California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by hombre_fatal » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

philipov wrote: post #30

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…

While I may have sympathy for your more substantive points, anytime I hear someone mention virtue signalling, it makes it sound like they're virtue signalling. Better to just not bring up that dog whistle.

I have to agree. It's distracting because it's a low signal quip that asserts that your opponents have no substance behind their views beyond looking good. Just make your argument.

Even if this were the rare valid application of it, it's so overused as a low effort attack that the comment is no better off for using it.

Finally, we have to contend with the fact that people earnestly believe in the things they say and do. If it were just for optics and they didn't actually hold their positions, these issues would be far easier to deal with.

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

#52

Post by scarmig » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

ironlake wrote: post #43

atomicUpdate wrote: post #14

> 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 for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists? I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback…

> settled on racist teachers If the population of gifted kids is statistically over-represented by white kids, then one of these must be true: • The test doesn't measure giftedness, but rather level of education. So we would expect kids from worse schools to perform worse. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal. • Gifted kids from minority communities don't have equal access to the test or the cla…

> This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal.

The test is not a form of racism, institutional or otherwise. It's doubling as a proxy measure for the socioeconomic disadvantage the students have experienced up to that point.

You can't get rid of socioeconomic disadvantage by refusing to measure it, no more than you can cure COVID by refusing to test for it.

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

#53

Post by wood_spirit » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #35

I had to leave California so my gifted child could get a proper education. Now he's getting it, while I'm paying roughly half in property taxes.

Can you share more details? Where have you moved to? What alternatives did you consider?

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

#54

Post by Spivak » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

atomicUpdate wrote: post #14

> 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 for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists? I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback…

You don't understand the non-pushback because you're someone who thinks of racism as a personal matter and something a person either is or isn't. Everyone is racist, I'm racist. Those ideas have been deeply ingrained into me from when I was a little girl all the way through now and they're never going away. What I can do is learn to recognize when my "first thought" is likely a racist one, push it to the frontal cortex for rational analysis, and adjust my response if necessary.

Racist as a pejorative is one who is doing it on purpose or with indifference, context matters. We perceive white children as smarter is an everyone problem, not an individual teacher problem.

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

#55

Post by BadHumans » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

edmundsauto wrote: post #13

BadHumans wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on...Going to need a little bit more of an explanation here.

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.

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

#56

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

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…

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 endeavor when schools are so dramatically unequal in the states, but I also think we could address that inequality of opportunity with better funding policy.

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

#57

Post by surgical_fire » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

ironlake wrote: post #43

atomicUpdate wrote: post #14

> 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 for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists? I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback…

> settled on racist teachers If the population of gifted kids is statistically over-represented by white kids, then one of these must be true: • The test doesn't measure giftedness, but rather level of education. So we would expect kids from worse schools to perform worse. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal. • Gifted kids from minority communities don't have equal access to the test or the cla…

> They all took the same test, white kids came out on top. This is a racist belief

I am not even white, but something there in your rationale does not make sense. If they all took the same test and white kids were on top, how is this a belief?

Is there a word missing somewhere? Is the implication that the test was rigged? It is an honest question, I couldn't follow the rationale there.

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

#58

Post by jessepasley » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #11

My 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…

Is that how gifted students are identified these days? When I went through the gifted program as a kid/teen, we had to take what was considered to be an IQ test at the time. Being far ahead in some skills in schools might be have been indicator but not sufficient to being admitted.

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

#59

Post by gaoshan » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

norir wrote: post #21

I think fundamentally the problem is we are trying to fit everything into an industrial, and authoritarian, model of schooling. Students can't be trusted to self learn so we put them into a room, atomize them, strip away almost all of their freedom and force them to learn at the pace of the slowest learner in the group. It's little wonder that acting out is a constant problem. Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping…

I was a gifted program kid who was part of a new style of unstructured, learn at your own pace, self-learn program called the "informal" program. This was back in the early 1980s (the program itself had started in the 1970s).

The net result was that the highest achieving gifted kids did really well and the slacker gifted kids (myself included) did abysmally. Turns out some of us needed a level of structure and rigor enforced on us to nurture whatever gifted talents we had. Some kids learned it at home, for some it seemed to be innate and for others we did not have it anywhere in our lives and needed to be instructed in how to study, what to do, when to do it and at what pace.

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

#60

Post by Jcampuzano2 » Tue, Nov 26, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

throwaway106382 wrote: post #16

This is what happens when you push equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. Everyone gets the same crappy outcome. Freedom is inherently unequal.

Equality of outcome could even eventually lead to an objectively worse outcome for society as a whole when on a larger time scale due to holding back brilliant minds.

Those who were clearly brilliant and may have been entirely capable of pushing societal, technological, medical etc. advances forward in a larger time scale are held back, stifled, or even in cases of things like affirmative action (which I believe should exist, but only on the economic level, not on the basis of race or identity) have been denied of opportunity to go on and do great things.