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

And, alternatively, a reply to that post:

http://investinginkids.net/2014/02/28/grading-the-pre-k-evidence/

An important point that gets lost a lot is that test score gains from pre-K often fade as children age and get subsumed into the inferior educational system. However, and fascinatingly, there still seem to be advantages that show up in adulthood.

RCTs are very, very difficult to put into practice with live children in large numbers, as anyone with social science background knows. While it's certainly important to try one's best to get close to that, we won't get much of anywhere if we insist on pure RCTs for anything to ever matter with human subject research.

Re my post about closing the "words spoken" gap:

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/17/289799002/efforts-to-close-the-achievement-gap-in-kids-start-at-home

Thanks for sharing this inspiring article.

Agreed.

I find it unbearably sad that we seem to only throw money at this problem far, far too late for it to really matter to most of the children who could benefit from that intervention.


On the other hand, HeadStart doesn't produce very robust improvements, either-- so is it that it is just too little? Or is it that past toddlerhood, it's already too late?

Val The LAUSD is the largest in the country, has a huge pool of extremely affluent children in pockets, and is probably the only place you could cordon off the 'gifted' children in that way. In Seattle and its suburbs, the cutoff is actually higher and most programs have children in separate classrooms. Seattle has one gifted school which is overcrowded, and which has generated huge amounts of political ill-will, mainly due to the insufferable parents who insist that their children couldn't learn if near the other children. It's not a great situation, I will say that.

Our suburb has separate classrooms. The IQ cutoff is 150 or so, much more rare than 145, but due to test prep and affluence etc. they have, I believe, about 8 gifted 3rd grade classrooms for 2014-15, among a total of approximately 25 or so 3rd grade classrooms district-wide.

Yes, that is statistically ridiculous and impossible. I believe it comes down to the fact that parental input inflates scores upwards and we have early testing (1st grade). So whereas you'd probably see more of these kids at IQ=135 four years on (even with parental prepping continuing, it just has less of an effect than motivation), that is not what we see in the gifted program.

HowlerKarma--Robust results--

A lot of these programs do not prove effective in the long run because we do not have a meritocracy in place to incentivize academic achievement.

Scholarships are hard to come by--you can't just be #2 in your class and be in the 95% for SATs. In many countries, that would be enough to guarantee you a spot in college. I know a woman who was in this position but due to a lack of religious or other affiliation (she was "generic" white) she didn't get a single scholarship. She dropped out of college. This was 15 years ago and things are much worse now. I myself had better SATs, but was "only" 3rd in my class among AP class takers. I, too, dropped out of college but went to community college. Only by working 80 hour weeks at a minimum wage that was 20% higher in terms of purchasing power than it is now, was I able--as a minority-scholarship eligible person--to finish school, with loans. We were from a small town. I know three other people, one black, two white, who dropped out due to economic reasons. All of them were in the top five in their classes, did well on their SATs. How we would later laugh about those lies they told us:

"Work hard in school and you'll get a scholarship!!!"

Yeah, right.

American children actually do pretty well, before the poor figure out the extent to which it doesn't matter how well they do--the price of college is too high, the community college too far, gas prices too high, the need for cash to help their parents pay rent too urgent, to go. And they give up.

That is what causes so many of these effects to drop off in high school, and why our international standings drop off. People stop trying because they lose hope. If only we could lie more effectively to teenagers.

From Wikipedia:

"International comparison

In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment 2003, which emphasizes problem solving, American 15 year olds ranked 24th of 38 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, and 26th of 38 in problem solving.[134] In the 2006 assessment, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57 in mathematics and 29th out of 57 in science. Reading scores could not be reported due to printing errors in the instructions of the U.S. test booklets. U.S. scores were behind those of most other developed nations.[135]

However, the picture changes when low achievers, Blacks and Hispanics, in the U.S. are broken out by race. White and Asian students in the United States are generally among the best-performing pupils in the world; black and Hispanic students in the U.S. have very high rates of low achievement. Black and Hispanic students in the US do out perform their counterparts in all African and Hispanic countries.[136][137]

US fourth and eighth graders tested above average on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study tests, which emphasizes traditional learning.[138]"

Head Start targets children to keep them out of jail. Literally, lower incarceration rates in the future is a major explicit goal of this program. But it's useless, because education doesn't keep you out of jail. Being white and living in a nice place does--statistically speaking, of course. But when you're putting in tons of effort, it's not nice to know that you have about a 50 times higher chance of having it all taken away from you, than some other kid putting in less effort, all because of the color of your skin, or the junky town / neighborhood you live in.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2014/01/marijuana-legalization-in-black-and-white/

(Sorry for the religious link.)

