This whole idea that schools funding would be dependent on the income of the people around it seems insane to me.
The idea that everyone should have as good education as possible, affordably and as free of any charges as possible, is such a base level idea, that i can never really wrap around my mind why anyone would think of it as a good idea not to have that.
Sure, not everyone can go to the best university, but the limiting factor should be how smart you are and how dedicated in your studies, not the size of your parents bank account.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
This whole idea that schools funding would be dependent on the income of the people around it seems insane to me.
The idea that everyone should have as good education as possible, affordably and as free of any charges as possible, is such a base level idea, that i can never really wrap around my mind why anyone would think of it as a good idea not to have that.
Sure, not everyone can go to the best university, but the limiting factor should be how smart you are and how dedicated in your studies, not the size of your parents bank account.
Seems sensible, until you realize the people with money like the advantages they intrinsically have, and love their kids way more than they want to give unfortunate kids a fair chance. It's that selfishness people forgive themselves for.
I rode the short bus to school four days a week, then on Wednesday I'd become the dumbest genius after spending a week as the smartest fuck up.
My classmates were Nazi Kid, Fat Native Kid who got picked on, Kid who tried but had methhead parents, Athletic kid who nearly killed a kid, my girlfriend from first grade, and Josh.
Josh was a younger, dumber version of me who wouldn't shut up. I shut him up.
The behavior mod class went from school to school, a carnival of the damned. Throughout the years I went on and off meds, got into fights, and provoked comments about how the teachers all got into behavior mod thinking that it was gifted and talented. Eventually the gifted and talented program dumped me because I fucked their numbers.
My mother, bless her heart, tried one last time to advocate on my behalf. I got picked up by the bus that goes to Country Club by the college. I was then dropped in JASON with the kids who had tutors and were doing calc in fifth grade. There were two girls in that class.
After that I stopped being a problem for the school board.
e:You're missing the most likely motive. "Fuck those kids, I hope they die.".
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
The fastest students were finishing three or four times faster than the average students and as much as ten times faster than the slowest students. The standard deviation is outrageous.
...
The quality of the work and the amount of time spent are simply uncorrelated.
...
The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.
As mentioned it's industry-dependent, but in some cases? Absolutely, there's a huge (or even negative) ratio between top-level and bottom-level performance.
Do you really think that 10% of programmers represent the majority of productivity for programming as a whole?
Most important line in that article:
This data is not completely scientific.
I know. Also the fact that it's entirely a sale pitch for hiring "high quality" programmers over others, without giving any metric at all as to how quality is measured, discussing repeatability of past quality, etc. It comes across, to me, as "Don't outsource our jobs to India".
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
You also see it in cryptography and computer security on the defense side. You don't just need to be smarter than the average person on the other side, you need to be smarter than all of the people on the other side for the entire span of the useful life of the product, to include anticipating future technologies and mathematical theory developments. That's a pretty high bar to meet.
I've even been on the wrong side of that. I'm pretty weak at learning languages, but after, say, 4000 hours of study, I got modestly decent at Arabic. In, say, 2000 hours of study, my friend was so good that native speakers could not identify him as a non-native speaker (which, incidentally, he was also non-native at English, which I only found out about after knowing for for 3 years or so).
It's definitely worthwhile to identify individuals with natural talent for X, whatever X is, and then cultivate it. You can teach nearly any person with motivation and without any severe defects to be average, but when possible, it is far wiser to take the exceptional and make them even more exceptional. As this relates to educational policy in specific, having advanced courses and allowing some level of self-direction (AP classes aren't appropriate for everyone, but should exist for those who want it) is useful at this goal.
As to gifted programs vs. special education, you need both, but I'd argue you could trim a few of the latter without any substantial issue. The bottom, say, 0.1% (very roughly estimated figure that may be super wrong) are very, very disproportionately expensive and produce the worst improvements on a per dollar basis. When you're talking about people who will not be able to live independently regardless of engagement with the educational system, they shouldn't be eating into the general educational budget, and we should really think hard about where the appropriate cost/value of what services are provided.
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
You also see it in cryptography and computer security on the defense side. You don't just need to be smarter than the average person on the other side, you need to be smarter than all of the people on the other side for the entire span of the useful life of the product, to include anticipating future technologies and mathematical theory developments. That's a pretty high bar to meet.
I've even been on the wrong side of that. I'm pretty weak at learning languages, but after, say, 4000 hours of study, I got modestly decent at Arabic. In, say, 2000 hours of study, my friend was so good that native speakers could not identify him as a non-native speaker (which, incidentally, he was also non-native at English, which I only found out about after knowing for for 3 years or so).
It's definitely worthwhile to identify individuals with natural talent for X, whatever X is, and then cultivate it. You can teach nearly any person with motivation and without any severe defects to be average, but when possible, it is far wiser to take the exceptional and make them even more exceptional. As this relates to educational policy in specific, having advanced courses and allowing some level of self-direction (AP classes aren't appropriate for everyone, but should exist for those who want it) is useful at this goal.
As to gifted programs vs. special education, you need both, but I'd argue you could trim a few of the latter without any substantial issue. The bottom, say, 0.1% (very roughly estimated figure that may be super wrong) are very, very disproportionately expensive and produce the worst improvements on a per dollar basis. When you're talking about people who will not be able to live independently regardless of engagement with the educational system, they shouldn't be eating into the general educational budget, and we should really think hard about where the appropriate cost/value of what services are provided.
