Statistical Errors Keep 4700 K-3rd Students From NYC 'Gifted' Programs

alostpacket writes "The New York times reports that statistical scoring by the standardized testing company Pearson incorrectly disqualified over 4700 students from a chance to enter gifted / advanced programs in New York City schools. Only students who score in the 90th percentile or above are eligible for these programs. Those in the 97th or above are eligible for 5 of the best programs. 'According to Pearson, three mistakes were made. Students' ages, which are used to calculate their percentile ranking against students of similar age, were recorded in years and months, but should also have counted days to be precise. Incorrect scoring tables were used. And the formula used to combine the two test parts into one percentile ranking contained an error.' No mention of enlisting the help of the gifted children was made in the Times article, but it also contained a now-corrected error. This submission likely also contains an erro"

Comments

Totally arbitrary anyway

[MightyYar]

All this "precision" to test against an arbitrary "90th" and "97th" percentile.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[dwhitaker]

It may be arbitrary, but it is still a somewhat socially-accepted metric. I suspect that many people would agree that the top 10% (or 3%) of students by whatever accepted measure qualify for "gifted".

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

-see life of Linus Pauling, Einstein. etc ...

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[firex726]

While I agree with your premise, I can't say I agree on the examples.
The education has undergone a lot of changes since 1910, when Linus was in it.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Charliemopps]

No, it's fucking retarded at its face. So we find the children that need the LEAST amount of help, and give them the most help. Then we take the kids in the most trouble and flunk them out, punish them, hold them back a grade. The entire premise is idiotic. In this country we have trouble getting normal children the basic skills they need. Last I checked, our gifted students were doing ok. So lets start focusing on the kids that need it, and let the ones that gifted ones be gifted on their own.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[pla]

All this "precision" to test against an arbitrary "90th" and "97th" percentile.

This.

When having aged one more day than someone else who got the same score means not making the cut, well, welcome to life, unfairness and all. The sooner kids learn that, the better.

Now, parents - If you really believe your little nose-picking demon can do better in the "right" environment, I can give you far, far better advice than suing the school system over fractions of a point on an admissions test: Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Aranykai]

You have it backwards. You find the kids with the most amount of potential and give them a greater opportunity. That being said, I was a 'gifted student' throughout school(class of 04 for what its worth) and I don't recall any 'help' or special tutoring. Most of the time that status simply granted us access to advanced placement courses, taking higher math or english studies than you would normally have access to or sometimes special after-school opportunities.

I hate to sound crass, but the problem with students that 'need help' in our education system is 80% the result of inept parenting at home(or lack there of) and has nothing to do with the schools. The other 20%? Well, not everyone excels at every task.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[pla]

It may be arbitrary, but it is still a somewhat socially-accepted metric. I suspect that many people would agree that the top 10% (or 3%) of students by whatever accepted measure qualify for "gifted".

Socially accepted or not, it still counts as completely arbitrary to say that 33000 kids get in to the "good" schools, but #33001 (NYC has 1.1M public school students) gets to attend one of the standard prison-camp style facilities.

Now, for the kids right at the edge, of course they care - But on a larger scale, it makes absolutely no difference to society as a whole whether Dashiell (age 6Y10M4D) or Phineus (age 6Y10M3D) make the cut.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Slyfox696]

No, it's fucking retarded at its face. So we find the children that need the LEAST amount of help, and give them the most help. Then we take the kids in the most trouble and flunk them out, punish them, hold them back a grade. The entire premise is idiotic. In this country we have trouble getting normal children the basic skills they need. Last I checked, our gifted students were doing ok. So lets start focusing on the kids that need it, and let the ones that gifted ones be gifted on their own.

I'm sorry, but your opinion is silly. Why are you interested in making everyone mediocre? How about we push ALL kids, not just the ones at the bottom? Whether it's publicly acceptable to say or not, the fact is most of the kids at the bottom will never advance past subpar. They'll be the manual labor, the janitors, the cooks, etc. And there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, any person providing for their family is okay in my book.

But the gifted children, they are the thinkers, they are the ones who will change the world. We need to be giving them every opportunity to succeed we can, and to hold them back simply because there are some kids who are not intelligent seems a completely backwards outlook on life. You're saying we should not provide assistance to the children who will change the world so we can instead focus on those who will work fairly unintellectual jobs. That makes no sense.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Prof.Phreak]

All this implies that there are 4700 empty seats in those gifted schools. There aren't. Very likely other folks with 96.98 percentile got in due to their b-days falling out onto the same month as someone a week younger and same exact grade on the same exact exam. In other words, by most measures, the folks in these schools are "just as" gifted as the folks who missed out due to the error (bad luck).

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[dwhitaker]

In an ideal world it would be an "all of the above" situation with getting kids help. Is your child struggling? Here's more, personal help. Is your child excelling? Here's some resources to help them achieve more. Is your child neither struggling nor excelling? Here's more help so that they don't struggle and can possibly excel.

There will always be inequality in education, and there will always be finite resources that need allocation. As a society, we seem to have decided that we need amazing talented people that receive more attention even when they are doing well. We've also decided that struggling students should get extra help. Unfortunately, there are often many other issues related with struggling students, and their lack of performance in the classroom is indicative/symptomatic of other issues. It is hard to quantify gains due to interventions (which cost money) for this group. (I also think it would be hard to quantify some gains in the 'gifted' group, but people like high test scores, and they may not need further justification.)

We can neither have a 'Harrison Bergeron'-type society, nor can we have a society that devotes all of its resources to the gifted/wealthy/etc. We need a balance, but this balance is both hard to attain and maintain.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Your kind of thinking is what's holding our students back. Letting the slowest kid in the class dictate the pace for everyone else only kills any kind of interest in education that the advanced student would have. Meanwhile the kid who isn't doing as well may be special needs and that should be determined. If the child isn't special needs you have to stop and wonder if they're simply lazy or if there is a deeper problem. In any case, what do we do with the lazy student who thinks that learning is for fools because he has no desires in life aside from becoming a gang banger or the next goof on The Deadliest Catch? If your going to use his performance to determine the pace of the class then you're doing a great disservice to those who are willing to work for better.
 
Your way of handling things would only lead to mediocrity and stagnation.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[mwvdlee]

Great idea; we should also implement this system for school sports programs.
Kick all the talented kids out of the teams and replace them by the kids that perform worst.
Last I checked, our talented athletes were doing ok, so lets start focussing on the kids that need it.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[drinkypoo]

You have it backwards. You find the kids with the most amount of potential and give them a greater opportunity. That being said, I was a 'gifted student' throughout school(class of 04 for what its worth) and I don't recall any 'help' or special tutoring.

