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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: 0.201s | source
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roguecoder ◴[26 Nov 24 21:25 UTC] No.42250221[source]▶
The whole point of "gifted" was that these are kids who are disproportionally likely to drop out of school, engage in risky behavior, get pregnant, get bad grades, etc.

The problem is that A. they called it "gifted" so people thought it was something you _wanted_ your kids to be and B. the screening test they used was the IQ test, which you can massively improve your score on by studying for it. So parents were determined to get their kids into "gifted" education, and coached their kids on the tests to get in, and in the meantime kids from less-privileged backgrounds with the same characteristics were being labeled as behavioral problems and shunted into remedial programs.

Now that we have the label of "neurodivergent", it seems to me it would be productive to reframe "gifted" education as "neurodivergent" education: rich parents would stop trying to get their kids into it, and it would be able to serve the kids it was intended to serve.

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mattnewton ◴[26 Nov 24 21:31 UTC] No.42250269[source]▶
where did you get the impression the genesis for "gifted" programs was to solve high iq problem kids? this is the first I'm hearing of that.
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1. roguecoder ◴[26 Nov 24 22:37 UTC] No.42250878[source]▶
There were two strains, to be fair: there were eugenicist arguments as well, and some authors from the turn of the twentieth century go on at length about how the problem children probably aren't _actually_ gifted because truly superior people wouldn't misbehave. But for example, from "Classroom Problems in the Education of Gifted Children" (1917):

"It is just as important for the bright child to acquire correct habits of work as it is for the dull or average child to do so, whereas in the ordinary class the brightest children are likely to have from a fourth to a half of their time in which to loaf, and never or rarely have the opportunity of knowing what it means to work up to the limit of their powers. The consequent habits of indolence, carelessness and inattention, which are so likely to be formed under such conditions, might be avoided by the provision, for such children, of special courses of such a nature as to fit their peculiar characteristics."