I was essentially raised by a single working mother who spent 12 years getting herself a Master's Degree while working full time and raising a very independent and even more obstinate little boy.

We weren't the poorest people I knew, but clothes came from Goodwill and we did not have enough money to put oil in our home's heater during some winters.

By 7th grade, I had been managing my own meals, hygiene, laundry and getting to and from school for a few years. I was also running as fast as I could directly to jail or worse. I had become feral.

I was extremely lucky that my mother forced me to try out for a magnet program, which got me into a different social group and even though I continued to find some trouble, I did not continue to find ever worse kinds of trouble.

Of course, I could be wrong, but I believe that art program and the teachers, students and counselors there saved my life.

It would be a real shame if we allowed people to dismantle those programs, as I certainly am not the only economically disadvantaged person who found themselves at least somewhat stimulated and essentially saved by the experience.

Gifted programs were providing that, via extra supervision and easier classes to manage (everyone wants to be there). These activists are now robbing these kids of their only alternative at having a functioning environment for 8 hours a day.

I think that was the most impactful part. I'm curious what you think though.

If you were to dissect what makes actually makes a gifted and talented program different or better is it actually anything to do with the selection part of it or is it a result of being surrounded with peers from better socioeconomic backgrounds who are more likely to make it through the selection in the first place?

Take another step back and also consider if you had a twin with virtually the same upbringing as you up until your mom forced you to try out for the magnet program, would they benefit more or less from the g&t school existing or if that funding had been distributed to their under-funded schools? Would more kids on average benefit from the existence of these programs than not?

Obviously there are other confounding factors here but I'll enter this in as a counter-anecdote, I went to a small suburban school district in the north east that had a single, well-funded public high school, our graduation rates, testing outcomes, and college acceptance rates were comparable with g&t schools in other states.

For me, I don't think it was the curriculum or the socioeconomic background of the kids so much as the little sliver of hope it gave me/us.

It was the remote possibility that I just might be able to build a life that did not look like the adult lives I could see. A life that wouldn't be a decades long, living nightmare of hypocrisy, low-wage slavery, overwhelming debt and silent desperation, which is what I could see in most adults I had ever met, even (maybe especially?) the "wealthy" ones.

I'm not sure regular public schools generally offer that kind of possibility or outlet to basically hopeless, misguided (but creative) kids like I was. My previous schools only offered extra discipline in the form of regular beatings [1] which mainly just triggered and reinforced my lifelong distrust of authority figures.

  [1]: I (wrongly) assumed corporal punishment had long ago been outlawed or at least effectively banned in Florida's public schools decades ago, but alas our government officials will never permit anyone to besmirch our earned reputation as an ignorant backwater. Corporal punishment is apparently still permitted to this day:

> If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.

> For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.

In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?

While there are some concerns that have been raised about bias within the tests themselves[1], in my experience the concern about testing among actual educators is usually that the tests are pitched as objectively "measuring intelligence" when in reality they measure a confluence of factors.

Intelligence is certainly a major factor but external factors such as having a stable home with quiet times that are conducive to studying, good nutrition, good role models, and good teachers play a major role as well.

There have been controversial attempts to control for those factors, for example by including information about the test takers socioeconomic status, but for the most part "intelligence tests" do not attempt to control for external variables. So it's impossible to tell how much of the delta in scores between two individuals reflects actual differences in their intelligence compared to differences in their environment and starting conditions.

The risk of tracking students solely based on such tests is that you end up compounding the existing penalties of having a bad environment.

Don't get me wrong, I think testing has an important role to play, but we should be honest and stop pretending that these are "intelligence tests".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_bia...

Edit: also your link doesn't cite any serious claim that these tests are inappropriate for use within a westernized country like the US.

Interesting. To me it seems like intelligent students with negative environmental factors would yield the highest ROI from being admitted into a gifted program. Just look at the testimonials from commenters in this thread who came from humble beginnings and credit gifted programs with helping them climb the social ladder. Whereas sufficiently well-off kids have parents who can make sure they get excellent educational resources and will be fine regardless of how they score on some test.

> Edit: also your link doesn't cite any serious claim that these tests are inappropriate for use within a westernized country like the US.

To be clear, I agree that concerns about inherent cultural bias within the tests themselves are somewhat overblown. The real issue is that the tests do not solely measure intelligence and yet we act as if they do.

Indeed placing smart kids into gifted programs does help them, that's why these programs should not be abolished. However IQ doesn't fluctuate that much over one's lifespan, so at worst we're missing some children on the edges, which is inevitable in any human system.

Tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices [1] should make all of these things irrelevant except nutrition, since the tasks involved are things nobody really studies for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices

That certainly looks like an improvement, but I would imagine that things like poverty and the student's home situation would still play a similar role to nutrition. That is: given two children of equivalent raw "intelligence", if one has a stable home situation with loving parents who stress focus and discipline and the other bounces between homes in the foster care system with no good role models, I would expect the former to score higher on just about any test you could give them.

> the tasks involved are things nobody really studies for

Perhaps that is true today, but I see no reason Goodhart's law would not apply -- if you start basing a student's educational opportunities on how well they score on an RPM test, then a cottage industry of RPM test prep will emerge. There are some tests that are exceedingly hard to train for (e.g. dual n-back comes to mind) but looking at RPM it doesn't seem like something that would take much practice to pick up some reasonable strategies.

Again, I still think testing is very useful, especially for spotting outliers in a similar-enough population and ensuring they get additional resources necessary to excel. I'm just skeptical about social scientists' claims that intelligence can be objectively measured by a multiple-choice test in a way that cannot be gamed by people with enough resources.

