An interesting thing I see here is that no one seems to be discussing the needs of the kids themselves in all this. It's all about races, politics, ideologies.
However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.
At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.
A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.
Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).
> Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc.
Thomas Sowell puts an even finer point on this:
"If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"
If you don't have equal outcomes that is prima facie evidence of structural racism (or some other ism). It's like solving an integral and setting C at whatever value makes the equation work for your preferred solution value.
Fundamentally, we have no idea how to educate kids at scale. This is especially true of disadvantaged youth who have difficult home lives with their own myriad particularized challenges.
Is the solution to hold back those who are advantaged and just toss them into unaltered "normal" classrooms? That doesn't really seem correct. It's difficult to understand how it might help anybody.
However, maybe there's something we haven't figured out yet. Something that isn't the de facto racial segregation we currently accept, that also isn't so painful and counterproductive for the advantaged students.
This problem seems to require a creative solution that we are unable or unwilling to identify. Addressing wealth inequality would be an obvious start, but this is out of the purview of educators.
Sadly, dismantling one system that has known defects (but also obvious benefits for the advantaged students) without having any idea how to address the underlying problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
The ideal school lets every student learn at their own pace, using a tablet with pre-recorded lectures and computer-graded quizzes. Instead of lecturing, teachers tutor small groups that did poorly on the same quiz, to help them understand the material and progress. This is the mastery learning model [0]. Classroom experiments have shown that mastery learning students learn much more with the same time spent with teachers [1] [2].
This shows that society knows how to educate children equitably and at scale. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it.
I have an idea how to educate kids to scale: don't.
Unfortunately, the American genius is for replacing labor with machinery. When we encounter a field in which that simply doesn't work, we are thrown for a loss.
>Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).
Agree.
My company had a Diversity and Inclusion series, and the one thing that resonated most with me was the concept of Equity vs. Equality. It was accompanied by a picture of two kids trying to watch a ballgame over a fence, where one kid could not quite see over the fence and the other was far too short.
In the part labelled "Equality", each kid has a 6" tall box to stand on. They get the same things, but the result is that the too-short kid still can't see the game, and the taller kid simply gets a better view. For the part labled "Equity", the tall kid gets a 2" box and the short kid gets an 8" box, resulting in each having an equal view.
Now, that's a pretty simplistic presentation, but does highlight that simply giving every person the same thing is not a solution. Needs will vary across the population, and that's what we should be targeting.
The same should apply for the baseball game they are watching.
The less able players should get 4 strikes, the better players maybe 2.
Correct?
I’m familiar with the illustration you referred to. It’s sad how so few miss the fact that the kids are trying to watch a Competition! And, if the rules were as set forth above, the game wouldn’t be worth watching in the first place.
If naming victims is important, than we should also name the students who are victims of their parents being systematically excluded and oppressed as well I would imagine?
I think the smarter thing to do would be to stop demanding everyone complete the same tasks. Let the quicker students skip the repetitive exercise and give them something challenging.
See also the recent discussion on same-age vs mixed-age classrooms. By mixing age groups, the kid who is advanced in history can hang with a grade or two above her own. But she might be a grade below in writing, and that should be 100% ok.
I was a poor kid that attended a gifted program in first grade, the majority of the parents were upper middle class doctors and lawyers. It was lord of the flies classist bs. I clearly wasn't supposed to have been let in and went back to normie classes. It wasn't again until 6th grade that I was back into a one class a day advanced program.
I don't think there should be separate classes for advanced or gifted students. Many of the aspects of gifted programs are just better funded less shitty versions of regular classes. Just like the startup within a corp trope, the gifted programs are often just cover for a private school within a public school.
A big factor is that not every teacher is capable of teaching gifted students.
The gifted public school I went to recruited college professors to teach our middle school classes. I met a lot of HS teachers that couldn't keep up with the math the gifted students where doing as early as 7th grade.
It's silly to expect for the average teacher to be able to teach every kind of student. Some teachers are better at challenging gifted students. Some teachers are better at teaching large groups of "average" students. Some teachers are better at teaching basic concepts to students that the educational system has failed.
I think a great strategy would be to allow students who are done with the daily lesson early to have the freedom to be let lose on Khan Academy or other sites which aren't necessarily focusing on getting farther ahead but instead they are given the freedom to explore applications of topics being taught (i.e. mathematics as applied to bird migration patterns or cryptography, etc.).
It's a good idea, except... It would defeat the main purpose of education, which is to teach obedience to authority and that knowledge and subsistence comes only from authority figures, not ones' peers.
> School Committee member Lorna Rivera said at a January meeting that she was disturbed by the findings, noting that nearly 60 percent of fourth graders in the program at the Ohrenberger school in West Roxbury are white even though most third graders enrolled at the school are Black and Hispanic.
> "This is just not acceptable," Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. "I've never heard these statistics before, and I'm very very disturbed by them."
I’m not sold on gifted education to begin with. It’s a complicated issue for sure, with pluses and minuses. But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
I can only speak for myself, and my experience as a rather low income kid in the public school system.
Without advanced learning, I'd have learned at a much slower pace and felt held back and bored. I started in regular classes, and the amount of disruptors and time teachers spent babysitting was absolutely absurd. Luckily I was able to be placed in advanced classes, and all that disappeared.
