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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

#371

Post by jstewartmobile »

perl4ever wrote: post #108
jstewartmobile wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 STE…

will also add that i think you asked a perfectly fair question, and have no idea why you've been downvoted

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

#372

Post by thebooktocome »

barry-cotter wrote: post #298
thebooktocome wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Heritage Foundation has been caught lying in their self-funded "studies" so many times that I find it difficult to give them the benefit of doubt.

I’m not saying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m encouraging you not to, saying if you find something they’re wrong about or lying about shout it from the rooftops. Note this study was national news in the US when released and quite thoroughly discussed so if there are flaws you could either find them yourself or google for them.

Well, that's five minutes of my life that I'm not getting back.

https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/TTR-TchrCompen...

Consider me not surprised that there were serious methodological problems, including a general ignorance of the literature.

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

#373

Post by shard972 »

dang wrote: post #358
trempdig wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has accomplished everything she wanted. She’s used faked science to push her agenda and sell a lot of books along the way. Because of her progressive credentials, anyone who questions her gets skewered by an army of 2nd grade teachers who eat up the pseudoscience. She’s the math version of “The Secret”.

You can't use HN like this. Thoughtful critique is welcome; shallow dismissals, name-calling, and personal attack are not. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . They're not hard to follow if you want to. We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. Would you please stop creating accounts to do that with?

no

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

#374

Post by shard972 »

liability wrote: post #151
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.

You can help the top 90% by keeping the bottom 10% away from them. And similarly, you can probably help that bottom 10% by removing the bottom 1% (the bottom 10% of the bottom 10%) from their environment. You can probably get good milage out of recursing this up until the point you're dealing with fractional people.

so remove all the blacks?

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

#375

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

sershe wrote: post #232

I actually wonder what's up with bullying in US schools. I grew up in Moscow, Russia in the 90ies (many people were not well off to say the least) and I was both super nerdy and extremely eh, daring (I would talk back to other kids who were much stronger/more popular than me all the time etc.). Sure, I was not popular, yet I was bullied lightly and almost never physically, mostly by a couple classmates who were just…

My gf is from an ex-ussr country and I also have a lot of friends from Russia/other USSR countries.

I also have a kid that has been identified as gifted (tests give without a margin of error IQ well above 130) and bullied.

I'm from Western Europe (Portugal) but I would assume it is similar in the US/UK and other countries. The main difference I see and talk with 'eastern' europeans and westerns is the sense of community and civility. Whether you agree with communism or not, with USSR or not, there was (and still is in most places, but changing) a sense of community and the greater good. Parents knew each other and each other kids. I grew up just after my country left a dictatorship and in a more tightly knitted group. I knew if I ever bullied/hit a kid in school my parents would find out about it and most likely I would get a beating. I would also probably share a sport or some activity with them even if they weren't in my class. Nowadays here kids and parents in general don't have this relationship, which I think makes much easier for bullies to appear. If your parents met on Friday for coffee and they talked about you bullying their kid, it would be an issue for you, but now, kids have no sense of 'consequence' because their own parents don't care so much or have a sense that what is going on is affecting others (since they aren't in any kind of social circles).

I have seen this change nowadays in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia (not sure about Moscow but I can ping some friends there) and the idea of individualism is starting to gain there (as it gained here) and more problems are arising as well in those countries in the last decade.

my two cents

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

#377

Post by yters »

varjag wrote: post #255
yters wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of history? I'd argue three Rs is the basics everyone needs, and then they can find their own way.

Most of history was pretty bad.

On what do you base that claim? Some say other periods and places were much more idyllic than our current state.

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

#378

Post by underpand »

jcranberry wrote: post #366
underpand wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post your source.

> Students in the district who took Algebra 1 in eighth grade in 2014 (the last year it was offered as a stand-alone course to eighth-graders) had a repeat rate of 40 percent. By contrast, the first group of students who took Common Core Math 8 in eighth grade and Algebra 1 for the first time in ninth grade (and who graduated earlier this year) had an Algebra 1 repeat rate of 8 percent.

(emphasis mine)

https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-how-one-city-got-math-ri...

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

#379

Post by pingyong »

catalogia wrote: post #364
pingyong wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh if you can "teach the test" without imparting meaningful understanding of the material, the test wasn't good the first place.

It turns out creating "good tests" isn't so easy. Generally tests suffer from one or more of the following: subjective grading, game-able question formats, or superficial coverage of the material. Most tests administered by school teachers have very subjective grading. Basically every essay question has subjective grading, as do "show your work" math test questions. Multiple choice questions remove much of that subje…

It's definitely not trivial, but I think a solution would be to have tests that are, to a certain extent, subjective (I don't think they end up being that subjective in Math, and they'll always be subjective in English), and then they get graded by teachers from different schools.

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

#380

Post by empthought »

tsukikage wrote: post #296
empthought wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no difference between voters who attended school only because they were forced to, and hypothetical voters who weren’t forced to attend school.

We don’t trust kids with the choice to smoke, drink or have sex. Hell, we don’t trust them to watch certain films. Why should we trust them with the choice of education any more than other choices that can screw up the rest of their life?

Who's trusting kids with anything? Do they not have parents?

The point is that students who are not engaged themselves, and whose parents are not engaged enough to ensure that they go, will no longer make school less valuable for all by their very presence.

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