Getting any sort of advanced instruction for our daughter has been like pulling teeth. I assumed it would be readily available, given that we live in the heart of Silicon Valley and our child attends a very well-funded public school.
The school started off saying they don't offer advanced instruction, then grudgingly agreed to assess our child to see if she even would require it. But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level.
Even when faced with her clearly advanced abilities (3.5 grades ahead in math, according to the diagnostic from the online math platform they use), they are still doing their best to hold her back. Their rallying cry? "Even Steph Curry practices dribbling".
After hearing this for the third time, I finally pointed out that Steph Curry wouldn't have become who he is if he were never allowed to practice anything but dribbling. The school has continued dragging their feet.
The unsurprising result is that advanced students leave for private schools. We never would have bought a home in an expensive district had we anticipated departing for a private. I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive.
This whole process has been very disappointing (and surprising) for me, since I had a very different experience growing up. I went to public schools in Sacramento, where magnet programs were freely available and students could open enroll from anywhere in the region. We had classmates who lived halfway to Tahoe. It was great. I understand their programs are still up and running, and it's shocking that the well-heeled districts around here are so hostile to advanced instruction.
Happy to connect with other nearby parents of young kids. Contact info is in profile.
This is the result of woke policies in public schools. They already removed gifted programs and magnet schools because most of the students benefiting from the programs were White and Asian (more Asian). For the same reason they are trying to remove calculus [1][2]. And the UC system will stop accepting SAT scores [3].
The whole "woke" angle is just a case of admittedly convenient misdirection. Government schools have always consistently pushed for mediocrity and getting rid of any sort of accountability re: educational outcomes, and this latest instance is no different. Standards and accountability can only be achieved and sustained via meaningful competition (such as 'magnet' schools striving to compete with private educational offerings).
Because the root cause is that the government has a monopoly on public schools. It is only a recent development that the indoctrination of the captive audience has become enticing for woke proselytizers.
The issue with gifted children isn't about indoctrinating them to whatever beliefs. It's the destructive belief that high academic achievement is the result of some unfair "privilege" which they seek to counter by limiting opportunities for advancement.
Yes, of course. Evangelists are happy to use all the tools at their disposal - both overt preaching and structural changes that conflate equality of outcome with fairness regardless of the means of achieving it.
If parents had a way of avoiding government schools, it would be far less enticing for those with an agenda to capture them.
Being able to attain high academic achievement IS privilege itself, a far far more real one than most privileges people jaw on about. Your standardized test scores to a large extent determine your quality of life.
On some level it’s positively shocking that gifted classes have lasted as long as they have. Looked at from a thousand mile out view a TON of the woke agenda is direct and indirect attacks on those that perform well on standardized tests.
Why would having "gifted" classes detract from other students? In the case of OP's daughter giving her permission to simply skip math class and self-tutor in an empty classroom (by e.g. self-studying a more advanced textbook) would probably be an improvement over having to sit through a class that's below her level.
Once you do that less "privileged" students also benefit, since the teaching resources being spent on that bored student will be freed up to focus on the smaller class of students that need more assistance.
I don't see why it's a given that this is guaranteed to result in worse outcomes by any measure, even "woke" ones that might consider it a loss if OP's daughter pulls ahead further from the median grade, even if the median also goes up as a result of better spent teaching resources.
> Why would having "gifted" classes detract from other students?
Note that I am a fan of gifted classes, but to answer your question:
1. If you pull out gifted kids from classes with simply “above average” kids, you lower the ceiling of what it means to be “the best”. As a result, the above average kids may not push themselves as hard/far. This concept is common in sports as well — the competition yields higher results.
2. The class that is left, usually an honors class, ends up moving much more slowly. A dirty little secret of teaching is that the pace of a class is limited to roughly the ability level of the bottom third of the class. Any faster, and you have lost so many people that the class can’t self-correct via peer interaction. Any slower, and you cause so many of the high performers to lose interest that motivation becomes an issue. When you pull the gifted kids out of, for example, an honors class, the level of the bottom third of that class often drops precipitously.
I personally don’t think that these are good reasons to eliminate gifted classes. I think it points to the need for more effective/efficient differentiated instruction. But that would require good teachers and good administration, and imho those things are extremely difficult to have at scale.
For 2, in the honors class, the bottom third is closer to the top once the gifted kids have left. So aren't they all able to move faster as a percentage of their capability without the gifted kids? And isn't that what should be optimized?
What usually happens, due to student teacher ratios being a thing, is that the honors class is replenished with lower ability students from the “regular” (i.e., non-honors) class, so the average is brought down fairly substantially.
Note that all of this is a non-issue if you are only pulling a few kids out of a school to go to a magnet high school or something similar.
An example of this can be seen in Japan where the gifted and motivated students are moved into magnet schools for high school, but there is relatively little negative impact on the regular high school, while the magnet high school students get an eduction that pushes their intellectual boundaries.
If you pull lots of kids from a regular class, they're also going to benefit from a narrower spread of abilities.
The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers. Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.
You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job - somehow, it is a given that both students and teachers should always be left to "discover things by themselves".
> If you pull lots of kids from a regular class, they're also going to benefit from a narrower spread of abilities.
I think you’re talking in theory and not practice.
In reality, one of two things (or both) happens.
1. They pull from the “slow” class. Different places call it different things, and it’s not special ed, but it’s distinctly low levels of education. The “slow” class doesn’t benefit due to it basically serving the role of child care rather than education.
2. The “regular” class is effectively a slow class, so same as above, there is very little educating happening, just child care.
Ah, but the people getting moved into the slowest actual education benefit because they go from no education to some education, right?
No again. The modal outcome is that these threshold folks are given passing grades while learning very little, all while making the experience frustrating for the student and the teacher.
> You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job
I have seen these teachers and its potential effectiveness, but only in special ed. The biggest pay offs seem to be in elementary school with basic/fundamental literacy and numeracy.
As grade level increases, the impact of this instruction decreases substantially in terms of impressiveness largely due to limited scope.
> The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers.
I agree with this, but not for the reasons you give.
> Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.
First, classes with highly skilled students are not necessarily easier. They are only easier if the teacher makes few changes to the curriculum to adjust to the class (basically lack of time or teacher laziness). Gifted classes in particular can be challenging for teachers who think that they want to teach the smartest kids because often some of the students will know more (sometimes a lot more) than the teacher about the subject. This can create very awkward moments (note that this phenomenon can also be seen at universities with students and adjuncts, sometimes even at elite schools).
