<p>The gifted school I had experience with wanted to be top in the state so they taught to the test. My DD can rip any test at anytime. Big deal. She cant hand in homework but she can do 110% on many tests. I’m not complaining the ACT was good enough for a scholarship at University.</p>
<p>Our district has a full time gifted program beginning in third grade. Students are selected based on test scores and teacher recommendations, and then given an IQ test. Some students chose not to participate because they need to leave their home school and are bussed to another elementary school. My son participated in the program, and I was for the most part pleased with it. However, when my third child was selected we chose not to have him participate because his social life was very important to him and he would not have been happy changing schools. </p>
<p>What I found interesting was that when my son graduated last year none of the top ten students in his class had participated in the program during their elementary school years.
However, as I looked at the list of schools that students were attending I did notice that most of his former classmates did go on to top tier schools and top LACs.</p>
<p>My district’s take on gifted ed: try to drive the gifted kids out of the public system. </p>
<p>This has worked pretty well so far. There’s a reason why our very large public school system has 5% the number of NMSFs that a neighboring district (also large, but not quite as large) has.</p>
<p>The public schools have a lot of legal requirements and special ed is one of them. Our district became known as a good district for special ed services and guess what happened. These kids can cost between $20K and $170K. If you get a lot of them in your district, then it can wind up taking away funds for the rest of the students and that includes T&G students. Now the special ed students should receive an appropriate education but it is very hard when the expenses are so high for them.</p>
<p>My view of T&G programs locally are that they are a carrot to create a base of support (from parents) for funding and I think that it’s fairly effective at doing that. I don’t know what the level of academic benefit is but I’d guess that it isn’t that high. Some of the after-school clubs and project probably have more academic and real-world benefits.</p>
<p>It reminds me of when the honor roll gets printed in the local paper and goes on and on and on.</p>
<p>Skyhook, the answer is YES – it was a waste of time and was very much as you describe at my kids school. It ended up that the gifted boys in my son’s class ended up going on strike and refusing to go to their gifted pull out, because they were upset about missing better, more academic stuff going on in their classrooms – for example, my son didn’t really appreciate doing puzzles and brain teasers while his classmates were watching & discussing Hamlet. My daughter qualified for the gifted program from K-12… and never bothered to take the school up on the offer - most of the activities she was offered were arranged for afterschool - probably the longterm result of the boycott staged by her older sibling and friends – , and she was just too busy with the rest of her life. The label was mildly useful – but that’s about it.</p>
<p>BCEagle, mine is special ed AND gifted. My district also doesn’t do special ed/gifted well. When spawn was in private placement, we wanted him moved to a different school that was significantly less expensive, and a shorter bus ride, than where he was going so that he could get an education in addition to therapeutic services. District wouldn’t move him, though it would have saved them a pretty penny. </p>
<p>On a related note, the district has stated that putting kids into private placement (which can easily be $40K/year or more per kid) is less expensive than having their own programs. So they send 'em out.</p>
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<p>Yes and no. Yes, better to offer accelerated classes. No, better than nothing.</p>
<p>Pull out is worthwhile because it helps keep some kids from getting bored. It also allows the gifted teacher to assign more indepth homework for the kids to investigate. Suggest that they let kids take math with the next higher class (acceleration without creating an additional class).</p>
<p>Our gifted son was identified at 3 1/2, when he taught himself to read. Thank goodness for the New York City Public Schools…we had a choice of elementary schools with gifted programs. The one we chose wasn’t perfect (nothing is), but he loved it. He went on to his magnet public HS (where 35-30% of the kids are NMSF), had a great HS experience and is a college sophomore now. He wouldn’t have done nearly as well without GT education, despite everything we did as a family (reading, traveling, museums, music lessons, etc).</p>
<p>When I was a kid our school started a GATE program, tested kids and then bussed any one with 135IQ to a central location, that lasted a few weeks. They lowered the score to 120 and put us in a combo class; as I recall it was 4/5/6 combo, about 10 kids per grade. In many ways the classes were great, I still recall the teacher reading the Watergate transcripts (expletive deleted) and recall many of the vocab words we learned. It was, though, socially isolating as kids prefer to play with others in their same grade and with only 10 kids per grade, both sexes, there was not much choice for after school visits.</p>
<p>Once we hit jr. high they simply tracked every one and that worked well as you had 30 kids in the top classes.</p>
<p>In my kids school the gifted program was lip service and really not worth much, there was not much money for it and over the past 10-15 years everything in public education is about mixing the ability levels in class, not ability grouping. Personally I believe is some level of ability grouping.</p>
<p>We were in a different situation for HS, smaller (100+ per grade) magnet type school; they grouped completely in math/science/English/arts/sports and not at all in social studies/history/etc. So, a kid could be gifted in English, lousy in math and be in the right group for both. Every one in a certain grade had those subjects at the same time so kids could move up and down as needed and be addressed in their strengths and weaknesses. I was very impressed, but cannot imagine a some of my NEA friends agreeing to that being workable as it went against the current union ideals- which seems to change as the pendulum swings.</p>
<p>We had gifted programs in elementary only which were of the pull out mode. It was a huge help for DD (less so for DS). DD was given an opportunity to read much more intense books (unfortunately due to lack of curriculum oversight some of these were assigned in later grades), prepare lengthier papers and work on some special projects (design and build a bridge using only toothpicks). She enjoyed them but was required to do the homework from her regular classes as well which annoyed her (and sometimes us as well).</p>
<p>Our district, which is poor and the center of a rural area, had a program from 4-6 grades that wasn’t a true G&T program (I don’t think they could have mustered up enough kids!), but was a separate class for around 5% of the grade population. My kids loved it, not so much for the “enrichment” (they really couldn’t compare it to anything else - nor could we), but for the kids in the class. Those kids formed a pretty strong bond and while D & S had friends from outside the class, their classmates in the program were the ones they were generally closest to through high school, long after the program ended.</p>
<p>That might have happened anyway, as they were the highest performers, but I think this side effect social-intellectual interaction is one of the reasons parents look to selective colleges for their kids; it’s the peer group that draws them as much as the professors or the facilities.</p>
<p>Aproximately 40% of my daughter’s 5th grade class has been identified as “Gifted” and are in the “Advance Program”. In a school that is 50% minority and 45% free lunch poor, the “Gifted” are overwhelmingly white and middle class. It was the same when my son (now a hs senior) attended there. </p>
<p>The instructional differences are substantial-- but nothing like the what I have read in this thread. Mostly more advanced reading/math (although not too advanced) and the occasional enrichment activity (they are currently putting on a cut down version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream).</p>
<p>The main difference is the population-- they are separated out from minority or poor students, giving white, middle class families an educational experience that is essentially similar to the segregated schools of old.</p>
<p>I am a former gifted program student, i can say mine definetly was no a waste of time. I had some family issues in first and second (death of a parent) so i didn’t join until third grade. I am sure that it saved me from becoming disinterested in school. Yes, we did other stuff besides regular school work–it was to challenge us and keep us from getting bored. I still remember some of the special class activities we did, like a class play about fractions or the trip to the science center.
