Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.

If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".

The way you wrote this it feels like you're about to say that Giavant tanked the program, and your parenthetical is sarcasm. I don't think that was your intent, but you may want to be aware in the future (and it could be an issue with the reader, of course.)

Totally expected that comment to take a much darker turn.

Which is just wrong. The gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future. Boring them, stunting their potential, ruining their education is the worst thing schools can do.

Kids need to be in different tracks. You need at least three tracks. Obviously, it should be possible to move between them as appropriate.

Citation needed.

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...

And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think.

One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are:

1. Success in business, science and technology are all strongly associated with intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...

2. Intelligence tends to be relatively stable. https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726

Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology.

The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement.

And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road.

Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?"

And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you.

On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?

But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both.

[1] https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...

That's also a problem with "citation needed" argument - people who are in position to publish papers are often motivated politically or just bad at thinking and logic.

However I think that simply dumping money into education as it is is more likely to produce bad results than good ones. That's because the current education system is driven more by ideology than pseudoscience than by anything resembling an effective methodology. Given the "citation needed" atmosphere, I'll offer https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm as an argument. We have lots of changes being made educationally which are promised to produce better results over time. And, time and again, they don't. As Feynman said, the planes aren't landing.

But if we can invest, I also question the promised savings in the article. It does not distinguish between increase in income due to having the characteristics that help one get a degree, versus increase in income due to what is taught in a degree. This can be a very large difference. If you have a subscription to The Economist, read https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... for how much college rankings and benefits change when you try to measure universities by estimates of value added.

That isn't to say that there is a better figure available for education. But it does not speak well to their intellectual integrity that they failed to point out this major shortcoming in their own data.

That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.

If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.

- (signed)Tired of watching "inspired dumbasses" waste their time, inherited fortunes and other persons' time.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university.

Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers.

The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.

> "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future"

didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling".

It read "contribute significantly to our future".

Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.

The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in.

On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?

If some kid is all juiced up and excited about something, its tragic for the school to stamp that out through neglect and busywork.

IDK how we could build an education system that supports kids in excelling while not degenerating in to a caste system

Some are great at maths and shit at other classes and vice-versa.

I agree that publicly funded schools should cater to as wide a range of needs as possible. And at a certain point it becomes the parents' responsibility. If your child is highly gifted you may need to invest your own time and money beyond the basic education provided by the state. Another preferable option is to invest far more money in public education. That is difficult to get widespread support for.

You know damn well these metrics don't exist today. You yourself do not include any measurements in your logic. But still require it of others. I don't think you are doing this discussion in good faith at all.

Or rather the core of the argument: Why is a single dollar better spend on a non-gifted kid rather then a gifted kid in terms of societal outcomes.

Non-gifted meaning in this case someone who get's a lot of support through government intervention like for example no child left behind.

My claim is that we all depend on each other and that if you dropped a gifted person in the woods and isolated them they wouldn't achieve much useful. They might not even survive. It's this interdependencey that gets ignored when we idolize one of the societal roles too much. People smart at math are important. But so are the people who give them the free time to do that by building highways, serving them food, or making the computer they use. In a market economy those folks are valued less and I'm not here to debate economic systems and the morality of that. Just that if we do not make an initial investment in those folks, the gifted folks won't have as much time to make their contributions to society. So there is actually an important balance to seek when trying to optimize for the greatest benefit to society. Also keep in mind that societies have executed the elite when things get too unbalanced.

I already mentioned in another comment that the ideal would be that everyone gets the education investment that challenges them to learn as much as they can. Since we aren't there yet I don't think it's unfair to give an average and basic education and to let parents of gifted children take on some of the educational responsibilities. The state can only do so much.

As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?

As far as metrics or sources, no I don't have any. My argument is mostly persuasive, but I hope based on basic things we can all observe or repeated chapters from human history. However that doesn't exclude me from curiously asking for sources for claims from others. Sources are an opportunity for me to learn more than fits in an HN comment.

This is precisely the problem: making it seem like everything is "fair" because all kids get the same lowest-common-denominator/no-child-left-behind education system. Every child deserves to have the opportunity to learn, which is why the special education system (which receives enormous resources, far beyond the proportion of students who receive SPED services) exists. According to your logic, we could just get rid of SPED and say "it's all fine because all children have access to the same public education". But that misses the point, which is that different children need different resources to learn. Some need remedial support, and some need more advanced learning.