"The first practical intelligence test was developed between 1905 and 1908 by Alfred Binet in France for school placement of children. Binet warned that results from his test should not be assumed to measure innate intelligence or used to label individuals permanently."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Early_IQ...

The problem with this model is twofold:

1. First it ostracizes the ones in that enrichment class, and demotivates children left behind. It also causes rifts and resentment among friend groups. Every day the other children see Sam and Sally leave class and go to a "special kid room", and this turns into jealousy and bullying. The kids in the enrichment class feel bad for being there, and the kids not in the enrichment class feel bad for not being there. We learned a whole lot, but I think this model could have been implemented such that we could still have learned those things without the associated social costs.

2. It's not a great selection mechanism. For example, they passed over some of my friends who, in my experience, are way smarter than me. Why? Well one had slight dyslexia, but he was a math genius. Another is a music and art genius, but she wasn't great at numbers. So we have people who would have benefitted from these programs, arguably both have a very high IQ, and yet this whole process left them feeling "less than". They had to sit in boring, sad reading class while us "enrichment" kids were putting on a production of Macbeth. If that's the kind of thing we were doing, why wasn't my artist friend invited? Because she couldn't do algebra in 3rd grade?

So if there's so much social pressure, resentment, bullying, and the selection method isn't even that great anyway.... then what are these programs for? Can't we come up with a better model that enriches all kids? Instead of asking some magic sorting hat and trusting it's selecting the best students?

Anyway, that was my experience decades ago... maybe things are different now. Obviously I have no idea what's going on with 3rd grade social dynamics these days.

Yes I agree we should be wary of setting up Lord of the Flies in our schools, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore the existence of children like Bluejay[1].

> Can't we come up with a better model that enriches all kids?

I think the basic answer is "no". Past a certain pace/complexity many children will simply be unable to keep up and retain information. We should strive to rid ourselves of the modern delusion that since everyone is equal morally, they must all be equally capable and have equal potential.

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/bluejay/

For instance, why aren't we putting all the kids into a room and testing their artistic aptitude, and funneling the kids who are the best artists into elite art programs to foster that ability? Why were IQ tests the only tool used to distinguish students? My wife's school had various different "academies" with disciplined focus areas -- arts, music, sports, etc. - which sound like a good way to do things.

I guess my general point is that all children deserve enrichment, not just the high IQ ones. And even if the high IQ children are more needing or deserving of this enrichment, the methods I've experienced used to make the determination as to who is of high IQ are heavily flawed, although my experience is out of date.

The city I live in has several such schools and does exactly that, so I agree.

> all children deserve enrichment

This seems almost like a contradiction in terms. If all children get enrichment then surely it stops being enrichment.

These are exceptions. Skills tend to be highly correlated at both the low and high end: people good at math also tend to be good at reading/writing. Also, many gifted programs may only focus on a single subject or are individualized, such as being accelerated in math but grade level at reading.

>1. First it ostracizes the ones in that enrichment class, and demotivates children left behind. It also causes rifts and resentment among friend groups. Every day the other children see Sam and Sally leave class and go to a "special kid room", and this turns into jealousy and bullying. The kids in the enrichment class feel bad for being there, and the kids not in the enrichment class feel bad for not being there. We learned a whole lot, but I think this model could have been implemented such that we could still have learned those things without the associated social costs.

Welcome to the real world. This is what life is like. Life is not fair. Why do Google employees earn more than Amazon warehouse workers.

The argument against the name "gifted and talented" isn't that some children have gifts that are different from others, it's that the sole arbiter of whether a child is "gifted", as if it were something anointed by Jesus, is not that they did well on some standardized test in kindergarten.

I definitely agree with the author, something like "accelerated learning" is a much better name

1. https://youtu.be/O2f_MlZtjuY?t=9

But as much as I love the Simpsons, I'm not sure of its value as evidence in a policy discussion either way.

I'm not using the Simpsons episode as "evidence", I just thought Mrs. Krabapple's statement of "Now I don’t want you to worry, class, these tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and success, if any." was such a hilarious statement, and while of course it is hyperbolic, does have evidence to support the gist, that leading kids into different "tracts" at such an early age can have an outsized effect on their life, and that effect can be unwarranted based on what can be small differences in the "cutoff" to get into gifted programs.

The Simpsons episode however is more designed towards the social status aspect. If being in a gifted program grants status, without any connection to the education conducted within the program, all we are simply describing is moving kids into segregated groups of those that has money and power and those that doesn't. The actually program itself has no meaning and could as easily be renamed as the rich people club (private schools?) with the same education material and program as everyone else.

When it comes to people on the lower end of the IQ spectrum, we do see that a single test would not work to determine which tract a student should follow. A failing test could be a sign of low IQ where the student need to be at a school for children with special needs, or it could just be a temporary setback where the regular program is perfectly suitable. In border cases there would basically be an extended period of testing and trial attempts to see which one would be best suited to the individual.

In theory the same process should be on the higher end of the IQ spectrum. If you got a border case where a individual is just slightly above or below the qualifications for a gifted program then what would be best for the individual would be to extended the testing phase and see where they develop best.

“Now I don’t want you to worry, class, these tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and success, if any.”

— Mrs. Krabappel

As you pointed out, Bart admits to cheating and gets sent back to his ordinary class. The GP’s point is that these tests merely determine who will be admitted to the “gifted and talented” classes, not who will succeed in them, and the Simpson’s episode bears that out. If there were a more accurate way of predicting success in gifted classes then we should use that instead of standardized test scores.

