The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for the gifted and talented communities.

Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron.

Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally does not afford equality of opportunities is a fool’s game that ends with Bergeron-esque levels of absurdity.

Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we all aren’t equal, we don’t all have access to the same opportunities, but as a country we can implement policies that lessen the imbalance.

Head Start is a good example.

Well-run gifted and talented programs in schools are also good examples.

Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society.

that's exactly what these school policies in CA and elsewhere are attempting to do; we can argue about which method might be the most effective, but no matter what you will find anecdotal examples about why X method "doesn't work".

The problem, or a problem, is that the problems the schools are trying to fix are deeply rooted in social inequality and much of that takes place outside the school. Striving for less inequality in general will also help solve the inequality in education problem.

Finland's approach is based on equality and has been very effective.

It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing.

Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own.

This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.

If only. The school system is actually terrible at helping the most disadvantaged and marginalized students. These students would benefit the most from highly structured and directed instructional approaches that often have the pupils memorizing their "lesson" essentially word-for-word and getting prompt, immediate feedback on every question they answer[1] - but teachers who have come out from a proper Education department hate these approaches simply because they're regarded as "demeaning" for the job and unbecoming of a "professional" educator.

Mind you, these approaches are still quite valued in "Special" education, which is sort of regarded as a universe of its own. But obviously we would rather not have to label every student who happens to be merely disadvantaged or marginalized as "Special" as a requirement for them to get an education that fully engages them, especially when addressing their weakest points!

Modern "progressive" education hurts both gifted and disadvantaged students for very similar reasons - but it actually hurts the latter a lot more.

[1] As an important point, the merit of this kindnof education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students! In fact, even Abraham Lincoln was famously educated at a "blab school" (called that because the pupils would "blab" their lesson back at the teacher) that was based on exactly that approach.

What does this even mean?

To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the 1900s US particularly healthy. Yet that was probably the peak of the US keeping resources in the hands of "those who move society forward" the robber barons and monopolists. We didn't think anything of working to death unwanted 5 year olds that were unlikely to make a positive impact on society.

As for "dying culture" that to me is a very different thing from society. Societies can have multiple cultures present and healthy societies tolerate multiple cultures.

> Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.

Which conquerers? I can think of no historical example where a conquerer somehow convinced a target to take care of their needy so they could conquer.

> This is perhaps the sole political topic I will die on a hill for.

I'm really interested in the foundation of these beliefs. What are the specific historical examples you are thinking of when you make these statements? Or is it mostly current events that you consider?

The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself.

Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior?

As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness?

A few months ago, there was a rebroadcast of an interview about the physician who developed roughly half the vaccines given to children in the US to this day. He seemed to be an unremarkable student, and persistence seems to have been the key quality that led to his successes, not a sequence of brilliant revelations.

> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.

I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR is hyper competitive with multiple levels of weeding out the less desirables to try and cultivate the genius class.

The problem with both is that your level of academic achievement dictated what jobs you were suited for with little wiggle room.

Now, that isn't to say, particularly under Mao, that there wasn't a purging of intellectuals. It is to say that later forms of the USSR and China have the education systems that prioritize funding genius.

Your team only moves as fast as its slowest member.

I didn't have history in school, could you expand on this part? This sounds very interesting.

And those people do not even have to be geniuses or top students. Our society moves forward on the back of millions of ordinary people, yet those ordinary people, me included, would benefit most from a rigorous education system.

This can mean a jump from working class to middle class and nothing more. That is absolutely driving society forward.

Not offering a means out of "the shit" for these kids is a way to hold them down into the circumstances they were born into and nothing more.

Zero kids I'm thinking of who went through these programs went to Yale or any other ivy. Most have great lives 20 years later, off the backs of that early opportunity for achievement.

Rather than trying to focus on the less-achieving third (half, tenth, etc) with the goal of bootstrapping entire groups (for your definition) via equality of outcome, it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.

It would also make sense to put aside some extra resources for those we know can achieve but are held back by specifically addressable hurdles like money or parents or etc.

If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.

There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of opportunity.

Quite obviously. That's what's being strip-mined at the moment.

I, and my peer group from "back home" would have had zero chances in life without these programs. We were not well off, and my peers did not come from families that had anything more than strong parenting - almost none had parents who had gone to college. They were tracked into gifted and talented programs at an early age by a school system that identified their highly capable students and resources were given to remove them from the "regular" track.

These programs have been removed since. It's holding those that need the most help back, while in no way hurting the people intended. The kids who have the ultra-parents with unlimited resources are going to private schools to begin with.

> If you only focus on churning out the most A-students possible without attempting to help those up to the level they can achieve, you end up with a serious nepotism / generational wealth issue where opportunities are hoarded by a different class of not-gonna-pay-it-back'ers. Legacy admissions, etc.

Short of extremely well-off suburbs (and neighborhoods in a handful of cities I suppose) this was never a thing in the public school system. Those generational wealth students don't touch the public school system at all. They are not relevant to the discussion and never have been.

> equality of opportunity

Correct. Equality of opportunity is what matters. The folks removing any gifted and talented programs, advocating for killing off magnet schools, etc. are the ones removing said opportunity in favor of equal outcomes. It's dragging everyone down to an extremely low bar and pretending they did something good.

Without inner city public school programs oriented towards the G&T crowd I would not be where I am today because my parents were working class at best. They were good parents, but they simply did not have resources to keep up with the "legacy" crowd. All they could do was try to get me into the "right" public schools and hope I'd be given a chance. This worked. Those programs are now gone - and anyone who grew up where I did in the same circumstances is more or less shit out of luck.

This is outright evil. Strong language and emotion be damned. It's deserved in this case.

The part where I disagree is the 'why' and the 'who'. There are a number of very strong forces (aka lobbying groups, aka decisions like 'no child left behind') doing their best to destroy the public school system. By making this conversation about gifted vs not gifted, we are again distracted and pitted against ourselves.

Public schools should be well funded and funded in an egalitarian manner that doesn't replicate residential aggregation of race or money. It should be funded for kids who need remedial help, help appropriate for their age, and help because they're advanced. It should be funded so that people who move from one group to the next, and you can and do move from one group to another, are supported

IMO the goal of the lobbying and shit policy is to make private school the default option for those who can afford it and those who can barely afford it. Public school will be left to the masses, and will be defunded leaving a populous more easily controlled, with less social mobility.

