Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

Job Truniht posted:

Computers can't do abstract. They can't write journal papers. We can do computing, but we can also do many more things in mathematics than that. Computers are not worth more than people. It describes a logically impossible hypothetical situation written at a time when computers and computing were relatively new, large, and expensive. In other words, this story is not meant to be taken at face value.

Understanding arithmetic doesn't meant you understand the fundamentals of math, which are never taught at a high school level. However, the inverse is always true. If you understand the fundamentals of mathematics, you understand arithmetic.

Okay, so to boil it down, your superior approach to education left you still totally ignorant of how to approach literature.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Job Truniht
Nov 7, 2012

MY POSTS ARE REAL RETARDED, SIR

Effectronica posted:

Okay, so to boil it down, your superior approach to education left you still totally ignorant of how to approach literature.

I'm looking at it on context of this argument. It's built on a premise that only works in a self contained story and nothing more. Otherwise, someday in a dystopian future people will forget math and some goon will relearn math from arithmetic and computers will be worth more than people therefore teach arithmetic is dumb the argument of the day.

e: Actually Aub killing himself actually resonated with me after wasting my time reading that poo poo

Job Truniht fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Sep 16, 2015

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

Job Truniht posted:

I'm looking at it on context of this argument. It's built on a premise that only works in a self contained story and nothing more. Otherwise, someday in a dystopian future people will forget math and some goon will relearn math from arithmetic and computers will be worth more than people therefore teach arithmetic is dumb the argument of the day.

e: Actually Aub killing himself actually resonated with me after wasting my time reading that poo poo

Okay. The story is about, literally, the way in which a militaristic society only sees things in terms of military usefulness, such that even someone's hobbies become an instrument of war. It also goes into how this makes the society stupider. This is tied to the rise of the computer in the context of the Cold War so as to create a context for this hobby to also be liberating, giving you a feeling of power that can't be taken away by the oppressive society of the Cold War.

Asimov, while not a canonical writer, nevertheless had things to say in his stories, and he understood that the technology was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Eqeta.

Four Score
Feb 27, 2014

by zen death robot
Lipstick Apathy
Infintesimal cross-section of American education system makes changes of little to no consequence wrt addressing how lovely American education is, freak out everyone

Bast Relief
Feb 21, 2006

by exmarx
Holy poo poo what a lot of hot garbage.

I was one of those bored kids, but never caused more trouble than a little bit of pranking and smart-rear end jokes. Please tell me about the hugely disruptive things you all did that trumps what bored, hopeless, and underperforming students do, the kind of kids who really have given up on achieving at all.

We act like just because we were unchallenged in school, that somehow a public school can't provide a program for all. AP and IB will continue to exist, but more students are going to be allowed to enter. Deal with it. Certainly some kids would benefit from learning trades and being connected with job opportunities. The difference from schools in my day is exposure to the shop and internships is now coming from entering an academy within the school that offers those things. That means you'll have kids destined to work as lineman learning alongside kids destined for engineering degrees. What's wrong with that? I think it's absolutely vital that we educate our students who are not destined for academics in problem solving, critical thinking and communication. Do we really want people without those skills working construction on the buildings we use? Working in food service? Sharing community space with us?

Tracking students into remedial courses lowers expectations, and wouldn't you know it, results in lower performance compared to mixed classes.

But hold on, a special snowflake is bored, and is totally being held back from being the youngest person to receive the Nobel.

Tacky-Ass Rococco
Sep 7, 2010

by R. Guyovich

Bast Relief posted:

Holy poo poo what a lot of hot garbage.

I was one of those bored kids, but never caused more trouble than a little bit of pranking and smart-rear end jokes. Please tell me about the hugely disruptive things you all did that trumps what bored, hopeless, and underperforming students do, the kind of kids who really have given up on achieving at all.
...
But hold on, a special snowflake is bored, and is totally being held back from being the youngest person to receive the Nobel.

There appears to be a strong inclination in this thread to take one's personal, anecdotal experiences and generalize them. I had an experience which was wholly different than and contrary to yours -- which one of our experiences was correct? Which one should be generalized? (Neither of them.)

Junkyard Poodle
May 6, 2011


Tracking in math is a good thing. AP programs are a good thing. Holding talented individuals to the lowest common denominator is a silly practice. I hope the parents in the district use the Parent Trigger law and correct this soon.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Panzeh posted:

You can kinda tell me about the cushy white-collar nature of being an assistant manager of a wal-mart and then tell me about how a paying apprenticeship(which is also common in other college degree fields such as architecture) is worse than dropping thousands of dollars on college.

But is an apprenticeship better than free college?

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant

Junkyard Poodle posted:

I hope the parents in the district use the Parent Trigger law and correct this soon.
:golfclap:

Somewhere, Michelle Rhee's clit is throbbing...

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Bast Relief posted:

Holy poo poo what a lot of hot garbage.

I was one of those bored kids, but never caused more trouble than a little bit of pranking and smart-rear end jokes. Please tell me about the hugely disruptive things you all did that trumps what bored, hopeless, and underperforming students do, the kind of kids who really have given up on achieving at all.

It doesn't "trump" what hopeless students do, it's almost the exact same thing. Fighting/bullying, skipping school, making the classroom environment nearly impossible to teach in effectively, getting drunk and high (often during class!), etc. The fact that the education system is badly failing students on the lower end should not be justification for letting them fail another group of students instead. Regardless of why kids aren't engaged with their education, they do some really destructive (and often self-destructive) poo poo.

Since the curriculum is the same anyway, just accelerated, there's not even a good argument that it's a form of tracking (and, indeed, as a result, our gifted program had people entering and leaving every year), and since those children would take up space in another classroom anyway, it makes no sense to say it's an unfair use of resources. This opposition to gifted programs seems to come either from gifted programs that are being administered improperly and used as an exclusionary setting for high achievers, or out of pure spite, and neither of those seem to me to be a good reason to be against what is, in essence, a special education program.

Surely everyone would be (very rightly) enraged if schools said, "gently caress it, anyone more than two standard deviations below the mean cannot be helped, we need to focus on the majority." Why does this all of a sudden change when you switch "below" with "above", especially considering that giftedness often presents with some form of learning disability? The education system has an obligation to meet the diverse needs of all students.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

Are gifted classes really privileging those kids that much, though? They often cause "issues" in normal classes because they're bored, and a lot of the people who can coast through high school with no effort are hosed as soon as they encounter an actual challenge because they have no work ethic or study skills. Inasmuch as school is just as much about teaching "intangibles" as well as academics, gifted kids would be deprived of those important skills if there were no option for gifted classes available.

I've seen someone go down that route, flunk out of university, and try to kill themselves while drunk and high on crack cocaine. I know other people who've faced the similar problem (completely crumbling at their first actual challenge) and gone on to commit suicide because of it. So, when you say that gifted classes are simply privileging an already-privileged minority, I'm going to say you don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about.

It's obvious that the current pedagogy is not working for the vast majority of students, but it's a complete non-sequitur to suggest that eliminating gifted classes would do even the tiniest bit to help. Those kids are still going to need to be in some class somewhere, after all.