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Many moons ago, when I was in undergrad, I read some research supporting the claim that tracking high-performing students out of regular interaction with their lower-performing peers produced some modest improvements for the high-performers being tracked out, but also produced catastrophic drops for the low-performers being left behind. If this is still so, then it seems to me to be another reason (on top of the already-enumerated class-based suspicion) to be skeptical of aggressive tracking.
I'm also pretty skeptical of people's school-related anecdotes, at least when it comes to using them as a basis for diagnoses of 'what's wrong' with the school system. One reason is that the school system, even in the single manifestation of one local school, is much larger than any individual or family, and policies have tremendous effects that a single parent could not even under the best circumstances be alive to. Another reason is that school is seat of a lot of important identities, and the stories we tell about school in its relation to ourselves, our children, ourselves as parents of our children, and so on, are extremely high-stakes when it comes to defining our self-conception. But people are really bad at objectively understanding things which are high-stakes to their self-conception. The idea of 'gifted' children and their treatment seems especially fraught here.
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
You also see it in cryptography and computer security on the defense side. You don't just need to be smarter than the average person on the other side, you need to be smarter than all of the people on the other side for the entire span of the useful life of the product, to include anticipating future technologies and mathematical theory developments. That's a pretty high bar to meet.
I've even been on the wrong side of that. I'm pretty weak at learning languages, but after, say, 4000 hours of study, I got modestly decent at Arabic. In, say, 2000 hours of study, my friend was so good that native speakers could not identify him as a non-native speaker (which, incidentally, he was also non-native at English, which I only found out about after knowing for for 3 years or so).
It's definitely worthwhile to identify individuals with natural talent for X, whatever X is, and then cultivate it. You can teach nearly any person with motivation and without any severe defects to be average, but when possible, it is far wiser to take the exceptional and make them even more exceptional. As this relates to educational policy in specific, having advanced courses and allowing some level of self-direction (AP classes aren't appropriate for everyone, but should exist for those who want it) is useful at this goal.
As to gifted programs vs. special education, you need both, but I'd argue you could trim a few of the latter without any substantial issue. The bottom, say, 0.1% (very roughly estimated figure that may be super wrong) are very, very disproportionately expensive and produce the worst improvements on a per dollar basis. When you're talking about people who will not be able to live independently regardless of engagement with the educational system, they shouldn't be eating into the general educational budget, and we should really think hard about where the appropriate cost/value of what services are provided.
Ability to do a job is ability to do a job. It doesn't matter if an employment law attorney is tone deaf, but it does matter if a musician is, so even if that was the entirety of the case, it supports my point that identifying and cultivating natural talents is important. Leaving any morality aside, being unable to perform the necessary functions in a job makes you incompetent at it.
Besides, that's not the extent of it, as anyone who was worked with a cross section of skill levels know. It's frightening how bad the Afghan National Army is, for example. Honestly, the difference is so apparent, even someone with no military background whatsoever could trivially notice a night and day between them vs., say, US Special Operations.
Do you really think that 10% of programmers represent the majority of productivity for programming as a whole?
Maybe not 10%, but there can be a massive difference in productivity, with the low end being negative even - there were some co-op students/interns that we spent more time cleaning up what they did, than would have taken to do it in the first place. My first co-op job was cleaning up the mess of a program a previous co-op had made that everybody was using but was horribly crashy (I'd fix several crashes or deadlocks a week, every week, for a few months straight)
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
You also see it in cryptography and computer security on the defense side. You don't just need to be smarter than the average person on the other side, you need to be smarter than all of the people on the other side for the entire span of the useful life of the product, to include anticipating future technologies and mathematical theory developments. That's a pretty high bar to meet.
I've even been on the wrong side of that. I'm pretty weak at learning languages, but after, say, 4000 hours of study, I got modestly decent at Arabic. In, say, 2000 hours of study, my friend was so good that native speakers could not identify him as a non-native speaker (which, incidentally, he was also non-native at English, which I only found out about after knowing for for 3 years or so).
It's definitely worthwhile to identify individuals with natural talent for X, whatever X is, and then cultivate it. You can teach nearly any person with motivation and without any severe defects to be average, but when possible, it is far wiser to take the exceptional and make them even more exceptional. As this relates to educational policy in specific, having advanced courses and allowing some level of self-direction (AP classes aren't appropriate for everyone, but should exist for those who want it) is useful at this goal.
As to gifted programs vs. special education, you need both, but I'd argue you could trim a few of the latter without any substantial issue. The bottom, say, 0.1% (very roughly estimated figure that may be super wrong) are very, very disproportionately expensive and produce the worst improvements on a per dollar basis. When you're talking about people who will not be able to live independently regardless of engagement with the educational system, they shouldn't be eating into the general educational budget, and we should really think hard about where the appropriate cost/value of what services are provided.
Ability to do a job is ability to do a job. It doesn't matter if an employment law attorney is tone deaf, but it does matter if a musician is, so even if that was the entirety of the case, it supports my point that identifying and cultivating natural talents is important. Leaving any morality aside, being unable to perform the necessary functions in a job makes you incompetent at it.
Besides, that's not the extent of it, as anyone who was worked with a cross section of skill levels know. It's frightening how bad the Afghan National Army is, for example. Honestly, the difference is so apparent, even someone with no military background whatsoever could trivially notice a night and day between them vs., say, US Special Operations.
Then how about this - body count is probably not the best metric for determining soldier quality. Hell, it's probably not even a good metric for determining the quality of "elite" units like SOCOM because of the nature of their work.
And this revolves around to a routine criticism of the tech industry - because tech is so overly focused on "hard" tech skills, they find that they struggle with non-technical skillsets - this is a massive problem in open source, where they routinely find it hard to get people who can do a lot of the supposedly "soft" stuff, like technical writing and organization.
