Should gifted students go to a separate school? • Hacker News Board

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#191

Post by whorleater » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

_m8fo wrote: post #84

I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular s…

>1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students)

While this is probably true, (although not necessarily proven), the solution to income inequality is not to cripple those ahead, it's to bolster those from behind. Regression to the mean doesn't make a better education system.

>2. Remove equality of opportunity. That's not an argument against intellectual school segregation. Equal opportunity can be achieved by making the "gifted schools" easier to access for those who strive for it.

To your main point about how everything that benefits gifted students do benefit the entire system as a whole, I completely agree. However, the reality is that many of those features (smaller classes, better curriculum, practical education) don't scale to the population as a whole, and funding for education is limited. When there's a finite amount of resources to distribute, and the choice is between distributing to the children that are "gifted" or spread it around so thinly it might as well not have any effect at all, you bet your ass I'm going to vote for the former.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#192

Post by erikpukinskis » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

reflexive wrote: post #180

habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

> The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them. You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the…

If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. Leaders usually spend all their resources reinforcing hegemony. And many of the people having the most positive effect on society will do it in a totally inconspicuous way. And many of those folks will come from bad schools, succeeding despite lack of institutional support. I suspect interpersonal support is a better predictor of positive contribution than institutional support.

For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#193

Post by caw » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

It's been a while since I took German in high school, but I remember there being a distinction between Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. The opportunities offered to students of each school were different (vocational or University), and you had a test to determine which one you went to.

That sounds similar to the proposal in the article. Is there any data from this system that would support the premise of a separate gifted school being a better way of teaching advanced students?

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#194

Post by delinka » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:17 PM UTC

John23832 wrote: post #186

lend000 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High income families already send their children to "smart" private schools; why not allow gifted children on the public school track to enjoy similar opportunities?

Why not just make schools better for all, rather than replicating the educational resource hoarding that takes place in private schools?

How would that even be enforced? You'd have to make it illegal for private schools to exist.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#195

Post by whorleater » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:21 PM UTC

conjectures wrote: post #141

CodeSheikh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How other schools will suffer? Endowments from rich parents? Being rich does not mean your kid is smart and these gifted schools should be very selective to whom they admit.

> Being rich does not mean your kid is smart But it does mean you can pay to get them tutored to jump through hoops, and generally push them harder. There's a very strong relationship between wealth and elite college admission for example. Which is down to culture and opportunity as much as gifts and talents. If being selective means controlling for socioeconomic background when assessing potential - then I'd be more…

> If being selective means controlling for socioeconomic background when assessing potential

So...affirmative action like in colleges but for earlier forms of education?

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#196

Post by stoic » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:23 PM UTC

I don't know about anyone else (a problematic side effect), but I went to a science-focused public magnet school instead of my neighborhood high school and it made a world of difference in my life, both in terms of instruction and social experience.

Maybe this deprives the kids in the neighborhood school of some diversity near the top end of achievement, but maybe they shouldn't have been dicks to us in middle school if they wanted us to stick around.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#197

Post by clock_tower » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:24 PM UTC

lol214365 wrote: post #120

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been inside a school? The stupid kids don't gather around to bask in the glow of the gifted kids. They DO gather around them and call them 'faggot' and trip them in the hallway, especially if they are smart but not athletic.

Only if you confound "dumb kid" and "problem kid". Certainly, get problem kids out of the equation, but that doesn't mean there isn't some benefit to different cognitive classes coming into contact with one another. If for no other reason, you don't want the cognitive elite going through life never knowing that the rest of the country are reasonable, functional people instead of fools and rubes.

They're reasonable and functional? That's news to me -- at least for Appalachia, Texas, etc. (Have you read Hillbilly Elgy?)

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#198

Post by _m8fo » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:24 PM UTC

bigtunacan wrote: post #37

ng12 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in the US is that the AP kids get shafted because so much of the budget is spent on running a glorified daycare for the kids who really don't want to be there.

A lot of kids today think that laziness and a "fuck all" attitude is totally ok. They don't think education is important and frankly don't realize the potential consequences this may have on them in later life. When I was a kid, I had to slop pigs, and shovel the shit out of the pen. My dad would say to me as we were shoveling pig shit or doing some other awful work, "This is why you get good grades. Some day you are…

I love this story. Thanks for sharing. I'm curious though, did you try this with your other kid? The one who's presumably not having any problems? I'm curious if your method would further strengthen their resolve.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#199

Post by strathmeyer » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:24 PM UTC

I scored the highest in my county on a middle school math exam. I got a 4.0GPA in high school and perfect math SATs. 2 years of calculus and 1 of stats and a college level CS course before I graduated high school. Played sports, presidented clubs, eagle scouted. Was rejected from 5 universities so I ended up going to some loser school nobody had ever heard of called Carnegie Mellon University and after I graduated with a worthless degree in Computer Science they told me they didn't have any help for me and it should be easy for me to find a programming job. I asked for help until they banned me from campus and prohibited me from speaking to anyone in the "CMU community" or else they would arrest me and hold me in jail for a few weeks again. So, yes, it would've been nice if we couldn't gone to a separate school where they could've explained us our opportunities.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#200

Post by lordCarbonFiber » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7:24 PM UTC

habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

These are all legitimate concerns. In my experience, growing up in South Carolina (some of the worst public schools in the US) the opportunity to go to a "gifted" (I hate that word, takes all of the emphasis off of effort or any actionable quantity) school for high school probably saved my life [0].

What doesn't get brought up is how night and day being in an institution that challenges you surrounded by peers that interest you is (the classes we took were of greater depth than most of underclassman college course I later took). By high school I don't think worrying about late bloomers applies much and while I can certainly sympathize with wanting to do more to enable the lower performing schools and students, hamstringing the top performers can't leave you breaking even. And YMMV none of the people I've known have ever suffered from "looking down" on less intelligent people. Hell the opposite, being in a situation where you're challenged leaves you acutely aware of how little you actually know. We need more of these institutions moving forward, to make sure our young people don't fall into the cracks.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor's_Scho...