I'm not saying that gifted classes should be eliminated (though I think they're another symptom of the broken system). I'm saying that people disproportionately focus on them. When I said "privileged minority", you discarded "minority" completely - along with the entire rest of my post - and spent your entire reply asserting that the <25% of people who can do 12th-grade level reading and math when they graduate from high school are the real victims of our educational system, and that making sure they're not bored is way more important than the fact that three-quarters of high school grads can't do math and half of them only have "basic" reading comprehension abilities. For some reason, any educational reform discussion gets swarmed by people who are way more concerned about the 9% of American students in gifted programs than the 14% of American high school grads who are functionally illiterate. Just look at the opening of this thread. Algebra I was being moved to high school because the vast majority of kids were failing it or barely scraping by with terrible grades in it, but the debate about it is dominated by "but what about the few students who didn't fail :qq: ", like it's not even a problem to have a weed-out class in loving middle school.

Jack of Hearts posted:

I don't quite understand. Are you saying that calculus is part of a "basic but comprehensive education," which you argue the school system is failing to provide? That's fine, as far as it goes, but it's difficult to criticize schools for not teaching kids calculus when they legitimately don't give a poo poo.

(Source: I was a kid who made it to calculus who didn't give a poo poo.)

What do you think is the unique property of calculus that, unlike all other knowledge taught in the 13+ years of American schooling, causes kids to not give a poo poo about it?

There isn't one. It's up to the school, the curriculum, the teacher, and the teaching style to get students motivated. You weren't motivated because the educational system failed to get you motivated, which is just one aspect of the large structural problems with math education that Common Core is trying to fix (spoiler alert: it's going to fail, because the system is far too broken for incremental improvement).

If you're clever, you might notice that this applies to gifted students too! Just as the educational system is failing to keep the students that it's not suited to interested and motivated, it's also failing to keep the ones that it is suited to interested and motivated. Do you people really think the smart kids were the only ones who were ever bored or unmotivated in class, and that the only reason you weren't interested in school was because you were too smart to be entertained by the same things as the struggling plebes who were just having so much fun drowning under a morass of poorly-taught math?

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Main Paineframe posted:

If you're clever, you might notice that this applies to gifted students too! Just as the educational system is failing to keep the students that it's not suited to interested and motivated, it's also failing to keep the ones that it is suited to interested and motivated. Do you people really think the smart kids were the only ones who were ever bored or unmotivated in class, and that the only reason you weren't interested in school was because you were too smart to be entertained by the same things as the struggling plebes who were just having so much fun drowning under a morass of poorly-taught math?

Is the bolded section referring to your conception of gifted students? Because, if so, you're incorrect. The school system is not geared towards gifted students in the slightest, which is why it's important to have specialized educational programming for them. At most, you can say that the school system is suited to high achievers, but you have yet to so much as acknowledge that there is far from a one-to-one correspondence between high academic achievement and giftedness. A lot of the people who ended up in my gifted program weren't tested because their teachers figured they were really smart; they were tested because they were causing significant problems, and often showed tremendous academic under-achievement. It's, I suppose, a happy accident that it turned out they were actually gifted instead of developmentally delayed and/or emotionally disturbed.

Your assumption seems to be that gifted kids are already ahead of their peers, and that gifted programs exist only to put them further ahead, when this is far from the truth. You express a desire to help the students who feel hopeless and are under-achieving, and at risk of dropping out, without realizing that these two groups have a significant intersection. Consider, too, that just because gifted kids are able to learn faster, does not mean they do not require instruction. They don't pop out of the womb already knowing everything they need to know, and life is not some sort of RPG where they level up every year and automatically learn new things. The difference is the speed at which the curriculum can and should be presented, not the material itself -- this is why it's so important to ensure that these children remain engaged. If they do not, they will not learn the things they should know, and there's a risk that they will be one of the under-prepared, under-achieving high school graduates (or drop-outs) that you indeed profess to be more concerned with.

This is a separate issue, too, from what grade level Algebra I is taught it; it's just that, in the course of this discussion, lots of people repeatedly talk about dismantling gifted programs as well, which is counter-productive.

esquilax
Jan 3, 2003

Main Paineframe posted:

I'm not saying that gifted classes should be eliminated (though I think they're another symptom of the broken system). I'm saying that people disproportionately focus on them. When I said "privileged minority", you discarded "minority" completely - along with the entire rest of my post - and spent your entire reply asserting that the <25% of people who can do 12th-grade level reading and math when they graduate from high school are the real victims of our educational system, and that making sure they're not bored is way more important than the fact that three-quarters of high school grads can't do math and half of them only have "basic" reading comprehension abilities. For some reason, any educational reform discussion gets swarmed by people who are way more concerned about the 9% of American students in gifted programs than the 14% of American high school grads who are functionally illiterate. Just look at the opening of this thread. Algebra I was being moved to high school because the vast majority of kids were failing it or barely scraping by with terrible grades in it, but the debate about it is dominated by "but what about the few students who didn't fail :qq: ", like it's not even a problem to have a weed-out class in loving middle school.


What do you think is the unique property of calculus that, unlike all other knowledge taught in the 13+ years of American schooling, causes kids to not give a poo poo about it?

There isn't one. It's up to the school, the curriculum, the teacher, and the teaching style to get students motivated. You weren't motivated because the educational system failed to get you motivated, which is just one aspect of the large structural problems with math education that Common Core is trying to fix (spoiler alert: it's going to fail, because the system is far too broken for incremental improvement).

If you're clever, you might notice that this applies to gifted students too! Just as the educational system is failing to keep the students that it's not suited to interested and motivated, it's also failing to keep the ones that it is suited to interested and motivated. Do you people really think the smart kids were the only ones who were ever bored or unmotivated in class, and that the only reason you weren't interested in school was because you were too smart to be entertained by the same things as the struggling plebes who were just having so much fun drowning under a morass of poorly-taught math?

This issue in this case is that gifted classes have sort of been eliminated for math - the San Francisco Unified district has lightened standards for math, but unlike the Los Angeles or Oakland districts is preventing the upper ability groups from taking Algebra in middle school. When they're using the term "tracking" as a boogeyman harm to the upper ability groups is a legitimate concern.

It's the biggest concern in this case because those are the students that the current event is harming, there probably wouldn't be much opposition if their answer were tailored to the students who were actually struggling instead of being a one-size-fits-all solution.

Unseen
Dec 23, 2006
I'll drive the tanker
In my home town, we took placement tests to determine what math classes we should take grades 5-8.

In high school we pretty much decided our own fate for class difficulty. If your grades were particularly terrible you'd have to bargain with a guidance counselor to get into advanced courses.

Isn't letting kids choose their own difficulty (with guidance) the ultimate solution? Everyone gets what they want.

WhiskeyJuvenile
Feb 15, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo
gifted kids can learn on their loving own jesus stop loving being a god damned baby and worry about how do we teach kids how to loving read by the time they're 18

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

Is the bolded section referring to your conception of gifted students? Because, if so, you're incorrect. The school system is not geared towards gifted students in the slightest, which is why it's important to have specialized educational programming for them. At most, you can say that the school system is suited to high achievers, but you have yet to so much as acknowledge that there is far from a one-to-one correspondence between high academic achievement and giftedness. A lot of the people who ended up in my gifted program weren't tested because their teachers figured they were really smart; they were tested because they were causing significant problems, and often showed tremendous academic under-achievement. It's, I suppose, a happy accident that it turned out they were actually gifted instead of developmentally delayed and/or emotionally disturbed.