I was considered gifted in elementary school and they taught me speed-reading and we played logic games. Pretty useful, I guess. They wouldn't let me do any of the cool stuff though and since I was a problem child they stopped involving me (though I was always well-behaved when associating with the GATE class) so it was in the end a fuckoff waste of time and money, to me. That's OK; the whole system is hypocritical. Public school is part of the lie that you can excel through hard work in today's system, and GATE is part of making that lie convincing.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bbelt16ag]

i think that's utter bull shit. given enough time and effort, even your own effort all knowledge comes. There is no reason to not teach these kids the fundamentals of how to learn and grow in this society. They do not have to be janitors or cooks unless they want to be. We can make freaking robots for that crap. They must have the basics so that they can learn on their own after school or their world will be very bleak indeed. I watched my own parents work day in and day out trying to make ends meat. By the time i graduated from highschool their bodies were wrecked, and aliments of other kinds were coming as well. this is not how we should be treating people in this society. At some point those jobs won't be there anyways like i said above, the time is coming where we are going to have machines doing most of the manual labor, and perhaps most of the lower thinking jobs as well.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bbelt16ag]

Change is the only constant in this time, old laws, old ways, old things will die. We must evolve and try new things. The time is now, before it is too late.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bbelt16ag]

better yet teach them how to learn and give them more oppotunities to excel. School is not the place to learn.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[anagama]

His opinion may be silly, but he isn't alone. I overheard two teachers saying the same thing, that the gifted kids take care of themselves and don't need any help.

Of course that's often false. It is a common enough occurrence for some gifted kids to get really lazy because early on, they find it is easy to skate with minimal effort. Later in their education careers however, when subjects become inherently tougher, those skating work habits turn to failure. I have personal experience here.

Secondly, relying on smart kids to take care of themselves is not a recipe for a well rounded education, it's a recipe for hyper focus on a single area that may or may not prove valuable to the student. In the college context, the point of a liberal arts education is to expose students to a wide range subjects because sometimes, very interesting things can happen when knowledge in different subject areas intersects. Ignoring smart kids might make sense for a diploma mill, but it doesn't make sense if the actual goal is help kids succeed by showing them where interesting (and potentially lucrative) intersections can be found.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bryan1945]

I think you don't understand how this works. The great students get access to advanced classes. They don't need extra teachers or tutoring, i.e. "extra help." The underachieving students get extra teachers and tutors. At least that's how it is supposed to work, and how it works in my area. I'm not in NY, so I can't gauge the reality of it there.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[theshowmecanuck]

Nice tin foil hat.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[__aaltlg1547]

Did the test identify 3% of students as above the 97th percentile and 10% of students above the 90th percentile? If, so, then it did its job.

Age has to counted to the DAY? At 5 years old (age for entering kindergarten), you're still slicing those hairs thin (1.66%) at one month resolution. Age to the day would be .055%. What's the resolution of the test? The only advantage of computing age to the day is it's easier than rounding or truncating to get age to the month. Also, what grade has to be considered. A 2196 day old child entering 1st grade who scores above 90% of children of his age may belong in a GT 1st-grade class (although I consider 90% a low bar for "gifted." But if that 2196 day old child is entering 2nd grade and scores the same, he's behind most of the 2nd graders in his class, and not to be compared with a 2500-day old child who scores similarly above average for her age.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[__aaltlg1547]

Holding them back a grade, if we could remove the stigma, would be exactly what most of the "slow" kids need, because many of them are not really slow, they're younger than most of the kids in their classes. It would put them in classes with other kids who are closer to their level of ability and skill mastery. Instead, we hold back the whole curriculum so the "slow" (young) kids can keep up with the average.

And there's no reason we can't educate each child according to his or her ability, with the possible exception of the top 0.1% that teachers won't be able to keep up with.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[ShanghaiBill]

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

-see life of Linus Pauling, Einstein. etc ...

The "truly gifted" are also wasting a lot of time in "normal" classrooms. This is the 21st century. We should be using technology to customize education for each child, and let them learn at an optimal pace. This is easiest for subjects like math, and my son's school uses Khan Academy and IXL to make much of the math self-paced. They also let the kids pick their own books to read using AR Bookfind. My son has read over a hundred books this year, and has yet to find a book that isn't in their system.

Both of my kids qualified for California's GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) Program. But it seems to me that it could be expanded to include a lot more kids, because the parents do a lot of the grunt work. So if you double the number of kids, you are also doubling the number of parents. The school just needs to provide a framework. I take an afternoon off work each week to work with these kids and I love every minute of it. Some of these kids are amazingly bright. Last week I showed a fourth grader how to do a cross product of two vectors, and she "got it" in less than a minute. I walked away thinking "this kid is going to change the world someday." She also laughed when I told her a "math joke":

Q: What do you get when you cross a tsetse fly with a mountain climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

FWIW, I was a "gifted" student in the 1950s (IQ 160). They brought me up to believe that I was part of an elite and everybody else was stupid. I now know that I was wrong. It's a fundamental mistake to write off the other 80% as being too stupid for a good education.

We read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and obviously we were the alphas. The other kids are betas and gammas who just aren't as smart as us and a good education would be wasted on them. (This was a mirror of the British class structure, of course.)

Yes, it's true that 80% of kids can't do well in the educational system, and yes, it's true that a problem is the parents. I draw 2 conclusions:

(1) If you have a bad family background, school gives you a second chance. Not a school dedicated to getting high scores on machine-graded multiple-choice questions, but a school in which teachers act like human beings with feelings, and can relate to kids and support them, the way surrogate parents do.

(2) Every study says that the main factor that correlates with school achievement is family income. Adequate housing, health care, and employment is necessary (if not sufficient) for raising kids. You can't read to your kids if you're working 2 low-paid jobs, morning to night. The U.S. has about the greatest inequality, and the most widespread poverty, of any developed country. We didn't use that science education to eliminate poverty, we used it to make millionaires into billionaires. The upper 1% owns 75% of the wealth. Let's distribute that wealth a little bit and eliminate the poverty.

If you take those 80% and give them the advantages I had (father with a secure, well-paying union job, mother who didn't have to work), I think most of them would learn a lot. I think it would turn out that the percent of kids who can't learn wasn't 80% but much lower -- maybe 40%. Maybe 20%. Maybe less.

We can look at countries like Finland, which has eliminated inequality and poverty as much as possible, to see what an egalitarian society is like. They seem to be doing pretty well.

How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.

And you can get that return from kids in the top 20% and the bottom 80%.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Well the first grade class might start a war with the top 1% of them, and you know how that turns out.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

It's difficult or impossible to identify the kids who will make major contributions to society in middle school, for God's sake. Read the biographies of Nobel laureates. Many of them were fuck-ups in high school (and beyond).

Assuming that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates contributed to society (or at least made a lot of money), neither of them showed much promise in high school.

Most of the people who made significant contributions came from financially comfortable, and often wealthy, families. Try eliminating poverty and inequality, to the extent that most other developed countries have.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.

Complete bullshit. Just to pick a name that everybody knows, Bronx High School of Science is as good as, and maybe better than, any suburban schools, by any standard. There are some very good high schools in New York City, and every upscale parent knows which ones they are.

You're ignoring the fact that suburbs are expensive, and they self-select for wealthy families. That's often the reason people move to the suburbs.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Livius]

If your goal is to produce equal outcomes irrespective of ability, and dumb everyone down to the lowest common denominator, then yes, it's counter-productive.

If your goal is to allocate educational resources for the greatest return on investment, then no.

