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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

#61

Post by downerending »

seamyb88 wrote: post #42
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.

No one deserves to be bullied. And I'd be pretty okay with permanently removing bullies from the general population.

That said, in my experience, the gifted/nerdy/aspy kids got the lion's share of the bullying. I still carry it with me decades later, and at least one of my comrades in misery killed herself because of it.

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

#62

Post by cortesoft »

ZhuanXia wrote: post #55
cortesoft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>.... 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? It is so strange reading this comment, as I know how Americans are primed to respond to it, and how precisely opposite my response is.

Care to share what your response is? I am not sure I know what the traditional American response is?

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

#63

Post by StanislavPetrov »

The problem with this article is that the author keeps talking about aggregate "achievement". Is it better to slightly improve the aggregate number of children who can limp across the arbitrary "achievement" thresholds supposedly measured by ever-changing tests, or make sure that the resources exist for every child to exist in an environment that allows them to learn at their own speed? Classrooms forced to teach at a pace that accommodates the slowest learners necessarily hold back the education and growth of every student capable and eager to learn at a higher rate (as well as inducing boredom and apathy). I'd argue that we should be increasing resources to the slowest students who have the hardest problem closing the achievement gap rather than trying to eliminate that gap by pretending that all students learn at the same rate and holding back our best and brightest.

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

#64

Post by itsdrewmiller »

mancerayder wrote: post #49

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 s…

Earlier in the article it addressed some achievement metrics for the same district:

>For instance, after San Francisco Unified de-tracked math, the proportion of students failing algebra fell from 40 percent to 8 percent and the proportion of students taking advanced classes rose to a third, the highest percentage in district history. Until 10th grade, students take the same mathematics classes. From 11th grade on, students can choose different pathways.

The author is indeed trying to connect feelings about ability and achievement. I'm not sure how this is postmodern.

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

#65

Post by sudosteph »

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…

Middle school is just terrible in general, I think. Not that high school is much better. But middle school was easily the worst part of my life, though in retrospect I'm thankful it at least wasn't physical bullying. Still, the emotional toll messed me up pretty good.

In my case, I still got bundled in with the "high achievers" in the IB honors program in HS, but it wasn't any better for self-esteem. The kids in that program weren't genuinely smarter or nicer for the most part - they just had parents who were wealthier and able to afford tutors/extra-curriculars plus stable home environments. The teachers in that program were incredibly unaccommodating to disabilities and there was a sickening elitism that the IB kids has towards everyone not in IB. The "normal" kids weren't the ones making me miserable, it was my peers.

I eventually couldn't take existing in that state, and the toll it all took on my mental health came to it's reasonable conclusion in the form of self-directed violence. Eventually transferred schools. Almost dropped out, but found a loophole that let me take some community college classes for credit and graduate a semester early, so I still got through.

Took me a long time to get perspective on all that. My only long-term friends I still have today from HS were from electives - they were skipping class and smoking up in HS. I never considered that option for myself (did no drugs at all back then), since I wasn't really interested in "coping" so much as getting out. But still, I don't think being separated helped at all. Sure I passed every test, but I was socially out of my depth the entire time. Just being surrounded by other young people in general can be a recipe for misery for people who can't fit in. I'd like to think online school would have been better, but not sure if being completely isolated would have just messed me up more in the long run.

Edit: left out a key word, "physical" bullying. There was definitely tons of the other sort.

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

#66

Post by thrower123 »

It does a great disservice to smart kids to pick them out of the regular rank and file completely. You really need to be aware that stupid people exist, and how to deal with them. And that they are still people.

There are a lot of smart people that have spent their entire lives in a bubble that is only inhabited by people at least a standard deviation above average, if not more. And it shows.

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

#67

Post by borski »

cortesoft wrote: post #60

How do we help those kids that are in 'gen pop', though? Simply pulling the smarter kids out, helping them, and ignoring the rest doesn't seem like a good answer, either. I feel like HN is not the best place for this sort of discussion, since everyone is coming at the problem from the perspective of the high achiever. The low achievers deserve help, too.

I agree with this 100%, but the issues are not intertwined. We need to fix how classes are taught in "low achieving schools," but that's really hard to do when teachers are paid so poorly. Teaching isn't a lucrative career, and thus those that would be great teachers don't generally go into it. It's a really complex and difficult problem that I don't know I have a solution for. I do know that getting rid of magnet schools isn't it, though.

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

#69

Post by nine_k »

cortesoft wrote: post #51
nine_k wrote: post #24

I'd just hazard to say that the current school system is not very functional. It puts kids through a lot of unpleasant experiences, requiring to exert a lot of effort and spend a lot of time. The problem is that not so much of that effort, discomfort, and time is due to learning new and useful stuff. Instead, some kids waste time bored when they are ahead of the class, some waste time clueless when they are way behin…

I always feel like my most valuable lessons from school was about how to live and interact with people of different types. I learned academic stuff outside of school... it was learning to deal with dumb people, bullies, smart jerks, dumb teachers, stupid rules, etc that were the lessons most important to my life.

Good thing that you were able to extract the lessons!

Some people, when repeatedly thrown into a pool, learn how to swim. Unfortunately, some don't.

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

#70

Post by underpand »

cortesoft wrote: post #60

How do we help those kids that are in 'gen pop', though? Simply pulling the smarter kids out, helping them, and ignoring the rest doesn't seem like a good answer, either. I feel like HN is not the best place for this sort of discussion, since everyone is coming at the problem from the perspective of the high achiever. The low achievers deserve help, too.

The bottom 10-20% (larger in 'inner city' schools) of people with behavioral issues will always ruin it for everyone else.

Behavioral issues negatively correlates with intelligence and effort in school (by both the parents and the students). Increased tracking (i.e. separate low achieving and regular achieving) can be used to 'rescue' the majority of students that are average from having their education disrupted from the behavioral issue kids. Effort and behavioral (i.e. evaluate based on behavioral infractions) based hoops for parents and students can be used to separate the low achieving from the disruptive.

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