poor to participate in the fancy science trips, couldn't afford class materials, constantly late, and homework never got done due to what I remember as "family issues". I was bright and gifted, but a high achiever I was not.

I don't blame them for pushing me out of the system, I didn't play by the rules. But from what you're saying, that's part of the problem and I don't disagree... but allowing me to persist and annoy those gifted kids with resources, encouraging families, and ambition wasn't really fair now was it?

But forcing a child to use their non-dominant right hand could be considered a form of cruelty I suppose, so not seeing how they're really related.

When I go back home to Appalachia, I fall back into my old bad habits readily but if I got a call from my boss, I'm switching to "educated" and that's more than just ditching the drawl, it's modifying the entire way I structure my thoughts. I think that's very common and not unfair to expect from someone claiming that they desire education.

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.

they look for this and throw out offending questions on the SAT all the time

Give an upper class white kid a problem involving tennis scores, no problem. The kid will be able to easily understand what is being talked about, there isn't anything mentally jarring going on.

Give a poor black kid a problem involving tennis scores, boom, problem. Odds of a poor black kid knowing how tennis scoring works, much less likely.

My, largely well to do, neighborhood has tennis courts. The more diverse, and poorer, neighborhood I grew up in, didn't. I am still not sure how tennis is scored, but I am pretty sure the kids in the house next to me understand it.

Repeat this idea a few times with some of the other tests. Give some word recall lists using words poor/minority kids aren't accustom to. It is harder to recall words that you have never heard before, they are basically nonsense syllables, which is a very different test. If you had thrown "quiche" in the middle of a word list 8 year old me would have had no idea what you were talking about.

Modern day IQ tests have tried to correct for these biases, but school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results.

Do you have any evidence of school administrators choosing "older" tests with biased questions about tennis scores or whatever other cultural trivia rich white kids are most likely to know about? I took an IQ test when I was a kid (early 90's) and it was a bunch of abstract questions involving mental rotations of objects, determining the next number in a sequence, determining the missing object from a set of objects, and so on. There were no questions about vocabulary or trivia of any kind.

The point is that it is possible for corrupt administrators to bias test results, and the methods to do such are fairly easy to come across.

I'm not objecting to IQ tests, just pointing out that if a school wanted to create a test that only admitted certain students, that it is very possible to do such.

Over around 18 years of having various maths topics in schools

The only thing that required some "non-math" knowledge were cards related questions and maybe dice

but what is that tennis counting example? do they actually appear on IQ questions?

how about maths exams?

Oh and poker hands.

I can easily imagine an IQ test 50 years ago involving scoring in bridge games.

Step 2 is divide the poor against each other.

Step 2 is important so people who are poor won't ever band together and demand change.

It is sad that the "left" has forgotten this, while those in power continue to use the same tactics decade after decade, century after century.

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.

I imagine other factors such as home life, economic status, and cultural emphasis on education would be much, much stronger predictors on IQ test performance.

Certainly home life, economic background, etc have an impact on educational outcomes. But I'm making a narrower claim here. A student with a poor home life is likely to test poorly regardless, although the difference might be larger in some tests than others. But a student with the same educational aptitude may test better or worse depending on if they're being tested on topics that are familiar or unfamiliar to them.

Removing cultural context is certainly a solution. I'm not sure it's the best solution. Excessively-abstract problems are only one aspect of intelligence. Anything involving reading comprehension is going to have some linguistic or cultural elements, but I'm not sure it's valid to just remove reading comprehension altogether.

If you want to see a standardized test from a different culture, here's one that's made the rounds a few times. This is for eight-graders in Kentucky in 1912. The sections on Geography & Physiology certainly stand out, but even the math section has a notably different emphasis than modern education.

https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...

If we are talking IQ scores within the same western country, we know now to make culture fair fluid intelligence test (it's not the same as future achievement score)