by tafda on 11/26/24, 4:53 PM with 526 comments
by csa on 11/26/24, 5:25 PM
The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for the gifted and talented communities.
Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron.
Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally does not afford equality of opportunities is a fool’s game that ends with Bergeron-esque levels of absurdity.
Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we all aren’t equal, we don’t all have access to the same opportunities, but as a country we can implement policies that lessen the imbalance.
Head Start is a good example.
Well-run gifted and talented programs in schools are also good examples.
Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society.
by bobfromsf on 11/26/24, 6:04 PM
Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we were utterly ignored. We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age. My kid is 6 grades ahead in math, scored over 175 in his VCI and they refused to even entertain the idea of skipping even a single grade.
California is doing whatever it takes to drive away any family that cares even a modicum for their children’s education and had the means or is willing to sacrifice to ensure their children are adequately educated. Meanwhile they are dropping the requirements at the same time, so the gap between private school and public school educated kids keeps growing more and more.
It’s pretty telling that in SFUSD, 50% of the black and brown kids graduate high school without being able to read properly. The real racism isn’t gifted kids, it’s dropping the educational standard for those that can’t afford private school so that they graduate and can’t compete when they get into the workforce because they have been undereducated their entire lives.
by hardwaregeek on 11/26/24, 6:01 PM
Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant. They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass. What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles and knew to put you in prep. Once you were in the school, if you wanted good teachers, you had to take honors. I had a fantastic history teacher who talked about how he loved teaching regular history, but he was constantly pressured by administration to only teach AP. So for a lot of students who didn't have the grades to do honors, they got stuck with the mediocre teachers. Not to mention, psychologically, it sucks being in the bottom 50%. There were so many kids who thought they were dumb or underachievers, but were really just in the wrong environment. When they went to college, they blossomed from not being in such a rat race.
I'm not saying the solution is to eliminate gifted programs, but let's not pretend that they're universally great for kids. They're often much more status games than actual educational fulfillment.
by WillAdams on 11/26/24, 7:33 PM
The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since it conferred an advantage on students who were able to work and study well enough to move ahead, but failed to make arrangements for students who couldn't to get free college after graduating from high school.
by niemandhier on 11/26/24, 9:34 PM
What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess club, post soviet backyard hacker pad, Berlin maker space … I think what would help much more than school run gifted programs, would be more opportunities for interested kids to mingle an push each other forward.
by norir on 11/26/24, 5:31 PM
Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping away at some of the problem don't generally do much about the structural problems in schools and clearly amplify some of their existing biases.
I do not have children but I have given a lot of thought to how terrible our schooling is. I would never want to subject my children to 20 years of what I went through. But the presence or absence of traditional gifted programs is nowhere near the top of my concerns.
by jjmarr on 11/26/24, 6:07 PM
I also previously attended special education when my academic abilities were questionable, at best. I benefitted from intensive education on phonics and basic literacy skills, rather than being shoved through the pipeline without comprehending the curriculum.
The contrast was evident when I spent my lunch times in Grade 11 tutoring a "hopeless" student in Grade 9. Over the course of a few weeks, it became abundantly clear to me that this student did not understand any of the math he had allegedly learned before. He more or less pattern-matched his way to eventually getting the right answer and blundered his way through converting a fraction to a ratio without realizing they are fundamentally the same concept. That was good enough to keep pushing him through grades, I suppose.
I was just getting into formal logic as a hobby, so I focused on teaching basic reasoning. As an example, I spent a lot of time explaining that the "equals" sign is a statement that two things are the same. I proceeded to focus on logical implications---that some statements can follow from other statements.
It became much easier to teach everything else once we had those fundamentals. His ability to solve problems was much better when he understood the logical sequence of steps he should take to reach an answer. His math teacher later thanked me in Grade 12, because he started getting good marks and switched to university-track mathematics. That probably wouldn't have happened if he didn't get attention specific to him.
There should be a reframing of the problem space.
Sorting students into gifted or special education based on an accurate assessment of their abilities isn't a case of giving more resources to smarter people and less to dumber. A class of gifted students should require less resources because the students can self-motivate and aren't limited by their peers. This frees up resources for those who need them.
by bunderbunder on 11/26/24, 6:17 PM
For most of us, the reality was that our status as relatively studious kids created a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development. Gifted programs mostly served as easy, almost dismissive solution for our parents, who would rather see our very real social-emotional challenges as further evidence of our intellectual excellence and the importance of separating us from our peers so they won't "hold us back."