As for curriculum, we were doing calc 2 while the standard classes ended at about an intro to trig, for example.
I don't know how to fix the disparity, and unfairness, if it exists. But please don't throw out the whole program.
These days no one is ready to talk about cultural and behavioral differences that lead to different outcomes, but it is the most obvious cause of disparities in education and career success between ethnicities. The reason policies like affirmative action or gutting gifted education are discrimination to me, is that students from certain backgrounds are being punished for their cultural and behavioral differences. For example, most Asian cultures emphasize a focus on hard work, academic success, respect for your elders, etc. Anyone who has spent any time in the American schooling system knows that Asian students have remarkably different behavioral patterns from white or black American students. They make choices that lead to their success, and now they’re being discriminated against by those claiming there are “too many” successful Asians. A similar argument can be constructed for other groups.
The 30% of black and Hispanic students who were already in Boston's gifted program by virtue of their intelligence are now also going to be discriminated against in order to pack the advanced classes with their less intelligent peers. This will push the black and Hispanic students already qualified for the program out.
It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others. At least that what it can sound like outside the gifted bubble.
Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
I'm not. There were approximately 30ish "gifted" students in my graduating class. By that, I mean they were identified as gifted early on and attended gifted classes until middle school when there were other minor accelerated learning classes (like taking Algebra a year early).
For the vast majority of "gifted" children, the reason they were gifted at all has a ton to do with the amount of time their parents spent with them outside of the classroom. Usually, "giftedness" is about a parent's ability to focus their child in a way that the child would likely not focus on their own.
Just look at the science fair projects that get national recognition. It takes no effort at all to determine the difference between a project produced by a kid and a project created by a parent who guided the kid through the steps necessary to produce a scientifically valid conclusion.
I'm all for high schools pairing with universities to let high school students knock out college classes and get high school credit for them, though. English III and English IV are particularly useless classes which do nothing for most kids. Replace them with college classes.
I was with you initially, but after thinking about it could be argued that creating classes that are overwhelmingly white in an overwhelmingly non white district are something approaching segregation. In the end, all that is being done to the “advanced” students is that they’re being offered the same education that their peers are getting. Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on offering a better quality of education for the entire school. I’m sympathetic to both sides of this issue but I don’t find it simple.
It’s not segregation because the school doesn’t place students in these classes based on their skin color.
Oftentimes these disparities arise from communities being economically mixed along racial lines. It’s not even the case that these economic disparities arise from what’s called “systemic racism.” In urban school districts many kids are immigrants or children of immigrants, and have lesser economic circumstances because of recent migration. Treating them differently based on skin color doesn’t help erase some historical injustice. For example, Bangladeshi Americans, a group I belong to, have a household income in New York City much lower than whites. Indian Americans, by contrast, have incomes much higher than whites. These disparities aren’t due to differing effects of “racism” but recency of immigration and characteristics of the immigrants. This is true for Latinos as well. They have lower incomes now because a large number are recent economic migrants. But their incomes are converging with those of white people over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. (In fact, after three generations, half of Latinos don’t even identify as such.)
The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination.
For similar reasons, it makes no sense to discriminate between kids based on race to address present (rather than systemic) economic disparities. For purposes of dismantling gifted programs and test-based admissions, whites and Asians are typically lumped together. But in NYC, for example, most Asian kids in the gifted programs are actually fairly poor, because they’re the children of recent immigrants. It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
Did you miss that part of the article or have you intentionally excluded the presence of Asian students in your reply because it makes your argument stick better? I don't think it meets the definition of segregation when a subset of multiple groups are given special treatment due to their aptitude on topics that are inherently race-agnostic. Yes, those with money and power can better educate their kids compared to the poor, but so can those without money who simply value education higher (speaking as a 1.5 gen immigrant who grew up extremely poor). Why are we always the first ones to be penalized in the name of racial equality?
> In the end, all that is being done to the “advanced” students is that they’re being offered the same education that their peers are getting.
This is generally not what advanced students get. They are usually taught different, more advanced curricula. Not all kids are capable of learning quickly, so the whole point of a separate program is to provide quick learners with advanced curricula and others with the support they need.
>Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on offering a better quality of education for the entire school.
This assumption rests on the false supposition that all children have the same intelligence and learn at the same rate, and the only difference is environmental factors. While environmental factors are certainly important, they aren't everything, despite how wonderful that would be towards realizing the fantasy of a "fair and just" world. The fact is that people are different - innately. Just as a proper schooling system allocates resources for students that learn at a slower rate, so should a proper schooling system allocate resources for students who learn at an advanced rate.
> Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on
Segregating students who would fail to be engaged by mainstream coursework unless disproportionate effort and attention was focussed on them is “offering a better quality of education for the entire school.”
> But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
It would only be a legal risk if they were putting kids in the program based on race. This does not seem to be the case. It just so happens to be that a disproportionate amount of whites and Asians made it into the program.
> A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
I'm having a hard time trying to understand what the acceptable outcome they want is. Proportional enrollment based on race?
This possibility bothers me, since I never identified myself by race. So would I be lumped into a generic "Asian" category in their statistics based on my skin colour? Why is this the correct form of human categorization?
It is a common trick of managers to only measure things that make them look good. Is the number of regressions going up? Remove the isRegression checkbox from your bug tracking system.
