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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

#41

Post by faceplanted »

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've been reading this thread and honestly I'm getting the impression that it matters far more what the kids are separated _from_ that whether they're separated at all.

Which tallies with my own experience, in the UK there's secondary school and college (AKA sixth form) before university, which basically means the last two years of high school are separate from the first 5, you go to a different school (sometimes, some places have both on the same campus). And I made the choice to go to a college further out of my way that added 10 hours of cycling onto my commute every week pretty much so I'd never have to speak to anyone from my secondary again, the new place was just another college, no special grade requirements, but not being around the same people and being able to basically "reset" made my life so much better that I can't really argue that never separating kids is a good option.

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

#42

Post by seamyb88 »

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…

Sounds like you have some real problems in your society for that bad experience at school. Surely if you're the gifted individual you claim you are, you'll want to change society rather than seclude yourself from it as much as you can get away with. The non-gifted kids, whatever the fuck that means, don't deserve to bullied/abused either.

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

#43

Post by dcbadacd »

762236 wrote: post #36
borski wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I have exactly the same experience as the previous commenters, I was also basically rescued into a (learning-)conducive environment and I'm seriously thankful for that. The alternative would've very likely been awful because I've seen on a good friend of mine what happens when there isn't an opportunity to get into a "magnet school". It basically caused clinical depression and such a strong distaste for school that it made completing even high school basically impossible.

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

#44

Post by cortesoft »

dak1 wrote: post #7

From the article, it sounds like the measure of 'better achievement' is baseline scores across all students. I was always of the opinion that separating based on ability level was not about improving the baseline, but about allowing those able to learn greater depth to do so. Not every student is going to earn a Fields Medal or develop new medical procedures, and frankly, that's ok. But we do need some who will push…

So we shouldn't care about improving how the lower performing kids do, since they aren't going to win Fields Medals or develop new medical procedures?

This is a super tricky question to answer... how much extra achievement by the top of the class is worth how much extra achievement by the bottom of the class? There isn't a simple answer.

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

#46

Post by dcbadacd »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #10

I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just because someone wants to detrack math. A friend of mine who is a teacher says that he has MORE discipline problems from the smart kids who aren't challenged enough. The real secret should be to embrace independent, computer-mediated systems like Khan Academy. Ev…

The sage-on-a-stage also comes with socializing both during and after lessons, that can't be replaced with computers. If anything, I think it'd cause a lot more sadness than the current system.

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

#47

Post by ryandrake »

When I was in middle school in the 90s, I think around 7th grade (~12yo), the school district experimented with a new way of organizing the student body where they separated us into six distinct, equally sized cohorts based on some evaluation of each student's performance and capability. From what I could tell it was rougly:

1. Gifted / clearly university-bound

2. Potential college prep

3. Community college

4. Normal underperformers

5. Little hope, likely will drop out

6. No future besides unemployment or prison

You took all your classes with your own cohort, rarely had to interact with anyone outside your cohort, and coursework was tailored to your level. It was glorious. I went from boring, slow classes and having to run and hide from tormentors to appropriately paced coursework and always interacting with friendly, nice, smart kids. My childhood mental health went on a noticeable upswing during this experiment. Too bad it ended around 3 years later and I was thrown back into the prison "general population" full of kids whose talents included arson and filing other kids' teeth down in the metal shop. Not sure why they ended the program, because it really made school bearable.

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

#48

Post by cortesoft »

dguido wrote: post #8

Here's the opposite perspective: https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2012-02-06-bs-ed... > But as the facts now show, smart kids don't always stay smart, and when they are bored or bullied or ridiculed or neglected, some turn off and some drop out. Thirty-plus years of experience and research into how these students learn has taught us that the academically able can and must be challenged and engaged, inspire…

Right, so it raises the question: What is the relative importance of helping the best students verse helping the worst students?

Even if we solve the talent identification problem, SOME kids are going to be the lower achievers.... are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best? How much are we willing to sacrifice in either direction?

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

#49

Post by mancerayder »

This difference between tracked and untracked math experiences was illuminated recently in a survey we gave to San Francisco ninth-graders and ninth-graders across another large district, where all students are in tracked groups. The San Francisco students were significantly more positive about both mathematics and their own potential. Importantly, the San Francisco students were also significantly more likely than students in tracked groups to say that they enjoyed solving complex math problems, and that work was at the right level for them — neither too easy nor too hard.

So is the topic achievement, or is the topic their feelings?

In a Postmodern twist of language, we've rhetorically connected a statistic around feelings and a statistic around achievement, but those are two separate items.

They eliminated advanced math classes until 10th great? I'm EXTREMELY happy I'm old now, because when I was a kid ANY class I took with the average or the below average, I was bullied.

Some people are better thinkers, some people are better as leaders, fighters or lifters of boxes. I'm sorry, Postmodernists, we're not equal and never will be.

In NYC they're wanting to remove the gifted and talented classes not because they don't work, but because of racial disparities. The idea here is that we should all fail together, since equality is most easily achieved by trimming the top.

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

#50

Post by cortesoft »

catalogia wrote: post #23
daxorid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because, as per usual, they buried the lede. First, they cherry-picked studies. Second, the few studies they referenced addressed overall school performance , not performance of the gifted students. A perfectly valid way of reading this article is: gifted kids in de-tracked schools do the teachers' jobs for them by helping out the slower kids, which results in better school performance.

It may be the case that the gifted kids are helping slower kids score better, but not actually learn better. At least, that's what it was like when I was a kid. Teachers would constantly pair up smart kids with dumb kids for group assignments or study, and the smart kids would end up doing all the work. This benefits the teachers when they're evaluated by how well students are scoring.

They usually use test results to measure achievement, though, and the smart kids can't do that for the other kids (at least assuming they aren't cheating)
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