Second — this is another “secret” that I think covid made less of a secret — the main function of most lower level classes beyond basic literacy and numeracy in elementary school is state-supported child care.
In reality, especially in high school, there is very little learning going on in the lower end classes. The students don’t care about the content, the students’ parents don’t care about it, and their peer groups don’t care about it. The only people who care are the teachers and admins due to standards states have set and funding tied to testing to those standards. There is essentially no product-market fit to use terms that most HNers might understand. The important thing is that the kids have a place to go while the parents work. These are terrible classes to teach.
The actual way to fix this, imho, is to meet the students and their families where they are at. Specifically, introduce them to skill sets that they may actually find useful and/or interesting. It would be ideal to pair this up with co-op working opportunities. Note that this system largely exists in Japan (where they do tracking), so this is not all just theoretical conjecture.
There are a few problems with this system.
One issue is that this type of education can be difficult to create and maintain, because the content could vary widely from school to school — a school in rural Iowa would probably focus on different skills than a school in Brooklyn. This also would make it difficult to measure, so only the local community would really know if it was working (that’s ok, imho).
Another issue is that this type of education done properly is rife with socioeconomic and race issues. For example, if you are teaching a student sales in a coop environment where they actually do sales, it’s probably prudent to teach them something like register shifting so that they can adjust their language to their audience. I will leave it to the reader to figure out why that is a minefield in the US (but probably shouldn’t be).
Apologies for the wall of text, but I think that this is an interesting topic that is poorly understood by many/most highly educated Americans. This is especially true of a lot of HNers who seem to have largely experienced schooling from a middle/upper-middle class perspective (specifically, a largely college-bound school/community).
> Second — this is another “secret” that I think covid made less of a secret — the main function of most lower level classes beyond basic literacy and numeracy in elementary school is state-supported child care.
I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with. So the incentives I pointed to in my previous comment are fully at work, and all the more so if you make the tracking more fine grained. Special ed actually helps by bringing better-trained (and more highly-paid) teachers into the picture in a way that's institutionally provided for.
You're right that a more vocational curriculum would also help some students, but that's hard to implement for the reasons you point out, and still doesn't address the underlying issues wrt. more "academic" subjects, which tend to suffer.
> I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with.
I guess this is a chicken-and-egg problem. The best teachers don’t want to be there because there are few opportunities to teach, again mostly due to student and community ambivalence. There are positive examples like those seen in the movie Stand and Deliver, but those kinds of teachers are super rare, and often the powers-that-be stack the deck against them (administrators, community, peers, etc.).
Fwiw, one can see expert teaching in low-level non-special ed classes by looking at folks researching low SES education. Most of the outcomes are basically one level of classroom failure improving to a slightly different level of classroom failure (mostly due to relatively low time on task and general ambivalence in the student and community populations).
In general, the scope of what a good teacher can do is relatively limited unless a few conditions exist:
1. Students are relatively similar in terms of ability level — that is, no wide outliers. This is not an issue if each teacher has only 3-4 students, so basically each student will get tailored instruction.
2. The students and their communities value education.
3. Relatively low student-teacher ratios. Note that good teachers get better outcomes than bad teachers even when the student-teacher ratio is bad, but the overall impact is often significantly less.
Anyway, thanks for the comments. I haven’t stretched my mental legs on this topic in a while.
I realized recently that some people have a view of education that is much more competition-oriented than my default worldview. E.g. the set of parents who want to make sure their kids do well relative to all the other kids in order to have a higher chance of success in the competitions later on in life (college, jobs, social status, wealth).
Fairness (in the sense of trying to create a level playing field and make sure nobody has unfair advantages) is important to the extent that something is a competition.
This means people who see education as competition will care about fairness - either they will want things to be truly fair or they will want any unfairness to be in their favor.
So from this point of view, special classes for kids who are already doing better can be seen as an unfair advantage (especially because there's plenty of real bias involved in determining which kids actually end up on those classes).
I think we need to fix the biased selection process and make it more possible for more kids to benefit from advanced learning opportunities, especially kids whose parents don't have the resources to take them out of public school to do something more individualized.
If you put slower kids into (legitimately) accelerated programs they just get left behind and do even worse. When you separate children into classes that proceed at different rates based on how fast they learn, everyone is actually getting their own "special classes".
Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.
I think the poster was generally referring to the fact that students who progress at a faster rate will have an advantage by simple virtue of having covered more material in school. They will be more preferred by colleges which leads to being more preferred for jobs. Basically a "rich get richer" effect.
Of course the idea that this is a bad thing (as opposed to being exactly how a merit-based system is supposed to work) is based on presupposing that higher performance was the result of unfair discrimination in the first place.
My contention is that you don't have to presuppose the higher performance was a result of higher discrimination in the first place, my contention is that you can argue that "merit" as measured by academic achievement and standardized testing is not worthy of its status.
It's clear that diversity programs lead to the intake of those who are worse test takers. Yet companies who hire more diverse people correlate to companies which have better financial outcomes for investors. Yet school systems systemically put certain students who cover lots of material and do well on tests into special classes, put them in the best schools, put them into the best jobs, in spite of this observation. These students, so the idea of merit goes, will be more productive and the benefits they have to society will trickle down to the rest, yet in practice what we see in society is a society stratified where those who are part of communities where there are fewer good test takers are disadvantaged.
My contention is more fundamental, it's an attack on the very validity of the testing itself, and testing determines who gets into programs like gifted classes. Testing in practice has the purpose of discrimination in favour of an elite few, is inherently contentious and ripe for political assault.
I self-studied advanced textbooks in the same classroom with the rest of the class. The teacher approved it though and sometimes gave me tasks she couldn't solve herself.
> Your standardized test scores to a large extent determine your quality of life.
This is largely untrue unless one defines quality of life with a very narrow set of criteria and/or lives in a relatively small echo chamber.
I know tons of people with very high scores who have very low QoL, and I know many multiples of that with mediocre scores who have very high QoL.
The skill (or maybe luck) to find a way to use the abilities one does have in order to provide high utility seems to be the common thread in the high QoL folks.
Not true. Most of European schools are govt-run, yet there are pretty good programs for "gifted" people, mainly centered around competitions, culminating in the international IMO and IOI.
A lot of education for gifted people happens outside of school: clubs, correspondence competitions (these days probably all online). Also, gifted people often learn from books.
In most large cities, there is not a single government which has a monopoly on public schools: there are generally multiple individual school districts which each try to compete for the wealthiest students. That results in some school districts being more amenable toward a focus on gifted programs and some being less so. School boards are subject to elections, which does mean that the priorities of the schools are not homogeneous.
