Not really. There shouldn't be "gifted programs", because they're not actually measuring "intelligence" but "how much money do the parents have to create extra schooling"
What about this, why not have __every__ school provide personalized education to each person? Do we not have the money for that? Because we are __the richest country__.
> Not really. There shouldn't be "gifted programs", because they're not actually measuring "intelligence" but "how much money do the parents have to create extra schooling"
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.
Pretty sure this comment is about the fact that if you can pay for tutoring your kid is likely to do better in the thing they were tutored on, which in turn will make them more likely to get into. GT program. Keep in mind that all of this about population-level stuff, nobody is saying that poor people can't get into these programs, merely that the hill is steeper.
I also went through a gifted program. It was at one of the most poorly funded schools, and I had to take a 1.5 hour bus ride to get there. It was definitely not the most convenient option, and it was not the best school available by far.
When I was in 6th grade, I took a test that put me into algebra in 7th grade. The other options were pre-algebra, or remedial math. My parents didn't pay anyone, and this actually took place when I switched from private school to public school. How was that not a measure of my intelligence? Don't you think I would have missed out in terms of education if I was placed in the lowest tier, which is effectively what removing gifted programs does?
But that's precisely what we're saying: gifted programs for any student, regardless of wealth.
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?
Does giving more tax money to underperforming schools help society?
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?
Show me what I missed then. What could be an explanation of why there is a huge difference in racial demographics when it comes to these schools that don't fall into one of those two categories?
What could explain the huge difference in racial demographics when it comes to the NBA ? Will we start preventing black kids from playing basketball at an early age so whites can catch up? I mean if there is no such thing as differences between peoples, surely the NBA is racist for not accepting barely any Whites huh?
Height is well-defined, easily measurable, observable, and highly correlated to the ability to put a ball in a basket that is high off the ground. It is not at all comparable to IQ, which is neither well-understood nor well-defined.
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.
(I'm not here to defend whatever you think your arguing against, more interested in your thought processes here.)
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?
> 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
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).
Despite the drawbacks you listed here of the IQ test (which are drawbacks of testing in general I think), which are all true, there is no better predictor we know of than SAT like tests or IQ (which are pretty similar and what they test for). What do you suggest doing then?
> 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.
Well, I'd guess that most people here are not interested in a discussion that involves working backwards from an already chosen solution rather than figuring out what the solution is without any ideas being forbidden from the start. (myself included) Good luck!
> If you think it's the second one, are taxes going to gifted schools actually...helping society?
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.
Uh, could that be because it just takes time (often measured in generations) for historically-ingrained attitudes to shift in a socially-beneficial direction? What a silly question. Mind you, the C. R. T. folks are the ones who keep telling us that having a "good education", "getting the right answer" and "being on time" are uniquely oppressive "White values" and that Blacks are just different.
Why do we think it's our business exactly? If some cultural groups don't value education, isn't that their prerogative? Why do we think we need to get involved in the interest of representation?
One answer: If you have a selection process that compares a minority group against the general population for any metric which produces a well-defined ranking, and then selects for the top X% of performers on that metric, then you will end up with a selected group that has a lower proportion of the minority group.
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.
I just ran some monte carlo simulations. Turns out I was totally wrong, at least for a uniform distribution. I now suspect it's probably true for any distribution, but I can't prove it yet.
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.
I guess he is alluding to effects of rounding up/down in small samples but those cannot be biased in one direction. Nor are they certain to happen.
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.
I was in some gifted programs that were based on an IQ cutoff. I know its an imperfect measurement and we can work on better ones but theres a difference between a private school (how much money) and a gifted program.
>"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."
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?
I think the implication is that if people with means to act with authority, power, and know-how on the day-to-day operations of the school actual sent their kids to the schools that all the kids go to (even the kids that don't have parents with authority or power or know-how), the schools that all kids go to would be just as good.
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 good PISA ranking of Finland could also be a result of having less immigrant kids than other countries in the comparison. (Before you downvote, it doesn't mean immigrant kids are stupid, but they often struggle more because of language barriers and poverty).
Finland had a great educational system, that pushed them to the top of the PISA world ranking, changed it with a new "progressive" one, still got good scores the very next year because of pure inertia and became the darling of the Left worldwide. Right now their PISA scores are tanking, they barely made top 10 in 2018, ahead of Poland, and are behind all developed Asian countries, plus Estonia and Canada. That should explain why no one harps about how great Finnish educational innovations are lately.
Finland's legislation to ban private schools actually changed how "gifted/special" schooling programs changed too. That's a starter point for people interested to go research it a bit more.
Okay I did a bit of research along the line you said. From what I can find it seems the basis of Finland's school system is that not all students are equal. Report cards are based on individualized grading by each teacher. (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...)
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.
Finland must be doing g&t differently or you're completely misunderstanding, because in the UK there was never really a hard monetary barrier for the program.
while I agree that banning private schools would force public school quality to rise, that doesn't really have much of anything to do with whether public schools have a gifted program or not.
Monopolies underperform. Banning private schools leaves a public school that won’t improve because administrators aren’t faced with any competitive pressure (apart from a few private tutors).
This is anecdotal, but in one place where _this actually happened_ (NYC) things didn't work out exactly that way. There are more complications than just "money isn't flowing in":
This makes sense unless you want to send your kid to a school with a specialized education, like a religious or STEM-focused institute. There are a lot of reasons to use private schools, even if the public school education system were excellent
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...