I was simply curious-- since this tends to be a group
of mostly 'high-achievers' who also are (mostly, again) parents to high-achievers...
I thought it was an interesting attribution-- that wealth is the answer-- when such a thing completely ignores real cognitive differences and also non-monetary enrichment as a mechanistic/functional difference.
We also-- as a community-- discuss access issues related to 'better' educational programs, etc. with some regularity. The article assumes that such barriers are monetary, which seems to run counter to what some of us here have encountered, but in some instances, it may confirm what we've experienced anecdotally.
Mostly, I'm curious to know what others think (again, anecdotally) about how this relates to GT policies locally. Do others think it's related? It seems to be in my own location-- the more
advantaged (note that I didn't use the term "rich" because I'm actually convinced that higher incomes are also only a proxy for the real causative variable) children are pushed harder, have MUCH higher levels of parental involvement, more expensive educational enrichment, etc. etc. There is a drive to make MG kids
seem to be HG (but it's also painfully clear, again anecdotally, that the vast majority of those kids are near-gifted or MG, and there is this weird dichotomous effect of making the GT programming-- which is all pay-to-play anyway-- "more accessible" which means, um, 'less demanding' basically).
So from my perspective, this is all part of the same phenomena which drive administrators to assume that the parents who post here are probably "those" kinds of parents (that is, parents of near-gifted kids who have a litany of excuses or have 'shopped' for a test score that qualifies for a program), which is obviously harmful to kids who really are HG/HG+ need differentiation.
It also seems to be true that, as a commenter to the NYT article notes:
I don't buy the author's argument that the quality of public education has not declined. I am a university professor, and I am absolutely shocked by my students' lack of preparedness. They have no idea, even by their junior year, which words in a sentence to capitalize, how to use a comma, and which verb tense to use. Their knowledge of history is woefully scant. I have come to believe that the biggest problem lies in our expectations. We have set the bar so low that anyone can pass it with minimal effort. Of course people who have the resources to are pushing their students beyond the sea of mediocrity that constitutes today's education system. Those who invest in their children's education (whom the author derisively refers to as "the rich," even if they make $165,000 per year) are now being "blamed" for doing what all parents should do. Now the author wants society to pay for the shortcomings of the bloated administrations of these schools and the government departments charged with "reform." The fact is, these administrators have no incentive to solve the problem--if they did, they would be out of a job.
I found the term "rich" when applied to a two-income household making 165K fairly inflammatory, myself. In many urban parts of the country, that income is solidly middle-class, and only in a few places would it be "wealthy" as far as I can tell.