You know by the way people (Gary Tan, etc) talk about it the only students that matter are the first generation Asian kids who didn’t grow up rich. As another first generation Asian kid that didn’t grow up rich but had the privilege of educated parents but didn’t achieve anything that you’d consider “moving society forward” what should happen to everyone else?

If those are the kids in a specific school/school system that happen to be the most academically gifted, then they should be the ones attending the gifted and talented programs. I don't see how them attending precludes anyone else from also qualifying though? That the demographics happen to skew this way in some number of school districts is interesting at best. Rewarding strong parenting sounds like a win for society to me. Second generation immigrant children doing better than their first generation parents sounds like the American Dream working as-intended to me!

> you’d consider “moving society forward”

I likely have a much looser definition than you do, perhaps. This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community. Making the jump from poor to middle class is a huge generational achievement on it's own. If I was tossed into the "general classes" in middle school I likely would have simply been working in a factory or retail like most of my peers who stayed within that track ended up doing. The folks in the accelerated programs statistically have gone into more lucrative careers - even those who did not attend college.

It all comes down to helping those who want to help themselves, and recognizing you can't help those that don't want it. Spend the resources on the former, and give the latter the opportunity to change their ways - but don't tear down those trying to better themselves in the name of equity.

Can you list which conquerers? I'm curious as to what you're referring to here

Do gifted students move society forward ?

Where is society moving to ?

Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.

Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your opinion

What do you think should happen to people like me?

I was certainly capable of teaching myself in high school and skipping multiple years in certain subjects; why not just do that? Or find some other topic to learn about that isn't taught in school, like programming.

As a former "gifted" child—which I thought was code for "autistic" and not actually a compliment at the time, so it surprises me people willingly refer to their child as such—public school never catered to me, but I wouldn't have traded that environment for private school or homeschooling if you paid me. In my experience all that people talk about how private and homeschooling affects your ability to socialize with normal people is true.

As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.

> In my experience all that people talk about how private and homeschooling affects your ability to socialize with normal people is true.

In my experience, people are surprised that I spent 2/3 of my pre-college education in various forms of homeschooling. "You're so well-adjusted", is a frequent refrain.

Based on how a lot of education systems work in the US (recognizing only discrete progress in a student), if your child is 1-2 years ahead then that's worth recognizing and start nurturing. That's about when public schools also recognize the giftedness of a student.

You don't need brilliant children to achieve this kind of advantage, just a careful eye and consistent nurturing.

Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else? The point is that different kids has different needs, the general classroom is designed for the average student and doesn't fit those who are very different regardless in what way they are different.

If you have a group of animals where most of them are dogs but a few are cats, then use statistics to justify treating them all like dogs, that is not fair to the cats, is it?

Gifted programs work best when people don't consider them prestigious or think that they will improve the life outcomes for the participants. When they are more about individual interests than status and objective gains.

I'm hopeful that AI can offer highly individualized education to each kid, and get around this issue entirely.

"Differently abled" works just fine both ways, that there is stigma attached to the title helps since it means parents wont push for it for no reason.

Even if this were the rare valid application of it, it's so overused as a low effort attack that the comment is no better off for using it.

Finally, we have to contend with the fact that people earnestly believe in the things they say and do. If it were just for optics and they didn't actually hold their positions, these issues would be far easier to deal with.

No, then it would have been easier. Virtue signaling is so hard to deal with since people don't want to lose their virtue, they have to stay the course and continue to upheld that what they did was virtuous or they lose all their hard work.

A good sign is if you call your opponents names rather than try to win them over, then you are just virtue signaling instead of trying to fix anything, insults doesn't improve anything except act as signaling. This is how most politicians acts, it tend to make you very popular and make your tribe view you as very virtuous, virtue signaling works.

That's even vaguer and less compelling rhetoric than "virtue signaling".

As in gifted and talented individuals who form a community, or all these folks from this ethnic background you think are talented? Because if it's the former then I'm surprised they've got a community going, and if it's the latter you would be better served getting the calipers out and go measure some skulls instead to promote that nonsense.

"A recent analysis in Nature caused a stir by pointing out that the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners belong to the same academic family. Of 736 researchers who have won the Big Recognition, 702 group together into one huge connected academic lineage (with lineage broadly defined as when one scientist “mentors” another, usually in the form of being their PhD advisor)."

> getting the calipers out and go measure some skulls

Please, just stop.

[0]: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/yes-scientific-pro...

[1]: How to win a Nobel prize https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-02897-2/index.ht...

I agree with your overall message but it's those thousand people and the hundreds of thousands ( maybe millions ) of people who make the scientific progress possible. It takes a community and an infrastructure to turn a scientific discovery into scientific progress.

Like it took thousands or millions of people to take the discoveries of von Neumann, Church, Turing, etc into something worthwhile.

That old SF story seems to come up rather often today. I read it decades ago, and never saw the 1995 made-for-TV movie.[1] For decades it was forgotten.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film)

The downside to early tracking is that it becomes increasingly difficult for kids on remedial and standard tracks to break into G&T/advanced classes with each successive year, but it's pretty easy to create an exception-based assessment process to facilitate these moves.

Fast forward to today, where I have three kids in three public neighborhood schools in San Jose. Math tracking starts in middle school and is based exclusively on students' NWEA (https://www.nwea.org/) scores, which determine whether you're placed in accelerated math, standard math or remedial math in 6th grade. Some schools let kids move into the accelerated track in 7th grade based on their 6th grade achievement, but many don't [because the 6th grade accelerated curriculum includes the entirety of 6th-8th grade "standard math" curricula, and expecting a kid who only received 1/3rd of that as a 6th grader to miraculously know the other 2/3rds as they start 7th grade isn't reasonable]. The result, from what I can tell, is that you have all kinds of mixed grade classes in high school now, since kids of essentially any grade could be taking the same classes (whether AP classes or core curriculum, or even electives). It's frankly a mess, and the level of distraction is off the charts. Overall, achievement of G&T students is lower and the kids at the lower end are suffering, too, because they're also not receiving differentiated instruction at the level they often need.

In my opinion, it's a great illustration of how DEI policies applied to public education can fail all student demographics. On the plus side, ironically, the social/emotional maturity of kids these days far exceeds generations past.

Is this a thing? I hear conservative people complain about it a lot, but I have no clue what this looks like.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

Regardless—point taken.