Quite the opposite. Being in class with my friends is what kept me emotionally grounded, and being separated from them, in a way that sends a clear message to everyone involved (including me) that it needed to happen because I was somehow too good to be in the same classes as them, did lasting harm. Even now my lifelong best friend is obnoxiously deferential to me on all sorts of subjects because he sees me as "the smart one" instead of a more sensible perspective like "the one who happens to enjoy math."
But I did move around as a kid enough times to see a few different ways of doing this sort of thing, so I can say with certainty what does work, and it works well for everyone involved: flipped classrooms. It's magical. In a group where kids who have mixed skill levels on a particular subject are asked to support each other instead of competing with each other, they do just that. And I can say from experience that it's a much better way to make a classroom more challenging for kids who do better in that subject. Helping your peers understand a tricky subject is a much more interesting intellectual challenge - and builds more useful life skills - than an artificially "accelerated" learning program ever will be. And it's better for long-term learning, too, because it helps build even stronger foundations of understanding.
And I am also seeing, now that my kids are in a school that uses flipped classroom teaching, that it's better for everyone else, too. My younger child, who has been having trouble with reading, gets an immense amount of value from being able to pair with friends who are stronger readers.
by reverendsteveii on 11/26/24, 8:07 PM
by Animats on 11/26/24, 7:47 PM
Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because these are the numbers:
Average IQ [1]
- Ashkenazi Jews - 107-115
- East Asians - 110
- White Americans - 102
- Black Americans - 90
There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.
(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)
Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]
Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.
We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.
[1] https://iqinternational.org/insights/understanding-average-i...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...
[3] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
by jaco6 on 11/26/24, 11:21 PM
The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.
by frmersdog on 11/26/24, 5:58 PM
It once again comes down to us not being able to have nice things until that racial hysteria is resolved - minority parents assured that their children aren't being mistreated because of conscious and unconscious perceptions on the part of the school, white and affluent Asian parents assured that their children aren't going to receive a subpar education just because their child's class is double-digits percentage black/brown - and, perhaps more broadly, there is a decoupling of elite educational attainment and basic economic stability. Suffice it to say that anyone telling you that the only problem is that schools are Harrison Bergeroning their little prodigies either aren't acknowledging the whole story or are hoping that you don't know it yourself.
by jmyeet on 11/26/24, 5:40 PM
For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing. Housing is too expensive. Housing needs to be cheaper. But too many people have a vested financial interest in maintaining and growing high prices.
Interestingly, high property prices are a big contributing factor here too. Schools are funded by a mix of Federal, state and local taxes and a big part of local taxes come from property taxes. So the wealthier areas get better-funded schools. It's economic segregation in the same vein as redlining.
California in particular has created a massive funding hole through Prop 13, which is essentially a massive tax break for the state's wealthiest residents.
I would add another dimension to this: how gifted? 99th percentile students will largely be fine. There are scholarships and progrrams to find and nurture these people. You start to see more disparities when you look at the 90-98th percentiles. If you're from an affluent background, you're going to be fine. If you're from a poorer background, it's way more likely that things go wrong for you. Your quality of school matters. You may catch a criminal charge of some kind, which can entirely derail your life.
While all this is going on there are significant and organized efforts to dismantle the public education system (ie "school choice" or "vouchers"), which are nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the providers of private education at the expense of everybody else.
by resource_waste on 11/26/24, 5:19 PM
Skip a grade and teach them stuff ahead of time (No, their social skills cant handle it apparently)
Teach them extended topics... aka waste their time on stuff they can already do.
I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it and I got it in my head.
I don't really understand pacing of US K12. In Retrospect, its basically teaching people math and reading skills. If we are just looking for daycare, sure the status quo is fine. Otherwise it seems school should be built around those fields rather than arbitrary ages.
by glimshe on 11/26/24, 5:38 PM
by fmitchell0 on 11/26/24, 8:27 PM
I agree that focusing on 'equality of outcomes' is not a good fit for our American culture and it should be about 'equality of opportunity'.
From wikipedia (which quoted Harvard): "Affirmative action is intended to alleviate under-representation and to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the majority population."
