That’s not what I wrote or what anyone I recall from the thread wrote. My quote was:
@Tigerle, I don’t think anyone on this thread doesn’t believe any kids should be accelerated. I think what some of us are objecting to is what I see as a kind of catastrophizing that can go on when we talk about gifted kids, which is precisely what makes it harder for the gifted kids who really aren’t being served by their schools to get what they need.
It isn’t surprising that many simply above-average kids could operate on a grade level above, because the cognitive difference required to complete fourth grade work and to complete fifth grade work is going to be incremental. In some cases, the fifth grade work isn’t even going to be designed to be more difficult; it is simply going to cover different content. So to me, the fact that many kids are capable of doing work one or even two levels above grade level simply isn’t compelling evidence that the school is doing them a disservice. Some of those kids aren’t even going to be particularly interested in the subjects that they’re intellectually ready to tackle, let alone champing at the bit to move on to more advanced work. And that’s OK, as for most people, whether one encounters a subject first at age nine or age eleven is not going to have a serious impact on one’s life.
In addition, intellectually gifted children are still children, and elementary school isn’t as straight-content based as the upper grades. A seven year old can intuitively grasp concepts of algebra and read on a sixth grade level and still enjoy Charlotte’s Web and the song about grammar and seeing the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis - not to mention art, and PE, and recess. Unless we really are talking about a very rare child, he or she is also going to be learning some actual academic content as well. No matter how bright you are, you aren’t born knowing about American history or the system of government or the solar system. Even if you are an advanced reader and writer, you don’t necessarily have an intuitive sense of how to communicate effectively in different genres and to different kinds of audiences.
So the idea that there’s this widespread crisis of gifted kids who are bored to tears all day in school and learning nothing seems to me overblown and somewhat overwrought.
Should a kid who has taught himself algebra have to sit through addition and subtraction lessons? No. Of course there are cases in which acceleration is appropriate, and schools should have a mechanism for permitting some really exceptional students for moving forward, especially in cases where it would be fairly clear-cut to demonstrate content mastery of a highly content-based discipline. I frankly don’t know exactly what percentage of students would be best served by that, and I doubt others do either. But I think the conversation is better served by not inflating the extent of the problem.
It is also important, I think, not to conflate the problem of poor teaching with problems that inhere to a standard model of education. A teacher that doesn’t know how to deal with a gifted child appropriately is often not serving most other students well, either.
@Data10, you wrote (admittedly way back in the thread)
“If the definition of “gifted” is really narrow enough to be 1 in 740 (above 3SDs is 99.865%), then it’s not surprising that schools would lack the resources to accommodate the type of student that only comes once every couple years in the school (or more often in schools that have notably different distribution from general population). When the OP was talking about parents requesting accelerated kindergarten for their gifted children, I expect most parents were using a wider definition.”
I took that to mean you came down on the side of those who feel that the only kids who should have issues are the “really gifted”, who are so few that schools can’t expect to accommodate them anyway. I appear to have misunderstood or misremembered your point and apologise.
@Tigerle, post #249:
Likely you’re thinking of the Johns Hopkins report “How Can So Many Students Be Invisible? Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level”. In addition to the sorts of numbers Tigerle already quoted regarding kids ready to work one year ahead, take a look at the numbers of kids ready to work 2 or more years ahead – for instance, Figure 1: Grade 5 Student Proficiency Level… shows 24% of students 2 grades or more ahead in Reading, and 11% of students 2 grades or more ahead in Mathematics.
^ 40 % of kids could work at least one grade level ahead maths and 30% of kids could work a grade level ahead in language arts.
It doesn’t matter how you are ahead of the arbitrary federal or state grade standard. If you are too ahead in a classroom that you know everything your classmates are learning, even if everybody learning 2 grade levels ahead, you are bored and don’t get to learn. And if majority of classes are like that, you are placed in wrong grade level.
Not surprised at all by these figures. In my humble opinion, there are many children bored to tears so that others can continually repeat (they call it spiral learning but the kids don’t call it that). I believe there are many kids able to do the work 1-3 levels above grade level. Some even more.
So what do we do? I have left my kids in the “proper” grade for social& emotional levels. They are fine in those respects. Intellectually, it’s hard for them. If we didn’t have the resources for enrichment programs we’d be in a much different place. And honestly, spending many thousands of dollars annually is crazy. Without programs like CTY, SET, Davidson and others, these kids would be forced to acknowledge that they must wait 9 years to get intellectual stimulation. To me it is isn’t overblown or overwrought to hear a smart kid tell you they were taught the same thing for the 10th time, then taught it to the class, and they will be learning it again tomorrow because not everyone understood it. That to me, is a shame. Has nothing to do with when the Gifted kid does indeed learn something (usually they get it on first explanation). But boring kids doesn’t serve a purpose.