I wonder if the progressives ever wondered why so many Chinese students or Indian students could excel in the STEM programs of those top universities? Like we grew up with our parents making less than $500 a month in the early 2000s if we were lucky. Heck, a family from countryside or a small town probably made $200 a month or less. Like we studied English with a couple of cassettes and our English was so broken that we couldn't even clear custom when entering the US. Like our schools lost power every few days, and our teachers printed our exams and handouts using a manual mimeograph machine. Like I didn't even know touch typing before I got into college. Like I thought only experts could use a personal computer and typing "DIR" under DOS was so fascinating. Yeah, we were that poor.

Yet, our teachers did one thing right: they did their job. They pushed us. They did't give up on us. They tried every way to make sure their explanation is clear, intuitive, and inspiring. They designed amazing problem sets to make sure we truly understand the fundamentals of math, physics, and chemistry. They didn't shy away from telling us that we didn't do a good job. They forced us to write essays every day, to solve problems every day, and in general to learn deeply every day. I still remembered the sly smile when my chemistry teacher made sure we could solve the ICO-style multi-step synthesis in organic chemistry.

So, yeah, many of us wouldn't be where we are today if our teachers hadn't pushed hard on us. Equity my ass.

What separates you from the people that didn’t make it out?

Now the nuances for us in the US specifically: the US system is really good for the most and the least talented. The most talented get access to all kinds of free yet prestigious programs and camps, excellent books in local libraries, and professors in colleges. The least talented are carefully looked after, and they don't necessarily have much pressure to get into a college, and rightly so. It is, unfortunately, the vast middle who get hurt because they squander their time in school. They think they have learned, but they barely scratch the surface. NYT used to report that a straight-A student dreamed to become a scientist, yet couldn't even pass placement test of her college. Malcom mentioned in his book David and Goliath that a straight-A student failed her organic chemistry class in Brown University. Similarly in my personal experience, if it weren't for my teacher, I wouldn't know how deep I could go. If a student like me, who managed to stay top of the classes in elite universities, still needed intense nurturing from my teachers, I'd imagine many more do as well.

OChem is a weed-out class for pre-med students in every university.

CHEM 0350/0360 are notorious weed-outs at Brown.

> I guess my fundamental assumption is that when everyone maximizes their full potential, the outcome will naturally be different

At some point, it comes down to individuals. I've studied at Community Colleges, State Schools, and Ivies/Ivy Adjacent programs, and the curriculum is largely comparable.

Sure heads of state do occasionally come on campus at Harvard, but undergrads almost never attend those talks or opportunities - just like in any other university.

You can succeed or fail in any program, it just comes down to individual motivation.

> the vast middle who get hurt because they squander their time in school

The un-PC truth is this comes down to parenting. If parents don't help guide or motivate their kids, most kids will stagnate.

Teachers can only do so much.

If Farangi/Ang Mo parents cannot parent, that's on them.

That does include several of the school districts in the SF Bay Area, but the vast majority of the state is already under a state funding formula based on attendance and additions for certain types of needs.

Other states have different situations. Washington state is largely funded locally, with unfunded mandates set by the state; and many of the districts have issues with unbalanced budgets in recent years.

It costs a lot more to build a new school or maintain an existing one in The Bay than in Fresno.

It also costs more for teachers since the cost of living is so much higher.

(the money required to maintain the school building) + (a wage thats similar to the wages for other teachers in the state, with cost of living factored in) * (the best teacher to student ratio achievable across the state) * (student count at the school)

What you are ignoring is that educational spending imbalance comes from private voluntary educational spending (enrichment programs, camps, PTA), not public mandatory spending.

How do you do that though? How do you knock down an idea that:

- has at least hundreds of millions of subscribers, for many of whom the idea is an unassailable religious tenet

- has survived and endured for centuries (Lindy)

- manifests itself in the form of laws, businesses, and NGOs, and is propped up by violence, and by the hundreds of billions of dollars behind those organizations

Even if the idea is wrong, with all this momentum behind it, with all this skin people have in the game, all they've invested into it, how do you get people to abandon the idea?

The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since it conferred an advantage on students who were able to work and study well enough to move ahead, but failed to make arrangements for students who couldn't to get free college after graduating from high school.

I'm thinking the same legal rationalizations could be used to rule that high school football programs are illegal. No advantage conferred on the students who fail to make the team, and no free college for those who don't end up with an athletic scholarship.

Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant. They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass. What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles and knew to put you in prep. Once you were in the school, if you wanted good teachers, you had to take honors. I had a fantastic history teacher who talked about how he loved teaching regular history, but he was constantly pressured by administration to only teach AP. So for a lot of students who didn't have the grades to do honors, they got stuck with the mediocre teachers. Not to mention, psychologically, it sucks being in the bottom 50%. There were so many kids who thought they were dumb or underachievers, but were really just in the wrong environment. When they went to college, they blossomed from not being in such a rat race.

I'm not saying the solution is to eliminate gifted programs, but let's not pretend that they're universally great for kids. They're often much more status games than actual educational fulfillment.

Having an IEP meant I got special attention in elementary school, which really boiled down to a) some extra math worksheets and b) getting pulled out of class once a week to go with the other IEP kids to a special "gifted" class. The content of that class was probably less important than getting us out of the regular classrooms. This gave the teachers the chance to repeat material without boring us (and the behavior problems that come from that).

Now I'm the dad of a talented 10 year old boy who doesn't have this experience and is bored constantly. He is basically forgotten about as he's never going to test below grade level even if he's completely ignored, and there's no incentive or requirement that he stays engaged.

I too attended a magnet school, but the point of magnet schools were not actually for 'gifted' students. While many did offer advanced classes or programs, the goal was to influence racial desegregation by offering programs to encourage white students to attend black majority schools.

I'm commenting because my own kid went through the LAUSD highly gifted (HG) magnet program -- which is a subset of the "gifted" program -- his high school was: https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org.

(Without belaboring the point, it's a very high-achieving bunch. Multiple Harvard, MIT, and Stanford admissions in his rather small graduating class of ~70.)

There are good things and bad things about the LAUSD HG program. One good thing is that most admissions are done just by testing. There are 2 layers of tests, one for gifted and one (later) for highly gifted. If you test 99.5%+, you can be admitted to the HG program. The tests are done relatively early (4th grade for my kid) so they aren't as easy to game, although I'm sure it is done.

