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The Poor Neglected Gifted Child
theodp writes "'Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore,' explains The Boston Globe's Amy Crawford in The Poor Neglected Gifted Child, 'have national laws requiring that children be screened for giftedness, with top scorers funneled into special programs. China is midway through a 10-year "National Talent Development Plan" to steer bright young people into science, technology, and other in-demand fields.' It seems to be working — America's tech leaders are literally going to Washington with demands for "comprehensive immigration reform that allows for the hiring of the best and brightest". But in the U.S., Crawford laments, 'we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student' and 'risk shortchanging the country in a different way.' The problem advocates for the gifted must address, Crawford explains, is to 'find ways for us to develop our own native talent without exacerbating inequality.' And address it we must. 'How many people can become an astrophysicist or a PhD in chemistry?' asks David Lubinski, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University. We really have to look for the best — that's what we do in the Olympics, that's what we do in music, and that's what we need to with intellectual capital."
Fast tracking higher potential students is common pretty much everywhere except the US. Here we "foster understanding and tolerance" by mainstreaming students with special needs. We also ensure the average SAT score is below that of countries that limit who can take it to their top students.
Smart and gifted kid? Shove them to the back of the class. Oh that not so bright kid that can run and catch really good? he is a superstar!
We worship the Low IQ and brawn. (NFL players for example) while ridicule anyone smart. It is a culture thing, and in inner city urban cultures being a smart kid get's you isolated badly as your peers try to make you feel as if you are a traitor.
It has always been this way, on top of that Teachers are scared to death of kids that are smarter than them, and will punish the smart kid. Our education system is set up for average and can not handle the two sides of the bell.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Such program already exists. Advanced Placement, Science Bowl, International Baccalaureate, etc. Just put more money into those programs.
The entire POINT of offering special educational opportunities to gifted children is to help them grow further than they would in a standard classroom. That increases inequality between them and the other children that aren't capable of handling the gifted kids' workload.
'Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, 'have national laws requiring that children be screened for giftedness, with top scorers funneled into special programs.
So instead of doing the above program in the USA to help their own country, America's tech leaders want to use immigration?
Yeah, i can see why you guys need those gifted Chinese.
Wonder what the problem is? You tell me....
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Have you ever noticed how many teachers a special ed class has. Yeah it's not PC to mention it, but that doesn't make it less true. The US is spending a crazy amount of money on students who will, maybe, be able to wipe their bum consistently when they leave the education system. That's where the money is going.
Similar things happen in the UK because schools are assessed on A-C grade achievement. Most of the focus goes on students who are predicted to get C-D.
I think this describes the whole thing.
As if one had to take away from the one to give to the other. That idea of eihter-or is so cynical I can't believe it.
The "gifted" are so few that it wouldn't take such a huge amount of money. In the meantime, no investment is too small to raise the "general level" -- but who in power really desires well educated (and possibly critical) sheeple?
Remember: raising the general level will *help* the luminaries. And of course, the luminaries merit special treatment -- and in exchange will raise the general level.
I was born in 1948, so I grew up in the era of the "space race". Back then -- at least in the suburban public school system I attended -- the system did emphasize academics for those who scored above average on the standardized tests. (Not that it prevented us nerds from being excluded from the social circles that courted the football jocks.) Science club, math club -- we had them. Local, regional, state and national science and math fairs were common and us over-achievers were expected to participate. AP science, math and English were offered. Yes, the system wasn't as PC as today. But most of the kids who graduated from high school could at least name all the planets in order of distance from the sun.
How many can become a phd in chemistry? I don't know how many can become a drivers licence? Oh you mean a research chemist. People shouldn't be referred to as their qualification but what they do.
Smart people need less help. They need stuff, freedom, encouragement, safety, engaging work, something to extend them. But they don't need the whole budget to do it, just support in the right areas.
Of course smart people are best put to use on working out ways for people to click on ads (http://www.google.com).
Meanwhile we get dumber and dumber and people focus on more and more banal projects.
No, I'm not so sure we need to focus heavily on the top 0.1%, to live in fancy ivory towers. I do think it is more important that we look at the top 10% and the bottom 30%.
By standardizing everything, and focusing on the those who are struggling, we are boring the smarter kids. They go through school with little struggle, because they pick up the content quickly. Later, when the concepts get harder, they have trouble because they were not challenged earlier in the educational process.
Here in NYC, we have G&T classes, they put 32 kids in one classroom. It was done to cut cost, because G&T kids are easier to teach, also, they don't need extra funding for ESL or after school help. Only the big city-wide program gets extra funding, not from DOE, but rather from PTA fund raising. For the top 3 city G&T programs (Anderson, NEST, BSI), their goal is $1000 per student per year(or per semester, I forgot which). And they usually met their goal, because parents are very very dedicated, and have a lot of resources($$$). For district program, having a G&T program in school actually means less $ per student for the school.
since we cannot make everybody equally smart, at least we've tried hard to make majority of people equally stu...
there is no way he can win
We have an active religious lobby in the US that discourages free thinking, preferring indoctrination that includes no Bayesian interference.
Unless and until equivalent accolades are placed upon the throne of intellectual exceptionalism, American society is doomed to do well in the Olympics and poorly in graduating advanced math/science/physics wunderkind.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
But in the U.S., Crawford laments, 'we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student' and 'risk shortchanging the country in a different way.'
No, you utter imbecile. The problem of the western culture is not fund distribution. It's attitude.
Our "stars" are musicians, actors and professional athletes. Certainly people who work hard and having natural talent definitely helps - but it's not the smart, gifted people we adore in our culture. There's no science-based equivalent of the Super Bowl. The closest we get is that we sometimes thing astronauts are pretty cool.
You want more smart people in your country? I don't have a magic pill for that, but I can give you an indicator of how close you are: When the sexy girls fuck the geeks instead of the football studs, you're getting somewhere. When this map has more scientists on it than coaches, you're pretty close. When we pay two-digit millions in salary not to people who pretend to be a robot from the future on camera, or throwing an air-filled dead pig gut around, but to people who work on curing cancer or inventing new methods for energy production, then you won't have to worry about not having enough brains in the country.
The funding thing is just a small part of that culture.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Unfortunately the prevailing paradigm in the United States is that we must achieve so-called "equality of outcome" for everyone. We waste billions of dollars every year trying to convince ourselves that all kids really are the same and that there is no possible way one kid could simply have higher potential than another. This is so obviously absurd, but it is the foundation of our entire education system.
Of course, there are only two ways to make everyone equal - bring the bottom up, or bring the top down. You can't make just snap your fingers and bring a low-potential kid up, so the only thing you can do is deprive the smart kids of an education fit for their potential.
why are we looking Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China as our models? What scientific advances have come out of those countries recently?
US universities still generate a disproportionate fraction of scientific research, and US companies generate a disproportionate fraction of technological innovation.
There's nothing wrong with spending money on gifted kids, but something is wrong with how those countries do it.
Anonymous cowards
Can be deranged
This one’s below the IQ range.
Anomymous cowards
Some say they love God
But this one’s behavior would make that seem odd
Consider this
It’s no surprise
That the stench of his stink, will water your eyes
For in fair society
If you know you are wrong
Post anonymously as none can tie you to your bomb.
The most important thing is to ensure all minority groups are properly represented. Nothing else matters. Without it the country will fail.
This is the problem with the pursuit of "equality" mostly from people on the Left. To people on the Left, it's not fair that dumb people can't keep up, so their answer is to pour money and effort into focusing on the dumb kids, while the smart kids are bored and are not being brought to the full level of their ability. Separately, this is the problem with "equality" and the aspirations of the Left. We have to reward the smart and the winners rather than rewarding the dumb and the losers. Survival of the fittest works quite well. Pouring money into the dumb kids is a bad investment. Sure you might be able to find a success story here and there but the vast majority never amount to anything in life. If you were investing your own money would you put it into the bright kid or the dummy?