Gifted and talented programs are one type of solution when fast learning children in combination with a somewhat supporting environment create a situation where they do no longer fit in the regular system, having to artificial slow down their own learning and development as a person. Racial disparities in this context is likely caused by a difference in supporting environments occurring much earlier in the childs life.

IQ is environmentally malleable; particularly relevant to this, nutrition near the time of the test is relevant, and this is strongly associated with socioeconomic status, even moreso before children enter school where meal programs exist as a levelling force. Processes like NY once-and-done test at 4 years old maximize the disparities produced this way (later start or multiple chance programs that test in school mitigate some of that disparity.)

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

Probably any sport or art in which people tend to peak very young (early 20s), or that have opportunities available for young participants that will effectively lock them out of further high-level advancement if they miss them (because you're expected to have done those if you're "serious"), are like that.

Imagine someone forcing you to sit at a desk and practice spelling of basic English words?

And they can lose faith in school. And also it can be harder for them to find friends, when their thoughts and interests are a lot more grown up than their classmates.

It can be frustrating and lonely for them.

Recognizing reality and adapting to it is the opposite of dumb.

The label could change but it wouldn't make much difference except for politically.

Which means that the NYC public schools (the subject of this conversation, recall) have ~1000 kids like that right now.

Now their various "gifted" programs do take more kids than that; the bar for such things is often at the 95th percentile, not the 99.9th.

And the cost to society when even one of them falls short of their potential is incalculable.

Most people really don't end up mattering that much. If we can identify the ones that will matter, and do so far enough in advance, it's impossible to argue that we won't be better off for having done so.

I'm not saying we shouldn't treat prodigies differently. I'm saying that 99.99% of these "gifted" kids aren't anything like prodigies and that the money aimed at them is better off spent elsewhere.

An unprovable assertion if there ever was one.

https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/conscientiousness-to...

The irony here is that I first learned the Logo language in one of these enrichment programs.

In regards to racial biases towards IQ tests, it isn't necessary for the tests themselves to have racial bias. These tests aren't given out to all students, they must be recommended for it by their teachers. Maybe certain teachers would display less bias in a 'this student seems bored by the lessons' line-of-thinking versus 'this student seems gifted'. I have no idea about that part.

Isn't this basically nonsense? Are you sure every child is exceptional in some way? How do you know? Have you measured? How would you react to a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable child? Would your worldview just collapse? What does the word "exceptional" mean to you?

> quality that isn't necessarily intrinsic

Why does the intrinsicness of the property matter?

> learning environment that meets their potential

How would you label people who have high potential? What about low potential? Now, in the interest of clarity and simplicity, what single word would you use to label each category?

> aren't given out to all students, they must be recommended for it by their teachers

To my knowledge they are given out to all students at a particular grade/age - YMMV. If teachers must select students then clearly teacher bias would be a factor.

Why have we become so terrified of assigning adjectives to people? Why can't a person be "smart" or "dumb" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "strong" or "weak" or "disabled" or "retarded"? Just because some of these things are subjective doesn't mean that they are useless. Why have we started to pay such close attention to the feelings of some people assigned to categories they don't care for? "gifted" is just a word to denote such a category. If people don't like being "not gifted" they will learn to dislike "non-accelerated learning student" just as well.

1. An expansion of the concept of 'harm', so that now even casual word usage is thought to be evidence of causing harm. (ex: "Indirectly suggesting some students are 'not gifted' harms them")

2. Operating on an ideal that we are all born equal (not speaking of 'rights' here, but competencies, value to society, etc.). We are but a blank slate, to be molded by social structures. Any unequal outcome on anything has to be a sort of 'systemic discrimination'. (ex: "I see that there's some group that is underrepresented in that gifted program, therefore they obviously are discriminated against")

3. Operating as if humans do not have free will. Any underperformance on anything is not their fault, it's "the system".

America seems to be rekindling a bent for things like racial essentialism and wanting to bring the idea of identity groups to the forefront of any conversation on anything. This tendency has a way of clouding the underlying reality on any given issue. Culturally, there is an expectation that you must reinforce these ideas in conversation, and pay lip service to the group-based narratives or else be labeled a 'group-ist'. It then becomes very difficult to actually talk about the underlying principles and factors at play on any given issue.

My personal take is you have to sort of utilize this group-based thinking yourself as a sort of trojan horse, to then attempt to highlight the true underlying principles/factors at play in the conversation. It's a way to sort of short-circuit the uncritical thinking that many have around issues of the day.

I'm guessing some kids who would fit in those programs, might feel it's not for them, simply because they don't think about themselves as "gifted"? Maybe especially often kids from a poorer background?

I'd guess a name change is a good idea

Regarding these two in particular, they were stops on a euphemism treadmill:

  Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974,[18] also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"

  Mentally disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly-used insults. The medical diagnosis was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into a pejorative against those with mental disabilities. More specific diagnoses were created, like "autism", but—while less common--"autistic" is still sometimes used as an insult. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although "What are you, special?" has begun to crop up as a school-yard insult.[23] As of August 2013, the Social Security Administration replaced the term "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability".[24] Since 2012, that change in terminology has been adopted by the National Institutes of Health and the medical industry at large.[25]

Part of the trouble we have with communicating between one another has to do with the fact that the inner states of interlocutors are only partially observable to one another. i.e. I have no idea what you are feeling in your head and what you have experienced apart from what you communicate to me through expressions or words, and vice versa. You can use any words you want with a person, but you have no idea how the words you use will impact their internal state. You can make a guess, but it's not guaranteed.