Every LAUSD student gets the first test, so that's pretty egalitarian. You have to ask for the second test. That's the good part.

One thing the article discusses is the other paths to admission at some schools -- paths that are much more subject to gaming, esp. by parents. Things like outside evaluations and private testing to substitute for the LAUSD-administered test. That has been a source of controversy, rightfully IMHO, because these parents can be bulldogs. The possibility of gaming the system is the bad part.

One other thing to re-inforce in the above comment. The HG program did tend to favor "high-achieving" rather than "gifted" students. So there was a high proportion of boring grindset students, weighted towards STEM, and the result was that the actually creative types were in a minority.

My conclusion is that these programs can benefit the special needs of HG kids, but the devil is in the implementation details and the parents and status game will tend to mess it up. Also, we should have no illusions that their existence is in part a reaction to racial/social inequities, and that they tend to reproduce the problems of the outside society.

I'm not brilliant, but I absolutely did benefit. The magnet school I went to, and the gifted-students programs I attended pushed me, and I'd never really been pushed before; I was just on cruise-control, academically. There was room for potential, and it was not being filled by the educational system until magnets/gifted-programs.

Moreover, I benefited simply because the magnet school system removed me from my zoned school, but the circumstances here are probably unique to my situation. The short of it is that leaving the zoned school was life-altering. The educational pressure I describe above is probably more globally applicable.

College was a huge wake up call of "oh my, the workload is real." If I hadn't had the push I got in the magnet school system to work harder, I would have floundered and likely failed in college.

That's if I had made it to college at all. The trajectory of my life, the path where I didn't get into the magnet system … I can't imagine that path going well.

> They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass.

Yes, there's a standardized test that you must pass. But no, I spent exactly 0 time in prep classes. It's not needed: the bar is not that high.

> What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles

Not really … my mother tapped into her "social circles" — other mothers she met at my preschool — to try and learn what she needed to know about the schools, the school system, and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in order to effect better outcomes for her children.

I.e., what any good parent would do. The article misses the mark here too:

> Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents.

Yes, the "gifted label was coveted by parents", but not for "parental competition for prestige", but because it was key to me having a future. There were just certain, simple, logical steps in my education that were not possible to take without first getting the "gifted" label, since that's the bureaucratic grease that makes the whole system move for you. The law essentially results in a system that says "is kid gifted? if yes, then provide resources, else tell them to go away". Parents play within the rules of that system when they must.

… five minutes of listening to the parents talk about their children would tell you it's a conversation about "my kid is struggling with X, what can I do?" and not "hey, my kid is gifted, what about yours?" — the notion is preposterous, to me, having lived through it.

The magnet school system in my area suffered similar problems to the one you describe, but IMO that was mostly due to a lack of resources. I mentioned earlier the bar was low: one of the magnet schools that I didn't attend was because it had no seats: it was ~5:1 oversubscribed: for every child attending, there were 5 meeting the criteria, but SOL. I was one of the 5. I had to waitlist, and it took a year before a spot at one of my less preferred options opened up. (But even then, it was a vastly better school than my zoned school.)

Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we were utterly ignored. We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age. My kid is 6 grades ahead in math, scored over 175 in his VCI and they refused to even entertain the idea of skipping even a single grade.

California is doing whatever it takes to drive away any family that cares even a modicum for their children’s education and had the means or is willing to sacrifice to ensure their children are adequately educated. Meanwhile they are dropping the requirements at the same time, so the gap between private school and public school educated kids keeps growing more and more.

It’s pretty telling that in SFUSD, 50% of the black and brown kids graduate high school without being able to read properly. The real racism isn’t gifted kids, it’s dropping the educational standard for those that can’t afford private school so that they graduate and can’t compete when they get into the workforce because they have been undereducated their entire lives.

When he gets to college he can really excel, until then just let him go to school and make friends with kids his age.

I'm not entirely happy with where I am at 26. I wonder if I'd be further ahead - or behind - if I had skipped forward.

Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th.

I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.

And hopefully private schools would prevent "bullying hell" if they want all those tuition $$$.

No student has ever found all their courses interesting. You'd have a behavior problem no matter what level of material is taught.

The real victims are the kids whose parents can’t afford to do this. It tends to be disproportionately the kids in the very demographics that the left professes to care about. So it’s weird to me that they would choose to do things that make it harder for these groups to have economic mobility.

Pretty much no state at this point.

That said, specific school districts can be responsive. Usually this is in expensive neighborhoods with relatively well-off residents. These schools serve as de facto private schools even through they are technically public.

The exodus away from Seattle public schools surprise no one. After all who wants to take such risks with their own child’s education, that they only get try on? Unfortunately I don’t think it will be easily fixed. The school board is full of career activists, much like city and state leadership, and it is reflected in the culture of K-12 schooling. The DEI movement legitimized all of this and gave it cover. Equity made merit a taboo. And reversing those damaging movements will take decades.

Gifted programs, while perhaps chipping away at some of the problem don't generally do much about the structural problems in schools and clearly amplify some of their existing biases.

I do not have children but I have given a lot of thought to how terrible our schooling is. I would never want to subject my children to 20 years of what I went through. But the presence or absence of traditional gifted programs is nowhere near the top of my concerns.

The net result was that the highest achieving gifted kids did really well and the slacker gifted kids (myself included) did abysmally. Turns out some of us needed a level of structure and rigor enforced on us to nurture whatever gifted talents we had. Some kids learned it at home, for some it seemed to be innate and for others we did not have it anywhere in our lives and needed to be instructed in how to study, what to do, when to do it and at what pace.

Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because these are the numbers:

Average IQ [1]

- Ashkenazi Jews - 107-115

- East Asians - 110

- White Americans - 102

- Black Americans - 90

There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.

(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)

Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]

Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.

We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.

[1] https://iqinternational.org/insights/understanding-average-i...

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

[3] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts

For most of us, the reality was that our status as relatively studious kids created a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development. Gifted programs mostly served as easy, almost dismissive solution for our parents, who would rather see our very real social-emotional challenges as further evidence of our intellectual excellence and the importance of separating us from our peers so they won't "hold us back."

Quite the opposite. Being in class with my friends is what kept me emotionally grounded, and being separated from them, in a way that sends a clear message to everyone involved (including me) that it needed to happen because I was somehow too good to be in the same classes as them, did lasting harm. Even now my lifelong best friend is obnoxiously deferential to me on all sorts of subjects because he sees me as "the smart one" instead of a more sensible perspective like "the one who happens to enjoy math."

