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Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

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Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#161

Post by achenatx »

jkhdigital wrote: post #118
austinl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree, and came out so disillusioned with the public education system that I'm struggling to decide what the right answer will be for my children. I understand that many kids are not this way, but I was the type that read physics textbooks while in elementary school. We had a mentorship program that paired kids with someone from two grades above (e.g. 1st graders with 3rd graders). My reading level w…

Do you have children yet? My son is 6 so I am right in the middle of this process. My wife does not share my point of view (different culture, different educational attainment) which makes it even more difficult. If I could clone myself I would just homeschool, but that’s not possible so it increasingly feels like I have no choice but to be an accomplice in the crime of sucking the creativity and curiosity out of my…

home schooling comes in many forms. Some are groups of people that get together and rotate duties. Some are groups that hire specialist teachers.

There are charter schools, magnet schools, and academically focused private schools. Ultimately though if your child is too gifted you will need private tutors. You dont need the tutors all day and you can supplement with other more cost effective methods as above.

My city even has a school for girls that are preparing to compete in non academic subjects and that want to practice for half the day. Academics are only half day and then they do whatever their passion is for the rest of the day.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#162

Post by achenatx »

lordnacho wrote: post #75
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resour…

there is a lot of social nastiness in school. Kids may be prodigies academically, but likely they are simply not equipped to handle older kids emotionally or even physically.

The truly gifted are rare enough that the system probably would be mostly like it is today. Public schools are essentially factory production lines. You can get what you are looking for but not in the mass production factory.

My daughter is going into 7th grade in private school. There are several kids who are 3 years younger than her in her class. The small class sizes and flexibility of a private school makes it possible.

My daughter was in an excellent public school in 3rd grade with a lot of asians. There were kids doing long division in kinder. The school's solution was to create 5 tracks in each grade and each track was only around 4 weeks. The kids took a test at the beginning of the track and got placed in the appropriate level for their ability in just that subject area. The good thing was that kids didnt get permanently tracked, they could move up or down depending on their level in a particular area.

There were five 3rd grade classes and when they split for the tracks each teacher took one level.

This wouldnt really help the exceptionally gifted that would need to be more than a few grade levels ahead. But I think the topics that I was aware of were probably 2 levels ahead of grade level.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#164

Post by [deleted] »

colechristensen wrote: post #46
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing. From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do th…

[deleted]

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#165

Post by nouveaux »

tmaly wrote: post #120

I have a 6 year old daughter who has been taking lessons with the 3rd graders this past year. I just had a conference with her teachers and they are ok to jump her a grade. They thought two grades would have been too much socially. But they did agree to give her advanced lessons. She is in a Montessori where grades 1-3 are together. I really believe all children have the potential for genius. Its all in how they are…

Would you care to elaborate on the Pygmalion effect? How did you raise your child?

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#166

Post by mturmon »

beaner wrote: post #151
mturmon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not an adequate summary of the decidedly mixed record of charter schools. My kid, now 14, goes to a Los Angeles USD public school that offers specialized magnet programs for gifted and, separately, highly gifted, kids. The highly gifted program is quite accelerated and could accommodate some of the special needs you see evidence of in the comments here. (They are with their peers, not put into classes wi…

My comment by itself certainly isn't an adequate summary. That's why I recommended a whole book.

You claimed that "the data shows they work" and I was pushing back against that because it is false. Charters failed in LAUSD, the second-largest school system in the US.

It was honestly tried here, with the backing of several successive mayors, and donations from several rich foundations and billionaires. It turned out the profit motive wasn't as helpful in this setting as abstract speculation had supposed. Speaking personally, I used to defend charters but I changed my mind after this record of failure.

As long as we're linking books, here's this book reference from Diane Ravitch (https://dianeravitch.com/about-diane/):

During the 1980s and 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century — as a writer, professor, assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and member of prestigious conservative think tanks, such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Koret task force at the Hoover Institution — Diane Ravitch was a leading advocate of conservative ideas for fixing America’s education system, including charter schools, standards, accountability, and high-stakes standardized testing. But about 2006-07, she began to realize that these policies were not working. She began to criticize them, and to criticize the federal “No child left behind” law, with the publication of the book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she became one of the most outspoken critics of ideas she once championed.

Here's a short article of hers showing how for-profit charters in New York City managed to co-opt the education agenda of the mayor: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/03/27/new-york-charters-a...

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#167

Post by thomasrognon »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #152
dhshahsndeisjwn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just fund public schools at the level that private schools do and have reasonable class sizes.

Or just normalize school funding at a national level and get rid of the racist classism our predecessors built into law. Good schools should stand out for their teachers not how much tax the residents pay.

Or attach funding to each kid and let schools compete.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#168

Post by slantaclaus »

zozbot234 wrote: post #107
carlob wrote: post #105

I wonder if there are any studies about the effects of removing highly gifted students from a class of otherwise average students. I'm aware of a few about the lack socioeconomic mixing: rich kids in classes with just rich kids seem to see almost no positive effect, but poor kids who experience a good social mix in their class fare far better than their peers who are in schools where everybody comes from a poor backg…

> ... what about the overall effect on everybody else? Is it really better to have classes with the 1% smartest removed? This is a function of the method of instruction. "Pulling up the rest of the class" ought to be the teacher's job in the first place but these sorts of "direct instruction" (DI) based workflows, which do help less fortunate kids a lot, have become extremely unpopular. Every teacher wants to be teac…

The overall effect on everybody else is that they graduate higher ranked in their class, benefit from grading curves, there may be others. But regardless, saying that we have to sacrifice the smart kid so he/she can benefit the other students....its not the kid's job to do that.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#169

Post by slantaclaus »

esjeon wrote: post #117

From my own experiences, most "gifted" students are actually from middle or upper class families, and their parents are usually well-educated and very interested in the education of their own children. This will positively affect the "psychological well-being" of those kids, and likely also negate many negative impacts of academic acceleration. Plus, acceleration is really unnecessary these days. There's no shortage…

I once did a pretty broad GIS analysis looking at different kinds of data related to census block groups in conjunction with published standardized test scores and the correlation between income and education is practically a straight line.

Money and Education are a chicken and egg problem in terms of causality.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#170

Post by tmaly »

nouveaux wrote: post #165
tmaly wrote: post #120

I have a 6 year old daughter who has been taking lessons with the 3rd graders this past year. I just had a conference with her teachers and they are ok to jump her a grade. They thought two grades would have been too much socially. But they did agree to give her advanced lessons. She is in a Montessori where grades 1-3 are together. I really believe all children have the potential for genius. Its all in how they are…

Would you care to elaborate on the Pygmalion effect? How did you raise your child?

There is a positive to this effect that can really help the child grow and thrive.

https://bigworldlittleom.com/the-pygmalion-effect-and-its-ef...

But there is also a negative side to it that can destroy a child's self esteem.

https://www.wisdomtimes.com/the-pygmalion-effect-at-home/

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