My kids will tell me, hey I love learning but I wish we learned in class. They too recognize that enrichment is extra work. They still have to do the in class stuff.
^ “proper” grade for social& emotional levels.
For some kids, social & emotional levels is what the school, especially in the lowest K & 1st grade, is hard to endure. The problem is that most of the young kids are still developing those social skill, sense of justice, give and take, basics of argument, etc. If you are ahead in those, you would be like a teenager baby sitting a group of kindergartners everyday, except that you don’t have a power as a baby sitter and you are their equal, and equally ignored by the adults.
Imagine that you are unable to save an innocent spider or frog, or a picked up classmate from your vicious, immoral, immature and illogical 1st grade classmates. Day after day.
Gosh just thinking about it gives me chill.
Yes, @veronite, that was it. I knew there was an odd term in the title that I just needed to remember in order to google it, but just couldn’t.
I agree @apprenticeprof that no one should be skipped simply because the could work one grade level ahead. I was throwing out all these numbers to show that if eg the top 24 percent could work two grade levels ahead, imagine just how far the top 2 percent are from that mystical “grade level”.
If the differences between being grade levels are really that incremental, why is it so hard to catch kids up who are behind? Should be a piece of cake.
And there is no reason whatsoever why a kid shouldn’t enjoy art and PE and watch a chrysalis unfold with age mates AND be taught math and language arts at their level, of at all possible with other advanced age mates, too, but if necessary with a group of kids a few years older. And go back to their regular classroom for independent work time. The perfect fantasy school in my head works like that.
^ The perfect fantasy school in my head works like that.
It’s called homeschool, especially in a metropolitan area where you can find many local kids like them to share some privately organized science lab, art, and pe classes.
In a metropolitan area there’s no excuse for the district not to have dedicated classrooms for the top 4 or 5 percent.
@VickiSoCal I agree that there’s no excuse.
By the way, are you from Southern California? There was a time that I envied people there for Highly Gifted Magnet program.
@apprenticeprof, you wrote:
“So the idea that there’s this widespread crisis of gifted kids who are bored to tears all day in school and learning nothing seems to me overblown and somewhat overwrought.
… But I think the conversation is better served by not inflating the extent of the problem.”
I am not quite sure what you are trying to say. Are you talking about the number of children affected or the level of impact that is inflated in your opinion?
Nothing concerning gifted kids could ever be “widespread” - they are, by definition, only 2 percent of the population and some p, depending on where they grow up and go to school, are doing just fine. So, maybe 1 percent of the whole age cohort affected? You may feel that this is such a tiny ratio of kids that we could learn just tell them to suck it up. You wouldn’t tell that to parents of special needs kids, and you would expect public schools to serve them.
So, relative and absolute numbers tiny, nothingto be done about that, and kind of part of the point?
So, how about the level of impact? frankly, it is hard to overstate the impact of years of intellectual and social isolation. Again, kind of the point - if you haven’t lived it, you can’t get it. You will have to take the gifted child’s word for it, that hes, it can be a catastrophe. I would unhesitatingly call myself traumatised by my elementary school experience. My children’s schooling so far is not, and part of the reason is that I knew some mistakes to avoid. (I’m sure I made new ones), I for instance knew to avoid the local, very conformist public school, which has now successfully traumatised a friend’s kid for years, and a number of the kids in my older ones gifted track have had very bad experiences in their elementary schools.
I wish it were alla about “being a little bored in math class” (aren’t we all, a little sometimes, nudge nudge wink wink?) That is a very dangerous trivialising of the gifted child’s experience.
@SculptorDad I live in the suburbs. One of my kid’s teachers did her training in that program.
Tigerle, I’d never invalidate anyone’s individual experience. But each of us can only speak from our own experience, which only takes us so far in a discussion that has moved on to questions of how many kids are actually experiencing “years of intellectual and social isolation” due to giftedness.
There are actually MANY excuses in urban areas for not having designated Gifted classrooms. You guys must live in a dream world where gifted budgets don’t get cut to fund para’s for kids with developmental delays (mandated by law) or shadows for kids with disabilities (mandated by law). Gifted kids are invisible when it comes to dollars and cents.
