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Failing Our Geniuses
saintlupus writes "Time has an interesting article about the failure of the US educational system to properly deal with gifted students. For example, up to ten times as much money is spent nationwide on educating 'developmentally disabled' students as gifted ones. Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either?"
Yeah that about sums it up. In our school district, they're pushing more regular students into our magnet schools (this is a Louisiana magnet school, mind you). Basically they're trying to level the playing field. Unfortunately, this means the AP students don't have as many higher-level classes to take because they have to cater to the regular-class students. If you ask me, High Schools should be like colleges, where they get to choose whether or not you're smart enough to attend. This sort of thing just annoys me to no end.
I am 25 years old. I spent 1st grade through 8th grade in the ALPHA program in Florida, which required an IQ testing of 135 or above to attend. I would say that on the whole, I felt like I was constantly dealing with uninteresting and repetitive work. I know being gifted isnt "a handicap" but there was always an air of "ok well, you're smart enough, there are plenty of other people who actually need our attention." The only time I was being truly challenged was in my 2 hours of ALPHA a day, in which times we would do brain teasers, read Shakespeare, do simple physics projects, etc. Looking back I know our budget for that class sucked royal asshole. Our class was in the most broken down portable room on campus. The teacher often brough her own materials and made up stuff for us to do on hand-written photocopies. So yeah, I can see how this article would have some weight in truth.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
Just to be clear, the 'No Child Left Behind' nonsense has no additional funding for schools, and just additional requirements. Specifically, testing, testing, and more testing. That's it. Really. It requires a great deal more testing of students than ever before, and a certain pass rate for a school to get existing federal funding.
The end result is that children who are just below the pass rate on the 'pre-tests' (really, just more tests, but the results only get examined by the teacher or the school faculty) get the most attention. Those above it, especially well above it and those well below it, are more or less shafted by the way it's designed.
Alternately, several school districts have simply changed the rules for what constitutes a pass, and what a failure, on their tests, so that they have a high enough pass rate to continue to get full federal funding.
My K-12 days were in the 60s/70s. My mother was a teacher who quit after my sister and I were born. She used to be infuriated after parent/teacher meetings where she would ask a question and get the "don't worry, we're the professionals, you're an untrained parent" attitude when she had her education masters from Stanford.
Frustration with the schools led a group of parents to form an action group that discovered, among other things, that the district had claimed they had a MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors) program to get funds when they actually weren't doing anything for the gifted children but rather just grabbing money for the budget.
They did make a small dent - especially when my dad was elected and re-elected as head of the Board of Education. But I'm not sure that any of the good they did lasted much past his term of office.
The former Secretary of Education commented on NPR the other day that 40 years ago the best option for college-educated women was teaching and that's what about 50% of them did. That pool of (probably unfairly) cheap teaching labor dried up long ago. If you want good people as teachers you are going to have to pay them. Conversely, the teaching establishment needs to stop the same-pay-for-all nonsense. Teachers in difficult-to-fill specialties like science and math should be paid more. Top-flight teachers should be compensated better as well. Bad teachers should be fired. (There's no excuse for tenure in K-12.)
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Your response is correct, but the Time article doesn't appear to address the reason. Most people are familiar with the phrase "No Child Left Behind," but don't actually understand how it works.
AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) is a factor in the ranking of school systems. Specifically, it was designed to expose the fact that many school had masked the few poor performers with the majority of successful students.
What it effectively means is that all "sub-populations" (broken by ethnic groups, ESL/Limited English Proficiency, "at-risk," and low-income, among others) must demonstrate "adequate yearly progress." It's designed to even be a bit forgiving - the low-income group doesn't necessarily have to pass, they just have to have improved a reasonable amount from the year before. A subpopulation counts if it is 1% of the school population or 30 kids (IIRC).
If a school fails to meet AYP for two years in a row, they become a "school of choice." Parents may now choose to pull their students from that school and send them to another one, and the failing school will pay for transportation. I'm not sure how it works out in small, rural districts where a given high school is the only one in the district.
Once a school fails in AYP, kids start getting pulled. The kids who get pulled are the ones who have parents who care about education; that usually translates to the kids who do well in a school being pulled from it. You can see how much this would impact a school.
If a school fails to meet AYP for five years in a row, a radical restructuring is due; this generally means that large amounts of the staff need to be fired, or the school should be converted to a charter school or something similar. In practice, though, the actual actions at this stage usually aren't as substantial.
With the background out of the way, it's fairly easy to see why geniuses don't matter: they'll pass the test. Five or ten ESL students (or low-income, or at-risk, or whatever) can make or break a school of 3000. With the way the NCLB program has structured AYP, it should be obvious where a principal/district would focus resources.
I'm not arguing that schools don't need monitoring; they do, no doubt. But if this system sounds ridiculous to you, please do all of us a favor and let your elected officials know.
The statistic stating that "up to ten times as much money is spent nationwide on educating 'developmentally disabled' students as gifted ones" has no bearing on whether or not gifted students are getting their due and appropriate education. The simple fact of the matter is that special education requires MANY MANY more resources than a class specialized in advanced education. I work at university sponsored school for students with ADD, ADHD, and Asperger's kids and I can personally attest to the amount of money that needs to make sure these students grow up to become normal functioning members of our society. Psychologists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, specially trained teachers -- almost all of which have their PH.Ds. It's no surprise it costs more. As others are stating, the failing more frequently comes from poor school districts that aren't able to afford the advanced courses (or the better-skilled teachers to teach them). Or, more pervasive, the American love of idiocy and stupidity. I believe the best way to change it around and start helping our gifted students would be to publicly award smart people on TV instead of athletes and actresses.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Absolutely. There is obviously a correlation between the two, but there are plenty of lazy bright kids in the advanced classes and plenty of hard-working not-so-bright kids in the general/remedial level classes.
