The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#501

Post by bendbro » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:35 PM UTC

chowells wrote: post #166

slowhand09 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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And conservatives are flat-out wrong, as usual, because they're arguing against strawmen they've invented. No one is talking about individuals. The discussion is about group statistics. Individuals are irrelevant to the discussion. If there is a statistical difference in outcomes, why? Is one group inherently inferior? Or is there maybe not the equality of opportunity that they claim?

> No one is talking about individuals. The discussion is about group statistics.

Sweeping group level decisions ultimately affect individuals.

> If there is a statistical difference in outcomes, why? Is one group inherently inferior?

Why not?

Progress isn't exclusive to the left, and people offering progress often destroy rather than improve. Progress doesn't necessarily require sacrificing meritocratic ideals to satisfy some sludge of totally-not-marxist, totally-not-postmodern, totally-not-intersectional, totally-not-critical-theory thought. We can make everyone's life better through other methods. I'm happy to see the zeitgeist finally getting over this fixation that politics is described by "The Good Guys vs the right wing".

My idea:

Judge people on their individual merits and whatever happens is fair game. Implement a social safety net to prevent people from suffering. Reparate historical violations of the first tenet. Aggressively target monopolies. Increase environmental protections. Increase transparency in business and government. Increase education about our financial system, personal finance, and contemporary topics.

These ideas can be easily composed onto the ideas we already have, will result in benefit for everyone, and the political distance between them and the common man is much less than it is between all the woke stuff.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by lliamander » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

wbsss4412 wrote: post #484

lliamander wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas Sowell has a great book on the subject called Discrimination and Disparities . There are interviews where he goes over the high-level ideas in the book if you don't have time to read it, but the basic punchline is that this: no two populations have ever been equal, and only sometimes is that because of some form of oppression or because of genetic differences. There are a multitude of cultural and environmenta…

> unless equality of outcome is your goal those differences shouldn't bother you. I’m sorry, but this simply doesn’t follow. The premise: that there are a multitude of things that lead to to disparities (even just random chance). If disparities are random then yes, that’s not a problem I’m going to get tussled up about. But it’s not a matter of “it could be anything”. We have strong evidence that it is oppression, an…

If it is actually oppression, then yes that is a valid reason to be concerned.

But let's be clear, you just claimed that the mere existence of disparities is evidence of oppression. That only follows if group outcomes would be equal in the absence of oppression, but that is a completely invalid assumption that has no basis in historical fact.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

DougN7 wrote: post #433

bsuvc wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I can't imagine having to deal with those things. People don't act like that where I live.

I’ve recently become friends with someone from the inner city “hood”. It’s just unbelievable. Like someone below said, it’s not about race as much as poverty. The sad thing from what I’ve seen is the culture is self-destructive. Instead of trying to help each other up and out, many pull others back down (economically, socially, etc). I used to naively think I had answers, but after seeing the breath and depth of the…

The crab mentality goes hand-in-hand with widespread poverty and lack of community development. In schooling it shows up as bullying those who are most academically successful, for being "nerds" or "acting white".

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by robonerd » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:37 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #420

robonerd wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student? The well-behaved students. Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns, regardless of their IQ. And if a dim student who scores poorly on IQ tests knows how to sit quietly and behave themself, I think good teachers will help them a lot.

> Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting, and their lack of interest / trouble focusing reflects a societal (and school) failure to make school engaging and give them the appropriate challenges and direct feedback to keep their attention. Many of the greatest human breakthroughs were made by people who were squirmy and distr…

Even if you only hire "good teachers" and give them "enough resources", some of those teachers will perform better than others. And the attention of those teachers will be wasted on the students who don't want to be there; better to give it to the students who care.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by lmkg » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

dpbriggs wrote: post #209

lmkg wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. I don't see why race has anything to do with it. Simply put, we don't know how to make objective IQ tests yet. The questions in IQ tests tend to bake in a bunch of cultural assumptions, often in ways you don't expect. So the test measures a combination of IQ, and affinity with a specific cultural background. First, let me be clear about this: Th…

Any further reading recommendations? It's unclear why the cultural example of baking and sharing food would cause significant differences in test results but that's picking at an example. Were the six other questions also stereotypical of white middle class families? I imagine they were more abstract (lacking cultural context?). Would the solution here be to remove cultural context, or have culturally tailored exams?…

A few straight arithmetic questions, one about the alphabet, a few about parts of speech. These don't immediately jump out to me as cultured, although anything involving letters or grammar will be sensitive to the linguistic background of the students.

Certainly home life, economic background, etc have an impact on educational outcomes. But I'm making a narrower claim here. A student with a poor home life is likely to test poorly regardless, although the difference might be larger in some tests than others. But a student with the same educational aptitude may test better or worse depending on if they're being tested on topics that are familiar or unfamiliar to them.

