> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film)

> 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?

> “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."

>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?

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.

I grew up going through a gifted program (in the 80s) and it was the gifted program that was the subculture i fell into that really pushed me.

Before that I was isolated and flunking out. Maybe I would eventually have found my people, but at least for me the gifted program found me, and got me on the right path at an early enough age to matter.

Btw, this was in a region where intellectual capability and success was not as celebrated as it is in the Bay area.

The right peer group makes all the difference.

I currently live in a rural environment with tiny schools and wonder how I would’ve turned out if that’s where I did high school. I think you need a critical mass of other gifted kids to really set the bar and drive some aspirational goals. If your class has a single gifted kid, they’ll just see that they exceed their peers and coast; if there’s a whole group they’ll push each other once they know more about where the ceiling is.

This surely has a good amount of truth. Students won't engage with striving for excellence if they are socially/environmentally discouraged from it. How do parents/teachers/peers/school react to a student being very good at something?

"almost everybody has a story (from previously) of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool"

I had a very different (and much more positive) experience with G&T. I went to my local public school in rural Pennsylvania. In PA schools are required to write an IEP for "gifted" students. There are a couple of metrics, but the main one is anyone who tests > 130 on an IQ test. I remember taking a test in 2nd or 3rd grade (I was terrified of authority figures as a kid, so I have no idea how they accurately give these assessments, but at least in my case it was).

Having an IEP meant I got special attention in elementary school, which really boiled down to a) some extra math worksheets and b) getting pulled out of class once a week to go with the other IEP kids to a special "gifted" class. The content of that class was probably less important than getting us out of the regular classrooms. This gave the teachers the chance to repeat material without boring us (and the behavior problems that come from that).

Now I'm the dad of a talented 10 year old boy who doesn't have this experience and is bored constantly. He is basically forgotten about as he's never going to test below grade level even if he's completely ignored, and there's no incentive or requirement that he stays engaged.

I agree with you, and wish this perspective had informed many of the comments nearby.

I'm commenting because my own kid went through the LAUSD highly gifted (HG) magnet program -- which is a subset of the "gifted" program -- his high school was: https://www.highlygiftedmagnet.org.

(Without belaboring the point, it's a very high-achieving bunch. Multiple Harvard, MIT, and Stanford admissions in his rather small graduating class of ~70.)

There are good things and bad things about the LAUSD HG program. One good thing is that most admissions are done just by testing. There are 2 layers of tests, one for gifted and one (later) for highly gifted. If you test 99.5%+, you can be admitted to the HG program. The tests are done relatively early (4th grade for my kid) so they aren't as easy to game, although I'm sure it is done.

Every LAUSD student gets the first test, so that's pretty egalitarian. You have to ask for the second test. That's the good part.

One thing the article discusses is the other paths to admission at some schools -- paths that are much more subject to gaming, esp. by parents. Things like outside evaluations and private testing to substitute for the LAUSD-administered test. That has been a source of controversy, rightfully IMHO, because these parents can be bulldogs. The possibility of gaming the system is the bad part.

One other thing to re-inforce in the above comment. The HG program did tend to favor "high-achieving" rather than "gifted" students. So there was a high proportion of boring grindset students, weighted towards STEM, and the result was that the actually creative types were in a minority.

My conclusion is that these programs can benefit the special needs of HG kids, but the devil is in the implementation details and the parents and status game will tend to mess it up. Also, we should have no illusions that their existence is in part a reaction to racial/social inequities, and that they tend to reproduce the problems of the outside society.

> a magnet school, so already presumably for "gifted" students, that in turn had advanced courses like honors or AP.

I too attended a magnet school, but the point of magnet schools were not actually for 'gifted' students. While many did offer advanced classes or programs, the goal was to influence racial desegregation by offering programs to encourage white students to attend black majority schools.

> Also, imo, the vast majority of students did not benefit. It's not like they were all brilliant.

I'm not brilliant, but I absolutely did benefit. The magnet school I went to, and the gifted-students programs I attended pushed me, and I'd never really been pushed before; I was just on cruise-control, academically. There was room for potential, and it was not being filled by the educational system until magnets/gifted-programs.