As a former gifted student I do wish that there were more programs and opportunities for the gifted kids to thrive. I grew up in a tiny farm town over 20 years ago in the middle of nowhere and had taken all of the harder classes by the time I was a HS sophomore. I didn't know where to go from there, nor did my counselor or my parents. I wonder where I would have been had someone/anyone helped me get to the next level. People in the school system don't know what to do with bright kids, they just know what to do with kids with sub average IQs.
Having spent pretty much my entire school life bored out of my mind and unchallenged by uninterested and uninteresting teachers, I recognized this starting to happen in my own son's life. After some initial reluctance and self-doubt, my wife and I removed him from mainstream education and started to home school. We're fortunate that my wife is a stay-home mum dedicated and intellectual enough to do a fantastic job teaching our kids. I help out with the sciences, maths and programming lessons in evenings and on weekends.
In short our choice to home school is the best thing we could have done for our kid, he's significantly happier, learning much more and crucially he's capable of much more than he would be at school because we're prepared to teach him at HIS pace.
We periodically test our son to check how he compares to other students in core subjects like english, maths etc. The last time we did this was a couple of months ago and he was comfortably working at GCSE level in these core subjects. He's well beyond GCSE level in the fields that interest him. He's eight years old.
His teachers could not sufficiently challenge him or make the most of his talents so he was side-lined and ignored at school. My wife and I are now quite confident of our abillity to impart knowledge to our son so we've decided to do the same thing with his little sister.
I don't think mainstream education makes the most of our kids and I don't think it makes great employees either. Having recently tried to hire new junior programmers for my team I was astounded by how weak the candidates were even though they had CS degrees from good universities. Like lots of things in life if you want them doing well you're probably best doing them yourself. Homeschool for the win!
Isn't it strange that racist idiots are crap at poetry ?
When I was in primary school, it was pretty evident that I was bored in class, simply because it was too basic. You know what they did? The just pushed me forward a year. And then another, and another, and another. This meant I was 10 when I started high school. You know what sucks about being 10 in high school? Everything. Other kids are assholes - even more than usual - because you make them look bad. Teachers expect more from you, but at the same time, they don't really want to put up with you. Even PE is bullshit at that point, because 10-year-olds suck at physically keeping up with 14-year-olds.
I'm not sure about the numbers, so I don't know if this is a worthwhile endeavor, but here's what I always thought would be a better solution: gifted students should progress at a social pace similar to other kids. This means they would be in a class with other students their age who had also been placed in the gifted student program up until the age of 17 or 18, when they would normally graduate high school anyway. The major difference would be that these students, at a time deemed fit by qualified educators, would begin earning college credits. That way, they would have a running start upon entering college, and not be socially crippled.
What use is a above-average brain if the person lacks the social skills to apply their intelligence? No, they are not single-handedly going to invent the cure for cancer.
On the other hand, the NFL star leads by example, unites us in support for our team and might very well have a much larger beneficial effect on society than the nerd in the back of the class room could hope to have.
Of course, this idea, that intelligence is not as important as some might want it to be, might be lost on a forum that ironically calls itself 'news for nerds, stuff that matters'.
I was steered into "gifted" classes as a child but math never came as second nature to me. I don't have Asperger's syndrome or anything -- I never read particularly fast or could effortlessly absorb patterns. What landed me into the gifted program was the fact that I came from a family of educated individuals. People who spoke English, not some broken dialect that violates basic grammatical rules. They also imposed high expectations, taught me much through travel, and made a point to buy me books rather than toy guns.
Excluding those very rare individuals who have some disorder like Asperger's, children generally have approximately the same academic potential. They're like seeds from a tree. Minor genetic variation exists among them and some really are more predisposed to success than others, but much more important than predisposition is the environment in which they're grown. "Gifted" children in the United States aren't neglected because the vast majority of those who will test as gifted will have one common factor: they come from educated families. Having opportunity doesn't make one gifted.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Beautiful.
... whatever
It's funny they mentioned Olympic athletes. Those folks are not trained in a school's PE class. Their parents hire coaches and training facilities at their own expense. Same goes for music prodogies. If you have a gifted kid, hire tutors and buy enrichment programs.
What we have is so far from being based on merit it's deplorable. The only kind of intelligence that is in high demand in our upper ranks is social intelligence - people that can lie and manipulate well. Everyone else is just *used* for profit.
I have been complaining about this for the past twenty years that my kids have been in school. Move the slow and the 'unwilling to learn' to the front of the class and the best and brightest to the back. In other words, last place. And whatever we do, DO NOT let the brighter kids shine.....it is unfair.
There's no doubt it needs a shake up here in America. What we need are stronger public schools. We need to stop draining the money from them. Do NOT privatize them, or you'll end up with walmart education.
As for failing our gifted students... we're failing EVERY student with the current state of affairs. We need to stop the standardized testing which isn't helping our children learn anything. We need to flip the classroom as Salman Khan has been working toward. We need to support our teachers. And yes, TEACHERS need to come up with a plan for fixing poor teachers.. but only AFTER we've fixed everything else and evaluations can be fair.
We need to give every child a chance to be a scientist or an engineer instead of just mostly the white kids. (I'm white, we are wasting many precious resources this country has because of the color of a child's skin) and if that means helping the children who are going slower than their classmates, so be it.
The only thing right about no child left behind was the title. We need to stop leaving children behind.
Gifted students need support as well. Those students who get the school work need to be helped to move forward. I remember that in grade school math and language skills came easy to me. There was nowhere to go with math though. No special programs, nothing to increase my abilities beyond what everyone else did. Language skills were different. There were several tiers of reading and we were separated into groups according to ability. There just wasn't anywhere to go after a certain level. We could have went farther.
..and while gifted children are funneled into special programs as advertised by the article, an outsized amount is spent on students who struggle academically via large vocational training centres known as the Institute of Technical Education (ITE). comparatively, much less is spent on students studying in Junior Colleges (which lead to the British GCSE "A" Levels). I suppose it's important to look after both ends of the spectrum; in this respect, I'd say that at last the U.S. have got half of it right.
Good luck with that.
We need to shovel more money at trying narrow the achievement gap between men and women, also minorities. That's not to say we shouldn't have gifted programs. We should. We just need to fill them with people who lack the natural talent and drive to succeed in those fields. And then focus on hiring better teachers to narrow the gap. I'm not sure exactly how much money this will take, but let's just call it "a lot more". Until teachers are better paid than professional athletes and wall street bankers it makes no sense to argue whether teachers are overpaid.
We need to understand that when we see someone excel at something, it's merely the result of gender/racial bias, in need of correction. All humans have equal potential, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, which I will simply assume is the result of unconscious bias. Though I fully believe in evolution, I don't think any selection pressure could cause different populations of humans to be naturally more or less bright as a group, nor could there be any inherent differences between males and females, because this would make me feel bad about the world in which I live.
</liberal>
A troll like this isn't even necessarily a racist, just a sadist who feels empowered by offending other people / evoking bad feelings.
I think the problem here is that we have a decent and loud percentage of people who don't just want equal treatment but think the law and government are there to create equal outcomes. Meaning we have to suppress the gifted or just lucky while wasting resources hoping one in ten down's syndrome kids learn to tie their shoes on their own. Anyway time to refer to one of my favorite short stories.
