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Should gifted students go to a separate school?

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Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#201

Post by fsloth »

Yes. Anyone who in primary school did their entire math book on one sitting for the fun of it and got admonished for it - "what on earth I'm going to do with you now in math, that was the entire material" probably agrees with me.

Or my wife, who knew her egyptian history inside out and got laughed at because "she could not name Cleopatra as a female pharaoh". (Cleopatra was greek aristocrat, not a pharaoh)

Needless to say my enthusiasm for math really wasn't the same after that. Or her eagerness for history.

To be totally disconnected from ones peers is a torture no child should be forced to suffer. To be taught by teachers who aren't actually comfortable with their discipline.

And this was 30 years ago in Finland, now touted as one of the best examples in primary education.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#202

Post by trumpeta »

I think we have the technology to challenge the smart kids in a mixed classroom. The dumber kids will act as a sort of social regularizer and the smart ones will be allowed to progress at a faster pace. I think classes should be "stationary" and individual students will move through them at their own pace, challenging for the good ones and slow for the slower ones. No kid should leave the class until they have mastered the subject. They could also move at different paces through different subjects.

I believe the current system's limitations stem from the teacher's capacity to attend to at most 30 students at a time, this may have been the case when everything was whiteboard. But now you have iPads and interactive websites and so on.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#203

Post by mholmes680 »

>>students who are gifted have specific learning needs that require:

>> tailored learning strategies

>> education supported by a challenging curriculum

>> teachers trained in gifted education

>> more exposure to students of similar ability

>> opportunities for acceleration

I find this interesting, coming from the "gifted" track in HS and being married to a special education teacher at a public school. The same list applies to both groups, and i don't see why it wouldn't apply just to all students.

How could any of these be more important for some students and not others? They can't be. Its just that public schools don't have the ability to deal with a class of students 25 large and deal with 25 different ways of teaching. Technology and public school funding hasn't caught up here... huge gap. So, we've dreamed up schools where we group kids to deal with the shortcoming. We're not helping students here, we're helping ourselves ignore real solutions.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#204

Post by _m8fo »

whorleater wrote: post #191
_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 i…

I won't address your second point, as the problem we'd then be discussing is completely different (i.e. we're now discussing resource allocation).

However, in regards to your first point: I said nothing about crippling those ahead. I'm curious what makes you say that honestly. Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. Regression to the mean, would be putting gifted students in an environment where they wouldn't thrive. However, this said environment would also cripple regular students. So the solution, as I've said, and you agree with is to make education better, more generally.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#205

Post by stale2002 »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #170

No. There is something one learns by going to public schools and seeing all his fellow human beings held to the same standards. I grew up in Armenia in the post soviet union era. The one thing they got right was the education part. There were no distinctions. We all learned the same material, gifted or not. Those that lagged got extra attention and help. When I first got here the segregation of "gifted" vs "non-gifte…

OK, so if you are all learning the same material, what happens when someone learns all the material months before everyone else?

Do they just sit around and do nothing? Is that really a productive use of their time?

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#206

Post by stillsut »

magicalist wrote: post #158
zeteo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. > What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for…

> It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.

A studious freshman is usually on par with his calculus instructor (Math PhD) in the domain of textbook college calculus.

Being advanced(PhD) or gifted usually means pursuing more open-ended type interests and research. The foundational skills, which form the majority of K-12 curriculum, won't be out of reach for someone keeping pace in non advanced tracks.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#207

Post by squeaky-clean »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #4
dijit wrote: post #2

Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the…

Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing. I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how…

> Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing.

Exact same situation here, but Florida. Elementary school was alright, but middle school became pure FCAT preparation and nothing else. My parents withdrew me from them at that point and put me back into regular classes.

They also used a "block schedule", where each day, you would only attend half your classes, but for twice as long, alternating which classes on which days, and then rotating the order of the classes. (So of your 6 classes, you attended daily: 1,3,5 then 2,4,6, then 3,5,1, then 4,6,2, then 5,3,1...).

Here's an calendar I found of a school currently doing this, tell me this isn't confusing as hell:

http://ponce.dadeschools.net/blockschedule.asp

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#208

Post by myowncrapulence »

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…

But schools are made up of the children that attend them.. If a gifted child ends up in a bad school, he can certainly boost their esteem and encourage competition among intellectual thoughts.

One good seed can really foster a lot of inspiration.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#209

Post by mathattack »

My 2 cents as a parent... The "Don't let any kids fall behind" is an extremely laudable goal. Educating everyone, and aiming for a high standard for people of all abilities and socio-economic backgrounds is extremely vital. We may not be achieving that goal well, but it a very worthy one, and will do more than almost anything else to reduce income inequality.

The danger is that having this focus in school means that kids get neglected once they pass that threshold. When a school is graded by "% of kids who are at-level" there is no incentive for the best ones. In my opinion this is why these kids need to be pulled into separate schools where the ambitions are higher than the minimum threshold.

I see it with kids who are several grades ahead in math and reading, and their only options are skipping grades (and being socially awkward) or being bored out of their mind in class.

This isn't permanent tracking, but it's giving the option to excel for those who are ready and willing.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#210

Post by jgust »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #13
dijit wrote: post #2

Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the…

>> "before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with" I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and for…

> failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well

Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?

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