Inequality is what causes our low outcomes later on. Children keep striving... until an older brother gets arrested, a parent gets sick or loses their job, and then the economic reality hits.

Though Asians and Whites do better on average, if you break those groups down by socio-economic group and heritage, there are shocking divisions among each sub-set. The poor rural white vs. the New England entrenched classes, the political refugee Asian (Hmong, Cambodian, etc.) vs. the economic migrant Asian (Chinese, Japanese), vs. African Americans who are descended from slaves vs. African economic migrants (Kenyans, Tanzanians, Ghanaians) vs. African political refugees (Somalis, Sudanese, Congolese)--it comes down to why you came here, and who you think you are, and what place you think you can have in this society.

/soapbox

It's like the RCT question brought up earlier. We can't control for all these factors, so just thinking of making elementary school meritocratic, or distributing resources in that pool, does not make sense. In order to incentivize people to perform, we absolutely must create a meritocracy.

That's why though I have one view about what I want for my own child, I have another view about what I want to see for education and social programs in the US.

That's why though I have one view about what I want for my own child, I have another view about what I want to see for education and social programs in the US.

Agreed.

Being poor and white (in terms of educational disadvantage) may in fact be one of the very worst starting places for any child-- because those children don't even have a lot of "interventions" intended to mitigate the negative impact of their life circumstances, and all too frequently, no "hand up" materializes until college (if then). Increasingly, it simply never materializes at all.

Yes, those children have a huge invisible privilege due to race-- but it also comes with a hefty side of "you're already entitled" and expectations that may be completely unrealistic when they have actually got far more in common with classmates and peers who are low-income and of a minority ethnicity, with little support from their home environments. Everyone ASSUMES that a white child in kindergarten lives in an "enriched" environment, and that's profoundly untrue for some of those children.

I've talked about this problem with a friend who is a middle school teacher at a neighboring (and rural/poor) district-- she can't give research assignments because 90% of her students lack basic transportation even to the municipal library-- which won't give them library cards anyway if they live outside of city limits. She estimates that at least 70% of her students (who are about 90% white) lack internet resources at home.

NYC had gifted magnet schools as well.

Entirely depends on the university you attend. Many top tier universities offer NO academic scholarships because everyone who gets in is already top tier. But there are many smaller liberal arts schools that LOVE that #2, #3 or even #25 kid and offer large scholarships to bright kids. I talked with several of these schools when looking at colleges for my DD.

But many of these scholarships don't make up for the tuition increases over state schools. That was my case, and my friend's case. We got scholarships to Christian schools who effectively made it so that we'd "only" have to pay state university fees.

We couldn't even afford that. Her parents had a small business in a small town that was in the red every other year, and my own mom was a single mom with two children.

We never even considered top-tier schools like MIT, Harvard, etc. though we'd both received invitations to apply based on SAT scores. I'm just trying to explain the situation that young people are in when they calculate whether it's worth it to continue striving towards that goal.


Oh, I believe it. I was one of two minorities in my all-white class and definitely the white kids from poor families had it the worst. They believed they had no chances at scholarships, their parents were working-class and had no idea about college, and they didn't feel comfortable in the city. They felt like people thought they were hicks.

Of course I can also see how inner-city black kids get caught up in the net.

The point is that we have GOT to stop jacking the poor around in this country and make it worthwhile to get in the top 25% of your class.

Funny how people here seemed to think free college was anti-meritocratic. I think that if you have admissions criteria that are higher, it would be the epitome of meritocracy, at least after awhile, because there is a real, tangible reward there for children to strive for. Just stay in that top 25%, that top 10%. In Texas the 10% rule has seen disproportionate growth in the share of Hispanic and black high-school graduates and college entrants, though it's still unequal. But they made gains during a recession, which is pretty amazing.

Charlotte has an HG magnet program with the district having about 1/5 the students of LAUSD.

If the cutoff is 145 (1/500), districts with as few as 50k students should be able to field an HG program though they'd have to have looser age groupings. Also have to account for private schools and homeschooling. But if the will is there.

Maybe you should have, because many top-tier schools have need-blind admissions and give large grants to students without the financial means to pay the tuition.