You're working from a common, but fundamentally flawed assumption here: that the only reason "high-achieving" students perform well in school is because they're just plain smarter. The prevailing idea behind many modern educational reform movements, such as Common Core, is that this deceptively simple assumption is basically wrong, and originates from a flawed, incomplete understanding of education.

Rather than that, the problem is that students have a wide variety of learning styles, and current American teaching styles and curriculums aren't really well-suited to most students' learning styles. Students who perform poorly in school aren't doing so because they're stupid or lack talent/aptitude/potential/etc, they're performing poorly because the educational system is simply not presenting information in a way suited to the way the majority of students are best able to learn. On the other hand, if the educational system is not suited to the learning styles of a majority of students, it naturally follows that there's a small minority of students whose learning styles are well suited to this educational system, and therefore they respond extremely well to the current style of education and perform excellently in school - which stands out all the more when compared to their peers whose brains aren't naturally suited to the way information is being presented in class. In other words, high-achieving kids aren't necessarily high-achieving because they have a higher aptitude and talent for knowledge and learning - they might just have a higher aptitude for the particular manner in which American classrooms present information.

If this is true, then gifted kids are the kids that the current style of teaching is actually best suited to. The progression of the curriculum may be too slow for their tastes, since it's been slowed down to compensate for the fact that most kids struggle with it for reasons we didn't quite understand fifty years ago, but gifted classes are still basically the same educational style as regular classes, just with a faster pace and more depth to the material. They're still every bit as flawed as regular classes are, they just move faster since their students are better suited to overcoming the tremendous problems with this style of teaching, and also because this style of teaching is utterly guaranteed to bore the poo poo out of students if it doesn't change as fast as the students can possibly handle and drop concepts as soon as the class can pass a test about them.

Now, let's be clear here: I am NOT saying that all kids are of the exact same intelligence level, nor am I saying that it's impossible for one kid to be smarter than another kid. What I am saying is that the way the human brain approaches knowledge is now thought to be far more complicated than a spectrum with "smart" on one end and "dumb" on the other, and school grades are no longer thought to be a reliable proxy for which end of the spectrum you're on. There are differences in intelligence, but those are dwarfed by much larger differences in learning style which have a far greater impact on school progress and test performance than a generic measure of "intelligence" does. There are very likely plenty of kids with a high mental aptitude who are sitting in regular classes because the educational system is simply not teaching them in a way they can understand, and there are probably plenty of kids with average mental aptitude who make it into gifted and honors because they are just particularly well suited to the way current American education works.

The objective of Common Core is to move to a new style and manner of teaching which is more interesting to students and covers a much wider variety of learning styles. Implemented properly, it should raise educational outcomes significantly because the same information will be presented in an order and manner that is far easier for students to understand, comprehend, and remember. On top of that, kids who do perform particularly well should be less bored under Common Core, because it is designed to be more motivating and involved for students, and thus even the students who already understand the material shouldn't get bored nearly as quickly. In practice it's going to fail horribly, since the problems in the educational system run too deep for Common Core to overturn them and be effectively implemented, and both teachers and parents hate change. But that doesn't mean the complaints of parents who whine about years of curriculum being restructured to present information in a more effective and constructive manner have any validity to them.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Main Paineframe posted:

You're working from a common, but fundamentally flawed assumption here: that the only reason "high-achieving" students perform well in school is because they're just plain smarter. The prevailing idea behind many modern educational reform movements, such as Common Core, is that this deceptively simple assumption is basically wrong, and originates from a flawed, incomplete understanding of education.

Stop right there; this is precisely the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that gifted children are very often not high achieving, and high-achieving students are frequently not gifted -- this is precisely why I feel that gifted education programs are so important. High-achieving students, gifted or otherwise, are the group of students that we can afford to be the least concerned about; this is no way should mean that gifted children in general do not deserve the same level of instructional support as any other group.

No matter how often and vehemently I state that my fundamental premise is based on the fact that "gifted" and "high-achieving" are not even close to synonymous, it seems your arguments are still based on the premise that they are.

Surely, many children who are high-achieving have a very high work ethic and are merely of average intelligence, and some may be below average but particularly suited to the way information is currently presented. This has absolutely nothing to do with gifted programs, and I don't know why you continue to insist that it does.

As for this:

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

gifted kids can learn on their loving own jesus stop loving being a god damned baby and worry about how do we teach kids how to loving read by the time they're 18

This is not even close to correct. Like I said, a lot of the kids in the gifted program I was a part of were identified because of their abnormally low achievement, including (in some cases) sub-par literacy skills.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Jack of Hearts posted:

Your compulsion to insult everyone who disagrees with you is amusing in light of your supernatural thread, in which you convinced everyone who wasn't you that you're an idiot lunatic. It's cool that you think you're smarter than everyone else, but it'd be nice if you did literally anything to justify that notion before going off on people with opinions with which you disagree.

the entire point of his post was that unpaid OT in a white-collar setting is lots of the time still superior to normal blue-collar work

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Main Paineframe posted:

The objective of Common Core is to move to a new style and manner of teaching which is more interesting to students and covers a much wider variety of learning styles. Implemented properly, it should raise educational outcomes significantly because the same information will be presented in an order and manner that is far easier for students to understand, comprehend, and remember. On top of that, kids who do perform particularly well should be less bored under Common Core, because it is designed to be more motivating and involved for students, and thus even the students who already understand the material shouldn't get bored nearly as quickly. In practice it's going to fail horribly, since the problems in the educational system run too deep for Common Core to overturn them and be effectively implemented, and both teachers and parents hate change. But that doesn't mean the complaints of parents who whine about years of curriculum being restructured to present information in a more effective and constructive manner have any validity to them.

The whole post was interesting, thanks.

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

PT6A posted:

Surely everyone would be (very rightly) enraged if schools said, "gently caress it, anyone more than two standard deviations below the mean cannot be helped, we need to focus on the majority." Why does this all of a sudden change when you switch "below" with "above", especially considering that giftedness often presents with some form of learning disability? The education system has an obligation to meet the diverse needs of all students.

This logic doesn't make sense. It's entirely reasonable for someone to only care about people at the bottom of whatever spectrum. It's like saying that it's wrong to help the poor at the expense of the rich. The big, obvious difference is that a poor (as in bad, not income, though the two often coincide) student who is disregarded usually ends up with a pretty awful life working as a wage slave. A gifted student who is forced to take a less challenging curriculum may be bored but will still be better off than most other students and perform better at college and likely end up with a much better job.

Basically, the consequences of disregarding (or more accurately, just giving less focus to) one group are far greater than with the other. Focusing on people at the bottom is a completely reasonable thing to do.

(Regarding this specific situation, I would imagine that there's no need to disregard gifted students; I'm just pointing out that "it's just as bad to ignore the gifted as it is to ignore the disadvantaged!" is stupid logic.)

Tacky-Ass Rococco
Sep 7, 2010

by R. Guyovich

Ytlaya posted:

A gifted student who is forced to take a less challenging curriculum may be bored but will still be better off than most other students and perform better at college and likely end up with a much better job.

What's your evidence for this claim? I have anecdotal personal experience which differs. I don't object to you being correct, I just want some evidence.

Samog
Dec 13, 2006
At least I'm not an 07.