Both goals have merit, but you can't have both, only a trade-off between them.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Sarius64]

I find this repeated constantly throughout society. I was in a similar situation and kicked out of GATE for completing all of the modules available and then bouncing off the ceiling because I was unbearably bored. Instead of helping me, I was told to be quiet and just do my work, which I had already done. My reflection on this now makes me think that there were fundamental conflicts having women teachers that expected boys to simply accept social norms that women desire. The system is hypocritical. Improvement of our children is the last goal on the list of any teacher union, in my opinion.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[LordLimecat]

GT courses are generally more difficult. Its not about "more help", its about "ok, the student is excelling at multiplication in 2nd grade, lets see if we can have him mastering Algebra by 6th".

Try putting a student who is struggling with multiplication into that program. Maybe theyd take to it, most likely theyd just be frustrated.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[LordLimecat]

I generally agree except for the over-broad word "intelligent". Theres a difference between "doesnt do well in school" and "this person is unintelligent".

One is clearly defined, the other is vague, poorly defined, and inaccurate. Someone may be really good at agriculture / farming, or wilderness survival, and do poorly in school; I would consider both to be forms of "intelligence".

Let me know when we have a solid definition of "intelligence" and a solid test for it, till then probably good to drop descriptors like "unintelligent".

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

What seems to be more arbitrary is having too few seats for gifted children. If there is higher demand, shift more schools to schools for gifted children. Of course, you can also say the test is arbitrary because it tests learned/memorized knowledge where a test that simply tested a pupil's ability to follow directions would be sufficient for placement in one of these schools.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar experience to yours. If I hadn't been in the gifted programs through High School I probably would have dropped out. It was honestly the only challenging part of the education. Also it was the only place where I could be where nobody would bully you for knowing things. Every single other class I had been in, everyone was constantly pushing us to not be better than them. Honestly school was pretty much hell except for those classes, and I shudder to think how I would have turned out if I hadn't been in them. I would probably have been homeless somewhere.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[jelizondo]

Just a pointer to someone trying to quantify the gains due to interventions.

I am not qualified to say if this approach is correct or not, but when I read I thought it was very interesting and such a shame on our society that kids, who could be happy and productive when adults, are left by the side of the road to rot.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[ButchDeLoria]

Improvement of our children is the last goal on the list of any teacher union, in my opinion.

Glad my lovely state of South Carolina is a right-to-work state.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[ButchDeLoria]

Agreed, I was bumped up a grade (in middle school somehow) and I started having issues. By the time I hit high school I just stopped giving a shit, and cut school dozens of times, or faked illness to go home. I still came out with As and Bs in AP classes, but before I was bumped up, I was getting straight 100s.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[phantomfive]

That's kind of a good idea, actually......

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bistromath007]

The fact that you consider holding somebody back a grade because they did not show sufficient competency to pass a punishment shows me that you understand as much about education as our most respected and best paid experts in the field do.

That is to say, absolutely none.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[qwak23]

I like that one.

My favorite lately has been:

Q: What did the Mathematician say when he saw his new office?
A: It's affine space.

I got put in and taken out of a couple gifted and talented programs in elementary school (multiple programs due to switching schools). These programs were more or less a joke from what I remember, I didn't necessarily think so at the time because I was age 6-9, but we were never really challenged to do anything, it was really just like an additional free period to do whatever. I remember a lot of coloring. The program you describe above sounds much better.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[CrimsonAvenger]

GT courses are generally more difficult. Its not about "more help", its about "ok, the student is excelling at multiplication in 2nd grade, lets see if we can have him mastering Algebra by 6th".

Wish we'd had that where I went to sixth grade...

I had the poor man's version - teacher gave me her old algebra 1 textbook, told me to go sit out in the hall, and learn what I could....

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[mlookaba]

My elementary school awkwardly tried to implement a gifted student program in the 70s.

In a nutshell, they pulled a bunch of us out of class with a lot of fanfare, and then took us to a separate room where they spent time telling us how they were going to broaden our horizons for learning. They did that for several months. There was no learning... just propaganda. Eventually the program got cancelled (I assume) because there were no actual results.

In the end, I was no better off than I was before, and missed out on lots of real learning with the rest of the class. Oh and because I was allowed to skip class for a couple of hours each week, my classmates resented me. Thanks guys.

This kind of thing can be very valuable, but you have to have people who are intelligent enough to do genuine service rather than just following an arbitrary doctrine laid out by well meaning but clueless drones.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[ShanghaiBill]

I remember a lot of coloring. The program you describe above sounds much better.

We don't do any coloring. A lot of it is self paced computer work, or online research for older kids. But we try to include some gross stuff too, like making slime or training worms to respond to stimuli. Last month someone brought in a sack of cow eyeballs and the kids dissected them. That was educational even for me, since I had never seen the inside of an eyeball before.

I should point out that this is an after school program. These kids are in normal classes during the regular school day.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bestalexguy]

we find the children that need the LEAST amount of help, and give them the most help.

What we actually do is investing education money in a way that maximizes the return for society. And we should do that even more.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[qwak23]

We never had an after school one. Just a period set aside during the normal school day for the G+T kids to sit in the same room together. Granted occasionally there was some substance outside of coloring, but it often felt it was a just a free period to relax with little direction (and very few resources to do any additional learning). After elementary school kids were divided up into grade level and advanced courses and high school had some interesting electives, but those were optional and anyone could take them (nothing wrong with that either).

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[drinkypoo]

I don't think it has anything to do with gender. The teacher who really put my off education was Mr. Knudsen in third grade. I spent a lot of time writing lines, or with my head down on my desk in that class. And I was big then, so it was uncomfortable then. I don't think whether a teacher is an asshole is at all related to their gender.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[khallow]

How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.

What makes you think the US spends less per child on education now than then? The US is still one of the leaders in per capita spending. As I understand it, if we went back to the spending of the 60s, we would be spending somewhat less at the K-12 level and about a factor of 3 or 4 less at the college level.

I think what's happening here is that we aren't getting that $2 of return on $1 of educational spending. And I'm deeply cynical of any society-wide effort such as public education that glibly transfers blame to "parents" when it fails.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

I should have said public higher education. In the 1960s, the New York City University system was free (and it turned out many Nobel laureates and industry leaders like Andrew Grove), and the New York and California state university systems were practically free.

The big increases in higher education spending seem to be in the private schools. New York University used to be a third-rate school for frat guys. Now it pulled up its standards and is one of the most expensive schools in the country. They spent a lot on educational improvements, but they also have dorms like 4-star hotels and Olympic gyms.

K-12 is a different story. IN the 1960s, schools were segregated in most of the country, they didn't accept handicapped kids, and they expelled kids who didn't fit in. Now they have to teach them all. As a result, the NAEP scores for black students have risen dramatically to almost while levels since NAEP started keeping track in the 1970s.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Zak3056]

Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.

Complete bullshit. Just to pick a name that everybody knows, Bronx High School of Science is as good as, and maybe better than, any suburban schools, by any standard. There are some very good high schools in New York City, and every upscale parent knows which ones they are.

You're ignoring the fact that suburbs are expensive, and they self-select for wealthy families. That's often the reason people move to the suburbs.

Speaking as someone who went to Brooklyn Tech, I have a high respect for Bronx Science and find your description of it as "as good as, maybe better than any suburban school," to border on insulting. The specialized schools in NYC are some of the best in the country, hands down. That said, this in no way invalidates the point the GP was making--that suburban schools are, typically, of higher quality than large city schools. Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant are places where the entire school is in the "gifted program" and do not reflect the quality of city schools overall.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[wvmarle]

And then 4,700 students missed out of that 10% of the top (at least that's how I read it).