Is there any evidence that gifted programs do anything for elementary school kids? I say this as someone who went through a gifted program, btw.
All that really matters for "preparing for college" is to take a bunch of AP classes in high school, learning test-taking strategy/game theory for standardized tests, and spending your free time outside of school on resume-building extracurriculars (if you care about/can afford top-tier private schools, anyway). As long as you're on track for that in middle school, you're fine.
Let me ask you a question. Would you have been able to take your AP classes in high school, without having been through the gifted programs earlier?
My high school did not do the Advanced Placement curriculum, but since I tested out of Calculus 101 & 102 at college, the equivalent of 2 years of AP Calculus (AB and BC), I can comment that my high school used accelerated math classes starting in 9th grade. And the only kids who could handle the accelerated math classes, with just a handful of exceptions, had been in the gifted middle school program with me.
Aka, by 12th grade, you had a set of kids who finished at calculus 2, a set who finished at calculus 1, a set who finished in pre-calculus, and a set who finished in trigonometry. Where you ended up was almost entirely based upon how much math you already knew going into 9th grade.
Yes, people in my High School did exactly that. It was more common with Language courses, but my AP Calc class had 30 students. The G&T programs I participated in focused on a group of 10-15 kids in my class. No Child Left Behind and Common Core are extremely un-popular, but my understanding is that criticism it is mostly focused on their implementation, not the philosophical intent of the laws to provide a quality education to all kids in the country, regardless of their socio-economic background.
...yes, there are massive problems with NCLB/Race To The Top/Common Core. I think that I have posted numerous times about how they are horribly flawed.
But here's the thing - the old system wasn't all that great either, and I say this as someone who benefitted from that system. Yes, I went through my school's gifted program, which in turn allowed me to effectively be a college freshman my senior year of high school. I also got to see how the school district struggled to keep students in lower tracks engaged, and how the suburban parents routinely tried to bleed off support for the urban schools for their own children. I also saw that my classes were predominantly filled with the children of the local professional class and "bedroom community" professional commuters.
So no, I don't think there are two choices here. And I also think that, for all the flaws in these programs (and God knows they are numerous), actually forcing the schools to stop writing off non-college track students is a good thing.
I don't know how it works in the states, but in Canada where I grew up there wasn't really a "gifted" program per se (a few specialized schools for the early grades, I qualified for but didn't go to one). Through grades 7-12 everything was common, though maybe they would bump you a year ahead? There were advanced math classes from 7+ and the option of doing several AP classes if you had completed the appropriate HS course already, but none of that was school dependent
Yes, people in my High School did exactly that. It was more common with Language courses, but my AP Calc class had 30 students. The G&T programs I participated in focused on a group of 10-15 kids in my class. No Child Left Behind and Common Core are extremely un-popular, but my understanding is that criticism it is mostly focused on their implementation, not the philosophical intent of the laws to provide a quality education to all kids in the country, regardless of their socio-economic background.
Yeah, the problem with Common Core is that it's pretty much a ploy to enable privatization of education in the US.
To say there are problems with those assumptions is to say that the Pacific is a bit wet. Take the argument about production of classical music: to argue the 90/10 theory there while ignoring the patronage-based system in use is rather problematic.
Edit: Actually, the issue there is that they are confusing profligacy with quality. Volume of production is only a sign of skill in the most menial of tasks.
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
You also see it in cryptography and computer security on the defense side. You don't just need to be smarter than the average person on the other side, you need to be smarter than all of the people on the other side for the entire span of the useful life of the product, to include anticipating future technologies and mathematical theory developments. That's a pretty high bar to meet.
I've even been on the wrong side of that. I'm pretty weak at learning languages, but after, say, 4000 hours of study, I got modestly decent at Arabic. In, say, 2000 hours of study, my friend was so good that native speakers could not identify him as a non-native speaker (which, incidentally, he was also non-native at English, which I only found out about after knowing for for 3 years or so).
It's definitely worthwhile to identify individuals with natural talent for X, whatever X is, and then cultivate it. You can teach nearly any person with motivation and without any severe defects to be average, but when possible, it is far wiser to take the exceptional and make them even more exceptional. As this relates to educational policy in specific, having advanced courses and allowing some level of self-direction (AP classes aren't appropriate for everyone, but should exist for those who want it) is useful at this goal.
As to gifted programs vs. special education, you need both, but I'd argue you could trim a few of the latter without any substantial issue. The bottom, say, 0.1% (very roughly estimated figure that may be super wrong) are very, very disproportionately expensive and produce the worst improvements on a per dollar basis. When you're talking about people who will not be able to live independently regardless of engagement with the educational system, they shouldn't be eating into the general educational budget, and we should really think hard about where the appropriate cost/value of what services are provided.
Ability to do a job is ability to do a job. It doesn't matter if an employment law attorney is tone deaf, but it does matter if a musician is, so even if that was the entirety of the case, it supports my point that identifying and cultivating natural talents is important. Leaving any morality aside, being unable to perform the necessary functions in a job makes you incompetent at it.
Besides, that's not the extent of it, as anyone who was worked with a cross section of skill levels know. It's frightening how bad the Afghan National Army is, for example. Honestly, the difference is so apparent, even someone with no military background whatsoever could trivially notice a night and day between them vs., say, US Special Operations.
Then how about this - body count is probably not the best metric for determining soldier quality. Hell, it's probably not even a good metric for determining the quality of "elite" units like SOCOM because of the nature of their work.
