It’s not just California, but California may be one of the more egregious state neglecters.
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.
> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society
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.
> spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back"
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[0] - 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.
[0] As an important point, the merit of this kind of 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 loudly "blab" their lesson back at the teacher) that was based on exactly that approach.
Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?
I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to the general student population, when studies have found that students entered into charter lotteries who are not selected do about as well as those who get to go to the charter school).
I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for situations where it's clear that there's less need for deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value in having a broad body of knowledge and much more usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span and cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal punishment to make them work.
I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster in the classroom to encourage students to value performance.
> deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
These things come after one has the basics down pat. Modern "Progressive" education rejects this point altogether. It's whole approach is entirely founded on putting the cart before the horse.
> Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span
Attention span is a function of engagement. As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students for whom other drivers of high effort mighy be not nearly as effective, as you hint at.
> hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students
There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers, no critical thought or deeper understanding of the concepts was expected. That was not engaging. That style of "education" had me failing classes and hating every waking moment of school. It was only the last year of HS that I started to shine after hitting AP classes with more interesting topics that required some deeper understanding and mastery. If I hadn't experienced non-rote classes my last year I might be a janitor now.
> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers
Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it to just get the rote learning part done with in the easiest, quickest and most effective way, by employing the structured approaches that are ignored by most teachers today?
I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand. I just can't get those things to stick. I need to comprehend it and be able to employ its utility.
I also have a very poor working memory that hinders my ability to solve certain problems that most would find to be trivial. I think I would have done quite badly in the environment you're describing.
> I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand.
I apologize but I don't believe these things to be literally true. You can clearly speak at least one natural language with native-speaker fluency, and that inherently involves committing a large amount of raw data to memory that may never be "fully understood" in a complete sense. More generally, memorizing stuff effectively that one does not clearly understand happens all the time in all sorts of education, and my view is that genuinely effective methods can indeed make this roughly as easy as memorizing the lexicon of one's native language.
(The success of spaced-repetition software is at least an existence proof that such methods are in fact possible, though the context is not exactly the same as classroom instruction.)
Of course whenever "sufficient understanding" happens to be feasible it should be included; I have never said otherwise. What "Progressive" education means when it pushes "open inquiry" and "students learning by themselves" is something radically different, that in practice amounts to letting the students 'sink or swim' with no effective support whatsoever.
I asked for sources, not a quibble on a sub-point.
I disagree. I like rote and rigor, but I think it's a mistake to ignore developing problem solving and intuition early. A lot of programs overshoot, but figuring out how to make decent guesses and test them is important (as is getting lots of practice on well-defined problems).
edit: it looks like you're editing your comment. You added:
> As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity
I disagree here, too. ;) I mean, yes, it can be, but we have other tools in our toolbox. The hammer is useful but has diminishing returns as we try and apply it more and more.
> developing problem solving and intuition early.
There's no reason why these things couldn't be developed in a more "structured" approach than the default (avoiding the overshooting you mention). The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most critical point.
> There's no reason why these things couldn't be developed in a more "structured" approach than the default (avoiding the overshooting you mention). The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most critical point.
Again, citations for the efficacy of scripting and recitation would be appreciated.
> The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most critical point.
I agree that quick feedback improves performance and morale. We close that loop pretty quickly in my classroom most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project) for starters, one of the largest educational studies ever conducted: "The results of Follow Through did not show how models that showed little or no effects could be improved. But they did show which models—as suggested by the less than ideal conditions of the experiment—had some indications of success. Of these models, Siegfried Engelmann's Direct Instruction method demonstrated the highest gains in the comparative study. [T]he models which showed positive effects were largely basic skills models. ..."
Ugh. I was wondering whether it was going to be Follow Through. You understand it was a terribly conducted study, and analyses of the data by other parties have drawn the exact opposite conclusion?
There's a reason why I'm particularly skeptical to what you're saying, btw: we know from pretty high quality research lasting decades that the combination of tutorial instruction plus mastery methods are supremely effective. The big problem is, these approaches don't scale.
Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the opposite of this approach.
On the other hand: Direct Instruction could be a way to hit a minimum quality level in schools which have suffered from instructional quality problems. It's also worth noting that modern Direct Instruction is much, much less recitation-based than you imply.
Just one piece of anecdata: the private school I'm at was much more scripted and regimented around this type of philosophy 15 years ago. The private school down the road is still there. We've really pulled away in performance since broadening methods and doing a lot more of the open-ended inquiry that you look down your nose at. Indeed, the engineering programs that I teach share very few features with DI, and have gotten nationally recognized results.
> Structured recitation in a classroom is basically the opposite of [tutorial instruction plus mastery methods].
Reference for this statement? From a rather abstract POV, it seems to be the closest thing to "mastery methods and tutorial instruction" that can actually scale to a large class size and engage all students by default.
Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match) has very little bearing on what's most effective for marginalized and disadvantaged students who may have significant challenges with basic skills.
> Also, what method can be most effective in a "nationally recognized" engineering program (most likely with highly recognized students to match)
Part of what got my attention and asking you for citations:
> > > As an important point, the merit of this kind of education is by no means exclusive to disadvantaged students!
For more anecdata: I coach a MS competitive math team as an elective. Anyone can join. It's not selective. Our school is roughly 3% of the middle school students in our chapter, but we routinely take >50% of the top 12 spots. We don't do rote but just explore ideas and compare approaches. Also, students in the program on average pick up about .7 years of math skills beyond what similar control students at our school do during that time.
I came into this job thinking I was going to be all teaching and demonstrating methods, and doing a bunch of drill-and-kill, etc. In practice that's where I've been least effective personally and where the classroom has been a sad place to be.
During COVID, I was a substitute teacher in an 8th grade science classroom and I was teaching physics. We recited definitions and drilled and killed. The students did well in the material, but developed no great love for me or physics, and didn't do better in their next year of science classes than students who had been taught in a more informal, exploratory way. The students that I taught physics still actively avoid my programs.
> Reference for this statement?
In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class." It's about engaging with concepts actively.
On the flip side, Direct Instruction is more structured and teacher-led, focusing on clear, step-by-step teaching with a ton of overlap between sessions and very clear structured measurement of basic tasks.
> In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class."
This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach. You're right that this is not directly "teacher led" in a material sense, but only inasmuch as the equivalent effort happens outside the classroom. The "debate, critique, and defend" approach shares both the "immediately applicable practice" and the "quick feedback" features of DI - there's clearly "a ton of overlap" between studying a lesson on one's own and later debating, critiquing or practically applying the same content in class. Just because it might not be literal "blabbing back" doesn't mean that much of the same underlying dynamics is not involved.
> This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach.
A flipped classroom falls short of tutorial instruction. Often, it's just recorded lessons presented outside school time to leave more time for using the classroom in other ways.
Homework in conventional primary classrooms is not helpful and may be harmful, and as best as I can tell, this includes flipped lessons and textbook readings. We've got a pretty big mountain of data accumulating on this topic.
I'm trying to flip some topics in AP Microeconomics and it's really hard to do in an effective way.
Actually: I find in AP Micro I am doing things much closer to how you describe, because I'm micro-optimizing for (students doing well on the AP Micro exam) instead of (producing students that I feel understand economics in a generally useful way).
> "quick feedback" features of DI
I think pretty much everyone agrees quick feedback and measurement is valuable. Having one clean expected answer that the class says together is one way to get this, and I guess it's perhaps the one that requires the lowest instructor skill and thus is most repeatable.
But I would say, for example, that Khan Academy does it much better-- pacing things to each student, providing individualized feedback, supporting spacing effects through mastery challenges, and allowing questions whose responses would not be said the same by all students. It's trickier, though: you need to stand in the back of class to tamp down on device misuse. And in the end students do work in exchange for recognition from their instructor in a well-functioning classroom, which is hard to get if they're spending most of their time trying to please a computer.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'm surprised that "device misuse" is that big of an issue. I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device. Aside from that, I do in fact agree wrt. on the potential of Khan Academy and similar systems - they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
> I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device.
In our case, schools purchase and bring their own devices past elementary school. But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
> they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
They don't, though. In my experience, there's 3 reasons why a student will devote effort to improvement in a classroom. In order of their efficacy and difficulty to instill:
1. Pressure from grades/the gradebook. In my experience, this is only weakly effective. Even in my environment where families are really achievement focused. There is too much of a delay; even if things are updated in Khan or the gradebook nigh-immediately, the measure doesn't become consequential for a long time.
2. Social pressures in the classroom: desire to not look foolish; relationship with an adviser; desire to please the teacher; effects of appropriate praise; desire to do fun things that other students are doing.
3. True interest and independent engagement in the subject.
You could alternatively view this also as a scale of how quick and effective feedback is. By #3, the student starts to measure themselves.
Khan or DI will have a hard time taking a student to #3. Khan's a super-strong, super immediate version of #1; DI is a very weak version of #2 (but possibly the easiest to implement).
