Gee, I haven't written an education policy post in a while. Instead of writing something original, let me point you to some interesting posts, articles, and studies that I've read this week.
Megan McArdle points to a study that shows that Gifted and Talented Programs aren't that effective. They are more about the prestige.
In urban areas, G&T schools keep middle class parents in the city. In the burbs, G&T are even more silly. In Jonah's middle school, the G&T class is 40 minutes long, once per week. The projects that they do would benefit all kids, and shouldn't be restricted to a small group of kids. The kids in the G&T class aren't more likely to excel later in high school.
Brookings published a report that sums up the latest research on class size. Class size matters, but mostly for lower income areas. Adjustments of two or three kids in upper income areas has no impact on learning.
Gail Collins writes, "Last week, in Ohio, the State House went for the whole hog and approved legislation that would allow for-profit businesses to open up their own taxpayer-financed charter schools." White Hat Management, a for-profit charter school operation, was certainly behind this legislation.
It's not surprising. The owner, a source for my dissertation on school vouchers, is a major Republic fund-raiser and has been pushing for vouchers and private schools for ages now.
And now just an anecdote. The class size for Ian's class increased this year from ten to twelve. The two, new kids had behavior problems, which spread to all the other students. Formerly sweet calm kids turned to desk-flipping anger monsters. The teachers were stressed out. The parents were stressed out. The kids were stressed out. After telling this story to a teacher in another school yesterday, he reported that all special education classes were having the same problems. Because of budget crunches, special education has been cut to the bone, and it's having a real impact on the students.
Apt. 11d 
Are you suggesting that G&T programs do not change emotions (affect) or that they do not change outcomes (effect)? I know I am a bit of a grammar nitpicker but thought you should know and I couldn’t find the link to send you a private email. Thinking of you and wishing you the best
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ha. thanks, carosgram. just writing too fast, as always.
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“Because of budget crunches, special education has been cut to the bone, and it’s having a real impact on the students.”
I suspect that “to the bone” looks quite a bit different than adding two kids to a 10 kid class.
Also, are we sure that if we removed two sweet kids and added the two angry kids, that we wouldn’t get very similar results? It might be the kids themselves (especially getting two of them at once), rather than simply the numbers.
From what I’ve heard over the years, GAT is all over the place. So I’m not sure it makes sense to compare it to standard ed when the GAT teachers are teaching anything and everything that seems like it might be fun or interesting. I remember reading a GAT teacher’s comment explaining how he or she was spending the entire year having the GAT kids do a cemetery project where they’d go to the cemetery, record data and then analyze it. An hour or two a week for the entire year!!! I’m sure that some of the kids ate that project up, but I’m not sure that teacher understood the concept of opportunity cost.
I’ve mentioned it before, but Rogers’ Re-Forming Gifted Education has a lot of information about more effective gifted education, with data on seemingly every possible permutation. She herself critiques the once-a-week pullouts that are so popular. It’s not even one of the 10 best GAT interventions, but it is cheap and doesn’t rock the educational boat. On the other hand, you hear over and over again (for instance in MM’s thread) that those pitiful once-a-week pullout classes were the only light in the course of a child’s entire school week.
My daughter’s been going to a gifted summer camp for the past few years and her brother will be starting this year. A couple of the years, I’ve felt that any child of average intelligence could have benefited a lot from the camps, which were very project-y. One week every year is a garden/horticultural/outdoors/weather/entomological camp and the other week varies. In the camp that varies, they’ve planned and built a city and planned space station projects. This year it’s going to be archeological-themed, which I think my youngest will love. I have mixed feelings about the project-y stuff, but it keeps my older child happy.
Next year, my oldest will graduate to the big kid groups where the kids take separate courses, rather than just immerse themselves in one subject for a week. The offerings looked a bit weak in math and science. My husband told me to tell the head of the program that. I did and naturally she wanted to know if he would teach a course! The program head (who is in the local college school of education) says that they find it difficult to get facilities and teachers for science. I was able to provide the GAT camp head with about half a dozen names of possible science people, and the last I heard, she was in talks with a guy who already does a laser and optic camp for 7-12 graders. Interestingly, that existing 7-12 grade camp is directed at recruiting kids to study and become future technicians.
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For some anecdata,
My G&T program probably literally changed my life, in that it introduced me to a language which I now speak fluently and a country I now study, and a discipline I probably wouldn’t have heard of until I was a lot older, but which I decided at age 9 I wanted to pursue, and for which I am now in grad school. It’s possible that I would end up in the same doctoral program anyways, but I think a burning desire since third grade to study a language and take up a certain somewhat obscure career probably had a big part to do with my eventual double major in college and choice of doctorate program. I was lucky in that I went to a good elementary school where I didn’t need a G&T program to be challenged in the more basic subjects, so basically they provide a chance to study interesting and obscure disciplines (e.g. egyptology). By middle school, funding had been cut enough that G&T was supposed to be incorporated into our classrooms, or something. We did have a math, science, and engineering club for girls run by a local college student, but I don’t think you had to be in the G&T program to participate.
