Gifted and Talented in New York

Out of all of the haploids in my Dad’s ballsack I was the strongest. The champion of the Thunderdome imo.

blessed be his name.

It’s possible you read too much dickens. If it was just a matter of providing food and water, we would solve the problem by providing food and water.

When you say “problem” are you talking about the child level or the “people that control the money and make the decisions” level?

People who control the money and make the decisions level. For example the urban planning conducted in the mid 20th century under Robert Moses was deliberately designed to segregate. That’s not easy to undo.

My wife and I were just discussing gifted and talented program stuff. She was G&T. I was not. My recollection is that the program wasn’t all that good at identifying particularly great students when it was all said and done. Maybe that’s just my district though.

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I think this is probably correct. If the choice was between the GT, or a comprehensive early childhood program that included universal childcare such that even the kids of single moms spent most of their day around loving adults who read to them and sang them songs, I’d pick the latter.

But the latter is probably way more expensive and can’t be funded by cutting GT. So it feels like cutting our nose to spite our face.

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success is 1% inspiration, 49% perspiration, 50% constipation

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Same. I was in G&T, I knew kids who had no business being there but were semi-intelligent and “popular” and so they were in. The entire program was a giant waste of time, we didn’t do anything particularly useful or interesting. We certainly didn’t do anything that the school could say gosh, this was an exemplary accomplishment by the G&T program, let’s put this up somewhere for everyone to recognize and we can brag about it.

Reminds me of “honors” classes at my old high school, which at one point were for math only and truly represented a higher degree of challenge vs. normal math classes. The catch is that if you were in honors math, you got a bonus toward your GPA - meaning, those in honors math would finish with a higher class rank than someone not in honors math, all other things being equal.

That led to “honors English” and “honors History” and so on, all of which also gave extra credit toward GPA. However, there’s only so much space and so many students and so you’d get two kids in the same classroom learning the same material, but one is in “honors” and the other was not. It’s also how you’d get ridiculous shit like someone having a 5.79 GPA on a 5.0 scale, which the HS used as “evidence” that “we’re uber-serious about prepping our kids for college.”

Reminds me, I need to go poop.

One of the benefits of honors classes is the caliber of students you get to have in the class with you. Sure, there’s more work, but also tends to be less distractions.

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If you’re in a class with other honor students, I would (mostly) agree with you. This relies on “who should be an honor student” being adjudged correctly, which again in my experience it was not.

If you’re in a class with normal students, where literally the only distinction between you and them is “you said you wanted an honors course” and “they didn’t say they wanted an honors course” [which is what goes on at my old HS - at least did for a number of years; don’t know if they’ve corrected that - my guess is hell no considering a couple years back someone set a “new school record” with a GPA of something like 5.963 and that person was in band, which has exactly one class period for everyone] then I would pretty strongly disagree.

in many places, the legacy system of identifying GT or honors kids is dependent on parents insisting their kid deserves to be in and so they place the kid. then it fills up. who knows the system best and advocates loudest? mostly the wealthier folks, those with time to game the system by being a squeaky wheel. then the districts look at those programs and find…they are “full” so don’t need to change how they do it.

using classroom results alone is not a good measure of being gifted or talented, right? A kid could have a HUGE IQ and not be interested in the classwork, adept at following the social conventions, or fluent enough in the classroom’s language to display to the teacher that they are gifted or talented in the ways they are measuring.

So if you want kids with real gifts and talents, you have to look for them. using something that properly measures it. If you use the old metrics (wealthy parents who advocate loudest, reading early, whatever) you will nearly perpetuate the makeup of the GT group.

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I went to a very diverse and large HS. Of the 1460 freshman, about 900 made it to graduation. There were both honors classes and, more rigorously, AP prep for seniors. Since most of the students body was just avoiding truancy and were out the door at age 16, it had the effect of curating the classrooms. Also a lot of job training for those not headed to higher degrees, like auto mechanics and carpentry.

I thought it worked pretty well. I got into the state uni with a lot of credits.

“Gifted and Talented” as used in the public education system is a misnomer. It should be called advanced/honors/above average/something else. Truly gifted children are a whole 'nother thing, and much more rare and fall outside the purview of the public education system.

