Talented and Gifted Education vs. Remedial Education

Great Debates
41

The issue I have with these programs is twofold. One, it is often more of a socioeconomic sort than an academic one. I was not selected for any of the gifted programs in my school. In fact, I was steered, and not very gently, towards shop classes. At that time in New York State a Regents Scholarship Test was given to all high school seniors. I was the only one not surprised by the fact that I received the highest grade in the school, plus 1420 on my SAT’s when I took them several years later.

Why was I not selected for the gifted programs? Well, the people who were doing the selection are primarily dead, so it’s hard to say. My guess at the time, and to this day, is that I did not come from the economic class that was expected to attend college. Single parent family, subsistance farm, the whole works. There’s a strong bias towards sending the “right people” to these classes.

The second problem I have is that I don’t believe it is a government function to provide mastery of any subject. Teach them well enough to meet the minimum standards, and get them out. Expecting the school to provide private tutoring to students so that they can achieve at a higher level is absurd. It’s not their job, and they’re clearly not qualified for it.

What if my precious little Poindexter has a highly developed palate? Should I expect the school cafeteria to provide him with duck l’orange with white truffles? Hot dogs are for the other kids, mine is special. They wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the gifted menu, it would be cruel to even expect them to try it. They’ll be happier with the sloppy joes.

It’s the job of the school cafeteria to provide an adequately nutritious lunch, nothing more. It’s the job of the education system to provide an adequate education, nothing more. If your kid needs more than that, pack a lunch.

42

Not mastery? How odd. I think, and my district officially thought, that the job of the school is to help each child get the most out of school to the limit of his or her abilities. I can’t imagine why that’s such an awful thing. Or perhaps you want to keep shipping our jobs overseas?

As for GATE identification, I agree to some extent. Our district starts with tests that should have identified you. That seems the fairest way to me. I think though that while there may be some teacher bias, parents in higher socioeconomic brackets are a lot pushier, and a lot more concerned. My kids teachers told us at parent teacher meeting nights that the GATE parents showed up, even there were no issues, while the parents of kids who could have used a bit more parental involvement didn’t. It’s a damn shame, but that seems to be the way it goes.

43

Ah.

Quote one particular teacher, to myself and my neighbor: “OK; pull them out. C’mon, you twooooo!”
We pull out the books we’re reading while keeping them inside our open at the front desks. He has a collection of short stories by Giovanni Guareschi I’ve loaned him; I have two Lope de Vega plays he’s loaned me.
The teacher: “O…K… now I’d really like someone to explain to me why, if ever, am I supposed to get angry at two students for reading good literature in lit class, specially since the two of them still manage to keep track of where in the book are we. Keep the books above your desks, you’ll screw your backs.”

Most of my teachers had that kind of attitude, actually. There were a few who were offended by questions, but I realized several years ago that it was because they didn’t know the answers and saw me as “challenging their autority” when I was actually unintendedly challenging their ignorance.

I was bored shitless 8 months out of 9; the last one actually managed to be more of a challenge. If I’d been supposed to spend all 9 months doing the teacher’s job for her then I would have been bored all 9 months, I imagine.

44

Hey, if those overseas can do our jobs better than we can they deserve to have them. That’s what capitalism is all about. As far as mastery goes, it’s a nice platitudinous phrase, but what does it really mean? There is not enough money to do it, so as a mission statement it’s nonsense.

You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. If there aren’t enough resources to teach every second grader to read, you don’t have any business spending money to teach some of them calculus.

45

[QUOTE=Nava]
Ah.

Quote one particular teacher, to myself and my neighbor: “OK; pull them out. C’mon, you twooooo!”
We pull out the books we’re reading while keeping them inside our open at the front desks. He has a collection of short stories by Giovanni Guareschi I’ve loaned him; I have two Lope de Vega plays he’s loaned me.

[QUOTE]

Don Camillo and Peppone - marvellous stuff, simple but rich with rustic wisdom - that is not so rustic.

I am not that keen on seriously mixed ability, quite a lot of my early life was spent outside the classroom as I had finished the term’s work, or bored out of my brains.

However I learnt that we are differently talented, at a fairly selective Uni we found that we had different skills - and would explain things to each other until one could see that ‘mental click’.

46

Why the HUGE increase in remedial education (at the University level)? I’m perplexed, as to why universities have to offer stuff to freshmen students, that should have been taugh in HS! I thought the traditional college-track curriculum included 4 years of math-up to calculus? anyway, why waste so much time in HS-if a kid wants to go to college, shouldn’t the HS have SOME responsibility to adequately prepare students for university?
I’d be pretty pissed off, if i completed HS-then found i had to spend most of freshman year, taking stuff i should have already had. Why do highschools do this? :confused:

47

Why is the topic phrased as Gifted versus Remedial? Does this mean that we must take from one group to help another?