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

gifted kids can learn on their loving own jesus stop loving being a god damned baby and worry about how do we teach kids how to loving read by the time they're 18

browsing wikipedia doesn't seem like a very good alternative to an algebra class, to me

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

Stop right there; this is precisely the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that gifted children are very often not high achieving, and high-achieving students are frequently not gifted -- this is precisely why I feel that gifted education programs are so important. High-achieving students, gifted or otherwise, are the group of students that we can afford to be the least concerned about; this is no way should mean that gifted children in general do not deserve the same level of instructional support as any other group.

No matter how often and vehemently I state that my fundamental premise is based on the fact that "gifted" and "high-achieving" are not even close to synonymous, it seems your arguments are still based on the premise that they are.

Surely, many children who are high-achieving have a very high work ethic and are merely of average intelligence, and some may be below average but particularly suited to the way information is currently presented. This has absolutely nothing to do with gifted programs, and I don't know why you continue to insist that it does.

As for this:


This is not even close to correct. Like I said, a lot of the kids in the gifted program I was a part of were identified because of their abnormally low achievement, including (in some cases) sub-par literacy skills.

Well, sure, but were those kids actually gifted? Did they actually belong in the gifted program? Other people in this thread have already complained that the way students are selected for gifted programs are complete bullshit, and suggested that any sufficiently motivated white parent can get their child into one eventually if there's even the slightest oddity in their in-class behavior. So let's first answer the question "What is 'gifted'?"

There's no federal definition of giftedness, but state programs usually define gifted children with phrases like "exceptional ability to learn", "a remarkably high level of accomplishment when compared to others", "high levels of motivation", and so on. None of that correlates with the halfassed trimmed-down IQ tests most states give to any kid whose parents demand it, but in theory that's what "gifted" (or "gifted and talented", as some gifted program advocates prefer) is supposed to mean. Given that many states with gifted programs don't have any room in their "gifted" definition for "kids who aren't performing well and aren't learning well", the fact that poor-performing kids end up there (as long as they're white, anyway; gifted programs have just as much of a racial disparity as everything else) just means that gifted programs often suffer from vague, loose, and subjective standards that have been broadened to uselessness by decades of parental whining.

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

Samog posted:

browsing wikipedia doesn't seem like a very good alternative to an algebra class, to me

Yeah, to hell with all the other kids. I hope they loving burn for eternity rather than impinge on the smart kids's right to have Algebra a year earlier than otherwise.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Main Paineframe posted:

Well, sure, but were those kids actually gifted? Did they actually belong in the gifted program? Other people in this thread have already complained that the way students are selected for gifted programs are complete bullshit, and suggested that any sufficiently motivated white parent can get their child into one eventually if there's even the slightest oddity in their in-class behavior. So let's first answer the question "What is 'gifted'?"

There's no federal definition of giftedness, but state programs usually define gifted children with phrases like "exceptional ability to learn", "a remarkably high level of accomplishment when compared to others", "high levels of motivation", and so on. None of that correlates with the halfassed trimmed-down IQ tests most states give to any kid whose parents demand it, but in theory that's what "gifted" (or "gifted and talented", as some gifted program advocates prefer) is supposed to mean. Given that many states with gifted programs don't have any room in their "gifted" definition for "kids who aren't performing well and aren't learning well", the fact that poor-performing kids end up there (as long as they're white, anyway; gifted programs have just as much of a racial disparity as everything else) just means that gifted programs often suffer from vague, loose, and subjective standards that have been broadened to uselessness by decades of parental whining.

It's not my place to judge. If they were professionally assessed and they made the cut, I assume they deserved to be there. Given that there was no actual advantage to being in that program apart from receiving a different pedagogical approach, I can't see why parents or students would want to be in that program if it were not more appropriate for their learning. Indeed, many people ended up leaving the program in high school to take advantage of the lower standards in normal classes. The gifted classes were not actually differentiated on high school transcripts since it was not a provincially recognized distinction, so apart from benefitting from the instructional environment, there's really only disadvantages to be had from being in the gifted program.

Could you fake your way in? Yes, probably. But the question remains: why would you?

Junkyard Poodle
May 6, 2011


Effectronica posted:

Yeah, to hell with all the other kids.

:ironicat:

on the left
Nov 2, 2013
I Am A Gigantic Piece Of Shit

Literally poo from a diseased human butt

Effectronica posted:

Yeah, to hell with all the other kids. I hope they loving burn for eternity rather than impinge on the smart kids's right to have Algebra a year earlier than otherwise.

Why throw good money after bad?

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

on the left posted:

Why throw good money after bad?

This needs some expansion to make any sense.

WhiskeyJuvenile
Feb 15, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo

Samog posted:

browsing wikipedia doesn't seem like a very good alternative to an algebra class, to me

I literally taught myself algebra when I was 12 by reading this

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"
A gifted kid will probably get more out of reading wikipedia than going to a formal class.

Trabisnikof
Dec 24, 2005

Panzeh posted:

A gifted kid will probably get more out of reading wikipedia than going to a formal class.

On the other hand, if the response to a child completing a reading assignment early is to tell them "put your head down for the next 30 minutes" you're quickly turn a "gifted student" into a "troublemaker".

Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost

Trabisnikof posted:

On the other hand, if the response to a child completing a reading assignment early is to tell them "put your head down for the next 30 minutes" you're quickly turn a "gifted student" into a "troublemaker".

I always liked the "here's an other worksheet" that was thrown away when completed.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Trabisnikof posted:

On the other hand, if the response to a child completing a reading assignment early is to tell them "put your head down for the next 30 minutes" you're quickly turn a "gifted student" into a "troublemaker".

This is so true. I attended class and even wrote exams drunk off my rear end, in high school and university, because "why the hell not?" I graduated high school with good enough grades to get into the university I was aiming for, and I then graduated from that university with about a 3.9 GPA. That's not a good thing. I was basically a loving alcoholic for the last 6-8 years of my schooling, out of pure boredom. The fact that I finally realized I should stop causing major poo poo around 10th grade in immaterial, the damage was already done.

The thing everyone has to understand about gifted kids is that it's not all good; we are/were hosed in the head in a lot of ways, and I'm thankful I had a program where teachers, administrators, and other kids understood a good part of what was going on inside my head. There were times I considered self-harm (even if you don't consider my prodigious intake of liquor and tobacco to qualify in its own right), and, thank gently caress I made it through, but I might not have without the support of many excellent educators, some of whom have already passed on, but all of whom I owe my life.

Now, do y'all understand why I'm so loving passionate about this? These educators literally saved my life, as far as I'm concerned. No one deserves to be deprived of that support. Thank god they were there for me, or I might well be nothing more than a stain being scrubbed off the pavement. It seriously pisses me off to see these programs being treated as some sort of frivolous afterthought.

This "she'll be right" attitude about gifted students is loving sickening, knowing how close I've come to self-harm, and how some others who weren't lucky enough have literally killed themselves as a result. When you (not the post I've quoted; others in the thread) say that "gifted kids don't need support," I hope you know that blood is on your hands.

This is not to say, of course, that other students aren't very poorly served by the education system. Many, if not most, students suffer, equally or more. This is far from an excuse to make one group suffer when it could be so easily fixed.

wiregrind
Jun 26, 2013

Samog posted:

browsing wikipedia doesn't seem like a very good alternative to an algebra class, to me

but they are genius gifted kids they will find a way, don't worry

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

It's not my place to judge. If they were professionally assessed and they made the cut, I assume they deserved to be there. Given that there was no actual advantage to being in that program apart from receiving a different pedagogical approach, I can't see why parents or students would want to be in that program if it were not more appropriate for their learning. Indeed, many people ended up leaving the program in high school to take advantage of the lower standards in normal classes. The gifted classes were not actually differentiated on high school transcripts since it was not a provincially recognized distinction, so apart from benefitting from the instructional environment, there's really only disadvantages to be had from being in the gifted program.