But I did move around as a kid enough times to see a few different ways of doing this sort of thing, so I can say with certainty what does work, and it works well for everyone involved: flipped classrooms. It's magical. In a group where kids who have mixed skill levels on a particular subject are asked to support each other instead of competing with each other, they do just that. And I can say from experience that it's a much better way to make a classroom more challenging for kids who do better in that subject. Helping your peers understand a tricky subject is a much more interesting intellectual challenge - and builds more useful life skills - than an artificially "accelerated" learning program ever will be. And it's better for long-term learning, too, because it helps build even stronger foundations of understanding.

And I am also seeing, now that my kids are in a school that uses flipped classroom teaching, that it's better for everyone else, too. My younger child, who has been having trouble with reading, gets an immense amount of value from being able to pair with friends who are stronger readers.

I also had experiences with mixed skill level classrooms and frequently found myself paired with students who didn't want support -- either from myself, other students, or the teacher. They didn't want to be in a classroom of any kind. I can imagine environments where this does work, but it freaks me out a little bit that you say you're certain this works.

As an additional anecdote, my son loves his gifted classes. But similar to myself, that's where his friends are.

I wonder if we'd both agree that kids' social environment is more important than the structure of any particular learning program?

Not an educator, but it seems like "supporting gifted kids" is one of those phrases where everyone acts as if its meaning were clearly defined and agreed-upon, while avoiding looking too hard at how it is neither.

What should the goal be for institutions or parents? For example, to accelerate these kids to the end of the curriculum ASAP? To quickly get them into the workforce? To whisk them through a carousel of possible specializations in the hopes of matching genius to a tough problem?

The above options intend to direct their strengths, rather than support their weaknesses and trusting that the rest will follow.

However, I did attend a GT program during elementary school. This school was a "regular" public elementary school in the sense it had a local geographic boundary, and kids in the area attended this as their default public school. However, then kids who qualified for GT would be bussed in from around the county to go to this school.

Within the school, past the 3rd grade classes were segmented into GT and "base" classes (i.e. non-GT). The "base" classes were local kids who did not qualify for the GT program. GT qualification was based off a single test score, taken in the second grade. Kids in the GT and base classes were often respectively referred to as GT or base kids.

In retrospect, it's always appeared super detrimental to me that those kids were called "base" as if they were a somehow more basic version of the GT kids. The name "base" in itself was probably intended as a kind euphemism, to not otherwise default to calling them non-GT kids, i.e. non Gifted nor Talented.

Anyway, all of this to say GT programs probably have a place, but in my own anecdotal experience they were not always executed flawlessly.

It once again comes down to us not being able to have nice things until that racial hysteria is resolved - minority parents assured that their children aren't being mistreated because of conscious and unconscious perceptions on the part of the school, white and affluent Asian parents assured that their children aren't going to receive a subpar education just because their child's class is double-digits percentage black/brown - and, perhaps more broadly, there is a decoupling of elite educational attainment and basic economic stability. Suffice it to say that anyone telling you that the only problem is that schools are Harrison Bergeroning their little prodigies either aren't acknowledging the whole story or are hoping that you don't know it yourself.

To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of ends.

I also previously attended special education when my academic abilities were questionable, at best. I benefitted from intensive education on phonics and basic literacy skills, rather than being shoved through the pipeline without comprehending the curriculum.

The contrast was evident when I spent my lunch times in Grade 11 tutoring a "hopeless" student in Grade 9. Over the course of a few weeks, it became abundantly clear to me that this student did not understand any of the math he had allegedly learned before. He more or less pattern-matched his way to eventually getting the right answer and blundered his way through converting a fraction to a ratio without realizing they are fundamentally the same concept. That was good enough to keep pushing him through grades, I suppose.

I was just getting into formal logic as a hobby, so I focused on teaching basic reasoning. As an example, I spent a lot of time explaining that the "equals" sign is a statement that two things are the same. I proceeded to focus on logical implications---that some statements can follow from other statements.

It became much easier to teach everything else once we had those fundamentals. His ability to solve problems was much better when he understood the logical sequence of steps he should take to reach an answer. His math teacher later thanked me in Grade 12, because he started getting good marks and switched to university-track mathematics. That probably wouldn't have happened if he didn't get attention specific to him.

There should be a reframing of the problem space.

Sorting students into gifted or special education based on an accurate assessment of their abilities isn't a case of giving more resources to smarter people and less to dumber. A class of gifted students should require less resources because the students can self-motivate and aren't limited by their peers. This frees up resources for those who need them.

In his supposedly "10" California school, music had been defunded to spread equality to other school systems; also, no career emphasis programs or special tracks were available.

I considered moving to one of the Dallas suburbs, but I like the Southeast weather and setting better.

Note: I'm "Latino", whatever that means, and my son is mixed (my wife is a snow white American) with a "Latino" last name.

Why does the author claim this is a broad trend with social justice and equity goals at its heart when that isn't what the evidence provided suggests? (Imo: clickbait.)

The mentality there is that it is better to raise the average, than to focus resources on a small % of the population. Seems to have worked pretty well for them, all things considered.

Skip a grade and teach them stuff ahead of time (No, their social skills cant handle it apparently)

Teach them extended topics... aka waste their time on stuff they can already do.

I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it and I got it in my head.

I don't really understand pacing of US K12. In Retrospect, its basically teaching people math and reading skills. If we are just looking for daycare, sure the status quo is fine. Otherwise it seems school should be built around those fields rather than arbitrary ages.

Very few people take issue with providing resources to someone falling behind. On the other hand, enough people take issue with letting someone get ahead that it has become a political issue, and has lead to regressive educational policy.

Instead, we're still forcing students into rigid cohorts based mainly on age, effectively optimizing for the statistical mean while leaving both ends of the ability distribution poorly served. This is particularly wasteful with gifted students who could be advancing much faster if the system accommodated their pace of learning.

The tech to deliver adaptive education at scale exists today. The main barriers are institutional inertia and perhaps a misguided egalitarian impulse that confuses equality of opportunity with enforced uniformity of outcomes. We should embrace the natural variation in human capabilities and build systems that help each student reach their potential, rather than constraining everyone to march in lockstep.

Extracurricular studies are always possible for the students who are furthest ahead of the curve, and good schools usually do accommodate that. For the rest, I would argue that a fixed number of tracks that insist on pulling students along is the only practical solution.

