I don't know where sub-forum is the right place to discuss books, so I will just mention it here. I've read a few books that I liked very much recently, not on gifted education but on education in general. One that gave me a pleasant surprise is The Smartest Kids in the World. I learned a lot about the system of teacher training in the US, Finland, Korea and Poland. It is disheartening that our system seems to have no rigor at all, but it also explained a lot. I was always amazed at the general attitudes that the teachers and the district have toward gifted students, but having some ideas of what these teachers may have or have not learned, such attitudes really make a lot of sense to me now.

The current emphasis of schools seems to be to send as many students as possible to colleges. It's somewhat counter-intuitive. It really shouldn't be about the college degree, but about what the students will have learned when they enter the workplace. Some surveys and research, and lots of anecdotes show that today's kids learn less in K-12 than older generations. So it seems that we are simply redistributing the learning task over a longer period of time so that kids enter college with a lower academic level than in the past (hence more students are "ready" for college). And of course they then spend a huge amount of money in college to learn things that they should have learned in high school for free (including all the remedial courses that students take in college). Meanwhile, K-12 schools have an even harder time to accommodate the students at the higher end of the spectrum. I, for one, am all for the recent trend toward competency-based education instead of doing-your-time-for-a-degree.