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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.
Wonder what the problem is? You tell me....
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
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.
America's tech leaders have no choice.
Radical egalitarians and teacher's unions control education in the USA. Tech leaders are no match for the political power of "education" workers.
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.
America's tech leaders want to reduce wages.
Play Command HQ online
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.
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
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.
You got the "actual agenda" question right. Unfortunately many others here didn't. They get a fail by falling for some of the most elementary propaganda tricks. A particularly effective one here is flattering people's egos. It's amazing how book smart people can be so gullible.
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
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.
Do you have some *gasp* numbers to demonstrate that the "crazy amount of money" you claim is such a high percentage of education budgets that it impedes the ability to deal with gifted students, or are we just supposed to accept the assertions of a smart fellow like you?
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!
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.
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."
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.
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.
Well, the USA has thrived on draining brain from the rest of the world for most of its existence. Space program? Thank the german rocket engineers...
It's part of the american system - offer really cool universities that are way too large for ourselves (which is why they get filled up with football players and crap) so they attract the brightest minds from elsewhere.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Do you know what the biggest factor in achievement is? How rich your parents are. It's not how talented you are, how much "potential" you have, it's how wealthy your parents are, the money being pumped into education is to try and bring equality in that achievement.
Of course, people will say "I did alright for myself and my parents were lower class/poor", you are the exception - not the norm.
The opposite could be to just concentrate on the top 20%, and make sure they earn enough to support the bottom 80% by paying more taxes.
..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.
And if you don't have the money to do so, future be damned?
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
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).
Then again, which child was nurtured and told through his whole life that he was special? The smart kid, whose abilities are ignored and who's made fun of four doing well in school, or the kid who can knock site all the other children? Perhaps the awkwardness isn't genetic...
Gifted students, particularly those who want to learn, don't need 1 on 1 attention, they can be more self sufficient
So they should cost no more, and arguable even less than regular students to educate. This "no money for gifted students" is a ploy to get more money.
they do need to be taught something different from the rest of the masses...
The masses? Are you trying for self parody?
How to continue to learn even though everything has always come easy. How to stand out in a crowd as being exceptional when they are exceptional.
Two things which work against each other. One of the biggest problems with very good students is that, as you observe, they become lazy. Telling them they're "oh so special" exacerbates that problem because it explains and rationalizes why they don't have to work so hard. Don't tell them they're "oh so special", which is no different that the other feel good crap you find in education these days, and put them in classes where they're held to very high standards. That will make them feel less special, since they're surrounded by equally good students, and teach them they actually have to work to compete.
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. =====
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.
Hear, hear! Teaching the smartest kids should cost no more than regular students.
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
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!
Still no meaningful numbers to back up your assertion that "that's where the money is going". Obviously you can't "know the solution", because you haven't even shown that there's a problem.
NFL stars have a beneficial effect on society? I guess they stimulate the economy, but that is more the product itself, the stars are replaceable.
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?
Those programs for high-IQ kids exist. They're not everywhere, though, and they're not always free. Just as the regular public schools don't except everyone on the very low end of the intelligence scale (there's a point below where there is no mainstream opportunity), the regular schools aren't always the best for someone multiple standard deviations above the average. But there are private schools, magnet schools, STEM schools, and universities which will take in the truly gifted - sometimes on scholarship. But at that age, it's the parents who have to recognize the talent and actually take the initiative. And, sadly, most parent don't because - let's face it - it's easier to keep you current job and let little Johnny-genius skate through classes being bored than it would be to do what it takes to get him (or her) into a school where the advance learning is taught.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
What use is the average gifted player who lacks the skill to throw a ball or to spot a game situation? Those players get trained to be able to lead by example. No one expects the rookie to learn Football all by himself and then come on the field and throw the deciding pass. Everyone knows that this requires years of constant exercise and training and educated coaches and medical supervision far away from the normal school curriculum. But the intelligent children are supposed to learn it all by themselves?
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.
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.
... 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."
On the other hand, the NFL star leads by example, unites us in support for our team
So in other words, a bunch of morons join a tribe and then mindlessly cheer for more morons who have a knack for fiddling around with balls. Yeah, so damn useful.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Here, I'll save you some time: gifted kids don't need help.
They also don't need to be held back - or worse, labeled as ADD.
The kids that can advance faster should be allowed to advance faster.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
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
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.
Yes, there are people who won the lottery. This doesn't make buying lottery tickets a worthwile investition.
American schools were MUCH different when he went, though.
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.
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.
Human to AC: the whole point of having sapience is seeing things not just like they are, but also like how they could be, and if that's a prettier picture, steering them towards it. Animals take things as they are, humans don't have to.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
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
...can also get a good education.
(Whoops, pressed the the enter key too quickly.)
The solution, imo, is to have a standard of ability that students must meet before they are admitted into public school.
Americans need to realize that refusing children admission into a public school is not denying them an education - there's still homeschooling (which can be done for free), co-ops (several families of children with disabilities could pool resources to be able to afford necessary resources. Single-parent families and/or families where both parents work, work together to trade-off on supervision time. Etc.), and private schools.
