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?"

Comments

No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[faloi]

The public education system has been failing gifted students since long before No Child Left Behind.

Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[clragon]

It's no surprise. Some cultures love their smart people. The Asian's love their smart people. They glorify them, they treat them with a lot of respect, and view them as a source of national pride.

I lived in China for the first 10 years of my life, so I know the Chinese culture well.

You said Asians love their smart people, it's true, but only under certain perimeters. The first problem is how do you define "smart"? Are smart kids the ones with the highest IQ test scores? Are they the ones that get the highest marks in class? Or are they the ones that can sell the most cookies to neighbors?

In China, IQ Scores are redundant and are not paid any attention to by the education system. Here however (In Canada), it is used to determine if a child is able to enter the gifted program in elementary school.

What the Chinese actually value is someone who can learn fast, think fast with flexibility and without making many mistakes. Although one might argue those people can be called "smart", but smart is too general a word in English and could be referring to a wide rage of characteristics. See, the Chinese does not value IQ or "gifted-ness" because it doesn't reflect what a person could accomplish. Instead, to get into the fast-track classes in China a child has to be placed in the top 40 in his or her grade (this is according to the middle school I was going to go to, there were 60 kids per class and 8 classes per grade.) So instead of getting the kids to take a IQ test of which they have no control over the results, getting into the fast-track classes becomes a competition between students so the winners are respected. In Canada, the gifted kids doesn't "beat" others to get into gifted classes, so there is much less of a reason for other kids to respect them.

One type of smart person the Chinese frown upon are people who stay home and study the textbooks all day, but can't carry the knowledge over and apply it to the real life. It wouldn't matter if the person has the highest mark in the class, if he or she can't solve simple social problems then they will receive little respect.

This is very similar to the definition of a Nerd in the western culture. However, one key difference is the clear line drawn between a "nerd" and a smart person in China, while here in Canada it is assumed anyone who has the highest mark in the class must be a nerd.

Answering the hypothetical question

[A beautiful mind]

Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either?

Yes. "Not leaving a child behind", in educational context means lowering the level of the education for the average and the smart students.

Anyone with half a brain would tune education for the average person, or very slightly above the average to encourage improvement and the stupid/disabled and smart kids would get special programs to help their development the best. Leaving no man behind is a stupid analogy to the problem, as the stupid kid who can't learn more drags down the kids who can.

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Re:of course

[SatanicPuppy]

Actually I was in a tracked school...I graduated in the early 90's, so that should give you a data point. I moved into the system in 9th grade, and was immediately shunted into the "standard" classes, where an "A" average was a 4.0 (As opposed to the Remedial classes where it was 3.0 and the Accelerated classes where it was 5.0). I stayed there until my junior year, when the first round of standardized tests swept through and I outscored almost the entire school. Got put into the accelerated track my senior year and my GPA literally doubled.

On the one hand, as someone who experienced both sides, I really appreciated being in the advanced classes. It was night and day; better people, better work, better pace. On the other hand, it sucked hard being stuck in the standard track (there was no provision for smart kids there, because if you were smart, you wouldn't be there), and no real effort was ever made to reevaluate students once they ended up in a track.

I think tracking is in many ways too rigid, but I don't know of a better way to do it. Lumping all kids together is awful.

Tracking

[Descalzo]

As another responder already said, it has been called 'tracking,' though I don't know if it's illegal. My school district frowns most heavily upon it, and prefers to deal with it in-class. But what if a student is 'mis-tracked?' If it's a track in which the student is re-evaluated annually then that kid is going to be really messed up for a year. I have been toying with the idea of regrouping on a weekly basis. The problem with a weekly basis is that it's hard to make a week as meaningful as a year. It's a hard question, one teachers and administrators are trying to solve.

On a related topic, it's odd that if a student has an IQ of 70, that's like 2 standard deviations below the norm, and the student is identified as intellectually disabled. Failing to identify and serve this student's needs is going to get your school into an enormous amount of trouble.
Then you have another student with an IQ of 130. This student is no more normal than the other. He is intellectually gifted. Failing to identify or serve this student's needs will not even earn anyone a slap on the wrist.

This problem will get solved when a slashdotter decides he has enough money to take this comparison all the way to the Supreme Court.

Re:of course

[thrawn_aj]

anyone know if they've ever tried splitting the smarter/average/dumb kids up into their own classes permanently from 5th or so through 12th, as in they hardly ever see the other groups anymore except between classes and at lunch?

Yes. I went to school (through high school) in India and I was lucky enough to be in such a system as you describe. That is one reason why the whole idea of "jocks" and "geeks" and "nerds" was so alien to me until I came to the US. In my day, the person we strived to compete with and get ahead of was the super-geek-jock :P - the guy/gal who did everything right. Kinda nice when you think about it. That gave me an edge that I have never regretted. My 3.5 years of college in the US (and I say this in a good way) were the most relaxing in my life, even with a physics major and I ended up learning a LOT of other stuff as well (I love liberal arts schools :D).