They just don't understand that Asian families work their kid harder? It's a different world. When I was a kid, there were only 3 acceptable outcomes: becoming a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. Then I discovered coding - sorry mom :)
So I went to a bottom of the barrel districts for school, but still aced it. I got admitted in a great US school, and a semester later I had proved my worth enough to get a full scholarship. What if you had put me in a better system? I would have only excelled more!
The problem is not the school environment, but the families. From what I have seen, only military-style schools, with the students living in, can provide better chances for disadvantaged students. The best school environment will do nothing against a toxic family and toxic friends that use racist monikers to attack those that have a chance to succeed ("crab mentality").
And BTW the comment below "I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine" makes no sense. I went to school in a tropical country, with no AC. Yes I did sweat a lot in class and I took 2 showers per day minimum, but I didn't die.
Since the lack of amenities like AC or computers will do nothing to prevent people that are pushed up by their family, I think they will likewise do nothing to help people succeed when they are held back by their social group. Amenities are just a highly visible distraction, correlated, but not causal.
> "Diversity substantively means fewer whites and asians."
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Asians? They (or perhaps I should say we) had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. Many of us weren't even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Asians to compensate blacks for the past injustices perpetrated by whites, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
“Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
It’s extremely racist.
Anti-Asian racism will become normalized as long as “antiracism” is part of the Democratic agenda. They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
> “Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Why do you say this is "Marxist ideology"? What makes it Marxist, precisely?
This is true, antiracism is active in the presence of racism, “not racist” may or may not be.
> it’s a Marxist ideology
No, it's not. I suppose if you met “Marxist” metaphorically in that, like Marxism, it posits the existence of a status quo struggle, and calls for consciousness of that struggle and activity within it rather than indifference to it or denial of it, it would be accurate, but that's kind of a weak basis for such an emotionally-loaded metaphor.
> purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Antiracism does not call for “purposeful systemic racism” for any purpose.
>They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
Source? From a reputable location, the only ones I'm finding are sites with headlines like:
“If I wanted America to fail”
Capitalism Explained
George Soros
Honest News
How Do You Kill 11 Million People?
Joe Biden in Five Minutes
Lara Logan’s Warning to America
Make Mine Freedom
Obama Admin Caught Sending Guns to Drug Cartels
Rules for Radicals
SCOTUS: Government Can Force You to Buy Anything
The Iron Lady
The Socialist’s Camoflage
Trump Admin Accomplishments
Vote Fraud
What is a Constitutional Moderate?
and even Breitbart says
Prop 209 prevents race-based affirmative action in state contracts, government jobs, and university admissions
If you take a random sample from a population, then you'd expect the sample to be representative of the population. All else being equal: if you categorize a population in some arbitrary way, and there's a particular distribution of those categories in that population; you should expect the same distribution in your sample.
In this case the distribution in the population was not identical to the distribution in the sample.
Why would you expect the sample of gifted children to be representative of the population. By almost every measure Hispanic and Black students fall behind other students. The achievement gap is very well studied.
The challenge is fixing the problem, not pretending it doesn’t exit by making white and Asian students educations worse.
This is like the Boston PD issuing orders to shoot more unarmed Asians since black and Hispanics are shot more disproportionately.
Intelligence being shown in schools isn't random: it's a result of who can afford better education in the lower grades, education materials in pre-school, a baby sitter who can teach basic math before school begins, private school, pre school, etc. This makes perfect sense, and the smart thing to do is to implement a program below this at the younger grades to try to give the entire lower grade levels a better chance at getting that advanced learning. "Something isn't right" doesn't mean kill the whole damn program. Maybe evaluate their on-boarding process in addition.
In my elementary school, I was lucky enough to not miss the one day they were testing for advanced learning (if you missed it, tough luck: that was the only onboarding year) and it changed my school experience forever. I don't think I would be the person I am today, at all, if I had been sick that one day. If there are similar restrictions or barriers for entry that are not related to intelligence, they need to be looked into.
The lack of offering for good students is already a major issue at every step of the education system as it is, closing these classes is a major step backward and "fuck you" to good students (especially with such a lame justification).
If you have a rock in place of a brain there's always some program to keep you in the education system but at the other side of the spectrum if you reach the top 10% of students "that's it you won the game" and you're doomed to utter boredome until university. This is enormously demotivating.
I was in this situation all the way until university (consistantly achieving the best grade without putting any effort into it) and the lack of mental stimulation took a massive toll on my mental health, especially during high school but also middle school to a lesser extend.
Looking back at my scholarity I think it was mostly fine until age ~12 because until then school is mostly a fun daycare to meet friends so it's no big deal if the educational content is low or trivial, but then the next 7 years (which corresponds to middle and high school in my country) could have easily been compressed into 4 as far as I'm concerned. But the possibility to do it simply doesn't exist.
Clearly black children are not achieving at the rate that white children are, but that’s no reason to suspend the gifted program. Yes, the white kids are getting more academic and overall support at home, and this can only be fixed by getting all of the kids this kind of support, not by kneecapping the white children (who are not super privileged or they wouldn’t be in Boston Public Schools to begin with).
Ridiculous policies like this are why we sold our house in the city and left for a $2 million house in the suburbs, where the price of admission means that every kid has lots of support at home, depleting the city schools of one more kid and dragging them down even further.