The real problem is the near-monopoly that the govt has on K-12 education. A one-size-fits-all system invariable caters to the fat middle of the IQ curve and it is politically easy in America, where most people have enormous sympathy and want to help those, such as retards and cripples, who find themselves in difficulty through no fault of their own, to find tons of extra money to spend on "special needs" - I hate that term; high IQ students have special needs too - students.
Add to all of that the natural revulsion of Americans toward any kind of education program that funnels students early on onto paths that limit their life aspirations and it is easy to see why govt-run education short-changes high-performing students.
One of the best things about America is that there is no test that children take early on that limits how far they will be able to advance in life. Such tests are common in other countries, but in the U.S. a person can be a high school drop out, decide to get a GED at age 28, attend any college they can qualify to get into and eventually reach the pinnacles of career success. That's one reason why the U.S. has traditionally been the number one immigration destination in the world; America has traditionally been a place where the only barriers to success are the limits of one's talent and willingness to work hard. Any solution to the problem of not properly educating high-performing students must preserve that. Not everyone has their head on straight at age 12. No one's life should be crippled because they didn't perform well on a standardized test at such an early age.
I'm from the same era, and can corroborate nani's experience. Even the football players in my high school -- the guys with scratches on the back of their hands, from dragging them along the ground as they walked -- could name the planets in order.
Of course, since schools were funded by a property tax on the local landowners, the same opportunities were not available to the poorer kids going to the school on the other side of town. The desire was to raise that school to the academic level of the rich school, by spending more on education in general, but what seems to have happened is that the funding was just averaged between them, leading to the poor neglected gifted child syndrome.
My best student would qualify as on the street in the AC. He may very well end up that way. He is no doubt my best and brightest student that can't make it to class. When he does, he's straight A, all the way. Yet because he's working extra hours just to get by, because he doesn't have backing to focus on school without having to have two jobs to get in, he's struggling to make it to class.
While I know you are just trolling, I do want to point out that I have some of the best and brightest who just can't seem to get the assistance they need and because of that they are struggling with the basics. The bigger point is that we aren't seeking out these bright few and culturing them to become the best and then we wonder why our advanced college programs only have a select few from other countries in them.
This argument, tried and true boils down to the following:
1. We don't have the support infrastructure in place to culture the best and brightest
2. Society is too busy with bread and circuses to care about those of innovative talent. As long as we are fed and entertained, we are happy.
3. We focus on people who use the existing infrastructure to get ahead as leeches.
4. We do not respect hard work at all levels. Ditch digging is hard work, and I don't think you could get a CEO to do that for a day. (A new show idea.)
Place something witty here
When I was in school, a common trick my teachers employed was to distribute the smart kids into desk groups with dumb kids hoping the smart kids would help out, and rub off. It wasn't entirely misguided. If you want to get good at something, it helps to do that thing with people that are better at it than you. The result though was some intimidating kid expecting me to let him cheat off of me for every test, saying "yo! how you do dis?!" That was fun. Way better than getting to sit with my friends.
actually most (west) Europeaan countries have had multi-tiered (3 or 4) education systems for decades, where the top 10-20% of pupils go to special high schools that prepare them to go directly to university in 6-7 years.
the remaining top half is prepared for a collage-university equivalent in 5 to 6 years, and the bottom half prepared for trade-collage (from say construction to basic IT).
I had very inconsistent performance through-out school. I had teachers accuse me of being learning disabled during my earlier years (grades 1-3), but I graduated high school with ~95% average and went on to graduate with honours from a top engineering school. I would definitely not have been allowed to join the gifted group had I been subject to this kind of profiling early on. Why should my success or failure be based on the evaluation of largely incompetent people?
I have a relative who only started speaking after the age of 4. He almost certainly would have been moved into the challenged group under this system of identifying the gifted. Instead, under the existing system he flourished graduating from high school at 15 and going on to receive multiple advanced degrees, including one from Harvard.
Truly gifted people succeed despite not being treated with special regard. If you feel that your failure is the fault of your school not pampering you then you are not truly gifted.
Let me pose a counter argument.
In many fields, we already have more PhDs than we know what to do with. There aren't enough university positions for all of them. Their salaries end up not being commensurate with all those years spent in school, and they live miserable frustrating lives trying to raise funding for their research.
On the other hand, in the USA the public debate still revolves around things like supply-side economics, climate change, and what God thinks about abortion. Issues that are settled among educated people who aren't demagoguing an issue for personal gain.
I would posit that we are already doing enough for the gifted in our society. What we really need to do is *raise the average*. If that means we end up with plumbers who speak three languages and have a B.S. in chemistry, so be it. We are better off as a society when the average person is equipped with the skillset of a university graduate. If you look at the Nordic countries, they're pretty much already there, and better for it.
This was the reason people like Thomas Jefferson supported public education. Not as job training, but as a prerequisite of citizenship. For democracy to succeed, the average person must possess the "ars liberalis"--the liberal arts--literally, the arts and skills of being a free person.
This is inevitable under the No Child Left Behind Act. The law states that all children have to meet a single standard. The intended consequence is to raise the abilities of the less able and the disadvantaged. The actual result is that the gifted and average, who meet the standard easily, are considered "done" and ignored after that point. All the resources go into raising the abilities of the less able; sometimes an impossible task.
The end result is that the actual potential of most children is what gets "left behind".
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
There's no screening in the U.S., but I'm not sure we do so terrible a job of serving gifted children depending on where one lives. It's just hit or miss. The city and state where I grew up don't have a reputation for being "good" in terms of education, but there were selective magnet programs at the junior high and high school levels that were pretty decent. My elementary school split its classes by ability, so even at that level I was in a classroom with kids in the top ~quartile. That's more rare these days, but my son's public elementary does the same thing starting in 2nd grade.
Many many many schools have Extented Learning Programs (ELP) or Advanced Learning Programs (ALP), or some such classes for advanced students. Even 30 years ago when I was in elementary they had advanced classes for accelerated math and reading, is see no shortage of opportunities for my kids to participate in extended learning for math, science, engineering, and even the arts through public school. You want to get the "best and the brightest" to go into science and engineering... increase the pay, prestige, and fun in science and engineering at all levels.
Why is "all extra" money steered to special needs or the "average" students: BECAUSE PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LEARNING OF ALL STUDENTS. Not just the best, or worst, all.
I was born in 1967.
In the 1970s when I was in elementary school, even in our small rural school (the whole grade was ~50-60 kids), there was a gifted/talented program. It was informal, open to kids solely as recommended by teachers, and essentially took the 4-5 of us in the school who were wasting hours per day doing nothing (Kristi, Steve, Vincent, and later Bob...you might recognize yourselves) in class waiting for the others to catch up, and took us to learn more on pretty much whatever we as a group wanted to do - meteorology, dinosaurs, math, astronomy, etc. It was absolutely great and AFAIK there was no (apparent) resentment by those not in the program, nor did we make a big deal about it.
When I hit 6th grade, we moved to Bloomington MN, and there was a 'high achiever' program for that much larger school district. In this (only for 6th grade) the ~50 kids that qualified after teacher recommendation, testing, and evaluation by (I'd guess?) developmental pschologists and the district were segregated into a totally separate school for the whole year. That was personally rather hard (I don't know that I was mature enough to be in this program in a totally new school, even if I was smart enough) but a second year would have been much, much better, I expect.
The problem was, there WAS no second year...ever. After this 6th grade of extremely high-level classwork, we were all dropped into the mainstream. Maybe those who went back to their old friends had a better experience, but I found 7th grade extraordinarily hard, just going back to utter boredom - and both my grades and attitude reflected the problems. Tough time of life to be even more adrift, imo.