Makes me wonder: how many "K-3rd" students are there in NYC? And how many did get in? Obviously most students must have gotten in or there would have been more of an outcry, and the errors listed seem to be very marginal (e.g. age recorded in months, not days). So this 4,700 can't be more than 5% of that top 10%. Which means there should be about a million students in that age group in NYC, if not more. Is that reasonable, on an 8 mln total population?

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Velex]

You're both wrong. I was "gifted" as well. All that status did was alienate me from my peers and increase the difficulty of classes. There is no "gifted" diploma; all you get is the same piece of paper everyone else got. All that being "gifted" did was make something that should have been a breeze for me so I could focus on things that are naturally difficult for me, social interaction, into constant stress.

I pushed myself, took all kinds of AP classes, and for what? So I could have a lower GPA? No, being "gifted" is bunch of hogwash. I could have gotten a 4.0 if I'd taken slacker classes that might have given me a chance to develop a much more important life skill: being social.

Nobody asks for your GPA anyway in a job interview. Nobody cares what classes you took. All they care is that you have a college degree. Nobody gives you a "look at how smrt I am!" degree. You get a degree just like everyone else.

Advanced classes and the "gifted" status are wastes of time given how our society works.

You pay for a degree at a college, and it doesn't matter how you get it. Being "gifted" doesn't bump your resume ahead of anybody else's. Then you get a job, and how much you make has absolutely nothing to do with being "gifted" or which percentile you rank in. Being social instead of being a mentat, though, does matter. So screw the "gifted" status. I would have been better off taking the same damned classes as everyone else and having more friends rather than trying to turn myself into a mentat.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[servognome]

No, it's fucking retarded at its face. So we find the children that need the LEAST amount of help, and give them the most help.

No we determine the learning potential for the student and resource and tailor experiences so that students have the best opportunity to reach their learning ceiling. It's something done in sports all the time. You don't give professional training to the slowest kid in the class because all you get is mediocrity. You also don't completely ignore the slow kid and just focus on the future professional, because you alienate the child and the sport dies. In sports (essentially physical education) there is a system of tiers that help children of different skill levels perform as best they can. This also has the side-effect of keeping a greater proportion motivated and involved. There's only a few hundred pro athletes for any sport, but there are literally thousands who participate in beer league athletics.
The current education system doesn't just do a poor job of teaching children, it has the effect of discourage continual learning.

We should try to get the best overall education from our investment through strategic targeting and not implement a one size fits all system.
In economic terms marginal return = marginal cost

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[servognome]

Not just that, but once you are in the system, you're on a lifelong track. So if you are in the 90th percentile at age 6, it's very difficult to break into the system if you're a late bloomer and are in the 97th percentile at age 10.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[FatLittleMonkey]

Pauling yes, Einstein no.

Einstein's family were able to introduce him to talented mentors when he was young, and most of the schools he attended recognised and encouraged his genius. For example, when he failed the entrance exam for the Swiss Polytechnic, their principal sponsored his entrance to an advanced school to finish his secondary education, where he lived with the family of one of his professors. The only struggle he seemed to have was getting a teaching position for two years after graduation from the Polytech (his patent office years.)

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[qwak23]

I had a really good math teacher in sixth grade, I don't remember how well she knew the topics and how well she presented it, but she did one awesome thing. I had been moved out of the advanced track due to my lack of desire to do homework (it wasn't challenging, bored the crap out of me and I still aced the tests). This teacher recognizing that some students had the ability but couldn't be in that track for whatever reason gave students opportunities to learn more advanced stuff. before each new topic, a pre-test was given, if you scored high enough on the pre-test you were exempted from that weeks work, and given a more advanced topic to study independently. These topics were not part of the course, so if you didn't pass a test you just joined right back in with the rest of the students for that topic.

The only downside to this was that when I moved on to the next years class, the work I had done didn't count for anything and I was right back to being bored and lazy ;)

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[TheFirebyrd]

Agreed. My son is going to do kindergarten again. He's just not where he needs to be to do well moving on. If I insisted, he could go to first grade, but it would be terrible for him and he'd probably be identified as "special ed," when it's clear that he mostly just needs more time. There are countries that don't even start school until age 7 and their kids do just fine, but if a kid can't read here at 5, there's supposedly something wrong with them. My son is getting more interested in academics all the time and has made huge strides. I'm sure by the end of next year, he'll be caught up to where he needs to be and will do fine from there on out. He's an April birthday, btw, so while not the youngest in the class, definitely one of the younger ones.

Re: Totally arbitrary anyway

[GoDj1rrA]

They should have hired some gifted kids to do the scoring.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Up here the metric is top 2% (the same as for Mensa) and its a very widely accepted system for helping students with what amounts to a learning disability. Its not easy for a student who finds everything ridiculously obvious and boring to learn how to focus, study or learn designated material in the long haul.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

The gifted program I was in (Canada, Ontario, etc.) was very helpful and helped challenge me in ways I simply wasn't in a normal classroom until highschool.

We studied some law, photography, computers, logic, society, politics, art and a number of other subjects, often at something akin to at least highschool level starting in grade 4 over and above our normal school work.

I think the lessons we learned about social issues that gifted students have in a classroom were some of the most important though -- problems like perfectionism and not handing in work and ignoring 'boring' instruction and not getting the grades required as a result.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Its great to see how little you know about what gifted programs try to offer and the problems that high IQ students face in the classroom.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Interestingly you contradicted yourself.

If grades are irrelevant, then why do you care if your grades ended up being lower? And since you got advanced placements out of it, wouldn't that mean you gained value that other students didn't get for the future workforce?

Sounds like you're bitter but actually got something out of the program.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Being in the gifted program at my school (removed one day a week to do advanced work, but I still had to do the schoolwork assigned in class), I had at least two teachers try to fail me on purpose because they resented the gifted students.

Of course, when my mother saw the list of zeros on my report card all being for assignments given same-day in-class on gifted days, it didn't take long to figure out.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Who cares if they'll contribute? The point of school is to give students a reasonable amount of assistance toward being able to make the choice to be useful or not. Currently the school system fails both the most and least intelligent.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Unfortunately (by definition) the majority of society is not made up of the top 2% and often doesn't see the point in giving them special treatment.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

Agreed. A couple kids I know did fine when held back a grade. I know several others who did great being pushed forward a grade or two as well.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

With a 160 IQ you are elite. Go use your brain and enjoy that it works so well. The vast majority of people have a hard time processing raw data at the speed that you can.

I was one of the dumbest kids in my gifted class with an IQ in the mid 130's and the one girl who's IQ was over 160 made me look as stupid as my regular classmates felt around me (in those situations that benefit from data processing and absorption rates). ... once upon a time, when my professor said he thought I was wrong about something, half the class stood and cheered. One of those leading the applause apologized at break and explained they were glad I finally made a mistake for once. Didn't bother me, but sometimes its good to understand exactly how different you are when you think that quickly compared to the average person.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

My sixth grade teacher loaned me a C64 for the year and told me to see what I could do with it.

