San Francisco Middle Schools No Longer Teaching Algebra

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > San Francisco Middle Schools No Longer Teaching Algebra

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Yashichi posted:

That's really lovely but it seems to be a distinct issue from students having different levels of ability and classes that reflect that fact

The problem is that there is no perfect, objective way to evaluate a student's academic abilities. The problems with standardized testing - including the racial disparities - are heavily debated, and leaving it up to a teacher's or administrator's judgement is exactly how all the minorities end up in a lower level.

Yashichi posted:

I'm not sure why the course of action is to pretend all students are equal because racists might abuse the system. Shouldn't the goal be to improve educational opportunities for students with these disadvantages instead?

If a kid is having trouble in class, is it because they're just plain dumber...or is it because the curriculum is insufficient to handle a wide variety of learning styles? It's tempting to blame the underperforming students for their failures and praise the advanced students for their understanding, but it could just as well be that the overperforming students just happen to be better at rote memorization.

According to the OP article, the vast majority of kids performed poorly in 8th-grade Algebra 1, so depending on which view of school performance you follow, either most of the kids are stupid (in which case it's a waste of limited resources to cater to the few who aren't) or the curriculum up to that point wasn't preparing the kids properly to understand Algebra 1, in which case the curriculum needed to be shuffled around.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2015 02:14

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:22

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Honestly, we should be glad that some school districts are making changes. One of the biggest problems looming over Common Core is that, due to poor and limited teacher training, failure to obtain appropriate materials, natural resistance to make real changes to teaching style, and political uncertainty, Common Core is being implemented in name only in many school districts. Over much of the country, the curriculum is just the same crap with a different name.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...40f8_story.html

quote:

The Common Core State Standards that most states have adopted have triggered plenty of political debate. But have they transformed how teachers are teaching — and what students are learning?

Not nearly enough, according to Education Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to closing achievement gaps.

Teachers are often assigning work that asks far less of students than the Common Core standards require, according to the organization. Children are rarely asked to write more than a few sentences at a time, for example, and are seldom asked to grapple with complex ideas and arguments.

Those conclusions are based upon an analysis of more than 1,500 language arts, humanities and social studies assignments that teachers gave middle-school students in two unnamed urban school districts during a two-week period last school year.

It’s a glimpse of what is going on in classrooms, not a nationally representative or scientific sample. But Education Trust staff members say that the patterns they found raise important questions about potential problems with how Common Core is being implemented nationwide.

“Like others who have been involved with the Common Core, we think these new standards have enormous potential to focus teaching and learning on what is most important,” says a new report by Education Trust released Wednesday. “But, as our analysis makes clear, that potential remains unrealized, and there is much work to do.”

Fewer than 4 in 10 assignments were aligned to a grade-appropriate standard; in high-poverty schools, the proportion was even lower. Only 4 percent of assignments asked students to think critically at high levels, whereas 85 percent of assignments focused on basic recall and basic skills, according to the analysis.

Critics might quibble with how the organization judged assignments, but the analysis is a good reminder that the Common Core standards have been translated differently in different places. Some school districts have spent years preparing for the transition to new standards, for example, while others have offered teachers little in the way of meaningful training and professional development.

“In the absence of detailed guidance, districts, schools and teachers are replicating what they hear at workshops or conferences promising ‘Common Core-aligned’ resources,” says Education Trust’s report. “Lessons from the Internet labeled as aligned are being taught again and again, whether or not they are worthy.”

The report aims to nudge school district leaders and principals to take a closer look at whether classroom instruction reflects the lofty goals of the Common Core — to ensure that children are really prepared for the intellectual rigors of college by the time they leave high school.

“Standards alone cannot ensure that all students are college and career ready,” the report says. “For young people of color and low-income students in particular, classroom assignments must reflect the deeper thinking and sophisticated application of skills that have been missing from so much of their schooling.”

# ¿ Sep 14, 2015 14:31

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

If high schools are changing their curriculum then it's a fair bet that colleges will adjust too, so that's kind of a red herring. Either that, or they'll just leave it like it is anyway, since engineering programs are infamous for their aggressive weed-out. Either way, the point of high school should to be to prep people for life, not to prep people for college; if a college adopts requirements that don't match up with the high school curriculum, that's the college's problem to fix.