The Feds supply relatively little educational funding. But–wouldn’t a small percentage of the millions being wasted in Iraq help educate everyone?

It’s not as though we’ve got just smart, average & dumb. Quite a few kids are combinations of the above. And some have non-academic talents that are being ignored as art & music programs are cut so the schools can concentrate on the frigging Test.

48

My guess is that since a college degree is now virtually required for many jobs, some colleges (especially the high-volume state ones) have to lower their standards to give this broader segment of the population an education.

49

To talk about some of the issue presented here.

1.) Students teaching students is highly effective at raising the bar for both groups, when done with similarly gifted groups. OTOH, those far above the bar do not usually receive anything close to the same benefit. (But they can be a great help.)

2.) Educators seem to be afraid to label students as gifted, not necessarily because they are against the idea that some people are far above the bar, but rather that it creates many a hassle from the parents who just know that little Johnny is brilliant. (Not that this is all parents, but they certainly are the louder ones).

3.) I won’t speak authoritatively for other schools, but taking a quick look at our (state) DoE’s values for us, we spend ~ $7,400 per student on “Regular Education” and ~ $14,600 ps on “Special Education”. I know of no Talented and Gifted program. There may be some small addendum in the elementary, but I have not heard of it. (I am the secretary of the local union, our president is an elementary teacher, as are many of the members of our negotiations committee, and I have never heard anyone speaking of it.) I don’t have the hard numbers here, but, even factoring in the reduced size of AP courses, the ratio of pennies spent on enrichment programs vs $100 spent on remdial program seems entirelty credible. (I would also add in that, to offset the small size of AP course, we also have similarly or smaller sized remedial courses for those students who fail the state graduation test - MCAS.)

4.) Our system (and, although I am only directly referring to the one in which I work, I think I can make a pretty good argument for extending my observations across the country’s system) is failing our brightest kids, and views like Bill Door’s are evidence for this. These top 2% or whathave you make up a small minority of the class population, so it is easy to cut funding for these programs without having major public outcry. In schools as small as ours (86 seniors), it is cost prohibitive to run AP courses and talented programs. The number of students who can handle the greater work load and more difficult problems is so small, it basically requires a full-time teacher’s position to be able to handle, say 2-6 students (our top 2-7%), when the normal class size is 20-30. Thus, we get brilliant kids who can coast through their work, are not challenged to the point where they understand how to work hard, and we lose much of the potential they had.

I have long maintained that we are failing our top kids. It would not require a large investiment in time or money to be able to challenge them, but it does mean an increase in money for a relatively small percentage of the population.

50

I’m going to agree with you and disagree with you, as a product of very spotty GATE education.

As a Navy brat, I moved everywhere around the country as a child. If it had a coast, we were there. I got to sample a few gifted programs in my time. I had wonderful experiences with dissecting lamb’s hearts and drawing in pointillism in the third grade; I had pathetically sad experiences in high school at a school that not only had no AP courses, it also did not inform its students or their parents of the possibility of AP courses at a neighboring school, where “Honors” just meant extra work.

If I’d had classes like the GATE program I was involved with in California throughout my primary school career, if I’d had challenging college-level courses in high school, I would have graduated college with better than a 2.7 GPA. The problem was simply that I’d never learned how to work, just as you say. All my classes were so insanely dull I never had to study more than an hour or two before a test to get straight A’s.

You see this problem and say “Gifted people are bad to hire because they don’t know how to work.” I say “If gifted people don’t know how to work, then they need to be challenged early so that they learn how.” Without classes to challenge gifted students, those 4.0 GPA kids are never going to be any better than you imagine, and just as you’ve admitted, lots of those kids come from families that don’t have the resources for private tutors and prep schools. Mine certainly didn’t, as much as they wished they did.

51

Sure they can. If they want to raise taxes high enough, they could get every kid in the district a private tutor, too. Do you know of any schools where cutting of federal funding for gifted programs was followed up by the school district finding a way to fund it by themselves? They cut the gifted program in my school when I was in eighth grade, and here it is sixteen years later - it was never reinstated.

It’s sort of too bad they cut it when they did, since I’m sure by sophomore year of high school a number of us would have been able to both grasp and apply the concepts taught in grant-writing course I had to take for my first job immediately after college; had that happened a few years earlier, we could have found grants ourselves to keep the program afloat!

This far removed from the experience myself, I think Voyager has a good point about taking the program seriously in order for it to “work.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of “gifted education programs” were just like the one we had, and only amounted to a couple of hours of special instruction a week. I suppose that it was useful in a limited way, but mostly in keeping kids from being bored in class than teaching them anything truly valuable.

