I followed the link but I don’t see the program that will let mediocre students ace the cogat.
And perhaps that is biased along ses lines if this sort of thing costs money but racial?
Putting aside that historic racism has created some of today’s economic disparity, how is the cogat racially biased?
How do you distinguish between recent hispanic immigrants that don’t do well and recent asian immigrants that do?
What would you suggest?
The policy proposals around here have included things like a lottery.
This is not how most public school systems define gifted, is it? Don’t they usually take academically advanced into consideration?
My district gave an aptitude test . . . Not an achievement test. But the goal was to find kids with those traits. In their mind, that’s what giftedness “is” and the achievement is a symptom.
So this seems like you are agreeing with my last sentence where I identify the one situation I can think of where your observation might apply.
And you did in fact identify it. This seems to support the notion that there isn’t some vast overlooked population of gifted URM.
ISTM that the majority of kids in gifted programs are academically accelerated mostly through hard work. The type of giftedness you are talking about seems much less common and not easily overlooked for anyone that is looking. Is this sort of giftedness more common in URM groups?
I don’t know about full potential but I don’t think anyone dropped out while I was in school (the graduation rate is listed as 99+).
I can see how the two overlap more than a little bit.
I don’t recall anyone ever transferring out to their local school. It could have happened but it wasn’t common enough for me to notice. I can only think of one kid that transferred out because his family moved. Can I ask why this matters?
Is there a high dropout rate in other magnet schools?
I have my AIG certification. And I was actively looking for students of color who aren’t identified. And I was working with an AIG teacher who has a similar set of priorities. And both of us serve on our school’s racial equity team. This anecdote should not be taken as proof that the vast majority of gifted black students are identified.
Again, if there’s a huge racial disparity in identified kids, either the test is broken, or the kids are.
In some, it’s huge. Basis is particularly bad about burning kids up. But the point is that if a kid’s identity is based not on being hard working, but on being smart, when it gets hard, they can collapse and not recover. This happens in college a lot. It’s not about suddenly discovering you aren’t the smartest. It’s about thinking being the smartest is the thing that makes you YOU, that you embody that list I posted and because you have these inherent qualities, it will never get hard–and if it does, it means you are a fraud.
Again, not arguing against accelerated instruction. Arguing against the idea that we need to determine if a kid is acing calculus because he’s “Really smart” or if he’s somehow manipulating the system by working on his homework two hours a night, like some sort of loser. That’s the attitude that I grew up with and that still persists. This is why parents want their kid identified as “Gifted”. It’s seen an a qualitative label
I can see how you might get there if you are inclined to believe that the playing field is level but its not. Poverty is color coded in many places and poverty can affect academic achievement. This doesn’t mean the kids are broken or that the test is broken.
A previous poster asked how much the race gap would be closed if you corrected for SES factors and I think the black/hispanic::white gap would diminish appreciably. How much of this is actually SES disparity and not broken tests or broken kids?
There is a fairly large disparity in identification between asian kids and white kids. Are the kids broken or is the test broken?
In my experience, that’s more commonly the attitude in high performing HS where skills, not potential, is the focus. But the “gifted” mystique is more common with the littles, and parents jockeying for position.
Okay, but at young ages at least, there definitely is something worth looking at. Consider four kids:
A kid who’s acing every test because they’re working their asses off to ace every test is getting a great education: they’re needing to struggle in order to access core instruction. That’s the ideal.
A kid who’s not struggling and is still acing everything needs to be looked at for AIG services: they need to be placed in a situation where they do struggle.
If we put the first kid in an accelerated program, that may be inappropriate. They’re already struggling, and acceleration might move them out of their ZPD. Sure, maybe their capacity for work hasn’t tapped out, and they can adjust; but that’s a move that should be considered carefully.
Compare to:
3) A kid who’s struggling and is still failing everything needs to be looked at for EC services: they’re not accessing the core instruction, and they may need different instruction. They’re the opposite of kid 2.
and
A kid who’s not struggling and who’s failing stuff may need support services to help them develop better habits. Or it may be that they need some wraparound services: maybe there are struggles in their nonacademic lives that are taking priority for them, and they need (for example) access to regular food, or housing, or something else before they can succeed.
The goal, as others have said, shouldn’t be to get every kid to the same achievement. It should be to encourage every kid to work as hard as they can, and to provide them the opportunity and skill set to do so.
Then what is it about gifted programs that you find problematic? If we cannot debate why you find them problematic are we supposed to just agree with you that there is a problem with gifted programs?
I frankly don’t understand why the last thread was a problem
I don’t think we should create system to accommodate “nice white parents”
Particularly not if it’s a vanity project.
Oddly, the concept of “potential” is one that I have seen used to reinforce and break down current social structures. It is intellectually dishonest in both cases.