Arguably the overall societal gains are higher from turning a future accountant into a future scientist than improving the 25th percentile student’s outcome anyways.
This is the first comment I’ve seen that is in touch with the reality of Boston Public Schools. The Boston public system was destroyed by forced integration that caused people with financial means to withdraw and move to the suburbs and/or put their children into private school. The racist motives for the initial split may have faded, but the legacy of that public/private split continues in a way that is self-reinforcing. No matter how woke you are now, nobody who can afford to do otherwise wants to send their kid to a public school that is failing based on every available measure.
Almost every major American city has the same story of a stripped city core where even as young professionals gentrify the real estate in the area they don’t do the same to the schools by sending their kids to private school. A family will live in a neighborhood with a gang reputation (eg San Francisco’s Mission or Viz Valley) before they send their kids to a bad school.
I remember times when the equality rhetoric was about "if we just do blind auditions, the racial disparity in orchestra will go away." That didn't happen and the rhetoric has taken a more aggressive stance: "give all races equal opportunities by quotas and we'll get the desired outcome soon." That didn't work either, the rhetoric has dropped the pretense of justice and has resorted to a simple idea: "white is bad, black is good." It's entertaining to watch how the so called "equality justice seekers" attack white and asian kids because they dared to outperform blacks and hispanics. I can totally see how universities will implement soon the curve fitting so popular in the corporate world: when asian students will be given a "GPA budget" that they can distribute among themselves, and that budget will be "3.0 for everyone or 4.0 for some and 2.5 for others."
> I remember times when the equality rhetoric was about "if we just do blind auditions, the racial disparity in orchestra will go away." That didn't happen and ...
It wasn't even tried, really - not in the educational context, at least. You can't talk about these educational disparities without noticing the real elephant in the room - the stark differences between mainstream and minority culture, and the obvious problems with the lack of enduring social capital in these undeprivileged minority communities. But somehow, the whole subject of culture has become a dirty word among equality advocates. For some reason, people seem to have fixated on the idea that it all boils down to race and diversity in some way, even though it's hard to see how these could make a difference.
This is a strawman. Please point me to the place in this article where the superintendent states this. As far as I can tell, the officials quoted are concerned about the lack of diversity in their advanced classes, which are disproportionately white. This is not the same as "white is bad".
> I can totally see how universities will implement soon the curve fitting so popular in the corporate world: when asian students will be given a "GPA budget" that they can distribute among themselves, and that budget will be "3.0 for everyone or 4.0 for some and 2.5 for others."
This is pure fanciful speculation and has no relevance to this article. The school district has not proposed any such scheme. What evidence supports the claim that such a program will be implemented "soon"?
In corporatese, "lack of diversity" means too many white and asian males, and generally if you're concerned with too much quantity of something, that's because this something is deemed bad.
The relevance is very direct. The next thing those "concerned officials" will notice is that asians and whites get much higher grades on math and other stem subjects.
Whether intentional or not, one reason/consequence for gifted programs is they help public schools compete to keep upper income people in public schools and away from private options. However, within those schools it can create a very two tracked environment. One group of kids is invested in heavily, the other effectively warehoused.
I went to a math and science magnet school. It was placed in a lower performing school. The magnet school had the effect of improving the average performance of the school while actually investing little in the communities that needed the most support. In a way it was a kind of school bussing and I got an exposure to more diversity in high school. OTOH it was clear there were two tracks at the school for the haves and the have nots.
Still, what is the alternative? For upper income people public schools exist in a marketplace competing with private schools. It also seems suboptimal to have them abandon the public schools (already happening due to Covid) and segregate themselves further into private schools.
In our school system they basically have kept gifted programs but let anyone opt into them. Maybe that’s a good option? I dunno.
I'm skeptical that there's any amount of investing in children that can make up the gap between those with engaged and invested parents and those without. Adding in raw ability does not make closing any gaps easier. And, obviously, how much money a family has has a strong influence on whose parents are engaged and invested.
I attended a form of magnet school, funded by a dozen or so school districts in the county. It was able to offer classes that none of the districts could have afforded by themselves. Even there you had implicit tracking - you could do lots of calculus or lots of chemistry or lots of physics, but not all of them. Dismantling it might have improved funding a bit at the home schools, but at the cost of shutting down all the advanced courses entirely.
Letting people opt in to gifted programs is a wonderful idea! A great many children only wait for the chance to succeed. That said, it might be worth considering carefully the resources requires and consequences. There will inevitably be children who are not up to the task. Opting them in to programs they are not ready for is setting them up for emotionally devastating failure as you grow class sizes.
I am uncomfortably reminded of how many colleges use lower division courses as weeders. They let anyone opt in to 101 and 102, but 301 is dependent on making it past those.
I love the idea of public schools. Education can, should, must be for everyone. However, this belief often sits awkwardly with the reality. Ultimately, if you want to keep higher income families in public schools you have to offer them something compelling. Dismantling gifted programs for anti-racist reasons may not always make the grade.
My takeaway was that the kids getting into gifted programs are overwhelmingly the kids whose parents know how to get them into gifted programs, through combination of knowing the system and/or squeaking loud enough that their kids get placed. "Knowing the system" includes knowing that you have to start on applications to multiple schools perhaps a year or more in advance, for example. Kids are slotted into the gifted programs from a very young age, and then tend to accumulate early advantages which carry forward, again with strong advocacy from parents who know the system.