The solution isn't just to keep throwing money at the problem, because empirically that's been completely ineffective. If a large segment of the population are effectively learning nothing in e.g. the last 4 years of high school, they shouldn't be forced to attend, wasting resources that could be spent educating people who actually want to be educated. Instead there should be stronger support for people who come back to complete a high school diploma at a later age, as many of those students will come back with real motivation for study once they find their career opportunities without it are limited.

I don't know your circumstances or when you were in school, but my son is in high school in Kansas, and he's taking university classes with the encouragement of the school. And not easy classes, either. One of them is a proof-based Calc III. I'm working with a high school student to give them a research experience (they obviously can't do much, but they get exposed to the research process, which is pretty exciting). The high school gives them credit for doing it.

Yes, you cannot skip a grade, but nobody is stopping a kid from going to a later grade for some classes really. The school social atmosphere has to be right for it though.

But nobody wants to pay for it.

Nobody should be, but many people are.

At a minimum, the college-style model of subject-based classes and prerequisites for those classes should start much, much earlier, in elementary school.

There are elementary-school students who should be in calculus classes, and there are high-school and university students who should be in remedial arithmetic classes. (Though in some cases the latter would be less true if K-12 hadn't failed them so badly thus far.)

But also the focus on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

I read a good book a while back that pointed out how much more we spend on special ed, which is aimed at the bottom 5%, compared to what we spend on gifted education, which is the top 5%. It asked why we would spend so much on one and not the other, especially since the ROI is so much higher for the top 5%. (It obviously skipped the whole "making our society better and helping those in need" argument since it hurt their argument).

The difference was quite apparent to me during high school when I compared my older siblings’ yearbooks to my experience of the same school a decade later. They had so many more classes, clubs, sports, programs, and activities available to them than I did.

Without new revenue streams, gifted programs were affordable for school districts until they were not.

For example: homelessness. The number one cause of and solution to homelessness is... housing. Housing is too expensive. Housing needs to be cheaper. But too many people have a vested financial interest in maintaining and growing high prices.

Interestingly, high property prices are a big contributing factor here too. Schools are funded by a mix of Federal, state and local taxes and a big part of local taxes come from property taxes. So the wealthier areas get better-funded schools. It's economic segregation in the same vein as redlining.

California in particular has created a massive funding hole through Prop 13, which is essentially a massive tax break for the state's wealthiest residents.

I would add another dimension to this: how gifted? 99th percentile students will largely be fine. There are scholarships and progrrams to find and nurture these people. You start to see more disparities when you look at the 90-98th percentiles. If you're from an affluent background, you're going to be fine. If you're from a poorer background, it's way more likely that things go wrong for you. Your quality of school matters. You may catch a criminal charge of some kind, which can entirely derail your life.

While all this is going on there are significant and organized efforts to dismantle the public education system (ie "school choice" or "vouchers"), which are nothing more than a wealth transfer from the government to the providers of private education at the expense of everybody else.

As it stands, it’s just a bunch of kids who mostly land on boringly normal tracks to public flagships. There’s not much upside in even identifying them, because "gifted" has been reduced to mean, well, pretty much anyone who can get a good grade.

It isn't that unreasonable to ask for an education system that pushes kids as fast as the kid keeps up with and eases them back if they regress to the mean at some point

Learning the multiplication table early isn't necessarily a sign that someone is a genius, but it does mean they are ahead of their class. There is no benefit to holding them back to the level of other kids their age "just in case they might not actually be gifted" or whatever it is you are proposing

If they wind up graduating high school early but then not really doing anything exceptional in their lives that's actually fine

Surely you can see the damage this would do to the majority of children currently being told they are "gifted"?

Being "gifted" until the 6th, 7th, or 8th grade would psychologically cripple a lot of these kids through high school. It's better to not allow that "advanced but not gifted" demographic in from the outset, than it is to unceremoniously boot them at some arbitrary time in the future if they fail to keep up with those at the extremes.

The better ideas are the remediation, normal, advanced and then gifted classifications. And you don't get the gifted label unless you are on the extreme of exceptional.

We don't have to call it "gifted", we can call it "accelerated" or "ahead of their age" or whatever else you want

The point is that while they may not become exceptional adults, if they are exceptional for an 8 year old it is doing them a disservice to keep them at the same level as all of the other kids their age

> Being "gifted" until the 6th, 7th, or 8th grade would psychologically cripple a lot of these kids through high school

I don't think you can claim this without evidence.

And no, people whine-blogging online about being a former gifted kid and now a depressed and anxious failure is not evidence

My naive take is that there is a need for each. remedial helps kids to catch up. Normal is where you have perhaps 70% of the students, advanced where you have kids with more natural ambition in some subjects and gifted is where you send the top 5%?

(for those who don't know: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/1fdg8io/wh...)

Frankly, I don't say this to be a dick, but teachers don't exist who can handle kids like me. I spent 16 hours a day at the public library sometimes devouring 1000-page books about how lasers worked. I got a perfect SAT score. I also won a district-wide art show three out of four years in high school. I made varsity in four sports and won two state championships. I got second place in the state spelling bee. I was on a television quiz show when I was 12. I could run a 5-minute mile when I was 12 and slam dunk a basketball by the time I was 14. I was good at everything I ever tried to do. I was smarter than the teachers and I was a rotten little immature kid who let them know it.

Some kids just aren't going to be served well by school no matter what you do, but what else was I going to be served well by? I took some college classes in high school and they weren't any more interesting. I had no interest in starting or running a business. I wasn't mature enough to hold a regular job. I can't think of anything the school system could have done that would have been better than just regular school.

Much like this writer, I ended up okay anyway.

IIRC, GATE was where I had my first exposure to programming (Logo).

Huh. I was a gifted kid. I was also an ass. But now that I think about it, I was mostly in ass in reading-based classes. I always read ahead of the curve and have a short-term near-photographic memory, and so excelled at recall-based examination, which is most of the liberal arts and social studies in school. Meanwhile, I never acted out in my math classes, particularly once school went multi track, and I didn’t consider that it was because I was engaged. (My math, economics and engineering teachers consequently liked me more. Go figure.)

