I believe that if this country can devote a fortune to special ed --- including individualized education plans, personal teacher assistants, and so on --- it can provide similar attention to gifted students.

There are public schools for gifted students: the Davidson Academy, in the LA public school system, in Florida, etc. (And there are many private schools.) If these districts can manage, so can others. The problem is a lack of will on the parts of the school boards and state authorities. I'm not saying these schools are perfect, but they're better than forcing a kid to do 2+2 when he can do 54288/54 or 2x(4x2 + 3x + 8) = 100.

Finally, I had said that high IQ greatly increases the probability that someone will become an inventor, etc. Although an IQ of 130/98th percentile isn't a requirement for being a scientist, etc., the simple facts are that it makes things a lot more likely in that regard.

Also, the higher the IQ, the more a student is being damaged by a system that caters to an IQ of 90-110. This is unacceptable.

Also right now, almost NO resources are devoted to gifted students and most GATE programs don't honestly address their needs anyway. Right now, I don't think that even 0.5% of public school expenditures go to GT students.

I don't want to rant, but seriously, this is a huge disaster in our system.

Val

Last edited by Val; 07/22/08 03:49 PM. Reason: typos