And this revolves around to a routine criticism of the tech industry - because tech is so overly focused on "hard" tech skills, they find that they struggle with non-technical skillsets - this is a massive problem in open source, where they routinely find it hard to get people who can do a lot of the supposedly "soft" stuff, like technical writing and organization.
My observations working in tech fields for many years:
1) Most com-sci/engineering/etc grads can't write worth shit.
2) The old rules about some organization and basic excel skills will have people fawning over you still apply.
That shit still has to be done and everyone hates it. Once place I worked literally paid it's programmers to do documentation as a seperate thing cause it was the only way they'd found to make them fucking do it.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Yeah, the problem with Common Core is that it's pretty much a ploy to enable privatization of education in the US.
The right hates it too: at the county party meeting they had the superintendent as a guest speaker. He's all for the original idea of Common Core, where a test you take in Alabama is the same level as Oregon's, and he didn't mind the inclusion of Koranic verses as examples (he stressed this when people brought it up) for children to read, but he bemoaned that college professors wrote the thing, saying that they made it too complicated.
Personally, I blame the Education Reform "industry". Not the idiots who clamor for private, non-religious charter schools, but the "advisers", "consultants" and "contractors" who are paid taxpayer dollars to brainstorm in committees and think tanks before coming up with "Education is awful, pay us more". If you want an example, look what happened to Zuckerberg's billion dollars- not a dime of it reached teachers or kids.
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
The military is a terrible example. For the U.S. Military, there are (according to wikipedia) 160K soldiers stationed abroad, and about 1,150k stationed in the US. When you start talking about the number of soldiers deployed in an active combat zone, the ratio becomes even more skewed. So, I would expect that the number of kills a soldier makes to be significantly skewed due to the deployment. I would also state that the number of kills a soldier makes is not a good measurement of military productivity, because otherwise the US would be taking actions to insure that domestic soldiers had more opportunities to kill.
Furthermore, realize that taking the position that 10% of people in a profession account for 50% of the productivity combined with the idea of a meritocracy would entirely justify the current wealth gap. That same wealth gap that has been debunked so many times on this forum. Just in this thread alone we've seen the wealthy engage in wage fixing of both highly talented programmers and "low end" foreign citizens brought to the U.S. on work visas.
America's television execs steal the best ideas and shows from other countries. Why doesn't our education system do the same?
Where would we steal from? The Asian method of rote memorization is great at producing mathematicians and engineers but is terrible at promoting creativity, which is ideally something we'd like to have. The Nordic countries don't have failing inner city schools, or for that matter inner cities. Plus, we're an empire the size of the E.U. with a third of a billion people. Any switching is going to get expensive, fast.
America's television execs steal the best ideas and shows from other countries. Why doesn't our education system do the same?
That's kind of what we are trying to do. The major issue is that the U.S. education system works at the local level - with varying systems of state control. Part of the federal policy for the last twenty years has been about using federal funds to slowly wean Americans away from the idea that their local school board should be the ones in control of educational policy.
So, like a lot of modern domestic policy, we get bureaucrats and politicians trying to sneak change in through the back door through incentives and forced standardization. No one wants to be the one who gets up and says, "Yes, the American education system should be controlled by the American government" so you get a death of a thousand cuts to local control.
America's television execs steal the best ideas and shows from other countries. Why doesn't our education system do the same?
Where would we steal from? The Asian method of rote memorization is great at producing mathematicians and engineers but is terrible at promoting creativity, which is ideally something we'd like to have. The Nordic countries don't have failing inner city schools, or for that matter inner cities. Plus, we're an empire the size of the E.U. with a third of a billion people. Any switching is going to get expensive, fast.
Hell, it's not even great at producing those, in large part because of the stifling of creativity.
Our PISA and NAEP scores always point to a slow and steady slight improvement over time. Kids in high school today are better educated than when we were in high school and we were better educated than our parents. We aren't the best, but we've never been the best, so the fact that this hasn't changed doesn't strike me as worrisome. Nor that we need to wholly reconsider our methods of schooling. Particularly since the primary culprit in poor test scores is poverty and white supremacy related. We have some of the smartest rich white kids in the world.
This is crap, because I'm seeing the opposite happen, in front of my eyes, with my nephews and nieces.
Due to common core and no child left behind polices, the schools have removed the advanced / gifted student programs, in order to staff the learning disabilities programs.
This means the smart kids are left to themselves. In my generation, I got to take advantage of the gifted student programs. In the generation before me, kids would have skipped a grade. Either way, the smart kids would be pushed harder.
But my nephews and nieces have neither of those choices. The school district will NOT let the smart kids skip grades, because it would make them look bad on the common core tests. Likewise, the school district no longer has a gifted program for the smart kids to go to (because, as I pointed out earlier, that money was spent on special ed teaching assistants).
Did I mention that this elementary school is the highest rated one in the state?
Thus, what is happening is that, on average all kids are getting smarter only because the dumbest kids are getting less dumb. The smart kids though, they aren't getting smarter, they're getting held back. By the time they reach college, they'll be far below the education levels of the international students, unless the parents take drastic measure, like private schooling or private tutoring.
That's what I'm seeing happen right now, right in front of my eyes.
I would love to bring one nephew in particular to Boston in a few years, and get him enrolled in Boston Latin exam school. Or maybe help pay his tuition to Philips Academy or Philips Exeter. Because it's obvious that the top public school in his state won't cut it.
So, in short, you're arguing that the problem is that we're not just dismissing the kids at the bottom as lost causes and actually trying to give them the education that they are legally entitled to?
Do I need to point out how that sounds?