To give you an idea of what the system was:

Starting with the 3rd grade, the entire school (10 classes per grade level with about 50 students each = A CR**load of students :P), was put into the running. Classes were named from A through J and your initial class was determined by a criterion that no one seemed to know :P. However, after that, it was all merit-based. Your class (A - J) in the next grade was determined by how well you did in the current grade (exams, etc.) Upward mobility was the key and with it came the chance to be with the smart kids and learn from them. Oh it was farking beautiful :D. And it didn't really hurt anyone either - if you wanted to be a fuckup, you had full freedom to do so, without bothering the sincere kids and as a bonus you got to hang out with other fuckups like yourself :D. Win-win! Everyone's happy.

Of course, it couldn't last. The parents whose kids were in the loser classes saw this as a social stigma (albeit well-deserved). I heard that they discontinued this practice a few years ago so my hometown in India should be reaching full mediocrity right about now :P.

Re:To flesh that out some

[iamhassi]

"exceptional people will be bored no matter what you put in front of them."

Not to boast any but I was in grade school in the 80s and I would finish classroom assignments much faster than all of my peers. After helping all the students immediately around me understand and complete their assignments I would get out of my seat and help other students.

Teachers labeled me hyperactive and moved my seat into the corner and used tape to create a box around my seat, telling me I'd be punished if I left the box. Later I was put on Ritalin, which was brand new in the 80s. That helped, but I wish instead of medicating me I would have been allowed see how far I could have gone.

Re:To flesh that out some

[adamruck]

What most people don't understand is that all of the following are true:

a) Crappy brain + gifted drive = mediocre career
b) Mediocre brain + mediocre drive = mediocre career
c) Gifted brain + crappy drive = mediocre career

Being "gifted" doesn't mean shit without a lot of other good attributes. Even if you have a gifted brains AND drive, if you have really crappy anger management, your still screwed. Schooling is only 1 part of a much much much larger equation.

I would suggest visiting this page to see what some famous people have said about the subject.

http://creatingminds.org/quotes/effort.htm

Re:of course

[Bluesman]

Or he had a 2.5 average due to boredom and frustration, and moving him to the advanced class gave him the motivation to get the A.

This isn't unheard of. In 1st grade I was considered "slow" and was at the bottom of my class. The teacher assumed I was stupid. I was bored and daydreamed constantly instead of doing the color, cut and paste dittos, which were assinine.

After maxing out a standardized IQ test (a fact that the school tried to hide from my parents) my parents thankfully realized what the problem was and sent me to a private school, where I excelled.

I'm so thankful that I went to grade school twenty years ago, instead of today. Today I would have been diagnosed with ADHD, put on drugs, and gone through life labelled a dunce.

Public schools really get my dander up, because this sort of thing is so common. There is so much blame to go around, and all of it is well-deserved. Bad teachers who don't give a crap, teachers unions, stupid politics, PTO moms who bulldoze the schoolboard into making ridiculously bad decisions...I could go on and on. There is hardly a punishment great enough for people responsible for ruining promising childrens' lives.

Home schooling used to seem like such a wacky idea, but my wife and I are seriously considering it instead of dealing with all this crap. That my tax money still goes to supporting a hopelessly broken system that does almost more harm than good pisses me off to no end.

Re:To flesh that out some

[ShieldW0lf]

Snobbish, but true.

Exceptional people don't need to be spoon fed, they find repetition boring, and they find the necessity to waste their days proving to their intellectual inferiors that they can complete rudimentary tasks.

Hell, I knew how to read, print, add and subtract when I was 4 years old. You think there was a day of my life that I found school challenging? I used to finish all my classwork and all my homework homework and two paperback novels a day before school finished for the day, and I was still spending lots of time staring vacantly out the window.

I have no regard for the education system. All it ever did, throughout my life, was hold me back, slow me down, and force me to be surrounded by violent stupid monkeys.

Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?

[Inverted Intellect]

For anyone with an IQ above 130, public school is an undeniable waste of time. I have to disagree with you on that. For me it was not a waste of time. It was actively harmful. I got extremely good grades about the first six years of elementary, degrading after that, going into mediocrity and failure later on. You see, I never learned discipline because I wasn't given assignments that challenged me early on. This is also due to a lack of drive on my part, but the school system is also to blame as they never thought I might need a different kind of help. When I started getting mediocre grades, I was described as a "bright, promising student who needs to live up to his potential." I kept completing the occasional assignment which I happened to have an interest in in a competent manner, prompting more of that kind of comment. I've largely failed to live up to this supposed potential.