There was a lawsuit in my town when a family with a kid with asthma petitioned to have a minivan pick him up from his house to take to school. The family produced documentation that walking to the end of the block was physically impossible for him if he were to have enough stamina to make it through the school day. Except the transportation company doesn’t run minvan services, so the town paid for a taxi. Every day, twice a day. You have cases like this multiplied by 100 and before you know it, bye-bye gifted classroom. (Until the parents posted a picture of their kid playing in a travel soccer league…that put an end to the taxi.)
I don’t mean to sound like a grinch on the subject of kids with special needs. But there is a well entrenched process in parts of the country where lawyers and experts take a school system to court and in a few years, the G&T is gone, the arts enrichment is gone, and you can’t throw a ball down the hall without hitting a personal aide, shadow, specialist/one on one. I mean- what school system has unlimited resources? Nobody. And you still need to pay to keep the lights on and toilet paper in the teacher’s bathroom.
Who has brought a successful lawsuit on behalf of a gifted kid?
Plenty of reasons large school district do not accommodate gifted kids, especially in the elementary grades. BUDGET is the main reason. School districts are strapped monetarily and being a large district does not mean being a rich one. In fact, I suspect the percentage of needy kids is higher in the city than those surrounding suburbs. It is also hard to get people to raise taxes to pay for a group they don’t understand- especially since the large majority of voters will not have gifted relatives. Too many resources are currently being taken because of vociferous parents of the severely ■■■■■■■■ kids (as a physician I have seen the lowest end and how desperate they are for every incremental bit) that are huge drains on a school system budget. Add that to the impoverished whose parents can’t/don’t do their jobs that require a system’s resources.
We must be living in Lake Wobegon. 30-40% of the population can’t be gifted, under any meaningful definition of the term. It’s almost mathematically implausible that 30-40% of the population is a full grade year ahead of the population mean.
@blossom and @wis75 I am curious what part of the below costs my school district extra money other than the testing to place kids?
We have ~20 elementary schools. Most have 2-3 classes per grade level at 30 to 35 kids per class.
3 of those elementary schools have a dedicated class for 4, 5 and 6th grade GATE. Those classes are exactly the same size as regular classes at those grades. The teachers make the same amount of money. There is no bussing, you want GATE, you get your kid to one of those schools. The kids go to PE, band, etc. with the rest of the school.
We have one (out of 6) middle school with dedicated GATE classes for science, math, language arts and social studies. Also the same size as regular classes at the middle school. Also no busing. The GATE kids do band, leadership, and other ordinary middle school electives with the rest of the school. The middle school shares a campus with the magnet high school for the district that most of the GATE middle schoolers end up attending (they are not required to, but it is best place for most of them) As needed the high school teachers can offer classes for the middle schoolers.
VIckiSoCal: You have 30 t0 35 kids in a class? Really. We have a dozen max 18, then they split the class. Given the size of the classes maybe I am not so jealous of GATE anymore.
I heard of a wealthy town nearby that some years ago had parents getting IEP’s ( special regulations) written so that their kids could get the access they needed to be challenged in the classroom. I would never do that as we have other means to get the same results. But some folks must get really aggravated listening to school admin and take matters into their own hands.
I don’t think it’s budget as we live in a high income and low density area. They spend more money per student than many other districts. They have a lot of resources and don’t have to worry about the toilet paper per above. They just can’t get their minds around giftedness. Then again, I can’t get my mind around thinking everyone learns the same way.
We have a G&T school in the ‘best’ suburban district for k-8 (and then you get to go to the top high school, which is all but impossible to choice into unless you’ve attended this k-8), but not everyone opts to go there because the transportation options are limited. A friend chose not to send her daughter there because she lived across the street from another elementary school and the G&T school is on a commuter route in the opposite direction (but she’d have to get into that commuter traffic to get back to her home. She also had another child too. After a year or two, she picked a different elementary school in an affluent neighborhood so while there weren’t G&T classrooms, most of the students were working about grade level ahead since they’d all attended very good pre-schools, had tutors or services when they help, and the school had plenty of money to pay for any services. Same school district but the PTA of one school can supplement anything the teachers need.
Sometimes getting the education you want your kids to have requires choices. G&T classroom v. neighborhood school, moving to the suburbs to get what you want, spending a lot of the day commuting to a chosen school, going to a different school than your siblings (and sometimes on a different schedule for breaks), jumping up a grade or two…
There are also private schools that are very good, and offer scholarships, but the one that offered a scholarship to my kids absolutely does not allow skipping a grade (one of my kids is young for her grade and I think they would have put her back a grade, which would have been a good thing). I know many people with gifted kids who have moved to be near the school they wanted, who have gone to the private school, who have gone to public school and taken classes at the local university while continuing to get services from the public school (and the school pays for the college classes), gone to magnets and charter schools. None of it is easy.