Removing cultural context is certainly a solution. I'm not sure it's the best solution. Excessively-abstract problems are only one aspect of intelligence. Anything involving reading comprehension is going to have some linguistic or cultural elements, but I'm not sure it's valid to just remove reading comprehension altogether.

If you want to see a standardized test from a different culture, here's one that's made the rounds a few times. This is for eight-graders in Kentucky in 1912. The sections on Geography & Physiology certainly stand out, but even the math section has a notably different emphasis than modern education.

https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#506

Post by omgJustTest » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

I went 3 different high schools in several states as a child. Some schools had lots of money (ie gifted programs) and others were quite literally at risk of losing state funding due to low standardized test scores. I was the first person in my family tree to graduate college and only person to ever have a PhD.

The teachers at the well-funded, near-apex "Magnet" school in North Carolina were generally better and had more time with students... especially in Science/Math. Teachers had more adult expectations of kids, but most importantly they were _consistent_ with their expectations and cadence of material presented.

Teachers at the under-funded, near-loss of state funding school in Tennessee were kind, "normal" people who happened to go to college at some point in the past. Primary detractors from the classroom were that student's low-expectations often led to large portions of uncontrolled "worksheet" tasks. Work was not graded well, inspected well or feedback given in a timely manner. I personally graded all the science teacher's Junior level homework as a Senior. She often didn't appear to understand the subject and was doing her best to not let the bottom students fall through the cracks.

Elimination of gifted programs, in my opinion, is the best option. The best students will learn what they need to, their parents will make sure of it, and the best teachers need to work with the worst students at this age group.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by postfck » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

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Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

corrral wrote: post #469

kube-system wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to pay more to hire people to do harder jobs.

Absolutely—my point is that these schools aren't behind the "good" ones, funding-wise, and even pay better . Past a certain not-that-high point, giving schools more money doesn't help them much. There's probably some astronomically-high level of funding that would help, past some tipping point, by enabling things like single-digit class sizes, tons of social workers and counselors, extensive home-outreach programs, e…

[deleted]

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

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Post by MattGrommes » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

smachiz wrote: post #460

car_analogy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property. But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets…

You're excluding the fundraising capacity and ancillary services funded and paid for by the PTA. Wealthy neighborhoods have PTA budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands/millions. They pay for after school activities, language immersion programs, music, sports, you name it. It is shocking the discrepancy between neighborhoods in NYC. Average donation per pupil might be $20 in a poor neighborhood and $5,000 in a w…

We saw this first-hand in San Diego. We luckily found a place to rent in a pretty well-off area (Point Loma) and our kids elementary school regularly raised >$250,000 a year for the school (1st through 4th grades). When we moved to a more "normal" school in another state, we found their stretch goal was more like $30,000 and it took all year to get there. The first school paid for multiple extra teachers and aides, as well as lots of other benefits.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#510

Post by bena » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #311

bena wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not have the normal needs students helping the children with learning dysfunctions? Promote that camaraderie all the way down. Let them see what it's like in another's shoes. Etc. All of your arguments for putting the gifted in normal classes, but applied to normal students and children with learning dysfunctions. Gifted students are special needs students. They exist on the entire other end of the spectrum th…

>"So why not have the normal needs students helping the children with learning dysfunctions?" Sure, that's fine. >"Gifted students are special needs students. " Gifted students can usually take care of themselves.

This is how you demonstrate that you should not be making decisions about childhood education in two answers.

What you are advocating is to essentially make every class a special education class serving the students with the lowest abilities. This won't bring those with learning dysfunctions up, it will only serve to bring the rest down while also building resentment towards those with dysfunctions.

And even gifted students need guidance. While they may be able to learn material on their own, knowing what material exists isn't something that is granted to one at birth. And it's not a guarantee that their interests will always align with what is necessary to learn.

Your statements are also kind of contradictory. You want to eliminated gifted education and put those students in normal classrooms. When I ask if you'd be fine with putting normal students in classes with those with dysfunctions with the explicit goal of helping those students, you said fine. But then you said gifted students can take care of themselves. So why would they go to class in the first place.

So, by your answers, you want to eliminate resources for children with learning dysfunctions and allow gifted children to skip school if they want.

There's no way to reconcile the disparity between acknowledging that children with learning dysfunctions need additional resources and ignoring that gifted children are also a special case of student that need additional resources.

Either you wind up advocating for the complete elimination of additional resources, acknowledging that not all students need all the same resources, or trying to pretzel yourself in a way where you can knock the gifted children down a peg while keeping the children with dysfunctions away from the general classes.