If focus is illiberally applied to the outcomes, then those at the edge of the bell curve are denied opportunities that likely work for them, i.e. the slashing of gifted programs as a gifted student.
by r0p3 on 11/26/24, 5:57 PM
Why does the author claim this is a broad trend with social justice and equity goals at its heart when that isn't what the evidence provided suggests? (Imo: clickbait.)
by cljacoby on 11/26/24, 6:11 PM
However, I did attend a GT program during elementary school. This school was a "regular" public elementary school in the sense it had a local geographic boundary, and kids in the area attended this as their default public school. However, then kids who qualified for GT would be bussed in from around the county to go to this school.
Within the school, past the 3rd grade classes were segmented into GT and "base" classes (i.e. non-GT). The "base" classes were local kids who did not qualify for the GT program. GT qualification was based off a single test score, taken in the second grade. Kids in the GT and base classes were often respectively referred to as GT or base kids.
In retrospect, it's always appeared super detrimental to me that those kids were called "base" as if they were a somehow more basic version of the GT kids. The name "base" in itself was probably intended as a kind euphemism, to not otherwise default to calling them non-GT kids, i.e. non Gifted nor Talented.
Anyway, all of this to say GT programs probably have a place, but in my own anecdotal experience they were not always executed flawlessly.
by afthonos on 11/26/24, 6:13 PM
by smurda on 11/26/24, 8:38 PM
The best part about the program was being around other precocious peers. I think many of us would have been described as misfits - clever enough to sit at the adults table but clearly not a fit there.
30 years later, I have deeper relationships with those 30 people than my high school or college friends.
by nonameiguess on 11/26/24, 5:46 PM
Frankly, I don't say this to be a dick, but teachers don't exist who can handle kids like me. I spent 16 hours a day at the public library sometimes devouring 1000-page books about how lasers worked. I got a perfect SAT score. I also won a district-wide art show three out of four years in high school. I made varsity in four sports and won two state championships. I got second place in the state spelling bee. I was on a television quiz show when I was 12. I could run a 5-minute mile when I was 12 and slam dunk a basketball by the time I was 14. I was good at everything I ever tried to do. I was smarter than the teachers and I was a rotten little immature kid who let them know it.
Some kids just aren't going to be served well by school no matter what you do, but what else was I going to be served well by? I took some college classes in high school and they weren't any more interesting. I had no interest in starting or running a business. I wasn't mature enough to hold a regular job. I can't think of anything the school system could have done that would have been better than just regular school.
Much like this writer, I ended up okay anyway.
by ksynwa on 11/27/24, 3:15 AM
by bilbo0s on 11/26/24, 5:25 PM
As it stands, it’s just a bunch of kids who mostly land on boringly normal tracks to public flagships. There’s not much upside in even identifying them, because "gifted" has been reduced to mean, well, pretty much anyone who can get a good grade.
by hintymad on 11/26/24, 6:19 PM
by kepp on 11/26/24, 8:53 PM
One thing I do know is that the outcome of kids that were part of the gifted program was very normally distributed. Some people made out just fine when they got to adulthood, and some of them absolutely ruined their lives.
I still think the whole thing was ridiculous and instilled the wrong ideas and lessons to us.
by flustercan on 11/27/24, 6:58 PM
That being said - in most of my non honors classes kids would get made fun of for doing the work or knowing an answer. G&T was nice not because the curriculum was so much different, but rather because it created space where the kids who liked learning could be left in peace.
by EarthBlues on 11/26/24, 7:24 PM
To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of ends.
by bparsons on 11/26/24, 11:08 PM
There are many jurisdictions that can afford to do both, but most are not in that position.
There is far more wasted potential in the case of the hundreds of thousands of kids who fall through the cracks because of a crummy education system. Many states already create an uneven playing field by funding each school system based on the quantum of local taxes collected in their particular communities. Poor kids shouldn't have to further compete for resources within their own, poorly funded institution.
by didibus on 11/26/24, 10:10 PM
Like the rate of development and learning just follows a different curve, but ends up near the same point once an adult.
I think it was only some gifted student retain an advantage in adulthood, and it is normally when they are gifted in a specific discipline for which they maintain a consistent and continued practice through to their adulthood.
by barfingclouds on 11/27/24, 8:54 PM
by hirvi74 on 11/27/24, 4:58 AM
I was in the 'ungifted and talentless' program in my youth. I am curious, how did life turn out for you all? Have you used your gift in any meaningful way? If so, how? (I'm asking with sincerity and not judgement).
by thimkerbell on 11/26/24, 8:04 PM
by 1024core on 11/26/24, 7:16 PM
So the solution to bad grades in some communities was to take away the opportunity for ALL communities.