When some words are used by bullies to bring violence onto other children, it adds a new dimension to an otherwise benign word. I play the violin and the word "retard" is used often, because it means to play the music "slowly". But when it's also being used as an invective against a child by a bully, well now it has a darker meaning.

I can go through life simply saying this word without thinking about other people's feelings. But it's going to change the way some people perceive certain conversations. For instance, if I am conversing with someone who has not played violin and does not speak French, and has only seen this word being used by bullies to make other children feel lesser, or has been bullied themselves using such words, that is going to increase anxiety in the internal state of this person. They will wonder why I am using that word, and they may question whether or not I have bullied people in the past using that word. They may recall memories of themselves being bullied. Now all of a sudden the conversation is derailed just because you said the word "retarded", even without any ill-intentions.

While it would be nice if we could write down a word and settle on a definition for all time, that's never going to happen. The reason for this is we will never be able to settle on a universal dictionary definition for all words, and even if we could, no person can really know the dictionary definition of all the words they use, so it definitions would end up being ad hoc anyway. The meaning of words therefore comes from the dictionary as well as our own personal experience with the way those words are used. Unfortunately, we all have different experiences with the way words are used -- for me the word "retard" is the word I see at a beautiful violin solo before I play it. For others it's the word they hear before getting stuffed in the locker. In order to maintain copasetic conversations with all individuals I encounter, I strive to understand these "sensitivities" as you call them, but really they are just different perspectives, and no one is more or less valid than another.

Since people's internal states are unknowable, it's impossible to predict them accurately 100% of the time. Dictionaries provide an oracle for parsing language. If we're forced to consider how people might feel in response to any factual statement that we make, we end up in absurd situations[1].

I'm suggesting that we shift the burden of managing emotional states away from the speaker and towards the listener. Just like with laws (codified social/behavioural protocol), so with language (codified communication protocol) ignorance of a word or definition is your problem, not everyone else's. Don't impose your ignorance on others. If you're not sure, the right thing to do is ask "Why are you using that word? What does it mean?" not jump immediately to offense.

In order to maintain copasetic (great word, thank you for it) conversations, I personally strive not to be offended by anything and expect others do the same.

> While it would be nice if we could write down a word and settle on a definition for all time

I mean, we can and many languages with prescriptive dictionaries do. All we have to do is collectively agree that clear communication is more important than people's feelings. The value proposition seems clear enough.

1. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/niggardly-attitude-to-word-c...

But ...

> People's internal emotional states are their own to manage. Language is a tool for communication...

It is not very good communication to not consider how people understand what you say.

Communication has two ends and simply blaming people for not understanding you when you were aware that a word has multiple meanings in general usage makes no sense.

Also, word meanings change through usage. A non-pejorative word becomes pejorative. Ignoring that is not good communication.

This is not just about "internal emotional states" but simply what the word means to someone else objectively. I.e. "internal rational states", if you will.

A word whose common usage has become pejorative is in rational fact, and in any up-to-date definition, pejorative. If you are not trying to be pejorative, you achieve better communication by not using it. Even if in the past it did convey what you wish it still did.

Also, we are not 'terrified' of adjectives - we are 'terrified' of a world that is unable to continue the gradual march of empathy to larger and larger groups that humanity has thus far been able to maintain and is critical for our long-term survival. If our monkeybrains were unable to evolve social constructs allowing the cooperation and common action of more than 7 people we'd still be stone age apes barely capable of using tools.

The key social "technology" that enables that is empathy with a monkey whose experience doesn't match the small tribe of individuals we're personally capable of caring about. It's an abstraction that enables everything else and it's important.

I'm having a hard time parsing this, but I think you're arguing that the world is getting less empathetic, and therefore less cooperative? I disagree, and think the reverse is true. The more we can disregard emotions and work as cogs in a machine, the more productive we ultimately are. It's exactly this capability that allows us to cooperate in groups of many hundreds of thousands: the ability to interface with each other not as emotionally complex primates, but as executors of a function.

Natural human empathy has very, very low limits. You can only really care about 7 or 8 people at any given time. The rest is social constructs that allow a sort of abstract empathy where in-groups are gradually expanded.

Human civilization simply doesn't work without this kind of social construct. We degrade to feces-slinging apes pretty quickly.

This seems like a distressingly common construction. Is it a logical fallacy? Does it have a name?

The word "jealousy" comes to my mind

Maybe sometimes feelings, not logic underlies the arguments? And any logics was made up afterwards

These arguments are built on the apparent either-or black-and-white setup, while in the reality, a range of possibilities exists.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

That being said, not sure what the alternative is. On one hand, challenging students to the limit of their abilities and bump them higher as soon as they exhaust a level is a laudable goal. Alas, as long as the educational pedigree is used in competitive scenarios (grant, internships, jobs), this will simply create an inflationary pressure to bump everyone to the top level and degrade the top level quality to the lowest common denominator.

We are missing a objective bar, for example a hard standardized exam to gate college admissions. Such an exam becomes an incentive for developing strong programs. Time to take a clue from China's gaokao. Alas this requires that we come to terms that not all schools, not all programs, not all demographics, not all kids are equal, which doesn't seem to be something XXI century America is willing to publicly accept.

For example, I believe this conversation around these programs would be different if they were called something like the "Harder work program".