Of course there are lots of layers of laws and bureaucracies above school districts that can apply curricula or regulations to temper this, but unlike state governments, where representatives are elected on a slate of issues and tied to political parties, school boards are elected on just 1 issue: how are they going to run the schools.
A "woke" claim asserts that some widely accepted and seemingly race-neutral practice is actually racist, whether in its intent or its effects. These arguments are often made in terms of disparate impact. Gifted and talented education disproportionately benefits white and Asian students.
I appreciate the neutral and factual explanation of the term, as a reader from Europe, with English as third language. And I do not understand the downvotes, both to your explanation or to the equally neutral question.
The definition of "woke" is like the definition of "hipster". Whatever these words might originally have meant in some narrow context, they are now used as vague condescending insults for a broad range of people the person speaking doesn’t like.
Find 10 people opposed to “woke” and you’ll get 12 or 13 distinct explanations/criteria for the term.
If you substitute “poopyhead” for “woke” across the internet it won’t substantively change the meaning of anything you read.
That's not right. Woke is an adjective form of SJW (Social Justice Warrior) and almost exclusively used by people who disparage people interested in social justice in a sneering way. It is meant to be insulting but it does have meaning.
It’s not that these words have no meaning. The problem is that the meaning is vague and changes depending on the speaker and context, so that to the reader/listener it is generally impossible to tell quite what meaning is intended. The word says more about the identity politics of the user than it does about the target.
“Woke” is in practice a vague pejorative that people use to redirect a conversation from critical thinking to tribal thinking.
It is used to elide facts and specifics, like measurable and persistent racial disparities in social outcomes including education. Instead we are invited to consider whether a given person or policy is “woke”, which is not objectively measurable in any way.
If there are specific complaints about a policy, we can consider those directly. No need to apply a reductive label. The top comment was quite specific.
All policies represent agendas and have implications for groups within society, including policies implemented in the past that we live under today. To different perspectives, any given policy will have different upsides and downsides. Moving forward is about finding balance, consensus, or compromise among these perspectives.
Applying a simple label like “woke” is an invitation to ignore this complexity in favor of binary (“is this woke or not”) or linear (“how woke is this”) modes of thought. It’s also an invitation to prejudge the merit based on a sense of whether an idea comes from inside or outside the tribe.
It’s like trying to troubleshoot a space station by focusing on whether solutions seem “cool” or not.
The downvotes are because this person is unfairly presenting a single perspective on what the "woke" term means. If you aren't willing to present other perspectives and engage with them in good faith, then you're a propagandist.
It is much better to read a single factual and accurate explanation, than to read two biased perspectives from two shitheads on the opposite sides of political spectrum.
Example of 'Woke', non race, non class issue: Relative Age Effect.
If you are born in November you have almost no chance of becoming a star athlete, if you are born in January your chances are triple.
Noone designed the system to be unjust, but noone throught about ensuring it's fair either, and for decades noone questioned it.
That's what 'Woke' people claim to 'detect'. Sometines it's right, sometimes it's wrong.
Results matter as much as Intent does - communists had great intent, and where did it get them. Neoliberals have great intent and volumes of theory, all they have to show for it is a stangnant economy and rising inequality.
I am going to present a sane and rational counter-argument for completeness. I am personally undecided on some of these issues.
The counter argument would go something like this:
Structural racism and sexism are so deeply embedded in society that it's hopeless to try to eliminate these tendencies directly. Not only are these tendencies complex, systematic, and often unconscious, they are also difficult to impossible to measure. Outcome on the other hand is easy to measure.
If you start with the hypothesis that at least a large chunk of differences in outcome are a result of differences in opportunity (including hidden ones), then addressing outcome directly is the most effective way to try to combat bias. One way to do this is to eliminate societal systems and programs that seem to lead to outcomes (either positive or negative) that differ statistically from the baseline race and sex distribution in society.
The root of this debate seems to be biological determinism. The "right" (loosely defined) side of this debate argues that once overt racism and sexism are removed most of the remaining differences in ability and outcome that manifest are biologically innate. The "left" (again loosely defined) argues that this is at best unproven and point to the reported subjective experiences of women and minorities in which they report continuous low-grade racism and sexism that remains even after racism and sexism of the overt codified variety are removed.
> The root of this debate seems to be biological determinism. The "right" (loosely defined) side of this debate argues that once overt racism and sexism are removed most of the remaining differences in ability and outcome that manifest are biologically innate.
"Biological determinism" is a huge red herring here. There are lots of causally-relevant factors wrt. social outcomes that have nothing to do with either biology or perceived prejudice/discrimination (however defined). Biological differences might explain some of the different preferences across genders (the broad 'people vs. things' orientation that even seems to show up in experiments with infants), but they're realistically irrelevant to anything else that the "woke" actually care about.
What does it mean to give "equality of opportunity" to a black child in America, who's ancestors were enslaved, who's great grandparent was lynched, who's grandparents couldn't vote, who's parents couldn't go to university because of discrimination?
Who lives in a country where three white men can murder a black jogger, and it requires a international outcry for the police to prosecute?
As I understand "woke", it does mean trying to equalise "opportunity"; it just recognises that "opportunity" in the sense of "something offered" is not the same as "opportunity" in the sense of "the chance to do well", and tries to correct that.
In this particular case, does it make sense to take away gifted and talented programmes? There is clearly equality of opportunity offered. But a woke response might be to also identify individuals in disadvantaged groups who would be at that level were it not for their disadvantage and help them get there.
> What does it mean to give "equality of opportunity" to a black child in America, who's ancestors were enslaved, who's great grandparent was lynched, who's grandparents couldn't vote, who's parents couldn't go to university because of discrimination?
Much of this applies almost equally to Slav kids in America (when you account for what their origin countries were like) yet they seem to do pretty well compared to Blacks. So I think there's reason to be skeptical about your claim that "we've offered plenty enough to the Black community and it hasn't helped, so equality of opportunity itself must be the problem". We haven't done nearly enough for true equal opportunity to be achieved, and this goes equally for both mainstream society as a whole and the Black community itself which has often pushed in counterproductive directions.
As a term it is barely used except by people that overwhelmingly hate the culture (which as said, does not exist as an entity). Asserting what is true and what is not about the term in general doesn't work as a consequence and we should most closely try to approximate what the speaker in question means. I think you covered that well, but for a casual non-native reader it is important to have this expressed.
"Woke is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.[0,1]"
Unfortunately like most terms associated with progressivism, feminism or race, almost no one here ever uses the term in good faith, understanding either its history or taking its purpose at face value, and it's simply become another anti-leftist pejorative.
