Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Gifted: Left Behind?

Well, mon, that's your answer. The elite priveledged kids will still get their advanced education. By not offering advanced track options in the public school you're only denying disadvantaged youth from excelling because the wealthy elitist parents will still pay for their childrens education elsewhere, or tutoring.

Wait. That's probably not right. I was just thinking that their video's not right, showing a perfectly racially diverse classroom with a small class size of engaged students and I jumped on a knee-jerk reactionary response that tugs at the same heart strings. We should probably just stick with the truth, we're just parents trying to do the best for our children. In the case of the gifted children it means not clipping their wings while they're developing. All children deserve the chance to grow and thrive in their own childhood.

Eta: the video's not right because that kind of small, engaged, racially diverse classroom they depicted IS not what they are trying to preserve... Really?! That's a picture of the public school class that ability grouping would destroy?! Uh-huh.

You know how some people don't want to call children gifted or advanced because they want to call it something else?  I was thinking maybe if you kept calling advanced, but you called the other kids novice and beginning.  Would that be less offensive?  That implies that all children are on the same path to being educated.  
Or is it not the word gifted that irks some people, just the idea that some kids are ahead of others?  Like, does everybody have to quit being ahead to make it ok? 

This train of thought is in response to this article Bostonian posted "equality vs excellence"
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/InequityInEquity.pdf


And this "anti-ability grouping PSA"
Posted by Mon.
http://www.tolerance.org/blog/students-beware-ability-grouping-ahead

Eta: still reading the article.
It seems that some people feel that identifying high-ability students is used to impede rather than support. I just thought of a new way to track kids. You could have one class that wants to learn and one class that wants to do the bare minimum. The teacher that likes to differentiate can have the students that want to learn, whatever their abilities, and they support the students and don't hold them back. The students are self selected.

Interesting idea--but I think it might suffer some of the same issues as other tracking systems once the parents figured out what was going on--I think most parents would not want their kid in the 'bare minimum' group. So then I can imagine all the parents who care raising heck about getting their kid into the 'wants to learn' class regardless of how their kid feels.

Re lack of political correctness, here's another interesting idea that I heard awhile ago but haven't seen work yet. A speaker re 2e kids suggested that one rationale that might help advocates of gifted education is that minority/underprivileged/socioeconomically challenged 2e kids tend to be under-identified, and screening for and helping such kids might be useful to schools and teachers under the No-Child-Left-Behind incentive structure. I don't know how the recent changes to No-Child-Left-Behind might affect this, but it was an interesting idea that these 2e kids might be particularly under-served, and that including them as a reason for gifted identification and education might be helpful in advocating for gifted kids generally, as well as being a very good thing to do.