And as mentioned upthread, since CA got rid of the requirement for GATE education, schools (including those in incredibly well-heeled districts) have gotten rid of advanced learning options for students. The result is that kids with involved parents procure outside resources, while their peers whose parents are not involved/as well-off are robbed of the chance to learn.

Looking back on the thread the more important point I wanted to make was in reaction to the claim that gifted children are far more valuable to society than let's say a nurse. Since my claim is that we all play an important role then I do agree now that resources should be spent in a way that allows each student to learn the most.

> My claim is that we all depend on each other and that if you dropped a gifted person in the woods and isolated them they wouldn't achieve much useful. They might not even survive.

No one is arguing against this, no one. You seemingly joined this discussion out of nowhere. Made this point which is completely unrelated to what we are talking about and are arguing with multiple people.

> As far as your question about the single dollar spent on the non-gifted kid but not spent on the gifted kid, I'm not aware of that happening. Don't all children in the same area have access to the same public education?

No child left behind is exactly this. The non-gifted children get disproportionate amounts of attention.

> As far as metrics or sources, no I don't have any.

Which is exactly what I said....

Yes you did say that I don't have sources or metrics. However unlike you I didn't call your question unfair or hypocritical. It's always a fair question and one that anyone can ask out of curiosity so they can learn more if there are indeed sources that the commenter previously learned from and can easily share. In fact I demonstrated how one can respond to such a question with honesty and without getting defensive and making accusations of arguing in bad faith, like you did.

You should review HN guidelines. Twice now you've responded in a way that is not welcome here.

In particular: Be kind.

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

Based on the kind words of another commenter I can now better see how gifted children could be better served. I don't think gifted children are being left behind but they possibly could learn more in an improved system. However that shouldn't be done with the false motivation that was initially claimed: that they are more important to society.

Equally important is more accurate and enough.

In our very well-heeled district, the administration resists calls for offering options for advanced learners. It has nothing to do with resources, so adding more resources would not result in more learning for advanced students. The constraint is ideological, not financial.

I would support you in administrative changes if I were in your area. The area I'm in at the moment barely invests in a sub-standard education because anyone with even a little money uses private schooling.

I disagree. I highly value a society of people with basic education. I think a lot of people do. It's one of the things most people are happy to pay taxes for.

The people who create tomorrow's society are the gifted and motivated here now.

It seems to me that the correlations for IQ are not too high for many of what people might call "success."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...

of course we should put more resources into education. worldwide, education is the primary tool to improve everyones life. and with that i don't mean just science and general knowledge, but also moral education that teaches us how to care for each other and for the world.

we need to learn not only how to make the world a better place, but also why. and we need to understand that it takes the contribution of everyone to achieve that. not just the gifted ones, which is why i believe that helping strugglers is more important right now, in order to reach a critical mass of people that understand this and sway public opinion towards more resouces in education, at which point we will be able to help everyone, gifted or not, to develop their full potential

Note that I'm making no comment on whether I think this is fair or not.

i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.

Of course kids who are struggling might really just be stuck on one issue, and once they get past it they'll be fine - i.e. when I was in around Year 2, for whatever reason my reading-level reports for somewhat low. Post that of course, I shot ahead (I have no idea why or how, in that case the metric probably just was mis-measuring whatever my interest was at the time).

Which is an example of exactly the issue with the idea of "gifted kids" - they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults.

After all: plenty of gifted mathematicians, certainly people smarter then me. If they're working as mathematicians though, the lifetime earning potential of my average career in IT is going to be higher though.

That's a shocking claim to make. Feynman, Von Neumann, Turing, Einstein, Gauss...I think I could go on all day naming people whose contribution to society was outrageously disproportionate and who were all stereotypical "gifted children".

Of course they exist. You wouldn't be having this conversation on a computer on the Internet if they didn't.

Some people are smarter than other people, and being smart gives you myriad advantages in navigating the world. This seems pretty uncontroversial.

Can sooo relate to that... That's essentially the thing where I took my top-3% highschool-degree (spending presence-hours+30min/day on school - the day I grade-overtook a person spending 4h/day by final results was fun) to a "mediocre" uni degree.