As a result, these programs have a lot more to do with extending class privilege than anything else, and class in the US has strong correlations with race.
Its so weird how its okay to just say that parents are just too dumb to figure out how to get kids into gifted programs.
My parents literally didn't speak English and was only in the country for less than a decade after coming to the USA with a backpack and 20 dollars, and still figured out how to push me into gifted programs at a mediocre city school. It was study, do well on exams and read whatever was handed to me. I didn't even speak english w/ fluency until I was in the 3rd grade and I still did fine.
Well, it can be solved very nicely by teaching everyone else how to "know the system". So where are the activists going door-to-door in black neighborhoods convincing the parents to submit applications to multiple schools and coach their kids through math problems so that they could get a better chance at admission?
Nope, much more rewarding to go bash the upper-middle class for wanting a better future for their kids than a ghetto and a minimum wage.
Mind you, nobody dares to go bash the top 1% "Ivy-league-by-donation" class. Their kids will inherit wealth, networks and power anyway. You are just helping them clear out the next 20% of the income spectrum, that would actually have a shot at competing with them. So feudalism and hereditary rule incoming.
I would also recommend listening to the 'Nice White Parents' podcast. I'd also add to that the 'School Colors' podcast https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/
Both of these podcasts explore the issues that inspire changes like these. If you've already made up your mind, you may not be convinced that abolishing gifted programs is the way to go, but at the very least both of these programs are entertaining and present a perspective that many people don't have. Especially for people on a forum like HN which includes many people who graduated from such programs and don't know what regular schools are like.
Logistics seems like a potential issue. It might work in a place like NYC where everybody can live within a few minutes of multiple schools, and just ride the subway to school every morning like my mom did in 1940.
I live in a mid sized city in the Midwest, and the same concept would translate into 25000 minivans hitting the road every day at the same time in the morning and afternoon. Granted, a lot of parents already drive their kids even just a few blocks to school, but it could be made a lot worse.
The day when both of our kids were out of day care and could just walk themselves to school was a huge liberation for my family.
As a parent of white and asian children, this type of thing does cause visceral concern for me. Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?
At the same time, I also recognize that there is scant evidence that gifted and advanced learning programs are beneficial. Selection bias is extremely hard to control and is the driving factor behind most deltas in education statistics. Are the kids coming out of the program better equipped because of the program? Or were the better equipped kids selected into the program? I'm inclined to guess that typically it's more of the former than the latter.
So for now I'm delaying judgment on these moves. We will be watching carefully to see whether the quality of the teaching slips when our gifted programs are cancelled. If that happens, and if I believe we can get better teaching elsewhere, we will go private and it will be fine. But my guess is that the gifted program is really not that important and we will be fine continuing without it.
As a parent of Bangladeshi-Irish children, I’m not delaying judgment. Whether or not gifted programs are valuable is besides the point. I’d welcome a concrete debate about the utility of gifted programs, and whether the benefits are worth the resources spent on them.
But the gifted program here wasn’t eliminated because of cost-benefit reasons. It was eliminated because administrators felt that too many kids in the program looked like our kids. They’ve taken a page out of the Old South playbook and there is no reason to reserve judgment on that.
I recognize that the terms of the debate might not be what I would choose. But I'm more concerned about the practical impact on my children than the ideological content of the debate. If the gifted programs are not actually having a causal positive impact on my children, I don't care so much if they are cancelled, no matter why they are cancelled. I am less interested in the ideology of the two sides of the debate, although I respect that other people feel differently and I don't wish to foreclose on other people arguing that aspect of things.
> Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?
Well yes, this is what they mean when they talk about "combating privilege".
I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up, rather than taking away resources to bring privileged people down. In many respects that is the only viable option. For example, kids who have been abused are going to need more support to reach the level of achievement of kids who live in homes free of abuse. You can't solve this by taking away the advantages of the more privileged group (i.e. abusing the children who haven't been). You can only address this issue by providing more support for victims of abuse.
The funny thing is that if they really tried to combat the privilege - the rich families connected to the ruling class - the privilege would combat them into the ground, so they wisely chose a weak opponent that vaguely resembles the rich (common skin color).
Yes, yes, and yes... this is happening in California already. As a future parent of Asian kids, I’m preparing to have to spend through the nose on private education.
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However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.
At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.
A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.
Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).
If you want to improve the outcomes of the lower performers, you have to address the environmental factors.
You do not take away the challenges for the high performers. That solves no problems, and creates more.
Most importantly, you cannot, and should not, ever, let ideology dictate what is best for the kids. Doing so does a grave disservice to all kids.
Some kids need far more challenge. Give it to them. Some kids need extra help. Give it to them.
Thomas Sowell puts an even finer point on this:
"If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"
Is the solution to hold back those who are advantaged and just toss them into unaltered "normal" classrooms? That doesn't really seem correct. It's difficult to understand how it might help anybody.
However, maybe there's something we haven't figured out yet. Something that isn't the de facto racial segregation we currently accept, that also isn't so painful and counterproductive for the advantaged students.
This problem seems to require a creative solution that we are unable or unwilling to identify. Addressing wealth inequality would be an obvious start, but this is out of the purview of educators.