Finally, in high school, there was nothing. I'd completed advanced Chemistry, AP Calc, and Engineering Physics as a junior and had literally nothing left to do as a senior. Fortunately, this was the first year of the Post-Secondary Educational Options (PSEO) program, so I went to a local junior college my whole senior year, but even that wasn't much educational advancement. (The program was also entirely new, and had some teething pains.)
Now, with my own kids 20-30 years later, I see the same thing happening - except there are no actual programs that support gifted/talented at all (while there are ample monies available for the 'mainstreaming' of kids who *might* eventually learn to eat without assistance). Constant boredom, programming that is deliberately designed to hobble advanced students and prevent them getting 'too far ahead'. Some teachers at the elementary level did try, at a personal, individual-class level to help support and address these kids' needs, but by junior high/high school, that level of personal attention absolutely vanished. PSEO is much better, but still, essentially this means that the taxpayers - who already are paying for the schools - are FURTHER subsidizing a school district's inability to sufficiently address educational needs by paying to send those students to local colleges.
-Styopa
OK, posting as AC to avoid accusations of bragging etc. etc....I really don't give an F about mod points.
I was the G&T kid in a down and out area of the UK, far too many years ago. No special treatment, no differentiation. In my day, you learned to keep your quiet and just get on with it. I didn't really let anyone, even my teachers, know what I could do...until it came to A levels, then I pulled the cat out of the bag, got my grades, and chose any university I wanted. Following that I got my Masters and my Ph.D. and ended up in a very nice R&D career thank you very much...time in the US and the UK, created a few industry initiatives and generally made a few waves here and there. It's been fun.
My early education did mark me though. It wasn't cool to be smart, so I wasn't. I played dumb and did dumb things. I never got the highest scores in class and generally kept my head down. I mingled with one or two of the more thuggish elements of the class and generally made sure I wasn't the spof who stood out. Academic excellence was never encouraged. I never got to be stretched or challenged or learn the true exhilaration of working with people who are as smart or smarter than you are - you can run together and achieve great things....It wasn't until I got to University and realized I was still at the top of the heap there (but it was then acceptable to be able to think) that I thought I might have quite a capable stone of meat in there.
The consequence is that I missed opportunities to be _truly_ special, to really stretch out and make a mark. Don't misunderstand me, I've had a great career and I'm very well paid, but I do sometimes wonder what it would be like if I'd been recognized at the earliest stage.
Our son, who is now 12, is also pretty smart (He's also a great sportsman). The difference now is that he's been streamed with 19 other kids who are _also_ very capable and he's being properly stretched. I don't know what he'll do with his life, but he's certainly getting a better runway onto it than I had....I'm pleased to be able to say that he _is_ being stretched, and he can't complain that the system let him down.
The moral? Smart kids are special needs, just like the ones who are at the other end of the spectrum. Treat them like they are and you'll get the best out of them. 50% of the population has below average intelligence. Don't be afraid to recognize both the -3 S.D.s _and_ the + 3 S.D.s....they both need the same amount of help, just different help.
A troll like this isn't even necessarily a racist, just a sadist who feels empowered by offending other people / evoking bad feelings.
That's pretty much the definition of a Troll.
soylentnews.org
What else can be said except that he's completely right and that, frankly, I don't think we're smart enough to do it here in the US. The immigration situation here is totally rediculous, there was a time when we would actively seek out genious in the same way as a football team looks everywhere for new players. These immigrants (like Einstein) changed the world and today, for whatever baffling reason, we make the process as difficult and as confusing as possible. If you think about it, immigration by itself is the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to beef up the IQ of the American gene pool.
If we can't get that right, I don't think we're going to shift our focus away from America's Got Talent long enough to institute programs to cultivate genius. It's one of the most heartbreaking issues of our time.
People talk about "gifted" kids as if they're simply a normal kid turned up to eleven. Our school system has a pretty good program for those kids (and they're also good at filtering out the normal kids who have whip-cracking tiger parents). Where they completely vapor-lock is when they're presented with a kid who's gifted in some areas, but normal or even below normal in others. My daughter is in the gifted class but also has an IEP. You'd think her teachers were trying to accommodate a silicon-based methane-breathing life form. It's not that they're not willing to try, it's that there's no pigeonhole already there, so they don't know what to do, and they have to make it up as they go along, all the while dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy.
The problem advocates for the gifted must address, Crawford explains, is to 'find ways for us to develop our own native talent without exacerbating inequality.'
Talent is not equally distributed so inequality of outcomes will always exist. Socialists refuse to acknowledge that basic truth and keep trying to force the equality of outcomes which is never possible and generally results in less freedom and greater poverty for most people. Not every one can be forcibly elevated to live in mansions so socialists instead try to force everyone to live in mud huts.
Crawford, and those who foolishly think as she does, need to surrender "equality" as a goal.
And before anyone starts spouting off with claims that democratic socialism has made the EU a more just society than the U.S, let me preemptively respond by pointing out that U.S. innovation and the U.S. military umbrella has allowed the EU to prop up generous welfare states that will soon have to been abandoned because they are going bankrupt. Democratic socialism is a failure in the long term because the incentives are all wrong. Providing a comfortable life for people even if they are not productive guarantees national insolvency at some point.
I was immensely smarter than the average student and had the grades to prove it. I was in the Gifted and Talented program in early education and had advanced math training, etc. When it came time to go to a very cheap, local technical school since that's all I could afford, there were zero scholarships for smart people. My ACT score didn't get me a damn thing. I had to have parents in a certain club or be an immigrant or have 1 parent or be a minority or be pregnant or have a family member in the military. At least I started college during my senior year of high school and got 9 free credits on the school's dime.
It was such complete bullshit, I almost ended up as a car salesman if it wasn't for money from my grandma and the Pell Grant. I became the best programmer in the college's history and the only one to get a perfect score on the final 9 week project in advanced programming. I finished 18 week algebra in 7 weeks then became a college-paid math tutor and programming tutor and all my students passed. When I graduated with 2 degrees and near-perfect grades, NOBODY would hire me without a 4 year degree (hello, two 2-year degree?!). I learned in college that 2 + 2 = 4 but nobody saw it that way. So I took the Tek Systems standardized programming assessments. I beat 89% of their programmers worldwide. STILL no job because of the college I went to.
So I told them to go fuck themselves and gave up. Then I got a job at 23 directly hired as head IT manager/CIO because of my 2 degree fields + 7 years of experience repairing computers as a side business. I'm still at that job and I'm the youngest head IT manager I've ever met. I bet I still can't get a job as a programmer. Something needs to be changed, BADLY!
This is going to sound like a troll, but hear me out:
Their entire way of life is dependent on a few smart people at the top (and by few I mean a couple million) and boatloads of marginally educated farmers and workers. They don't have a wide spread mechanism for private schools, nor do they have a huge labor-base to draw on from outside the country.
The US has a huge labor force just to the south that is willing to work manual labor for reduced wages. We also have an enormous industrial-agricultural complex which uses machines to mass produce food. What we can't have is a population which relies on agricultural or physical labor - we're too mechanized (and gentrified, to be honest) to employ 95% of our population in manual labor jobs and hold only a few percent up for high tech, white collar work. We also have an enormous network of private, for-profit institutions which specialize in educating in every specialty field there is, whether it's sciences or arts. Yes, those are pay-to-play, but there are also scholarships available to the amazingly gifted.
So US schools focus on preparing young minds for the factories of white collar labor in the US. We try to feed them with a basic education which can be used anywhere in any mid-level job, by any mid-level intelligence. The focus of the public system is not on creating 5% superstars and 95% ditch diggers, but 70-80% average workers.
What is lost is that to educate that top 5% and give them individualized instruction and stimulation costs (in the US) about $30,000-$50,000 per year, whereas the average the public school system has to spend is on the order of $11,000 per student. We filter out kids into smart, average and remedial. China segregates into amazing and useless.