Now I'm a computer programmer & sysadmin.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[__aaltlg1547]

Good for you, recognising what your kid needs, and good for him, getting it. He will most probably do great that younger class. He'll be developmentally at or in the high end of the kids in his grade and likely end up in advanced classes, meaning he will get a better education overall. And he won't grow up under the curse of thinking he's dumb and clumsy because he can't keep up with the kids whose main advantage is they're a few months older than him.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

This shouldn't really surprise me, being the internet and all, but almost every single response to this thread so far has been "Well my GPA was 5.1 and I aced every single gifted class and wrote a best selling novel by the age of eight and had a threeway with supermodels by age 11".

No one believes any of you, not even one bit.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[volmtech]

I can't believe you quoted figures without Googleing. From the Dept of Education in constant 2009-10 dollars, 1961-62 $2835, 2008-09 $10694. I know you're old like me but keep up with the times. My daughter has been teaching collage English for 10 years and says the students get dumber every year.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[anagama]

I had at least two teachers try to fail me on purpose because they resented the gifted students.

Wow. That's just weird and vindictive.

I was in a similar once/week program -- I remember getting into trouble in my regular classes, being scolded for this or that, but mostly I have very few memories, as if I daydreamed through school. But every memory I have of that other class is really good, sort of nostalgically golden. I had a great time in it and I wish all my school had been that way.

They're Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

They might as well file for bankruptcy. Their is no wrath like the wrath of a parent who thinks their child is gifted and talented.

Re:They're Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

My spouse had a parent complain to her that her kid didn't get to go on the special field trip that the TAG students did. So they had to inform her that her child didn't get to go because she wasn't in the TAG program. Not the least of reasons is that her daughter cannot read at a skill level beyond sight-reading (due in no small part because of the home support). The mother literally and in all seriousness asked if the schools position was that all students her age should be able to read. My wife teaches sixth grade.

Re:They're Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by sight-reading in this context? You're not expecting sixth-graders to read and simultaneously perform music that they haven't seen or heard before, are you?

Re:They're Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

Different ac here, but what I think they mean is that they read using only sight words. Basically, there are three levels of reading. The first is the sight word level. Kids at that level read by knowing that "cat" is pronounced in a certain way and is the fuzzy animal. The next level is the decoding level. This is where you can take words and break them down into their component sounds, so you see "dog" and break it down into d-o-g and know it is the fuzzy animal because that is in the audio memory, which is much larger. The third level is the fluency level, where the process becomes almost automatic and paring rules for irregular situations develop. Another interesting part of fluency is that you don't need to have the "voice" in your head read along with you, but rather can read without translating it to audio first. According to the info I found online for our state, you should start to be able to decode in first grade and competent at it by second. Full fluency should be present by fifth or sixth grade.

Standardized Assessments

[dwhitaker]

I'm sure that a debate will emerge in the ensuing contents about the pros and cons of relying on standardized assessments as heavily as we do. From the summary, though, it seems as if the problem was not with the assessment, but rather the ancillary aspects of assessing. This doesn't excuse the mistakes, but it also isn't a compelling argument for abolishing standardized tests.

For what it's worth, Pearson is a for-profit educational publisher and assessment creator, but there are other assessment creators out there that are non-profit (e.g. ETS, the makers of the GRE). The entire assessment process is hard, and maintaining high-quality throughout is even harder.

Re:Standardized Assessments

[bryan1945]

If you had 5 students, you could test each of them closely to see their skills. 50 students, you can still look into individuals' skills. At 500, you may be able to have some customization. 5000, I doubt it. 50000, no way.
And that's assuming you think it's fair to make personalized tests. If Bob is good at math and Beth is good at English, do you cater or counter-cater to their strengths? Like you said, assessment is hard beyond a single individual.

Age

[hedwards]

Why are we measuring age with regards to giftedness? The age at which students are permitted to enroll in classes does not permit students born in September to enroll early, but if you are born in August you get to enroll, then when it comes to the standardized tests students who were permitted early entry get a lower bar with regards to entrance.

Since things are in flux to the point where a few days make a difference, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until there's some validity to the testing being done? As far as I know there's no validity to the notion that early testing leads to the right decisions being made. Some folks just develop early, but don't hit a particularly high mark, and some take longer to develop and ultimately to a higher level.

I remember when I was a kid getting screwed over because of my age, if a couple of months are that significant, then the testing shouldn't be done.

Re:Age

[nblender]

A prognosis of 'gifted' is not to be confused with 'developing early'... Sure, my 'gifted' son appeared to develop early but his brain works differently and that is what is being assessed... His reading/writing/arithmetic was tested for sure, but those results are only a small part of the overall scoring... He was 99th percentile for reading/writing/comprehension but tested low for working memory and processing speed... A non-gifted individual will do better than my son at discovering a pattern in a long sequence of symbols, for example... Or will do better at word problems.. Even though my son could read and divine symbolic meaning from adult novels when he was 6, he still has trouble with word problems in math because as he's reading them, his brain explodes with the many possibilities that are emerging as each sentence progresses and has trouble sorting out the important parts of the problem... This is what is measured when they test for giftedness...Gifted children each have different strengths and weaknesses; they're not to be confused with the pop culture vision of a child prodigy... I actually with there were a different word other than 'gifted' because that word carries a lot of misconception...

I'm not a psychologist, just a parent who's been submerged in this...

Re:Age

[hedwards]

That's more or less my point. At the K-3 level there's very little that can be said usefully for future development.

I don't really get why we're still evaluating students at such an early age for giftedness when it doesn't become reliable until later on. Evaluate for learning disorders as soon as you can, sure, but separating out the gifted students before you really know who is and isn't causes all sorts of problems. And age really shouldn't be a factor, if it matters which month you're born in, that should be a substantial reason to question the validity of the testing regime.

Ultimately, you get a system where you're rewarding students for having been fortunate enough to develop early when you're trying to reward students for being fortunate enough to be gifted. Which as you note isn't necessarily the same thing in all cases.

Re:Age

[Bacon Bits]

Keep in mind that if we're talking about Kindergartners that "a couple of months" is a significant amount of time, and at this age brain development is almost exactly a function of age. They're only 60-70 months old. It shouldn't be surprising that those that are 70 months old do better than those who are only 60. They've been alive 20% longer! Certainly, there are outliers, but they're going to score exceptionally either way (good or bad). Additionally, knowing the age of your subjects allows for basic test feedback to verify that nothing is wrong (older students should generally outscore younger ones). I'd agree that differences less than one month are unlikely to be significant, but since there's no significant cost to using the actual birthdate instead of just the birth month (there would have been prior to computerized data processing) then there's no reason at all to not use the complete birth date.

Here's another thing to keep in mind:
"Even before the error, the number of students qualifying for gifted seats — 9,020 — was far higher than the number of seats. The new number is more than 11,700. The competition is most acute for the citywide programs, where only several hundred seats are available."

So, yeah, 2,000 more students qualify, but the programs were apparently already full. Congratulations, Timmy! We made a mistake and you qualify for advanced schoolwork! Now go back to your regular classroom.

