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Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

hechingerreport.org

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Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#31

Post by chongli »

nine_k wrote: post #18
mdorazio wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because IQ is only loosely correlated with actual achievement? College admissions generally care about achievement (grades, awards, activities, extra-curriculars, etc.), diversity, and likelihood to be a successful student who later donates money back to the school. IQ is not a great predictor of these outcomes since there are a lot of high-IQ individuals who don't really apply themselves.

But it answers a wrong question. Stanford does not admit kids by IQ score. But it does have an entrance exam, as opposed to a lottery among those who applied. That is, they likely see some value in separating by some measure of aptitude.

The entrance exam is a fig leaf. If they admitted based on IQ scores directly then they would be open to direct and severe attack by IQ skeptics and anti-racists.

By using an entrance exam, they get to claim they’re admitting based on academic achievement but in reality they know that the test is highly correlated with IQ. All written exams are, for the most part.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#33

Post by borski »

hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a world of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked.

Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actually just learn, and not have to hide my report card or test scores as soon as I got them, because doing "too well" meant a beatdown after school.

2/3 of my MIT admission essays were about this experience, incidentally.

[edit 1] Aside: one additional anecdote is that I was constantly getting in trouble before Stuy; I was always bored, because the work was easy, and nobody ever gave me additional work to do, so I would talk to the other kids. I was always an extrovert, and very bad at being bored; I could not sit in one place and just stare at the wall, or pretend to listen to a teacher drone on about some geometry thing I already knew. So I got in trouble constantly for distracting the other kids. That stopped in Stuy, because I wasn't bored; I was challenged.

[edit 2] The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#34

Post by jedberg »

When I was in High School, we didn't have "advanced math" per se. You just went in to the next math. If you were advanced, you did Geometry as a freshman, and if you were remedial you did Geometry as a senior, but we were all mixed into the same class.

I ended up making friends with a senior (as a freshman) because I'd help her with the problem sets after I quickly finished them. This not only helped her, but it helped me master the material better because I had to know it well enough to teach it. The teacher encouraged this by allowing all of us time to work together in class, so this happened with a bunch of small groups.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#35

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #16

Educational bureaucrats are compromised dregs and monsters. Their paymasters want high-value cogs. Gifted program is there to preserve the value. The rest of the program is there to reduce them to cogs. The result is--at best!--broken people with big bank accounts and nice offices, struggling to fill the void. In other words, home-school your kids. Give them goals outside of pleasing some salaryperson who doesn't eve…

Yes, homeschool should be considered as at least an option if you care about your childrens' education.

The rest of the parent comment is paranoid drivel, which I do not endorse.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#36

Post by 762236 »

borski wrote: post #33
hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a world of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck . It really sucked. Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actuall…

I had a similar experience. It was wonderful to be put into a magnet school filled with kids that were smart and generally wanted to learn (every one of them went to a college/university), and to be separated from the kids that hated school. That is the sad thing: so many of the kids causing problems in the normal schools wouldn't cause problems if they attended schools that focused on their vitalities in the way that the magnet schools focused on ours.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#37

Post by jstewartmobile »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #35
jstewartmobile wrote: post #16

Educational bureaucrats are compromised dregs and monsters. Their paymasters want high-value cogs. Gifted program is there to preserve the value. The rest of the program is there to reduce them to cogs. The result is--at best!--broken people with big bank accounts and nice offices, struggling to fill the void. In other words, home-school your kids. Give them goals outside of pleasing some salaryperson who doesn't eve…

Yes, homeschool should be considered as at least an option if you care about your childrens' education. The rest of the parent comment is paranoid drivel, which I do not endorse.

did you go to public school? an ordinary one?

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#38

Post by adamnemecek »

hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

How old are you?

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#39

Post by nostrademons »

hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

I have a life story similar to you up through middle-school - second pick for G&T, bullied heavily, repeated physical abuse from peers, ended up hanging out with losers who were into drugs both in middle & high school. After that it diverges though - I switched to a charter school for high school, went to a top liberal arts college, then worked at a couple startups and had a pretty prestigious position at Google. I've still got some scars from that time, but on paper at least, I did okay.

For me, being separated from the bullies made all the difference in the world. And it wasn't separation as in "hang around only with other smart kids" - my charter school was academically worse than the public school that I left behind, and like I said, I hung around with the stoners, rockers, and drop-outs. But the charter school focused explicitly on building community and accepting people for who they were. In short, it made it a point to address the emotional needs of teenagers that so many public institutions conveniently forget about. That made all the difference in the world.

For you - if you can muster the money or get insurance to pay for it, I'd highly recommend seeing a therapist that works with trauma. This stuff sticks with you a long time, but it doesn't have to define your life.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#40

Post by dragonwriter »

> The other reason that students do well in mixed groups is that teachers know they need to “differentiate” work, providing opportunities for students to take work to different levels.

This isn't a reason students do well in non-differentiated groups, but a confounding factor to the basic question of whether or not they do (one directly underlined in the case of the unspecified other bay area district studied where detracking and teacher professional development were simultaneous interventions.)

It's well-known that students do better when material is tailored to their individual ability, so if you are comparing students grouped in broad ability groups without this individualization and those detracked from broad groups but provided individualization, you lose the ability to distinguish between effects of broad group tracking and the qualitatively well-known effect of individualization.

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