The two philosophies really are different. And for every top 5% student who gets "chosen" in China there's a top 10% (5.001%-10%) child who gets put in the useless category and is expected to remain in subsistence farming for the rest of their lives. In China, you are chosen and lifted up or you get kicked to the curb and thrown out with the trash. In the US, the public system offers a chance to keep going even if you are not the brightest in the class. And there's something to be said for that. (and of course, there are still ways to rocket to stardom early if you have the money or insane talent).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Read his biography some time. And he didn't even have the Internet. Here, I'll save you some time: gifted kids don't need help.
Instead of promoting mediocrity (EOE, no child left behind, etc) gifted kids should be in an accelerated program.
No Child Left behind is leaving the hole class behind.
who just can't seem to get the assistance they need and because of that they are struggling with the basics.
Actions have consequences. It is a shame that you have talented students who come from families with financial difficulties, but keep in mind that it is welfare state handouts that have destroyed the family unit and created large numbers of students who, through not fault of their own, must struggle early on because of their parents' choices. It also doesn't help that progressives have re-ordered society by promoting "if it feels good, do it" as a primary value. Culture matters. The cultural destruction wrought by the left is ultimately the cause of the difficulties you describe. As quaint as it may seem, traditional values existed because promoting self-reliance, hard work, personal discipline, duty to family and delayed gratification really did create a more prosperous, just and content society.
I've rallied for this very topic for years. While I whole-heartedly agree we should do what we can as a society to help everyone achieve a level of sufficiency, it baffles me to no end the inordinate amount of resources we expend to bring a minority of people to within spitting distance of everyone else, while those that could propel society as a whole to new heights, are lucky to have a foreign language in High School (Oh, you're bright, well, you should do fine no matter what; ergo we need to assign 3-teachers per kid to those less advantaged than you. so that they can grow up to live in a group-home and run the fryer at the fast-food joint).
Very funny, however, I think the final verse should read
Anonymous cowards,
You know you are wrong
So, don't post anonymously, just move along.
Here http://search.slashdot.org/com...
We had a good set of gifted programs at my public high school (Los Angeles area) fifty years go? Have we come down that far since then?
"in the U.S., Crawford laments, 'we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student' and 'risk shortchanging the country in a different way.'"
Exactly. The USA is doing it all backwards for political correct reasons. Not only that but when we take our kids out of the public school system so we can better teach them advanced science, history, engineering, arts, etc the liberals try and gilt trip us claiming that we are harming other children by not subjecting our children to the abuses of the public schools where they would pull up the public school sagging scores.
No thanks. I pay my educational taxes to educate everyone else's kids and I put in the effort and time to educate my kids. I take responsibility for them.
"When the sexy girls fuck the geeks instead of the football studs, you're getting somewhere.."
You mad, 'nice guy'? You're exactly the sort of creep that makes a woman's skin crawl.
For Christs Sake! It is NOT The governments Job to attend to MY child. They should not be involved in manipulating the future of our children at all. It's bad enough that we're forced into using these shitty public schools, but then to take even more resources away from us to fund special programs for kids that don't need extra help in the first place is ridiculous. Maybe we should put the kids in special camps based on their IQ next? Children are not a resource to be exploited by the federal government. Period.
It would be a rather insipid thesis. There's nothing unique about the US in this respect. The rest of the world just obsesses over a different sport - namely, football/soccer. Just down the street from where I live in Italy is a middle school that specializes in athletics, mainly football. This is the way it's always been. The Romans were sport fanatics. So were the Mesoamericans. Classical Greece at its height was obsessed with athletics, and it was percieved as complimentary, not antithetical, to education.
It's your attitude that strikes me as odd - the idea that running with a ball is in some way incompatible with other forms of achievement. We should have a society of people who can both run AND think.
... many of these programs are extra-school (informal ed) and are too often disconnected from the everyday classroom experience. So instead of infusing students' experience with worthwhile programs (science fair, history day, OM, FIRST, etc...) they become glorified dog bones in the case of too many teachers and administrators. Compacting, accelerating, articulating... these are relatively speaking stone-age tools in education and your average teacher has barely heard of them.
I'm tired of going through the textbook to prove what a couple of prizewinning engineering students "really did". It's getting worse in the sense of decoupling from school - just got through judging our state science fair, where a larger than ever number of kids apparently walked into a professional research center, the door closed behind them, and they did something with a handful of profs or RAs and in some cases their research paper was a published journal article. When your state science fair poster has a line that includes "Support for this project was provided by NIH grant XYZ123456789" (I spit you not - I can show you the pics) then we have to go the next level on thinking about this. I'm all for students achieving as high as they can but two things need to happen: (1) they need to put these students in a separate class of "runners" so they don't mop the floor with the student who did good science on a shoestring or within the school lab* and (2) we need to weave the classroom experience and flow of content and process in every subject area to these ISE experiences.
*: yes, I see the loophole - just start hiring research-savvy PhDs to teach at your school and stock it with NMR and PCR and LRF and then it's a race to the top of personnel and experience within the school. THAT'S GOOD - past a certain level, a real writer should be teaching our kids writing, a real musician should be teaching our kids music, a real scientist should be teaching our kids science.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The high-school model needs to be applied from the very beginning. The idea that a class of 30 kids are all at the same academic level and can therefore be taught the same material / pace is absurd. They will still be with other kids of similar social development, especially during the times of the day when they are mostly with their own class. At the same time they are accustomed to the idea that they are in classes with kids of different ages. This doesn't increase the load on teachers.
When I was in 1st grade I remember working with a different group made up of 1st and 2nd graders during reading time, instead of reading with the rest of my class.
The problem is that the many people with influence believe themselves to be 'gifted' when they are in fact mediocre at best. To actively seek out and promote people who are truly gifted would serve to expose this inconvenient truth.
1) Our tests are accurate enough to detect the very best.
2) The very best are there almost solely because of innate talent, not a bit of talent, a bit of luck, and a lot of hard work.
Neither is accurate. Most of them time out test are only good enough to find the guy that is in the top 20% or so, not the top 1%. After that luck is mostly in control. Was the athlete born the right month? If not, then when he is a child he will compete with kids 8 months older who surprise surprise routinely beat him at sports. No one ever realizes he has the skill and is never given the training.
Finally, the real difference between most 'prodigies' and everyone else is that the prodigy spend every last minute they can working on their skill.
I was a 'gifted' child - in large part because my father was originally told I was bad at reading and took huge steps to get me to fall in love with reading. He encouraged me to read comic books, then fantasy novels etc. He made me a huge nerd - and I love him for it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Both my children went to selective public high schools, and in their classes were SOME poor student.
but some kids are gifted, and others are just average, and a great many are below average.
We really can't afford to keep footing the bill for the below average and start getting the the gifted into the schooling they need.
While it sounds good on paper, I can see this making things worse for both "gifted" and "normal" students through unintentional and intentional consequences. Our education system in this country is already over legislated and regulated. Crap like this is why my 5 children are home-schooled. It sucks to have to do it, but at least I know what they are learning without any kind of labeling of themselves by some test evaluated ability. I always aced every test in school, but none of the tests ever prepared be for the real world.
And a 'gifted' child that makes good grades, doesn't have discipline problems, and makes a high score on college entrance exams will be recruited by any number of colleges looking to raise their academic performance metrics.
I grew up in Taiwan. I think I was 6 or 7 and they gave every kid a drawing to color. It was the same drawing for everyone in the class of 50 or so and you could do whatever you wanted with it.
A few weeks later they called my house and said that they think I showed promise and wanted my mom to give them permission to do something. I don't remember the details, but I think my mom declined to let me participate.
