Failing Our Geniuses 815
saintlupus writes "Time has an interesting article about the failure of the US educational system to properly deal with gifted students. For example, up to ten times as much money is spent nationwide on educating 'developmentally disabled' students as gifted ones. Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either?"
Re:of course (Score:3, Informative)
First Hand Experience (Score:5, Informative)
No Child Left Behind (Score:5, Informative)
The end result is that children who are just below the pass rate on the 'pre-tests' (really, just more tests, but the results only get examined by the teacher or the school faculty) get the most attention. Those above it, especially well above it and those well below it, are more or less shafted by the way it's designed.
Alternately, several school districts have simply changed the rules for what constitutes a pass, and what a failure, on their tests, so that they have a high enough pass rate to continue to get full federal funding.
Nothing new. (Score:3, Informative)
Frustration with the schools led a group of parents to form an action group that discovered, among other things, that the district had claimed they had a MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors) program to get funds when they actually weren't doing anything for the gifted children but rather just grabbing money for the budget.
They did make a small dent - especially when my dad was elected and re-elected as head of the Board of Education. But I'm not sure that any of the good they did lasted much past his term of office.
The former Secretary of Education commented on NPR the other day that 40 years ago the best option for college-educated women was teaching and that's what about 50% of them did. That pool of (probably unfairly) cheap teaching labor dried up long ago. If you want good people as teachers you are going to have to pay them. Conversely, the teaching establishment needs to stop the same-pay-for-all nonsense. Teachers in difficult-to-fill specialties like science and math should be paid more. Top-flight teachers should be compensated better as well. Bad teachers should be fired. (There's no excuse for tenure in K-12.)
Re:of course (Score:5, Informative)
AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) is a factor in the ranking of school systems. Specifically, it was designed to expose the fact that many school had masked the few poor performers with the majority of successful students.
What it effectively means is that all "sub-populations" (broken by ethnic groups, ESL/Limited English Proficiency, "at-risk," and low-income, among others) must demonstrate "adequate yearly progress." It's designed to even be a bit forgiving - the low-income group doesn't necessarily have to pass, they just have to have improved a reasonable amount from the year before. A subpopulation counts if it is 1% of the school population or 30 kids (IIRC).
If a school fails to meet AYP for two years in a row, they become a "school of choice." Parents may now choose to pull their students from that school and send them to another one, and the failing school will pay for transportation. I'm not sure how it works out in small, rural districts where a given high school is the only one in the district.
Once a school fails in AYP, kids start getting pulled. The kids who get pulled are the ones who have parents who care about education; that usually translates to the kids who do well in a school being pulled from it. You can see how much this would impact a school.
If a school fails to meet AYP for five years in a row, a radical restructuring is due; this generally means that large amounts of the staff need to be fired, or the school should be converted to a charter school or something similar. In practice, though, the actual actions at this stage usually aren't as substantial.
With the background out of the way, it's fairly easy to see why geniuses don't matter: they'll pass the test. Five or ten ESL students (or low-income, or at-risk, or whatever) can make or break a school of 3000. With the way the NCLB program has structured AYP, it should be obvious where a principal/district would focus resources.
I'm not arguing that schools don't need monitoring; they do, no doubt. But if this system sounds ridiculous to you, please do all of us a favor and let your elected officials know.
The Money (Score:3, Informative)
Re:of course (Score:3, Informative)
Best vs. brightest (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. There is obviously a correlation between the two, but there are plenty of lazy bright kids in the advanced classes and plenty of hard-working not-so-bright kids in the general/remedial level classes.
As a former public high school teacher, I speak from experience. I taught physics and AP chemistry (both classes composed of advanced 11th and 12th graders) and physical science (composed of general/remedial 9th graders). I felt really bad for the few really hard working kids in my physical science class who had to put up with the disruptions of their fellow students. (Yes, I disciplined those kids, but you can only do so much in certain school systems.) I fought to put one student who I thought was of average intelligence but very hard-working in an advanced class for the following year. Unfortunately, that didn't work out as the advanced class was too far ahead of her. I had another student who was mildly mentally retarded, but was such a hard-worker that he outperformed almost everyone else in that class.
Re:Shows the failures of socialism (Score:3, Informative)
Despite all talk of equality, socialist states spent a lot of time screening for promising students. Guess having a surveillance culture helps with that. Ever wonder why the Soviet Union had so many chess champions? Doping doesn't explain that one, early screening for talents and widespread chess clubs do.
Re:of course (Score:3, Informative)
It does somewhat dent the conclusion when one notes that the stories are certainly exaggerated, if not outright untrue - Einstein performed well in school, and there are questions about the veracity of some of Gauss' more impressive performances.
Re:To flesh that out some (Score:4, Informative)
School is only important to the mediocre.
The truely notable, exceptional people will be bored no matter what you put in front of them. School is a waste of time for everyone but those who would be left behind without this program. Nothing worthwile (acedemically) happens before college anyway, and even then real learning doesn't really start untill you break free of "those who can't do" and start getting some real world experience. And by then those that would be left behind are long gone.
Re:To flesh that out some (Score:3, Informative)
Mediocre people lap up the "education" they get from school without concern for their own welfare. They learn what the book or teacher tells them to learn. They don't teach themselves to think. They do so at their own peril.
The real world will place you into a special hell called "middle management" if you're mediocre. The smart ones just burn in slavery or, if they're really smart, reach escape velocity and start their own business.
Re:Tracking (Score:3, Informative)
My own 8 year old daughter would not be able to teach herself math, physics, geometry, literature -- but she absorbs coaching very well. Oh... and she has an IQ of 187, and reads at the college sophomore level. Do the math: earlier in this thread an IQ of 70 was labeled special needs, and an IQ of 130 was labeled gifted. 130-70 = 60. Now, observe that 130+60 = 190, or roughly my daughter's IQ. Does she belong in a class with kids whose IQ is 100-130? If you say the kid with an IQ of 130 does not belong in the same class as the kids with IQ of 70, you have to say no. But she *does* need teaching, coaching, and peer interaction.
It's great to watch her get together with kids that are both age and intellectual peers. She and one of her friends were both studying Egyptology when they were 6 years old. They got together to play -- and did the normal 6 year old "dress up" thing that girls do... except that all the stuffed animals were turned into Egyptian gods and they wove Egyptian history into their play. *That* is why you need to give these kids a chance to interact with each other. A normal classroom is a torture for these kids.
Re:Obligitory "Incredibles" quote: (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter (Score:3, Informative)
Not without a new constitutional amendment:
Anyway, you can't simply eliminate irrationality by government edict, and if you tried you'd only end up creating a bunch of martyrs. The more fanatical elements would continue believing in secret, and you'd end up with all the myriad social repercussions normally associated with severe ideological repression. Religious persecution has failed to achieve its goals too many times throughout history to be taken at all seriously at this point.
Re:To flesh that out some (Score:3, Informative)
It's possible that his gift was noticed, appreciated, and encouraged by the school. I think he finished in the top of his classes, at least wherein that information is recorded.
It was a different era then, with schools that genuinely appreciated intelligence...
Re:of course (Score:4, Informative)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
But then you say: I don't see how this conclusion is at all possible based on Einstein's youth.Re:To flesh that out some (Score:3, Informative)
The poor are only given enough money so they can continue to work like slaves in factories for the rich.
If you were to make a capitalist-like system, the dumb kids would work as servants to the smart kids, fetching them books and carrying thier bags, while only getting enough education to read the spines of books they had fetch to the smart kids.
The smart kids would get smarter, while the dumb kids get dumber.