The problem isn't that kids at the bottom aren't being dismissed, it's that the services they're getting are coming from funds that used to help the kids at the top. It's robbing Paul to pay Peter. Ideally, programs would be in place to help both groups, with school budgets being increased accordingly. Except this is America, where "Taxes are theft." doesn't get you laughed out of the discussion.
Even framing it that way is problematic, especially considering how much socioeconomic status and school performance are tied together. It is in a very real way arguing that it is somehow wrong that support is being taken from the haves and given to the have-nots. And while I agree that we should be able to fund both, I also think that, all things considered, the group that has been historically underserved deserves the first shot.
One thing to consider is that the top 10 percent of people in a given discipline are more productive than the bottom 90 percent combined. If you take a gifted child and challenge them, instill a love of learning, maybe give them a head start on the skills they'll need for further education, you create an exceptional worker. Take that same gifted child and bore them to death so they learn to hate school, and you've just squandered a ton of potential. Failing a gifted student is not better than failing a slow one.
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
The military is a terrible example. For the U.S. Military, there are (according to wikipedia) 160K soldiers stationed abroad, and about 1,150k stationed in the US. When you start talking about the number of soldiers deployed in an active combat zone, the ratio becomes even more skewed. So, I would expect that the number of kills a soldier makes to be significantly skewed due to the deployment. I would also state that the number of kills a soldier makes is not a good measurement of military productivity, because otherwise the US would be taking actions to insure that domestic soldiers had more opportunities to kill.
There are obviously some caveats regardless, but that's a deliberately dumb way to interpret that data point. Many soldiers spend a significant portion of their career training in a non-operational environment, so you'd obviously not include people not doing their jobs in an assessment of how well they do their jobs, much like you don't ask how well they are doing their jobs during their free time, either. You'd also want to look at a group size larger than individuals, as, say, the platoon leader has a management role, and the guy guarding the rear may very well not do anything if the enemy doesn't try to flank you, but is still an essential part of the process in case they do.
It's super complex and we could have a whole thread on it that goes into depth about all sorts of sub-issues, but the core concept is pretty obvious.
Furthermore, realize that taking the position that 10% of people in a profession account for 50% of the productivity combined with the idea of a meritocracy would entirely justify the current wealth gap. That same wealth gap that has been debunked so many times on this forum. Just in this thread alone we've seen the wealthy engage in wage fixing of both highly talented programmers and "low end" foreign citizens brought to the U.S. on work visas.
Two separate issues. Recognizing your best engineer is way better than your worst engineer has nothing to do with billionaires being billionaires. Much of their wealth is acquired just by having wealth, not due to any special merit. Moreover, while I'd argue a little bit of income inequality is a good thing, it's not an unlimited warrant, so it's entirely possible to argue that the best engineer is far better than the average engineer and deserves to be compensated for such, but it isn't a suggestion that five mansions and the first car that is 10% diamond by weight is the correct compensation for such.
I don't have anything against the idea of common core. I like the idea that kids in every school on every state are being thigh the same thing, though maybe in a different way depending on the teacher. The problem as I seer it, and I'm in no way an expert mind you, is the content of common core. The math is so backwards to even people with college level math skills it makes no sense, the way they are teaching history has never been great but this is worse.
I don't really know the solution, but I think our school system is one of our countries biggest problems and isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves.
America's television execs steal the best ideas and shows from other countries. Why doesn't our education system do the same?
That's kind of what we are trying to do. The major issue is that the U.S. education system works at the local level - with varying systems of state control. Part of the federal policy for the last twenty years has been about using federal funds to slowly wean Americans away from the idea that their local school board should be the ones in control of educational policy.
So, like a lot of modern domestic policy, we get bureaucrats and politicians trying to sneak change in through the back door through incentives and forced standardization. No one wants to be the one who gets up and says, "Yes, the American education system should be controlled by the American government" so you get a death of a thousand cuts to local control.
Local educational control is a silly relic of a stupider time.
America's television execs steal the best ideas and shows from other countries. Why doesn't our education system do the same?
Where would we steal from? The Asian method of rote memorization is great at producing mathematicians and engineers but is terrible at promoting creativity, which is ideally something we'd like to have. The Nordic countries don't have failing inner city schools, or for that matter inner cities. Plus, we're an empire the size of the E.U. with a third of a billion people. Any switching is going to get expensive, fast.
Just a pet peeve, and I know you didn't intend it, but I absolutely loathe the way 'inner city' is used. It was invented as a synechdoche for poor black people (same with 'urban') but just doesn't make any damn sense for most cities. Know what the innermost part of the city of Chicago is? The Loop and River North. Know how much it costs to live there? Oprah is the token black person. Inner-city New York? Midtown. Central Park doesn't have many Hoovervilles anymore. LA has its skid row downtown, but LA is kind of special.
Also, the EU has a proper half a billion people. They aren't as integrated as we are governmentally (or culturally or language wise) but its not as though we are uniquely large to address problems. Our rural areas are more remote is about the only main difference.
Is there any evidence that gifted programs do anything for elementary school kids? I say this as someone who went through a gifted program, btw.
All that really matters for "preparing for college" is to take a bunch of AP classes in high school, learning test-taking strategy/game theory for standardized tests, and spending your free time outside of school on resume-building extracurriculars (if you care about/can afford top-tier private schools, anyway). As long as you're on track for that in middle school, you're fine.
Let me ask you a question. Would you have been able to take your AP classes in high school, without having been through the gifted programs earlier?
My high school did not do the Advanced Placement curriculum, but since I tested out of Calculus 101 & 102 at college, the equivalent of 2 years of AP Calculus (AB and BC), I can comment that my high school used accelerated math classes starting in 9th grade. And the only kids who could handle the accelerated math classes, with just a handful of exceptions, had been in the gifted middle school program with me.