Could you fake your way in? Yes, probably. But the question remains: why would you?

The problem, as I alluded to before, is that there's no formal or standard definition of "gifted". There is no nationwide professional consensus of what qualifies as a "gifted" kid, nor are there any nationwide criteria for how a kid should be considered gifted - usually they just give a kid with loud parents one part of an IQ test, and if they don't score high enough and the parents don't shut up then they do it again with a different part of an IQ test, and repeat until the kid gets into gifted or the parents shut up. As you might guess, there's no nationwide consensus about what kind of classes are best for gifted kids either. Every state has different everything when it comes to gifted programs - and, to make it even worse, a number of states don't define or fund gifted education either, leaving it up to school districts to make their own decisions about it. As far as the federal government and at least a dozen state governments are concerned, there is no such thing as a "gifted" student requiring different schooling from regular kids, although this doesn't stop school districts within those states from coming up with their own standards. The whole thing is a miserable, chaotic patchwork written by lobbyists and parents without the slightest hint of rigor. What little research exists about gifted programs is seriously complicated by these serious problems with the sample population.

Why would people want to be in gifted programs? Well, what parent doesn't want their child to be in a super special accelerated program only for smart and talented special snowflakes which will teach them more things than regular kids and which will surround them exclusively with other white upper-middle-class smart and talented kids?

PT6A posted:

This is so true. I attended class and even wrote exams drunk off my rear end, in high school and university, because "why the hell not?" I graduated high school with good enough grades to get into the university I was aiming for, and I then graduated from that university with about a 3.9 GPA. That's not a good thing. I was basically a loving alcoholic for the last 6-8 years of my schooling, out of pure boredom. The fact that I finally realized I should stop causing major poo poo around 10th grade in immaterial, the damage was already done.

The thing everyone has to understand about gifted kids is that it's not all good; we are/were hosed in the head in a lot of ways, and I'm thankful I had a program where teachers, administrators, and other kids understood a good part of what was going on inside my head. There were times I considered self-harm (even if you don't consider my prodigious intake of liquor and tobacco to qualify in its own right), and, thank gently caress I made it through, but I might not have without the support of many excellent educators, some of whom have already passed on, but all of whom I owe my life.

Now, do y'all understand why I'm so loving passionate about this? These educators literally saved my life, as far as I'm concerned. No one deserves to be deprived of that support. Thank god they were there for me, or I might well be nothing more than a stain being scrubbed off the pavement. It seriously pisses me off to see these programs being treated as some sort of frivolous afterthought.

This "she'll be right" attitude about gifted students is loving sickening, knowing how close I've come to self-harm, and how some others who weren't lucky enough have literally killed themselves as a result. When you (not the post I've quoted; others in the thread) say that "gifted kids don't need support," I hope you know that blood is on your hands.

This is not to say, of course, that other students aren't very poorly served by the education system. Many, if not most, students suffer, equally or more. This is far from an excuse to make one group suffer when it could be so easily fixed.

Sounds like you needed therapy, not accelerated classes with fewer minorities! Sorry, I'm not really trying to make light of your experiences, and I honestly hate to pick at what was obviously a very critical and personal time in your life, but you were in gifted programs and you still spent half your schooling drunk out of your mind and pondering suicide, so it doesn't really sound like you fared so well even with an accelerated curriculum. It's great that you had teachers and classmates who were supportive when you were very obviously having problems, but that's by no means a unique property of gifted classes. It sounds like what you really needed was therapy and adult supervision in your life, and in the total absence of both, you just happened to lucky enough to be surrounded by friendly and sympathetic people at school, and white enough to not get your life permanently derailed by your misbehavior.

I'll say, for the record, that I'm not just talking out my rear end about gifted programs with no idea about them, either. I was in gifted programs too! So are a bunch of other people in this thread, actually. I wouldn't be surprised if half the people in D&D were gifted kids, actually.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
Why do you think that gifted programs are filled with middle class white kids? Mine wasn't. There were kids from poor families, kids with single parents, and kids that most definitely weren't white. It sounds like you were in a really lovely gifted program that was less about gifted education and more about the very thing you criticize -- giving a leg up to students who were already advantaged and performing well. That's a valid criticism, but what it means is that gifted programs need to be reformed to work properly, instead of ditching the idea altogether.

Perhaps I was a little overdramatic in my last post -- I never actually considered suicide, but I suspect that if I had not had the support that I did, I would have. In high school and university, I did show up to class and exams drunk because otherwise it would just be "too easy." That was more a problem in university because of the easy access to alcohol (the drinking age being 18 up here); in high school I'd just ditch class more often than not. In my last year of university, I would routinely drink anywhere from 2-4 pints at lunch, just so I could get through my afternoon classes without soul-crushing boredom. The gifted classes were different. They weren't an unending torrent of pleasure by any means, but they weren't actively unpleasant either. I think it made a big, big difference. I don't think letting kids gently caress around aimlessly on Wikipedia is a valid substitute for that.

This is why I get very upset when gifted programs are treated like some kind of useless frivolity, or some kind of handout to rich white folks. It made a big difference to me, and I hate to think that such an option is being taken away from kids who would benefit from it out of some bizarre notion of fairness. No kid deserves to feel like school is unrelentingly boring and hopeless for any reason. Whether it's because they're bored, or because they're struggling, or because they're being bullied, the results can all be the same. (EDIT: This is why I actually support the move which was the original topic of this thread; I simply disagree with the common assertion that we shouldn't consider gifted education until all other issues are fixed. Gifted education is important for exactly the same reason why the curriculum reform originally under discussion is important)

I appreciate your concerns about the very imprecise definition of gifted at a legislative level, and the way in which the system can be gamed by parents who are interested in doing so. Those problems should be fixed by actually fixing those problems, instead of taking a flawed system and disposing of it entirely.

PT6A fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Sep 17, 2015

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

Why do you think that gifted programs are filled with middle class white kids? Mine wasn't. There were kids from poor families, kids with single parents, and kids that most definitely weren't white. It sounds like you were in a really lovely gifted program that was less about gifted education and more about the very thing you criticize -- giving a leg up to students who were already advantaged and performing well. That's a valid criticism, but what it means is that gifted programs need to be reformed to work properly, instead of ditching the idea altogether.

In the US, "giving a leg up to students who are already advantaged and performing well" is the purpose of gifted programs; as I pointed out, while the definition of "gifted" varies tremendously, it's usually accepted to mean "high-performing or with a high aptitude for learning", a definition shared by the National Association for Gifted Students. That's part of why I'm making such a big point of the vagueness of the word "gifted" - because I have no idea what your definition of "gifted" means, it clearly doesn't match the most widely accepted meaning in the US (where the full term is "gifted and talented"), and you have yet to actually tell us what you think "gifted" means. I don't know what it's like up in Canada or whatever you are, but I'm talking the US only, and plenty of terms mean different things in Canadian than they do in :911:.