Sadly, dismantling one system that has known defects (but also obvious benefits for the advantaged students) without having any idea how to address the underlying problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
This shows that society knows how to educate children equitably and at scale. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
[1] http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105487
Unfortunately, the American genius is for replacing labor with machinery. When we encounter a field in which that simply doesn't work, we are thrown for a loss.
Agree.
My company had a Diversity and Inclusion series, and the one thing that resonated most with me was the concept of Equity vs. Equality. It was accompanied by a picture of two kids trying to watch a ballgame over a fence, where one kid could not quite see over the fence and the other was far too short.
In the part labelled "Equality", each kid has a 6" tall box to stand on. They get the same things, but the result is that the too-short kid still can't see the game, and the taller kid simply gets a better view. For the part labled "Equity", the tall kid gets a 2" box and the short kid gets an 8" box, resulting in each having an equal view.
Now, that's a pretty simplistic presentation, but does highlight that simply giving every person the same thing is not a solution. Needs will vary across the population, and that's what we should be targeting.
The less able players should get 4 strikes, the better players maybe 2.
Correct?
I’m familiar with the illustration you referred to. It’s sad how so few miss the fact that the kids are trying to watch a Competition! And, if the rules were as set forth above, the game wouldn’t be worth watching in the first place.
https://imgur.com/a/dlo0Y2k
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In reality, everyone won't get to the same place unless you raise the bottom and lower the top.
What we should be aiming for is removing barriers. Let people reach their own potential - which won't be the same across everyone.
also the victims of teacher unions that are keeping schools closed, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting that position.
Or let them explain it to the slower kids.
I was a poor kid that attended a gifted program in first grade, the majority of the parents were upper middle class doctors and lawyers. It was lord of the flies classist bs. I clearly wasn't supposed to have been let in and went back to normie classes. It wasn't again until 6th grade that I was back into a one class a day advanced program.
I don't think there should be separate classes for advanced or gifted students. Many of the aspects of gifted programs are just better funded less shitty versions of regular classes. Just like the startup within a corp trope, the gifted programs are often just cover for a private school within a public school.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204386
It's silly to expect for the average teacher to be able to teach every kind of student. Some teachers are better at challenging gifted students. Some teachers are better at teaching large groups of "average" students. Some teachers are better at teaching basic concepts to students that the educational system has failed.
It's a good idea, except... It would defeat the main purpose of education, which is to teach obedience to authority and that knowledge and subsistence comes only from authority figures, not ones' peers.
All sane people agree with you. However, those who prioritize "equity of outcome" disagree.
Well put ..
> "This is just not acceptable," Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. "I've never heard these statistics before, and I'm very very disturbed by them."
I’m not sold on gifted education to begin with. It’s a complicated issue for sure, with pluses and minuses. But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
Without advanced learning, I'd have learned at a much slower pace and felt held back and bored. I started in regular classes, and the amount of disruptors and time teachers spent babysitting was absolutely absurd. Luckily I was able to be placed in advanced classes, and all that disappeared. As for curriculum, we were doing calc 2 while the standard classes ended at about an intro to trig, for example.
I don't know how to fix the disparity, and unfairness, if it exists. But please don't throw out the whole program.
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Heather Mac Donald wrote about behavioral contributors to disparities and other issues stemming from a societal overfocus on diversity in The Diversity Delusion (https://us.macmillan.com/thediversitydelusion/heathermacdona...). You can read a brief contribution from her regarding behavioral drivers of socioeconomic disparities (like crime rates) at https://www.newsweek.com/if-systemic-racism-real-why-does-bi....
I don't believe you are gifted or not. If I did, I wouldn't be as successful as I am, because I didn't start out as "gifted."
It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others. At least that what it can sound like outside the gifted bubble.
Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
For the vast majority of "gifted" children, the reason they were gifted at all has a ton to do with the amount of time their parents spent with them outside of the classroom. Usually, "giftedness" is about a parent's ability to focus their child in a way that the child would likely not focus on their own.
Just look at the science fair projects that get national recognition. It takes no effort at all to determine the difference between a project produced by a kid and a project created by a parent who guided the kid through the steps necessary to produce a scientifically valid conclusion.
I'm all for high schools pairing with universities to let high school students knock out college classes and get high school credit for them, though. English III and English IV are particularly useless classes which do nothing for most kids. Replace them with college classes.
Oftentimes these disparities arise from communities being economically mixed along racial lines. It’s not even the case that these economic disparities arise from what’s called “systemic racism.” In urban school districts many kids are immigrants or children of immigrants, and have lesser economic circumstances because of recent migration. Treating them differently based on skin color doesn’t help erase some historical injustice. For example, Bangladeshi Americans, a group I belong to, have a household income in New York City much lower than whites. Indian Americans, by contrast, have incomes much higher than whites. These disparities aren’t due to differing effects of “racism” but recency of immigration and characteristics of the immigrants. This is true for Latinos as well. They have lower incomes now because a large number are recent economic migrants. But their incomes are converging with those of white people over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. (In fact, after three generations, half of Latinos don’t even identify as such.)
The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination.
