Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYT opinion: No (rich) child left behind

I wonder why a tiger-mom can send their kid to one hour of Sylvan tutoring a day and they get ahead, yet half of the town here sends their kid to school tutoring an hour after school every day and they can barely keep up? Is it because the tiger moms tutor their brightest kids and oour school only tutors the struggling students? I'm not even sure tracking is enough. I read here that the best educational fit would be to give the kids MAP testing (out of level achievement test) and group kids with a similar score in the same class for each subject, disregarding the ages:grade levels completely.
My homespun opinion agrees 100% with yours made in uk, if they would quit priotising socialization skills in school and start prioritizing education, plement tracking so that all students can learn enough during the eight hours a day they're already there, it would do more to "level the playing field".

Cognitive dissonance.

This supposed assumption on the part of Bostonian has approximately nothing to do with the issue at hand, and is certainly not a requirement for his line of reasoning.


It's curious to me that you can appreciate the trend, and thus understand that there is significant correlation, but in your mind anything less than a correlation of 1.0 makes the explanation unsatisfactory. Personally, I'm not bothered by the fact that statistics allows for variance and outliers.

Not a direct answer to your question, but here is a new article finding that the effectiveness of math tutoring may depend on the biology of the child. The article phrased things more strongly than even I would:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/29/us-science-brain-math-idUSBRE93S0XI20130429

Your child's brain on math: Don't bother?
By Sharon Begley
NEW YORK | Mon Apr 29, 2013 5:02pm EDT
(Reuters) - Parents whose children are struggling with math often view intense tutoring as the best way to help them master crucial skills, but a new study released on Monday suggests that for some kids even that is a lost cause.

According to the research, the size of one key brain structure and the connections between it and other regions can help identify the 8- and 9-year olds who will hardly benefit from one-on-one math instruction.

"We could predict how much a child learned from the tutoring based on measures of brain structure and connectivity," said Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, who led the research.

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I think the paper is

http://stanford.edu/group/scsnl/cgi-bin/drupal_scsnl/content/publications
Supekar, K., Swigart, A., Tenison, C., Jolles, D., Rosenberg-Lee, M., Fuchs, L., & Menon, V. (2013). Neural predictors of individual differences in response to math tutoring in primary-grade school children. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. (In press)

If a person chooses to live in a place where $165k/year can barely pay for housing, that's the choice they've made. We all know that those choices come with significant other advantages that don't exist in places where such a person could pay cash for a nice home in a peaceful neighborhood, particularly in the quality of government services (police, fire, education, transport, etc.). But to call that "middle class" is just insulting.

Where we live, in a Tiger mom rich area, lots of highly educated parents, it is very common for parents to hire private tutors for their kids in high school and junior high. My friend hired a math tutor for his 5th grader, who is "good at math," but they want him to be better.
When it comes to the SAT, these kids will outperform the poorer kids who may be just as smart, since they will have access to better study prep resources.
My son got accepted to our local community college's summer gifted program. He will take 5 weeks of classes there in math, science and literature. The classes are pricey ($300 a week for a half-day class, ouch), but we think it is worth it. His best friend also got accepted but the dad is a truck driver and they just don't have the money for it, so he will stay at home this summer and read, etc.
Having financial resources can obviously help your gifted child, if used wisely. That isn't to say that poorer gifted children also can't do well.

I think $50,000 year is middle class an wiki agrees
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

and we can just assume both parents usually work because that's normal.
So 100,000 is on the border between "upper middle class" and above.

so says wiki.

It's certainaly not "independantly wealthy", like the upthread definition of "rich" described, saying "not dependant on income from work".
just my semantical 2c hth

I also think $100,000 yr is for a doctor which has always been called "rich" as a profession by most towns, although they have to work for a living too... in case we're talking about 100,000 as one income, not the family income.

eta I remember one town the richest lady in town was the one who owned three daycares.

eEta: 'ing too much because I'm speculating too much. I just googled & family doctors average $180,000/ yr now.

Re: defining "rich"

I live in a large Canadian city with one of the world's highest costs of living on a PPP basis. Even here, $165k/year will buy you a top-10% lifestyle. Housing might not be palatial, but thats a feature of urban geography.

I don't think we should misconstrue what "rich" looks like. I would say being "rich" is about virtually all of life's decisions containing an element of personal choice. If a household can choose which city it lives in, have control over the school the children attend, participate in regular leisure activities, pay for post-secondary studies, and still have money to spare for a comfortable retirement, then that's rich in my books. And, even in the most expensive geographies, a $165k+ household can achieve at least several items on that list.

Maybe a simpler litmus test of SES is whether, on a given day, the bulk of a household's concerns could be lumped under #firstworldproblems.

In what world is the problem not being able to retire until you're 90 yrs. old?