Should gifted students go to a separate school?

1) Pointless if you want to go to a top school. I don't go to one, so

2) Most dual enrollment programs restrict what coursework you can take. Near zero intersection with my CS coursework, though I did get my general ed requirements done.

3) It's community college, it's not something you can put on a resume.

With the credits I got I'd need to do a heavy schedule to graduate even in 3.

> And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet

Have you been around children? While there are few exceptions that shine no matter the environment, there are far more who excel with a better peer group. This idea that "smart kids are always going to be intrinsically motivated" is just as bogus as "smart people do well and have smart children". What happens in those situations is that the smarter children usually wind up coasting through, simply because they find it so easy to stay ahead of the mean.

> Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good.

And yet people do every minute, "smart" or not. Being a free country does allow people the freedom to search for the best possible opportunity given their resources, and not be forced into regressing into the mean.

I think much of the time what we have is "gifted parents".

Some thoughts:

Can school administrators reliably identify "gifted" students? Gifted in one subject? Averagely gifted?

Should we remove the better able students from regular school, leaving the average ability much lower?

If there aren't very high quality teachers available to teach "gifted" students, then what's the point? Conversely, if we had more very high quality teachers, wouldn't that go a long way toward fixing our education problems anyway?

Affluent and/or highly educated parents can easily skew the finding that their child is gifted.

Source: I went to a highly selective, private school outside the US (the inspiration for Hogwarts, fwiw). My kids go to public school in the US - one has been identified by the school as gifted (but doesn't want to participate in the gifted program), the other has not. Our school district receives something like 0.5% of the funding they get for special needs students, for their gifted program.

I have also taught coding in middle school. In my time in the class room I saw several students who came from higher income/higher educated households that performed well. I saw a big middle group who did ok. I saw several students who didn't care to do any work. I saw one student from a lower income demographic who showed uncommon promise in the subject. Given that evidence what am I to do with a gifted student budget assuming I have one? All I could do at the time was to approach the parent of that one student and give my feedback, ask that they consider encouraging his talents. I have no idea what happened after that. The other thing I could do is help the smart motivated kids from affluent families achieve even better results than their peers than they were already able to. I'm really not sure that would be a good use of my time and money..

1. Children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential.

2. False dichotomy.

I've read the book you're referring to. It doesn't make any of the claims you're making, in particular:

> Regular students cannot benefit from compacting the K-5 curriculum.

If I'm wrong (and I may, it's been a while), feel free to reply with a quote and a page number. I have the book.

In any case, the "compacting" of the K-5 curriculum is just a hack. The real solution is to get rid of such constraints to begin with. That way, students who are "gifted" will naturally just go to the next level.

The reality is this: schools for "gifted" children just tend to be better schools. The same better schools that would lead to better outcomes, for everyone. Mind you, this isn't the same as putting, for example "special-ed" students in separate classrooms.

Case and point:

> The major finding of this study is that third and fourth grade classroom teachers make only minor modifications in the regular curriculum to meet the needs of gifted students. This result holds for all types of schools sampled. It also holds for classrooms in different parts of the country and for different types of communities. Implications of these findings for researchers and gifted education specialists are discussed. [1]

[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0162353293016002...