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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

#91

Post by ivalm »

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…

These are not the only three alternatives.

And looking at actual outcomes in the US it’s easy to see that the truth is different. It’s not even white kids that come up on top, it’s mostly Asian kids (and before that Ashkinazi kids). It’s not because they have some institutional privilege. It’s because culture matters and valuing smarts and education is important not just for test taking but also for benefiting the society long term.

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

#92

Post by jltsiren »

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…

I don't have much experience with how education works in California, or in the US in general. But there is one universal issue with special programs for gifted kids: parents. It's hard to distinguish gifted kids from average kids with ambitious parents. If you let ambitious parents push their kids to programs they are not qualified for, they can easily ruin the programs for the actual gifted kids.

Gifted programs work best when people don't consider them prestigious or think that they will improve the life outcomes for the participants. When they are more about individual interests than status and objective gains.

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

#93

Post by vitehozonage »

soco wrote: post #39
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…

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…

> From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.

If you have a group of animals where most of them are dogs but a few are cats, then use statistics to justify treating them all like dogs, that is not fair to the cats, is it?

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

#94

Post by spamizbad »

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…

This is my view as well. You can see the effects of this policy from the 80s and 90s with the sheer number of "former gifted kid" adults who feel like they were destined for greatness but ended up with pretty standard knowledge worker jobs. There's a difference between being a bright, contentious hard-working student and being genuinely intellectually gifted - today we lump these kids together, which not only balloons the cost of the program but gives both students and parents a false sense of what it actually means.

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

#95

Post by jjmarr »

Speaking as someone who attended a public high school with competitive admissions, the students are much more important than the teachers or the education itself. Being around a group of talented and driven people motivates you to do well.

I also previously attended special education when my academic abilities were questionable, at best. I benefitted from intensive education on phonics and basic literacy skills, rather than being shoved through the pipeline without comprehending the curriculum.

The contrast was evident when I spent my lunch times in Grade 11 tutoring a "hopeless" student in Grade 9. Over the course of a few weeks, it became abundantly clear to me that this student did not understand any of the math he had allegedly learned before. He more or less pattern-matched his way to eventually getting the right answer and blundered his way through converting a fraction to a ratio without realizing they are fundamentally the same concept. That was good enough to keep pushing him through grades, I suppose.

I was just getting into formal logic as a hobby, so I focused on teaching basic reasoning. As an example, I spent a lot of time explaining that the "equals" sign is a statement that two things are the same. I proceeded to focus on logical implications---that some statements can follow from other statements.

It became much easier to teach everything else once we had those fundamentals. His ability to solve problems was much better when he understood the logical sequence of steps he should take to reach an answer. His math teacher later thanked me in Grade 12, because he started getting good marks and switched to university-track mathematics. That probably wouldn't have happened if he didn't get attention specific to him.

There should be a reframing of the problem space.

Sorting students into gifted or special education based on an accurate assessment of their abilities isn't a case of giving more resources to smarter people and less to dumber. A class of gifted students should require less resources because the students can self-motivate and aren't limited by their peers. This frees up resources for those who need them.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #68
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…

Why? It costs a lot more to build a new school or maintain an existing one in The Bay than in Fresno. It also costs more for teachers since the cost of living is so much higher.

Yeah that’s fair, you might need to make the formula more complicated. The goal though would be to alter what we have now, which is extreme differences in quality between schools in rich areas and schools in poor ones, to a model where everyone can access a similarly decent quality of public schooling. Maybe the formula would need to look something like

(the money required to maintain the school building) + (a wage thats similar to the wages for other teachers in the state, with cost of living factored in) * (the best teacher to student ratio achievable across the state) * (student count at the school)

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

#98

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

influx wrote: post #29
resource_waste wrote: post #6

What is the goal for gifted students? Skip a grade and teach them stuff ahead of time (No, their social skills cant handle it apparently) Teach them extended topics... aka waste their time on stuff they can already do. I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it…

The factory model of education made sense in the industrial era, but it's increasingly anachronistic in an age of personalized technology. We have the tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty and pacing based on each student's capabilities - similar to how modern video games seamlessly adapt to player skill levels. Instead, we're still forcing students into rigid cohorts based mainly on age, effectively opti…

We have tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty for students who value education, whether because they're self-motivated or because their parents make them. The challenge is what to do about the large number of students - at many schools the majority - who don't. When you where dynamically adjust to a student who doesn't particularly care to study, or doesn't have the support to do it properly, you end up with the recurrent scandals where a high school is found to be graduating people who can't read.

Extracurricular studies are always possible for the students who are furthest ahead of the curve, and good schools usually do accommodate that. For the rest, I would argue that a fixed number of tracks that insist on pulling students along is the only practical solution.

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

#99

Post by scarmig »

chimpanzee wrote: post #87
surgical_fire wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

you missed this relevant (albeit, unspecific) fragment when you extracted the quote: > with a millennia of discredited science to back it up

The third prong is a bit badly posed: descriptively, white kids test better than black kids, and each of the three prongs offers an explanation. The third prong points to a discredited belief of genetic inferiority; by positioning the three prongs as exhaustive, the author structures the argument such that if you don't accept either of the first two prongs, then you must be a racist.

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

#100

Post by cljacoby »

Seems there's a lot of comments in here expressing discontent with the dismantling of GT programs. I won't speak as to where/how GT programs should be implemented, I have no idea.

However, I did attend a GT program during elementary school. This school was a "regular" public elementary school in the sense it had a local geographic boundary, and kids in the area attended this as their default public school. However, then kids who qualified for GT would be bussed in from around the county to go to this school.

Within the school, past the 3rd grade classes were segmented into GT and "base" classes (i.e. non-GT). The "base" classes were local kids who did not qualify for the GT program. GT qualification was based off a single test score, taken in the second grade. Kids in the GT and base classes were often respectively referred to as GT or base kids.

In retrospect, it's always appeared super detrimental to me that those kids were called "base" as if they were a somehow more basic version of the GT kids. The name "base" in itself was probably intended as a kind euphemism, to not otherwise default to calling them non-GT kids, i.e. non Gifted nor Talented.

Anyway, all of this to say GT programs probably have a place, but in my own anecdotal experience they were not always executed flawlessly.

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