Moreover, I benefited simply because the magnet school system removed me from my zoned school, but the circumstances here are probably unique to my situation. The short of it is that leaving the zoned school was life-altering. The educational pressure I describe above is probably more globally applicable.

College was a huge wake up call of "oh my, the workload is real." If I hadn't had the push I got in the magnet school system to work harder, I would have floundered and likely failed in college.

That's if I had made it to college at all. The trajectory of my life, the path where I didn't get into the magnet system … I can't imagine that path going well.

> They basically passed a standardized test that they spent a few years in prep classes to pass.

Yes, there's a standardized test that you must pass. But no, I spent exactly 0 time in prep classes. It's not needed: the bar is not that high.

> What this measured was whether your parents were tapped into particular social circles

Not really … my mother tapped into her "social circles" — other mothers she met at my preschool — to try and learn what she needed to know about the schools, the school system, and the rules of the bureaucracy she was contending with, in order to effect better outcomes for her children.

I.e., what any good parent would do. The article misses the mark here too:

> Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents.

Yes, the "gifted label was coveted by parents", but not for "parental competition for prestige", but because it was key to me having a future. There were just certain, simple, logical steps in my education that were not possible to take without first getting the "gifted" label, since that's the bureaucratic grease that makes the whole system move for you. The law essentially results in a system that says "is kid gifted? if yes, then provide resources, else tell them to go away". Parents play within the rules of that system when they must.

… five minutes of listening to the parents talk about their children would tell you it's a conversation about "my kid is struggling with X, what can I do?" and not "hey, my kid is gifted, what about yours?" — the notion is preposterous, to me, having lived through it.

The magnet school system in my area suffered similar problems to the one you describe, but IMO that was mostly due to a lack of resources. I mentioned earlier the bar was low: one of the magnet schools that I didn't attend was because it had no seats: it was ~5:1 oversubscribed: for every child attending, there were 5 meeting the criteria, but SOL. I was one of the 5. I had to waitlist, and it took a year before a spot at one of my less preferred options opened up. (But even then, it was a vastly better school than my zoned school.)

> We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age.

Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th.

I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.

I’m happy that you were able to work around the state’s horrible treatment of your gifted child, by throwing money at the problem. I’ll probably have to do the same with my children in my Seattle suburb.

The real victims are the kids whose parents can’t afford to do this. It tends to be disproportionately the kids in the very demographics that the left professes to care about. So it’s weird to me that they would choose to do things that make it harder for these groups to have economic mobility.

Any school system is not going to provide any education for him. Just write it off, and take things into your circle of influence. He needs someone to teach him material at his level. Whether it’s a family member, or 2 dedicated hours a day with a tutor.

Now as others have pointed out here intellectual development is only one kind. You may see your son as exempt from certain requirements and activities, when he is really not. If you have dedicated time where his intellectual needs are met you will less tempted to step in and save your son from important life lessons.

It’s difficult to express exactly my experience. I know you are proud and excited for your son. But remember he is only with you for a short time, and being smart and getting degrees and jobs etc is such a small part of having a good life. If you only focus on that part he may have a very hard time and not be able to take advantage of his gifts.

I'm sorry, California does indeed allow children to skip grades. I also live in California and can think of 2 kids in my son's school who have skipped a grade. It is totally permitted - we've even discussed skipping our son one grade because he too is bored and capable of more, not only in maths but in every subject. We decided against it for social reasons.

I'm not this super smart or anything, but I was allowed to skip a grade and the result was hell for me - I was a scrawny kid even in my age group and a year of physical development means a lot at young ages. I was taken out from the environnment of my peers and placed with total strangers who were all told that 'I was special', which didn't put me in a favorable light. I basically had no friends and quite a few enemies for a year before my parents wizened up and took me to a different school.

That's interesting. My parents were told, in SC and FL, to have me skip a grade or two (not six!), but refused due to the social burden they expected it to put on me.

I'm not entirely happy with where I am at 26. I wonder if I'd be further ahead - or behind - if I had skipped forward.

> He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored

My solution was to read books and draw comics in class. I had some teachers that understood, some that didn't.

