California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

She makes some good points, but my take is that we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our weakest links. Our world has become so complicated, one small mistake can have dire consequences. So, it's the state's priority to spend its limited resources helping those struggling to tread water. Gifted children will get the stimulus they need at home via independent study or from their family. I know since I gave myself an almost complete college education in computer science before I graduated from high school. Splitting gifted kids apart can warp them socially for life too.

What is the purpose of government? Maybe its some sort of collective action/game theory thing, i.e., handle problems that is in no individual's best interest to solve.

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

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

That's extremely optimistic.

> we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our weakest links

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.

You can help the weakest links without tearing down the most gifted.

Well-off gifted kids will get the stimulus they need at home. Poor gifted kids are out of luck. And thus, the policy serves to entrench socioeconomic disadvantage in the name of making everybody equal.

> but my take is that we in the 21st century are more bound to the success of our weakest links.

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

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

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.

> 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

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

> This is definitely not true for poorer gifted students:

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.

I don't believe it. Almost every kid in America has access to the internet, a public library and a teacher. How many don't have access to any of those? That's a different problem.

It's just the truth. Look at the boeing dreamliner failures. Hundreds of smart people doing a bang up job. It just took one a few missteps to jeopardize the whole production and peoples lives.

it is not a teardown we are talking about. But rather giving attention. Give certain students more attention and that takes away equal attention from everyone else.

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

> Or by disrupting the rest of the class.

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.

Chained to our legs, making every step harder. And you're a bigot if you refuse additional chains.

poorer kids will be more affected by family attitudes because they will be less likely to be in a well funded school system with sufficient support for gifted kids

But they often don't have an easy way to get to the library, or a quiet place where they can sit and watch a Youtube tutor, or even a trusted authority who tells them that all of this is worth their time.

>only because they can vote

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).

The issue is time, attention and guidance. Well-off kids have parents who are usually well educated and who (if they arrange their priorities appropriately) can make time to spend with their kids. Poor kids do not have such parents; their parents usually wouldn't know where to begin, and even if they did, they don't have time to spend with their kids if they're working multiple jobs that they get fired from if they're late.

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.

I appreciate what you are trying say. I'm having a hard time believing it because I was one of those kids. The only thing my parents gave me was access to books, technology, love and free time. They possessed zero experience in engineering or technology, gave zero guidance. In fact they told me I was wasting my time being on the computer so much. I think people like to inject themselves as some sort of necessary mentor but gifted kids are gifted.

> love and free time

I think that kids who got those tend not to realize both how important and how non-universal these are.

I grew up the child of an elementary school teacher and a househusband (formerly a nuclear chemist), and didn't have a whole lot of money but did have a whole lot of curiosity. Taught myself to program and a whole bunch of other things. For most of my teens and twenties I was very much like "Anyone can do what I did - all it took was a public library card, Internet access, and a lot of time spent reading and tinkering."

But then as I grew up I met lots of other people who were gifted too, sometimes very much so, sometimes with a lot more financial resources than my family had. But they lacked the "love, attention, and free time" part. What'd happen is that their brain wouldn't let them focus on anything long enough to really master it or apply it effectively. They'd be off chasing the void that the lack of love left in them, often in extremely self-destructive ways. Many of them are dead now.

We all need the "love and attention" part, but it functions at such a subconscious level that people who have it just assume that everybody else does too, while those who don't keep seeking it, oftentimes in ways that won't build anything durable for themselves, to the detriment of everything else in their life.

You're right, but I don't think giving a dollar to gifted programs instead of intervention for struggling kids solves that problem. In fact if a kid is gifted but is struggling because of household issues, again, the money is better spent on struggling kids and they'll benefit from it.

There are a lot of reasons a kid may be struggling in school and it doesn't mean they are dumb or their future is worthless, as your hypothetical kids shows. I live in an area with one of the top public schools in America, they have a well funded gifted program. I know several parents whose dyslexic children are not getting the support they need.

You tear them down by not providing the education they deserve. You tear them down by forcing them into classes with dumb kids. You tear them down by forcing them into classes with trouble maker kids.

Nobody is getting more or less attention and nobody is advocating for that.

I would help both kids equally by having two teachers. One who could help the smart kids and one who could help the less intelligent kid. This isn't an either or situation.

> You're going to disenfranchise him?

No, I'm just going to wish that he was more educated and informed, and that the school system 40 years ago taught him critical thinking. American school needs to get better at teaching middling students too, too many USAians I talk to are incapable of reasoning about and discussing policy. With all that being said, the way he is the "weak link" is that by voting, he is most capable of negatively affecting the most people.

> not providing/ forcing

Seems a bit of an entitlement

Do you want to address the actual points instead of picking on my word choice?

Maybe? Disenfranchise him, and see how all of the good he does for his community is consumed by the energy he puts into not being the second-class citizen that you've designated him as. We're bound to the success of our weakest links because they affect our lives beyond the arenas where they're weak. In our subject's case, he's ass at voting, but society gets more out of him than just that one ill-conceived moment.