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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?"
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The public education system has been failing gifted students since long before No Child Left Behind.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Maybe the developmentally disabled kids need a lot more help to be functional (and if they don't get that help as kids, we end up feeding them their whole adult lives), and the genuises don't need as much help?
Honestly, I wish I'd gotten help for my actual limitations (mild autism, which has been moderately crippling at times), but frankly, for the genius stuff, it would have been sufficient for the schools to mostly get out of my way.
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Then, like today, it was much easier for schools to keep classes uniform by holding bright kids back so that more effort could be spent on the "slow" ones. Uniformity is the goal, and it's a lot easier to dumb down smart kids than the other way 'round.
Oh, and here's a clue: if you offer bonuses for teachers of math and science, the teachers with the most seniority (regardless of whether they can add) will teach those classes. My kids had a math PhD teaching music, but she couldn't get into the math program against the ed majors who ran the system.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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Well my school sure failed me!
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
More to the point, it would mean treating students as individuals and that would totally screw up the system.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I was in grade school in the early 80's. I went to a good public school. My parents were both teachers and chose to live in that neighborhood because of the school district. Even then, the gifted program was just OK. My parents had me in several after-school classes and activities to bolster the schools shortcomings.
It still comes down to parents doing actual parenting. If you've got a gifted child, you have to know they are only going to get so much from their school.
I was lucky. My parents knew what they were doing. They let me explore my interests without pushing. They had me in a creative writing class. They got me into science competitions. The best thing they did was buy a computer for the house. This was a TRS-80 in 1982. It was a stretch for the household budget, but messing with that taught me more than anything else.
geekd
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.
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"When everyone is special, then no one will be."
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
In my experience (mine and people I know), it's not that gifted kids don't try to get ahead, it's that they are often actively prevented from doing so.
What the educational system at large now represents, is a dumbing down to the least common denominator so that nobody feels bad.
... like "This child is bright, this one... not so much"
No child should be left behind, and certainly school can be challenging for some. But by instituting a tenet that "There are no losers" so let's give everyone an award - we're raising a generation that thinks mediocrity is ok. It's not ok, and the failure to nurture gifted children is ensuring our future demise.
What ever happened to respecting and cherishing differences?
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.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
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.
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One of the reasons our nation's gifted children are suffering is because of a severe lack of skilled, qualified teachers to suit their needs. Let me elaborate with a personal story: my mom always talks about how my grandmother was a second grade teacher, and was well known for her ability to teach her second grade students well enough to read from the newspaper by the end of the school year. Parents went out of their way to get their children into her courses. The problem, though, was that she had a horrible salary. She was a single mother and had to take care of four kids. Life for my mother was hard.
Teachers like my grandmother aren't around anymore because other industries pay better. That's not to say people are greedy money grubbers, though, because in most of the United States it is difficult to support oneself on a teacher's salary. So when given the choice between taking a $40k teaching gig or a $60k software developing gig in a state like, say, California (where schools are nearly last place in the country and living costs are HIGH), the majority would go for the $60k gig. And without good teachers or resources, we end up taking the mindset of "How do we keep the less gifted students on track with the norm?"
We all see ads and propaganda for the Army, right? Recruiters at every school. But where the hell is the propaganda for teacher recruitment? If our public education system had the same budget as the military, none of these problems would've existed. We'd have had ads asking for teachers playing at the theaters before the previews came on. Superintendents of public school boards would be making speaches at universities about why you should get a job in teaching. Gifted students would have access to advanced courses and cirriculum in the same school as the normal kids. (I've got nothing against the nation's military, though, and I wasn't intending to give that message off. Sorry.)
On another note, I took an IQ test a while ago and found out that... well, my IQ wasn't as high as the girl in the beginning of the TIME article, but it was up there. I don't remember being able to talk as well as she did, but in my psychology research I found out I did a lot while I was a kid. Memorizing the names and locations of the United States, making large structures with building blocks, y'know? However when I was at school I was a complete bonehead! I'd find it hard to read a lot of the material they gave in class and outright hated writing and grammar lessons. And I was always imagining different things, I never really focused on the teacher's lessons or anything. I was told that some of my classmates didn't even think that I would get past high-school.
There's a lot in deciding who is smart and who is not. A lot of the issues that students have are simple barriers or developmental issues that they haven't grown out of. Things like dyslexia, attention deficity disorder, or even an early fear of math. And there are a lot of issues with standardized testing, because many students learn and study in different ways, and if teachers aren't aware or open to these different types of learning methods, how are students supposed to excel?
Add onto that a lot of immigrant children don't even know English, so how are they supposed to learn in a classroom? One of the issues with the "No Child Left Behind" Act is that it rewards schools that perform well in academic standardized testing, but when a lot of students from poor immigrant families perform poorly because of a lack of education or the language barrier, the school and the entire district suffer the consequences. Ultimately the children are being taught material from the SATs and standardized testing for the sake of passing the exams only!
I'm not the original poster, but I'll still answer your question: No. I'm bitter that I lost a lot of my childhood by sitting in a prison of the mind, wasting my time instead of doing something better with my life.
I'm not on Slashdot because of my time in school. I'm here because I value continuing education. Don't laugh.
Except for about four years of my schooling (one in primary, one in middle, and two in high) where I was given a chance to self-educate, I spent my time in school alternately at the top of the class or rebelling. Those times when I was self-paced, I completed a couple of years' coursework at a time. For anyone with an IQ above 130, public school is an undeniable waste of time. I'd even say that it's a waste of several hours a day for the average student. Not much goes on in school except crowd control, lunch, and socializing.
I have had a few teachers who pushed me to my limit and were educated enough to lead me, but most were just average and knew little about their subjects. The textbook was always a better source of information than the average teacher, and I didn't have to waste fifty hours of my life to get through it at a snail's pace. My time on Slashdot educates me better than my time in school did, though the signal/noise ratio has gone down in the last few years.
I understand you'll see this post as egotistical and smug, but I feel qulified to comment on this story (and your post) because
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After I took the SAT in seventh grade (and scored similarly to an average senior that year), I was allowed to skip eighth grade. There were upsides and downsides, and I'm fairly happy about where I am now -- but it's not for everyone. I lost a lot of friends and there seemed to be a higher asshole to polite person ratio in my graduating class.
I took a self-paced English course the summer after my freshman year. I finished a semester's worth of work in two weeks. I'm still pissed off about all of that wasted time. I could probably have learned a couple of languages, I would probably be better at math.. Hell, I could have become even more of a virtuoso guitarist if I had started music lessons a couple of years earlier ;) .
I've had this discussion with many of my genius friends, and this attitude is pretty much universal among them. Yes, the school system is nearly useless for all ends of the spectrum. In my cynical moments I imagine that it's a plot to keep the country stupid and docile while they turn the Republic into a fascist shadow of its original promise.
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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.