Of course, the status quo isn't producing students ready for college math, either. In recent years, colleges have been putting significant numbers of freshmen into remedial courses after finding that their actual math skills and knowledge are not up to par for college math, regardless of what classes they took in high school. Arranging math classes so that you can cram as many concepts into them as possible for college is useless if the students aren't fully learning and grasping those concepts. Making sure that the curriculum is arranged in a way that's easy to learn is more important than doing the minimum necessary to check off as many college entry requirements as possible.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 14:22

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

Not to mention, making gifted kids show up and be bored all day, with the tacit admission that they don't need to be there are aren't going to learn much, seems downright cruel.

If kids are "bored all day" then we should be fixing the problems with the general curriculum, not making a second, super-special curriculum for anyone who looks bored.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 16:19

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Solkanar512 posted:

What's the difference between these two ideas in your mind?

The latter means having two broken curriculums - one that isn't suited to the learning styles of most students, and one more advanced but equally-broken one for the few students whose learning styles are covered by the curriculum. Of course, that's in addition to the third curriculum that already exists and that no one ever talks about in education reform - the "special needs" curriculum for students who, due to learning disabilities or some other cause, cannot be expected to be served by any standard curriculum, but are usually all shoved together into a single "special" curriculum because the resources simply don't exist to give each one a custom education suited to their particular disabilities.

Job Truniht posted:

I think you misunderstood my point. Not everyone is going to be engineer, and they don't have to be. The worst curriculum trap high schools can get into is the one where you teach that way just to keep pace with STEM colleges and kids who want to go to them. It'd be better to adopt something like the German system, where kids begin to specialize in high school and start taking classes specific to their talents.

The idea of standard examinations where"you must be this good at math or science or english" is meaningless in that sense. If you're becoming an engineer, what you do on the SAT/ACT/no child left behind exam is not going to help.

The point of high school is to not specialize, but rather to assure a standardized level of skills and knowledge that (in theory) every high school graduate has, regardless of what school they graduated from. Some jobs may require a higher educational level than that or some more specialized skills not covered in a standardized education, in which case those students can go to college and specialize in one particular field, but the point of high school is to ensure that every graduate has a wide-ranging level of basic knowledge, skills, and life skills that could be potentially applied toward many jobs. If they want to be an engineer or some other knowledge-heavy field, they may need specialized education on top of that, but the point of high school is to provide a basic but comprehensive education that is applicable to every industry. Now, when I say "basic but comprehensive", I don't mean "college prep", I mean "ability to read, write, and do simple math" - and high school is failing even at that! This is incredibly important - a number of studies suggest that over 10% of American adults are straight-up illiterate, and many more are barely literate. The latest numbers, from a recent federal study, say that 14% of American adults are essentially illiterate, and 29% of American adults have only "basic" reading abilities at best. Clear statistics are harder to find for math, but anecdotal accounts suggest the situation there is only slightly better.

This is why education reform is so goddamn important. The most critical issue is not about how to best fast-track students' advanced skills, it's about ensuring that we're even preparing students with the most basic, most essential workforce skills. Foreign manufacturers, for example, have been complaining for years about the poor quality of the American workforce, especially in the South - Toyota supposedly has to use "pictorials" to train workers at their Alabama plants because they're too illiterate to read written directions.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 19:31

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Panzeh posted:

Most high school kids would gain a lot more from spending half the day at a trade school than trying to get calculus shoved in their face in the vain hope that college will get them something.

Calculus isn't just useless college garbage wankery or super specialized science knowledge normal people don't need to know - like other high school math skills, it's applicable to aspects of daily life and a wide variety of occupations, particularly where handling or managing money over long periods of time is involved.

Jack of Hearts posted:

If you're saying that there are other objectives in high school education, then I agree, chief among them socialization. But if the paramount objective of high school is to achieve these basic proficiencies, what do you do with the ones who already have, and who are nevertheless compelled to attend? They have achieved the desired end; why shouldn't they go and continue their intellectual development in a place that doesn't mandate you take gym?

At some point, incidentally, socialization doesn't hold as a worthwhile end either. My best friend's little sister dropped out of high school at 16, took an equivalency exam, and went straight to community college. I thought this was very clever, as I had no idea it was possible. If you're capable, why bother with tedious junior English, when you can do slightly-less-tedious college freshman English and get credit for transfer?

See above. It's more than just "can you read written instructions and perform simple arithmetic", it's about providing "a wide-ranging level of basic knowledge, skills, and life skills that could be potentially applied toward many jobs" - and calculus is among those things. You don't need to go to college to start a business, but calculus is extremely helpful in the kinds of economic calculations you need to do if you're starting one responsibly.