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Totally agree.
Just being smarter isn’t “gifted.” Just means you might do a little better on Jeopardy!, assuming your timing skills on the buzzer are above average.

You know my thoughts. This is just another brick in the wall

I will preface this by saying that GT elementary school programs were not my specialty when I was a teacher, but I went through them as a kid and learned a little more about them as a teacher and just generally as an adult who is particularly interested in education.

So, first of all, I’ve never heard of a GT program where kids “enroll”. That’s not to say they don’t exist, but I don’t think that’s normal. The kids are identified as being gifted and then the parents can usually say “sure, put my kid in the gifted program” or “no, I don’t want my kid to do that”. The latter rarely happens, of course. I’m sure there are lots of cases where parents are upset that their kid wasn’t identified as being gifted and then get upset and push to get their kid in. I’m sure the actual merit of these cases varies widely (from kid was recovering from the flu the day they did the testing and qualifies when retested all the way to parents are big boosters and refuse to accept that their special snowflake really and truly does not meet the school’s definition of gifted) as does the reasonableness of the school’s response.

But rarely is it the kid’s choice.

Testing at age 4 seems early, but I know when I was in college the trend was to identify gifted kids younger.

Going through school myself, gifted education didn’t start until 5th grade, although we had “reading groups” broken out by ability, and starting in 4th grade math was also broken out by ability. But that was tracking, which is slightly different.

The trend was definitely to go earlier for formal gifted programs though, so I guess it’s not too surprising.

Well DTNF’s article was definitely promoting better ways of identifying gifted kids.

[Semi-related tangent]
I’m not sure what gifted education looks like at the K-6 level in Cincinnati where I grew up (in the suburbs, out of the city school district), but the city school district has an elite grade 7-12 school, Walnut Hills, that every 6th grader in the district tests for. The top X students get in. (I’m not sure what X is.) So certainly every kid has the opportunity to show their stuff and get in. I have no idea the quality of the test itself though, but I haven’t really heard any criticisms of the test so I assume it’s at least not terrible.

Being the only public high school that you have to test into in the entire state, unsurprisingly it is always the top ranked public high school in the state.

Also unsurprisingly, the student body of Walnut Hills is significantly richer and whiter/Asianer than the district as a whole, though there are certainly plenty of black and Hispanic and poor kids too. So at one point a group of people decided this disparity was a problem and they should convert Walnut to a regular neighborhood school. This idea fell flat on its face VERY fast because the district’s hands are essentially tied.

The interesting thing is that the school district includes a bunch of suburbs that are NOT actually in the city, but they ARE part of the city school district. And like all public schools, they’re funded primarily by property taxes… assessed as a flat percentage of a home’s value.

So what determines the property tax rate (at least the portion that goes to schools, which is the lion’s share of the total) is basically the ratio of assessed value to number of kids. The rich suburban districts are spending more per kid, but they can still have low tax rates because you have a lot of property value with not many kids. Whereas in the city you will get a lot of kids with not much assessed value so the rate has to be higher, even if they’re spending less per kid.

Well these suburbs in the city school district are a gold mine for the district: high assessed property values and low numbers of kids. The suburbs could break off and form their own school districts and drop their property tax rates significantly.

But they don’t do it, and they don’t do it for precisely one reason: Walnut Hills High School. They want their kids to go to the best public high school in the state, or they want to be able to sell their house to someone who wants this.

They don’t mind subsidizing all the poor areas of the district: it’s still cheaper than private school. But the minute that being part of the city school district no longer means getting to send their kids to this fabulous high school is the very same minute that they will vote to take their high property taxes and form their own school districts. And that will cause a giant sucking sound in the district’s coffers, that will cause them to have to raise the property tax rate on the remaining portion of the district by a lot. Which will not be popular.

So the city is basically stuck with their elite high school, and to their credit they promote it as being a meritocratic thing, which it truly is.
[/semi-related tangent]

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My city’s school district differentiates between bright and gifted. Bright kids are good at learning. Gifted kids are good at solving. Big difference. I imagine a lot of us who were labeled as “gifted” as kids, myself included, were really just bright.

Gifted kids are easily bored in the classroom, so ironically a lot of them probably don’t get identified until they’re older.