I hated when any teacher referred to me as gifted, incidentally. I thought it had an implication that my performance was bestowed on me from some outside power. A little too woo-woo for my teenage self.

Even though teacher after teacher had nominated me for the program no one actually gave me the placement test until 7th grade. Some math, lots of puzzles, timed quizzes, etc. I passed and spoke with the teacher. We didn't get along, and in today's slang she would be considered a 'Karen'.

I was the only person of color in the program, in a majority-minority school. And with the gifted teacher not wanting me there I asked to be taken out, went back to my 'ghetto ass friends'. I took the classes I liked and never gave the G&T program another thought.

I went on to take regular accelerated maths, language, history with a sprinkling of AP, dual credit classes. Where I met up with all those supposedly gifted students again.

Based on my experience on schooling in the 90s. The G&T programs have a serious racial issue that is only now being reckoned with.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

Speaking as someone who moved around a lot as a child, and would be identified as a G&T candidate in each new place if there was such a program available there; when it wasn't, school was unbearable. In the last 2 years of High School, I stopped going to class, and stopped handing in assignments, and still did well... enough. My teachers liked me, could tell that I didn't belong there, helped out where they could.

I think it's helpful to think of G&T kids as having a learning disability. It sounds strange, but if they aren't stimulated, they are miserable, and will not do well in school.

This is extremely toxic dogma and your anecdote does not disprove the fact that competence is roughly normally distributed. If we do not collectively acknowledge this fact and allocate extra resources to high achievers, we are handicapping our society in some misguided pursuit of an impossible equitable utopia.

Almost all kids who are in accelerated programs are there because they already HAVE extra resources at home. These are the people who are going to be ahead anyway. I'd rather lift the bottom up first, which is where the opportunity to benefit society the most lies, and then worry about using additional resources on the top.

> "One of the silliest things about this entire argument is that there are only a handful of prodigies born every year,"

Are people saying that?

> "...and most of the "gifted" kids aren't really any brighter than their classmates, they just get more attention at home."

Are you saying that no one is really brighter than anyone else? Or that the G&T kids at your school were mislabeled over others who actually are gifted?

> "but they had been coddled so much by their labels..."

I actually agree that the narrative told to G&T kids are actively harmful. "You are Gifted and Special" isn't helpful, at least as it's presented. It can lead to an inflated self-worth and insecurity, among other problems.

> "...and their parents that most of them were complete social incompetents"

Now here you veer into some assumptions that I don't think are fair, but you do seem to be committed to the idea that G&T is not a thing at all. You explain the phenomena, then, as an illusion created by coddling parents?

If rich people knew the only way to get good schooling for their kids is to make schooling better entirely, then we'd have better schools.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...

I think you have a misunderstanding about what a gifted program is.

I went through a gifted program as a child and I can assure you that my parents paid no money for it, considering our income was so low that we qualified for free lunches in school.

You have special education for students with needs that prevent them from being able to learn in a "normal" classroom, why not for gifted students as well?

I'll answer that question myself: no, it does not. Detroit Public Schools receives more funding per student than the average school district in Michigan, yet it is one of the worst performing school districts in the nation.

You cannot simply throw money at bad schools to make them better, so why punish gifted students by removing their ability to learn at a level that's more appropriate for them?

Measure height in 10 different ways on 10 different days, and you'll get the same value. Measure IQ 10 different ways on 10 different days and you'll get 10 different values. Do I have the same IQ at 3am after I haven't eaten all day, as I do at noon on a full stomach and a good night's sleep? I guarantee you my score will be different in both scenarios, so does that mean I have two IQs? Sleepy IQ vs. Alert IQ? When measuring IQ, is sleepiness vs. alertness controlled for? Is hunger?

Somehow I took a test in 3rd grade that changed the trajectory of my life. What if I didn't eat that morning? No one checked, and the only one to feed me was my mother. What if she didn't feed me? Would my IQ have dropped 10 points on that test and caused my entire life to change? Very possibly, I was on the threshold. I'm quite sure that some people in the room taking the test with me didn't eat that day, maybe not since lunch time the day before, since the test was at 8am. Would it surprise you to know that of the people in my class who were hungry while taking that test that day, most of them were children of color?

How do you think the IQ results turn out when a majority of children of color are hungry while taking it, and the majority of white kids are well-fed. At my school it meant that a majority of "gifted" students were white. Actually, come to think of it, all of them were. Not a single minority, despite minorities being represented at a proportionate rate at my school.

What's scary to me is that the unstated opinion in some of my social circles is that this situation is the result of whites simply having a higher IQ. As your post seems to imply here.

Edit: To the dead comment below me:

> IQ is very well defined - it's the grade you get in an IQ test

That's called a tautology, so what you're saying is that the tests are not measuring anything except themselves. The rest I will leave dead because it's subjective, so no need to resurrect it, but the way you defined IQ here is a verifiable logical flaw in your argument.

It's weird that on one hand you suggest IQ may be a poor, simplistic measure of whether a student is 'gifted', but then on the other hand reduce basketball skill/ability to a simplistic measure such as height.

It also seems you are making a number of claims or hypotheses here that I'm personally interested in knowing if there is any data/evidence to support:

1. Taking a test on multiple days produces high enough variance in results, that the test results are not predictive of any sort of ability or future outcomes

2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white)

3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests

Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?

For example, would you say hunger/tiredness is the core reason white children don't all have the same exact scores?