EDIT: back then, around 30% of people attended that kind of highschool.

What did I do with time: read prose of my native language and America (leading me to optimize highschool finals by dropping english for even less work old greek...) - I guess someone making me learn for 2h/day would have not really hurt my (very underused) culture knowledge and helped me a lot the uni years.

They may also want to avoid moving to a higher track to avoid teasing from colleagues for being a "smarty-pants" or perceived as too good for the friend group.

"too good" is elitist language, but I was clearly differently minded from my peers in early grade school and I think it harmed a lot more than it helped.

In most western government leadership now supporting smart people is basically elitism which is evil.

Despite the fact that practically it’s what needs to be done and what leads to a better society for everyone not. Not to mention most of Asia IS doing this and seem to be doing much better.

The CA Dept of Education used to require GATE programs. In 2014, they made them optional, so schools stopped offering them. What's shocking to me is that this happened even in districts where there are lots of high-performing kids, with families that care about advanced learning. When we moved to Menlo Park, we were surprised that our highly-rated school doesn't have any programs for kids who are advanced in learning. They just talk about how all their lessons have a "low floor and high ceiling" which sounds nice in theory but doesn't work very well in practice (at least when you have a mix of kids who range from 1-2 grades below grade level to 2-3 grades above grade level).

To clarify, this is the Las Lomitas district, which is west Menlo Park, not MPCSD, which covers downtown and the rest of MP.

If you want a magnet program, go to Redwood City — it has one. Even the privates are generally not great on math acceleration. I hear Menlo School doesn’t allow early acceleration either, and they’re one of the more academic private schools.

Feel free to email me (contact in profile) if you want more details.

Excellent story about the government not allowing anyone to be too smart or beautiful.

Example. If you’re smart, you wear head phones that emit random loud noises so you can’t form thoughts for long.

  SFUSD became Harrison Bergeron Unified. It’s a cautionary tale, not a model. Push back.

In fact, every school already has an advanced learning program. It's called the next grade!

Not only are there social benefits from having mixed age groups of children (younger ones learn by observing the older ones), but they could also each learn at their own level. There's absolutely no reason for age-separated schooling.

Eh, there are a lot of different things you learn in school. For example, I was doing algebra at home with my mom (which I would ultimately do in school in 6th grade) in 2nd grade when I was still having trouble putting spaces in between my words with my handwriting. LikeIwouldwriteallmyhandwrittenwordslikethis. It was a big struggle for me to start adding spaces between words. and don't even start on my spelling. I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject. But yes, I needed advanced math.

Nice girls, very innocent. Eventually the rest of the class started catching up with our math progress and by the end of the school year we were let out of the cage.

It was a fond memory, I am not bitter about it, still remember some of the gags.

I dont think i lost that much, my math interest was more of a natural force rather than whatever i did in a repetetive schoolbook. And maybe I gained some social skills instead?

Just a little funny way of dealing with it

Haha, that came out a bit different that i meant to. I meant that we were all very innocent, just like 3 well behaved 11 year old kids.

I had the same experience in 1st-2nd grade (in foreign language class, not math). Three of us were deemed too advanced for the grade so the teacher sent us out to the playground unsupervised with instructions to speak in the foreign language and correct each other.

I don't remember us speaking in that language too much but we played lots of games and it was fun.

It's possible to go to a higher grade just on some subjects though. In our (my child's) elementary, kids could go up a grade on math only if that suited them better. They stay in their grade but during math hour go to the classroom of a higher grade.

It worked reasonably well but there's some limits since it is only an elementary school so beyond a certain point there are no higher grades available on campus.

When you stop thinking in age-related grades, and start thinking in individual subjects, you realize how stupid the current system is.

People are differently skilled/talented in different subjects, why group them by age, instead of subject-specific ability?!

1. Outside of academics, the younger children are not at the same level of emotional, mental, and physical development. This prevents the two age groups from building substantive social connections.

2. There is a Donny Dumbass in every grade. So even if you go to the next grade up, there is still a Donny Dumbass taking all of the teacher’s attention.