I agree, but the language around those placements needs to be carefully policed to avoid everyone–kids and teachers–feeling like #1 is inferior to #2, and that both are better than #3 and #4. Not that #2 is wasting his time with the material but that he’s wasting his time with these kids. And people do talk like that about gifted instruction. And when we pull out a list of “affective traits” to decide the difference between #1 and #2, that’s even weirder to me. It’s like suggesting that academically gifted people are more human than normies: they feel more, they have deeper passions that the others can’t understand and they need to be grouped together with their true peers. This isn’t the attitude in every AIG program, but it does exist, in my experience. And it’s both remarkably persistent (because it flatters people) and toxic.
This goes to @bump 's tale of being bad at math. Our “low” math track puts kids in Alg 2 as Freshman. It’s about 20% of our students. When I started at this school, there was a meaningful stigma against those kids for taking “only” A2 as sophomores. We have lightened it, but it has taken a lot of conscious effort and structural change–and those changes have been fought every step of the way. Because a lot of people liked the hierarchy. They liked having a “best of the best” class and resented us “watering it down”. But I can show test data to hell and back that we are now a more rigorous school. But it still chafes. For example, we changed the name of our Freshman Calculus to, well, Freshman Calculus, and people lost their mind. They liked “super fast track”. Because they liked being super.
I’ve just seen so many high achieving students will terrible complexes about their own achievements. Guilt, imposter syndrome, shame, burnout. We really have to change the way people think about the academic process.
Wow, this thread is moving fast, but I wanted to talk about @MandaJo 's “skills vs. project-based” thing because I have some thoughts about that.
So both my kids (5th grade, K) currently go to a private “gifted” school. (I fought really hard for my younger child to go to the local public school, partially because of the concerns I’m about to talk about, but because of the pandemic all our plans changed.)
The best thing about this school is that it seriously recognizes that there may be extreme disparities between a child being “gifted” – or, if you’d rather, academically skilled? – in a particular field and being gifted in another field, and they have separated out math, reading, and writing classes so that they don’t have to be grade level. My fifth grader takes a math class that is several grades higher than her grade level, but reading and writing on her grade level. This is the whole reason we are at this school to begin with – no other school around here would let her do that and she was starting to hate math as a result. Now she loves it.
The related second-best thing about this school is that it recognizes something that @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness talked about in replying to @MandaJo 's post here, that is that “giftedness” sometimes has… things that go along with it. For instance, my fifth grader is mildly ASD and has trouble with social skills and emotional regulation, and is way behind her grade level in those things. And I feel like a bit of a special snowflake saying that but man it has been such a problem for us, and this school and its teachers have been great working with us on that.
So in a lot of ways their school is great! But they do seem to have this ineffable project-based mentality, which I haaaaate, and I wish they had a skills mentality instead (which they have had to pivot to a little because I’m not the only one who’s complained, but you can still see that they don’t really think that way). So, for example, in her fifth grade class they did a unit on Civil Rights, and they wrote a poem on it and made a Jeopardy game based on various things they learned, stuff like that. Which, I mean, isn’t terrible, I guess, and she did learn some stuff? but I don’t want to see Cool Neato Stuff, I want to know that my kid is learning how to a) understand historical events and trends and b) write about them, and I was unsatisfied on that front.
And of course they can’t have problem sets or take tests because that might be ~hard~ for the anxious snowflakes – which – I know that there are kids at the school who do suffer from anxiety, but personally I feel like the way to deal with that is to GIVE them tests, reiterate that it’s not a big deal, and get them used to it.
(Hilariously, her math teacher is more of what I’d call a skills-based teacher and she and all the math class parents are in agreement, so she has been sneaking us homework and test-taking which I don’t think the school knows about. Which my fifth grader dislikes intensely! BUT I’ve also noticed that the first test she had a complete and utter meltdown, and the second and third ones she didn’t, so I claim it really is useful for her.)
So anyway… coming back from my vent to the discussion here… I really like the model of recognizing that kids can be different in all kinds of ways, and trying to separate them out in different ways, although I can see that this takes more resources so might not always be possible, especially in the lower grades. (And it’s less necessary in the lower grades, I think; my K child also needs advanced math relative to the other K kids, but his teacher can handle that.) But I also like the skill-based model @MandaJo talks about, and I’ve had personal experience with seeing that the project-based mentality a) still exists and b) doesn’t work as well for my child’s learning, at least.
But do they go hand in hand, or does your particular child have all these traits? Like, lots of mildly ASD students are not double-described or twice exceptional. They are normal kids who happen to show traits of ASD. Kids with accelerated academic ability can not have all those “affective and behavioral traits”. My kid really doesn’t (I don’t think!): he’s just really bright and likes math a lot. But in the GT meetings there’s this weird vibe that that makes him kind of suspect. Also, there are kids with all those “affective” traits that aren’t academically advanced–and those same traits get treated very differently when they aren’t seen as signs of a gifted soul.
I see what you mean about it being stuck in the past, and agree that kind of labelling is unhelpful. LHoD’s ideas about gifted classes seem a lot better.
That’s exactly it, all students need to be stretched by their work. Plus it’s a good way to explain why kids need to show their working; I was one of those who annoyed maths teachers for years by only writing the answer down.
That’s not weird at all, plenty of kids are good at one or the other but not both.