What U.S. state has the best resources for kids at the gifted end of the spectrum?

As one of these kids, in Massachusetts, I had my math classes at a desk in the hallway by myself starting in 3rd grade, where I was just given an algebra textbook to read. I reviled the process of math lessons where the teachers just asked me to show the other 3 kids in my quad of desks how to do the lessons... I couldn't understand why they could not just grasp the concepts. It was frustrating for everyone involved, and the solution was worse. By the time I made it to high school I'd learned that: I could read the book and nail the tests, so I never did homework. why bother? Unfortunately they grade homework, I used to skip class because I already knew the material and I didn't want to answer for not doing the homework. I never used the muscles I needed to use for learning, and I was so over it I had trouble participating in the classes that were actually great and I enjoyed. There were AP classes in high school that I never qualified for, and I barely graduated, had to go to summer school every year, so I joined the marines which is probably the only reason the school moved things around so I could graduate.

This was a failure at every level of the education system for me, at a school system with 9/10 ratings. I needed engagement as a young student, I needed to learn and be challenged so I _had_ to study for things, I _had_ to do homework to learn... and by the time the structures where there that supported that I was lost already. There were allusions to a better future, I tested in the 98-99 percentile on the Iowa tests (except in English and spelling, I'm just middle of the bell curve there) so I was fed in Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth in 6th grade, but that never was anything more than a weekend at MIT learning about some truly amazing science, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. I'm sure my own discipline problems, apparent from a very young age, didn't help. It was just too easy to understand that the authorities around me where full of it, poke holes in their logic, see what I could get away with, etc... all because I was bored.

You've got quite a task in front of you, raising your son. I didn't find an outlet for this "gift" until I was in college and started writing code for real... self learning is everywhere in computer science and the problems are vast and difficult, there is always something new to learn and I do it voraciously. The other thing that helped immensely was learning to race motorcycles, it's a task that mandates preparation and planning, diligent practice, getting up when you're knocked down, and the amount of brain power you need to devote to it quiets down the inner loop I have that is always going. When I'm on track everything is quiet.

I hope you've got the resources to send your child to private school, I always imagined that path would have had a different outcome for me. My kids are in private (I'm also in CA) now and I've heard parents with older kids (even in school systems like Kentfield) saying the same thing you're saying about treatment of gifted kids.

In Seattle there is a strong movement to ban gifted education. The prospect of that becoming fully implemented has caused many politically progressive parents I know to move out to suburbs in some cases and red states in others. Even without bans there has been a tangible dumbing down of the rigor of schooling. And the forced introduction of weird political curriculums like ethnic studies in math (https://www.king5.com/article/news/education/seattle-schools...).

The exodus away from Seattle public schools surprise no one. After all who wants to take such risks with their own child’s education, that they only get try on? Unfortunately I don’t think it will be easily fixed. The school board is full of career activists, much like city and state leadership, and it is reflected in the culture of K-12 schooling. The DEI movement legitimized all of this and gave it cover. Equity made merit a taboo. And reversing those damaging movements will take decades.

The article goes over that.

specifically how it wasn't the grade that was the issue, it was the speed of the course material. so once your son catches up, the problems will resurface because of the slow people. just now compounded by the social isolation and lack of physical development in comparison to peers.

I think this is increasingly the case everywhere for people who just don't fall into any of the predetermined buckets that whoever designed a particular system has anticipated. People used to be much more flexible and driven by "common sense" (whatever that means to you) in past generations.

Nowadays the most you get back is a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and are then left on your own. I can totally see a modern bureaucrat letting someone die, in a conscious way, because "my job description says that this machine has to be turned off at 7:00pm".

Unless you're mega-wealthy, ofc., in which case society bends to your will with an unprecedented sense of obedience. Whether both effects are independent or related is left for the reader to think about.

> He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble.

No student has ever found all their courses interesting. You'd have a behavior problem no matter what level of material is taught.

Don't sweat schooling. It's good for him to be with people his age, and he will be fine long term. Let him do extra curricular that fill his curiosity.

When he gets to college he can really excel, until then just let him go to school and make friends with kids his age.

> The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it illegal since ...