So we have a standard for physical, mental, and behavioral ability. Little Johnny requires a diaper due to his disability, and therefore must have two aides available at all times to change his diaper? No; let his mother change his diaper, or pay for the two aides herself at a private school. Little Molly interrupts class by having random emotional outbursts where she throws desks at students that are concentrating (I actually went to school with a girl like this, who made the 1 class I actually liked hell)? Nope, she's out of the school. Billy has Downs, he will never be able to keep up with the class, but his mom wants him to feel "normal"? No, he isn't normal, mom just has to accept that.
And before anyone pulls out the argument that "Parents that don't care about education just won't bother to educate a kid that can't get into (or is kicked out of) public school" - that's bullshit. NOT putting your kid in school is already an option that is completely legal - not EDUCATING your kid, on the other hand, is illegal. How about we start calling people on this law?
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.
Leads with no purpose, you mean.
Pointless support, for a team that accomplishes nothing of value.
What, by enticing stupid people to waste their money on team-branded shit they don't need?
Fuck, professional sports even fails at being worthwhile recreation! Just ask the typical football lover what he's going to be doing on a Sunday afternoon. Is he going to be playing football? Hell no, he's going to sit his fat ass down on the couch and eat goddamn pork rinds all day while watching overpaid assholes run around on TV!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Hey dumbass, he did tell you where the money is going. If you're too stupid to multiply the reciprocal of his students-per-teacher figure by teacher salary to get dollars-per-student, that's your problem.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
If you are gifted at basketball or football (or hockey - in the north), you will reach an age where you do not have to pay out anything and often get money and goods under the table.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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?
Excellent point...but "investition"?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
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
It's a self-correcting problem. America doesn't need to help gifted students, and should continue its present course, Meanwhile, countries like Japan, Korea, and Germany will avoid mainstreaming and will fast-track the smarter kids. In a generation or two, we'll see who has the better economy.
But, but....won't doing that hurt little Johnny/Suzie's self esteem if they see little Nyguen getting promoted ahead of them based on nothing more than sheer ability?!??
[rolls eyes]
It makes sense, but in the US for years now, we seem to be more interested in catering to the lowest common denominator, than trying to promote true talent.
I think for those on the lower end, we should make vocational education something easier for those kids with that type of proficiency to find their way into...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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!
We're pretty bad at it, because of the systemic assumption that the most common learning style is the only one.
"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.
Apparently you don't understand the bell curve and standard deviation either.
For the 16% at either end of the bell curve, there are indeed large gulfs in how they learn, and those will be the ones hurt by Common Core, because they won't be served by Common Core, at all.
For the 68% in the center, you are absolutely correct.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
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.
It's not naive at all it's based on fact. But yes I guess some systems will allow for rule bending from the parent level and as anyone in the US knows - "Aptitude" tests (SATs for example) have flaws. The established system in Canada is quite rigid and testing is done in the absense of parents and your kid could study forever and it's just something that can't be learned. Just like you can't take a kid with a genetic defect that puts the kid at an IQ of 80 - and through learning bring his IQ up to 100. Just not likely to happen. Sure they can be 'smarter' through learning but this testing dertermines intrinsic aptitude and learned things aren't what is tested.
anecdote: in my elementary school there was 1 gifted teacher, where over the day, each grade's gifted kids (we had about 100 kids per grade, and 6-7 qualified as gifted in florida) would go into a class with the gifted teacher for an hour or so.
I also was far enough ahead in math that to help me stop being a disruption (I was not one to sit still) I was sent to help in the special needs class. IIRC, there were 6 kids in that class, and 2 full time teachers with special training.
I don't think it's crazy overfunding. I saw first hand that if you just get the few really gifted kids away from drudgery for an hour or so and challenge them with creative learning, In Florida the entrance was usually based on an IQ test given at a young age (I took it at 5). So oddly, across the students I remember, I was from a wealthy family, 6-8 from middle class families, and 2 from poorer backgrounds. it helps a lot. And frankly, the kids who are learning disabled I gained a huge respect for. My experience with the disabled is they usually try far harder than almost anyone else. I know if I had so much trouble wrapping my head around addition I would have given up way before some of these kids did, spending years trying to really "get" it.
But this is one state, and 1 district within the state. I've heard of a lot worse.
Like the title says, an AA or AS is essentially just the first 2 years of a 4 year program.
That has not been my experience when researching which secondary school to go to. My experience when researching curriculum is that Associate degrees focus almost entirely on using the most popular tools and cookie-cutter ways to solve common problems with those tools, while 4 year Universities have a mix of theory, analysis, and application; not just application.
We had an issue in my Uni where students with an AS in Information Systems were flooding in from 2 year schools, had credits in SQL, but had no understanding of set theory or how to even write an SQL statement, but they knew how to wizard their way through Access or Excel. Not just one school either, but a common issue from nearly ever 2 year school.