To quote another post that's quickly disappeared from the front page here:
> the left’s insecurity about genetics is partly why so many have fallen completely for the critical theory cult, leaving reality far behind, and sustaining this new (and false) consensus at this point solely by punishment of dissent
Wokeness is about caring about people who look different from oneself, and who aren't in positions of power. The summary you quoted is wrong on every level.
Source: Am leftist who is secure about genetics, though would prefer less methylation of my particular genes.
With some quibbles: the gifted programs aren’t being phased out entirely, assessments are just being moved to a state where they’re less gamified. The reason why note white and Asian people were on them was because they could pay to cram the gifted assessments, which then poisoned the whole program because those kids weren’t actually gifted.
SAT similarly is a pretty bad indicator of intelligence because there’s a pipeline of gaming them.
> I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive.
Menlo Park and Palo Alto school districts are overrun with parents who want to push their child into advanced classes from the moment they can put sentences together. Having talked to many friends over the years who work in tech with me who grew up in these school districts (I didn't, my experience was very different), their parents constantly applied pressure to school administrators and counselors to push their child into advanced instruction. I know parents that would spend hours a day trying to pressure school administration to push their child along. I can only imagine this form of sandbagging is just to put the brakes on you and every other parent who wants to push their child as much as possible. You're competing against every other wealthy, pushy parent trying to push their children into advanced classes as well.
If the districts are overrun with parents looking for advanced learning, why don't they offer it?
Palo Alto parents recently filed a lawsuit [1] claiming that PAUSD's system for offering advanced math unfairly discriminates against girls (who make up just 35 of the 162 students receiving advanced placement in middle school). Apparently the process involves an objective test and a subjective test, and you have to pass both in order to qualify.
> If the districts are overrun with parents looking for advanced learning, why don't they offer it?
probably because a fair chunk of the kids aren't actually gifted, and if you cave to the parent's demands then you end up with a "if everyone is gifted, then no one is gifted" situation.
Our local school frequently mentions that their 50th percentile is at the level of the 75th percentile nationally, which indicates that a decent number of the students are in fact well above average.
That doesn't mean that the dilemma you mention wouldn't arise, but presumably there are objective tests that could be used to make determinations. It wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better than ignoring advanced students like they're doing now.
Schools adjust their curriculums for the measured state of their student bodies. This is a major reason why they test and measure at the school level.
So if the school’s student body as whole outperforms the national average, then that school’s curriculum is enriched to meet the students where they are. State standards are a floor, not a ceiling.
This is good for the kids but not easily visible to the parents the way that placement in a gifted program is. Unfortunately, for families interested in markers of achievement, sometimes they will be unsatisfied with anything short of that letter that their child has been placed in the gifted program.
There is if the parents make a big stink or if it hurts the students. Getting the students into the correct level class (in both directions!) is not entirely trivial.
Consider that a gifted and talented program is maybe not the best option for your daughter. Not because she isn't capable. Because gifted and talented programs, especially for the very young (which it sounds like your daughter is), trade improvements in your child's strengths for exacerbating their weaknesses. Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
The benefit of course is that students in gifted and talented programs get inordinate amounts of money spent on them compared to their peers (class sizes of 10-15!! Individual attention from the best and most accomplished teachers!). This is an extremely hard benefit to pass up, and I don't envy you making that decision if you buy in to above (although I expect you won't, very few people I have this conversation with agree with me).
> Consider that a gifted and talented program is maybe not the best option for your daughter.
So is your opinion that such a program is not a good option for any student? Why not conclude instead that there should be good advanced programs, not like the ones you've seen?
> Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates. Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything. IMO, that's worse than the picture you paint.
FWIW, I'm not looking for smaller classes at all. Her current class is 15 or 16. I'm looking for instruction that is at an appropriate level. It could be with her own class, or by having her sit with another class for math or reading. Class size is not the point; it's all about having appropriate instruction.
> As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates. Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything.
Welcome to the “parents of gifted children” club. I agree with the previous commenter that G&T probably isn’t the right place for your kid, at least not for now, although you might not have any practical alternatives.
Let’s be real though: one need not invoke resentment-laced arguments about fairness to see that public schools just do not have the resources to properly educate (upper) outliers. Pretend you had a child whose growth curve put him on track to be a future 7-footer—you might consider investing in some private basketball coaching. Different gift, same idea.
> Let’s be real though: one need not invoke resentment-laced arguments about fairness to see that public schools just do not have the resources to properly educate (upper) outliers.
Let's also be real though. This was a conscious policy decision made by school boards across the country.
G&T programs used to be what school's public and private marketed. Now the public schools where I grew up don't even offer AP classes, and a huge portion of their budget now goes to special education.
Why did we decide we have the resources to spend on the lower end of "special" scale but not the upper?
It was the same thing when I was a kid in the 90's and I was bored out of my mind at school, completely and utterly un-challenged. I can barely even put into words how bitter I got about being dragged through such a system. There was no such thing as "advanced" classes, and the only so-called advanced stuff I ever did was outside of school in special programs, which I'm pretty sure my parents had to pay for me to participate in. It was a parent-created/run organization.
Anyway, to answer your query, my belief after decades of observing the education system here (BC, Canada) is, politicians and decision-makers basically feel that smart kids have a huge advantage and they don't need the help. They will succeed and be useful members of society whether we leave them for dead or help them thrive. So... the dollars can be allocated to "those who really need it". I have heard this overall sentiment shared over and over and over, as far back as when my parents and I attended city council meetings appealing for ANY sort of "gifted" program implementation, even a tiny hint of one. The answer was always "find a private school", "I heard there's this virtual school you can attend on the computer", "we'll think about it", etc. I honestly don't see this changing anytime soon.
I could say way more on the subject but didn't feel like posting much more of such a personal topic. Happy to chat about it more with whoever, though.
In California, “we” decided this in 2014, when the state did away with mandatory GATE requirements for districts. It’s now optional, and schools aren’t doing it.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything.
If one goes through life expecting people they encounter to care about them, they'll be bitterly disappointed. Some of my teachers were nice to me, and would go out of their way to help if I asked. Did they really care about me? I doubt it. They were just good people. The rest of of my teachers were pretty indifferent. A couple actively disliked me (my own fault).
But what I wanted was not caring, but for them to do their job.
They are well aware of this, which is why they make a great show of caring. But do they really care? The educational results suggest the reality is they don't particularly.
