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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

#101

Post by borski »

seamyb88 wrote: post #73
borski wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non-gifted kids (to use your terminology) weren't bullied or abused. They were friends. They played sports together. I played sports too, just not with them, because I wasn't invited to. I wasn't 'cool.' I 'tried too hard.' I 'cared too much about learning.' Not sure what you're going for here?

I added a "non" to the word in the title of the post to indicate the opposite of that thing. But my terminology.

You followed it up by "whatever the fuck that means," implying that you were unclear on what 'gifted' (or the opposite thereof) meant in the first place. I wasn't looking to get into a debate on what it means to be gifted or not, and thus I was making it very clear that I was using your verbiage, and not being disparaging.

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

#102

Post by gojomo »

It's hard to find this sort of op-ed convincing when it includes hard-to-interpret imprecise word-salad like:

> Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers. In 2014, 63 percent of students were in advanced classes, whereas in 2015 only 12 percent were in advanced classes and everyone else was taking Math 8. The overall achievement of the students significantly increased after de-tracking. The cohort of students in eighth-grade mathematics in 2015 were 15 months ahead of the previous cohort of students who were mainly in advanced classes.

Huh? What's "Math 8"? How was "overall achievement" measured?

How could decreasing the proportion of students in "advanced classes" from 63% to 12% result in a "cohort of students" that is "15 months ahead" of the students who were in "advanced classes"? (What definitions of "advanced" could possibly mean 15 months behind "non-advanced" coursework?)

If there's a strong case, and the writer understands it, it would be explained better than this – and probably include tables & graphs, rather than just rambling assertions like the above paragraph.

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

#103

Post by gct »

kick wrote: post #52
nostrademons wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'v…

I'm currently not in a position to be able to look up this stuff (making dinner), but Duke has done a lot of research on this stuff under their TIP program that basically everyone in this thread might be interested in: it validates your experiences in numbers as the default for gifted children/adolescents/teenagers when not helped structurally, and provides a reasonable amount of information and resources to try and…

I was in TIP. Hanging out with smart, kind kids every summer was the highlight of my year. Lotta great memories. Public school...not so much.

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

#104

Post by underpand »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #64
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, s…

I did a little digging into the source of that statistic. The statistic compares the number of 8th graders who failed Algebra 1 before the change to the number of 9th graders who failed Algebra 1 after the change.

What we really want to know is how many students have passed Algebra 1 by the end of 9th grade. Unfortunately, the statistic in the article is useless.

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

#105

Post by wott »

empath75 wrote: post #78
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…

I think they’d do better by taking the kids who understand the material and asking them to work with the kids who don’t. You learn as much by teaching as doing, if not more.

It is very difficult to explain something which was obvious to you. Often you would not know how to decompose it, and above all, you would not know the pain points the others encounter, and why those points are painful. Teaching is a trade, after all.

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

#106

Post by seamyb88 »

chimi wrote: post #82
seamyb88 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, includ…

I went to a Grammar school and am finishing a PhD. Pretty damn nerdy. These gifted wonder kids you speak of... you reckon they aren't going to bully? I was selected at the age of 11 and told how magnificent I was. Growing up was still tough.

"It'll all be ok if we keep away from the riff-raff" doesn't do anything but say "we can only really afford to educate X amount of kids". This lot are brick layers.

Of course who am I talking to? I don't know. Might be somebody who thinks gifted means Daddy has a yacht.

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

#108

Post by perl4ever »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #88
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's say there is a city (somewhere in the northern half of the US) that has seen better days, due to the rise and fall of local industry in the 20th century, and there is a town/suburb that has much higher property values and better schools. The students in the suburban school(s) are much more likely to go to college than in the city schools. The suburb is nearly all white, with lots of parents with well-paying STEM jobs, while the city is not. De facto segregation. Which public school is "ordinary"?

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

#109

Post by chimi »

seamyb88 wrote: post #106
chimi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, includ…

I went to a Grammar school and am finishing a PhD. Pretty damn nerdy. These gifted wonder kids you speak of... you reckon they aren't going to bully? I was selected at the age of 11 and told how magnificent I was. Growing up was still tough. "It'll all be ok if we keep away from the riff-raff" doesn't do anything but say "we can only really afford to educate X amount of kids". This lot are brick layers. Of course who…

I had a single mom with a government job. Being discovered as gifted saved my life. I am still bullied to this very day. Most recently I was fired by bullies for refusing to write illegal software and now the company could be in serious legal trouble.

Gifted people don't escape bullying by growing up and it has immeasurably costly ramifications for society at large.

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

#110

Post by sokoloff »

cortesoft wrote: post #48
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?

Having grown up in public schools in a G&T cohort and participating in CTY/SET, I absolutely favor teaching all kids to the highest level of challenge they can benefit from. That’s going to mean some are challenged by simple arithmetic. Others by multi-variate calculus in 10th grade.

I think that necessarily means segregating the kids by ability in a subject, but I’m not married to that input or mechanism near as much as married to the outcome that every kid is appropriately challenged.

If challenging kid A results in a worse outcome for kid B, so be it.

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