The underrepresentation of minorities in gifted programs nationwide is a well-known and well-documented problem and has been for decades, despite the fact that many districts refuse to provide statistics for it; I'm not just talking anecdotally there. Gifted lobbies even have their own special terms for the racial disparity; NAGS calls it the "excellence gap", for instance. This article goes into the reality of gifted programs in the US, as well as their history, origins, and the problems they face in defining the undefined.

http://nytimes.com/2013/01/13/education/in-one-school-students-are-divided-by-gifted-label-and-race.html?referrer=

quote:

IT is just a metal door with three windows, the kind meant to keep the clamor of an elementary school hallway from piercing a classroom’s quiet. Other than paint the color of bubble gum, it is unremarkable.

But the pink door on Room 311 at Public School 163 on the Upper West Side represents a barrier belied by its friendly hue. On one side are 21 fourth graders labeled gifted and talented by New York City’s school system. They are coursing through public school careers stamped accelerated.

And they are mostly white.

On the other side, sometimes sitting for reading lessons on the floor of the hallway, are those in the school’s vast majority: They are enrolled in general or special education programs.

They are mostly children of color.

“I know what we look like,” Carolyn M. Weinberg, a 28-year veteran of P.S. 163, said of the racial disparities as she stood one day in the third-floor hallway between Room 318, where she and a colleague teach a fourth-grade general education class, and the one where Angelo Monserrate teaches the gifted class, Room 311.

“I know what you see,” said Ms. Weinberg.

There are 652 students enrolled at P.S. 163 this year, from prekindergarten through fifth grade. Roughly 63 percent of them are black and Hispanic; whites make up 27 percent; and Asians account for 6 percent.

This reflects the flavor of the neighborhood, and roughly matches the New York City school system’s overall demographics.

Yet in P.S. 163’s gifted classes, the racial dynamics of the neighborhood, the school itself and the school system are turned upside down.

Of the 205 children enrolled in the nine gifted classes, 97, or 47 percent, are white; another 31 of the students, or 15 percent, are Asian. And a combined 65 students, or 32 percent, are black and Hispanic.

In the 21 other classes that enroll the school’s remaining 447 students, only 80, or 18 percent, are white.

The disparities are most apparent in the lower grades.

Of the 24 students in Karen Engler’s kindergarten gifted class, one is black and three are Hispanic. Ayelet Cutler’s first-grade gifted class has 21 students, one of them black and two Hispanic. There are two blacks and two Hispanics among the 26 students in Athena Shapiro’s second-grade gifted class.

On a recent morning, a line of Ms. Cutler’s students moved from the classroom to the corridor, ahead of the general education class of Linda Crews. A string of mostly white faces and then a line of mostly black and Hispanic ones walked down the hall of a school named for a New York politician who sought to end inequities in education: Alfred E. Smith.

It was 11:25 a.m., and the classes wound their way to the cafeteria, a cavernous room at the school’s western edge. Once there, the children sat with those in their own class, each one at a separate long white table that, for a moment, froze the divisions.

For critics of New York City’s gifted and talented programs, that image crystallizes what they say is a flawed system that reinforces racial separation in the city’s schools and contributes to disparities in achievement.

They contend that gifted admissions standards favor middle-class children, many of them white or Asian, over black and Hispanic children who might have equal promise, and that the programs create castes within schools, one offered an education that is enriched and accelerated, the other getting a bare-bones version of the material. Because they are often embedded within larger schools, the programs bolster a false vision of diversity, these critics say, while reinforcing the negative stereotypes of class and race.

Despite months of repeated requests, the city’s Education Department would not provide racial breakdowns of gifted and talented programs and the schools that house them. But the programs tend to be in wealthier districts whose populations have fewer black and Hispanic children, and far more children qualify for them in affluent districts than in poorer ones.

In District 3, which stretches for 63 blocks along Manhattan’s Upper West Side and includes P.S. 163, there are five gifted programs for elementary school children, including the Anderson School, one of five citywide programs.

Farther north, for all of Districts 5 and 6, which are poorer and more heavily black and Hispanic, there are just two programs.

And though programs are clustered in affluent neighborhoods around Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in northeastern Queens, the accelerated classes are absent from broad swaths of central Brooklyn and southeast Queens, where more families are poor and black or Hispanic.

In District 7, in the South Bronx, there is not a single gifted program. The area, dominated by Hispanic and black residents, is among the poorest in the nation, with many people living below the official federal poverty mark.

James H. Borland, a professor of education at Teachers College, said that looking at the gifted landscape in New York City suggests that one of two things must be true: either black and Hispanic children are less likely to be gifted, or there is something wrong with the way the city selects children for those programs.

“It is well known in the education community that standardized tests advantage children from wealthier families and disadvantage children from poorer families,” Dr. Borland said.

And the city’s efforts to fix the system seem to have only made it worse.

Until recently, each of the city’s 32 school districts could establish the classes as it saw fit and determine its own criteria for admission. They varied, but educators often took a holistic approach; they looked at evaluations from teachers and classroom observations, relying on tests only in part, by comparing the results of students from within a district.

That changed in September 2008, when the Bloomberg administration ushered in admission based only on a cutoff score on two high-stakes tests given in one sitting — the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment.

The overhaul was meant to standardize the admissions process and make it fairer. But the new tests decreased diversity, with children from the poorest districts offered a smaller share of kindergarten gifted slots after those were introduced, while pupils in the wealthiest districts got more.

For the 2012-13 school year, 4,912 children qualified for gifted programs. The more affluent districts — 2 and 3 in Manhattan, 20 and 22 in Brooklyn, and 25 and 28 in Queens — had the most students qualify: 949 in District 2, which takes in Lower Manhattan and the Upper East Side, and 505 in District 3.

Some districts in poor and predominately black and Hispanic districts had too few qualifiers to fill a single class: in District 7, only six children qualified for gifted placements, and none for the most exclusive schools, like the Anderson School, which requires a score at or above the 97 percentile.

The number of classes over all fell sharply.

This year, the department changed the process again, substituting a new test known as the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test — Second Edition, or NNAT2, for the Bracken exam. This is what children competing for placements next year started facing this month, in tests that began on Jan. 7.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, said data showed that a “more diverse range of kids” excelled on the new test because it was less rooted in test preparation and would allow educators to more accurately identify gifted pupils.

But focusing on the gifted classrooms is missing the point, Mr. Polakow-Suransky said. Though it is worthy to debate whether the “world of G.&T.” is diverse enough, he said, the administration’s “equity agenda” is much broader: It seeks to improve the quality of education and close achievement gaps across the entire school system.

“We are not a system that is purely focused on running a good G.&T. program,” Mr. Polakow-Suransky said. “We are a system that is focused on dramatically shifting educational opportunities for, particularly, kids of color and kids from high-poverty neighborhoods who have historically in this city been deeply neglected.”

But the accelerated classrooms serve as pipelines to the city’s highest-achievement middle schools and high schools, creating a cycle in which students who start out ahead get even further advantages from the city’s schools.

And the numbers of black and Hispanic students who make it into the city’s specialized high schools, long seen as its flagship institutions, have declined significantly over recent decades. Though about 70 percent of city students are black or Hispanic, from 2006 to 2012 the two groups, combined, were offered only about 15 percent of the seats at the specialized high schools, according to the Education Department.

“I don’t think the fact that G.&T. programs are clearly and disproportionately white, and are so lacking, given the size of the population, in black and Latino students is the result of anyone’s bad intentions,” said Ellis Cose, a parent of a child who attends a gifted and talented program at P.S. 163. Mr. Cose is the author of “The End of Anger” (2011), which explores the issues of race and generational change.