I have first hand experience with this. My school had two advanced levels. The most advanced was all kids from the same grade. The intermediate level was taking the normal class with the grade above. I took the intermediate class. I sat in the back and the girl next to me offered me mushrooms. I had not yet reached the point in my development where I would have regular exposure to drug users, so this was a shock for me. This girl also wasn’t the most enlightened study partner.

This is basically the education reform movement of the 90s and aughts getting their wish via the monkey-paw. Schools and teachers are measured and judged on how kids perform on standardized tests. Your kid is likely in the 95%+ percentile so there’s not much room for “growth” as far as the metrics are concerned. So their efforts are on pulling up kids from the 5th percentile up closer to the median.

Also, it’s not uncommon for low performing students parents to sometimes freak out at the school if their kid starts falling behind, so everyone scrambles to get these kids back on track so the parents don’t pull their kids from school (which will only make things worse for the kids academics)

As far as most people are concerned, a kid that is acing everything is going to be fine in life and they don't worry about anything that could be going wrong there.

I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.

What year and what school district did this happen in?

I mean I'm curious because that's violent assault, of the sort that generally makes the local papers.

"I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw."

Citation needed!8-))

Sounds like an urban myth (albeit a good one)!

Also, it is unclear that the story demonstrates any relevant point in this discussion: one might say that using a shop band saw on another's teeth is a very clever, although, on the surface extremely unsocial, act."

That’s the reasoning anyway. It’s not like teachers are maniacally cackling over this situation - there’s significant turn-over. You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.

IME the teacher unions are also opposed to advanced learning. It requires teachers to do more work if classes are heterogeneous, since they would need to make up more lesson plans and assignments. And the teacher unions are opposed to tracking because then teachers don’t all have the same mix of students, which leads to member complaints. At least this is what we’ve been told.

First, creating lesson plans/assignments (and grading them) is extremely time consuming. So it's completely reasonable for teachers protest having their workload increased.

Second, things like gifted classes and magnet schools create a "creaming" effect, where the best students are pulled from regular classes and either sent to a separate school or in separate classes with high performers. If you're a math or English teacher that's getting professionally evaluated based on your students' performance on standardized tests, you are strongly incentivized to keep any high performing student in your class - the existence of gifted classes and magnets hurts you.

In the tech world, we sort of had a version of this during the Ballmer era of Microsoft, where engineering managers were sometimes reluctant to grade top performers too highly in fear their best developers will get reallocated. Some managers would give elite team members bad rankings just to keep them captive.

Teachers can simply be evaluated based on how their students do, relative to the students' prior performance. This wasn't a problem before 2014, when CA made GATE optional. Everyone understood that different teachers had different cohorts with different average abilities.

The teachers with lower-performing students weren't dinged because their students scored lower than the students in advanced classes. Instead, teachers could specialize in remedial, typical, or advanced learning.

Slow walking someone through learning a vocation over 2-4 years while sprinkling in some academic outcomes is a good option.

I’m assuming you just mean in your school system. Or do you mean more school districts are moving toward this?

The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.

Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones.

The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks."

- C.S. Lewis (in the voice of screwtape), almost 80 years ago.

Less developed children are challenging to the system, but it gets worse: there are children who are so violent that they essentially attend prison schools. Since this is CA, they are obviously not called that. Pretty sure that this is a massive drain on the educational budget.

This is largely a legacy of state testing and “accountability” regimes which were accelerated by national policy like NCLB and focus intense pressure on minimizing the number of students testing below grade level.

At my childrens school, as work is often online they allow them to go ahead in modules. The teacher mist open it for them though to have some control.

Some people in year 7 are doing year 9 work. Great for challenging them but it will be curious where this goes as you might get some people finishing all of highschool classes for a particular subject quite early and need to keep educating and challenging them.

For english they have a program where you can finish your end of school exams for this subject the year early, freeing time for other subjects.

This is in Australia.

Maybe, but at the same time it's OK if your gifted kid only has a PhD and a high paying job but not a Nobel prize. Whereas it's a bit problematic for society if Donny Dumbass spends his life being a burden to everyone because he remains problematic...

Humanity itself is at risk from various extinction level events.

If you insist that it's okay for all gifted students to never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries, we're likely extinct sooner rather than later.

The nongifted people, even if all completely stop contributing to society, would not result in an extinction.

