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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?

#261

Post by _m8fo »

whorleater wrote: post #247
_m8fo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You may be misunderstanding the source you cited.

Here's some information that supports your argument...

> It is clear from the results that teachers in regular third and fourth grade classrooms make only minor modifications in the curriculum and their instruction to meet the needs of gifted students. (pg 125)

...however.

> 61% of the responding teachers have received no staff development in the area of gifted education (pg 125)

> gifted resource teachers have little effect on what classroom teachers do to meet the needs of the gifted (pg 127)

---

In any case, your citation agrees with the holistic in practice.

> "...efforts must certainly must certainly include the selection or development of curriculum materials specifically design for classroom teacher use. They should also compact the regular curriculum, and to become more flexible in meeting the needs of all students, including gifted students." (pg 126)

P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.

Also, yes, I do believe it's possible to improve schools holistically.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#262

Post by Retric »

brightball wrote: post #259
Retric wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're also assuming that such a shift must play in the current model. There's no reason that sports couldn't be separated into community activities totally separate from the educational aspects of multiple smaller schools. I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club ac…

You would need the same number of teachers if the day was 4h long unless you had some students start with community centers and then swap. Now, if population density was high enough your model might work, but you are going to sacrifice a lot of time busing people around in the middle of the day.

Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#263

Post by emidln »

germinalphrase wrote: post #16

Alternatively, why not just allow advanced students to graduate and start college/career early, if they so desire. I know this happens in exceptional cases, but why force a kid to just load up with AP classes (which may - but probably do not - match college level rigor) rather than simply taking college courses? If they're past what high school can offer then let them finish and leave. We keep far too many students i…

At least in my case, the time to mature was necessary. While I could have passed most of my college classes as a freshman in high school (at least the ones I took freshman year in college, unsure that I could have passed the higher maths I took with just an understanding of basic algebra/geometry), there were a lot of social lessons that I desperately needed. I can think of specific experiences throughout my high school that taught me how to (not) interact in various situations.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#264

Post by automorphism »

_m8fo wrote: post #189
automorphism wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Gifted children come from the rich and poor and from all ethnicities. The way to reduce income inequality is to take the brightest students from across these diverse groups and help them achieve their potential. 2. The alternative is equality of outcome, i.e. cut down the tall poppies. This isn't a solution. Keeping gifted children lockstep with their age-mates does them serious damage that can last a lifetime. Re…

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 be…

Ok, I better understand the point you're making. You're not arguing against special treatment for the gifted; you're saying that, in practice, we should raise the standards of regular students to what is normally provided to the gifted, since the gifted have better education provided to them. Then we'll see improvements across the board. Sure.

My point about regular students not being able to benefit from a compacted K-5 curriculum in two or three years comes from the fact that gifted student can move through academic material faster than a regular student. A regular student may be able to move faster than is currently being done, but not as fast as a gifted student.

> 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.

So ability grouping as opposed to age grouping? Yes, I agree it would help a lot, though as I'm sure you know, the gifted prefer to be around themselves rather than older regular children. Gross' book shows a trend that the more satisfied the kids are with their education, the better they do in life, which is why a separate school makes sense to me. The gifted population is small enough and funding is small enough that I think it will make a much greater positive impact on gifted students than a negative impact on regular students.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#265

Post by r00fus »

justin_vanw wrote: post #95
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…

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…

A whole raft of opinions that have no backing, in fact, I can provide a lot of evidence that counterargues your points.

> Dumb kids don't benefit from being around very gifted kids. Let's not use the words dumb but lets say, "less smart". If this were the case, why would parents fight to get their kids into magnet and charter schools? Also special needs kids benefit from mainstreaming. Evidence > Unsubstantiated opinion.

> The very gifted kids are going to isolate themselves from the dumb people as quickly as they can [cite needed]

> They do see the very gifted kids and feel bad. [cite needed] - in fact, as a "gifted" kid, I often felt ostracized because of being selected (nerd).

> I think you'll find that parents are very uninterested in your theories of social engineering [cite needed]

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#266

Post by neap24 »

dagw wrote: post #33
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…

The solution to the problem you describe is different classes for students of different abilities, not different schools. The school I went to (in England) split most classes into 4 sets where the 'best' student's in each subject went to set 1 and the ones that need extra help went to set 3 or 4. Then there where extra-curricular 'clubs' in certain subjects for students that wanted to go even deeper than the lessons…

This is actually a great compromise solution (and practical). I had the experience of being in a "gifted" class from third grade to sixth grade. It seemed to be a win-win situation where the school (and students) got the benefits of intellectual diversity but allowed kids to learn more at their own pace.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#267

Post by erroneousfunk »

CodeSheikh wrote: post #62
shawabawa3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's no doubt that it's a good thing for the students that go to these schools. The question is whether it's good for society as other schools may suffer

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.

There's a very high correlation between household income and SAT scores: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and...

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#268

Post by r00fus »

justin_vanw wrote: post #239
TeMPOraL wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE 1., your analogy to food is both misapplied and unhelpful. The choice here is between "better education" and "standard education", not between "better education" and "no education at all". You can't test the logic of that argument by applying it to the food case and expect a sensible result. Unless you can disprove GP's three arguments, we're talking about a trade-off . Trade-offs should not solved by rhetorics an…

I never said 'better' vs 'none'. I said should you give some resource to someone who could benefit from it when there are other people who also would benefit that you will fail to identify. Presumably even in my analogy the people not given food had some food, since they were merely weak and not starved to death. But that ignores my argument anyway! My point is that you should do what you can do, even if it's imperfe…

More light, less heat. Where're your facts or evidence?

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#269

Post by LordKano »

whorleater wrote: post #183
llsf wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

For the early part of my life, that was me.

Working 10 years of jobs that I hated were my big motivator to resume my education with a renewed vigor. It has worked out well for me since but I would have been much better off if I had not been in that sea of mediocrity during my formative years.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#270

Post by whorleater »

_m8fo wrote: post #261
whorleater wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You may be misunderstanding the source you cited. Here's some information that supports your argument... > It is clear from the results that teachers in regular third and fourth grade classrooms make only minor modifications in the curriculum and their instruction to meet the needs of gifted students. (pg 125) ...however. > 61% of the responding teachers have received no staff development in the area of gifted educat…

> Also, yes, I do believe it's possible to improve schools holistically.

Then I doubt I'll convince you through internet comments, but I think our goals are aligned (better education for all). However, we want to take different approaches to achieve it. The source I cited agrees that we should create an environment in which teachers are flexible, but my point in citing is that despite the comprehensive research that's been done on this topic, we've made very few steps towards actually accomplishing it, so I think it's time to give up that line of thought and try another, which is to separate students.

Separated schooling does have advantages, such as challenging gifted students ("A troubling finding that emerged was the preference of a few of the [gifted] students for heterogeneous classes because they were easier and enabled them to attain a high class ranking with little work")[1] and separation of children enable them to grow at a faster pace ("After 2 years, academically handicapped students in cooperative elementary schools had significantly higher achievement in reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, language expression, math computation, and math application in comparison with similar students in comparison schools") [2].

> P.S. I find this discussion to be enlightening and very productive, for me at least. Thanks for being a good conversation partner.

Likewise, thank you for being a good discussion partner as well.

[1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0016986204048001... [2]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0002831203200232...

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