> But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
Indeed there are! I was in high school around 20 years ago, and our computers were “locked down”. You couldn’t install anything (or really run any unapproved binary), access to system tools was disabled, and every time a computer rebooted, it would wipe a clean image to the HD so no changes would be saved to disk.
My friend and I figured out how to bypass the lockdown before boot, and made a floppy that did so. Removing evidence of tampering was as simple as shutting down the PC. From there, we added a menu to the bootloader, put it on a CD, wrote a simple Visual Basic app launcher on the CD, and included Quake 2/3, GTA, Worms, and a handful of other games that could all install or run from the launcher, and then sold the CDs for idk $10 a pop?
We also learned that every computer in our district (that we had access to test on) used the same admin password for all the remote VNC access, which was fun. And the same password (different from the VNC password at least?) for all of the networked printers in the district - on football game day, we printed hundreds of our school’s logo on a rival school’s printers, with the logo being just barely off-white.
There's definitely technical/fancy tomfoolery. But I'm also just surprised in very low-tech ways.
I once had someone draw a very elaborate stick figure fight in CAD for an entire 74 minute period instead of the high priority project his teammates were waiting on.
It's tricky for me in the engineering project classes, because I'll often be very deeply involved with one group teaching a new task or skill. 90% of the time the other groups will make good progress, but the other 10% yields interesting surprises. I definitely am more careful to show up unexpectedly more and to carefully look at screens, not just to shrug when they look OK-ish from 15' away.
> Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?
Singapore/Hong Kong/Japan/Taiwan/Macau dominating the PISA
Singapore's math program in elementary is actually much less recitation and rote based than we are used to in Western mathematics education.
Indeed, it's very much pictorial and intuition-building in ways that fans of DI tend to look down on. It's concept and problem solving before rote.
I don't know so much about these countries in primary education, but I do have a few Japanese textbooks from secondary school translated into English and published by the AMS. This material also seems less rote-heavy than I am used to.
E.g. I'm looking at an on-level grade 7 mathematics textbook, and it's spending a lot of pages justifying the idea of negative numbers in addition and subtraction and with pictorial representation and has comparably few problems to do.
In a US math textbook, this material would have been done before grade 7, but in less depth. There would be a whole lot of rules, algorithms, and rote practice.
As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade.
However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math.
I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a lot of the busywork that school presents to you - because I saw little point in it, I knew the material, I'd read the book, I could write about it and often passed tests on it with flying colors.
If I'd been given an opportunity to do more engaging learning, and less information regurgitation style learning, I wonder where I would be. Like an introduction to computer programming class, would have completely changed the trajectory of my life - yes I'm a working engineer today, but it took me a long time to work my way up from a low wage service job.
ADHD is not at all well accommodated in public schools. I could never finish most homework as a child, because it was too boring and repetitive(I got it in 1-2 repetitions, but they made us do 20). My ADHD was severe, but I still got put in G&T classes because of my IQ tests, but that didn’t help much. GT classes were an hour or two in a different classroom doing silly “creative” projects, but then it was right back to normal classes where we were in the same room as students that had to sound out words in their paragraph of the class reading in the same amount of time many of us had read ahead a dozen pages. I never completed most homework and had poor grades putting me almost in the bottom half of my class. Everything changed when I got to AP and other advanced classes. They were more interesting and I easily rose to the top of them while nearly failing the boring standard classes. If it weren’t for AP classes followed by more interesting college classes I’d be a janitor or something. Us neurodivergent smart folks can be absolutely crippled by being stuck in boring regular classes. Having a mental difference/disability makes us hard to understand and accommodate. We can be both special needs and gifted/talented at the same time.
The instructional approaches I mentioned in the parent comment are not based on pointless 'busywork'. In fact, quick feedback to the pupil is considered an essential feature, which helps cope with the all-too-easily distracted "monkey mind" that's typically associated with ADHD.
This sounds thoroughly unappealing to gifted students though? I mean, repetition is _a_ tool in the toolset.
Respectfully I'm not seeing how your point is surprising at all. Are you just saying that when we do spend money on disadvantaged (whatever word is correct for "opposite of gifted") it isn't effective?
I'm just saying that when the institutional schooling system seems to "spend money on the disadvantaged" it's merely pretending to help the disadvantaged and marginalized, while actively rejecting the approaches that, at least as judged by readily available evidence, would likely help these students the most, and probably close at least some of the gap in outcomes.
> 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.
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?
>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.
Sure, but don't try to get people who can't hack college into college at the expense of those who can.
When I was growing up decades ago, we had a gifted program and a special education program. The gifted program was an attempt to expose gifted students to more complex thinking, while the special education program was an attempt to give student who struggle with normal education special attention to allow them to learn as best they can. It worked well.
In the 80's, the education system was the product of 200+ years of figuring out how to do it. For some reason, we decided it was wrong and introduce new methods of education that don't seem to be doing as well.
>The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse.
This seems like hyperbole. I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
> This seems like hyperbole.
It's not, there are multiple historical examples of societies, including the US, that place a low value on human life.
Heck, you'll even find comments in this thread talking about how important it is to cut funding to the useless eaters... errr undeserving masses.
Current US society isn't that bad, however, there is a significant population of people that see no problems with things like child labor and completely privatizing education (and everything else for that matter).
> I don't think the US treats any children as disposable refuse, no matter how dissatisfied you are with the current system, I'm certain that isn't the intent.
I never said the current US policies treat kids that way. I do, however, see some disturbing rhetoric throughout this thread about how we spend to much time/money/effort on individuals the commenters deem as worthless.
> > 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.
I think the idea is that conqourers force their conquest economies to fit their needs, which is often not good for the conqoured. E.g. they might try to shutdown industries which build local wealth over ones that are more extractive.
Not exactly the same, but Basil II of eastern Rome had his enemy soldiers blinded after a decisive victory and sent back to Bulgaria to be a burden.
You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society?
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.
Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests.
However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.
The equality of outcome can take many forms.
Calling pre-revolution Russian society "great" sounds like a bit of a stretch, mostly due to quality (and freedom) of life for biggest group of it - farmers.
You are equating "persecuting genius" with "supporting those from low-opportunity backgrounds". Classic mistake, especially considering that those kids could become """geniuses""" too if they had a chance to even try. Giving a decent shot at those from disadvantaged households will ironically probably do more towards improving the number of high achievers than allocating too many resources to the children of the rich, which is what we're doing now.
How does removing gifted and talented programs support "those from low-opportunity backgrounds"?
"persecuting genius" is literally what is happening.
I'm not talking about this lol, of course removing gifted programs is a stupid idea. I'm talking about your position.
Russia was a backward, underdeveloped nation that couldn’t even beat Germany’s B team, and then collapsed into civil war. 25 years later, the USSR beat Germany’s A team and effectively conquered half of Europe, holding it for nearly half a century.
China before the Communists got pillaged by a succession of outside powers, culminating in basically a failed state that barely had a national government. China after the Communists became prosperous and strong, with the world’s second largest economy and no prospect of being invaded.
I’m no fan of Communism and I think a better system of government could have taken these countries farther, but “collapsed their previously great societies” makes no sense.
No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used.
> 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.
It seems like you're choosing to selectively interpret things to fit your own argument.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
They did indeed kill off most of their intelligentsia in the last century. This is clearly what the OP is referencing and is a historical fact. I'm not sure why you decided to take it in a different direction.
Because for neither China nor the USSR was that the main contributor to their national problems. Further, the education system of both are definitely implementations of "let's spend the most money on the smartest people".
In a discussion about the collapse of societies, it doesn't apply. In a discussion about education reform, it does not apply. It is also not an example of the original commentors statement that conquerors have used social spending to collapse their targets.
I would further point out in both the case of the USSR and China's purge of the intelligentsia; it was FAR more about consolidating power in a dictator and far less about trying to set good national policy. In Mao's case in particular, he was frankly just a bit insane.
There’s a selection bias in that the USSR and China both actually turned into barely functioning societies afterwards, often because they implemented their ideals in inconsistent or hypocritical ways. If you take the same ideology and actually apply it consistently you’re the Khmer Rouge.
Sounds similar to religions. If a religious group sticks strongly to its religion's founding principles and teachings, it's "fundamentalist" and is basically a cult or something like The Handmaid's Tale. The groups that water everything down and are hypocritical and inconsistent are much more successful long-term, with far more members and lots of money.
The main difference is that unlike Marxism, most traditional religions can be the basis of a long-term successful society even if you apply their ideas consistently.
The cultural revolution began by lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities. Stalin did much of the same. It was a horrible strategy which is why they came up with the new ones.
I can think of many nasty things that Stalin did, but I don't recall anything even remotely similar to "lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities". In fact, teacher was probably one of the most respected occupations throughout the Soviet period.