For similar reasons, it makes no sense to discriminate between kids based on race to address present (rather than systemic) economic disparities. For purposes of dismantling gifted programs and test-based admissions, whites and Asians are typically lumped together. But in NYC, for example, most Asian kids in the gifted programs are actually fairly poor, because they’re the children of recent immigrants. It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
This is generally not what advanced students get. They are usually taught different, more advanced curricula. Not all kids are capable of learning quickly, so the whole point of a separate program is to provide quick learners with advanced curricula and others with the support they need.
This assumption rests on the false supposition that all children have the same intelligence and learn at the same rate, and the only difference is environmental factors. While environmental factors are certainly important, they aren't everything, despite how wonderful that would be towards realizing the fantasy of a "fair and just" world. The fact is that people are different - innately. Just as a proper schooling system allocates resources for students that learn at a slower rate, so should a proper schooling system allocate resources for students who learn at an advanced rate.
Segregating students who would fail to be engaged by mainstream coursework unless disproportionate effort and attention was focussed on them is “offering a better quality of education for the entire school.”
Just running the program is a legal risk.
I'm having a hard time trying to understand what the acceptable outcome they want is. Proportional enrollment based on race?
This possibility bothers me, since I never identified myself by race. So would I be lumped into a generic "Asian" category in their statistics based on my skin colour? Why is this the correct form of human categorization?
So I went to a bottom of the barrel districts for school, but still aced it. I got admitted in a great US school, and a semester later I had proved my worth enough to get a full scholarship. What if you had put me in a better system? I would have only excelled more!
The problem is not the school environment, but the families. From what I have seen, only military-style schools, with the students living in, can provide better chances for disadvantaged students. The best school environment will do nothing against a toxic family and toxic friends that use racist monikers to attack those that have a chance to succeed ("crab mentality").
And BTW the comment below "I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine" makes no sense. I went to school in a tropical country, with no AC. Yes I did sweat a lot in class and I took 2 showers per day minimum, but I didn't die.
Since the lack of amenities like AC or computers will do nothing to prevent people that are pushed up by their family, I think they will likewise do nothing to help people succeed when they are held back by their social group. Amenities are just a highly visible distraction, correlated, but not causal.
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Asians? They (or perhaps I should say we) had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. Many of us weren't even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Asians to compensate blacks for the past injustices perpetrated by whites, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
What does 100% diverse means in this context ?
Yes.
“Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
It’s extremely racist.
Anti-Asian racism will become normalized as long as “antiracism” is part of the Democratic agenda. They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
Why do you say this is "Marxist ideology"? What makes it Marxist, precisely?
This is true, antiracism is active in the presence of racism, “not racist” may or may not be.
> it’s a Marxist ideology
No, it's not. I suppose if you met “Marxist” metaphorically in that, like Marxism, it posits the existence of a status quo struggle, and calls for consciousness of that struggle and activity within it rather than indifference to it or denial of it, it would be accurate, but that's kind of a weak basis for such an emotionally-loaded metaphor.
> purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Antiracism does not call for “purposeful systemic racism” for any purpose.
Source? From a reputable location, the only ones I'm finding are sites with headlines like:
and even Breitbart saysIn this case the distribution in the population was not identical to the distribution in the sample.
Clearly something isn't right.
The challenge is fixing the problem, not pretending it doesn’t exit by making white and Asian students educations worse.
This is like the Boston PD issuing orders to shoot more unarmed Asians since black and Hispanics are shot more disproportionately.
In my elementary school, I was lucky enough to not miss the one day they were testing for advanced learning (if you missed it, tough luck: that was the only onboarding year) and it changed my school experience forever. I don't think I would be the person I am today, at all, if I had been sick that one day. If there are similar restrictions or barriers for entry that are not related to intelligence, they need to be looked into.
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If you have a rock in place of a brain there's always some program to keep you in the education system but at the other side of the spectrum if you reach the top 10% of students "that's it you won the game" and you're doomed to utter boredome until university. This is enormously demotivating.
I was in this situation all the way until university (consistantly achieving the best grade without putting any effort into it) and the lack of mental stimulation took a massive toll on my mental health, especially during high school but also middle school to a lesser extend. Looking back at my scholarity I think it was mostly fine until age ~12 because until then school is mostly a fun daycare to meet friends so it's no big deal if the educational content is low or trivial, but then the next 7 years (which corresponds to middle and high school in my country) could have easily been compressed into 4 as far as I'm concerned. But the possibility to do it simply doesn't exist.
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Ridiculous policies like this are why we sold our house in the city and left for a $2 million house in the suburbs, where the price of admission means that every kid has lots of support at home, depleting the city schools of one more kid and dragging them down even further.
Arguably the overall societal gains are higher from turning a future accountant into a future scientist than improving the 25th percentile student’s outcome anyways.
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It wasn't even tried, really - not in the educational context, at least. You can't talk about these educational disparities without noticing the real elephant in the room - the stark differences between mainstream and minority culture, and the obvious problems with the lack of enduring social capital in these undeprivileged minority communities. But somehow, the whole subject of culture has become a dirty word among equality advocates. For some reason, people seem to have fixated on the idea that it all boils down to race and diversity in some way, even though it's hard to see how these could make a difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
The current cult of meritocracy tends to make things even worse.
This is a strawman. Please point me to the place in this article where the superintendent states this. As far as I can tell, the officials quoted are concerned about the lack of diversity in their advanced classes, which are disproportionately white. This is not the same as "white is bad".