At age 10 we emigrated to the U.S. and I was thrown into a local public school. It was easy in comparison. It wasn't until 2 years later that I learned something new in math. And basically I was left back like 2 years because of the move. And because the kids were unmotivated to study, so was I. After living in America for 3 years I became more obsessed with looking cool, acting cool, and fitting in than working hard, like the rest of the kids. I started hitting the books once again when I realized I need to to go to college but by then my math was rusty and my English was not any better. Through some luck and hard work I managed to make it to an engineering program where probably 80% were foreign students from China, India, etc. I realized how unprepared I was in math compared to them and I had a harder time than I should.
Fast forward about 10 years and I work as a software engineer, reading slashdot on a Monday morning. I love America for all the beautiful nature, clean environment, and for the most part, honest and hardworking people, but it's also too brutal and uncivilized for me (lots of murders, inequality, bullying, etc.). I have a hard time deciding where I would like my kids to grow up.
I was a gifted child. Starting from Grade 3, I was in a special program. I went to a middle school that had an entire section for such students, and all my classes were with other gifted children. Then I went to a high school that was exclusively for gifted students, particularly focused on arts and technology. There was pretty much no fault in the system, save for the middle school being horribly overcrowded (which led to discipline problems, and when there's a lot of low-income students mixed with the typically middle-class gifted students, there's some adverse reactions).
It all fell apart in college. I couldn't get any scholarships, because when you're in a program like that, it's HARD. There were very few straight-A students because most of us were learning well above our grade level. I actually ran out of math to take - I did Calculus I (a college-credit class) in my sophomore year, and Statistics (an alternative to Calculus) the next, and that was literally as high as they could teach. Even the "core" classes were advanced - everything except physical education was at least one grade level above normal. Sure, on the state standardized tests we regularly got perfect scores, and my SAT was in the top tenth of a percent, but when a scholarship sees that you were a B-and-C student, they ignore you (it certainly didn't help that I'm middle-class and of no minority group, so I didn't qualify for any of those scholarships, but even the black female students had similar problems). I couldn't afford a good school, and I knew I would be bored out of my mind doing four years at a regular college.
So I did one year at a community college, to knock out the simple stuff cheaply (who CARES where you took Chemistry II when you're a programmer?), and was predictably bored the whole time. I then went to one of those sketchy "get your degree fast!" schools. They taught me absolutely nothing (my high school was several orders of magnitude better), but after testing out of about half the classes needed, I got my B.S. just over two years after I graduated high school, then immediately got a job from one of the internships they'd hooked me up on (I swear those schools have to get kickbacks or something from farming out interns - thankfully I had the foresight to refuse any unpaid internships).
Now, a lot of the stuff that helped me was state-level stuff, and I don't think it's the standard for US education. But if you want to make American education better for gifted children, make that system the standard, then fix the broken college system. Make trade schools for the people who don't need an advanced degree, make it cheaper to get into a college so you don't need a scholarship to qualify, and get some sort of standard in place for comparing grades fairly between unequal schools.
I recommend it. No I do not think that 20 years of hard work will make me into a new Beethoven. However hard work and very good training are what is needed to produce success. Here is an example of how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... her father as an experiment got her and her sister to the chess world. Nearly every sports super star you read about works much harder then his peers. Ditto for most people who succeed in research and hi tech. We should be promoting hard work and stop deluding our selves that we can pick winners because they where a little better in the beginning, which is what I think talent is.
That's about the crappiest description of a straw man I've seen all year.
I totally agree that US should fast-track high performers. The rest of the world does it. Because we do not appropriately reward performance, unemployment is increasing. That said, I can understand why some feel no love for the gifted. Successful kids turn into successful adults. The top 0.1% make bundles of money which does not trickle down enough. We need to put big taxes on the rich, not to punish them, but to keep our society functioning. The alternative will be social breakdown, which could get very ugly.
Birth is the leading cause of death.
We've tried finding the gifted ones, but it cuts into this quarters profits which affects my bonus. Therefore, because of this short term economic issue, we are going to import gifted from world sources, and wonder why the company goes bankrupt later. Ah well, at least I have my signing bonus, and the stock options that were successfully sold when the stock was still worth something. Ta-ta.
Intelligence is not just a one-dimensional thing. Better tailoring education to each individual addresses all the students' needs, not just those of the "best and brightest". Nations who do so will benefit more than will nations with a tight focus on students who perform well in certain ways.
"Intellectual Capital"??? All human labor involves some intelligence. And there's no human labor employed to produce more than one copy of anything that can't be replaced with a sufficiently sophisticated machine. Just call it "labor". No need for more loaded buzzwords.
Why? We have the resources to educate all American Gifted children, so why "cull" them?
You say some of the students in your district can attend the #1 school in country. Did it occur to you that "#1 in the country" by definition means that yours is the ONLY district in the country that offers that opportunity? No other district anywhere in the country offers that, by definition.
Curiostity is just too strong not to. I grew up before the internet, but read nearly every non-fiction book in the local library. I built a "science laboratory" in the basement, ham radio, learning painting, taught myself several musical instruments, and annoyed the local college computer room in later years. I think this sense of "initiative" was what they were looking for when I was offered admission to MIT with scholarship.
Most of my nieces and nephews are smart and do well in structured educational settings. But only one has intiiative and is in his 3rd startup company now.
I feel the same way in the large company I am working now. most of my coworkers display little curiosity about new technologies, books or conferences. They will only go to these things if the management orders and pays them to do so. It is so sad to be around dull people.
It sounds good in principle. Pick the best and give them the best education possible. But in practice, we'd only be selecting for those who do well in timed exams. What about the "gifted" child who fails the exam because he or she has exam fright? Or what about the child who's very good in math but very poor in language that he can't understand those tricky word problems?
And what about the late-bloomers? Those who first show their genius when, say, they reach their teens?
For me, it's still better to improve education overall, rather than concentrate funds on presumably "gifted" children. This way, those chldren who don't get selected
There really is nothing at all that the 1% would not spin to demand more immigration. It has nothing at all to do with talent and everything to do with depressing wages so that they can continue their grand theft middle class. They should be put through a guillotine.
...can also get a good education.
(Whoops, pressed the the enter key too quickly.)
America's tech leaders are literally going to Washington with demands for "comprehensive immigration reform that allows for the hiring of the best and brightest".
I'm honestly surprised that more hasn't been said so far of this statement. I suppose it comes up rather frequently here when visas come up, but I think that it needs to be stated again: there is no STEM worker shortage. There is no lack of qualified people. American companies are just too cheap to train, and don't want to pay American workers proportionate to their talents and the cost of living in America. And I think it's worth repeating that again, and again, and again, because as near as I can tell policy-makers actually seem to believe the nonsense they are being fed.
I was waiting for the "Burma Shave".
From what I've seen Common Core looks like it allows plenty of room for the smartest to stretch - it sets out areas of knowledge, but doesn't try to specify details about what constitutes a good grade.
All that seems to be required is implementing it so that everyone is stretched
An "A" should be a stretch for the smartest couple of people in the class
A "B" should be a stretch for the pretty smart people
A "C" (this was the lowest "honor" grade in Ireland) should be a stretch for the average student
A "D" should represent knowing the subject well enough to go to the next year.
5. In the end, it is up to the child's parents. If the parents are incapable of helping the child, why (and how?!?) should the state intervene?
"Exceptionals" should be helped, not selectively used and abused. Their "talents" are often very specific, their "failings" are usually as numerous and hobbling as the rest of humanity's. The same applies to humanity in general. In order to avoid living in autistic "societies". Where spikes of incredible skill are accompanied by generalized apathy - even incapacity - in almost everything else.Or just plain brutality and coarse savagery.