“I think it is really the result of people committed to a system that can never work if the objective is diversity,” he said.

“The only way it even conceivably can work is to give young poor kids the same sort of boost up that young affluent kids get, which is to make sure these kids get an excellent preschool education, make sure these kids get tutoring, make sure these parents know at what time in the circuit they are supposed to prepare their kids for what. And that is taking on a much larger task than tinkering with a test.”

THE idea of gifted education has drifted in and out of vogue in American schools. It was elevated in the 1950s, when educators and lawmakers pushed gifted programs in math and science amid fears about communism’s rise. It waned in the 1960s but re-emerged with a White House task force on giftedness and the signing of several federal bills in the 1970s that recognized gifted children’s needs.

Urban districts were seen as using the programs to help prevent white flight from the schools, in essence offering a system within the system that was white-majority and focused on achievement. “There have been claims that gifted education resegregates the public schools,” Dr. Borland said.

“Certainly there was concern with keeping middle-class families involved in public schools, and to the extent that we use tests to select kids for gifted programs, that tends to skew the programs toward children from wealthier, white families,” he added.


At P.S. 163, gifted classrooms date to at least the late 1980s.

Children take different pathways to the school’s classrooms. For general education students, the school is open to those who live in the neighborhood zone, a U-shape area that stretches roughly from West 96th to West 102nd Streets, between Central Park West and just west of Broadway. It captures brownstones and co-ops with park views as well part of the massive Frederick Douglass Houses, a public housing complex whose 20-story towers rise between West 100th and West 104th Streets east of Amsterdam Avenue.

Students from within District 3 whose combined scores on the gifted tests were in the 90th percentile or above can list P.S. 163’s gifted program as one they would prefer to attend. The central office then assigns them to one of their chosen schools. Another choice is the school’s dual-language program, which fosters bilingual learning among students who are split roughly 50-50, according to Spanish or English dominance. Students enter by choice, though priority is given to those in the neighborhood.

In the spring of 2004, P.S. 163’s principal at the time, Virginia M. Pepe, helped create her own assessment of a subgroup of prekindergarten students for placement in the next year’s kindergarten gifted program.

With one eye on the need for diversity and another on the need for objectivity, Dr. Pepe developed some cognitive tasks, like sorting objects, and mixed in an early childhood preliteracy assessment and an assessment of language. Kindergarten gifted teachers also observed the children.

It was a “balancing act” that year, to find the right mix of students for the new kindergarten gifted programs, she said. An aid in diversifying that program, which lasted just one year, was a policy from the central office that allowed families from districts north of the school — Districts 5 and 6, for instance — to send their children to P.S. 163’s gifted program if they chose to and if seats were available.

“Those districts did not have gifted and talented programs at the time,” Dr. Pepe said.

“Families that were Caucasian liked us because we offered more diversity, and multiracial families liked us because they thought their children would have opportunities to be in a more diverse setting, and African-American families from up in District 5 appreciated us because they were closer to home.”

In 2007, though, the Education Department stopped allowing out-of-district children to attend (a policy it has now reversed for the 2013-14 school year); the following year, it went to the testing-only admission policy. And that “slowed things down” in diversifying the gifted-and-talented program, said Nia Mason, an art teacher who began teaching at the school in 1988.

“The diversity changed overnight when they put that test in,” Ms. Mason said.

IF P.S. 163 has little control over admission to the gifted programs or who ultimately gets seated, it does control what happens in its classrooms. According to the current principal, Donny R. Lopez, the school’s leadership does its best to foster mingling between students in the gifted classes and others.

One day, half the students from Keira A. Dillon’s fifth-grade gifted class mixed with half the students from Robyn Lindner’s fifth-grade general education class and headed to the auditorium for a program run by the National Dance Institute.

There, onstage, the pupils from the two classes giggled and moved self-consciously as they followed the directions of Bianca Johnson, a teaching artist and choreographer.

At one point, when Ms. Johnson held up a photo of a man’s face and asked for his name, it was Jamal Brown, a boy from the general education class, who identified him as Jacques d’Amboise, the founder of the National Dance Institute.

Some teachers at P. S. 163 use the word “enriched,” rather than “accelerated,” to describe the academics of the gifted programs.

Ms. Dillon said that even within gifted classes there was a spectrum of ability, and that she commonly arranged pupils into small groups, according to their abilities, for reading, writing, math and the like.

This fall, in studying the branches of the federal government, about a third of her students understood that some concepts of power also extended to the states and that there was an interplay between state and federal powers.

“The general education students might not have all covered this topic,” said Ms. Dillon, whose class is more diverse than most of the gifted and talented rooms, with five black and eight Hispanic children among the 26 students.

Sara K. Bloch’s triplets are all in different programs at the school. Leon is in Ms. Dillon’s gifted class; Jason is in general education; and Felix is in what is known as an integrated co-teaching class, which mixes special education students with general education children like Felix. “To be completely honest, we feel that this class is probably similar to a regular fifth-grade class,” she said on the day she visited Leon in Ms. Dillon’s class. “Math is the same; all three — they have the same book.”

But Leon does seem to be pushed harder, Ms. Bloch said. He is asked to think of things in complex ways, not just to memorize dates of the American Revolution or names like John Adams, for instance, but also to understand relationships between events and people, or to explain possible motives or forces behind certain events, like the Boston Tea Party. She also said that the relationship between the parents and the teachers was more intense at the gifted level, with an expectation of parent involvement and connectedness.

“There is none of that in the other classes,” Ms. Bloch said.

In her experience in teaching those who teach gifted children in New York City’s public schools, Christy T. Folsom, a professor at Lehman College and a former board member of Advocacy for Gifted and Talented Education in New York State, said gifted children got a “much deeper experience and, in some cases, more advanced curriculum.”


“In the gifted classrooms that I’ve been in, the majority of kids are reading at grade level or beyond, and they can write well, and then so much time is not spent on basic skills so they can spend more time on content and on comparing historical eras,” Professor Folsom said. “They are then able to do the more deep thinking work because less time has to be spent on the fundamental skills.”

WHY parents embrace or reject public schools is a complicated equation.

At P.S. 163, several parents and teachers wondered whether white parents would stay if not for the gifted classes.

“You don’t see any white kids in the general education classes,” said one parent of a student in a dual-language class, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. “You might see one or two, but I don’t see any white families coming to register their children for general education. They come straight to gifted and talented.”

“I guess it is a question of, ‘How much diversity do you feel comfortable with?’ ” said the parent of one child in the gifted program, who did not want to be identified for fear of animosity from other parents. “Do I want him to be the only white kid in an all-black school? No. Would I like it if the racial mix was more proportionate? Yes, whatever the percentage of the makeup. That’s an honest answer, from my soul. Is it hypocritical for parents to say, ‘We’re sending our kids to public school,’ but they’re sending them to an all-white gifted and talented program? But it’s not our fault. We want the best for our children.”


Carrie C. Reynolds, a co-president of the PTA, said parents seemed to be basing choices not on race but on the academic environment and on socioeconomic factors.

“If you were upper income, well educated, you want your kid to have a more enriched education,” she said. “I think it is more economics than race. They tend to go hand-in-hand in New York City, but I certainly know families that have made a different choice, that are here at this school, that are white and are not in gifted and talented.”