Aka, by 12th grade, you had a set of kids who finished at calculus 2, a set who finished at calculus 1, a set who finished in pre-calculus, and a set who finished in trigonometry. Where you ended up was almost entirely based upon how much math you already knew going into 9th grade.
Very few of the people who were in my middle school gifted program were in any of my high school AP classes. The only thing that set me up for AP calc was taking algebra 1 in 8th grade. Access to AP classes was only really gated by teacher recommendations in the previous year. The only real benefit I got from my gifted program was learning how to write a properly sourced research paper a couple years before it comes up in the "college prep" English classes.
Also, calc BC translating to Calc 2 is not a rock-solid rule. My college just let you use a 3 instead of a 4 to opt out of Calc 1 if you took BC.
Well sure. I know its like the least popular opinion on the planet, but we are planned to spent 65 billion on DoD R&D alone in 2015 (according to the president's planned proposal from last year). We could cut...I dunno, 3 billion from that maybe? It won't solve anything magically but it'll help.
Well sure. I know its like the least popular opinion on the planet, but we are planned to spent 65 billion on DoD R&D alone in 2015 (according to the president's planned proposal from last year). We could cut...I dunno, 3 billion from that maybe? It won't solve anything magically but it'll help.
We could get a lot done if we just reallocated like 2-3% of the defense budget each year. It's the largest discretionary outlay by far I think.
Well sure. I know its like the least popular opinion on the planet, but we are planned to spent 65 billion on DoD R&D alone in 2015 (according to the president's planned proposal from last year). We could cut...I dunno, 3 billion from that maybe? It won't solve anything magically but it'll help.
It would help, but if we're cutting stuff and switching the money over to education why not cut oil subsidies or military contractors instead of R&D. Also I was referring to the fact that the people who broke the education system via Common Core almost certainly will be the ones hired to fix it, thus getting paid twice for screwing up.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Well sure. I know its like the least popular opinion on the planet, but we are planned to spent 65 billion on DoD R&D alone in 2015 (according to the president's planned proposal from last year). We could cut...I dunno, 3 billion from that maybe? It won't solve anything magically but it'll help.
We could get a lot done if we just reallocated like 2-3% of the defense budget each year. It's the largest discretionary outlay by far I think.
It would never happen.
The first thing the DOD would cut would be VA and personnel funding.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Well sure. I know its like the least popular opinion on the planet, but we are planned to spent 65 billion on DoD R&D alone in 2015 (according to the president's planned proposal from last year). We could cut...I dunno, 3 billion from that maybe? It won't solve anything magically but it'll help.
It would help, but if we're cutting stuff and switching the money over to education why not cut oil subsidies or military contractors instead of R&D. Also I was referring to the fact that the people who broke the education system via Common Core almost certainly will be the ones hired to fix it, thus getting paid twice for screwing up.
Unfortunately, we can't cut those specific areas. The DOD has control of their own budget.
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The idea that everyone should have as good education as possible, affordably and as free of any charges as possible, is such a base level idea, that i can never really wrap around my mind why anyone would think of it as a good idea not to have that.
Sure, not everyone can go to the best university, but the limiting factor should be how smart you are and how dedicated in your studies, not the size of your parents bank account.
Seems sensible, until you realize the people with money like the advantages they intrinsically have, and love their kids way more than they want to give unfortunate kids a fair chance. It's that selfishness people forgive themselves for.
I rode the short bus to school four days a week, then on Wednesday I'd become the dumbest genius after spending a week as the smartest fuck up.
My classmates were Nazi Kid, Fat Native Kid who got picked on, Kid who tried but had methhead parents, Athletic kid who nearly killed a kid, my girlfriend from first grade, and Josh.
Josh was a younger, dumber version of me who wouldn't shut up. I shut him up.
The behavior mod class went from school to school, a carnival of the damned. Throughout the years I went on and off meds, got into fights, and provoked comments about how the teachers all got into behavior mod thinking that it was gifted and talented. Eventually the gifted and talented program dumped me because I fucked their numbers.
My mother, bless her heart, tried one last time to advocate on my behalf. I got picked up by the bus that goes to Country Club by the college. I was then dropped in JASON with the kids who had tutors and were doing calc in fifth grade. There were two girls in that class.
After that I stopped being a problem for the school board.
e:You're missing the most likely motive. "Fuck those kids, I hope they die.".
So you think the top 10% of assembly line works represent over 50% of the total assembly line production, the top 10% of janitors represent over 50% of janitorial production, or the top 10% of engineers represent over 50% of total engineering production?
Poppycock, I say! Find this highly dubious even in industries such as sports that have laser focus on the top talents.
This is the kind of drivel that leads to studies showing that 94% of college professors rate themselves as above average. Or CEOs demanding to be compensated better than 75% of their peers, resulting in an exponential growth in CEO wages while everyone else stagnates.
I think this is more the idea:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
As mentioned it's industry-dependent, but in some cases? Absolutely, there's a huge (or even negative) ratio between top-level and bottom-level performance.
Most important line in that article:
I know. Also the fact that it's entirely a sale pitch for hiring "high quality" programmers over others, without giving any metric at all as to how quality is measured, discussing repeatability of past quality, etc. It comes across, to me, as "Don't outsource our jobs to India".
As other said, it depends, but where it is true, it is very true. In militaries in particular, a very small percentage of individuals produce the majority of the casualties, partly due to different equipment (A-10 plane vs. a rifle), but also due to elite individuals within normal units and also self-selected elite units. I'd actually argue one of the primary organizational goals of a military should be identifying and correctly positioning the top 10%.