More like welcome to the parents of any child club. School isn't designed to teach, it's designed to be day care. If you want special day care for your special child, it'll cost you, and may or may not be worth it. As it stands, I don't actually recall learning anything in school, or anyone really caring that I did or didn't learn anything, beyond getting me a passing grade of course.
Yeah, it's indoctrination into the 9-5 worker mindset, with a touch of "education" on the side. Parents who are concerned about their kids' all-so-important education being hampered by COVID-related school closures are seriously misled, unless they happen to have the most amazing schools on the continent. Even people I know who work in public education agree it's more daycare than actual education.
I'd definitely argue that the social isolation of not being physically in school would delay some social development, because that's largely what grade school offers imo. It's an environment for rapidly testing and experimenting with interactions between yourself and others, figuring out what works and what doesn't, resolving conflict between you and peers and older adults, forming bonds that will carry maybe into early adult years if not later ones. There's a lot of value in that, but I don't think genuinely academic learning comes until post-secondary, with the exception actually being any kind of vocational classes where you have a specific domain and framework to practice creating or doing something tangible.
> she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything.
So, she's starting to unschool herself (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling ). Perhaps she could use some help in that process, but it's not inherently a bad thing.
That doesn’t explain why they don’t let her receive math instruction with a different class. The teacher is already teaching the content, my child is just not in the room.
It also doesn’t explain why she can only use the math app at her grade level or one above. They are rate limiting her.
When I was in sixth grade my parents convinced my (private) school to allow me to join the ninth/tenth grader's Geometry class. Two problems developed:
1. The material wasn't challenging; I didn't grasp what the point of "proving" a bunch of obvious stuff was, although I was willing to go through the motions. So I was an 11-year-old smart aleck in a room filled with 14 year olds who found me annoying (because, truthfully, I was super annoying at that age!). This contributed to:
2. The 14 year olds were super mean to me, AND they basically revolted against the teacher when I was in the classroom
In the end the teacher was happy to just privately tutor me, which was kind of her, but I have to acknowledge that I was genuinely disruptive to her class.
So I think there are real repercussions to allowing socially undeveloped kids into a classroom filled with kids at a very different (social) level.
There might have been a different outcome if I'd been in a school with a larger pool of moderately-to-very-gifted-at-math kids.
The next year my parents sent me to a school that had an agreement with the local university to send kids gifted at math to take university classes. The college kids were much more tolerant of me as a curiosity (and I was actually challenged, so I didn't spend my time annoying anyone, which probably helped, too).
They don't care about her learning. It's a school, she's not being tutored. It's mostly about childcare and ranking, not learning and they know her rank. If you don't ask for an individualised education plan or otherwise show that you know the magic words that show that you are preparing evidence to sue them they're not going to do anything.
Education schools have been very clear for decades that acceleration and other accomodations for gifted students are wrong and evil.
The point of gifted classes isn't to teach you better math. It's to separate the kids who are too nerdy to survive in the same class as normal ones or who behave too "gifted kid" all the time to keep a class on track.
If you want to be a tiger parent, do what the tiger parents do and send them to afterschool programs. (well that's what I think they do anyway.)
That is definitely true but I would suggest that it is a societal choice about basic values that makes it so. I'm not saying I personally disagree with that choice but we should see it as one rather than just the obvious.
Schools could be like other institutions which focus their attention and assess themselves based on the best they produce. Even some schools are like this (or American schools anyway) with sports. Is Coach worrying about how good the average student is at basketball, or the lowest quartile? I think not.
We have decided that it is essential that everyone reaches a minimum level, that the average performance should reach a certain level and that these two things are very important and much more so than making sure that the very best students can reach their maximum level.
Again, I'm not saying I think that is wrong. In a democracy, it has a lot going for it, but it isn't the only way to run a society either.
> As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates.
Both of those things are objectively true, so this is a fine conclusion.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything.
This is also true.
Perhaps you could look at getting her private tutoring and making peace with the fact that school is mostly for socialising. Modern schooling is primarily about beating you into the shape that bureaucratic life demands of you, so in essence the impression she is getting now is one she will probably have her entire life.
I was in G&T programs and ended up skipping multiple grades and going to specialized schools for a few years. I was also a colossal asshole and a behavior problem so my story wont be an exact parallel.
The trade-off was worth it. But my teachers did care, they campaigned for some solution to what they saw as bad behavior from being bored and unchallenged. It did create authority problems to see the Teachers one was supposed to respect stutter on with easy problems and to see your peers having trouble spelling basic words, it was ok to be "other" from that. Early social life doesn't have to be tied to a classroom, I got that from neighborhood friends, athletics church and family. There is no excuse to having your young child wasting the opportunity of her headstart by following the same path as the other kids.
Once you are out of early ed, the honors and AP classes should provide enough challenges, it would be unusual for her to excel in every topic.
I didn't have any particular academic or career excellence other than the path I described there, turns out I just read fast and had tested out of standardized reading levels by the "third" grade but if someone hadn't intervened and noticed that I wasn't mean spirited, I just had read the whole book in the time the rest were reading three pages and now had nothing to do, I would have had a way different feeling about learning and likely would have ended up in alternative schools for being an authority issue.
Most kids in G&T programs even out with others academically over time, there is no reason to waste the younger years where she is showing advanced aptitude
> So is your opinion that such a program is not a good option for any student?
It is extremely hard to draw such broad conclusions. I do think on the whole G&T programs are a net negative- if only because they have drained so many resources from the vast majority of students. I think there is a reasonable middle ground to be had somewhere.
> Why not conclude instead that there should be good advanced programs, not like the ones you've seen?
I have seen quite a few advanced programs and I can attach various adjectives to them, and I think some were objectively good from the standard measure. I think the entire concept is flawed in a fundamental way though. All children will benefit from small class sizes, individualized lesson plans, encouragement to pursue their passions, etc etc. Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
> As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates
This is certainly a struggle. Do keep in mind that your daughter will take your cues to heart in how you interact with her schooling. Finding the challenge in the mundane is a skill I did not develop until I was much too old to take advantage of it.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything. IMO, that's worse than the picture you paint.
Thats certainly not a good situation. I wish you the best of luck in addressing it however you deem best. As I concede above, its hard to paint with broad strokes; every child is different and will respond differently to identical situations.
> All children will benefit from small class sizes, individualized lesson plans, encouragement to pursue their passions, etc etc.
Class size has nothing to do with it. As I've mentioned above multiple times, this is not what we are after. It is also not necessarily something that these programs offer; the program I was in 30 years ago did not have small class sizes.