I went from the elementary gifted program to the honors middle school program to a honors/ap program in high school. Without that initial full time gifted program I never would have challenged myself as much as i have.
another note, i was also special ed all through elementary school because of a speech impediment (apraxia).
one more: my brother also succesfully went through the challenge program at our school- he just graduated from NYU and attended interlochen high school for two years.
oh, and as a daughter of a educational specialist–i can’t even tell you about how grades of gifted children often suffer when they are not being challenged academicaly. It is so much better to encourage, challenge, and give gifted chilldren extra material than to leave them to become bored and uninterested in learning.</p>
<p>Our experience matches what I’ve read from others above: a gifted program that involves going to a separate, magnet gifted program can be highly worthwhile, while pull-out programs in the home school are highly variable, and depend on somebody in the school being really devoted to making it work.</p>
<p>Our district doesn’t do pullout programs. Most of the gifted offerings work by clustering gifted kids and kids working at a high academic level together, generally starting in third grade. Grouping the kids together is supposed to allow the teacher to teach at a higher level, move through the curriculum faster, and/or go deeper on some material. There are also magnet schools and a few individual honors programs for students identified as gifted or highly gifted. </p>
<p>It’s generally not been a waste of time, though that depends on the teacher. A group of kids who are bright and focussed will grow by leaps and bounds when led by a great teacher, or even a decent one. When the teacher is weak, or vindictive, it can be pretty awful. Each of my kids had a miserable year in elementary school because the class included one very bright but highly disruptive child, and the teacher couldn’t handle the situation. And the gifted program can be just as lockstep as a regular classroom, with instruction going at one speed. Again, having a good teacher is key, just like for any classroom.</p>
<p>Ethnic differences: of course an issue. Having an honors track rather than a specific gifted track helps here, since the gifted kids will have access but the track is also open to kids who are working hard. The gifted magnet programs, especially for highly gifted kids, are hamstrung because there is less of a push in inner city schools to do early identification of GT kids. The mass testing that’s done in our district for identification won’t pick up most HG students. That requires individual testing by the district, which generally comes about because a parent and a teacher agree that a child fulfills those criteria. There simply aren’t enough parents or teachers who would want to pursue this, or understand that the highly gifted programs are different than the gifted ones.</p>
<p>Our son’s gifted teacher in middle school was so disorganized (kept changing deadlines and requirements for projects, etc.) that it became a fairly frustrating experience us, as the family of a middle school boy (most guys that age already have organizational issues of their own!). </p>
<p>I remember yelling at son to get his ‘gifted’ work done – I felt guilty after seeing the teacher in action (a bright person but just completely disorganized and scattered). I realized homework & deadline issues weren’t entirely his fault.</p>
<p>Hub has vowed never to allow younger daughter in any gifted programs (she’s happy in regular class, though). I didn’t see it as a total negative, though. I still think daughter (who doesn’t test as high as son) could benefit from the enrichment stuff offered at the gifted seminars. Nice supplements, but nothing that out-of-the-norm</p>
<p>who say that even in regular public school classes, it was advantageous when the higher-performing kids can be clustered in the same classrooms, thus enabling the teacher to go faster or deeper. </p>
<p>Is that the essence of why the separate full-time gifted programs (as opposed to pullouts) seem to be more helpful to gifted students? The normal instructional classes are simply at a higher level? Pullout classes don’t result in the child’s core instructional classes being enhanced in any way.</p>
<p>D was in the same type of pull-out program, (from kindergarten on) and we loved the program. It wasn’t memorize and spew forth what you learned, but they learned interesting things, such as Egyptian history and mummies; aeronautics and had to make a paper plane that flew farther, based on what they learned; things that they wouldn’t have learned otherwise, but exposed them to other fields in science and history. What I liked was that the students used their knowledge to create and develop thinking skills.</p>
<p>Our district had a pull-out program. The value of it was entirely dependent on the teacher. A few years were extremely valuable, others not so much.</p>
<p>Because my kid did all those exact activities you mention in the pullout program. And I think they were interesting things. Maybe my remaining dissatisfaction was in all those same years of watching the regular core math, english and writing going by So-o-o-o-o S-l-o-o-o-o-w when they could have been using the same teacher and the same time to help kids advance in their core subjects.</p>
<p>Or maybe I just don’t understand education enough to know how much the stimulation activities were helping them.</p>