Then you were definitely under-served by your school. An encyclopedia of knowledge is useful, but these subjects are almost entirely about critical thinking. At the best schools, students are expected to complete about ten pages of writing across all their subjects each week by eight grade. That's a pretty high workload for teachers though, so I guess it makes sense that schools with a lower teacher to student ratio have to take shortcuts and use different instruments to assess their students. However, it does mean that students without writing experience spend a significant portion of their college careers catching up with their peers.

Sure. It’s why the G&T programmes helped. By the eighth grade the writing assignments were there. But at the elementary level, a lot of work is put into ensuring reading comprehension. If you have that the lessons are terrible.

Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only reason for the skew in enrollment numbers, and why aren’t teachers upset the LA Times are calling them racists?

I’m constantly surprised how often accusations like this are thrown around and how little pushback there is by those accused of it.

The problem I have with a lot of the stuff related to gifted learning is how it's structured and gate kept. In a public school, there should not be a limited number of seats for an academic program. Any student who can perform in that program should be allowed to participate, not just the top 10% or whatever. I think it should be measured on their current academic performance, not some IQ test or teacher recommendations. If you're consistently getting As in the regular course, you should be eligible to try the accelerated program. You may get more out of the accelerated program even if your grade drops from As to Bs. It also seems that many programs are all or nothing - either you're in the gifted program for all subjects or none at all. Being advanced in one or two subjects and in the regular classes for the others should be fine. It seems this is at least picking up more popularity in the past decade or two.

> Why has the LA Times settled on racist teachers as the only reason…

Notice how the extracted quote (and the article itself) never actually accuses teachers of racism? The accusation only appears in your complaint.

Systemic racism can exist without overt individual racism.

Likewise, the article explicitly leaves open the possibility of other causes by simply assigning racism to “a role in” rather than to, as you claim, “the only reason”.

Your complaint (with false accusations) is, without further explanation, simply manufactured outrage.

But since you did, I’d suggest you consider not only the value system of the victims but also that of the perpetrators and the system itself.

And also consider the history.

And consider the financial differences that often exist.

Consider the communities and their plights.

Consider destruction of cultures.

Consider the dietary and health issues that are faced.

Consider the overwhelming economic and media environments that 7 years olds grow up within and how that environment is often more impactful than parents could ever hope to be.

And, if we want to focus on biology, consider the role that vision, in particular color of skin, plays in our emotions, decision and behavior. Consider how we use color of skin to read health and emotions and intentions and how it might be harder to read those when the skin is imbued with unfamiliar tones and how on a population level, such misreads can build into mistrust and conflict.

You emphasized systemic racism as being a major cause, but group differences can be both non-biologic and NOT related to systemic racism

> not only the value system of the victims but also that of the perpetrators and the system itself.

This assumes the answer (systemic racism) in the premise. The values of the system can be good (agency, hard work, academic pursuit, etc) and misaligned with some group. That group would then do poorly, but not because the system or its values are racist.

> And also consider the history.

I did, this is why I compared to early/mid 20th century Ashkenazi and mid/late 20th century Asians. Both were very persecuted.

> And consider the financial differences that often exist

Most asians fleeing to the US in mid 20th century were much poorer than both current as well as at that time median underperforming groups in the US.

> Consider destruction of cultures.

If anything, current underperforming groups (eg african americans) are famous for having a lot of cultural products. This is where they thrive.

> Consider the dietary and health issues that are faced.

Again, both ashkinazi and asian groups suffered famines + serious malnutrition. Very few in american disadvantaged groups are in danger of starvation or serious malnutrition.

> Consider the overwhelming economic and media environments that 7 years olds grow up within and how that environment is often more impactful than parents could ever hope to be.

Everyone has access to all the same media. There is a significant effort (which I agree with) to over-represent underprivileged groups as successful heroes in modern TV/etc. Parents have significant influence on which media mix is consumed and what counts as "success." Both asians and ashkinazi were represented very negatively in the media mix of mid 20th century, yet they thrived. Nigerian american diaspora today thrives as well (unlike most other african american groups).

> And, if we want to focus on biology, consider the role that vision, in particular color of skin, plays in our emotions, decision and behavior. Consider how we use color of skin to read health and emotions and intentions and how it might be harder to read those when the skin is imbued with unfamiliar tones and how on a population level, such misreads can build into mistrust and conflict.

I specifically didn't focus on biology, but Ashkenazi were clearly targeted based on how they looked. Caricatures of "the Jew" were popular and everywhere in early to mid 20th century Europe. People perceived them especially as untrustworthy. Asians are also obviously and easily identified by a quick look at their face. South asians also have "brown" skin color, that is very similar to that of disadvantaged groups in the US, yet they do well academically/financially/etc. Most people can't tell apart nigerian americans from other african americans, yet nigerian americans tend to do well.

---

In all of this i'm not saying hardship doesn't exist, or that racism doesn't exist, or that differences are biological. I am saying that there is a confounding factor that is essentially bigger then all of this. I think this confounder is "culture/value system" of the group. Not all cultures/value systems are equal, not all of them lead to the same outcomes, these differences are not racist.

If the population of gifted kids is statistically over-represented by white kids, then one of these must be true:

• The test doesn't measure giftedness, but rather level of education. So we would expect kids from worse schools to perform worse. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal. • Gifted kids from minority communities don't have equal access to the test or the classes. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal. • White kids are smarter. They all took the same test, white kids came out on top. This is a racist belief with a millennia of discredited science to back it up.

No racist teacher required.

I am not even white, but something there in your rationale does not make sense. If they all took the same test and white kids were on top, how is this a belief?

Is there a word missing somewhere? Is the implication that the test was rigged? It is an honest question, I couldn't follow the rationale there.

> with a millennia of discredited science to back it up

The test is not a form of racism, institutional or otherwise. It's doubling as a proxy measure for the socioeconomic disadvantage the students have experienced up to that point.

You can't get rid of socioeconomic disadvantage by refusing to measure it, no more than you can cure COVID by refusing to test for it.

A socioeconomic disadvantage which in the case of California - and almost certainly elsewhere - is caused in significant part by historical racist policies (i.e. redlining).

And looking at actual outcomes in the US it’s easy to see that the truth is different. It’s not even white kids that come up on top, it’s mostly Asian kids (and before that Ashkinazi kids). It’s not because they have some institutional privilege. It’s because culture matters and valuing smarts and education is important not just for test taking but also for benefiting the society long term.

