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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

#361

Post by polotics »

borski wrote: post #33
hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a world of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck . It really sucked. Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actuall…

This! Martial arts, in my case Judo where the first hour was just muscling up, made all the difference: being able to flip and never hit, let aggressors accidentally hit corners of things instead... In the US I don't know how this would have worked, depending on how high escalation can go. Still learning to fight is good advice for bullied kids.

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

#362

Post by adwn »

ninkendo wrote: post #297
adwn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This pseudo caste system was probably beneficial to you in the upper caste, but I don't think students in tier 3 and below saw their lives improve. It is hardly a child's responsibility to suffer from the violence, bullying, and general disinterest in any academic achievement by another group of children.

Why is it such a given that bullies are dumb? In both middle school and high school, I was bullied incessantly by kids who were doing just fine, academically. Some of them went on to be quite successful people. Bullies nonetheless. It would be so convenient (and karmically just) if all the awful kids went on to be dropouts and losers in life, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. Sometimes they’re smart kids, b…

> Why is it such a given that bullies are dumb?

I guess I was projecting from my own experience – my bullies were rather dumb, and I got rid of them when they dropped out.

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

#363

Post by adwn »

jbergens wrote: post #291
adwn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This pseudo caste system was probably beneficial to you in the upper caste, but I don't think students in tier 3 and below saw their lives improve. It is hardly a child's responsibility to suffer from the violence, bullying, and general disinterest in any academic achievement by another group of children.

But it is ok if the not bright but nice kids are bullied?

You raise a good point. To answer your question: No, that is absolutely not okay.

I'm afraid I don't have a good solution for that.

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

#364

Post by catalogia »

pingyong wrote: post #349
catalogia wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever teachers realize they're being evaluated based on some metric, they almost immediately begin gaming that metric and with that it ceases to be a good metric. I had teachers give a lot of "group tests", walk out of the classroom during tests, etc. Standardized testing aims to correct this, but I think it's now considered by many teachers to be a joke. Even when exams are administered by independent proctors, t…

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 subjectivity, but at the expense of a system that can often be gamed and often covers the subject matter in a superficial way.

If incentives are correctly aligned, tests with subjective grading can work reasonably well. But when tests taken by students are used to evaluate the performance of teachers, the incentives of the teachers align against you. For wide scale experimentation, you want a test that actually measures meaningful understanding of the subject matter and at the same time can be graded objectively and at the same time defies the attempts of students, teachers, and school administerators to subvert the results. That's basically the holy grail of tests.

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

#365

Post by boalerized »

By the way, my account on HN was banned by Dan after the author of this article complained to the mods. Here’s the follow-up email the esteemed Stanford prof sent to me:

“ Hahahahaha you are now banned from Hacker News.

For any requests for my time from those outside of the Stanford community please contact my assistant Jessica Method: jmethod@stanford.edu

Jo Boaler The Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education Neurosciences Institute Faculty Affiliate Stanford Graduate School of Education room 326, CERAS, 520 Galvez Mall Stanford University, CA 94305-3009

phone: 650-723-4076

joboaler@stanford.edu”

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

#366

Post by jcranberry »

underpand wrote: post #104
itsdrewmiller wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier in the article it addressed some achievement metrics for the same district: >For instance, after San Francisco Unified de-tracked math, the proportion of students failing algebra fell from 40 percent to 8 percent and the proportion of students taking advanced classes rose to a third, the highest percentage in district history. Until 10th grade, students take the same mathematics classes. From 11th grade on, s…

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.

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

#367

Post by jcranberry »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #10

I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just because someone wants to detrack math. A friend of mine who is a teacher says that he has MORE discipline problems from the smart kids who aren't challenged enough. The real secret should be to embrace independent, computer-mediated systems like Khan Academy. Ev…

The article seemed to imply detracking functionally comes along with teachers catering to the capabilities of individual students since the class is not defined by a particular education level.

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

#368

Post by pksdjfikkkkdsff »

Kbelicius wrote: post #287
pksdjfikkkkdsff wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should talented kids be forced to sacrifice their progress and happiness to help the poor kids (or rather, for the odd chance it might help some poor kids)? That is tyranny, right there. The government is using their bodies, against their will. If society wants to help poor kids, it should use tax money to pay for people to help those kids. Forcing other kids to give up their possible achievements is exploitation…

> If society wants to help poor kids, it should use tax money to pay for people to help those kids. Forcing other kids to give up their possible achievements is exploitation. And using tax money to pay for people to help talented kids is not exploitation?

I said "if society wants it". At least society has a democratic choice. I grant that it can still amount to exploitation for some people.

Also for society as whole perhaps even an economic argument could be made, like the benefits for society of helping those kids could be higher than the costs. Then in summary nobodies tax money would be misappropriated.

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

#369

Post by LaLaLand122 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #334
hackerrenews wrote: post #9

I was fourth picked for g&t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy. Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even. Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids…

I find this argument uncompelling insofar as "smart" is a crap proxy for "needs protection from bullying". And, insofar as kids who aren't particularly bright have every bit as much of a right to not be mistreated at school, if our key motivation here is keeping kids from being bullied, a solution that is only available to a select few kids who are sometimes perceived as having greater personal worth would be entirel…

This!

And as I did mention in another comment I still can barely believe the cases of bullying people describe here, they are horrible! I don't think bullying at such a level is a global problem. I suspect such huge bullying problems must be just a symptom of a deeper society issue. We had a kid with Down syndrome in class for 8 years of primary school and nobody did EVER put a finger on him. By 12 years old I had known my classmates my whole live, quite a few of them also from activities outside school. I didn't like all of them, we had arguments which were not always handled diplomatically, but we had some basic decency towards each other.

Bullying and whether kids should be separated by ability are two orthogonal problems.

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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