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

(www.latimes.com)
412 points tafda | 1 comments | 26 Nov 24 16:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.282s | source
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bilbo0s ◴[26 Nov 24 17:25 UTC] No.42247700[source]▶
My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the government, would take gifted options more seriously if there weren’t so many kids who did nothing more than learn the multiplication table early being classified as gifted. You limit enrollment to only the extreme outliers and at that point there would be national security benefits to identifying these children. (Heck, I'd bet the federal government might even try to step in and take over the education of gifted children for its own benefit.)

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.

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1. spamizbad ◴[26 Nov 24 18:06 UTC] No.42248186[source]▶
This is my view as well. You can see the effects of this policy from the 80s and 90s with the sheer number of "former gifted kid" adults who feel like they were destined for greatness but ended up with pretty standard knowledge worker jobs. There's a difference between being a bright, contentious hard-working student and being genuinely intellectually gifted - today we lump these kids together, which not only balloons the cost of the program but gives both students and parents a false sense of what it actually means.