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California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

latimes.com

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Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#301

Post by iwontberude »

gowld wrote: post #133
cogman10 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What does this even mean? To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the…

You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society? The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself. Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#302

Post by bawolff »

cogman10 wrote: post #66
phil21 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

> 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. What does this even mean? To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the…

> > Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.

> Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.

I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#303

Post by roguecoder »

phil21 wrote: post #32
csa wrote: post #10

It’s not just California, but California may be one of the more egregious state neglecters. The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for the gifted and talented communities. Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron. Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally…

> 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…

I have been deeply amused that some recent studies found the signal that best correlated with innovation in a society wasn't upward mobility, but rather _downward_ mobility.

The less rich people are allowed to buy success for their mediocre offspring, the better off society is.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#304

Post by VirusNewbie »

nonameiguess wrote: post #50

I was in California GATE programs in the 80s and 90s. I was also (and still am, I guess) Latino, so it's not like there was universal exclusion if you weren't white. As far as I remember, being placed in these programs was entirely a matter of scoring high on some IQ test you were given in 1st grade. It's hard to say the program made any difference. We took some extra classes I barely remember. We had special summer…

>Much like this writer, I ended up okay anyway.

Don't leave us hanging! What happened?

I too was a (white) latino kid in GATE in the early 90s. I definitely didn't succeed at everything - i'm more athletic than a lot of nerds, but not compared to actual athletes, but school was easy enough that by the time high school came around, I completely stopped caring and just read a lot of books.

My study habits were bad though, so by the time I stared tackling harder subjects on my own, I lost a lot of confidence and had a pretty unimpressive career as a middling software engineer all through my 20s.

Eventually I learned some things were hard regardless of how smart you are, I learned to self study harder things, and now i'm doing well with lots of really smart coworkers at a FAANG.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#305

Post by laidoffamazon »

hintymad wrote: post #269
laidoffamazon wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said a few weeks ago that > As many countries demonstrated, wealth does not buy good genes. Talented kids stand out, as long as we have a decent public school system, which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable. That's how East-European countries and Asian countries produce high-quality students. What implications does this have for all students getting trained rigorously in the public sc…

I'm not sure where the contradiction is. The key to me is "which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable", which I equate to "rigorous training". I guess the difference is on how we define "talented". To me most kids are just educable, which means they don't constantly push themselves, they don't take initiatives to dig deeper, nor do they proactively find resources to do more. Or they struggle…

> I guess the difference is on how we define "talented"

Yes, and how we define "bad genes". I'm someone that you definitely wouldn't consider "talented" (since I've never worked at Google etc) and probably have "bad genes", what should be done with people like me?

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#306

Post by iwontberude »

pempem wrote: post #165
iwontberude wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally over romanticizing institutional learning. It’s worth abolishing and starting over.

A bold stance given your username. Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your opinion

The romantic notion that geniuses need an institution to coddle them and that by the grace of some government or non-profit organization then are humans capable of higher order thinking. The institutions are the tools for getting larger investments to allow for smart people to do their great work, not to create the people through education. Education systems today are fundamentally broken and reinforce feedback loops of poverty and dependency. It’s a prisoners dilemma. Case in point TAG programs are gamed often by wealthier families which makes the selection process incredibly unscientific and useless.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#307

Post by mattnewton »

roguecoder wrote: post #297

The whole point of "gifted" was that these are kids who are disproportionally likely to drop out of school, engage in risky behavior, get pregnant, get bad grades, etc. The problem is that A. they called it "gifted" so people thought it was something you _wanted_ your kids to be and B. the screening test they used was the IQ test, which you can massively improve your score on by studying for it. So parents were deter…

where did you get the impression the genesis for "gifted" programs was to solve high iq problem kids? this is the first I'm hearing of that.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#308

Post by roguecoder »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #223
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we oughta do is make a system where state education funding is equally distributed (per student capita) to all the schools in a state. Local funding by property taxes, while not most of the funding for schools, also needs to go. We also oughta try and tackle the administrative bloat on a federal level to get more of that money going to things that directly help students. I agree equality of outcome is a hopeless…

It has more to do with the income level of the families sending their kids to a school rather than the funds that the school has available. This is why the only way to successfully reduce inequality in the education system is to reduce inequality in society at large.

That doesn't even make sense. We've seen lots of positive outcomes from increasing funding directly to less-well-resourced schools.

We have to defy rich people's preferences to do that, but that is entirely possible.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#309

Post by niemandhier »

My personal observation: It’s not gifted programs, it’s the environment. I work on a pretty good science campus in a smallish university town, lots of smart people and so on. There are a few products of gifted programs, but most people just meandered in.

What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess club, post soviet backyard hacker pad, Berlin maker space … I think what would help much more than school run gifted programs, would be more opportunities for interested kids to mingle an push each other forward.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#310

Post by hardwaregeek »

deathanatos wrote: post #175
hardwaregeek wrote: post #86

Did people read the article? There's actually some interesting points about how gifted/advanced curriculum isn't always the solution. I'd have to agree. I went to a magnet school, so already presumably for "gifted" students, that in turn had advanced courses like honors or AP. And while there were students who genuinely benefited, myself included, it also became a game of getting into the most advanced course so you…

> Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant. I'm not brilliant, but I absolutely did benefit. The magnet school I went to, and the gifted-students programs I attended pushed me, and I'd never really been pushed before; I was just on cruise-control, academically. There was room for potential, and it was not being filled by the educational system until magnets/gifte…

I have to wonder, how much of these issues are because education is generally underfunded and not given enough respect?

> There were just certain, simple, logical steps in my education that were not possible to take without first getting the "gifted" label, since that's the bureaucratic grease that makes the whole system move for you.

That sounds like an extremely dysfunctional system that rewards people who know this trick, but hurts people who may not know it. Now, I don't hate the player, so I'm very glad it worked out for you and many others. It benefited me too. But at an administrative level, I'm not sure that's a good thing.

> Not really … my mother tapped into her "social circles" — other mothers she met at my preschool — to try and learn what she needed to know about the schools, the school system, and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in order to effect better outcomes for her children. I.e., what any good parent would do. The article misses the mark here too:

There's a lot of reasons a parent might not be able to figure this out, ranging from lack of proficiency in the English language, to housing instability, to lack of trust in school as an institution. Remember, we're 75 years removed from legal segregation. There's still a lot of distrust in programs actually being fair. I don't think we can assume that every child has a parent who can take the time to learn the bureaucracy.

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