I'm thinking the same legal rationalizations could be used to rule that high school football programs are illegal. No advantage conferred on the students who fail to make the team, and no free college for those who don't end up with an athletic scholarship.

What case might that be?

I was a gifted program kid who was part of a new style of unstructured, learn at your own pace, self-learn program called the "informal" program. This was back in the early 1980s (the program itself had started in the 1970s).

The net result was that the highest achieving gifted kids did really well and the slacker gifted kids (myself included) did abysmally. Turns out some of us needed a level of structure and rigor enforced on us to nurture whatever gifted talents we had. Some kids learned it at home, for some it seemed to be innate and for others we did not have it anywhere in our lives and needed to be instructed in how to study, what to do, when to do it and at what pace.

Within a couple years it'll be possible to provide kids with AI personal tutors that are better than the vast majority of public school teachers. Parents smart enough to capitalise on this are going to reap huge benefits, while kids trapped in the public school system will fall further and further behind.

It's worth pointing out that childhood malnutrition has a significant negative impact on IQ that persists into adulthood.

See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3796166/

Black children are far more likely to live in poverty than the other three groups presented in the parent comment. I'm really curious what the numbers would be were that not the case. I also wonder how much the rise in black IQ over the decades can be attributed to school lunch programs.

You are not supposed to talk about this.

IQ isn't relevant as it's not used to qualify students for gifted programs.

Recognizing gifted students should not be just measuring IQ (which is known to be a flawed metric)

I'd argue the parent's socioeconomic status is a much better predictor of IQ than "race".

IQ is a horribly biased way to measure "gifted". EQ is far more predictive of success and, honestly, more valuable to society. I have known a few very high IQ people and those with high IQ and low EQ can be difficult to collaborate with.

> Speaking as someone who attended a public high school with competitive admissions, the students are much more important than the teachers or the education itself. Being around a group of talented and driven people motivates you to do well.

Which ultimately means it's up to the parents more than anything. I suspect that's why magnet schools perform well. The parents interested and capable of going out of their way to put their child into a good school district are more likely to also be invested in their child's educational outcomes which can make all the difference.

> a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development

Not an educator, but it seems like "supporting gifted kids" is one of those phrases where everyone acts as if its meaning were clearly defined and agreed-upon, while avoiding looking too hard at how it is neither.

What should the goal be for institutions or parents? For example, to accelerate these kids to the end of the curriculum ASAP? To quickly get them into the workforce? To whisk them through a carousel of possible specializations in the hopes of matching genius to a tough problem?

The above options intend to direct their strengths, rather than support their weaknesses and trusting that the rest will follow.

I think these are good points, but I don't buy that these are true of a majority of gifted programs. Enough of my friends were also gifted (or we became friends because we were in the same problem) that I didn't feel the separation you describe. In fact, it was a relief to get out of classroom settings where peers valued social performance over intellectual performance. Gifted gave us a space where I could be comfortably awkward.

I also had experiences with mixed skill level classrooms and frequently found myself paired with students who didn't want support -- either from myself, other students, or the teacher. They didn't want to be in a classroom of any kind. I can imagine environments where this does work, but it freaks me out a little bit that you say you're certain this works.

As an additional anecdote, my son loves his gifted classes. But similar to myself, that's where his friends are.

I wonder if we'd both agree that kids' social environment is more important than the structure of any particular learning program?

This resonates for me. I really, really did not like being in GATE in the 1980s for the same reasons.

Also, now as a college instructor, I really like flipped classrooms.

I know at least one person - a very, very smart person - who really struggles in flipped classrooms. I think there are people who thrive in them and people who don't, and that axis is orthogonal to the gifted/not gifted axis.

Flipped classrooms look wonderful - here's a group of people who were struggling before, and look, they're thriving! But you can miss that here's another group who were thriving before, and now they're struggling.

Ditto. I skipped most of high school through an accelerated program and wound up in university before I was 15.

At the time I was happy. It was the first time I was surrounded by peers as smart or smarter than me. First time I wasn't bored in school.

It absolutely destroyed my social abilities and I spent the next 5 years miserable and depressed. I barely graduated and took another few years before I felt like I had caught up enough on everything I missed out on and I was able to start a career in my mid-20's at a comparable time to everyone else.