Not really evolutionary. Bad juju. Very bad.
One of my issues with gifted education in the US is three-fold: the screening process, lack of standardization for program design, and student accountability. All of the above have contributed to a watering down of the curriculum. In my opinion, gifted education after grade three should begin to shift from enrichment to acceleration.
I'm waiting for the home school advocates to weigh in on this issue. Both ends of the bell curve are represented by the home schooled. Gifted kids, whose parents want them to have an education that the public system can't or won't deliver. And the ones who shriek when science, Darwin and anything not found in The Book is mentioned in class.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well said. But don't ignore the value of intelligent managers. Having the best and brightest as CEOs (among other roles) would really be a great thing.
"Ditch digging is hard work" sure, but it's much harder to find someone smart. Your statement highlights a significant cultural flaw in the US: the age of manufacturing and agriculture and heavy labor is over. We need to value the work of the mind over the work of the body. We need to value intelligence over athletic ability.
If you're clearly among the best as a Football player in high school, we have an amazing system to pay your way and make sure you get both the opportunity and training to excel. And, sure, we get some good entertainers out of it, and there's some money in professional sports to funnel back into this, but money-wise it's small compared to the money in tech.
Where's the parallel system for people who would clearly make good engineers, scientists, or business leaders? Where's the cultural desire to pick the smart ones to run companies, not the (often former athlete) great salesmen?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
which bequeathed us with Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Lady Gaga?
in America for leaving behind the genetically defective people who do not have capabilities of learning.
Pull one of them aside, ask 'em what we should do, then do it.
Problem solved. What else ya got?
My Tech Posts on Twitter
so like so much of the much vaunted over-hyped american constitution,the bit about all americans being born equals is now seen to be so much bs? i would have thought if you counted properly that put together,the elitist further education system costs more for so called bright kids than it does for average or below average students,i bet there are not many small local schools etc that employ tax evasion specialists like aclot of the ivy league ones do.
What sensible person invests in the WOTST choices available? Screw equality, I am in favor of progress. Besides, greater progress is both possible and desirable; greater equality is impossible and undesirable.
You can't standardize education because you can't standardize people.
The problem isn't with the grades, it's with the utter lack of acknowledgement that different students learn in different ways.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I agree with you in a couple of places. For example I believe that we somehow have curriculum which allows someone who doesn't know how to write code get a degree in Computer Science. I've interviewed dozens of these people. I also believe that education is very often not succeeding at being interesting to a large number of students.
Where we part company most significantly is in two points:
a) Homeschooling is an answer with some general utility. If we assume your claims are accurate then you are a single earner family. Which means in my country (Canada) you immediately eliminate most families and likely most of them are the poorer ones. When you look at some of the attempts to assess the performance of Homeschooling you notice two things. i) It's not done very well, rudner(1999) for example constantly compares to a national average without normalizing and b) the objective differences are not very large. Rudner makes a big deal of comparing by decile but when you compare say his national average vs. his lowest income homeschoolers (as an attempt to normalize for socioeconomic factors) the difference in raw scores is about 10%. When you think how close that is to the spread of your data and keep in mind all we have done is normalizing for a single factor. It seems reasonable that homeschooling probably doesn't add much to a child's education in terms of objective test results.
b) The purpose of school, you or work is to perpetually keep your child interested (or challenge them). When your child is hired in a job it is because they can provide a service that other people are willing to pay for. While it is in a company's best interest to keep them from being so unhappy your child leaves and having them incur the cost of re-hiring. It's not their job to keep them challenged. That's actually the job of your child. If a student or employee can finish all their work before it needs to be done. Then they can work ahead or pursue other work. Homeschooling looks like a lot of work for minimal gain. I do what most involved parents do. Give our kids homework outside of school, evenings and weekends. Most of it is self-directed. I shift the curriculum around based on proficiency. As my daughter started to read several grades above her level, we started doing math. She's approaching the same level there and we will probably switch to sciences probably chemistry and computer programming. My wife handles French and Violin lessons.
I had to Google sapience, that doesn't happen very often - thanks!
Both my children went to selective public high schools, and in their classes were SOME poor student.
There was some poor student in your child's selective public high school class? Oh, the horrors!!! How gauche!
When I was in 3rd grade the (US public) elementary school decided to have an experimental program where they grouped all the gifted kids from 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade into the same classroom. We had an excellent teacher who had a curriculum that made it work. After all, most of what you learn in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade isn't all that incremental except for Math, and math was taught by splitting the class into groups... kind of a class within the class. It was fantastic. Our performance skyrocketed. Almost as much as the remainder of the schools performance collapsed. It's a tried and true teaching strategy to make group work by combining the poor students with the good ones. That way work still gets done. With no good students left in their classrooms, the rest of the school actually had to work at teaching the poorer students instead of letting the 'smart kid' do all the work and call it good. Additionally, the 'per classroom' test scores plummeted. It was good for the kids in a million different ways, but the program was scrapped after 2 years because the numbers looked worse.
The "chosen" people will then be bred with other "chosen" people to pave the way to our nations success....
"I know this... this is a unix system" -- Jurrasic Park
Posting to undo mistaken mod.
I left high school in the middle of 11th grade for much the same reasons. In general, unschooling/homeschooling are a great option for many people of all sorts of ability. A "basic income" could also replace compulsory schooling:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
More on the problems with compulsory schooling from a NYS "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion,class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."
By the way, Gatto points out the "gifted" label itself is a scam:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling. Thatâ(TM)s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isnâ(TM)t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We donâ(TM)t need state-certified teachers to make education happenâ"that probably guarantees it wonâ(TM)t."
And also by Gatto:
http://www.bartlebyproject.com...
"By 1973, schools were big business. In small towns and cities across the land schoolteaching was now a lucrative occupation - with short hours, long vacations, paid medical care, and safe pensions; administrators earned the equivalent of local doctors, lawyers, and judges. Eccentricity in classrooms was steeply on the wane, persecuted wherever it survived. Tracking was the order of the day, students being steered into narrower and narrower classifications supposedly based on standardized test scores. Plentiful exceptions existed, however, in the highest classifications of "gifted and talented," to accommodate the children of parents who might otherwise have disrupted the smooth operation of the bureaucracy. But even in these top classifications, the curriculum was profoundly diminished from standards of the past. What was asked of prosperous children in the 1970s would have been standard for children of coal miners and steel workers in the 1940s and 1950s. "
More here:
http://homeschooladvocate.org/...
And it gets even worse, by others:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
"The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Instead of having the 1% pay for super-schools for Superkids, the 1% demand that the bottom 80%, who pay 88% of all net taxes (sales, employment, social security, excise, fees, state taxes amount to 70% of all taxes) by shortchanging the kids who need help to avoid becoming welfare bums...whom the 1% will then starve to death. How about the financial sales tax be 8 1/2% also? Cures the expropriation of STEM kids into finance AND rewards work over holdings. Pretty good idea to me!
...in the 1960s, where our high school was divided into "Honors," "General," and "Modified" courses. One year, because of a scheduling error, I ended up in a "General" English course for the first week of the school year. I was utterly shocked at the level of instruction, which was like early grade school stuff to me. Yes, the gifted are different. Treat them well, and they will excel. Mix them with the masses, and you'll get what you paid for. BTW, I loved the "New Math."
What? In the way our public school education is funded the worse schools in the worse area get the less money and the best schools in the best area get the most money. As for education gifted children my suggestion is you get out of their way and just give them what they want. Don't try and educate them. You ain't smart enough. Just give them the resources they asked for.