What I'm saying here is that hunger and sleep are two confounding factors always present in any testing situation, at least in my experience as an educator. I have seen it personally in my students, especially when comparing my 8am section performance with my 12pm section's performance for the same class on the same tests and material. The 8am section consistently performs worse (sometimes by half a letter grade or more) on their tests compared to their 12pm peers, and this has been true across my career. What's interesting is I can compare these students across semesters, since they take multiple classes with me. I can see how they perform at 8am one semester vs 12pm another. But this is just my own little experience with college-age students, I'm not familiar with recent literature.

Anyway, the point is if I'm seeing these things in my students there is no reason to thing we wouldn't see these performance drops on 3rd graders doing an IQ test as well. So the question is: why aren't they controlling for these things? Or are they, and I don't know. Because they didn't control them for my cohort when I was tested.

> 2. The majority of 'children of color' are hungry when taking IQ tests ('of color' in popular usage means non-white) 3. The majority of white children are well-fed when taking IQ tests

I wasn't making a generalization here, I was specifically talking about my school.

> Reading between the lines, it seems you are hinting at the idea that all humans who approach the IQ test are equal in ability that the IQ test is testing for. If there are any disparities in results amongst any groups, it must be the result of other factors like being hungry/tired/etc. Is that a fair characterization?

Don't read between the lines here too much, I was making a concrete argument: If we want to measure something like IQ, we should do so rigorously and with purpose, because otherwise what are we even doing?

Even if we just assume IQ is defined as the result of the IQ test, we know that test result can vary based on testing conditions and the emotional state of the tester during the test. With regular testing this is not so bad because the effects average out over time, unless the problem is chronic. With IQ test though, the presence of these confounding factors is especially vexatious, because there is a general perception that IQ is a fixed, immutable quantity, so the score you get on the test cannot be improved.

In the context of gifted programs it means these tests are usually administered once and early during the normal course of a child's 12 year education, and these program really only exist in elementary school; by the time children get to middle and high school there are other mechanisms for sorting children (standard, honors, ap, electives, votech etc.). With something so consequential, we need to do it right, rather than just do a thing because it sounds right and hope that it works out for the best for everyone. If the consequences weren't so monumental than the slapdash approach I experienced (and again, this was a long time ago but at the same time not so long ago. Maybe it's different now, but this is how it was for me maybe things have changed drastically).

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...

> Traditional explanations for the black-white test score gap have not stood up well to the test of time. During the 1960s, most liberals blamed the gap on some combination of black poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate funding of black schools. Since then, the number of affluent black families has grown dramatically, but their children’s test scores still lag far behind those of white children from equally affluent families. School desegregation may have played some role in reducing the black-white test score gap in the South, but school desegregation also seems to have costs for blacks, and when we compare initially similar students in today’s schools, those who attend desegregated schools learn only slightly more than those in segregated schools.

Automatically blaming any discrepancy on outcomes between different racial groups on racism isn't helping anyone. It also doesn't really feel like you're looking to discuss or learn anything here, rather just to scold people for being racist. This is a tough question that doesn't have a solid answer yet.

Where did I scold people, or call people racist?

I said I'm not interested in the discussion if you think there is a _biological reason_ behind it.

Of course those taxes are helping society. There are gifted students living in poor school districts who wouldn't be getting the resources that let them excel if it weren't for the tax dollars funding those resources for them.

To put this in clearer language: If I have a bunch of 100-sided dice: 90 blue dice in one bucket, and 10 red dice in another, and I roll them all and select the top 10 numbers rolled, I'll have a greater proportion than 90% of blue dice, because there are more total dice rolls in that group.

It just seems really odd to me: It seems like because you get 9x the number of dice rolls for one group you would end up with a final distribution that favors the majority group, but that is obviously not the case. I need to wrap my brain around that one.

If I toss 9 quarters and a nickel and count the fraction of tails that rolled on the nickel then it will be equal to 1/10 of all the tails only if all coins roll tails or all roll heads i.e. in 2 outcomes out of 1024. In half of the other cases nickel tails will be overrepresented and in in the other half - underrepresented. It's because you cannot roll a fraction of a tail.

This is a dramatic oversimplification, to the point of being entirely misleading. Money =/= better schooling. Parental involvement, cultural attitudes about education, and not using a one-size-fits-all approach is what makes schooling improve. Is the implication is that if we forced rich people to send their kids to public schools, they'd use their rich person influence to raise taxes on themselves in order to get more funding?

Wealth is a clumsy proxy. A single-income home, with a parent deeply invested and active in the child's education (rather than how to get food on the table next week), implies a lot of unmeasured but real resources. Resources that are more readily invested in "communities with means." Leaving the communities without those same means deprived, deprived of resources that are not easily tracked by "how much money does the school get."

Of course wealth can play a role too. Consider a poor neighborhood where some of the money from the school goes to paying for school lunches, where in the wealthier neighborhood students are typically sent with their own lunchbox. It's not just about the money. It's about the people that have the money.

It's not something you can easily policy away, imho, because it's a systemic cultural issue, with a lot of messy tangles.

The kids are (often? Usually?) better at reading and writing in the new language, than their parents

https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-sc...

The idea behind banning gifted/special programs is to treat all students equally with equal opportunity and the same curriculum. Individualized grading by the teacher completely violates this idea.

So I am still unsure what point you are trying make. Based on my research Finland clearly rejects that notion of teaching and grading everyone the same.

Private tutors...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

But see, we aren't.

"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is one manifestation.

