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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

#81

Post by wwright »

downerending wrote: post #61
seamyb88 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you not feel that gifted/nerdy/aspy kids reciprocated?

It might just be that I’m a complete asshole, but I grew up in Mississippi feeling very isolated and estranged from everyone around me. I think I definitely felt like I was bullied when I was very young. But by high school and college, I was being outright toxic to people.

If I am generous to myself, a lot of that could be attributed to anxiety, depression, lack of examples of how to behave pro-socially in my life, being in Mississippi (which as far as I can tell might truly be the worst place in all of the US). But I was still as much of bully as a lot of other people, maybe more.

I don’t think that’s an isolated event.

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

#82

Post by chimi »

seamyb88 wrote: post #71
downerending wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have kids? Suppose you have two. One's into javascript and dungeons and dragons. The other's not great academically. No good at football either, and they still behave in a slightly awkward way. But great person, all the same. So, you condemn the latter child to the cesspit that is public life and protect the former? Or think up a better policy?

The gifted kids are bullied by their very nature, because they are different. They have abilities that create envy in others. That envy prompts bullying to neutralize their abundance.

Someone with abundance in a community of scarcity is a target for bullying. That bullying robs the individual and society of those gifts.

So, yes, we protect the gifted, precisely so their gifts survive to benefit all of society, including the bullies. That's the irony. The gifted want by their nature to share their gifts and do so -- even with the bullies and at their own expense.

The average individual is much less likely to be bullied and thus need less protection.

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

#83

Post by marcusverus »

seamyb88 wrote: post #71
downerending wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have kids? Suppose you have two. One's into javascript and dungeons and dragons. The other's not great academically. No good at football either, and they still behave in a slightly awkward way. But great person, all the same. So, you condemn the latter child to the cesspit that is public life and protect the former? Or think up a better policy?

Allowing kid A the opportunity to move at an accelerated pace with other high achieving kids does not affect the opportunity afforded to kid B. Education is not a zero-sum game.

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

#84

Post by virtuous_signal »

borski wrote: post #67
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 sc…

And I agree with this 100%. I think that if we could somehow by fiat pay teachers as much as we paid doctors or lawyers we would attract the same calibre of talent. But we pay teachers as much as janitors or secretaries and somehow expect them to inspire intellectuals.

One thing I'm not saying is that we should just give raises to everyone who's currently in the profession. It would have to be for jobs from here on out. I know of one school that does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equity_Project

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

#85

Post by kleton »

ryandrake wrote: post #47

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…

Did this "track" system run afoul of Civil Rights Act of 1964?

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

#86

Post by lutorm »

marcusverus wrote: post #77
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 don't think anyone is advocating for 'ignoring the rest'. The point is to prevent 'the rest' from setting the pace of development for everyone. You can't optimize educational outcomes for the full spectrum of human beings, from the no-effort types with an IQ of 85, to motivated types with IQs of 115+, in a single classroom with a single curriculum. It just does not make sense. If anything, separating high, medium,…

Your assumption here is in exact opposition to the article. Unless you can successfully argue that the numbers in the article are wrong, it appears that what seems like a preferable situation is, in fact, not.

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

#87

Post by chimi »

wwright wrote: post #81
downerending wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you not feel that gifted/nerdy/aspy kids reciprocated? It might just be that I’m a complete asshole, but I grew up in Mississippi feeling very isolated and estranged from everyone around me. I think I definitely felt like I was bullied when I was very young. But by high school and college, I was being outright toxic to people. If I am generous to myself, a lot of that could be attributed to anxiety, depression, la…

In toxic environments, the individual is forced to choose to be a target or be a bully. You chose to be a bully to survive. That is expected. If you'd chosen to be a target, you might be dead.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to unlearn those bully behaviors that enabled you to survive. Had you instead been able to focus your attention on developing your gifts and confidence, you would be much better off right now and society too, I imagine.

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

#88

Post by jstewartmobile »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #75
jstewartmobile wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you go to public school? an ordinary one?

Some of the time. Define "ordinary". Also state why you think that's a relevant question.

"Ordinary" being the typical sort of public school most children in your city/county/etc would go to. A school that pre-selects students based on race, wealth, test scores, etc would not count as ordinary for obvious reasons.

If what I wrote was drivel, it should be very easy to refute. Just labeling it as drivel seems like a cop-out--driven more by ideology than first-hand experience.

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

#89

Post by faizshah »

It's worth mentioning that gifted and talented schools also put all the top test takers into a small number of schools within a system taking away AP opportunities and other funding from other schools within the system.

Additionally, other kids in the system miss out from the interaction with top performing students whose habits and interests can rub off and help lift up other students. One of the most important parts of going to school is meeting people and learning new things from them and this isn't mentioned enough in the test score and percentile driven education age.

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

#90

Post by cloudwizard »

I would wonder what the standards used are. There was a recent article about how students are less prepared for University since Common Core was implemented. Maybe the advanced class is easier that it ever was.

The biggest problem with education for gifted or even average students is that our standards are too low. It would be like if we set a 10 minute max for the mile run. Anybody that could run faster would still get a 10Min score. Then we rate the school based on the average running time of the entire student body.

There is no incentive to push kids faster than 10 min. All the resources go into the 2 kids on crutches.

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