I'm no longer "exceptional" relative to my age peers, and Im just fine with that.

I have a son now and I genuinely don't know what I would do if he has the same challenges and opportunities as me.

On the one hand I would never wish what I went through on anyone. On the other, noone forced me to go. I wanted to.

Can you share more details? Where have you moved to? What alternatives did you consider?

Even base kids aren't all stupid. No matter what you call the program, the kids will know that's where the smart kids went.

As soon as we undo 3 centuries of systemic oppression and get the races roughly on par with each other, we'll have an easier time managing G&T programs.

where did you get the impression the genesis for "gifted" programs was to solve high iq problem kids? this is the first I'm hearing of that.

I ... I don't think that's true at all.

>it seems to me it would be productive to reframe "gifted" education as "neurodivergent" education

This I could get behind, because that's the definition of neurodivergent.

I was in the gifted program in Canada and while that may have been an aim, it was also to identify the best and given them opportunities to excel, to allow them to grow and go on to be extraordinary citizens.

That's kind of what we would expect to happen in the case where other kids get actual support & "gifted" kids are left to fend for themselves, or even sent to the library to keep them from disrupting everyone else.

You can just as easily measure the second derivative, i.e. see how fast they are improving at improving.

that would be racist[2]

It could be both. Prop 13 is definitely a huge problem, it cut school funding significantly since the 80s.

But also the focus on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

I read a good book a while back that pointed out how much more we spend on special ed, which is aimed at the bottom 5%, compared to what we spend on gifted education, which is the top 5%. It asked why we would spend so much on one and not the other, especially since the ROI is so much higher for the top 5%. (It obviously skipped the whole "making our society better and helping those in need" argument since it hurt their argument).

Spending per student isn't really that related to test performance so I don't really understand the link?

So paying incompetent administrators and teacher even more than what they make in California will somehow improve things magically? The solution is to always tax more, that's it?

Go on...Going to need a little bit more of an explanation here.

Specifically, Prop. 13's impact on commercial real estate, which was the real reason for it all along.

The factory model of education made sense in the industrial era, but it's increasingly anachronistic in an age of personalized technology. We have the tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty and pacing based on each student's capabilities - similar to how modern video games seamlessly adapt to player skill levels.

Instead, we're still forcing students into rigid cohorts based mainly on age, effectively optimizing for the statistical mean while leaving both ends of the ability distribution poorly served. This is particularly wasteful with gifted students who could be advancing much faster if the system accommodated their pace of learning.

The tech to deliver adaptive education at scale exists today. The main barriers are institutional inertia and perhaps a misguided egalitarian impulse that confuses equality of opportunity with enforced uniformity of outcomes. We should embrace the natural variation in human capabilities and build systems that help each student reach their potential, rather than constraining everyone to march in lockstep.

Help them learn to the full extent of their ability, at the full pace they can learn. There are many different paths that could achieve that successfully, but it's well-established that "have a uniform class grouped by age and punish anyone who stands out" is not a path to success.

Ultimately it’s appropriately paced education. Some people need accelerated education and some need decelerated education, and it might vary between subjects for an individual. Not having opportunities at either end of the spectrum is bad for the student because they’re can be left behind or not challenged enough.

Very few people take issue with providing resources to someone falling behind. On the other hand, enough people take issue with letting someone get ahead that it has become a political issue, and has lead to regressive educational policy.

> I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it and I got it in my head.

I don't know your circumstances or when you were in school, but my son is in high school in Kansas, and he's taking university classes with the encouragement of the school. And not easy classes, either. One of them is a proof-based Calc III. I'm working with a high school student to give them a research experience (they obviously can't do much, but they get exposed to the research process, which is pretty exciting). The high school gives them credit for doing it.

The goal should be to allow them to self-study topics ahead of time. For example, if a third grader has already demonstrated mastery of third grade material, they should be given textbooks from the fourth grade to study on their own. And if they can do fourth grade topics, go to fifth grade topics.

Teach them more skills and/or use the extra time they do not need on their strong sides to boost weak ones with extracurricular activities.