That said, I work in education IT. The fact that this mistake was made by Pearson doesn't shock or surprise me in the slightest. As soon as I saw their name I thought, "Oh, Pearson did it? No wonder it was wrong." Their software is shit and the fact that they're "industry leaders" should be a tremendous mark of shame upon the education assessment industry as a whole. Pearson is like your local cable company or wireless provider. They're the not a good choice, but they're often the best choice available.

Re:Age

[AmiMoJo]

A year is a huge amount of time for a child's development. In the UK we keep talking about splitting the school year into two groups six months apart because kids born in August are at a big disadvantage.

Re:Age

[hedwards]

I don't buy that. The problem is that you don't receive additional instruction for being a couple months older and this isn't supposed to be a test of how well you were prepared by your parents prior to going to school. What's more, at that age it's difficult to differentiate between being developmentally advanced for the age and having a more durable level of talent.

Bottom line the decisions should be put off a few years until the difference of a few days or a few months is a bit less meaningful. Choosing winners and losers in elementary school ultimately affects a student's academic performance for years to come. Seems to me that there should be a lot more concern paid to the scientific aspect of the evaluations seeing as it has life long consequences for those that are miscategorized.

Re:Age

[mwvdlee]

Just a few months can be significant; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect
Basically, if you want to give you kid the best chance in live for sports, aim for a january birth.
Want to give it the best chance academically, aim for september.
Best to aim for an additional month in order to avoid the potentially disasterous effects of an early birth.

Re:Age

[Richy_T]

I disagree. Schooling has become so geared to the lowest common denominator that most of any issues due to age will be masked. I was an August child and typically came top in science and maths (except when I got too lazy due to the work being easy).

Re:Age

[DoubleJ1024]

YOU are one of the few people I have ever met who understands me then. I am the same way when learning and thinking, and this plagued me all through school (kindergarten through university level courses). I finally learned 2 years ago that I have Aspergers, and after a BUNCH of reading, and implementing what I have learned I can handle dealing with normal people. I still do have stress days, and I have to handle it. This week was one of the worst I have had in a LONG time, due to U.S. Government bureaucracy. We are having the buzz-words: CI, Root-Cause, Fishbone, and Green belt/Black belt thrown around to save money, yet they will not listen to simple, effective solutions as they are not sufficiently complex.

Re:Age

[phantomfive]

Wise people forget about all the gifted/non-gifted/school nonsense and educate themselves. There is no other way, really.

Re:Age

[stymy]

Well, for one thing, think about what IQ, short for Intelligence Quotient means. It is the ratio of mental age to physical age, multiplied by 100 arbitrarily. Of course, for adults that aspect doesn't really matter, except maybe to judge senility of seniors, but for children, it is effective. The tests schools give are generally modified IQ tests anyways, so that's why they look at percentile. I know that in Ontario for example, proof of a high-enough IQ from a test done by a real psychologist is enough to get someone into the gifted program.

Irony

[phoomp]

Anyone else find some irony in the fact that the people deciding which kids qualify for advanced education programs couldn't get their math right?

Re:Irony

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Even before the error, theÂnumber of students qualifying
>Âfor gifted seats â" 9,020 â" was far higher than the number
> of seats.

It doesn't make a difference -- this is the real stupidity. It's long since been shown society would get much more bang for its buck devoting just a fraction of the money it spends making sure every last yokel can count to ten to accelerated education for people who actually invent stuff.

But those yokels, as adults, are amenable to claims that that is elitist, by other yokels seeking their support in power grabs.

Re:Irony

[Livius]

Irony, yes. Surprise, no.

I'd have been pissed.

[nblender]

My son was having trouble in his neighborhood school. The teachers/principal told us there was something wrong, likely ADHD or Aspergers... Broke our heart to be told this in a 5 minute 'parent teacher interview'... Anyway, after a psych-ed assessment, it turned out he just needed a gifted program possibly with some mild ADHD... The neighborhood school told us "Great! We'll just give him harder work. That'll keep him busy." but they already weren't dealing with his bullies, just brushing it off, and as we learned more about the gifted affliction, we understood that 'more and harder work' is not what he needed. He needed to be taught how his brain worked, how his brain was wired to learn in order to be successful as an adult... This is something that neither I nor his mother had when we were kids...

Anyway, the school board has a gifted program but they want _only_ gifted children and since his psych-ed report used the evil "ADHD" term, they rejected him... We found another school here (a Charter school, not private, still publicly funded, but more like an R&D sort of school) that catered to kids with multiple issues, including giftedness... Unfortunately, there were only 2 spots in his grade and more than 50 applicants... Coupled with a move to a new campus, an extra 25 spots opened up so my son got in. He's now in his second year there and this program has made a huge difference in his life... His first day at his new school, he came home and said "Mom! I've met my people!" ... He has a ton of friends at school, and is beginning to understand how his brain is wired... His teachers are giving him very successful coping strategies, and have imparted terrific insights to us about how to help him be successful... This has changed the trajectory of his life...

I can't imagine where we'd be were it not for this school... If we had been denied entrance, I dread think what state he'd be in...

I feel for the parents of these 4700 children, many of whom will not get the help they need...

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[nedlohs]

I feel for the parents of these 4700 children, many of whom will not get the help they need...

Sorry, if a 15 days birth date error on your birth certificate would change you from "gifted" to "not gifted" then clearly it's a complete farce and there's no "help they need".

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[hedwards]

Precisely. Sounds like they need to go back and review their methodology. And probably put off the assessment until later on.

I remember going through something similar as a child. Most of my friends had birthdays in the spring and summer, which meant that on these screenings they required a lower score in order to qualify, even though they had the same amount of time in class as I did. Consequently I think 2 of the 5 got into the gifted program and I didn't. But, the kicker is that as an adult, I'm so far ahead of any of them intellectually that they're unlikely to ever catch up.

Assessment is tricky business, but when the scores are being used for anything other than screening for a more thorough evaluation, you invariably make many, many mistakes. And for the most part we don't really understand enough about the brain to really get what we should be looking for in the first place.

And let's not forget that in the K-3 range it's easy to miss a learning disorder that throws the whole score off.

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[Pionar]

Your son's story reminds me a lot of myself as a kid. Very similar, except we didn't have charter schools back when I was a kid.

Good luck to your son!

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[Rich0]

Precisely. Sounds like they need to go back and review their methodology. And probably put off the assessment until later on.

The issue here is that no matter where you draw the line, and how you draw the line, there are thousands of determinations that would change if you moved the line even the tiniest bit in either direction.

They were calculating to the month, and not to the day. Now they're calculating to the day, and not to the hour - I bet that affects quite a few determinations. Then we draw the line at 97%, and not 98%, or 96%, or 97.1%.

The label "gifted" in many states really just means "individualized" - some part of the whole is treated as exceptional, and thus they get instruction tailored to their actual performance and not just their physical age. For what we spend on education I don't really understand why this couldn't be extended to everybody. When you're testing for IQ/etc all you're really trying to do is test somebody in a way that can measure performance across a very wide range. If you just performed that testing at regular intervals for everybody, combined with testing on mastery of the material being taught in class (what we traditionally test), then you could get a sense for whether the student should be placed higher or lower than they are, and their class assignments can be adjusted accordingly.

