Did anyone check the course material of the gifted programs? My honest assessment is that even students in a gifted class are not necessarily challenged. For instance, the math problems of 6th-grade gifted class on negative integers are something like "calculate -1 - (-2)". In contrast, an easiest problem when I was in the same grade would be something like "N is a negative even number, and K is a non-negative odd number. What is the smallest value of K - N". My point is not to brag how challenging my school work can be, but that most kids need careful nurturing to maximize their potential. It really pains me to see that so many kids squander their time just because the schools do not do their jobs.
California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
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Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
We just ejected from Seattle Public Schools for this reason. My daughter, as a gifted student, was basically ignored by her teachers for the last 3 years because she was smart, and therefore they didn't have to worry about her. But, by ignoring her, she atrophied. Her standardized testing scores dropped every year. She no longer cared about learning. It truly is a regression to the mean.
In what way are you certain that she's gifted?
IMO any student that is 1-2 years ahead can be considered gifted for the purposes of parents who are thinking about how to optimize public or private education for their kids.
Based on how a lot of education systems work in the US (recognizing only discrete progress in a student), if your child is 1-2 years ahead then that's worth recognizing and start nurturing. That's about when public schools also recognize the giftedness of a student.
You don't need brilliant children to achieve this kind of advantage, just a careful eye and consistent nurturing.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well-off gifted kids will get the stimulus they need at home. Poor gifted kids are out of luck. And thus, the policy serves to entrench socioeconomic disadvantage in the name of making everybody equal.
I don't believe it. Almost every kid in America has access to the internet, a public library and a teacher. How many don't have access to any of those? That's a different problem.
The issue is time, attention and guidance. Well-off kids have parents who are usually well educated and who (if they arrange their priorities appropriately) can make time to spend with their kids. Poor kids do not have such parents; their parents usually wouldn't know where to begin, and even if they did, they don't have time to spend with their kids if they're working multiple jobs that they get fired from if they're late.
If you let a random kid loose on the Internet, they will probably find propaganda / political / incel / gaming / porn / alt-right bullshit, because that is simply what the majority of the Internet is. I remember folks doing experiments back at Google in the '00s where they set a user-agent loose to follow links at random on the web, and the result was that you always ended up back at porn. Kids need some form of guidance to say "This is worth pursuing, this is not worth pursuing", and for a gifted kid, it needs to be someone who can personalize this guidance to their own interests. An involved parent can do that, but a teacher who is literally trying to keep their 30 other students from killing each other cannot.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prop 13 limits property taxes which are typically used for funding local schools. The comment is implying that it’s low school funding in Ca that is the culprit.
I understand now thanks. That point doesn't make sense to me in the context of the article because the article is claiming that black and Latino gifted children were under-scouted until the BLM movement. Seems that this and that are 2 different issues.
Prop 13 had a huge negative effect on quality of public schools in California, which I got to experience first hand.
The difference was quite apparent to me during high school when I compared my older siblings’ yearbooks to my experience of the same school a decade later. They had so many more classes, clubs, sports, programs, and activities available to them than I did.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#115My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the government, would take gifted options more seriously if there weren’t so many kids who did nothing more than learn the multiplication table early being classified as gifted. You limit enrollment to only the extreme outliers and at that point there would be national security benefits to identifying these children. (Heck, I'd bet the federal government might even try…
"GATE" as a CIA/FBI Psyop is already a common schizo opinion on 4chan. Don't make it reality please.
(for those who don't know: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/1fdg8io/wh...)
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
you missed this relevant (albeit, unspecific) fragment when you extracted the quote: > with a millennia of discredited science to back it up
The third prong is a bit badly posed: descriptively, white kids test better than black kids, and each of the three prongs offers an explanation. The third prong points to a discredited belief of genetic inferiority; by positioning the three prongs as exhaustive, the author structures the argument such that if you don't accept either of the first two prongs, then you must be a racist.
