<story><title>Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair</title><url>https://americasfuture.org/eliminating-gifted-programs-wont-make-education-fair/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thegrimmest</author><text>Are you saying you agree? It seems bordering on absurd to me. Why can&amp;#x27;t it be true that not every child has gifts? Isn&amp;#x27;t the point of being exceptional having qualities that set you apart from most people? Are there no exceptional children? Adults?&lt;p&gt;In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I thought the passages below were key. Instead of the constant &amp;quot;Tall Poppy Syndrome&amp;quot; that many education &amp;quot;reformers&amp;quot; engage in, would be better to improve these programs for a wider array of students:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asoneth</author><text>&amp;gt; I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased&lt;p&gt;While there are some concerns that have been raised about bias within the tests themselves[1], in my experience the concern about testing among actual educators is usually that the tests are pitched as objectively &amp;quot;measuring intelligence&amp;quot; when in reality they measure a confluence of factors.&lt;p&gt;Intelligence is certainly a major factor but external factors such as having a stable home with quiet times that are conducive to studying, good nutrition, good role models, and good teachers play a major role as well.&lt;p&gt;There have been controversial attempts to control for those factors, for example by including information about the test takers socioeconomic status, but for the most part &amp;quot;intelligence tests&amp;quot; do not attempt to control for external variables. So it&amp;#x27;s impossible to tell how much of the delta in scores between two individuals reflects actual differences in their intelligence compared to differences in their environment and starting conditions.&lt;p&gt;The risk of tracking students solely based on such tests is that you end up compounding the existing penalties of having a bad environment.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I think testing has an important role to play, but we should be honest and stop pretending that these are &amp;quot;intelligence tests&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Race_and_intelligence#Test_bias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Race_and_intelligence#Test_bia...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair</title><url>https://americasfuture.org/eliminating-gifted-programs-wont-make-education-fair/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thegrimmest</author><text>Are you saying you agree? It seems bordering on absurd to me. Why can&amp;#x27;t it be true that not every child has gifts? Isn&amp;#x27;t the point of being exceptional having qualities that set you apart from most people? Are there no exceptional children? Adults?&lt;p&gt;In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I thought the passages below were key. Instead of the constant &amp;quot;Tall Poppy Syndrome&amp;quot; that many education &amp;quot;reformers&amp;quot; engage in, would be better to improve these programs for a wider array of students:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>There is a great, and true, line from a very old Simpson&amp;#x27;s episode [1] about how early childhood &amp;quot;sorting&amp;quot; can have an outsized impact on someone&amp;#x27;s life. And there is plenty of other evidence (e.g. see Malcolm Gladwell&amp;#x27;s Outliers) that a lot of arbitrary differences are just magnified by this early childhood sorting.&lt;p&gt;The argument against the name &amp;quot;gifted and talented&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t that some children have gifts that are different from others, it&amp;#x27;s that the sole arbiter of whether a child is &amp;quot;gifted&amp;quot;, as if it were something anointed by Jesus, is not that they did well on some standardized test in kindergarten.&lt;p&gt;I definitely agree with the author, something like &amp;quot;accelerated learning&amp;quot; is a much better name&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;O2f_MlZtjuY?t=9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;O2f_MlZtjuY?t=9&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>