The Katyń forest massacres (to the extent that about a third of the victims were targeted for being members of the intelligentsia) come to mind as a reasonably similar instance of the kind of "lynching" you're referring to. Within the USSR itself we have the purges of leading intellectuals in Ukraine -- the number of victims is more difficult to quantify, but was likely far beyond the few hundred known by name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance
The June 1941 (and later) deportations in the Baltics (involving inevitably a very high mortality rate) seem to have at least partially targeted the intelligentsia as such in those Republics (in addition to the other usual suspects).
Right, but that's just the classic occupier tactic - target the (usually independent-minded) intelligentsia of conquered territories to suppress any budding national liberation movements. But OP was talking about Maoist purges of their own intelligentsia. Bolsheviks indiscriminately purged the nobility, which certainly did disproportionally affect intelligentsia, but they weren't ideologically anti-intellectual the way some Maoist strains or Khmer Rouge were.
Yeah, I was being charitable to Stalin, and considering the population those Republics as "his" people (which of course they never were). But I do see the distinction you are making here.
> Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
China is doing fine. In fact they're probably going to eclipse the US soon in terms of scientific output.
USSR fell for the trap of trusting the West and consequently they suffered a lot in the 90s.
Mao's policies including the persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution killed millions and set China back by decades.
Yes, that happened. It's also undeniable that since then, they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people.
I'm not sure if they get to where they are today - without going through the Maoist stage.
> they've massively improved the lifestyle of 1.4B people.
Because they gave up on the command economy idea and embraced markets and education. When they persecuted the geniuses everything went to shit and when they stopped things quickly improved. Really makes you think.
> The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself
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.
Grit is not more important than raw intelligence for making world changing discoveries, that’s nonsense on its face. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition, it takes BOTH incredible intelligence and extreme grit combined to make world changing discoveries. An average IQ person could never accomplish what Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, or Leonard Susskind did with grit alone and our modern world would not exist without them. With a few notable exceptions the giants of history mostly had great financial and social privilege as well, allowing them the time to apply their grit and intelligence to problems that didn’t have any immediate economic payoff.
I will say that math and hard sciences are unnecessarily difficult for outsiders to approach due to overly confusing terminology and not enough thought toward pedagogy. Great contemporaries like Sean Carroll and Leonard Susskind are demonstrating how to make the sciences much more accessible to people like me. But no matter how much more accessible you make it it’s inconceivable that average IQ people will ever contribute to the frontiers of it.
Yes, there is a high correlation between intelligence (no matter how you measure it throughout childhood) and achievement in adulthood. A huge, massive difference. Obviously there are exceptions. Somebody seeming like a bad student is not one. Do you really need a citation for that?
My question was specifically about the outliers: has any research been done if outlying achievements go hand in hand with outlier IQs? Without any research or evidence, it's an area prone to a Just World fallacy where extraordinary achievements "ought" to be achieved by extraordinary talent.
Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner: given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to expect the top 100 wealthiest individuals (outliers) to also be 100 most intelligent people on earth?
When you’re talking about outliers, it’s not an even-or situation. It’s not that being diligent is more valuable than being smart. Lots of people are smart, but the ones who are exceptionally smart and exceptionally diligent—outliers on two dimensions—are usually the most successful.
It’s also worth pointing out that people who e.g. study algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school aren’t actually outliers; they’re maybe the top 1/3 or so of the class in terms of mathematics ability.
Newton, Euler, Darwin, Einstein, Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman… Our modern world wouldn’t exist without them. Look up estimates of their IQ. Read some of their work and try to imagine having the same level of insight and producing similar volumes of it if you devoted every waking hour to the task.
Then read up on the ancient Greeks. Even after 12 years of education most modern people wouldn't be able to measure the circumference of the Earth like Eratosthenes did hundreds of years before Christ. The ancient Greeks were pretty darn smart.
So, the closest that I am aware of is the multi-decade study conducted by, the psychologist and intelligence researcher, Lewis Terman. The study was originally called, "Genetic Studies of Genius."
You can read about it here:
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/2018-kell.pdf
This one is somewhat tangental, but I find, "The Munich Model of Giftedness Designed to Identify and Promote Gifted Students" to be an interesting read too.
It would probably be weird to build many conclusion off the Terman study at this point, right? I've been dunking lately on people citing '90s and 2000's era twin studies as calling back to the phlogiston era of quantitative psychology; I don't even know what you'd call the raw material Terman had to work with; alchemical?
No, not to a person. There can be some stupendously dumb billionaires, especially since inheritance is a thing. I would however expect the average intelligence however-measured of the 100 richest "self-made" (lets just say who didn't themself inherit a generational amount of wealth) individuals in the US to be higher than a 100-person random sample of the population.
Equating achievement to financial success is a big mistake, but a bigly American one. The great scientists, while often somewhat privileged, were rarely in the billionaire class or their time’s equivalent. The average brilliant scientist or mathematician nowadays is making a wage that doesn’t afford them any luxuries whatsoever.
These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
Completely incorrect.
We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.
>We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years
We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry.
Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model.
State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price.
This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.
That is not true either.
There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost.
They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt.
It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population.
Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.
Which fields?
Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.
Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.
Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.
Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.
@WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW
You are correct but I think it has mostly to do with the way academia is organized. Scientific study is only really funded or respected if it quotes enough other works. However this is a dead-end way of working, bad research that quotes bad research will become the norm. Real talent feels this, leaves academia, the problem gets worse.
What is good for a society and what feels just are often disparate things.
But it is not unjust on a human scale that some people are born with lower potential than others. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life.
What is just then?
To whom is it just to invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
To whom is it just to -not- invest in people who are particularly likely to bring benefits to society?
We know that the vast majority of significant advances in engineering and science are brought to life by people that are significantly above average capability in their fundamental capabilities, gifts that were evident even before they entered school.
We know that significant advances are unlikely to be contributed by people for whom day to day life is a significant cognitive challenge.
This comes down to the harm / benefit of investing 2x the effort into one person.
The best likely case scenario for the bright student is that they go on to create something remarkable and useful. Advancements in technology and science are responsible for millions of lives saved every year, and billions of lives saving trillions of man hours they would have spent in tedious, exhausting work. This then translates into higher investment in children, creating a virtuous cycle of benefit.
The best likely case for the dim bulb is not so different than the no-intervention path, but with a slightly better quality of life. The best argument is probably that it might make a difference in how he approaches parental responsibilities, since his social crowd is likely to be of slightly better character.
I would say it is unjust to the many to focus your resources on the least productive in society, unless the reason for their lower potentiality is something that is inherently fixable (IE lack of education). If the problem is endemic to the individual themselves, it makes little difference or sense to invest a disproportionate effort in their education.
OTOH if you have a student that can absorb information at double or triple the normal rate, it makes sense to fast track them to a level of education that they can produce benefits to their society. To let them languish in a classroom developing a disdain for their teachers, whom the often know more than, only creates habits and preconceptions that guide them into dubious but interesting activities and away from the paths that might lead them to greatly benefit society at large.
Either way it’s kind of a shit sandwich though, so who knows.
Anecdotally for me, G/T was great for my eventual development, and probably moved me farther away from a life of high achieving white collar crime, which seemed like a worthwhile goal when I was 9.
Showing me that other people understood and valued my intellect was a huge factor in deciding to try to do something admirable with my life.
It also was largely a waste of money paying for me to launch mice to half a mile in spectacularly unsafe sounding rockets from the school track. The astronaut survival rate was not great.
> invest 2x the resources into a person that will never likely tinder a significant benefit to society?
So you would rather have the cleaning lady, the garbage collector, the truck driver,... not got proper read/write/calculate/economics... education and increase their chances of ending on the side where they fall for addiction instead?
I don't think that's what they're saying.
Anacostia High School in Washington DC has zero percent of students meeting expectations in Math, yet its funding per student is twice that of nearby districts that perform much better. Lebron James' I Promise Academy is similarly very well-funded both for in-classroom and wraparound services, and it's one of the worst schools in the state of Ohio. It is increasingly evident that we cannot improve student outcomes in failing schools simply by funneling more resources to those schools. Students who come from households who do not value education not only will not learn, but will also likely sabotage the education of the others in their schools. It is probably more effective to give direct cash payments to struggling families than to struggling schools.
The reality, which politicians will never admit out loud, is there is a population of K-12 students who 1. will never become educated to any measurable standard, and 2. disrupt the education of everyone around them. You could give unlimited funding to a school, and these kids will not learn. You could assign a huge staff of dedicated top-educators to each class, and it won't make a difference. You could isolate them from everyone else, each individual into a dedicated classroom with that staff of education PhDs all to themselves, and they will not learn. They will either graduate high school not meeting the standard, or they will drop out before they graduate. You can't force education on someone whose parents, peers, and surrounding environment don't value it.
Yes, this has been my experience in my stint running an after school program. It’s an unfortunate reality that must be accepted in order to have sane policy.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone that teaching basic literacy - reading, writing, practical maths etc - is a huge societal benefit. Nobody is advocating for not doing that.
