Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education The poor neglected gifted child

The word indecent also stood out to me in the context of the article. My initial thoughts, while piecemeal, were something along the lines of: this is attitudinal. The root of the problem is a viewpoint/attitude/perception passed along and seeming to grow stronger each time it is repeated.

To reverse this? If gifted kiddos (including those from families of modest financial means) are not given the message that it is "indecent" to provide curriculum at their challenge level... if they are not given the impression that they are destined to be followers... if they (and their parents) remain dedicated to acquiring knowledge rather than believing erroneously that knowledge/education/intellect is a scarce commodity to be rationed... possibly "the yawning gaps between the test scores of rich and poor students and between different racial groups" may decrease and intrapersonal/interpersonal healing will increase. Possibly it comes down to grouping by readiness and ability, and providing the placement and pacing which support learning for each group.

Good by whose standard? There are lots of jobs that need doing (babysitting, picking fruit, mining coal, packing meat, driving taxis and trucks, cleaning homes) that the smart parents in this newsgroup would not consider good. People are not entitled to good jobs and need to make themselves productive in whatever way they can.

Much of the low-skilled work cannot be priced too high, or it will disappear, with people mowing their own lawns, cleaning their own houses, and watching their own children.

We have-- but the focus has been on "neediest" rather than on "investment" there for so long that nobody even QUESTIONS throwing the entire $20 at the child who is 'struggling' to keep up.

I don't think that is going to change until we can (societally) admit that some people probably can't keep up with everyone else.

This is why I think that that first sentence really rankled with me. Clearly it resonated the same way with others; it's the notion that this is some kind of zero sum game to begin with, right??

Dude's point is well-taken there. As long as we see this as a 'zero sum game' in which ANY resources directed at students in the 99th percentile are "diverted" from "those poor children" at the 1st percentile, this isn't going to change. At some point we need to step back and ask which is the better investment in the long run-- and admit that even if it IS a zero-sum game, maybe we're not calculating the opportunity costs correctly.

Everyone has a different idea about a good job. Some people think that earning $100 per hour to write dull technical manuals is a good job. I don't. Some people think being a physicist is a good job. Other people would want nothing to do with that. Some people think that working in construction is a good job. Some don't.

The point is that, in this country, choices are lacking where they weren't 30+ years ago. We've moved away from the ideas that 1) an adult employee working full-time deserves a living wage and 2) people do not have to go to college to get jobs that pay living wages.

People may argue that "everyone knows fast food, etc jobs don't pay living wages." But this isn't historically true. I worked in fast food as a teenager and there were adults there who earned living wages and got benefits. And they didn't all have college degrees. They earned more than us teenagers because they had been there longer and worked a full week. In other words, back then, the company saw them as being more valuable. Etc. I could give lots more examples, like the factories in a town where I lived.

These days, the cost of fast food isn't much more than it was 25 years ago (e.g. $0.50 for a burger in 1984 and $0.89 in 2007). But profits are up. Something had to give to make that happen, and it was employee pay. Yet people spin a story that it's the fault of the employees because they didn't go to college or work harder in high school or whatever. So we continue to push low achieving students into college instead of giving them other options.

One result of all this is that everything is cascading downward. We end up with student-loan-debt-yoked young people earning minimum wage and insane competition for "elite" colleges because the state colleges aren't what they used to be for a variety of reasons. Education in the true sense of the word is becoming irrelevant. Certification is what matters. And the solution seems to be to keep pushing more kids to go to college on one side of things and more tiger parenting on another side. The (truly) gifted kids get lost in all this because they simply aren't part of the catastrophe.

Doesn't that perspective lead to wage compression?

How?

Lucas warns that any such effort will be gamed by more well-to-do parents, angling to get their children in, then fighting to ensure the gifted group gets better teachers, newer technology, and other advantages.

Unfortunately, this sums up how things our in our district, except that all the pushy, gaming parents haven't actually gotten better teachers or more technology: they've just made it harder for children of the non-gaming parents to actually get into the program. I could barely get the people at the TAG office to talk to me until my daughter aced their test. Until then, I was just another pushy parent to be treated with suspicion and wariness.

I agree. I also agree with Indigo that the problem is about attitude.

IMO, the best way to educate HG+ kids is to give them their own schools with teachers who are degreed in the subjects they teach and have had a lot training in the needs and capabilities of gifted kids. Sending HG+ high schoolers to community colleges is another approach for older students.

I can see that it's difficult for an elementary classroom teacher to meet the needs of a kid with an IQ north of 140. Lots of kids to be dealt with, the threat of losing funding or your job if the low performers don't pass a high stakes test, and, honestly, the teacher may not really know what to do. It makes more sense to me to let the kids attend their own schools. But the cutoffs would have to be numerical and not based on fuzzy things like teacher recommendations.

I know that LAUSD has a set of K-12 schools for kids with IQs over 145. That's a pretty high cutoff, and confines the students to the HG+ crowd. Does anyone here have experience with them? Do the kids move through material faster? Etc.?

There is no single "living wage", so using the phrase just obfuscates. A minimum wage job may represent a living wage for a young adult living with his parents but not for an adult trying to support a family of four. The fact that the latter cannot make ends meet at that job is not a reason to deprive the former person of a job opportunity. It is up to people to delay having children until they can support them. Employers pay based on productivity and supply and demand, not need.

Speaking of zero sum games... this.