Equally important, evidence does not strongly support the theory that smaller class sizes improve performance. Most of the studies show no benefit or a small benefit but only for certain types of students (white/Asian, not URM).
Similarly, we're not looking for individualized lesson plans. Just let her do the regular math for a different grade level. No customization needed. I realize that would require matching up 'math time' for her class and another class, but this is a school with 7 classes per grade. There are many ways to make this happen (for her and for other students who could also benefit from above-grade-level instruction).
> I do think on the whole G&T programs are a net negative- if only because they have drained so many resources from the vast majority of students.
> Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
I'm curious where you're getting your numbers from. I work in education technology, and the common wisdom is that tons of money is spent on Title I schools and special education. I have literally never heard anyone claim that GATE is a lucrative market.
1) a lower student to teacher ratio
2) better, newer equipment
3) better, more experienced teachers
I've never talked to someone who didn't admit to those advantages, only argued about how important they were or how expensive they might be. I can imagine it isn't a cash cow for the industry because the number of students is small and most of the difference is in teacher pay per child.
Re snap class sizes having an effect on outcomes. This is extremely surprising to me. The last I looked (admittedly quite some time ago) it was essentially the only factor that has significant weight and was reproducible.
Well, you will need teachers who have mastered algebra themselves. Other than that, I don't see why they need to be better or more experienced.
The profs I had in college were never trained as teachers, nor were they particularly experienced at it. But they knew the material to the point that it was trivial for them.
> But they knew the material to the point that it was trivial for them
On the flipside this can make it harder for the teacher to relate to the students. In a university context of course, students have each other as equals.
> I'm curious where you're getting your numbers from. I work in education technology, and the common wisdom is that tons of money is spent on Title I schools and special education. I have literally never heard anyone claim that GATE is a lucrative market.
I went to a magnet school for high school. While we did have a decent amount of swanky equipment for labs, that was pretty much all donated or begged off of companies. That does comport with your tales that GT isn't particularly graced with extra funding.
> Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
It is far more heartbreaking seeing those resources wasted on the comparatively incapable. You can bring a student to math, but you can't make him/her learn. Moreover it guts both our national competitiveness and eschews meritocracy in favor of classism, where the have's can privately acquire those services.
I was once hired to photograph a teacher for a magazine or the like. It was a music class at about the 3rd grade level. There was a student in the class that clearly had no idea what was going on and just moaned the entire time. They had an aide that stayed with them the entire time and presumably the entire day.
I understand that as a parent you’d want to do what you can for your child to give them a normal experience. I’d probably do the same in their shoes. As a society we should probably place limits on that. As far as I could tell he was one step above “vegetable” and gained nothing from the experience and it took an insane amount of potential resources away from the rest of the students.
> All children will benefit from small class sizes, individualized lesson plans, encouragement to pursue their passions, etc etc.
You don't need any of that for a gifted program. You just need to teach more advanced material, and at a faster pace. There's no reason whatsoever it should cost more.
Heck, my freshman physics class in college had 150 students in it. It blew by high school honors physics in 3 or 4 lectures. I learned a crap ton in it. It was terrifying, but also exhilarating.
Well, perhaps this is true. I wonder how well it would work in a k-8 setting. I've never seen it implemented there like that.
Edit: I can think of a situation where I attended a different grade's math class. That was completely separate from the g&t program at the school, and I simply haven't considered it as part of that.
I understand that k-8 is different, I was just pointing out that small class size is not necessarily correlated with quality teaching. This is especially true as the kids mature.
I also doubt that it is even possible to reliably detect a gifted student before 3rd grade.
And lastly, a gifted program can be little more than just giving the 3rd grade gifted students the 4th grade curriculum. No extra money required. No magical teaching required.
I think perhaps we are in (majority) agreement. My primary point is that g&t programs in the k-8 range don't look anything like what you describe. What you describe also happens, its just not called a gifted and talented program (at least in my experience).
If I hadn't had gifted classes to keep me intellectually stimulated, I probably would've been lighting things on fire during class in elementary school. I guess I would've found "the challenge in the mundane", but it most likely would've been through destructive and antisocial behavior.
I don't recall we even needed a lot of resources or personal attention or special student/teacher ratios in gifted class--they just set us loose with computers and told us to write logo programs (it was the early 90s), instead of being stuck in regular class trying to figure out how to cut myself so I could feel something other than bored.
I would've ended up getting a phd with or without gifted classes--I didn't need it to get a jump start on career success or something like that. I needed it to keep me sane.
>> As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy
And she may feel that way even in gifted classes, I know I did. There's only so much that teachers can do. If it's so easy then she can spend her time doing/studying other things that she likes.
I read all the feynman lectures in middle school classes (ymmv with teachers). Later I got into quantem mechanics and advanced math, all on my own and because I had a bunch of free time..
Those were some of my favorite years and shaped who I am today. There's plenty to learn beyond the school curriculum and your child can self direct it
People forget in the 8-12 year old range kids have their own ideas about things. Kids understand a lot and perceive when adults don't care about what is good for them at some level.
Can you provide any evidence that G&T programmes exacerbate weaknesses?
The idea that G&T programmes get inordinate resources doesn't bear any relationship to reality. Most school dsitricts don't have such programmes at all. Every single school district in the US has special needs teachers, assistants and ELL support. Most of them have no support of any kind for gifted students.
> Can you provide any evidence that G&T programmes exacerbate weaknesses?
None at all other than anecdotal.
> Most school dsitricts don't have such programmes at all
This doesn't jive with my experience where literally every school I attended had some sort of program (and I attended quite a few schools growing up- more than grades). Often in single district areas too where it wasn't possible for my parents to have chosen the right school. A quick google search reveals 6% of schools are enrolled in the national gifted and talented program. Perhaps that is your definition? I imagine it is far too narrow a criteria and that plenty of schools offer special classes for a small minority of their students.
If 6% of schools have a G&T programme surely that proves a tiny minority of students are enrolled? It's not like honors or AP classes are targeted at top 10% or 5% students.
In my school district, not every school had a GT program; if your base school didn't have one, you'd be instead bused to the nearest GT program. You'll need to compare school districts or (better yet) student populations, rather than merely schools, to get a better estimate.
Thats the "official" G&T program statistic. I don't know anything about the requirements to be on that list, but perhaps it is onerous? My claim (unsupported) is there are plenty of schools that run G&T programs that are not on that list of 6% that, if counted, would raise the percent dramatically- perhaps to the 75% level? I don't know.
> My claim (unsupported) is there are plenty of schools that run G&T programs that are not on that list of 6% that, if counted, would raise the percent dramatically- perhaps to the 75% level?