What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone. If someone is not academically gifted, why make them waste years of their life struggling through an academic education. What's the point?
The relationship between education and achievement for a given person probably follows an S curve. More education has an impact in the steep part of the slope, but eventually the limiting factor is natural ability, and achievement flatlines. The problem with education today is that people looked at that curve when it was in the steep part, thought "more education means better outcomes" and just kept blindly throwing education at people.
Most people would be far better served by vocational learning after a certain point. Effectively every career is a form of vocational learning, we've just delayed it further and further in the name of academic education which has limited benefit.
> What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone.
For a democratic society, I think there's a pretty big benefit in making the general population fairly well educated beyond just what it takes to make them proficient at a job.
The point would be to make sure they could reasonably reason about the policies and politicians they are voting for or against.
Now, maybe that can all be covered in high school classes. However, I think a lot of humanity and philosophy classes just don't come in until college level classes.
Reasoning and rational consideration of things is not easily introduced after about age 7. People brought up in a reactive environment will struggle and rebel against logical analysis, preferring “common sense” or emotion based decision making.
Reactive thinking is often pretty accurate, and people used to reactive thought think that their conclusions are “obvious”, so the idea that they need to also stand up to a first principles analysis undermines a fundamental aspect of their worldview.
If they haven’t been taught to see themselves and their environment in the third person by the time they are in kindergarten, it’s basically too late. It can be fixed, but it won’t likely be in school.
I expect better from someone whose user name is nuancebydefault
You are right, thanks for pointing this out. My comment was not very nuanced. I feel polarization happens easily with some topics. Well the benefit is, I got replies that are food for thought.
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward
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.
lol, when people talk about these things they’re talking about the Lowell High kids that want to go to Yale, not normal people like me. Let’s be real here.
No, I'm talking about regular kids who grow up in hard circumstances that just need an opportunity for a better life.
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.
I really do not think the modal case of social mobility is people in G&T programs, which definitionally only target the top N% of students
I'm not. All I want is that students get trained rigorously. The last thing I want is as what NYT used to report: a straight-A student who dreamed to be a scientist couldn't even pass the placement test of a city college. That shows how irresponsible our school systems became.
You said a few weeks ago that
> As many countries demonstrated, wealth does not buy good genes. Talented kids stand out, as long as we have a decent public school system, which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable. That's how East-European countries and Asian countries produce high-quality students.
What implications does this have for all students getting trained rigorously in the public school system? People that also speak of genes like Charles Murray say this is a fool's errand and that we should effectively just throw them off the ship.
I'm not sure where the contradiction is. The key to me is "which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable", which I equate to "rigorous training". I guess the difference is on how we define "talented". To me most kids are just educable, which means they don't constantly push themselves, they don't take initiatives to dig deeper, nor do they proactively find resources to do more. Or they struggle without careful guidance. Yet they can make leap and bounds when they experience a rigorous program. These kids need nurturing from the teachers. At least that's my personal experience: I was content with my performance, until the problem sets showed that I was not really as good as imagined. Also, I believe that training makes a big difference to people of similar level of talent. That is, wealth can't push a kid who struggles with Algebra II to understand calculus, but may well help a student with sufficient talent to stand out. My personal experience: I went to college, didn't have the drive to push through the tomb of Demidovich. And then my friend got me a much shorter book for challenging problem sets in Analysis. With his help I finished the book, and man, what a difference it made. I stayed top of my class and became a TA on calculus in my sophomore year.
> I guess the difference is on how we define "talented"
Yes, and how we define "bad genes". I'm someone that you definitely wouldn't consider "talented" (since I've never worked at Google etc) and probably have "bad genes", what should be done with people like me?
* Train you to the best of your ability
* giving you a no-shame route up and down so that you can choose your own level of challenge, which entails
* giving you opportunities to try the more gifted programs to see if you'd do well and enjoy them
and also
* giving you the opportunity to choose a less demanding program in which you can find and adequate level of challenge (if you need to)
BUT
* treating disruptive behaviour as a choice to go to a less demanding program
citation needed
I wish I could find it, but unfortunately it was likely ten years ago. The article left a lasting impression on me, though, so I repeated it once in a while in different context, at the risk of totally rewriting what actually happened.
I have been deeply amused that some recent studies found the signal that best correlated with innovation in a society wasn't upward mobility, but rather _downward_ mobility.
The less rich people are allowed to buy success for their mediocre offspring, the better off society is.
Is that why Elon Musk's mom went on TV to explain just how much of a genius he is? It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
There's a lot of strong words thrown around regarding this topic. You need a little of both. Consider a re-framing:
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.
> it would make sense to put into place opportunities for gifted students and high achievers without regard for where they live or come from.
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.
Generally I agree with you.
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.
Surprisingly, the best funded schools are not the ones that are in good places to live. Baltimore city public schools were $22k/student. Howard county was $20k for the same time.
> 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.
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?
> first generation Asian kids who didn’t grow up rich
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.
> Second generation immigrant children from first generation parents sounds like the American Dream working as-intended to me!
If your definition of the American dream is the tiny fraction of poor Asian kids that get into Stanford you have a screwed up definition of the American dream, which is built on people that go to Cal State LA and never had G&T programs.
> This can simply mean being a functional member of society that participates within their community.
People that work in factories and retail are also functional members of society and your sentence does not seem to imply that when you drew a contrast there.
I'm not following your hyper focus on first gen Asian kids or the implication that gifted programs are only for Stanford-bound students. My ancestors have been in North America since the 16-1800s, I went to public K12 and university, and I've benefited quite a bit from having parts of my education that weren't a complete joke (I've done much better economically than my parents, for example).
Teaching high-aptitude kids at their level also does not require taking away from the other kids assuming you have enough of them to fill a classroom.
The thread is discussing the people in G&T programs as the people that "move society forward" and the rest as people that hold society back. While OP seems to think that there's an expansive group that "move society forward", I'm skeptical that this is actually what they mean, because the people that are used as positive examples for these conversations are exclusively poor Asian kids that get into top schools, not ordinary people like me that are considered failures by this class of people.
There are literally multiple people in this thread (including myself and the above poster) saying they are talking about (relatively) normal people like themselves. We are outliers (someone taking AP calc BC in high school might be in the 95+ percentile in math aptitude), but not profoundly extreme outliers, and the 95th percentile is still millions of people. You seem to be the only person saying that it's a small group of elite kids under discussion.
> There are some who immediately consider this socialism, but I think it fits squarely in the definition of equality of opportunity.
Indeed. Wealth creates opportunities. When we have large disparities in wealth, we don't have equality of opportunity. A depressing amount of talk about "equality of opportunity" seems to focus on things like "when you reach age 18, you have the 'opportunity' to get into the same college as someone else" rather than "when you are born, your family's material resources are comparable to everyone else's". The thing is that that essentially requires some measure of equality of outcomes for the previous generation.
There is always a massive shortage of gifted students, original thinkers, and neuro-divergents. We need 10x as much, and we need to take care of each one. This society is starving for fresh ideas. We do not lack for effort anymore, we lack for creative and pragmatic thinkers. Without them we will continue to turn on each other, because without them, it truly is a zero sum game.
Disagreed. Public school should target the broadest possible audience. Gifted pupils are rarely held back in school and special needs people need additional effort.
Of course you cannot really teach them together in the same environment, it is not the task of gifted students to drag everyone with them, it is on teachers to provide necessities. But as long as school doesn't hold them back, they will be fine.
>Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves.
I didn't have history in school, could you expand on this part? This sounds very interesting.
> Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves
Can you list which conquerers? I'm curious as to what you're referring to here
> Taking resources away from those who move society forward
Do gifted students move society forward ?
Where is society moving to ?
Generally yes.
Bill Gates will eliminate polio for mankind within his lifetime. He has at least 140IQ.
I believe most successful people have high IQ. Perhaps not as high as 140, but probably more than people in general realize. That Gates have 140 does not surprise me at all.
There are so many confounding factors are at play that you're ignoring and attributing the achievement to high IQ (and that only).
The Guinea Worm is on the verge if eradication, mostly on the back of the multi-decade efforts of Jimmy Carter. I don't what his IQ is, but I'll assume it's below 140 and above whatever is the ballpark minimum required to enroll as a Navy Nuke.
I posit that you don't need to be a genius to eradicate a disease, just drive, a platform and the right resources and/or connections
I was curious and so I looked.
Jimmy Carter: 145.
Not sure how credible that is but it sure did make me chuckle.
You're speculating that a US president has a relatively average intelligence - why are you assuming that? The top job in a democracy is generally one of the most competitive positions in the world and US presidents are typically exceptional in multiple different ways. It'd be really surprising to have a US president with an IQ below something like 120 and I'd personally be assuming >140 for the average. As far as I can see a 140 IQ is around the 0.1-1% mark, it isn't that rare compared to presidents (<0.01%).