Job Truniht posted:

What you just described though is just another No Child Left Behind. It's not going to work. High schools are becoming increasingly irrelevant if we're stuck on "can everyone here do babby math?" School shouldn't hold your hand, it should push you and keep you constantly stressed. Those in turn come to help when you have to go to college and actual deal with real pressure.

I'll say it again - high school isn't college prep, it's supposed to prepare students to be ready to enter the workforce right out of high school. Some specialized knowledge-based fields may require further education or training, but by the time high school is over students should possess knowledge and skills that are applicable to large portions of the workforce. I'm not saying high school education should stop at "can everyone here do babby math", but if the answer to that question is "No" then that is absolutely far more important than the white kids being bored in class. Right now, only 25 percent of high school seniors are proficient in math; the question at hand should be "how should we improve the learning experience for that large majority of students", not "how can we use this data to further privilege the minority that is performing well".

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 23:58

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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?

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 16:26

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.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 17:48

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.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 21:39

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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.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 15:30

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.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 17:16

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

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.

Actually, you've got it exactly backwards. "Aptitude for learning", being literally impossible to measure reliably and objectively, is the condition that turns gifted programs into a segregationist's dream. School performance, while still tilted incredibly unfavorably against minority students, is at least a basically objective standard. Aptitude, being essentially unmeasurable, is the subjective element that transforms gifted programs from a simple magnification of the education system's problems into a beast all their own.

PT6A posted:

Except a properly administered gifted program shouldn't have that problem, because there's no particular reason to teach a different curriculum that's otherwise inaccessible to "normal" students. That just creates more work for very little benefit. In my program, we followed the same curriculum as everyone else, and received the same credits; the only difference was the demands of the coursework and the rate at which new material was presented. If anything, taking the GATE version of those courses was a disadvantage for admissions, because the class was more challenging. I agree 100% that giving students in the gifted program some kind of "advantage" as a result is foolish policy. The only advantage I remember was not being bored out of my goddamn skull all day.

If new material is presented faster, and the coursework is demanding and more in-depth, then how do you not end up learning more than the kids in the normal classes? The basic range of material may be the same, but you're covering more information, one way or another. No, you don't get extra credits for it, but that's not the point - there's potential to learn more, for years and years (in the US, many kids are shunted into gifted programs as early as kindergarden), and the difference in teaching coverage over the course of their schooling will make itself felt ten years down the road in the form of higher standardized test grades and more recommendations for honors classes and other such programs.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 21:08

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

For that to work, the person or organization doing the testing would have to be complicit in using the program to achieve those ends, though. This would probably count as some variety of professional ethics violation, so I find it difficult to believe that it would be achievable on a large scale.

So, the alternative should be that kids who learn faster should simply sit there and be bored, forbidden from learning things that might give them an advantage somewhere down the line? That's loving ridiculous, you know that, right? You're talking about making kids suffer, when it would be easy to prevent that suffering, just to maintain some notion of equality. That's reprehensible, and I'm glad the people in my school district had no such ridiculous notions.

No it wouldn't. The lack of any large scale conspiracy is exactly what makes institutional racism so difficult to combat - everybody at every level of the system insists that they're not racist in the slightest, but when you gather the statistics and add everything up, it emerges that a large percentage of subjective decisions made by the many individuals in the system were biased against minorities!

You've dodged this question before, so I'm going to put you on the spot: How do you propose that we identify kids who "learn faster"? No, don't answer this with a cop-out like "I'll leave that to the professionals", because the professionals don't know either. I've been alluding to this more and more heavily as the thread's gone on, but I'm going to say it straight out: the reason that the criteria and procedures for identifying kids who have an "aptitude for learning" are such a mess is because nobody has any loving idea how to do that. That's why some districts use standardized tests, some use IQ tests, some use school performance, and some just give a slot to every parent who asks rhe right questions: there is no wide-ranging agreement or consensus in education for how to identify kids who are better at learning.

