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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

#411

Post by brewdad »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #295
soco wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

In the past, in many states entry into gifted education classes required a professionally administered IQ test. Many locations needed 130+. Those requirements have gone away but I feel it wasn’t discriminatory. Can it really be criticized as such?

Certainly there are those who say the IQ tests themselves are discriminatory. I'm not qualified to say how much truth there is in that. But that is the likely reason they went away.

In my case I changed schools in the middle of second grade. A month later teachers submitted their list of students who should be admitted the the G+T program. Obviously I didn't make the cut since my teacher barely knew me. My parents tried for years to get me into the program but the district held firm that I had missed the window. Ultimately, I ended up third in my graduating class and attended a top university. The outcomes from the G+T kids were mostly disappointing. One teaches at a university, another works at Walmart. The rest are somewhere in between but mostly closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.

Maybe I actually dodged a bullet.

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

#412

Post by teachrdan »

echoangle wrote: post #404
jmyeet wrote: post #37

With most problems in society there is a huge stumbling block that people aren't actually interested in resolving because it conflicts with their other interests. For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing. Housing is too expensive. Housing needs to be cheaper. But too many people have a vested financial interest in maintaining and growing high prices. Interestingly,…

> For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing. Is that true? Without having a deep insight into the subject, homelessness seems to often be a symptom of mental illness and substance abuse. I don’t think having cheaper housing would really fix the issue of homelessness.

This is a major misconception. The people you see homeless on the streets are very disproportionately those with mental illness(es) and addiction problems. But studies show a huge percent of the homeless have jobs; the link below says 40% to 50%.

But we don't see people workings and living in their car or in a shelter "being homeless," so we tend to think of the visibly homeless as representative of all homeless folks.

And for those who do have mental illness or addiction problems, well, those problems are severely exacerbated by being homeless. They'd be more likely to get treatment and improve with housing.

https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends

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

#413

Post by TexanFeller »

sangnoir wrote: post #343
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is a high correlation between intelligence (no matter how you measure it throughout childhood) and achievement in adulthood. A huge, massive difference. Obviously there are exceptions. Somebody seeming like a bad student is not one. Do you really need a citation for that?

My question was specifically about the outliers: has any research been done if outlying achievements go hand in hand with outlier IQs? Without any research or evidence, it's an area prone to a Just World fallacy where extraordinary achievements "ought" to be achieved by extraordinary talent. Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner: given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to expect the t…

Newton, Euler, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman… Our modern world wouldn’t exist without them. Look up estimates of their IQ. Read some of their work and try to imagine having the same level of insight and producing similar volumes of it if you devoted every waking hour to the task.

Then read up on the ancient Greeks. Even after 12 years of education most modern people wouldn't be able to measure the circumference of the Earth like Eratosthenes did hundreds of years before Christ. The ancient Greeks were pretty darn smart.

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

#414

Post by WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW »

omegaworks wrote: post #356
WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely incorrect. We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.

>We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry. Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather…

That is not true either.

There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost.

They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt.

It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population.

Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.

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

#415

Post by hintymad »

didibus wrote: post #370
hintymad wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about G&T program per se, either. Nor did my country have it when I grew up. I do care about education. I guess my fundamental assumption is that when everyone maximizes their full potential, the outcome will naturally be different. So, pushing students to realize their potential will be against equity, but will be the best way to minimize the equity gap. Now the nuances for us in the US specifically: th…

And adding a bit more info, because I hate seeing people get misled about what equity is arguing for. The key difference of equity with equal opportunity is that equal opportunity provides the same resources/treatment to everyone, while equity recognizes that people start from different positions and may need different levels or types of support to reach the same opportunities. Equity is about ensuring everyone has a…

Yeah, I'm totally for this. I can see a push-back from some people, though: a talented kid may have access to more scarce resources, say a professor in a prestigious university, or a highly-selective camp like SAMS. For that those people will cry unfair.

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

#416

Post by zozbot234 »

mlyle wrote: post #396
zozbot234 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project) for starters, one of the largest educational studies ever conducted: "The results of Follow Through did not show how models that showed little or no effects could be improved. But they did show which models—as suggested by the less than ideal conditions of the experiment—had some indications of success. Of these models, Siegfried Engelmann's Direct Instruction me…

Ugh. I was wondering whether it was going to be Follow Through. You understand it was a terribly conducted study, and analyses of the data by other parties have drawn the exact opposite conclusion? There's a reason why I'm particularly skeptical to what you're saying, btw: we know from pretty high quality research lasting decades that the combination of tutorial instruction plus mastery methods are supremely effectiv…

> Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the opposite of [tutorial instruction plus mastery methods].

Reference for this statement? From a rather abstract POV, it seems to be the closest thing to "mastery methods and tutorial instruction" that can actually scale to a large class size and engage all students by default.

Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match) has very little bearing on what's most effective for marginalized and disadvantaged students who may have significant challenges with basic skills.

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

#417

Post by jaco6 »

It’s the modern hatred of hierarchy at work. People today so desperately want to believe in equality that they deny the plain and simple truth of intellectual hierarchy.

The problem is actually worse in the world of work than in school. Even workplaces like Amazon warehouses would greatly benefit from IQ testing of new hires, with fast track promotions for those in upper percentiles. It doesn’t happen because of beliefs about racial and social equality. Dumb people end up running places out of nothing more than inertia and fear of acknowledging excellence.

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

#419

Post by jaco6 »

casey2 wrote: post #49
User23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the alternative hypothesis to racist teachers is literally unspeakable.

What? That Negros are dumber than Whites? I'm sure this has been debunked multiple times, so people generally don't say it for fear of sounding stupid, not of enraging some higher up cabal of leftists that either secretly or openly control everything.

[dead]

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

#420

Post by wat10000 »

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote: post #322
iwontberude wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Completely incorrect. We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.

Which fields?

Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.

Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.

Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.

Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.

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