> You're speculating that a US president has a relatively average intelligence - why are you assuming that
I am not assuming that: any range that has studying nuclear engineering as its floor is above average intelligence. I thought it was self-evident, but apparently not - perhaps not many people know what a "Navy Nuke officer" is. To be more explicit the range is between above average intelligence and "genius". Regardless, I will never be convinced that people with relatively average intelligence are precluded from greatness; so excuse my scepticism when fellow nerds pat themselves on the back for being the engine of the world without pointing at any research that bears this idea out.
> To be more explicit the range is between above average intelligence and "genius".
You haven't made your point explicit. So what? What are you basing your argument on here? The existence of Navy Nuke officers may well have no bearing at all on Carter's intelligence. If Mr Carter was trying for jobs which required genius that suggests he was one.
> I will never be convinced that people with relatively average intelligence are precluded from greatness
Greatness is one thing, competition for US presidency is something else. I'm sure it is possible and happens on rare occasions, but an ordinary person cannot be reasonably expected make it through the scrum to become a US president. They usually have to have quite a few somethings to set them apart from the crowd - including great intelligence.
If you looked at my resume you wouldn’t think I’m “moving society forward” - I went to a public undergrad with a 50% accept rate.
What do you think should happen to people like me?
The fact you have a professional resume to point to likely means you are moving society forward. HN seems to have a weirdly high bar for this, and perhaps a very low understanding of just how bad "general" classes at inner city schools are.
This would imply a greater focus must be made to ensure they have a chance at success yes?
I'm exceedingly skeptical that there's a low bar for "moving society forward" if the bar is "being in a gifted and talented program or equivalent". But if society is made up of a small set of overmen burdened by pulling the undermen across the finish line I absolutely would be an underman.
You don't seem to have the right perspective to talk about things at scale like this. Taking that personally is unfathomable.
You are totally over romanticizing institutional learning. It’s worth abolishing and starting over.
A bold stance given your username.
Institutional learning has been around globally in a wide variety of forms. What is so heavily romanticized in your opinion
The romantic notion that geniuses need an institution to coddle them and that by the grace of some government or non-profit organization then are humans capable of higher order thinking. The institutions are the tools for getting larger investments to allow for smart people to do their great work, not to create the people through education. Education systems today are fundamentally broken and reinforce feedback loops of poverty and dependency. It’s a prisoners dilemma. Case in point TAG programs are gamed often by wealthier families which makes the selection process incredibly unscientific and useless.
I think you'll find human beings learn best in conversation with others. Sometimes thats through books, and articles but for many its at least partially through conversation. Letters, podcasts, salons, coffee haus, banya trees and rostras. Its been shown again and again and again that humans need other humans to learn and that our learning is like the shellacking of a shell. It is inevitably informed by the layer before.
They want the culture to die. Then from the rubble they will build their brave new socialist utopia. Except as any student of history knows, what we actually get is Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...
We just ejected from Seattle Public Schools for this reason. My daughter, as a gifted student, was basically ignored by her teachers for the last 3 years because she was smart, and therefore they didn't have to worry about her. But, by ignoring her, she atrophied. Her standardized testing scores dropped every year. She no longer cared about learning. It truly is a regression to the mean.
My oldest son managed to get into one of the actually functioning, albeit barely, magnet public High Schools in Dallas TX ISD ( Townview SEM). His little brother is in a magnet middle school and will probably follow to either SEM or the TAG (talented and gifted) magnet which is in the same physical building.
Both my wife and I agree, if we had to do it over again we would move to the exurbs and home school. TAG and SEM rank in the top 20-30 nationwide and it's still not that great. Homeschoolers can cover the same level of material and learning in about 3-4hrs where the public school alternative is all day sitting in desks and bored out of their minds.
I'm considering something similar but I find it hard to figure out a good alternative, because they all seem "nice," have smart words on the website, cost about the same (which is not little), but when you look at matriculation stats it's not that impressive or visibly better than public schools. And then a bunch of them are weird religious schools which gives me the heebie jeebies. I guess you really have to be part of the "in" group and get recommendations from the other parents/grandparents/families and that's where the class divide is.
100% agree with you. We went with a religious option because of cost, and, despite the religious aspect, are finding it much better.
We couldn't afford the private schools that are ~$50K, but, like you say, higher cost doesn't necessarily mean better education.
You can also learn outside of school, too. Expecting the school to cater to every student just isn't going to happen. Even at the swanky private ones.
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.
> You can also learn outside of school, too.
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.
> I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school
No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
> "You're so well-adjusted", is a frequent refrain.
Sure, some people make it work. I don't think this invalidates the broad observation that private and homeschooled people are frequently socially... off. I myself had a homeschooled kid in our town who transitioned to public school for high school and made a very gregarious time of it. Then again, his parents also had him integrate tightly with athletics for the decade before this over precisely the concern about socialization we're discussing. Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this. I'm just saying you can't expect to completely avoid normal people and then slot into them later in life.
> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.
Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.
> Then again, his parents also had him integrate tightly with athletics for the decade before this over precisely the concern about socialization we're discussing. Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this.
I'll add to your anecdata - most homeschoolers I knew did sports and other extracurricular clubs, outside of the co-ops they may be participating in.
> I don't think this invalidates the broad observation
The word you're looking for is stereotype. There's lots of harmful and inaccurate stereotypes about all groups of people out there, and polite society generally frowns on using them as a form of bigotry.
> Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this.
There are tons of opportunities for this sort of thing, in the form of non-school youth groups such as 4H, sports teams, scouts and so on.
In fact, actual in class socialization is frowned on or punished in most schools. It's the in-between time and extracurriculars when that happens most anyway.
> The word you're looking for is stereotype.
Sure, but that doesn't change anything. That some people will be unfairly characterized by this is an unfortunate byproduct of being born a human.
> There's lots of harmful and inaccurate stereotypes about all groups of people out there, and polite society generally frowns on using them as a form of bigotry.
Only the bigoted forms :) stereotypes aren't going to disappear out of inconvenience
> In fact, actual in class socialization is frowned on or punished in most schools.
I've never heard of a school that could combat socialization in any meaningful way.
> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
If that's the main thing you learn, it's only worth an hour or two of the school day. So it's not all wasted but it's mostly wasted.
In what way are you certain that she's gifted?
In Seattle, there's actually a test you can take to get you into the "HCC" program which is the gifted program in Seattle Public Schools. Seattle, however, has been trying (successfully) for years to dismantle it. So even if you pass the test, there's not very many places that you can go to get these services.
Was this a test that a child could be voluntarily signed up for by their parents? In my district in a different state, the students were first selected based on standardized testing to then take the IQ test like exam to get into the program.
I'm not so certain that a test like that is proof of anything other than that someone has the resources to study for that test. Seattle's system seems to have been a magnet program (where such tests are maybe appropriate) masquerading as a gifted program. One has to wonder how many gifted students went underserved so that such a magnet program could be maintained. Sunsetting it for a neighborhood program seems fairer and more effective.
In any case, it's good that you've observed your daughter's failure to achieve without an extrinsic impetus. It's probably a good time to sit down with her and determine what excites her intellectually so that she can be empowered to pursue that subject independently. I can tell you first-hand that relying on a school or school system - even one that routinely sends graduates (minority and white, working and middle class) to highly-selective colleges and universities - to shepherd students into stable and lucrative careers is currently a fool's gambit. Academic achievement is often necessary but not sufficient (and also more expensive and time-consuming than incorporating a measure of autodidacticism.)
Most tests like this are IQ tests, and studying has little impact on IQ test scores, except perhaps showing where you over think things or take too much time. It might get you from 12% to 35%, but won’t get you from 12% to 70%.
Most IQ tests are rife with cultural biases, and can, in fact, be studied for. There's also no indication of what constitutes "passing" for Seattle's test, and how that compares to "passing" in other jurisdictions.
IMO any student that is 1-2 years ahead can be considered gifted for the purposes of parents who are thinking about how to optimize public or private education for their kids.
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.
The OP strongly tries to claim (before contradicting herself in the concluding pargraph) that gifted is a major psychological difference, not merely being smart and a fast learner.
Can you quote where you are seeing that I didn't get that reading at all from GP.
I don't have much experience with how education works in California, or in the US in general. But there is one universal issue with special programs for gifted kids: parents. It's hard to distinguish gifted kids from average kids with ambitious parents. If you let ambitious parents push their kids to programs they are not qualified for, they can easily ruin the programs for the actual gifted kids.
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.
Naming the programs gifted and creating a gifted identity is the core issue. Instead, call it something like asynchronous development, and place kids in classes appropriate to their pace of development.
I'm hopeful that AI can offer highly individualized education to each kid, and get around this issue entirely.
> Instead, call it something like asynchronous development
"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.
The problem with changing the terminology is that people/kids are clever enough to turn it to a diss regardless. It's only a matter of time.