IOW, we are all relying on the gifted people to save us. Hobbling gifted people even slightly has a far worse impact than not helping non gifted people.

And yes, I am part of the non gifted.

I'm surprised to actually find that there are people who think that the life they currently enjoy was the result of train drivers and janitors.

Gifted people only ever educated and working in ivory towers would starve long before enhancing life for anyone, except for the efforts of their 'lessers'.

Well, I don't see how the nongifted people will come up with any the technology required to leave this rock.

So the only other option is that we never leave, or we leave purely on the efforts of the gifted alone.

I did not write that.

> The nongifted people, even if all completely stop contributing to society, would not result in an extinction.

I'm not referring to not contributing, I'm referring to contributing negatively.

> I did not write that.

No, you wrote:

> it's OK if your gifted kid only has a PhD and a high paying job but not a Nobel prize.

Which is no different from "never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries".

This really resonates. I rarely felt challenged until around high school when I accidentally tested my way into some advanced classes taught by teachers who demanded much more. It felt awful and my self esteem was shot, but I was grateful in the end. I had the same issues applying myself again in college, but for the opposite reason.

Nobody should have to stumble through school like that.

I do think it's important to diversify the experience of perseverance though. Math isn't everything.

Maybe this isn't bad for a public school system. Maybe the goal should just be to try to make sure no one falls below the floor. But the schools interests aren't well aligned with the needs of any student that is above that line, much less above average.

  Maybe the goal should just be to try to make sure no one falls below the floor.

- If you're unchallenged at school and have rich, college-educated parents, they can pay for tutors or teach you at home.

- If your parents are working two jobs to make ends meet, your SOL.

The public education system is meant to give opportunity to everyone, not just the rich.

It's not very clear to me, but the way I read it is that the school should say "if your parents help you at home, you don't need us at school". "So we'll just focus on those kids whose parents don't help them, because, you know, they have two jobs". Did I get that right?

My last Uber driver was a Pakistani, he told me his oldest son got into the Stuyvesant High School. He is one of those kids who needs to be challenged. Should he not be, because he's got "rich parents" ?

Schools should aim to maximize learning for every child, irrespective of their starting point or their parents' resources.

If schools have everyone go at the same pace, some kids won't learn anything at school. Parents with resources can always pay for private tutors or, if that's not enough, pay for private school.

I'm glad you brought up Stuyvesant. Imagine if Stuyvesant didn't exist, and all students at all public high schools in NYC went through math at the same pace. Imagine further that your Uber driver can't afford private tutors or private school, and is too busy working to tutor his kids himself. Would it be fair that his smart kid has to go slow whilst an equally smart kid with rich parents will be doing Calculus BC in 11th grade?

The unions are powerful beyond what you'd expect (with a UK perspective) because, in many cases, the body on the other side of negotiations (school board) is comprised of teachers' friends (often ex-teachers and even former union leaders) or family members.

If you're interested in this topic, you might enjoy the book 'Race to the bottom'.

> Imagine further that your Uber driver can't afford private tutors or private school

That's not hard to imagine. In fact I'm almost sure that indeed he can't afford private tutors (he told me he has 3 sons). As for private school, he even told me what school his eldest son was going to; it was a public one. I just googled it now, and US News ranks it as #1 among NYC's public middle schools [1]. I'd take that ranking with a solid grain of salt, but still, it's probably a very good middle school.

Now, here's the funny thing: 3 years ago, when his son moved from elementary to middle school, there were still selective public middle schools in NYC. Just one year later all selection was changed to lottery based. In the name of equity.

Thanks for your recommendation downthread for "Race to the bottom". I'll read it.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/new-york/ps-122-mamie-f...

Lets say you have two kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum and you have $30,000 per year to spend on educating them. Do you spend $15k on each knowing that you'll get very unequal results? Or do you spend the bulk of they money on the one that needs the most help at the expense of the one who has the most natural talent?

Schools are making these types of decisions all the time. The average school does not spend 25% of their budget on the top 25% of their students.