Thankfully, a vocal group of people raised a stink about it and even put it on the ballot. The uproar caused the school to backtrack and bring Algebra back in 8th grade starting this year.
This kind of idiotic "social engineering" that the SFUSD is doing is killing the public schools. Parents who can afford to spend the $50K/year on private schooling are taking their kids out of SFUSD and the district is losing funding.
Democrats often say that the Republicans would like to kill public education. But the Democrats are doing a great job of it themselves! Case in point: my friend's kid goes to an SFUSD Middle School. Their 5thgrade class has no math teacher! Math is taught via Zoom and "self-paced learning". SMFH...
by casey2 on 11/26/24, 11:41 PM
by aorona on 11/26/24, 10:01 PM
by asdasdsddd on 11/26/24, 5:19 PM
by rcpt on 11/26/24, 5:18 PM
by briandear on 11/26/24, 8:24 PM
by thimkerbell on 11/26/24, 9:44 PM
by chinabot on 11/26/24, 10:02 PM
by Eumenes on 11/26/24, 9:43 PM
by atomicUpdate on 11/26/24, 5:27 PM
Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only reason for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists?
I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback there is by those accused of it.
by JumpCrisscross on 11/26/24, 5:18 PM
Huh. I was a gifted kid. I was also an ass. But now that I think about it, I was mostly in ass in reading-based classes. I always read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-photographic memory, and so excelled at recall-based examination, which is most of the liberal arts and social studies in school. Meanwhile, I never acted out in my math classes, particularly once school went multi track, and I didn’t consider that it was because I was engaged. (My math, economics and engineering teachers consequently liked me more. Go figure.)
by throwaway106382 on 11/26/24, 5:28 PM
Everyone gets the same crappy outcome.
Freedom is inherently unequal.
by TrackerFF on 11/26/24, 7:01 PM
The mentality there is that it is better to raise the average, than to focus resources on a small % of the population. Seems to have worked pretty well for them, all things considered.
by laidoffamazon on 11/26/24, 6:52 PM
Why should people that think folks like me are failures deserve the bulk of our attention?
by roguecoder on 11/26/24, 9:25 PM
The problem is that A. they called it "gifted" so people thought it was something you _wanted_ your kids to be and B. the screening test they used was the IQ test, which you can massively improve your score on by studying for it. So parents were determined to get their kids into "gifted" education, and coached their kids on the tests to get in, and in the meantime kids from less-privileged backgrounds with the same characteristics were being labeled as behavioral problems and shunted into remedial programs.
Now that we have the label of "neurodivergent", it seems to me it would be productive to reframe "gifted" education as "neurodivergent" education: rich parents would stop trying to get their kids into it, and it would be able to serve the kids it was intended to serve.
by 999900000999 on 11/27/24, 7:56 AM
Basic literacy requirements to graduate, like the high school exit exam, are often called racist and removed.
Plus California is essentially a state of socioeconomic apartheid. The gap between the rich and poor is insane. You have kids who are semi homeless being told they just need to work harder, etc.
Hell on earth.
Honestly education itself is outdated. Instead of acting as part day care part jail let kids test out of the system early. If you can pass a GED test at 16 and do something more productive do that.
This is partially offset by California's University system which is probably the best on earth ( at least publicly funded). The community colleges are top notch and a great option for anyone who's iffy on continuing school.
I went from my 2nd eviction to getting enough aid for my own apartment. I did pretty well in college, dated girls from all over the world and made life long friends.
It's not perfect, if your parents aren't stable you might have a really hard time getting aid. Interestingly enough they carved out exceptions for LGBT students who had falling outs with their parents, but other were out of luck.
You have a real conundrum here. Say both your parents make 75k, that's only going to be 120k after taxes. Where's that extra 20 to 30k for school expenses supposed to come from ? You're well past qualifying for aid.
If I ran the world I'd make state college completely free contingent on 2 years of community college.
You don't even need a degree to benefit which I think a lot of people forget.
by dogprez on 11/26/24, 5:17 PM