When I was in Elementary school I had fairly mediocre performance, and before I was identified as gifted I had a lot of attention/discipline issues in class. Even identified as gifted the reality was that little was done to actually accelerate classwork for gifted students - they just got some special instruction once a week but stayed in regular classes. It wasn't until middle school and especially high school when classes were tracked to varying performance levels (especially in high school where the more college-like schedule meant that you could mix/match across grade levels and subjects). Once I hit those grades my performance was exceptional in areas.

If a kid is really gifted at some subject then even in 2nd-3rd grade they should be allowed to advance accordingly. If they've mastered 4th grade math when they're in 2nd grade, then they should be taking 5th grade math, and then 2nd grade english or whatever. If they're behind in math then they should be taking 2nd grade math when they're in 5th grade. The way we deliver instruction needs to be more flexible. This isn't about leaving children behind - it is about not tossing them into classes where they won't learn anything anyway, so that in the time they are in school they learn as much as possible and don't simply graduate with a meaningless diploma.

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[Aranykai]

I was in the same situation. My birthday being in september put me just past the cutoff time for almost all of the programs in my district so I ended up getting lumped into the groups the year following most of my fellow classmates. Thankfully that didn't seem to matter towards high school so it didn't interfere with AP courses etc...

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[bryan1945]

nblender- I'm happy for you and your family.

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[ButchDeLoria]

The kids won't get help anyway, all of the seats were full BEFORE the revision.

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[LongearedBat]

But perhaps another 5000+ places for gifted kids wouldn't be a bad idea. (Though it might be somewhat expensive.)

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[MikeBabcock]

We don't assess here in Ontario (Canada) until fourth grade. We use the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children

Reinhart, Rogoff, and Excel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they should have used Excel and asked Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff for some assistance.

Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[tepples]

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

In the pre-World War II era when Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein grew up, it was believed acceptably safe for a child to walk the streets unaccompanied. Nowadays kids are kept indoors over public hysteria over "stranger danger" and over poorly laid out, cul-de-sac-heavy street hierarchies that discourage getting from one place to another in anything but a passenger vehicle.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[__aaltlg1547]

When I was growing up, a long generation after Einstein and Pauling, it was still considered safe, but it was objectively much LESS SAFE than it is now.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[davester666]

But subjectively, the media have blown everything completely out of proportion.

Somewhere, a child was abducted by a person.

But the media reports it as everyones child everywhere is minutes away from to be taken next.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[__aaltlg1547]

But subjectively, the media have blown everything completely out of proportion.

Somewhere, a child was abducted by a person.

But the media reports it as everyones child everywhere is minutes away from to be taken next.

Nothing sells like hysteria.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[swalve]

It is possible that it is only more safe now because there aren't as many kids wandering around to be snatched up by Uncle Paul.

Re: Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[Theranthrope]

To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi:

"European civilization would be a good idea."

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[Theranthrope]

That's because greatest compilation of human knowledge ever collected is about half pornography...

How Gifted?

[Flozzin]

I find it hard to believe that a few days in the year change a child from gifted to ungifted. If it does, then these kids are on the extremely low end of gifted, and after a year they will even out with the rest of the kids their age. There was an /. article a while ago discussing how the gifted kids, that you see go to college at the age of 14 generally even out when they hit their twenties. Super geniuses are extremely rare. What normally happens is these kids are smarter than their peers, but not any smarter than your average adult. So they fly through highschool and college and end up at the same place everyone else does, just sooner.

Re:How Gifted?

[MaWeiTao]

It's not that the program itself creates gifted children. It's that it separate those kids from the under-performing ones and puts them in an environment where everyone is more invested in education. I'm convinced that the most critical component are the parents. If they care enough to push their students then the kids are more likely to perform well. A gift program that specifically requires an application process is the ideal arrangement because only parents who are invested are going to invest the effort. Everywhere else the under-performing kids, and especially troublemakers end up being a drag on everybody.

Re:How Gifted?

[tablebeast]

No one is calling these kids geniuses or super-geniuses, they are simply calling them gifted. And by gifted, they mean almost as smart as the average person was 100 years ago. So, by being labeled gifted, these kids may be lucky enough to get just a little bit less indoctrination of nationalistic claptrap and just a little bit more time learning how to memorize slightly deeper bullshit. Are they learning how to learn? Are they expanding their own personal ability to achieve? Not likely. If these parents think their kids are so freaking smart and don't want the schools lumping them with the booger-eating masses, then they should take them out of public school altogether.

Re:How Gifted?

[phantomfive]

To do well, it takes more than 'gifted,' it takes hard work. Even for someone like Mozart.

Re:How Gifted?

[volmtech]

So the same percent of kids who where not in a gifted class have PhD s and law degrees?

I was retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

My sister and I were both pronounced retarded by our elementary school for doing badly on the coursework.

We got sent to a special school where educational "decks" (cards) of lessons were available to us. We ripped through them because we were finally challenged and could work at our own pace.

That's when they figured out it was public school that was retarded, that we were just bored and public school pace couldn't hold our interest.

Then from (1976) age 12 to 18, after school each day I ran down to Florida State University campus and stayed there till midnight on their PLATO computers.

With limited resources, schools just cannot hope to teach at the pace of the fastest students without actually segregating them into faster-paced environments. Which pisses off all the parents of average paced students.

The ones who caught the error

[kilodelta]

One of the parents was a statistician. That's too funny for words.

Re:The ones who caught the error

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The folks who made the error . . . didn't get into the gifted program . . . obviously . . .

Look for a profit motive

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Look for a profit motive, right? Multiply the number of students by the profit they stood to make off of each student so classified. Someone close enough with enough knowledge of the processes and consequences of being misclassified to put these two things together has to do this.

Just the idea that you'd let a company like this supply AND measure students is a BIG mistake. If there's a chance to screw with the collection and/or processing of the data and one road takes you to greater profit and the other road takes you to lesser profit then you have a built in motivation to make "mistakes".

We're talking about a school text book company, a member in good standing of one of the most exploitative, manipulative RICO-ready industries in existence. One whose hands are filthy with the blood of the next bubble implosion - the trillion of so dollars of unserviceable student loan debt needed to cover, in measure, the massively inflated book prices that benefit not just the coke snorters at the top of this industry's corporate hierarchy but also the universities themselves.

The universities get a cut of cover price and believe me that total is a very, very BIG number. Thus the innumerable new 'versions" of textbooks which come out each year for the sole purpose of destroying the after-market for used text books. The company store was always a profitable idea but this one is astronomically profitable to all conspirators.

Not a big loss.

[Seumas]

Unless it is exceptionally different in NYC, it's not a huge loss. When I was in the TAG program on the west coast, I found that all it really meant was the material you studied was *slightly* less idiotic than the mainstream - but still fairly underwhelming. For example, in the English class we were reading Hemingway, while the mainstream reading class were reading Jurassic Park (yes, that highly regarded classical masterpiece of classical literature about a park of dinosaurs). In the long run - like most things in high school, including your actual "high school record", nobody beyond high school actually gives the slightest fuck about it. At no point in life has it ever been relevant to anything or asked about or. Well, until this Slashdot post. So . . yeah, I guess it's good for that. Hurrah.