1. The availability of money is an important constraint on the ability of schools to support each student.

2. Schools (or those who run them: principals) have wide discretion to make the type of decision you present.

In my local school district (San Francisco Unified - SFUSD), neither of these is true, because:

- SFUSD's budget is about $27,000 per student per year[0]. Assuming teachers make no more than an average of $135k/year, and that average class size is at least 20, only 25% of that budget is required to pay for a teacher per class. There's a lot of headroom.

- Budgets (set by the district, not by individual schools or principals) are not designed to maximize learning for children, but to maximize employment for adults.

For that reason, I don't think your question makes sense.

Let me ignore that for now, and assume your question does make sense. What would it mean to allocate budget differently for kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum? It sounds like the two kids would be in different classes, being taught by different teachers, perhaps with different class sizes. But that approach (which detractors call 'tracking') is disliked by many of the folks who control public education in the US.

Let's say you thought that the top 5% of students should be taught in separate classes, and that those classes should have larger class sizes, so these students only took 2.5% of the total budget. If you were to propose such a scheme, you'd be told it's unfair. Not unfair to the gifted students because they're receiving a lower per-capita share of resources, but unfair to everyone else because 'equity'.

[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sfusd-schools-budget-...

It took me a long time to figure them out, and when it finally came to a parent-teacher conference to discuss why I was having trouble with math, I count that as the beginning of my adventure in self-directed study. I took teachers entirely at their word at 8 years old, and it simply did not occur to me that they were just another human with ideas that might or might not be universal. "This is how you learn this" became an opinion, not a fact, and it was off to the races for me. I also found myself from time to time playing ersatz tutor because some other kids also didn't understand the teacher, and occasionally they liked my re-interpretation better.

There is something about realizing you've been sweating bullets for something that is actually easy. Few lessons stick around like that, but the attendant feelings are complex and often not fun or helpful.

Your... elementary schools?

Though I agree that it’s convenient if multiplying anything under 10 is a idempotent action :)

Is... that not how most people do mental math? I instinctively reduce everything to familiar patterns largely based on single digits numbers tables.

563 * 3557 is about 600 * 4000 => 6 * 4 * 100000 => about 2.4M

Are other people doing the standard algorithm visualized somehow?

Guess what? You'll first need to manually* derive the approximate "multiplication tables" (for individual digits), only then you'll be able to multiply multi-digit numbers.

I know it's cliched to say: "It's the system that's broken!" But it is for (most) public schools in the US.

Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but public schools are pressured to make sure that standardized testing scores are at a certain level for funding. Teachers aren't paid very well, nor do they get the proper resources to adequately teach their students.

I'm sure I'm grossly simplifying the problems there, but I can already see how those two points make it so that there's a lot of pressure on teachers to conform to teaching what's on standardized tests. I can't imagine that any of those factors make it very easy for teachers to even WANT to teach, much less get creative about HOW they're teaching their students.

[1] https://www.riekes.org/riekesnature

[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/ (side note, all of our kids could pass the high school "exit" exam when they started high school. I attribute this not necessarily to personal talents so much as a very low student/teacher ratio meant everyone learned things and a lack of "deadlines" on when they had to be done meant different approaches could be taken on a subject if one didn't seem to be working out)

Then we added in some IXL (which we had access to via the school). That allows for lots of practice of new and old concepts, and it requires more thorough demonstrations of mastery. I also used free websites to generate worksheets for skills like long multiplication and division.

Right now we're looking at AoPS and Po-Shen Lo for her main curriculum for next year.

If there's one thing I hate about social media especially, it's that we must skip all nuance to yell in absolutes.

My experience has been that homeschooling has been worse than public schooling, even where parents have been professional teachers.

No doubt it can be better for some and in some areas may be the only sane choice. Some stats even indicate better academic outcomes.

Yet I've personally seen it bring a lot of strife, unreasonable expectations, and pain into the home. And the outcomes I've seen don't inspire confidence. As a group, at least where I've lived, homeschooling parents: don't give the kids a choice, do it for their own selfish reasons, produce kids without enough socializing among peers, and often indoctrinate the kids with religious 'teachings' that undermine critical thinking skills.

I'm curious what does 'enough socialising' mean?

And yet kids have never had more access to knowledge, information and quality learning resources outside of school, without the toxic social environment. Say you'll do it yourself thanks and people call you a child abuser - while their kids are bullied and 'underperforming' at school with teachers they don't like. It's insane.