But one afternoon at the school, Ms. Lindner, the fifth-grade teacher, said she was “always surprised” when she saw more than two or three white children in her general education classes.

As a parent herself, and a resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she said, “there’s no way I’d put my kid in a general-education class here, no way, because it’s right next to the project and all the kids in general education come from the projects.”


She said her experience was that many of the children in her general education classes were at grade level or below and did not get the same support from their parents that the children in the gifted classes got. “They’re tougher kids,” she said of the general education students in the school. “They’re very street-savvy. They don’t have the background; their parents are hard on them but don’t know what to do with them.”

Andi Velasquez, who as the school’s parent coordinator has helped lead tours of the school for prospective parents over the last two years, said she had occasionally heard very “vocal” parents expressing surprise in seeing even a few black and Hispanic children in a gifted class.

“They say, ‘It has too many minorities to be a G&T class; that can’t be a G&T class,’ ” said Ms. Velasquez, 48, who is white and is married to a Hispanic man from Colombia, and whose two children attended the dual-language program at P.S. 87.


“And I say, ‘We’re proud of that,’ ” she said. “And those are the parents that haven’t come in the past.”

SANDRA M. ECHOLS, 46, a single mother who is black, has sent all three of her children to the gifted classes at P.S. 163, beginning with her oldest son who, in 1998, when he was entering fourth grade, gained admission to the program.

“It is an elitist program,” Ms. Echols said. “They don’t advertise it the way it should be advertised, but I’m glad I was savvy enough to navigate the system and give my children what they need.”

She remembers taking her oldest son to his middle-school gifted program and being mistaken for “the nanny.”

Her daughter got into the P.S. 163 program for kindergarten and was one of only two black girls in the class until second grade, when the other girl moved away, leaving her as the sole black child.

Now, Ms. Echols’s youngest son, Kenyan, 10, is in the fifth-grade gifted and talented class taught by Ms. Dillon.

Ms. Echols recounted her story while standing in Kenyan’s class one morning in the fall, when Ms. Dillon had invited parents to a “publishing party” to celebrate essays the children had written and edited.

“This class is the most diverse gifted and talented class I’ve seen,” said Ms. Echols, as other parents and children swirled around her.

She said that now her son was “best buds” with Lucas Pulsifer, who is white, and Nicholas Urena, who is Hispanic, and that they often arranged weekend play dates. “They represent what New York City is all about : a truly diverse melting pot.”

Minutes later, the party over, the parents began trickling out. Ms. Echols walked out with Lucas’s mother, Anna.

“We’re going to get coffee now,” she said, her arm hooked around the white woman’s elbow.

Correction: January 20, 2013

Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about racial separation in gifted and talented classes in New York City’s public school system misstated the admissions procedure for Hunter College Elementary School and its residency requirements for applicants. The school uses a separate test for placement and is open only to children living in Manhattan. It does not require a score in the 97th percentile on the tests used by the department of education, and children from District 7 in the Bronx are not eligible to attend.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Main Paineframe posted:

In the US, "giving a leg up to students who are already advantaged and performing well" is the purpose of gifted programs; as I pointed out, while the definition of "gifted" varies tremendously, it's usually accepted to mean "high-performing or with a high aptitude for learning", a definition shared by the National Association for Gifted Students. That's part of why I'm making such a big point of the vagueness of the word "gifted" - because I have no idea what your definition of "gifted" means, it clearly doesn't match the most widely accepted meaning in the US (where the full term is "gifted and talented"), and you have yet to actually tell us what you think "gifted" means. I don't know what it's like up in Canada or whatever you are, but I'm talking the US only, and plenty of terms mean different things in Canadian than they do in :911:.

The underrepresentation of minorities in gifted programs nationwide is a well-known and well-documented problem and has been for decades, despite the fact that many districts refuse to provide statistics for it; I'm not just talking anecdotally there. Gifted lobbies even have their own special terms for the racial disparity; NAGS calls it the "excellence gap", for instance. This article goes into the reality of gifted programs in the US, as well as their history, origins, and the problems they face in defining the undefined.

http://nytimes.com/2013/01/13/education/in-one-school-students-are-divided-by-gifted-label-and-race.html?referrer=

I think the most productive definition is the one I bolded, and I think the "high-performing" bit is irrelevant and actually harmful to the concept of gifted education. That's what's allowing for gifted programs to be used as a segregationist run-around, and it's both morally wrong and detrimental to gifted children themselves. In a properly-administered gifted program, one would see children who got in merely for being high-performing eventually become average, before ultimately falling behind the children who got in for having a high aptitude for learning. That's how a gifted program ought to work, and indeed in the program I was in, exactly that sort of attrition could actually be observed. Further, a gifted education program should not require advanced knowledge in the first place. A proper gifted program should be able to cater to a student who lacks fundamental skills or knowledge, but does have the high aptitude for learning, and the entrance process should be able to identify those students. This is one of the reasons why testing based on things like vocabulary is nonsense.

I'm not arguing that the system as it exists doesn't have severe problems, I'm saying that those problems are in no way related to the fundamental mission of gifted education, and it is better to work on fixing those problems than throwing the baby out with the bathwater and gutting gifted programs entirely.

Obdicut
May 15, 2012

"What election?"

PT6A posted:


I'm not arguing that the system as it exists doesn't have severe problems, I'm saying that those problems are in no way related to the fundamental mission of gifted education, and it is better to work on fixing those problems than throwing the baby out with the bathwater and gutting gifted programs entirely.

The system doesn't exist as a system. There is no system. There are a large series of ad-hoc approaches. What you are describing as an ideal gifted program is in place almost nowhere, because testing for aptitude for learning is extremely difficult--a test administered one way will show a child has high aptitude for learning, administered another way will show that they're a dullard. Getting the kid into the test in the first place, getting them to take it seriously, to believe it will affect their life--all huge problems in testing. IN addition the political pressures as explained by Main Painframe tend to make 'gifted' testing reflect what politically powerful parents want more than what kids need or deserve. In addition, the idea that children who get in for achievement but don't have aptitude will fall behind is fallacious, because children don't exist as lone entities; the same things that contributed to that child having been able to achieve in the first place are likely still in place. Imagine a child with aptitude to learn, who lives in the same room with three of his brothers and experiences food insecurity on a regular basis, to a kid whose parents have the wealth to provide them with materials in anything they show an interest in, who can hire tutors, and who gets a good, well-nutrient-ed, lead-free, non-asthmatic night of sleep every night.

I tutor kids for the GRE and SAT. One of my cynical wonderful kids said, "The SAT and GRE are, to an extent, a test of who can afford to hire you as a tutor". And it's true. No matter what test you design, there will be a way to prepare for that test, and that preparation will be more available to some students than others.

You are not going to be able to escape structural inequality.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Obdicut posted:

You are not going to be able to escape structural inequality.

This argument can be applied to anything ever. Just because it's impossible to avoid structural inequality entirely shouldn't mean that you simply eliminate gifted classes entirely. Why not just act to minimize inequality, and administer the program in such a way that it's as good as possible even if it's not perfect? The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.

It's clear that improvements can and should be made, even if it's not possible to create the ideal gifted program. The program I described was the one that I was in, so it can be done, in a public school no less! Is this going to be another "this can't possibly work in America because reasons" even as it's actually being done elsewhere in the world?

  • Locked thread