Anyways, I don't see the big deal. I was too dumb to make it into gifted classes in school but it's not like that stopped me from going to college. I just went to a lesser college. Still make good money
In Ontario, access to these programs was gated by an IQ test given to all students based on the outcome of a standardized test (this was ~30 years ago, no idea what they do today). I'm not saying it was perfectly objective or equitable but it was a start at trying to make it objective. Are programs not doing something similar in California or elsewhere in the US?
The solution is to make gift classes fluid. That is, the worst performing kids leave the program every year, while the best kids outside the program move in. Parents can only push so much, but they can't change talent distribution.
What about the kids who thrive when their parents push hard enough? Well, in that case the kids are indeed talented, no? If the US people are inspired by seeing the street of LA at 4:00am or by some NBA dude practices free throw 4000 times a day, then we've got to admit that toiling also works and should be admired in academic training.
Stack ranking kids sounds terrible.
Strict ranking is indeed terrible. A threshold makes sense, though. If a kid can't keep up with the demand of the gift program, the kid should seek a more suitable program.
Is it the kids who are chosen that make a program "work best", or the teachers and curriculum? Why not let anybody who wants to try it, try it?
I don't know; the overly-ambitious parents push has been working out pretty well as evidenced by the Asian community in the US.
If it was that simple I'm sure we would have seen it already. I imagine any gifted program, and you can imagine it in any way you like, will inevitably promote a majority from a certain group, thus by definition will be a target for every discrimination complaint - because basically it will be supporting and pumping more money to an already privileged group. So somebody has to decide: either targeted to constant fussing and worse, or no program at all and wait for the somewhat fewer gifted from the group with possibilities to still bubble up. Of course this can change every few years, and given a ideal situation when you had addressed the challenges of poverty, you can draft now a challenge-free gifted program. Note: From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.
> Note: From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.
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.
>Do you think challenged kids deserve more from public school than anyone else?
Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other. One could argue that the disadvantaged kids should be prioritized because they need more help, and are less likely to succeed without it.
Whereas gifted kids might be bored in school and do worse than if they had dedicated programs, but they still have the chance to find enrichment outside of school or catch up later in life.
Of course, whether those statements are true would need to be an area of research. How would you calculate the overall ROI for society between the two options? Is it more import to "lift up the bottom" or "accelerate the top"?
And of course ideally we would do both.
I'm just saying it's not surprising that most (liberal / social democrat type) people will default to supporting the "more needy" first.
> Well, let's say we can only spend the money on one group or the other.
That seems like a heavy assumption to me. The gifted kids are still being allocated to classes, so you can serve them better using the same resources you would anyway by just grouping them together.
> From the start we assume that the gifted deserve more from public school, thus we call them "neglected" when they seem to be simply treated the same.
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?
The issue is deeper than that: it's that we take some singular conception of what a dog is, and ruthlessly beat any deviation from that idealized dog out of all the individual dogs. Which ends up being every dog.
In the past, in many states entry into gifted education classes required a professionally administered IQ test. Many locations needed 130+. Those requirements have gone away but I feel it wasn’t discriminatory. Can it really be criticized as such?
Certainly there are those who say the IQ tests themselves are discriminatory. I'm not qualified to say how much truth there is in that. But that is the likely reason they went away.
In my case I changed schools in the middle of second grade. A month later teachers submitted their list of students who should be admitted the the G+T program. Obviously I didn't make the cut since my teacher barely knew me. My parents tried for years to get me into the program but the district held firm that I had missed the window. Ultimately, I ended up third in my graduating class and attended a top university. The outcomes from the G+T kids were mostly disappointing. One teaches at a university, another works at Walmart. The rest are somewhere in between but mostly closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.
Maybe I actually dodged a bullet.
The IQ test is heavily influenced by where and how you grew up. So yes, it can be criticized as such. Did I mention it's a very difficult, impossible even, task to balance all arguments?
> 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.
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.
> that's exactly what these school policies in CA and elsewhere are attempting to do
Hmm… either I wasn’t clear, or we are talking about different things.
Maybe I should have added “lessen the imbalance of access to opportunities” to be extra clear.
California is creating equality of academic outcomes by reducing the access to academic opportunities — certain races can’t stand out if they simply aren’t given the chance to do so.
The examples I gave of Head Start and well-run gifted and talented programs focus on increasing academic opportunities.
One of these is inherently regressive, and the other is inherently progressive.
> Striving for less inequality in general will also help solve the inequality in education problem.
I think we are advocating for the same goal.
To be clear about the how, I strongly advocate for increasing access to academic opportunities rather than limiting access to academic opportunities in order to generate an equality of outcomes at an overall lower level.
> To be clear about the how, I strongly advocate for increasing access to academic opportunities rather than limiting access to academic opportunities in order to generate an equality of outcomes at an overall lower level.
I agree. We may quibble about the details of how best go about achieving that, but yes, this is the goal.
Had never read this before.
https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Edit: I've heard of it before, especially on HN and Slashdot, but forgot entirely about it.
While I may have sympathy for your more substantive points, anytime I hear someone mention virtue signalling, it makes it sound like they're virtue signalling. Better to just not bring up that dog whistle.
I have to agree. It's distracting because it's a low signal quip that asserts that your opponents have no substance behind their views beyond looking good. Just make your argument.
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.
> 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.
> It's distracting because it's a low signal quip that asserts that your opponents have no substance behind their views beyond looking good. Just make your argument.
That is the argument.
> 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.
The point of the argument isn't that people don't genuinely believe these issues. Its that they participate in these views in earnest because of social conformity as opposed to a genuine understanding of, and commonly without any intention of helping resolve them. The symptom then is blindly electing leaders with no real plan (or worse) and the result is predictably poor outcomes. Its used as a battering ram in discussions; I thought it was a dog whistle too before moving out to the West coast by my god it really is everywhere here, and it really does stifle discussion. Its a real issue.
As you have just described, accusations of virtue signalling are really accusations of people acting in bad faith by another name - and doing that without evidence of bad faith is corrosive and fallacious. Hacker News even has rules against it because it is not accepted as a valid form of argument. Just because the accusations aren't being levied against someone you're directly replying to here doesn't make it any better.
If you have reason to believe these people are bad faith actors, present the evidence directly rather than trying to sneak it in with weasel words.
it's a perfectly good phrase to describe what it says. if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
> if that bothers you, maybe you need to ask yourself why.
That's even vaguer and less compelling rhetoric than "virtue signaling".
In my experience, people who use the term "virtue signalling" don't understand the problems that the supposed virtue signalers are trying to solve and simply use the term as a cheap dismissal of their policies. If the policies are bad, explain why they're bad. Don't just say that people putting the 10 Commandments in schools are virtue signalling.
Or indeed, it's possible that neither you nor the virtue signallers understand why they're doing it.
Regardless of whether or not either interlocutor understands the term, using the term virtue signaling itself is self-defeating for both parties for different reasons.
For the one hearing it, it’s a red herring, and for the one saying it, it’s a dog whistle. For the third party person reading the interaction without or with lesser context, it’s a thought-terminating cliche.
> For the third party person reading the interaction without or with lesser context, it’s a thought-terminating cliche.
if one's thought is so easily terminated, maybe there wasn't as much thought as one might think to begin with.
If good faith weren't a prerequisite for reasoned debate, perhaps.
remember, we're talking about somebody getting triggered by the words "virtue-signalling", so I think good faith left the conversation a few stops back.
I understand that they're trying to fix a perceived problem. In the case of the people pushing the 10 Commandments in schools, they earnestly believe they're going to solve teen pregnancy, drug usage, etc. Saying that they're virtue signalling ignores the problem and strawmans the reason for their proposal. Saying why their policy won't work and another will addresses the problem.
>Imho, the only viable/main solution is to acknowledge that we all aren’t equal
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 also 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?
> 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.
But lessening the imbalance is the opposite of what you want.
Say you have $300 to invest in educating one student.
If you invest it in the stupid student, that student will develop $100 of learning, and the imbalance will shrink by a small amount.
If you invest it in the smart student, that student will develop $300 of learning, and the imbalance will grow by a large amount.
Which is better?
It’s working out for many of the gifted kids I meet because it pushes their parents to put them in charter/private/montessori
There really isn’t a “gifted” program in a public school setting. Mostly it’s just more volume of work, not acceleration of learning. Head Start is certainly one of the better programs, but it’s not great compared to a Montessori or Project-Based Learning approach.
Another factor: in public school kids are generally punished socially for doing significantly above average. They learn to isolate their emotional selves from everyone and become a “success object” for the school.
It’s so critical for all children, including our best and brightest, to experience being valued as a person distinct from their performance. As Paul G has often said, following your interest is how to maximize your potential for impact.
