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New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

nytimes.com

51–60 of 274 posts

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#51
post #2

Smart rich kids can continue to go to academically rigorous private schools. Smart poor kids can go pound sand. Of course, to really strike a blow for equality, they should also ban the private schools. Reminds me of the Vonnegut story. "The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal..."

Take away every opportunity another child has that yours doesn't

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#53

Subtitle: "Students who are currently enrolled in gifted and talented classes will not be affected. But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students." The reasons can be debated, but it's a fact that on IQ tests, American blacks score about 1 standard deviation (15 points) below whites. A common threshold for a gifted program is an IQ of 130, 2SD above average. If you de…

'A common threshold' - this is false. There's no such 'common threshold'.

There's far far too much ambiguity and selection issues in IQ for us to use it reliably for that much in the real world.

Kids from poorer area have much less good parenting, their vocabulary is as small as 1/3 of those of richer kids entering Kindergarten.

From K-10 at least, it's probably a good idea to just teach kids, at the later high school grades, offer accelerated learning classes to whoever wants to enrol.

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#55

I am generally quite liberal but I strongly disagree with he current strain of progressive education reform. There are inherent differences within the capabilities of students, we can detect these early, and we should use them to provide students with appropriate challenges. Our education system should provide avenues for top students to excel, ad hopefully these top students become the people who create businesses o…

This seems to be a "present" of an older generation that fundamentally didn't put in any effort to understand their successors. With exception to the newest generation that now believes that racism is everywhere. That said, I think logistics of education today can supply almost everyone with a high quality education anyway and the role to connect people moves from universities to other places. So less elite and more…

Or this is the inevitable end of leftist thinking every single time. Sounds good on paper, fairness and all that, but totally ignores reality and ends up requiring large amounts of violence to enforce its idea of equal outcomes for all, where that equal outcome is always poverty and starvation.

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#56

Bad decision, went to these schools

I did too. Though they still had the shitstorm of bullies and race gangs (leader of the black gang threw a padlock at my head at lunch ) (leader of russian gang wanted to have me jumped because they thought I was stealing their lunch money due to my computer hacking skills) I still feel like it was a step above the schools near me where pretty much everyone was a jock. I used to have to take the bus and train to and from the city, and along the way, the bus would pickup the students from James Madison High School. They always threw stuff at me and bullied me although toward my senior years I got large enough where I wasn't as much of a target. Pretty much everyone from that local school was a moronic jock or trophy wife wannabe. I can't imagine having to be surrounded by people like that for 4 years. The type of kids we are talking about would use those motorola walky talky phones on full blast. They'd have headphones, but shitty ones, so loud that everyone could hear their music. Or they'd just be blasting some garbage pop on a portable speaker. Oafs are bad and I can't imagine any of these kids grew up into people who aren't assholes.

Don't get me wrong, assholes still existed at the G&T schools but in far less numbers. The word was that bunch of the assholes actually got in due to affirmative action (like the gang leader who threw a lock at my head.)

Taking away meritocracy is a huge mistake. But that is the essence of the BLM and woke movement. Intelligence measures don't discriminate against anyone except those that aren't intelligent. And yes, it's unfortunate that the conscussions from street brawls or malnutrition might cause a kid from a poor ghetto to be less intelligent. But letting that child into a G&T school, or simply abolishing the schools altogether, it doesn't solve that child's problems. It just makes us all less educated. And if we are all less able, how the hell are we supposed to help that kid?

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#58

It's long been a fallacy that you can sort young kids into high or low performers. Its a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. By starting so young (kindergarten!) in NYC they were creating the division out of essentially nothing. Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random l…

Education research is more heavily plagued by poor methodology than even psychology - the only reason it lacks a replication crisis is because it doesn’t have the academic integrity to bother trying to replicate anything.

It is the epitome of shitty studies cherry picked to support the idealology/politics of the day.

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#59

It's long been a fallacy that you can sort young kids into high or low performers. Its a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. By starting so young (kindergarten!) in NYC they were creating the division out of essentially nothing. Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random l…

It's possible that the average school provides insufficient challenge & motivation for the average student, so that rising expectations results in a rise of performance. It's also likely that an "advanced" programme was less tolerant to disruptions and required students to focus more.

But regardless, that doesn't change the fact that there are difference between people, and they're shown very early in development. It's things like, a kid not understanding whether a train is alive (it moves!) or not. Later, it's things like a person being able to understand basic math or not (I was the smartest kid in class, and had to tutor one of the worst... it was painful - he simply couldn't understand math! I tried all different ways of explaining, ended up having to teach him a mechanistic formula "write parenthesis this way, then keep trying numbers until the sums match").

Re: New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

#60

It's long been a fallacy that you can sort young kids into high or low performers. Its a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. By starting so young (kindergarten!) in NYC they were creating the division out of essentially nothing. Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random l…

I also think at kindergarten age, you are actually just separating by age. A kid with an early birthday could have lived 11 months longer than a kid with a late birthday, and when you are only 4 or 5, that's a good chunk of your life. See Malcolm Gladwell.
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