Unless you count AP or honors programmes as G&T this isn't remotely close to being true.
An opinion from the other end: In 1st grade (7-8 years old), I tested out of my grade and was able to go into the gifted program. My parents gave me the choice instead of choosing for me, and I chose not to because I had just made some of my first school friends and didn't want to leave them.
It's been well over two decades, and for almost all of that I've regretted the choice.
In addition to not getting the academic boost the gifted program might've given me, socialization with general-age peers didn't really help; I remained the odd one out for pretty much all of my school years, it was only come college that that really changed.
I had a similar experience but I don’t really regret choosing not to skip grades. I didn’t really bloom socially until I hit university either but I think being a 14 year-old freshman would have probably changed how that played out.
Just a side note that mine wasn't about skipping grades, it was a gifted program with other kids my own age. No idea how it would've played out years down the line, but that was how it worked early on where I was.
I was in gifted programs and honestly it was more to have a space where I was allowed to read and learn what I wanted. I actually learned from being in 'normal' classes and having parents who encouraged me to explain the lessons to my friends when they struggled. I learned how to teach in a way that was friendly and kind to my peers, and I understood the materials after at a deeper level too. I did tutoring and standardized test coaching in middle and high school which gave me both some extra cash and confidence in my knowledge.
Those skills I learned at a young age are in constant use. Absolutely invaluable.
Even as far as US College teams the team shouldn't just be composed of really good players. There should also be randomly selected college students in the team.
It's probably a good idea for music too. Too many bands are composed of just talented musicians and very attractive people. It should be blended.
> Even as far as US College teams the team shouldn't just be composed of really good players. There should also be randomly selected college students in the team.
This depends on your goals. Are you trying to build the best single team you can? Or are you trying to build the best repository of skill in that sport in the population at large? Or maybe something else? I bet you'd construct different team compositions depending on how you answer those questions. Ditto for the musicians.
How are the rest of the band meant to practice when the drummer can't hold time?
How often do you think the weak player will receive a pass in the sports team?
How do you think it feels for the weaker members to be always holding up the others? What does that do for their self confidence, or their long term development of skills?
I gotta agree, I clicked so damn well with the kids in any "gifted" program I ever partook in. Some of them were super socially-awkward, but I didn't care because they were super smart and loved to discuss super complex, deep subjects, at length. I learned from them and they learned from me. This just simply didn't happen in any normal school setting, whatsoever. Unfortunately all of those experiences were indeed outside of school, extracurricular stuff. If actual normal school had been like that, I may have actually liked school!
Yeah, I hear this a lot, and I heard this as a child. Maybe there's real data indicating this is the normal outcome, I don't know. But I do know that in my personal experience, nothing was better for my social growth than skipping grades. My favorite theory is that being a weird kid is easier when you also have a sympathy card by also being younger than everyone. Like everyone sort of gave me a break? I'm not sure, but it was great for me, way better than being in normal school with kids my age.
My experience is consistent with this, but I hope not representative.
When I was a kid I was pretty far ahead in some areas, but behind socially, and participated in some programs and activities for gifted kids. The kids in those programs were some of the most socially and emotionally maladjusted people I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. Maybe I was just in those places because I was also maladjusted, and other gifted programs aren't like that.
Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
I'm not sure that's the fault of such programs, I had that label applied without needing a special program.
so the alternatives are: A. lifetime benefits from being challenged up to their real potential during their most-formative years, versus alternative B. being cooler for a few years during puberty when being different is a bad thing.
"being cooler" is a really disingenuous way to phrase the upside benefit. It would be as if I said "so you have to take into calc in college. What a bummer!" to sum up the advantages of the g&t program
I can't pull it up but there's been studies on how much you accelerate a child's IQ and their life outcome. Not accelerating leads to depression, suicide, and drug abuse.
Have you heard of https://www.davidsongifted.org/ ? They will help lobby the school system, or help you find other resources. And also get your kid connected with other kids that are intellectual peers as well as age peers. Also, for math specifically, check out https://artofproblemsolving.com/
We eventually home-schooled. At some point, you look at all the time you spend lobbying school administrators and selling band candy, and decide it takes less time to just home school.
Just wanted to add my recommendation for checking into Davidson as well.
They offered a summer academy that hopefully will start back up again after covid and also have an online program that may be a good alternative to full home-schooling if you were considering going that route.
Update: Beast Academy is wonderful. AOPS is great too. Both very good suggestions. Your daughter may also like the math content produced by Poh Shen Loh [1].
It seems you would be far better served by something like Beast Academy [0] or Singapore Math [1].
A gifted and talented program generally just accelerates the core curriculum (i.e. teaches a grade ahead). Art of Problem Solving [2] has a compelling argument [3] against acceleration:
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“For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. That student who breezed unchallenged through algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, will breeze through calculus, too. This is not to say that high school students should not learn calculus—they should. But more importantly, the gifted, interested student should be exposed to mathematics outside the core curriculum, because the standard curriculum is not designed for the top students. This is even, if not especially, true for the core calculus curriculum found at most high schools, community colleges, and universities.
Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Curricular classes do not prepare students for the leap from the usual one-step-and-done problems to the multi-step, multi-discipline problems they will face later on. That transition is smoothed by exposing students to complex problems in simpler areas of study, such as basic number theory or geometry, rather than giving them their first taste of complicated arguments when they’re learning a more advanced subject like group -theory or the calculus of complex variables.”
This is sooo very true. I had an experimental math curriculum in the 6th grade that had special sections in the book that covered (in an age adjusted way) things like axiomatic definitions of numbers, extending the field of integers to rationals, limit sequences as definitions for real quantities, fields and rings and some other topics. I was sooo revved about that class and so bummed when the next school thought math meant doing sets of 50 long division problems each night.
But the excitement didn't die off. I had a great 8th grade math teacher who noticed that I did all of the exercises in the book during the first two weeks of class and diverted me into a more advanced class (algebra) and eventually got me into correspondence courses (trig and geometry) and late in the same year into the high school calculus class. By finishing calculus that year, I was able to branch into languages and other topics.
Branching out early is a great motivator for the right kids. More interesting material can lead to explosive levels of interest in kids.
The parent comment is exactly spot on. Those are exactly the right resources. If you are working with a gifted math student, 100% bookmark it and follow up soon. AoPS has a ton of excellent books for coursework and also just deeper problem solving (billed as competition problems).
In fact, even if you do not have a "gifted" youngster, learning to work on harder problems is so much better than learning to follow instructions by rote. Not to say all teaching is that way, but it seems like a majority.
