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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"
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.
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?
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.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
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.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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%.
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.