Public schools for a long time fought to hang on to top performing students to improve outcomes. I think the push against outcome-based approached is necessary, if misguided in this case. Outcome based policies have failed, wholesale, across the globe. They create strange, unproductive learning environments where signals of learning become the only thing children work on. “Most Likely to Succeed” is a phenomenal book on why outcomes-based learning is a farce and what the better way is.
For better or for worse, when I was in school in the 80s and early 90s, tracking started in about 4th grade (not counting kids who skipped earlier grades entirely). I essentially had about 90% the same kids in all my classes from 4th grade through high school graduation (not counting the influx from other feeder schools that joined in 6th & 9th). The result was less distraction in the classroom because everyone wanted to be there and was focused on learning, and much tighter rapport among the classmates. A lot of people make their best friends in college, but in my case, the friend groups that sustained frequently began in elementary and middle school!
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.
>the social/emotional maturity of kids these days far exceeds generations past.
I thought they were plagued by anxiety?
Nah, that was the aughts. These days the only anxiety is about cost of living, but it doesn't hit until college age. Speaking completely truthfully, my perception is that the teens of today are better adjusted psychologically than any generation before them.
Huh, why is that?
Everyone who grows up today has to get used to getting attacked online, it happens to everyone until they find their own filter bubble.
> Focusing on equality of outcomes
Is this a thing? I hear conservative people complain about it a lot, but I have no clue what this looks like.
> but I have no clue what this looks like
An earlier version of the CA academic framework (2022?) wanted all students to take algebra in 9th grade, rather than letting some folks start in 8th grade.
Why this matters:
- algebra in 8th grade allows for calculus to be reached by 12th grade by taking just one math class per year.
- conversely, 9th grade algebra means that a student would need to double up in math one year, which means that they have to give up a slot in another HS class in order to make room for the extra math class.
- calculus in high school is one key to get into competitive schools and programs, so this is seen as a desirable goal for academically inclined folks.
The reason this policy was proposed was that the folks in the faster track were not of a similar racial proportion as the entire student population, so it was deemed discriminatory.
The policy solution was to make it much more difficult for folks who aimed to end up in 12th grade calculus to do so.
Note that there was no broad support of this parents of the kids in the accelerated math program or by parents of those who weren’t.
This was a policy that was created by a group of so-called progressives who were happy to lower the overall group achievement level by limiting access in order to manufacture “equality” in the enrollment numbers (the outcome).
There was basically a revolt, and this become a policy suggestion rather than a requirement, but California made that change under duress rather than agreeing with the dissenters.
Note that this type of thinking is very common and very popular in the education academic/“intellectual” circles. They assume that people will eventually come around to their way of thinking. Imho, they are completely out of touch with (and largely have disdain for) “normal” people.
Is this a clear example without any conservative baggage?
Edit - here is an article that discusses this topic:
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/california-adopts-c...
It looks like this:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
That doesn't seem to be a problem in practice as discriminatory hiring around protected classes is illegal.
Regardless—point taken.
Just go in France and have a look. Also have a look at the evolution of the country PISA's score in the last decade, it is very telling.
What we oughta do is make a system where state education funding is equally distributed (per student capita) to all the schools in a state. Local funding by property taxes, while not most of the funding for schools, also needs to go. We also oughta try and tackle the administrative bloat on a federal level to get more of that money going to things that directly help students. I agree equality of outcome is a hopeless endeavor when schools are so dramatically unequal in the states, but I also think we could address that inequality of opportunity with better funding policy.
my wife has been teaching for about 15 years and i have one kid in HS and one in middle school. Adding money to a bad school makes it worse, we've seen it time and time again. The only time we've ever seen a school stop the downward spiral and turn around is when the neighborhood gentrifies or becomes hip and new people move there, have kids, and get involved and start holding feet to fire via school board and district elections. Even then, it takes a 5-10 years. It's not a question of funding it's a question of administrative competence.
It's not a question of funding it's a question of administrative competence.
This is also funding related. Yes, it takes time to turn things around and there needs to be oversight. No, withholding funds from failing schools wont' work. It's like beating people until they are happy.
Funding’s not the main reason for different outcomes in US schools, and probably not even a major reason. Considering all sources of funding, in some cities the struggling inner city schools have more money than a lot of the better-performing suburban schools (rural almost-always-poorly-performing schools, not so much)
Funding’s an easy target because it’s straightforward to fix, but we could even all that out (though, careful, or some struggling schools will lose funding if you simply level out who gets what) and the effect would be minimal.
Unfortunately, effective approaches to making real progress on that have little to do with schools at all. Stronger social safety nets and support, stronger worker protections, justice system reform, that kind of stuff. Hard stuff, where we lag behind much of the rest of the OECD and closing that gap at all is controversial. And many of the measures might take years and years to show up in improved test scores or what have you.
It has more to do with the income level of the families sending their kids to a school rather than the funds that the school has available.
This is why the only way to successfully reduce inequality in the education system is to reduce inequality in society at large.
That doesn't even make sense. We've seen lots of positive outcomes from increasing funding directly to less-well-resourced schools.
We have to defy rich people's preferences to do that, but that is entirely possible.
Why?
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.
Yeah that’s fair, you might need to make the formula more complicated. The goal though would be to alter what we have now, which is extreme differences in quality between schools in rich areas and schools in poor ones, to a model where everyone can access a similarly decent quality of public schooling. Maybe the formula would need to look something like
(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)
You might be surprised to learn that this is how education funding already works. Government isn't completely idiotic.
What you are ignoring is that educational spending imbalance comes from private voluntary educational spending (enrichment programs, camps, PTA), not public mandatory spending.
In California, there are only a handful of "Basic Aid" school districts where property tax funds exceed the minimum "revenue limit" per pupil that state government will provide funding to reach otherwise.
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.
While I think each student should be challenged in ways that cause their skills to develop, unequal opportunities lead to unequal outcomes which in turn lead to unequal opportunities and so on. There isn't really a separation between opportunities and outcomes that way.
But you also have to balance this with people in such programs not thinking of themselves as superior to others. This seems really hard -- I think it needs to be made clear that the goal is equalizing academic difficulty, not special treatment.
I didn't think the GP was arguing that. School systems are focusing on equality of outcomes, when they should be focusing on equality of opportunities.
Gifted kids will be able to take better advantage of those opportunities and experience better outcomes. But that's ok; that should be how things work.
When you focus only on equal outcomes, you end up with the lowest common denominator, and gifted kids get bored and don't excel.
When I was growing up (80s), I was in a program for gifted kids. I do expect that I got opportunities that other kids didn't get, which is a problem. But ultimately I thrived and have become successful, and I'm sure programs like that helped. In middle school and high school I was always placed in the highest-level classes (there were 4 levels), and I am certain I wouldn't be as successful had I been given the same instruction as kids in the bottom level or two.
My outcomes were certainly better, but as long as everyone has the opportunity for advanced instruction -- if they have an aptitude and can qualify for it -- I think that's fine.
I'm sure there was some inequality of opportunity when I was in grade school, and that sort of thing does need to be fixed. But we can't do so in a way that assumes all kids are equally gifted and talented. That's just not how people work.
To be clear I think the goal should not be to equalize opportunities or outcomes. I think the goal should be to equalize the amount of challenge each student experiences, wherever they are. (It's like strength training.)
> the gifted and talented communities.
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.
> 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
"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...
> [0]: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/yes-scientific-pro...
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.
Gifted and talented communities are all the persons who meet a criteria to join said community. In children this is often scoring beyond grade-level in tests.
If you do merit based acceptance into programs then obviously it will have a different demographic makeup than population at large. We can discuss the causes of this elsewhere, but obviously test/school performance varies significantly by ethnicity today in the US.
> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society
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.
It’s really strange that you have such emotional reactions to the concept of equity while my Indian middle class IIT educated dad who experienced Indian institutional failure in the 70s and 80s never really cared about if me or my sibling were in the G&T program.
What separates you from the people that didn’t make it out?
I don't care about G&T program per se, either. Nor did my country have it when I grew up. I do care about education. I guess my fundamental assumption is that when everyone maximizes their full potential, the outcome will naturally be different. So, pushing students to realize their potential will be against equity, but will be the best way to minimize the equity gap.
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.
> a straight-A student failed her organic chemistry class in Brown University
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.
Back in my Bay Area high school, it was the "American" parents that lobbied against APs and Honors classes, but Asian, Hispanic, and Eastern European students tended to be overrepresented in those classes.
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There's no point truly optimizing for "gifted" students - the truly gifted will be able to succeed in any environment.
> There's no point truly optimizing for "gifted" students - the truly gifted will be able to succeed in any environment.
I mostly agree, so long as the truly gifted have access to resources which allow them to leverage their gifts. They don't need a teacher who is focused on them. But they at least need access to books, internet resources, etc., to learn on their own, ideally with some guidance from others but not essential.
> I've studied at Community Colleges, State Schools, and Ivies/Ivy Adjacent programs, and the curriculum is largely comparable.