Nor, for that matter, are we even entirely certain that there is such a thing as "objectively better at learning". The old idea of a simple straight-line spectrum with "fast learners" at one end and "slow learners" at the other is no longer certain. There probably are differences in learning ability, but like I said before, those are probably mostly obscured by the differences in learning style. Gifted kids, rather than being just straight-up superior at learning, may simply be particularly good at absorbing information in the way that it is currently taught in schools. A better method of teaching might very well eliminate that disparity - not just bringing underperforming students up, but alleviating the massive difference in pace that allows gifted students to get so far ahead that they become unbearably bored.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 22:46

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

I can empathize with students who struggle with school, and do not learn as quickly as I did/do, but I have no idea what that's like and I don't know what can or should be done to alleviate that problem. Certainly something should be done, but I don't know what.

Treating gifted children as beasts of burden who ought to suffer in order that the other students do better, I don't think is a workable solution. If I have to put up with misery in order to do something for other people, that's basically a job, and I should be getting paid (or some other form of benefit). A big problem, I think, is that students are compelled to attend school, and compelled to attend every class.

Fix the classes. The reason most kids aren't learning fast isn't because they're less capable of learning, it's because the school is presenting lessons in a way that is difficult for people to quickly learn.

The reason school exists is for the kids going through it (and for all the employers who are having the state train their future workers for them, but we don't want private business running basic education anyway. The reason it's not fun, again, is because we are Doing It Wrong.

wiregrind posted:

Removing them would only pass the hierarchy to private schools, making a deeper cut in structural inequality.

See an example: With special programs an eager student in public education could get to learn calculus. But after the gifted programs are dismantled from public education; only rich students in private high schools would have a choice of having an advantage.
The class hierarchy would be firmly solidified as anyone poor is prevented from advancing unless the rest of the class advanced, while the rich in their own schools are able to go as far as they can.

The reason they're not teaching calculus in the eighth grade anymore isn't to level some playing field or prevent students from having an advantage. Instead, it's because there's no point in teaching calculus if the proper groundwork hasn't been built first in the preceding classes, and the curriculum was not ordered correctly to build that groundwork. Private schools may cram in calculus earlier, but even though that impresses parents who love to see a long checklist of skills that have been taught at the students, it's not a very good way at teaching calculus to students. Some might pass and a couple might even remember it a few months later, but it's a poor way of teaching it and basically a complete waste of time that could be better spent building proper fundamentals for a later calculus class.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2015 02:08

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:22

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

PT6A posted:

I want to make sure I understand you correctly: is it your claim that, given some ideal, perfect instruction, all students would be able to learn at the same rate as the most intelligent person in any given group of people? That seems like nonsense. That's like saying, given enough time, I could train myself to be a competitive sprinter. I can certainly improve, but I'm always going to be poo poo because, guess what, that's how I was born. Yeah, it loving sucks that people don't all have the same natural abilities; having been born with cerebral palsy, I know that really, really well. That doesn't mean we can change that basic fact by trying extremely hard to ignore it.

I don't know why you're still having trouble with this since I've described it to you specifically at least three times, but sure, I'll explain it again to you. Only a quickie this time, though.

It is my claim that while overall differences in "learning capability" most likely do exist, those differences are dwarfed by the effects of the differences in kids' learning styles. Gifted kids are not gifted because they are just better at all learning, they're gifted because they are better at handling the particular very limited way that classes are taught today. The difference between gifted and non-gifted is not "smart vs dumb" or "high brain potential vs low brain potential", it's "people whose brains are adapted to rote memorization (even though they're still bored by it because surprise, everyone thought school was boring, not just the gifted kids) versus people whose brains are better at other styles of learning that are rarely, if ever, seen in American schools". Failure to learn is, generally speaking, caused by the failure of the school system to teach properly (or due by out-of-school issues that interfere with the kids' schooling), not because the kids are stupid.

With an actually functional education system, a curriculum that focuses on building strong foundations for later learning rather than cramming inappropriately-ordered knowledge that won't last the summer, and teaching tactics that involve students far more and cover a wide variety of learning styles, everyone will learn a lot more, and the gaps in performance and perceived potential will be much, much smaller. Gifted programs are a symptom of just how bad the current system is at teaching.

Frankly, it's kind of disgusting to see that, despite the fact that everyone claims to acknowledge that the system sucks now, everyone is assuming that the way it's done now is the best way to do it. Why is everyone ascribing negative motives to the school administrators? They're trying to fix a class that's completely broken and horribly unsuited, and instead of admitting the possibility that maybe there was some problem with a class that most kids were failing, people are accusing the mean old teachers of trying to drag down smart kids out of spite or something.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2015 10:34

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