You also see it in cryptography and computer security on the defense side. You don't just need to be smarter than the average person on the other side, you need to be smarter than all of the people on the other side for the entire span of the useful life of the product, to include anticipating future technologies and mathematical theory developments. That's a pretty high bar to meet.
I've even been on the wrong side of that. I'm pretty weak at learning languages, but after, say, 4000 hours of study, I got modestly decent at Arabic. In, say, 2000 hours of study, my friend was so good that native speakers could not identify him as a non-native speaker (which, incidentally, he was also non-native at English, which I only found out about after knowing for for 3 years or so).
It's definitely worthwhile to identify individuals with natural talent for X, whatever X is, and then cultivate it. You can teach nearly any person with motivation and without any severe defects to be average, but when possible, it is far wiser to take the exceptional and make them even more exceptional. As this relates to educational policy in specific, having advanced courses and allowing some level of self-direction (AP classes aren't appropriate for everyone, but should exist for those who want it) is useful at this goal.
As to gifted programs vs. special education, you need both, but I'd argue you could trim a few of the latter without any substantial issue. The bottom, say, 0.1% (very roughly estimated figure that may be super wrong) are very, very disproportionately expensive and produce the worst improvements on a per dollar basis. When you're talking about people who will not be able to live independently regardless of engagement with the educational system, they shouldn't be eating into the general educational budget, and we should really think hard about where the appropriate cost/value of what services are provided.
The military example is flawed because, as the military itself has researched, you are dealing with levels of sociopathy not competence.
I'm also pretty skeptical of people's school-related anecdotes, at least when it comes to using them as a basis for diagnoses of 'what's wrong' with the school system. One reason is that the school system, even in the single manifestation of one local school, is much larger than any individual or family, and policies have tremendous effects that a single parent could not even under the best circumstances be alive to. Another reason is that school is seat of a lot of important identities, and the stories we tell about school in its relation to ourselves, our children, ourselves as parents of our children, and so on, are extremely high-stakes when it comes to defining our self-conception. But people are really bad at objectively understanding things which are high-stakes to their self-conception. The idea of 'gifted' children and their treatment seems especially fraught here.
Ability to do a job is ability to do a job. It doesn't matter if an employment law attorney is tone deaf, but it does matter if a musician is, so even if that was the entirety of the case, it supports my point that identifying and cultivating natural talents is important. Leaving any morality aside, being unable to perform the necessary functions in a job makes you incompetent at it.
Besides, that's not the extent of it, as anyone who was worked with a cross section of skill levels know. It's frightening how bad the Afghan National Army is, for example. Honestly, the difference is so apparent, even someone with no military background whatsoever could trivially notice a night and day between them vs., say, US Special Operations.
Maybe not 10%, but there can be a massive difference in productivity, with the low end being negative even - there were some co-op students/interns that we spent more time cleaning up what they did, than would have taken to do it in the first place. My first co-op job was cleaning up the mess of a program a previous co-op had made that everybody was using but was horribly crashy (I'd fix several crashes or deadlocks a week, every week, for a few months straight)
Then how about this - body count is probably not the best metric for determining soldier quality. Hell, it's probably not even a good metric for determining the quality of "elite" units like SOCOM because of the nature of their work.
And this revolves around to a routine criticism of the tech industry - because tech is so overly focused on "hard" tech skills, they find that they struggle with non-technical skillsets - this is a massive problem in open source, where they routinely find it hard to get people who can do a lot of the supposedly "soft" stuff, like technical writing and organization.
My high school did not do the Advanced Placement curriculum, but since I tested out of Calculus 101 & 102 at college, the equivalent of 2 years of AP Calculus (AB and BC), I can comment that my high school used accelerated math classes starting in 9th grade. And the only kids who could handle the accelerated math classes, with just a handful of exceptions, had been in the gifted middle school program with me.
Aka, by 12th grade, you had a set of kids who finished at calculus 2, a set who finished at calculus 1, a set who finished in pre-calculus, and a set who finished in trigonometry. Where you ended up was almost entirely based upon how much math you already knew going into 9th grade.
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And I'll just leave this link here. There's a revolt going on, with common core / no child left behind. It ain't just me.
http://www.longislandpress.com/2015/04/15/record-shattering-numbers-of-long-island-students-opting-out-of-common-core-testing/
But here's the thing - the old system wasn't all that great either, and I say this as someone who benefitted from that system. Yes, I went through my school's gifted program, which in turn allowed me to effectively be a college freshman my senior year of high school. I also got to see how the school district struggled to keep students in lower tracks engaged, and how the suburban parents routinely tried to bleed off support for the urban schools for their own children. I also saw that my classes were predominantly filled with the children of the local professional class and "bedroom community" professional commuters.
So no, I don't think there are two choices here. And I also think that, for all the flaws in these programs (and God knows they are numerous), actually forcing the schools to stop writing off non-college track students is a good thing.
Pretty much what everyone in my high school did.
Incidentally I was in a gifted program for a couple years and was in zero AP classes as it'd killed any desire I had to learn.
Yeah, the problem with Common Core is that it's pretty much a ploy to enable privatization of education in the US.
To say there are problems with those assumptions is to say that the Pacific is a bit wet. Take the argument about production of classical music: to argue the 90/10 theory there while ignoring the patronage-based system in use is rather problematic.
Edit: Actually, the issue there is that they are confusing profligacy with quality. Volume of production is only a sign of skill in the most menial of tasks.