As an example, try this: ask someone who doesn't believe that billionaires should exist if they could snap their fingers and make all billionaires vanish, but nobody would become any wealthier, would they? I've seen that answered yes way too many times. That tells me that some people just don't want to know that someone is doing better than them, regardless of if it actually impacts them or not.

Though to be even more fair, if the political class didn't prostitute their influence, there would be nothing for the wealthy to buy, so making billionaires vanish does not address that problem.

Probably because it's impossible for a person to make a billion dollar in value without stealing from others.

Name me a single example that has made it up there without

- labor violations

- stealing profits from workers

- causing damage to the people who have worked for them

Note I’m pretty sympathetic to the argument that extreme wealth inequality (billionaires) are are symptom of a poorly configured economic system and should be minimised, but your hyperbole is off-putting. And it’s probably hindering rather than helping you make your point.

Nothing like this to show you're open to healthy discussion.

But the comment you replied to had a subtantitive point about the linked article, and you replied to a tertiary part of that post with a political message (no billionares exist without theft/etc) that had nothing to do with the thrust of the conversation.

That led me to believe you were being a troll. You engaged in a way that seemed straight forward so maybe you are just somebody who feels very strongly about a political view.

First-a, he deserves what he has (as far as you can make such a statement in a complex society). He provided some value, got paid for it, he now takes a risk helping others do the same. The only difference between him and me consuming X, providing X+Y value, and using the Y to buy tiny parts of public companies to have some claim on their profits is scale.

First-b, and yes, if someone came and took away my Y for "fairness", I would start working less to just make what I consume. And I mostly /like/ my job, unlike most people.

Second-a, after critically thinking about it, I actually believe it's better for people like him to allocate capital, instead of either some "democratic process", or even worse some semi-elected bureaucrats. I wish we could have people like Bezos, Buffett, Graham, etc. run MANY MORE things (generally speaking, not attached to a particular implementation). We have all of history to indicate who does things better. Second-a-a, even if we were to say "free market is bad in this area, no free market is allowed [e.g. healthcare or housing]" (to be clear, I disagree with that, but let's say we did) I would prefer to install a conventionally-defined-self-made billionaire from another industry to run said area, instead of a govt bureaucracy like we do now.

Third, as others have mentioned you don't have to take his money, you can bootstrap (and then get rich and loan money just like him).

Second-b, combining second-a and third in a more narrow scope, do you think either voters or bureaucrats would fund startups (and, do it better than the likes of VCs)? It has happened, but rarely and almost always in response to an existential threat. Viaweb FAQ says they were financed by angels to the tune of $2m 90ies-dollars. What are the alternative sources of funding you envision in the "fairer" allocation structure for such startups, be it Tesla, Google, or Viaweb, given their success rate?

Communism is an outright religion - there is no experimentalism, outcomes are preordained, and no results may change the assumptions. The only thinking is telological. If anybody pays X for a product and sells it for X + Y where Y is greater than zero it is automatically exploitation by their conveniently loaded definitions.

1. The idea that loaning it out isn't providing any value in itself is objectively wrong. If it provides no value is ridiculous in even a preindustrial economy - let alone an industrialized one where economies of scale and large capex are why markets wind up dominated by big players.

2. The idea that it is a small monopoly is also objectively wrong - money is fungible and it doesn't matter if you get one million in a loan from one entity or ten thousand ones. Even if we accept the standards of morality "if it is a good thing" is irrelevant a question as asking if it is a good thing that vehicles use electricity or break down fuels to move. Those are the mechanisms by which it works - we don't have an option of movement without expending energy. Similarly if you ask for all loans to be free to avoid "exploitation" there is no reason to lock up the money in delays and put it at risk.

Your response is typical of psudo-intellectuals called out on their bullshit. It's a lot easier to say "I'm right regardless of the facts" instead of directly addressing the points raised.

Provide a rebuttal or stop with your nonsense.

2. "Communism is an outright religion - there is no experimentalism, outcomes are preordained" is a case of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong. I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to this other than "pick up a book".

3. "If anybody pays X for a product and sells it for X + Y where Y is greater than zero it is automatically exploitation by their conveniently loaded definitions." Again, this is the idea of "communizm" I had when I was 12 or 13. As you can imagine, either everyone who is a socialist or anarchist or left-libertarian or whatever is a complety drooling idiot, or this is a stupid straw-man designed to fool people with zero critical thinking skills.

4. "If it provides no value is ridiculous in even a preindustrial economy - let alone an industrialized one where economies of scale and large capex are why markets wind up dominated by big players." Again, this is circular reasoning: in the current system providing capital is a valuable service, therefore the system is good since in the system the system is good... do you see what I mean? You cannot justify a thing by reasons internal to the thing itself.

5. "Those are the mechanisms by which it works" See above. I'll also add: capitalism (and specifically our current flavour thereof) is not a Law of Nature: it is the result of a very specific course that history took over the past 300 years. Alternatives are possible. Criticism is legitimate. Ambition to improve is a good thing.

Shall I go on? I learned it's not useful to talk with people who are not in good faith from the get go. Why bother?

1 is obviously a value judgement. 2 contributes nothing to the discussion.

I have a $1m MMR startup that I founded without any external funding - but mostly because I was naive to such structures existing at all. I would have saved years of struggling if I had an initial cash infusion of a few hundred thousand.

Idk about you, but I would trade 10% of my $1m MMR company for more free time during my early 20s.

Yes. But again, not a lot of options to avoid it as you said.

Like for example just build something and start selling it and make money.

That's what I did. Millions others have too. You are on Hacker News, you are probably a hacker, you can just create assets out of thin air!