I’m not sure if there are many public schools that are willing to run the risk of being accused of elitism if they set up full programs for gifted elementary and middle school students. There are a lot of parents out there that barely tolerate tracking in high school students, so God forbid their district want to segregate kids even younger. It’s possible that in the years to come many schools will, but I’m not holding my breath.

52

Because they don’t have the money and the numbers.

I was desperate to take calculus as a senior. I wanted a head start in mathematics so I could get a comp sci degree more easily. My school’s calculus course counted toward college credit, largely because the math teacher was phenomenal. I have no idea why he was in a dinky-ass school in a tiny Texas town rather than at a university; maybe he was working his way toward his Ph.D but I’m surprised if he didn’t have it already. I was so desperate I took Geometry and Algebra II in the same year, preparing for this by taking summer school classes before that year so I could get ahead. Because of the structure of our school’s curriculum (thank you, Texas. Thank you with a big splintery baseball bat) we would not go beyond Pre-Calculus as seniors unless we took two math classes in one year.

I was all set to take calculus as a senior. I was het up, excited, ready.

We had four students capable of taking calculus that year. Only two – myself and one other girl – actually applied to take it. The school just didn’t offer the class that year, and the teacher quit out of frustration.

This is the same school that did not – and possibly could not – offer AP classes. They never told us that other schools could, that we could apply for transfers to those schools. They most likely never told us this because we were already a very poor school and with every student that drops out or transfers, the school loses money. Our parents’ tax dollars went to teaching the special ed kids (who definitely needed the help, don’t get me wrong) and not their own because of the academic counselor’s dishonesty.

So because of my excitement to take calculus I actually ended up BEHIND in mathematics. What was my other choice? Take a college course at Del Mar that probably wouldn’t count for credit wherever I happened to go to college? Hire a private tutor on the salary of a Naval lieutenant and a bookstore clerk? Apply for a transfer mid-senior year to another school, thereby dashing any possible hopes of academic honors, of making new friends, of spending the entirety of high school in one place (my big dream since I was a little kid)… no.

I successfully tested out of college algebra with a B. I took calculus in college – foolishly, I did this in the same semester I took first-semester Latin, to the end that I got a C in the latter and failed a class for the first time in the former. That, coupled with the most dismal class of my existence spent learning Haskell in intro to comp sci (the most useless language in the universe except for teaching students about A) recursion and B) how much it sucks being stuck in front of a computer all day long trying to force a screw in with a hammer), turned me right off science as a major.

53

It appear that in order to meet the No Child Left Behind standards (which the Feds don’t fund adequately, just impose) schools are taking money from gifted programs. They don’t get measured on how well they’re handling gifted students, only on, basically, the lower end of the spectrum who are at risk of not “passing” the tests.

54

Sometimes it’s hard. I kinew the number of GATE-identified students per school per grade, and a lot of our elementary schools only had 2 or 3. There is not a lot you can do with that number. Some of the schools with a lot of kids did have special classes.

I understand your point on tracking. Our district has a lot of parents who came here to work in the high tech industry. They set very high standards for their kids - maybe too high, but that’s a different story. They didn’t help run our group, but they did join and pay dues. Our district didn’t have the problem you mentioned, thanks to them. (It had lots of other problems.)

55

So what does that mean specifically? How was this money that they’re now appropriating to the poor performers being used with the gifted in a way that they’re now crippled without it; and how is it now being used with the under-achievers in that it actually helps them pass the tests that they couldn’t pass before?

I ask because the ideology behind NCLB and the administration that brought it to us is that added funding to public schooling isn’t necessary for a better education, and frankly evidence supports their position.

56

You read that voluntarily? :eek:

57

I wasn’t allowed to watch rated R movies when I was in elementary school, but I was allowed to read anything I could get my hands on.

By the beginning of sixth grade, I had read nearly every book that would be required reading in the first three years of high school English.

Blood, war, death, gore, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. I wasn’t allowed to watch it, but I could read it. So I did.

58

According to the column, this is a district by district thing. There didn’t seem to be any change in federal funding at all. However, if a school decides that to get adequate test scores they need to reduce the number of s tudents per teacher for some classes, they’re going to need more money. Gifted programs are a source, and a safe source since students in those programs are going to pass no matter what.
Whatever you think of funding and class size, you’ll agree that an at-risk student will do better with individual instruction as opposed to being in a class of 30, right? And the question is what do the districts think will help? Even if they are wrong, and the money is being wasted, the gifted students still lose out.

59

Oddly enough, The Scarlet Letter was assigned in my high school, and To Kill a Mockingbird was assigned to my daughter. It boggles my mind that you’d get in trouble for reading either.

60

I was scolded for To Kill a Mockingbird in fourth grade. Apparently the book was ‘far too mature’ for someone my age, and I should stick to Judy Blume.