I don't mind that these schools screen kids by IQ but I do mind that so many families participate in the test prep madness. That puts the rest of us between a rock and a hard place. Looking at the prep materials available on amazon, I personally feel that is getting close to cheating but there are children who go to a prep center 3 days a week to study using such materials with a professional coach and I don't know if I'd be hurting DD's chance if I did nothing.
This is the part that bothers me most. I mean, I agree with you-- but what
are you supposed to do, as a parent??
If you make a "gifted" program, the majority of people jockeying for entry are those who want the label for their kids... most of whom are bright-not-gifted, and most of whom are already ideally advantaged vis a vis SES and enrichment.
Okay, so that results in more demand than there are openings... which means...
that there are kids who NEED that program who are getting elbowed out by those who want the label... (and who are also often complaining about their kids' performance once they succeed in GETTING them in)... right.
So what to do? Ohhh-- make a "rigorous super-accelerated" program...
and the cycle begins anew.
People whose kids have no need of the substance want the LABEL anyway. At least that is how it works around here.
There is NO way to construct an authentically different program that meets the needs of truly HG/HG+ learners without the twin sequelae of parents whose kids DO NOT belong there wanting the program to be changed (usually watered down or shifted to lower difficulty and more volume), and those same parents being willing to go to occasionally abusive lengths to FORCE compliance from their children who are not quite up to the task ahead of them.
Everyone KNOWS that there is something different about being smarter, and that better educational outcomes are (generally) related to it. The real problem is that far too many parents are communicating to their own children that being "average" is failure... as a human being, apparently. Everyone is living in Lake Wobegon, though.
The only real answer is to stop making seats in such programs so SCARCE to begin with. I think that most of us who post here would be perfectly happy without any
label at all-- as long as the education that our kids were getting was actually suitable and appropriate. Right?
But that is a major digression from the larger underlying issue illustrated by the Chapman case, which is one of borderline parental pathology, quite frankly.
What I
do not like is the quite obvious SURPRISE that adults who get to know my DD often express to me/us-- that we are quite discreet, private, and circumspect about her and
what she is. She is functionally PG, and it is VERY obvious when you give her an opportunity to open up the throttle. We are not hovering, "helping" or doing much of anything else (save getting out of the way, much like a pit crew at NASCAR) once she has open road ahead of her. It's clear that we're in the minority by quite a healthy margin, however, judging by the responses of other adults.
That is a VERY disturbing thing to me. What distresses me about it isn't the personal facet, since that is merely annoying most of the time, and easily rectified by letting them give DD a shot. DH and I are pretty good advocates for that, so no problem there. What bothers me about it is that it signifies that the MAJORITY of "PG" children that these adults who work with youth are actually encountering...
are hot-house plants who are bright-to-MG children that have been pressured and TigerParented all to heck. I find that horrifying. I also think that this is where things like
Race to Nowhere are coming from. This is the toxic, unspoken side of "gifted" ed culture.
Don't believe me?
Check this out--
https://suite.io/alex-sharp/1qaj2cg