Also, that they let me into the program sort of proves how irrelevant an stupid it is -- even when they aren't fudging statistics. :P

can't be wrong

[dutchwhizzman]

They tested X children. The 10% that performed best were awarded with the stamp "gifted". The 3% that performed best were awarded with the stamp "especially gifted". If they now give 4700 children more the stamp "gifted", they will have more than 10% of the children with a stamp stating they belong to the top 10%. That can't be right, so the current results aren't wrong. I'm sure every school wants all of their children to perform "better than average", but in reality, if they all perform better, the average goes up and you still end up with half of them performing worse than average. The same applies here. The top 10% is the top 10%, no matter how you rate.

Re:In 'merica 90 is gifted and 97 is super gifted?

[O('_')O_Bush]

Your reading comprehension is low, possibly because you fall under that average. 90th percentile IQ is somewhere around an IQ of 120, and 97th percentile is somewhere between 128-130.

Clearly, gifted children. However, as someone else pointed out, IQ is malleable, and a cultural thing. Many very smart children lose their advantage by the time they are adults, and many average or above average children can end up in the genius IQ range as an adult once they realize they can be as intelligent as they want to be.

Hence why I hate statistics

[Murdoch5]

Statistics is the art of lying to yourself that you understand what should happen! The problem with statistics is that in general you just ignore mass amounts of data to try and prove a point, it would be like measuring a system and throwing out any strange readings. There is a much better system already in place that deals with the problem in statistics and that is to just measure or record the results of a finite population and only release results about that and only that population. You'll have the EXACT numbers and you wont be guessing or making assumptions!

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[stymy]

I guess you don't know what statistics even means, do you? A statistic is an estimator of a population parameter. If you have exact data you're not doing any estimation.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[Murdoch5]

That is what I said, a statistic is a bad estimator of a population because it doesn't take into account outlying data point from a set. This is a huge issue, by not considering outlying data points your not taking into account all of the data. The only thing I learned about statistics from school is that your better off getting a true result by measuring everything in the populate set and creating a truly accurate value or ratio.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[qwak23]

Whomever taught you statistics in a school setting failed at their job.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[Murdoch5]

They didn't fail, I'm sure they taught it perfectly but I just can't stand a "science" where you can ignore data. For instance if I take 200 weather surveys and in 199 of them I get a result which is inline with my predictions then according to my text book I can ignore that 1 result, the issue is that I really can't. That 1 result is very important because it shows that the data doesn't line up. I would be unable to take those results and grow them to state that in a population of 600 weather samples I should get 600 know results, because the fact is I have 1 unknown result from the first group and I can't really know how many from the second and third. Statistics leaves room for to many unknowns to enter the system.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[Murdoch5]

If I don't understand it fine but then no one has been able to explain in a way that makes it sound like a good solid science.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[qwak23]

the fact that there can be so many unknowns is what statistics attempts to deal with. Sure, at a base definition level "a statistic estimates a parameter of a population" but the techniques go well beyond just that. It's not that you're necessarily ignoring a result but questioning how significant is that result. We can't account for every single variable, we can't measure anything exactly, and if we can perform a given measurement multiple times, we will probably get different results each time, without the tools of statistics it would be difficult to make sense of any of our data. Of course like any other tool it can easily be misused, both intentionally and mistakenly, though with knowledge of statistics it makes it easier to call those cases into question.

And going back to the single outlier, it may be the case of a single variable that is normally not a concern but in that one case just happened to be so, that variable might be an equipment error, meaning it can be safely ignored (aside from needing to inspect the equipment), it might be due to an unknown phenomena which may warrant further study, it may have been human error, it may even have been expected once in awhile. Does that completely invalidate the model? Not necessarily. I work with models where the statistics is taken into account - Under normal circumstances this is what you should expect, however there may be a non-zero chance that this other result occurs, it's understood and accounted for.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[stymy]

It's not science. Science is about making predictions in the real world. Statistics is the mathematics of uncertainty, essentially.

Re:Hence why I hate statistics

[Murdoch5]

I've heard it called a science hundreds of times, I agree that it's not or at least shouldn't be.

Re:In 'merica 90 is gifted and 97 is super gifted?

[tgd]

Your reading comprehension is low, possibly because you fall under that average. 90th percentile IQ is somewhere around an IQ of 120, and 97th percentile is somewhere between 128-130.

Clearly, gifted children. However, as someone else pointed out, IQ is malleable, and a cultural thing. Many very smart children lose their advantage by the time they are adults, and many average or above average children can end up in the genius IQ range as an adult once they realize they can be as intelligent as they want to be.

Be nice. I don't know who this "Anonymous Coward" person is, but after fifteen years of their posting, its pretty clear they're developmentally challenged.

standardized testing can passover people who are s

[Joe_Dragon]

standardized testing can passover people who are smart but are not good at taking tests.

They're one up on me

[rsilvergun]

When I as a kid I got kicked out of the Gifted programs for lack of funding. There were only 9 of us that bothered and that wasn't deemed enough to pay for our teacher.

Re:Need statisticians

[Richy_T]

about 13.6% of the Slashdot readership.

Re:I call BS

[fibonacci8]

Since you're volunteering to be at, and record all dates of conception for every child everywhere, I think that's a perfectly valid stance.

Re:In 'merica 90 is gifted and 97 is super gifted?

[qwak23]

I swear it has to be a ruse. Anonymous Coward posts one day, sounds like a blithering idiot, next day they are posting the most intelligent and insightful response in the thread. Maybe just a manipulative bastard.

the real silliness...

[stenvar]

The real silliness is that educational opportunities are assigned by some central authority. We need much more of a free market in education. Give vouchers to people who can't afford it, but let parents make choices for their kids and let schools specialize in lots of different kinds of kids and programs as parents demand.

Re:the real silliness...

[Anonymous Coward]

More for-profit schools is the last thing needed to solve the situation. Privitization creates more problems than it solves.

Re:the real silliness...

[Sarius64]

Because current methodology in America is working so well we have to import our freaking IT staffers. Sheesh.

Gfted Student Metrics are Nonsense

[litehacksaur111]

I don't think it is okay to already start sorting out which students are gifted are not at elementary school age. For example, my son is now a student at Georgia Tech, but he was never admitted into the gifted program because they said he scored too low in the verbal reasoning and creativity sections. He was stuck in the slow classes and lost interest in learning until I took notice and began teaching him myself. I believe that all students should simply be given a choice to taken the "gifted track" and see how they do.

Re:These students aren't gifted, it's their parent

[mr_mischief]

Joel Spolsky nailed it years ago. Whenever you change your arbitrary quality or quantiry metric, people change how to game the metrics by which they are rewarded.

Re:Citation needed?! Really?!

[Theranthrope]

That AC is more right than you know, because the United States (and many other countries) is still mired in the 19th century's broken and degrading Prussian "factory for minds" system. Practically all of your "advancements" in "educational theory" amounts to shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, as the central tenet of the Prussian system's Industrial Era-philosophy is that minds can be "standardized" like machine parts coming off an assembly line is ultimately rotten to the core.

Money to fix cul-de-sacs

[tepples]

You solve the street hierarchy problem for walkers by placing footpaths between the ends of opposing cul-de-sacs.

That's how it should be done for new construction. But in practice, a city would have to retrofit existing cul-de-sacs to include such paved trails, and with the "taxed enough already" mentality that affects my country, I'm not sure where a city should find the money for that.