Perhaps. I didn’t really read that much into GGP’s comment. I just wanted to point out that the comment does (minimally) rebut scientific racism. And by selectively omitting that rebuttal in the quote, GP makes it appear as if the denial of scientific racism is just a claim of faith.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing. Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own. This is perha…
There's a lot of strong words thrown around regarding this topic. You need a little of both. Consider a re-framing: Rather than trying to focus on the less-achieving third (half, tenth, etc) with the goal of bootstrapping entire groups (for your definition) via equality of outcome, it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come fro…
> it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.
Quite obviously. That's what's being strip-mined at the moment.
I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.
These programs have been removed since. It's holding those that need the most help back, while in no way hurting the people intended. The kids who have the ultra-parents with unlimited resources are going to private schools to begin with.
> If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.
Short of extremely well-off suburbs (and neighborhoods in a handful of cities I suppose) this was never a thing in the public school system. Those generational wealth students don't touch the public school system at all. They are not relevant to the discussion and never have been.
> equality of opportunity
Correct. Equality of opportunity is what matters. The folks removing any gifted and talented programs, advocating for killing off magnet schools, etc. are the ones removing said opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. It's dragging everyone down to an extremely low bar and pretending they did something good.
Without inner city public school programs oriented towards the G&T crowd I would not be where I am today because my parents were working class at best. They were good parents, but they simply did not have resources to keep up with the "legacy" crowd. All they could do was try to get me into the "right" public schools and hope I'd be given a chance. This worked. Those programs are now gone - and anyone who grew up where I did in the same circumstances is more or less shit out of luck.
This is outright evil. Strong language and emotion be damned. It's deserved in this case.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was that simple I'm sure we would have seen it already. I imagine any gifted program, and you can imagine it in any way you like, will inevitably promote a majority from a certain group, thus by definition will be a target for every discrimination complaint - because basically it will be supporting and pumping more money to an already privileged group. So somebody has to decide: either targeted to constant fuss…
> From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same. If you have a group of animals where most of them are dogs but a few are cats, then use statistics to justify treating them all like dogs, that is not fair to the cats, is it?
The issue is deeper than that: it's that we take some singular conception of what a dog is, and ruthlessly beat any deviation from that idealized dog out of all the individual dogs. Which ends up being every dog.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#119“But they’re not just fine. Gifted children, more than others, tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others, a phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third-grader’s reading skills might be at 11th-grade level while her social skills are more like a kindergartner’s. They often find it hard to connect with other children. They also are in danger of being turned off by school because the lessons move sl…
> I always read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-photographic memory, and so excelled at recall-based examination, which is most of the liberal arts and social studies in school. Then you were definitely under-served by your school. An encyclopedia of knowledge is useful, but these subjects are almost entirely about critical thinking. At the best schools, students are expected to complete about ten pages…
> you were definitely under-served by your school
Sure. It’s why the G&T programmes helped. By the eighth grade the writing assignments were there. But at the elementary level, a lot of work is put into ensuring reading comprehension. If you have that the lessons are terrible.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> There’s little doubt that racism played a role in identifying children as gifted even though the label was based on supposedly objective criteria > Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only reason… Notice how the extracted quote (and the article itself) never actually accuses teachers of racism? The accusation only appears in your complaint. Systemic racism can exist without overt individual raci…
But why assign any specific value to systemic racism vs some groups value family + education more than others. Poor Asian families suffered a lot of discrimination (and still do) but their kids do well in these tests. Ashkenazi suffered a ton of discrimination especially early/mid 20th century but still did extremely well academically. I am not even saying they are inherently smarter, I’m just saying that their value…
Why are you replying to my comment with this? It has no relevance to anything I wrote.
But since you did, I’d suggest you consider not only the value system of the victims but also that of the perpetrators and the system itself.
And also consider the history.
And consider the financial differences that often exist.
Consider the communities and their plights.
Consider destruction of cultures.
Consider the dietary and health issues that are faced.
Consider the overwhelming economic and media environments that 7 years olds grow up within and how that environment is often more impactful than parents could ever hope to be.
And, if we want to focus on biology, consider the role that vision, in particular color of skin, plays in our emotions, decision and behavior. Consider how we use color of skin to read health and emotions and intentions and how it might be harder to read those when the skin is imbued with unfamiliar tones and how on a population level, such misreads can build into mistrust and conflict.