Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Try to fix public schools from inside?

You'd still have to fight the parents and the state and federal governments.

I think Ivy summed it up nicely. I'll work towards change, but I won't sacrifice my children to an ideal which at this point doesn't exist.

Well-stated, Tallulah.

Not really.

You just ignore them and do what you feel like doing.

Until they fire/sue you.

More people inside the system than you'd imagine have good hearts and understand children and want to do right by them but are restrained by the system. It kills them, but you can only bend the rules so far.

I've known two people who ran school boards that way. They got a lot done (it probably helped that they were both very smart, with one having an IQ of 160). The first one started a meaningful gifted program for HG+ kids, and the second one had the school system running at a surplus pretty quickly. Everything fell apart almost immediately after they left. Two years after number two was gone, they begged him to come back to fix the enormous deficit they'd already racked up. He had been paying attention to what they were doing and was disgusted. He told me there was no point if the other people from his tenure weren't there, too, which was not going to happen. Thus, there was no point to going back alone and then being blamed for what would have been continued decay. He was right.

Thinking about this just makes me feel so jaded and exhausted, knowing what little we've been able to accomplish here, and knowing how much time and energy I've put into trying.

But now you understand the magic of human group bureaucratic dynamics!

That was hard won knowledge!

Or hard-taught behavior anyway. I am on an Edu-committee. During meetings, most people adopt what I call "committee voice," which is a particular tone of voice and way of speaking that people use when in meetings. Everything is very neutral, and it's critically important to focus on paradigms related to planning and maximizing our impact. Sorry, we can't talk about those code violations; they aren't part of today's agenda, though we can certainly form a sub-committee to investigate your suggestion that they're serious. Dan? Can you look into that?

This approach pretty much guarantees that nothing meaningful will ever be accomplished by the committee. The troublemakers never use that tone. It's how the others can identify them as such in order to marginalize them and then blame them when OSHA starts imposing fines for code violations. But the troublemakers use their confrontational speech habits to secretly identify each other as the ones to talk to after the meeting in order to figure out a way to get stuff done behind the backs of the other ones. Thus, they avoid problems with OSHA (and of course, any credit therefore, but troublemakers aren't usually terribly competitive in the committee environment, anyway).

Our region has full-time self-contained gifted-only classes for the top 3% of students, but these gifted programs are always contained within certain regular schools.

Our region also has high levels of crime and poverty.

The gifted programs are generally placed in schools in dangerous areas.

This is a deal-breaker for us and we don't participate. We don't wish to place our children in harm's way, and we don't appreciate gifted children being used as pawns in various statistical and political games. Many others feel the same way, and participation in gifted programs is much lower than it would have been if the programs were located in nicer areas.

We don't feel the need to "get in there" and try to change things. The education system (and much else around here) is a basket case. It's a lost cause. Nevertheless our non-participation (along with many others) definitely sends a message.

Perhaps, of all the things I've read on this forum over the last couple of years, the message that seems common in this thread is the one that those in education need to be aware of most, that the majority of those with gifted children find the current system and efforts by that system so very inadequate that they've given up on it doing much of anything meaningful in their child's time in that school system. That speaks volumes.