Another resource is MOEMS, the Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools. They are totally reasonable and also fascinating problems. Get one of the books and check it out if you are working with someone in the late elementary.
Actually good rich public school district not having gifted program is a feature not a bug. If you have money and kid in 70-95% IQ percentile (typical for upper middle class) you can buy a house in Palo Alto, Short Hill or other rich suburb, send kid to school and not worry about gifted tests, school selection, lottery. Your kid will be fine with motivated students, etc. There will be dumb kids but overall class mix is really good (bottom 25% kid in Palo Alto is 80% percentile nationally).
The moment you introduce gifted program magic disappears and all “dumb” kids are in non gifted program with ambitious parents worrying about tests, everyone prepping for tests for 5 year old kids, etc.
District like Redwood City has much broader range of kids (from working class to rich techies) and gifted program is the only way to accommodate the range of abilities. In many districts gifted programs are very comparable to regular programs in good schools districts and is veiled attempt to keep white parents send kids to otherwise failing school.
It's not just about having a gifted program. They could do a great job accommodating these kids without a formal program, just by assessing kids and providing appropriately challenging curriculum. They just choose not to. They don't want to assess kids because they don't want to know what their true reading/math levels actually are.
And the 'common wisdom' that was passed to me by many other parents and district leaders is that advanced kids should maybe go to private schools. This is not the sign of a district that embraces a student body that skews advanced.
It gets worse when you leave the bay. There are states where they don't believe in the concept of kids being mentally gifted but they'll bend over backward to talk up their gifted athletic programs. You can be super good at dribbling and be valuable but good at math is just training... uhuh... Okay...
If she is that advanced you can probably get significant financial aid.
When I was in first grade, the public school I was attending told my parents they didn't have the resources to teach me at the pace I was learning and recommended that my parents tried to enroll me in a private school.
The private school I ended up attending had me go through an assortment of tests and at the end I placed well enough on them that my parents were given significant financial aid.
Welcome to the type of discrimination everyone is okay with. I'm saddened to hear of your difficulties, but it sounds about par for the course given my life experience.
The fact is, it's extremely difficult to find people who are cutting edge teachers of young minds. You can get them advanced course material and work with your child as long as your mind can keep up, but when it comes to outsourcing it or finding a mentor for pedagogy, if you don't know somebody, all you can really do is do the footwork, network, and pray to cross paths with someone who fits the bill.
The curse of course being that someone with advanced understanding isn't actually who you are looking for, but someone exceptionally good at teaching how to build understanding of complex topics. Those people will be in high demand, everyone will claim to be one, and a bad choice on your part distinguishing the frauds from the real thing could do much more harm than good.
Good luck. If it were me, I'd just try to get in as much extracurricular time as possible, or network with the type of people who could help, which you're already doing; so...
California used to have a better funded GATE (gifted and talented education) program - like maybe in the 70’s - but like much infrastructural social investment in America - it has undergone long term atrophy of decades.
I don't think it's decades of atrophy. In 2014 the state simply got rid of the GATE requirement. Districts abandoned their programs in droves after that. It was much more binary than a decades-long decay.
I had gate identified kids before that and at that time, the gate identification was still working, but any actual programs had atrophied to one day supplemental activities once or twice a year. Maybe a decade before that, there were entire classes of gate identified kids being taught by full time teachers.
Our son scored well, but we were told the district looks for students scoring 3 to 4 standard deviations above the mean. That's about 3 students per ten thousand.
Get an online tutor. Now that covid has happened they are all online. I have my kid tutored by someone in Australia despite being in the UK. He also has a local guy teach him extra math via video. Algebra, that kind of thing that is ahead of his year.
Shouldn't be too hard to find someone wanting to teach an advanced kid.
> But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level.
Closed-ended testing is standard for Gifted and Talented programs throughout the country. Are you saying that she did not meet the requirements using those tests?
Gifted programs in public schools are typically aimed at moderately gifted students in the 115 to 130 IQ range. A child who is either above that IQ generally or especially talented in a particular area tends to not be adequately accommodated by public school gifted programs.
To make matters worse, it's quite common for very gifted students to also have issues like ADHD or OCD, which qualifies them for a label of twice exceptional. When I was raising my now adult sons, schools typically wanted to label a child either gifted or special needs and often seemed incapable of comprehending that a child could be both.
I ended up homeschooling and as a consequence I was involved with an online voluntary health and welfare organization for the gifted. My impression was that it was pretty common for people with very gifted or twice exceptional children to homeschool due to frustration with how schools handle such students.
They need custom help that few people are qualified to adequately provide.
Sorry if I'm not using the terminology correctly. What I was trying to say was that they asked almost entirely addition and subtraction questions and then decided that she was just above grade level. If they had asked questions about fractions, multiplication, division, or geometry, they would have discovered she is well above grade level.
They did the same thing with reading: don't give a student the chance to show higher proficiency, and you effectively cap the level a student can be 'assessed' at.
It’s probably worth going somewhere specifically for testing giftedness so you can see if your child (on that day) is more likely gifted, highly gifted, profoundly gifted, etc. Also it can be helpful to find out if there’s other 2E (twice exceptional) things at play such as ADHD, etc.
We took our kiddo on a trip to Colorado to the Gifted Development Center which was a good helpful first step (and connected a lot of dots for us). More than happy to share experiences at matt at mindvault dot com.
Except at this end of the spectrum, it’s more like ‘A’ people teaching ‘A++++’ people. The average teacher might encounter only a handful of such students in an entire career.
The school started off saying they don't offer advanced instruction, then grudgingly agreed to assess our child to see if she even would require it. But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level.
Even when faced with her clearly advanced abilities (3.5 grades ahead in math, according to the diagnostic from the online math platform they use), they are still doing their best to hold her back. Their rallying cry? "Even Steph Curry practices dribbling".
After hearing this for the third time, I finally pointed out that Steph Curry wouldn't have become who he is if he were never allowed to practice anything but dribbling. The school has continued dragging their feet.
The unsurprising result is that advanced students leave for private schools. We never would have bought a home in an expensive district had we anticipated departing for a private. I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive.
This whole process has been very disappointing (and surprising) for me, since I had a very different experience growing up. I went to public schools in Sacramento, where magnet programs were freely available and students could open enroll from anywhere in the region. We had classmates who lived halfway to Tahoe. It was great. I understand their programs are still up and running, and it's shocking that the well-heeled districts around here are so hostile to advanced instruction.
Happy to connect with other nearby parents of young kids. Contact info is in profile.