As a former public high school teacher, I speak from experience. I taught physics and AP chemistry (both classes composed of advanced 11th and 12th graders) and physical science (composed of general/remedial 9th graders). I felt really bad for the few really hard working kids in my physical science class who had to put up with the disruptions of their fellow students. (Yes, I disciplined those kids, but you can only do so much in certain school systems.) I fought to put one student who I thought was of average intelligence but very hard-working in an advanced class for the following year. Unfortunately, that didn't work out as the advanced class was too far ahead of her. I had another student who was mildly mentally retarded, but was such a hard-worker that he outperformed almost everyone else in that class.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Actually, it is interesting you bring up socialism. Education is one of the very few things that socialist states, especially the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany, did very right. The Finnish education system, known for producing the highest-scoring pupils in the OECD-wide Pisa study, is a carbon copy of the East German system. The Soviet Union had an amazing percentage of university graduates and their number of female highly educated professionals was amazing for the time. Now sure much of their university time was wasted studying Marxism-Leninism, and the many-bedded dorm rooms of the time would seem ghastly today, but they did get the job done. For free, too.
Despite all talk of equality, socialist states spent a lot of time screening for promising students. Guess having a surveillance culture helps with that. Ever wonder why the Soviet Union had so many chess champions? Doping doesn't explain that one, early screening for talents and widespread chess clubs do.
blow your mind already
It does somewhat dent the conclusion when one notes that the stories are certainly exaggerated, if not outright untrue - Einstein performed well in school, and there are questions about the veracity of some of Gauss' more impressive performances.
Aparently last time we raised a generation that mistakenly thinks school is important.
School is only important to the mediocre.
The truely notable, exceptional people will be bored no matter what you put in front of them. School is a waste of time for everyone but those who would be left behind without this program. Nothing worthwile (acedemically) happens before college anyway, and even then real learning doesn't really start untill you break free of "those who can't do" and start getting some real world experience. And by then those that would be left behind are long gone.
No, the smart ones are always bored with school. They make their own education. Unfortunately, the schools aren't allowing that, much less encouraging it.
Mediocre people lap up the "education" they get from school without concern for their own welfare. They learn what the book or teacher tells them to learn. They don't teach themselves to think. They do so at their own peril.
The real world will place you into a special hell called "middle management" if you're mediocre. The smart ones just burn in slavery or, if they're really smart, reach escape velocity and start their own business.
Sorry to inform you, but it doesn't work like that. Kid's need intellectual coaching, just like the future sports stars need sports coaching. What if you had a stand-out little leaguer, and the coach absolutely refused to nurture that athletic giftedness. Two things would happen: a) the kid would not become a major leaguer, even if he had the potential, and b) every dad in the neighborhood would get together and form a lynch mob to take out the coach (rightly so, I'd join). Yet, your attitude with respect to intellectual giftedness is extremely common -- and it absolutely does great harm to these kids.
My own 8 year old daughter would not be able to teach herself math, physics, geometry, literature -- but she absorbs coaching very well. Oh... and she has an IQ of 187, and reads at the college sophomore level. Do the math: earlier in this thread an IQ of 70 was labeled special needs, and an IQ of 130 was labeled gifted. 130-70 = 60. Now, observe that 130+60 = 190, or roughly my daughter's IQ. Does she belong in a class with kids whose IQ is 100-130? If you say the kid with an IQ of 130 does not belong in the same class as the kids with IQ of 70, you have to say no. But she *does* need teaching, coaching, and peer interaction.
It's great to watch her get together with kids that are both age and intellectual peers. She and one of her friends were both studying Egyptology when they were 6 years old. They got together to play -- and did the normal 6 year old "dress up" thing that girls do... except that all the stuffed animals were turned into Egyptian gods and they wove Egyptian history into their play. *That* is why you need to give these kids a chance to interact with each other. A normal classroom is a torture for these kids.
Ayn Rand FTW!
Not without a new constitutional amendment:
Anyway, you can't simply eliminate irrationality by government edict, and if you tried you'd only end up creating a bunch of martyrs. The more fanatical elements would continue believing in secret, and you'd end up with all the myriad social repercussions normally associated with severe ideological repression. Religious persecution has failed to achieve its goals too many times throughout history to be taken at all seriously at this point.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It's revisionist to say that Albert Einstein did poorly in school and in higher education. He did well, and there's very little writing to indicate whether he was bored or not. The fact that he taught himself deductive reasoning, logic, calculus, and pretty much everything that made him the scientist we revere him has suggests, but does not prove that he was bored out of his mind at school.
It's possible that his gift was noticed, appreciated, and encouraged by the school. I think he finished in the top of his classes, at least wherein that information is recorded.
It was a different era then, with schools that genuinely appreciated intelligence...
From Wikipedia:
But then you say: I don't see how this conclusion is at all possible based on Einstein's youth.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
That's not the capitalist way at all. The capitalist way is: exploit everyone to their limit for your own personal gain.
The poor are only given enough money so they can continue to work like slaves in factories for the rich.
If you were to make a capitalist-like system, the dumb kids would work as servants to the smart kids, fetching them books and carrying thier bags, while only getting enough education to read the spines of books they had fetch to the smart kids.
The smart kids would get smarter, while the dumb kids get dumber.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?