So are we saying that teachers purposely disproportionately identified asian and white students as gifted? Can we not just admit that asian and white students usually have more learning resources provided to them during their younger years (both due to cultural and economic reasons) and thus in a typical classroom they will be the more likely to stand out academically before jumping to the race card. They've decided to skip straight past logic and straight to identity issues this time.

I am a "white-passing" latino (i.e. nobody assumes I'm latino until they hear my last name) and I was in the gifted program in California growing up. Plenty of the people also part of that program were black or latino themselves.

People talk about those all the time.

Racist as a pejorative is one who is doing it on purpose or with indifference, context matters. We perceive white children as smarter is an everyone problem, not an individual teacher problem.

Everyone gets the same crappy outcome.

Freedom is inherently unequal.

Those who were clearly brilliant and may have been entirely capable of pushing societal, technological, medical etc. advances forward in a larger time scale are held back, stifled, or even in cases of things like affirmative action (which I believe should exist, but only on the economic level, not on the basis of race or identity) have been denied of opportunity to go on and do great things.

Well, if they’re so brilliant…

So the solution to bad grades in some communities was to take away the opportunity for ALL communities.

Thankfully, a vocal group of people raised a stink about it and even put it on the ballot. The uproar caused the school to backtrack and bring Algebra back in 8th grade starting this year.

This kind of idiotic "social engineering" that the SFUSD is doing is killing the public schools. Parents who can afford to spend the $50K/year on private schooling are taking their kids out of SFUSD and the district is losing funding.

Democrats often say that the Republicans would like to kill public education. But the Democrats are doing a great job of it themselves! Case in point: my friend's kid goes to an SFUSD Middle School. Their 5thgrade class has no math teacher! Math is taught via Zoom and "self-paced learning". SMFH...

Why should people that think folks like me are failures deserve the bulk of our attention?

Seriously, we need all the bright people we can get, working on the tough problems and solving them. And we need even more basically competent people educated to keep what we have got figured out running smoothly. Life isn't some role playing game where everyone who wants to should get a turn being a surgeon or flying the jumbo jet. Competence actually matters.

only because they can vote

> Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family

This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students:

- whose parents may not even know anything about the field that the student is interested in

- whose parents may see higher education as a waste of time or have other anti-intellectual views like a sizeable chunk of the US

- who may have ADHD (pretty likely actually) and need some kind of external structure to pursue something to the student's maximum potential

> Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life too

Gathering gifted kids together, instead of bunching them with lowest common denominators, can result in lifelong friendships. Out of 5 friends from high school that I'm still close with, 4 are in big tech and 1 is in a prestigious PhD program, we still try to gather a few times a year even though we've been out of high school for 10 years.

Domain specificity of "weak link"-hood, as well as the compounding of innocuous, sub-symptomatic "weak links":

Carpenter Tom is a hard-worker, great husband, and community leader. And he voted for an autocrat, against his explicit interests (benefits from ACA, benefits from undocumented immigrant labor, benefits from special-ed resources for his kids) because he dislikes keeping abreast of current events (poor reading speed) and made his decision based on a misunderstanding predicated by, essentially, a game of telephone across his personal network that warped facts about the candidates.

He's a "weak link" on the subject that counts - the matter of the vote - but otherwise an upstanding member of the community. You're going to disenfranchise him?

I sympathize with the rest of your comment. I do think it's a bit naive to think that these programs help even of a fraction of the poor kids they should be reaching. They seem to mostly be a way to section off semi-affluent kids in "lesser" schools (e.g., parents who can't move for work or family reasons).

I don't think that's as big of an issue because kids have access to teachers, libraries and the internet.

> Gathering gifted kids together, instead of bunching them with lowest common denominators, can result in lifelong friendships.

Kid's together creates the opportunity for friendships. Focusing too much on academics at a young age will miss key milestones for social development. It's particularly acute for high functioning autistic kids.

Why are you assuming that because the parents are poor they are automatically ignorant or anti-intellectual?

Or by disrupting the rest of the class.

> Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life too.

Single streaming gifted kids can also warp them socially. Gifted kids in a single stream classroom need to learn to play dumb or become a social pariah. My school district had tracked 1-6, and semi-tracked 7-12. It was a real adjustment leaving the core group where learning and knowledge was appreciated and developed, even if most of the kids in the 'honors/advanced' sections were people I knew from the tracked grade school experience. My child had pullout 'branches' in his current school district 2-4, and AFAIK, it seemed pretty useless; my spouse had a similar pullout program growing up and also reports not getting much out of it, other than a target on their back, socially. Not having a core group supportive of learning gave my kid a lot of trouble in grade 7; although 7-8 is generally a hard time for kids; we're having a lot better experience in 8 at a small private school where the kids all want to learn.

OTOH, I have a cousin who absolutely hated her experience in a tracked system, so I get that too.

There's a bunch of different things all clamoring for more resources in education, and prioritizing is hard, but I think a lot of the conversation in the past few years has been about "why do they get this nice thing? they shouldn't have it" as opposed to "why can't we all have this nice thing" or "how do we make sure selection criteria is not discriminatory".

But I'm pragmatic. Gifted kids can often work more self-directed, so let their class sizes float upwards, and have the other classes float downward.

Kids that are struggling in class can be just as disruptive.

> Gifted kids in a single stream classroom need to learn to play dumb or become a social pariah.

Aka learn to function in society?

Here's my story from the other side. I have one gifted child and one child with dyslexia, but doesn't qualify for special education. My school district has a gifted program that is a whole separate school, but they have a handful of specialists to help kids struggling to read. They are shared across the grades and hard to get assigned. One of them has to actually be paid for by the PTSA since the district won't pay for it. That's messed up.

That's extremely optimistic.

If you let a random kid loose on the Internet, they will probably find propaganda / political / incel / gaming / porn / alt-right bullshit, because that is simply what the majority of the Internet is. I remember folks doing experiments back at Google in the '00s where they set a user-agent loose to follow links at random on the web, and the result was that you always ended up back at porn. Kids need some form of guidance to say "This is worth pursuing, this is not worth pursuing", and for a gifted kid, it needs to be someone who can personalize this guidance to their own interests. An involved parent can do that, but a teacher who is literally trying to keep their 30 other students from killing each other cannot.

But if that's the case, then government should probably be serving the greatest number, instead of a relatively small amount.

Bound in what way? Gated by? Morally obligated to?

if you gave attention to two kids, one was smart and quick, and the other was slow and stiff, who would you help more?