We're pretty bad at it, because of the systemic assumption that the most common learning style is the only one.
I don't see screening for giftedness going down too well here in North America when every yuppie parent and tiger mom thinks their kid is gifted and the kids are coached and pushed from an early age to excel at academics. They know how to game any system and they will coach their kids to score high on any test given. The test won't be so much indicative of whether a child is gifted so much as it is an indication of how educated, ambitious and affluent their parents are.
Having worked in schools for many years as a tech coordinator, EVERY school I have ever been in spends between 10 to 15 times as much on each special education student as they do on gifted and talented.
I have had to darn near commit crimes to get laptop computer, software, and books into the hands of gifted students because as soon as any of that shows up, the SPED department comes calling with what is the GOLDEN TICKET of special education. The I.E.P. It stands for Independent Educational Plan. If a sped teacher wants a bigger whiteboard or more computers in their class all they have to do is get it wrote up in a students IEP saying that the special ed student needs it for their education and it is like the word of god just came down and they had better get what the IEP says their student needs.
Equality is one thing and kids with special needs should never be left out, but to have a future engineer be told they cant have a laptop while we hand off a sped kid their 3rd one after they smash the first 2 is just not acceptable.
Where I am at now, we have multiple kids that are in special ed that actually have multiple paraprofessionals follow them around. 1 takes notes for a kid that will never be able to read or speak and the other stops him from screaming in class. Great use of $$$$. All this while the gifted kids do everything they can to get out of the classrooms and take online courses they get thru in no time at all and then leave school.
We do it in the US as well, but it's a terrible mistake for schools to engage in that.
When I was a kid, the tests to make the distinction were made during 1st grade with the high scorers being placed into a gifted program. Then there was another round later on that only took the top students as well. The problem though is that the students who wind up being the smartest later on aren't necessarily going to make the cut during that first round because their brains are still developing. So, you throw a shit ton of money at students that are marginally better off. The tests are also skewed so that age is taken into account regardless of whether there's more educational time under the assumption that maturity matters. And it does matter to an extent, but not anywhere near as much as academic rigor does.
Anyways, years later the one kid out of my social grouping that didn't get singled out for that special treatment was the only one to go to college early. They could have saved all that funding and just provided better access for all the students.
Mainstreaming has its own issues, but don't kid yourself about the benefits of segregation. You can learn a ton from the other students at normal schools.
I wish this myth would just die.
Everybody learns the same way, some people naturally prioritize one sort of stimulus over another, but there aren't these large gulfs that some people believe. Every class throughout the term should be using all the modes possible to teach. Not because of student preferences, but because the brain wants to connect with information in many different ways.
The fact that there are now people who refuse to learn because it's not being given to them in their preferred methodology is not evidence that it's true, it's evidence that students are being coddled. If they were being taught how to deal with the information those preferences would be greatly reduced because they would just know how to handle it.
Like the title says, an AA or AS is essentially just the first 2 years of a 4 year program. There's a bit of difference to it as they're self contained in most cases, but you might get to skip a class or two by not bothering. When I went that route all of the classes transferred so that I didn't have to take them again, and I don't recall any of them being optional.
If you can't finish an associate's then your likelihood of finishing a bachelor's is rather slim.
That's a rather naive view, a friend of my mother bullied the schools into not just taking her son early when he wasn't ready for kindergarten, but later on bullied his way into the gifted classes by hiring consultants.
Yes, if the kid is dull as a sack of hammers no amount of money will close the gap, but if you're within striking distance a team of consultants can figure out how to make the kid technically qualify even if the kid shouldn't be there.
My kids were identified as gifted in GA; over there the program is called target; kids are pulled out of their regular classroom one day per week, and receive special classes (focuses more on problem solving and independent studying) ; my kids loved it and we too. We just moved to Washington state, here they call it quest, they have pull-out one day per week and a full-time program ; my kids are in the pull-out and they love it. I've heard of similar programs in South Carolina.
"Ditch digging is hard work" sure, but it's much harder to find someone smart.
Are you sure about that? Citation? Why would you think that the amount of well functioning brains is lower than the amount of well functionning bodies?
Ah, i see you mentionned football...
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
statist program when I was a kid, and think that gifted kids will be gifted. I don't see any proof that these kids need higher amounts of education, they probably will end up teaching themselves anyway.
It takes more than a well-functioning brain to be an engineer or artist - it takes years of training. OTOH. no one digs a ditch with a shovel any more, so if you meant "backhoe operator", well, all due respect for the apex predator of the internet!
In any case, it's skill that's valuable, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Completely concur to start with defining what "smart" means before we start. I do not consider being able to gain a Chemistry degree as a sign of intelligence. Good memory, hard work, ability to focus certainly but even rocket science ain't ...
If you want true innovation, creativity and genius, you are not looking for "smart kids." Which is a shame. Because armies of ant scientists are not going to bring in the next big thing, the next revolution, or be the leaders of tomorrow.
I find solace in that thought ... ...
Love without logic is insanity. And vice versa.
What's more interesting is that people with well functioning bodies actually make better engineers. Because the engineering concepts used in the human body are way more advanced than the crappy simplified squares that engineers build. Geeks think they're so cool because the can work out the formula for a ballistic trajectory on paper, when that is child's play compared to actually getting your body to calculate a throw and actually accomplish it.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Unrecognized, gifted children face mind-numbing boredom and a horrific bureaucracy bent on their adherence to expectations set for "normal" students. By the time the SAT rolls around these students are psychologically fucked up. Too many are so tired of school and so uninterested in doing anything more that without an intervention of some type, they typically don't. Imagine what is lost then.
All we gain are genius-level gas station attendants.
PAY TEACHERS MORE, but require higher degrees and better grades from applicants. Yes, you need a bachelor's degree in math and a master's in education to teach third graders math.
FIRE REDUNDANT, loathsome, boring, corrupt ADMINISTRATORS. There are so many fucking administrators.
I remember when the administrators in my high school district were caught spending 100Ks of school funds on SUVs and fancy living. This is not very rare. Idle hands are the Devil's playthings.
With these two items in place, Common Core will (slowly) perish.
Is that why I have to listen to Bach every time I fill my car up?
You reap the benefit of an educated population. Even if you, your spouse, your parents, your spouse's parents, your cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, etc. didn't benefit directly from the public education system, you still benefit. If you don't believe me, go to a country where no education is required and report back. May I recommend Somalia?
As for guilt trips, you may lack the empathy to care but it's the appropriate thing for them to do. Nothing else works. Reason doesn't work in America. A recent study found that people were less likely to vaccinate their children if they were told that vaccines had no connection to Autism. Notice, no. Simply putting the idea in their heads was enough to get them to reconsider vaccination and this was even after extolling the incredible benefits of vaccination programs.
People operate emotionally on some matters and if a guilt trip is what is required to get proper funding for education, more power to those pushing the fucking guilt trip. Good God, you readily admit that the public school system abuses students but instead of a desire to fix it for your country, you run for the door. This makes you at the very least a coward if not an outright traitor in spirit. Yes, curricula need to be rethought, technology needs to be better integrated, evidence needs to trump tradition, etc. But we also need to face a very real reality as the buildings are crumbling and virtually no one who we would actually want teaching our children wants to teacher, schools are underfunded.
So long as they're underfunded, no money can be spent on rethinking curricula, experimenting with new ways and technology, etc. In addition the cheapest administrators and teachers will always be of a "it was good enough for me" mentality, and with the cheapest teachers too many students will be smarter than their instructors - with instructors who were never able to handle those smarter than they.
* I would also note that a lot of students can require both advanced and remedial attention.
Oh, but fuck it, you fund education for us all. It's not like I pay shit. Oh wait...