I'm very happy with the education system of the US colleges too. I was specifically talking about trainings in high 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.
At least this was not true in my personal experience. My parents gave me love and support, but they gave me zero relevant guidance on how to study. Funny that my parents told me that "just make sure you understand your textbook and can solve all the problems on it, and you will excel" because that was their experience in college. Yet they had no idea that we had no problem understanding textbooks, and questions we got from our teachers were miles deeper than our textbook. Merely following textbook will guarantee failure, except for the truly talented (this is very different from the US textbooks. Books like CLRS and Jackson's Electrodynamics are famous for tough exercises and deep discussions, but high-school textbooks, at least in my country, cover only the basics).
> There's no point truly optimizing for "gifted" students - the truly gifted will be able to succeed in any environment.
I guess it depends on what we mean by "gifted". If you are talking about gifted as in those who push themselves, who took initiative to find resources, who are so competitive or passionate that constantly seek challenges, then yeah, I are truly gifted and will stand out.
On the other hand, if you are talking about those who are like me, then I doubt we don't need to push them in high school. I got multiple wakeup calls because my teachers gave us challenging problem sets, so I realized that I didn't really learn as well as I thought.
counterpoint: https://ctmirror.org/2024/09/29/cant-read-high-school-ct-har...
America has some of the best schools, but also some of the worst. Engaging kids doesn't mean pushing them to academic heights. We should be working on engaging kids in all the facets of life instead of pushing sports and STEM.
> Engaging kids doesn't mean pushing them to academic heights
Agreed. I guess the previous discussions were conditioned on the assumption that some kids want to perform well enough academically.
> The most talented get access to all kinds of free yet prestigious programs and camps, excellent books in local libraries, and professors in colleges.
I agree with this part
> The least talented are carefully looked after, and they don't necessarily have much pressure to get into a college, and rightly so.
This has nothing to do with talent. The poorest in society do receive subsidies (medicaid, food stamps) that the middle class do not qualify for. But that has nothing to do with talent. It's also not "carefully looked after" -- they're just not starving.
I meant programs like No Kids Left Behind, so we are careful to make sure the least talented won't feel singled out in school, or to make sure that their egos get as little bruised as possible. We also tailor the difficulties to them so they at least learn something.
Do you make a distinction between a "bad student" and a "disadvantaged student"? Is it ever fair to describe a student as "less talented" than another, in your view?
And adding a bit more info, because I hate seeing people get misled about what equity is arguing for.
The key difference of equity with equal opportunity is that equal opportunity provides the same resources/treatment to everyone, while equity recognizes that people start from different positions and may need different levels or types of support to reach the same opportunities.
Equity is about ensuring everyone has a fair chance to succeed according to their own potential and efforts, not about guaranteeing identical outcomes.
Yeah, I'm totally for this. I can see a push-back from some people, though: a talented kid may have access to more scarce resources, say a professor in a prestigious university, or a highly-selective camp like SAMS. For that those people will cry unfair.
Ya, there's push back from some people on either side.
I think one side doesn't want to "pay" to help others. Sometimes the idea of like everyone getting 500$ a month in social security is more alluring than giving it only to those who need it. So some people do prefer equality over equity. Similarly, in education, they don't see why they should "pay" for students that are not "smart", or for the fault of their parents, etc. Or they think, well if they get an extra hour of math tutoring, everyone should, or no one should. Which is the idea of equality, and not equity.
While the other side can get jealous of those that got lucky and started with money or privilege. So when the kid with money goes to a prestigious university, even though they also had to show they were smart enough for it, people start calling it unfair. Or if one person managed to bust their ass and make it from nothing, they pretend like probably they had more luck or privilege.
> So, pushing students to realize their potential will be against equity, but will be the best way to minimize the equity gap.
That's not what equity is, but it's a common messaging by those trying to move the popular opinion against it, so I understand why you wrongly thought so.
Equity isn't about holding back high-achieving students or bringing everyone to the same level. Instead, it's about ensuring everyone has access to the resources and opportunities they need to reach their full potential, while recognizing that different people might need different levels or types of support to get there.
A true equity approach in education would mean:
Supporting gifted students to reach their full potential
AND providing additional support to students who face systemic barriers or need extra help
AND ensuring all students have access to quality education and resources
> Equity isn't about holding back high-achieving students or bringing everyone to the same level. Instead, it's about ensuring everyone has access to the resources and opportunities they need to reach their full potential, while recognizing that different people might need different levels or types of support to get there.
Isn't this equal opportunity, which means equality, which I also support?
> The goal is to lift everyone up, not to hold anyone back.
I thought California, or at least SFUSD, did exactly the opposite. For instance, they pushed the algebra to Grade 8 (or grade 9?) and geometry to grade 9, in the name of equity. That is, they try to restrict the access from even the ordinary kids (many kids have no problems studying algebra before grade 8) in the name of helping the challenged.
> Isn't this equal opportunity, which means equality, which also support?
Sorry, I forked the convo in two different replies. I explain the difference with equal opportunity in my other response. But basically, the introduction of the idea of equity was because the prior idea of equal opportunity assumed everyone starts from the same place, or has the same potential.
With equal opportunity, you give everyone the exact same education.
With equity, you give everyone the education they deserve.
> I thought California, or at least SFUSD, did exactly opposite. For instance, they pushed the algebra to Grade 8 (or grade 9?) and geometry to grade 9, in the name of equity. That is, they try to restrict the access from even the ordinary kids (many kids have no problems studying algebra before grade 8) in the name of helping the challenged.
Ya, instead of providing additional support to help struggling students access advanced math earlier, they essentially "leveled down" by restricting access for everyone. That case is often cited as an example of how misunderstanding equity (or using equity as a cover for other goals, let's be honest) can lead to policies that actually increase educational disparities rather than reducing them.
I can't explain it, and I don't support it. But it's not an example of equity, even if it pretends to be.
I think sometimes the political deadlock results in stupid things like this. Like, they wanted funding to help struggling students, got opposition to it, so resorted to this "cost-free" but harmful alternative, and labeled it as "equity" to try to make it more palatable and fool the people who wanted them to implement equity polices to believe they did.
> Equity my ass
I don't understand this statement. You say you were offered access to good teachers, that didn't give up on you because you were poor, or because you had broken English, that's a great example of equity, so like why do you dismiss it at the end?
All those are about equality, namely equal access. I'm totally for that. What I'm not for is manufactured equity, namely equal outcome by force.
You probably know a typical situation in many families: one kid is years ahead of math program without even trying, and another struggles with math no matter hard the parents try but is good at reading and writing. According to the progressive government, the parents should mandate the former kid to learn less math and the latter to do less reading, so they can achieve the same degree of learning. That's just insane.
That's not the definition of equity. Equality and equity are close but different, and both are positive concepts.
> I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron.
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.
It was taught in my middle school English class in the Bay Area in the 2000s, but they also utilized tracking.
> “In my early days it was an article of faith among a selfstyled ‘intellectual elite’ that they could teach calculus to a horse . . if they started early enough, spent enough money, supplied special tutoring, and were endlessly patient and always careful not to bruise his equine ego. They were so sincere that it seems downright ungrateful that the horse always persisted in being a horse. Especially as they were right . . if ‘starting early enough’ is defined as a million years or more."
László Polgár kind of did it three times.
Which policies? What you've said is something the right wing frequently asserts is happening, but can never say how. It goes in the same bucket as "mexico is invading us" and "Portland burned to the ground during BLM" until proven otherwise.
Functionally talented and gifted students autodidact to their interests which is a much better outcome than institutionalized bullshit schooling. I deeply disagree with your assessment that institutional learning is some universal booster for smart people and shows your own personal bias. So in balance of your position: I think it grinds down a students willpower and spirit to be placed on a pedestal to be given more resources than other kids. I’m willing to meet in the middle and say either system is equally depressive of students for learning in a way that leads to benefits for society.
Learning from teachers is a skill that can be learned, and taught.
Being unable to learn from others or collaborate with others will vastly limit what gifted children can accomplish in life. Not teaching those skills as skills sets gifted children up for failure in college and the workplace.
There's also other skills that are very often difficult for "gifted" kids to learn: rejection sensitivity disorder, for example, is often comorbid. Somatic exercises, learning to pay attention to our bodies and not just our intellect. Note taking. Slicing problems into small pieces it is okay to fail. All of these are things conventional education assumes kids will pick up on their own.
We have actual studies on the results of unschooling gifted kids, and the outcomes are not good. It is much better if they can be coached on skills they don't have, even when those are skills other people acquire passively without having to be taught.
It doesn't necessarily take "more" resources to educate gifted children: it takes differentiated resources. "Your brain works differently, so this classroom works better for you" is just as true for learning disabilities as it is for "gifted" students.
I’m not advocating for isolation, rather I’m talking about anarchy. Being able to self select who you learn from and not being in a graded and tracked institutional setting. It’s soulless and contrived.