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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?

#241

Post by Retric »

stale2002 wrote: post #173
TeMPOraL wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model. It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society , it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices. Whether or not options shoul…

How is "getting a good education" a negative effect? It is the opposite. If smart people do the things they need to do to become even smarter, everyone benefits.

Smaller schools have less educational diversity. Suppose you want a gifted and talented education, but also want to play baseball. At tiny schools that may not be an option, but at a larger school you can have upper tier classes and a wider range of clubs.

EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.

IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#242

Post by huehehue »

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…

I've unfortunately been on all ends of this -- in gifted programs throughout grade school, until high school, where I missed out because my parents (and myself) didn't know there was an application process.

Conveniently, that was the only chance to be in the program for the next four years. Miss the deadline between middle and high school, and you can't take the advanced classes (which were the only way to get >4.0 GPA), you can't participate in Model UN, your network is restricted to the "regular-tier" crowd. Incredibly exclusionary and really screwed over some people.

I feel that offering yearly or semesterly applications for a course of study transfer would solve a lot of those problems. Capable students who want in will get in, struggling students who want in can study up and get in after a few tries (no reason to reject dedicated but slow learners), and students who don't care just won't apply.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#243

Post by justin_vanw »

_m8fo wrote: post #116
justin_vanw wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Who cares? This is not an argument for or against this. It's totally inappropriate to decide the best way to educate a child based on your personal theories about how wealth should be distributed, and your untested wild ass guess about what effect some educational policy would have on that theory. 2. You get better teachers and a stimulating environment that is challenging. - Small classes: maybe, it's not necessa…

I won't respond to the first point. If you're seriously asking "who cares" about income inequality then I don't think discourse will be productive. In any case, you didn't seem to refute my main point that gifted schools would also benefit regular students.

Ok, I will bet that you don't even believe that there are intelligence differences between people, right? Every person is equally capable and it all comes down to whether you give them enough opportunities and resources?

EDIT: I'm saying 'who cares' in the context of deciding whether to set up a gifted magnet school or not. You shouldn't decide what is good for a child based on your pet theories about who should or should not have a yacht.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#244

Post by BigJeffeRonaldo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #108
brightball wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described why so many people support school choice and voucher policies. It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model. EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.

> It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model. It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society , it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices. Whether or not options shoul…

If that is the case, public education does not exist to educate children (or at least this is not its primary goal), but rather exists as some sort of bizarre redistribution program. High IQ parents are then expected to feed their children into the hopper for the gain of others.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#245

Post by edbaskerville »

Aqueous wrote: post #93
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…

4. This idea that education is only for my own individual welfare has to end. It's creating a culture of individual atomism that is instilling the most anti-social, selfish values and corroding the country at its roots. We go to school not just to be educated but to educate each other. If you're smart, you set an example to kids near us who don't feel that way. Hopefully, those who aren't labelled 'smart' gain from t…

A lot of vitriol in response to this (specifically, the uncritical accusation that this is "bullshit"). But you're right on.

The problem is, you can't take an existing current public school system (of the worst kind), flip a switch that says advanced kids have to teach the less advanced kids, and expect things to work. It requires a total rethinking of the school as a small society engineered for learning from each other.

To those that say teaching each other is a recipe for abuse, or that it doesn't happen: that's only true when you've set up school as a simple game defined by scores on homework assignments.

Ideas worth trying (some stolen from my fourth/fifth-grade class, whose teacher, Kent Daniels, actually tried many of these things out with success):

* Replace lecturing, for the most part, with individually adaptive material, aided by computers where appropriate, housed in a one-room schoolhouse with kids of many ages and skill levels.

* Allow for lots of individualized creative work. Read a book of your choice and present it to the class, write about it, whatever. Program a robot. Etc.

* Eliminate homework as a basis for grades. Maybe eliminate actual home-work and replace it with in-school work; and maybe eliminate grades entirely. Schoolwork should be a mechanism for learning, not a graded success metric, and this eliminates the biggest problem with the next item.

* Encourage kids to help each other out. Teaching others is the perfect way to better master the material, develop effective communication skills, and other things that simply getting the high score on a math test doesn't do.

* Turn the teacher into a roving mentor: their job is to get an individualized sense of how everyone is doing, to help kids, and to help kids help each other. Their job is to be a better feedback control system than testing could ever be.

* Monitor the teachers in much the same way the teachers are monitoring the kids: not with standardized testing, but with empowered professionals. Create an adaptive, fuzzy hierarchy of learning and teaching.

* Experiment with different kinds of testing at multiple scales. Some structured evaluation will probably serve as a nice complement to this fuzzy system.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#246

Post by run4yourlives2 »

fsloth wrote: post #201

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 t…

Your wife (and you) are wrong. Cleopatra was a Pharaoh.

Yes, she was a Greek decent of Alexander, and the Ptolemaic Dynasty was of his blood, not Egyptian, but it's founder Ptolemy declared himself Pharaoh, and therefore she had the title as well.

It's similar as to how Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of Canada, even though she is English. To say she isn't the Queen of Canada is simply incorrect.

This level of hubris is a perfect example of why mixed education is a good thing. Nobody is so gifted to be above the human frailty of being wrong.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#247

Post by whorleater »

_m8fo wrote: post #219
whorleater wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting gifted students with "regular" students is not regression to the mean. How is it not? "Gifted" students are not given a chance to grow, since there's no pressure for them to excel in a school where they're already ahead. "Gifted" students aren't different from other children, they're responsive to the same social pressures all students face, and placing them with a "gifted" peer group allows them to thrive.…

I don't understand your argument at all. It seems to hinge on some arbitrary obsession with gifted students. Your entire argument could be applied to at-risk students, who arguably need the help even more than gifted students and would see greater percentage gains as a result. Rather than discuss endlessly who should get what, we should rise the tide that raises all ships, no? >"Gifted" students are not given a chanc…

Do you believe that it's feasible to improve schools holistically? Because I think that's the major disagreement between you and I. I think the idea we can one day improve schools as a whole, for every student, is a goal worth striving for, but I do not think it's realistic nor feasible in the current education system.

This problem of cooperative education (wherein we separate students with similar features) is well studied, for both "at-risk" and "gifted" students, and it's been show that regular classroom practices do not benefit either group [1].

[1]: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED379845.pdf

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#248

Post by justin_vanw »

llsf wrote: post #168
justin_vanw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they w…

RE 1. It has already been mentioned that food analogy is not a good one, since we are not talking of not providing education to smarter kids. And, this is not a binary issue, there is a whole spectrum of intelligence. RE 2. The previous post does not say "every kind of diversity is automatically good". But I certainly agree that social and intellectual diversity has benefits for all parties. RE 3. "Smart people do we…

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

Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that I can ignore your theory about what is 'collective good' because it is stupid and will do me and my family irreparable harm, and I can substitute my own theory of what is actually going to move us towards more 'collective good' and act according to that. That is what being free means.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#249

Post by throwanem »

Not that it's going to get any traction, but I find myself compelled to ask: is it possible that the problems with attempting to enable human beings to make the most of their individual capabilities, by means of an assembly line, are not best solved by incremental modification of the stations and routing on that line?

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#250

Post by jraedisch »

mholmes680 wrote: post #203

>>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 a…

I think that the issue is how much society is willing to spend on education as a whole. Sure, if we do not want to spend more, we can have some trophy schools and lower the quality of the rest a bit further, and if we let just the good students go there, that will ensure the success of those schools even more. On the other hand we could try to get some gifted people into every school as teachers. Of course that would be much more expensive.
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