My observations working in tech fields for many years:
1) Most com-sci/engineering/etc grads can't write worth shit.
2) The old rules about some organization and basic excel skills will have people fawning over you still apply.
That shit still has to be done and everyone hates it. Once place I worked literally paid it's programmers to do documentation as a seperate thing cause it was the only way they'd found to make them fucking do it.
The right hates it too: at the county party meeting they had the superintendent as a guest speaker. He's all for the original idea of Common Core, where a test you take in Alabama is the same level as Oregon's, and he didn't mind the inclusion of Koranic verses as examples (he stressed this when people brought it up) for children to read, but he bemoaned that college professors wrote the thing, saying that they made it too complicated.
Personally, I blame the Education Reform "industry". Not the idiots who clamor for private, non-religious charter schools, but the "advisers", "consultants" and "contractors" who are paid taxpayer dollars to brainstorm in committees and think tanks before coming up with "Education is awful, pay us more". If you want an example, look what happened to Zuckerberg's billion dollars- not a dime of it reached teachers or kids.
The military is a terrible example. For the U.S. Military, there are (according to wikipedia) 160K soldiers stationed abroad, and about 1,150k stationed in the US. When you start talking about the number of soldiers deployed in an active combat zone, the ratio becomes even more skewed. So, I would expect that the number of kills a soldier makes to be significantly skewed due to the deployment. I would also state that the number of kills a soldier makes is not a good measurement of military productivity, because otherwise the US would be taking actions to insure that domestic soldiers had more opportunities to kill.
Furthermore, realize that taking the position that 10% of people in a profession account for 50% of the productivity combined with the idea of a meritocracy would entirely justify the current wealth gap. That same wealth gap that has been debunked so many times on this forum. Just in this thread alone we've seen the wealthy engage in wage fixing of both highly talented programmers and "low end" foreign citizens brought to the U.S. on work visas.
Where would we steal from? The Asian method of rote memorization is great at producing mathematicians and engineers but is terrible at promoting creativity, which is ideally something we'd like to have. The Nordic countries don't have failing inner city schools, or for that matter inner cities. Plus, we're an empire the size of the E.U. with a third of a billion people. Any switching is going to get expensive, fast.
That's kind of what we are trying to do. The major issue is that the U.S. education system works at the local level - with varying systems of state control. Part of the federal policy for the last twenty years has been about using federal funds to slowly wean Americans away from the idea that their local school board should be the ones in control of educational policy.
So, like a lot of modern domestic policy, we get bureaucrats and politicians trying to sneak change in through the back door through incentives and forced standardization. No one wants to be the one who gets up and says, "Yes, the American education system should be controlled by the American government" so you get a death of a thousand cuts to local control.
Hell, it's not even great at producing those, in large part because of the stifling of creativity.
There are obviously some caveats regardless, but that's a deliberately dumb way to interpret that data point. Many soldiers spend a significant portion of their career training in a non-operational environment, so you'd obviously not include people not doing their jobs in an assessment of how well they do their jobs, much like you don't ask how well they are doing their jobs during their free time, either. You'd also want to look at a group size larger than individuals, as, say, the platoon leader has a management role, and the guy guarding the rear may very well not do anything if the enemy doesn't try to flank you, but is still an essential part of the process in case they do.
It's super complex and we could have a whole thread on it that goes into depth about all sorts of sub-issues, but the core concept is pretty obvious.
Two separate issues. Recognizing your best engineer is way better than your worst engineer has nothing to do with billionaires being billionaires. Much of their wealth is acquired just by having wealth, not due to any special merit. Moreover, while I'd argue a little bit of income inequality is a good thing, it's not an unlimited warrant, so it's entirely possible to argue that the best engineer is far better than the average engineer and deserves to be compensated for such, but it isn't a suggestion that five mansions and the first car that is 10% diamond by weight is the correct compensation for such.
I don't really know the solution, but I think our school system is one of our countries biggest problems and isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves.
Local educational control is a silly relic of a stupider time.
Just a pet peeve, and I know you didn't intend it, but I absolutely loathe the way 'inner city' is used. It was invented as a synechdoche for poor black people (same with 'urban') but just doesn't make any damn sense for most cities. Know what the innermost part of the city of Chicago is? The Loop and River North. Know how much it costs to live there? Oprah is the token black person. Inner-city New York? Midtown. Central Park doesn't have many Hoovervilles anymore. LA has its skid row downtown, but LA is kind of special.
Also, the EU has a proper half a billion people. They aren't as integrated as we are governmentally (or culturally or language wise) but its not as though we are uniquely large to address problems. Our rural areas are more remote is about the only main difference.
Very few of the people who were in my middle school gifted program were in any of my high school AP classes. The only thing that set me up for AP calc was taking algebra 1 in 8th grade. Access to AP classes was only really gated by teacher recommendations in the previous year. The only real benefit I got from my gifted program was learning how to write a properly sourced research paper a couple years before it comes up in the "college prep" English classes.
Also, calc BC translating to Calc 2 is not a rock-solid rule. My college just let you use a 3 instead of a 4 to opt out of Calc 1 if you took BC.
Well sure. I know its like the least popular opinion on the planet, but we are planned to spent 65 billion on DoD R&D alone in 2015 (according to the president's planned proposal from last year). We could cut...I dunno, 3 billion from that maybe? It won't solve anything magically but it'll help.
We could get a lot done if we just reallocated like 2-3% of the defense budget each year. It's the largest discretionary outlay by far I think.
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It would never happen.
The first thing the DOD would cut would be VA and personnel funding.
Unfortunately, we can't cut those specific areas. The DOD has control of their own budget.