Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments More inclusive "GT" classes in middle/high schools

6000 per grade level, so 78,000 K-12?

Unfortunately, it has always been an issue that high ability students do not get lower teacher/student ratios than the student body at large. The few occasions where I have witnessed this happening, the remedy has been to add other (relatively closer) students to recover this balance.

Yeah - we are in a large district (over 100K for K-12) and I don't think we can create a class of PG student (maybe if you lump many grades).

Streamed classes were the norm in the 80's in the part of the U.S. where I grew up as well. Fortunately, my kids' current district still has different tracks, at least for now.

Interestingly, in our district and a couple of neighboring districts, many high SES families wait until middle school before siphoning their kids to expensive private schools ($15k - $30K range).

I wasn't using "differentiated work products" as a term of art. Per the definitions you provided, I should more properly have stated differentiated and variable work products - differentiated from non-GT classes and variable among GT students.

Actually, I do believe that it probably mirrors reality. By 5th grade, DS, who has been double-accelerated in math, have three schoolmates who have been single-accelerated in math. In comparison, there was one single acceleration in the class ahead and none in the class behind.

Until last year it was considered better for the year 3/4 kids to be ability grouped across those 2 years. This year it is considered better for them to do maths in mixed ability groups within their classes. The kids havent changed. Placement and services are not based on what our kids need they are based on the needs and wants of the establishment. They quote modern research but they only listen to the current fad.

There is often SES grouping in schools as kids tend to go to the local.school especially poor ones with buy parents and no transport.

Obviously students at rare levels will find it hard to find a large local cohort, by definition. There's no getting around that, and so they may need some individual attention, some resources for self-directed study, connection to peers in a larger are, etcetera.

But what about larger groups at the upper levels. What about top 5%, top 10%, top 20%, top 50%. Or what about students between percentiles 75 and 90? Why shouldn't all students at all levels be entitled to be taught at their approximate level? There should be classes catering to all levels, and placement in these classes should be purely meritocratic. This merit should not be compromised to fulfil other types of quotas. As long as everyone is being taught at their approximate level, how could it possibly matter if there are measurable demographic differences between the classes? I've never seen any convincing argument not to do what I'm suggesting.

When people don't like the situations their kids are put in in schools, they leave if they can (or don't enter in the first place).

In our district, the gifted programs are generally in lower performing schools, schools with more discipline problems, schools in more dangerous parts of town, and so on. There are various reasons things are done this way. But a consequence is that a lot of gifted students don't participate in the public school system.

The gifted classrooms themselves are meritocratic, and they are an incentive for qualifying students to participate in the public school system, but when you consider how bad the schools are that contain the gifted, many students and parents say no thanks. The gifted community would love to have a single K-12 dedicated gifted school in a safe area, but the district has no purpose for such a school.

Schools and districts use gifted (and above average) students as a commodity that can be placed and moved around as pawns in a sytem, basically to manipulate demographic and school score statistics. This is so unacceptable to large numbers of students and parents that many are effectively left disenfranchised with no acceptable public school option, and are pushed into options that many can hardly afford.

The Idea was 6000 per either grade level or roughly the same age, but yes you have the idea. I was a very simple program. I created 6000 random numbers, and counted how many passed trough a very small window. I only iterated 50 times so that it was easy to view all of the individual samples.

Usually with Monte Carlo you will be trying to solve problems that are not as easy to solve deterministically as this one, and you will run a very large number of iteration then apply traditional statistics to the results.

In this case I thought it would be interesting to approximate the variation you might see in 50 equal size cities, or in one city on 2 randomly picked years. Of course, in 2 successive years random would not make total sense because you would be resampling many of the same children, which should reduce the amount of variation observed.