> I can totally see how universities will implement soon the curve fitting so popular in the corporate world: when asian students will be given a "GPA budget" that they can distribute among themselves, and that budget will be "3.0 for everyone or 4.0 for some and 2.5 for others."
This is pure fanciful speculation and has no relevance to this article. The school district has not proposed any such scheme. What evidence supports the claim that such a program will be implemented "soon"?
The relevance is very direct. The next thing those "concerned officials" will notice is that asians and whites get much higher grades on math and other stem subjects.
Whether intentional or not, one reason/consequence for gifted programs is they help public schools compete to keep upper income people in public schools and away from private options. However, within those schools it can create a very two tracked environment. One group of kids is invested in heavily, the other effectively warehoused.
I went to a math and science magnet school. It was placed in a lower performing school. The magnet school had the effect of improving the average performance of the school while actually investing little in the communities that needed the most support. In a way it was a kind of school bussing and I got an exposure to more diversity in high school. OTOH it was clear there were two tracks at the school for the haves and the have nots.
Still, what is the alternative? For upper income people public schools exist in a marketplace competing with private schools. It also seems suboptimal to have them abandon the public schools (already happening due to Covid) and segregate themselves further into private schools.
In our school system they basically have kept gifted programs but let anyone opt into them. Maybe that’s a good option? I dunno.
I attended a form of magnet school, funded by a dozen or so school districts in the county. It was able to offer classes that none of the districts could have afforded by themselves. Even there you had implicit tracking - you could do lots of calculus or lots of chemistry or lots of physics, but not all of them. Dismantling it might have improved funding a bit at the home schools, but at the cost of shutting down all the advanced courses entirely.
Letting people opt in to gifted programs is a wonderful idea! A great many children only wait for the chance to succeed. That said, it might be worth considering carefully the resources requires and consequences. There will inevitably be children who are not up to the task. Opting them in to programs they are not ready for is setting them up for emotionally devastating failure as you grow class sizes.
I am uncomfortably reminded of how many colleges use lower division courses as weeders. They let anyone opt in to 101 and 102, but 301 is dependent on making it past those.
I love the idea of public schools. Education can, should, must be for everyone. However, this belief often sits awkwardly with the reality. Ultimately, if you want to keep higher income families in public schools you have to offer them something compelling. Dismantling gifted programs for anti-racist reasons may not always make the grade.
My takeaway was that the kids getting into gifted programs are overwhelmingly the kids whose parents know how to get them into gifted programs, through combination of knowing the system and/or squeaking loud enough that their kids get placed. "Knowing the system" includes knowing that you have to start on applications to multiple schools perhaps a year or more in advance, for example. Kids are slotted into the gifted programs from a very young age, and then tend to accumulate early advantages which carry forward, again with strong advocacy from parents who know the system.
As a result, these programs have a lot more to do with extending class privilege than anything else, and class in the US has strong correlations with race.
My parents literally didn't speak English and was only in the country for less than a decade after coming to the USA with a backpack and 20 dollars, and still figured out how to push me into gifted programs at a mediocre city school. It was study, do well on exams and read whatever was handed to me. I didn't even speak english w/ fluency until I was in the 3rd grade and I still did fine.
Nope, much more rewarding to go bash the upper-middle class for wanting a better future for their kids than a ghetto and a minimum wage.
Mind you, nobody dares to go bash the top 1% "Ivy-league-by-donation" class. Their kids will inherit wealth, networks and power anyway. You are just helping them clear out the next 20% of the income spectrum, that would actually have a shot at competing with them. So feudalism and hereditary rule incoming.
Both of these podcasts explore the issues that inspire changes like these. If you've already made up your mind, you may not be convinced that abolishing gifted programs is the way to go, but at the very least both of these programs are entertaining and present a perspective that many people don't have. Especially for people on a forum like HN which includes many people who graduated from such programs and don't know what regular schools are like.
Any thoughts about making the Magnet school program 'the standard' for every kid? As an alternate policy to ending it, as the article describes.
I live in a mid sized city in the Midwest, and the same concept would translate into 25000 minivans hitting the road every day at the same time in the morning and afternoon. Granted, a lot of parents already drive their kids even just a few blocks to school, but it could be made a lot worse.
The day when both of our kids were out of day care and could just walk themselves to school was a huge liberation for my family.
At the same time, I also recognize that there is scant evidence that gifted and advanced learning programs are beneficial. Selection bias is extremely hard to control and is the driving factor behind most deltas in education statistics. Are the kids coming out of the program better equipped because of the program? Or were the better equipped kids selected into the program? I'm inclined to guess that typically it's more of the former than the latter.
So for now I'm delaying judgment on these moves. We will be watching carefully to see whether the quality of the teaching slips when our gifted programs are cancelled. If that happens, and if I believe we can get better teaching elsewhere, we will go private and it will be fine. But my guess is that the gifted program is really not that important and we will be fine continuing without it.
But the gifted program here wasn’t eliminated because of cost-benefit reasons. It was eliminated because administrators felt that too many kids in the program looked like our kids. They’ve taken a page out of the Old South playbook and there is no reason to reserve judgment on that.
Well yes, this is what they mean when they talk about "combating privilege".