> "Warren Buffett has made his money using ... land ownership and exclusivity ... a human construct"

Well, sheesh... if your starting frame of reference is that "capitalism is stealing by definition", then there's really no further discussion to be had.

Why not? Is Capitalism the universal truth or something that we can't touch or change?

That's the best part, it isn't for a chunk of people. It destroys life for another chunk of people.

So yeah, maybe, to you, it's not bad. To others? It's fucked.

2. Do you consider all the supply chain related deaths, all the prison related deaths, all the civilians killed in America going after oil part of "people killed under capitalism?"

Okay, let me try. I'll go with Jerry Seinfeld.

What labor violations did he do? Who did he steal from and what damage did he cause to the people who worked for him?

She made something appealing to hundreds of millions of people, and they willing gave her money for it. The horror.

And her books sold well enough before the movies and merch.

There are ~500mm Harry Potter books in print (all years, all languages). Author royalties are between 6 and 15 percent of the cover price. She would definitely have been wealthy, but not billionaire.

What's your actual "you've provided too much value to willing participants" amount? If she negotiated royalties of 20% she would have been a bad person? If she put her money in an index fund and it doubled every 10 years, she'd become immoral later?

Maybe we should put a limit on charity giving? Or do you have an official list of Authorized Ways to spend money?

The actual problem is people can use wealth to corrupt others, e.g., buy political influence. But instead of railing on that, you can't see that you're fighting against value generation itself.

You and that other guy clearly have a bone to pick.

Punishment, for writing such addictive tales of wizardry!

In my opinion the Labor Theory of Value is a tautology.

not all billionaire are good, and not all are bad.

Minecraft became what it is because of the third-party developer community. They saw nothing of it.

> j.k. rowling

Has already been explained. But also, her editors, and the fact that copyright/intellectual property is still a govt backed monopoly.

> George Lucas

Same deal as J.K.

critically, they did so voluntarily and for the compensation of entertainment, passion, and helping themselves.

rowling and lucas didn’t harm workers nor did they violate labor laws. complying with IP laws was not in the criteria, nor should it be.

So you mean they're paper billionaires by "owning the means of production" Yeah. I know. :)

I don't know how you could misread this badly. A paper billionaire means that they don't have billions in the bank; it's just the sale price of the last share that was traded in their company multiplied by the number of shares they own. It's not real, and any attempt to confiscate shares will not result in real money being given to anyone else. Shares are only worth real money when they're sold, and no one will buy shares in a confiscation world.

Can you explain? If they have options, and they probably do, then it will go up. What is your question based on?

People act like we don't understand how "value" and "equity" works.

We do. We don't want money. The idea is to own the means of production. Amazon is nothing without its workers. No company is anything without its workers. The workers deserve to be represented in that huge equity.

Every time you say things like "we" and "people" you discredit yourself. It's a pointless statement. You can have equity; start a company, or join a company (such as Amazon) that awards share options.

That becomes the crux of this. "Billionaires are bad" is a discussion about the system that actually allows them to exist, rather than the people themselves.

Warren Buffett has made a ton of his money using state-backed monopolies like real-estate. Land ownership and exclusivity, even when the land use is unproductive, is a human construct after-all.

The problem is that Asian New Yorkers, on average, have higher IQs then everyone else. So they end up in the G&T (Gifted and Talented) programs.

African New Yorkers, on average, have lower IQs then everyone else. So the G&T programs have only a smattering of darker-skinned students.

This is called "systemic racism."

“The move to get rid of G&T is long overdue,” said Rachel Griffiths of Brooklyn. “You can tell at a glance in my sons’ school which class is G&T and which class isn’t — the racial divide is that stark. What does that say to all the kids about who is gifted and who isn’t? In addition to learning reading and writing, the kids get an ugly real-life lesson in systemic racism.” [1]

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/08/parents-rip-de-blasio-for-plan...

Sounds like it is, actually. Fast-and-loose claims of "systemic racism", absent any kind of constructive proposal aimed at actually addressing perceived prejudicial attitudes, are just the politics of envy writ large.

That is a cultural divide problem. Asian cultures value education so much more than North American culture so families have a large focus on ensuring their children are well educated (in spite of our education system) as they view that as their ticket to success.

If we in Western countries continue to eschew improvements to our education system, and even reduce the ability for students to access programs that provide them a proper education, then we will continue to fall further and further behind Asian countries in innovation and productivity. Instead we look at the few programs for students that thrive in spite of the system and kill them because it is cheaper than investing in bringing other students up to that level.

What you just stated was actual racism, that other populations are unable to achieve what the Asian students have accomplished, so the program gives them an unfair advantage

Four-year olds are experiencing systematic racism?

Asians kids do better then whites. Racism against whites? Is that because we live in an Asian-centered society where white folk are marginalized? Asians keeping the white man down? Do we need affirmative action for white people? I think that is what Harvard is doing!

It looks like the next NYC mayor will be a black man, so he might be able to keep the "G&T" program going without being accused of racism.

>whites* Oh boy, looks like I struck a nerve there. If any student isn't testing well enough to enter then that's how it is. Good someone else has that chance. I wouldn't have a problem if there were no white people in it as long as everyone is testing against the same criteria.

>It looks like the next NYC mayor will be a black man, so he might be able to keep the "G&T" program going without being accused of racism. I accused you of racist commentary and logic, not the mayor. And if he said what you did, it would be racist as well, regardless of their color, which is not a qualifier on the capability of being racist.