The class size thing makes sense. My high school in a high income area had huge classes (e.g. there were 45-50 kids in my calculus class). I know one class that was so crowded teachers asked students to skip every once in awhile, and students had to sit on the window sills and on the floor (not enough desks was pretty common for many classes, actually, so it was motivation to show up early). However, my school was the academically top school in my city at the time (we had an International Baccalaureate program + regular honors and AP classes), and large class sizes and overcrowded conditions didn’t really impact on the quality of the education. Students were also pretty much treated like college students, in that we had an open campus so you could come and go as you pleased, and absences weren’t punished, except in that it might affect your grade in the class. (I know because senior year I skipped English at least once a week, but I was a good student so the teacher was fairly lenient as long as I came after school and discussed the material with her. I never skipped physics, because make up class, especially make up lab, was a huge PITA)
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“The two, new kids had behavior problems, which spread to all the other students.”
I’ve got a great solution! Tax cuts for millionaires!
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I live in MA where we have little state funding for gifted and talented programs. Some districts do seem to have such programs. I would go a step further wrt MM’s suggestion that GAT programs are a status symbol; I think they have a lot to do with racial segregation as well.
We have no GAT program. My son is a little bored, but more than that, he’s a little arrogant these days. I need him to learn how to deal with boredom better, so I don’t mind the boredom part. Our latest issue is that he loves to learn and do new things, but once he gets to the point where he has to practice to develop mastery, he wants to drop it because he loves learning, not practicing. It’s a challenge.
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Doug, what a brilliant plan! Luckily, the folks in the state capitals have already had your wisdom and are implementing that plan post-haste!
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“My son is a little bored, but more than that, he’s a little arrogant these days. I need him to learn how to deal with boredom better, so I don’t mind the boredom part.”
Having a smarter peer group from time to time might help with the arrogance problem. There’s nothing like going to an environment where you’re just average to give a bit of perspective, and I think the earlier that that can be arranged, the better.
At our kids’ private school, there’s no GAT, but there are small class sizes and lots of college faculty parents. Among my son’s dozen or so kindergarten classmates, there are at least two physics department kids, which is pretty sweet.
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“Tax cuts for millionaires!”
Doug,
Technically speaking, a millionaire is a person with more than one million dollars in net worth (variously calculated, of course–the house may or may not count), rather than a person who makes more than a million in income every year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaire
It’s mathematically possible for above median income people to become millionaires over the course of several decades of limiting consumption and investing the difference. I’d personally feel very uncomfortable heading into my golden years with less than $2 million in retirement. Few people actually succeed in saving that sort of money, but all of us who have any surplus income should at least be trying.
At least, that’s the socially responsible thing to do. The less socially responsible option is to spend all your surplus money now and then complain later about all the evil rich people.
(None of the above applies to people who genuinely have no surplus.)
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Here’s one more thing on “millionaires.” If I have $1,000,000, at current interest rates, I can only realistically expect maybe 1.5% from a high interest savings account (I’ve seen that number, but I’m not sure what the fine print is). That’s $15,000 a year. $2,000,000 gets you $30,000 a year. Woohoo! Time to buy a Bentley!
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Having a smarter peer group from time to time might help with the arrogance problem.
I don’t know, but it does cut down on the number of times you have to pretend you give a rat’s ass about hockey.
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Oh, FYI, I the G&T program was a once a week pull-out type thing. My elementary school in general was purposely anti-tracking, which I think I’ve probably blabbered on about before.
I can kind of understand McArdle’s point, in that educated people want their children to go to good public schools, but I’m not sure what she’s complaining about: that public schools don’t suck uniformly, and anyone who can doesn’t send their kid to a private school? I get that if they live somewhere with utterly atrocious public schools, middle class parents (or really, any parent who cares at all) will send their kids to a private school, even if it’s a strain on the family finances. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I don’t see why not improving public schools to the point where most are willing to send their kids there anyways isn’t for society a better option. Paying more in taxes for your schools (esp. directly through a local bond) is generally cheaper than private school tuition, and good public schools benefit all children, and by extension society as a whole, by creating an educated populace.
Part of the problem is, of course, that the resources it takes to make a school filled with children from diverse backgrounds great are much more than the resources to educate a bunch of motivated, upper-middle class children who care about where they go to college and get parent support, and who are willing to channel that support into the school. I’ve been to schools all along the spectrum though, and it’s really difficult but not impossible to run a school which can be a good school for kids with a variety of backgrounds and abilities. It does take a lot more intervention though. (My elementary school provided a whole network of social welfare services to students to make sure every student was reasonably fed and healthy and on task, including, among other things, bringing in a full service dental clinic to do fillings and give everyone sealants.)
I also am biased of course, because I benefited greatly from living in “the most European city in the US,” which was somewhat European in that we had metro-level taxes that provided funding for great social services. No universal healthcare, alas, but the best urban school district in the country (at the time, at least), great public transit, city subsidized cultural enrichment stuff, a robust parks dept, plus it was generally safe to let your kids play on the street, which allowed my family to live an upper-class lifestyle on a middle or sometimes even lower middle class income. I got a top class education for very little, extensive after school activities which were all free or very inexpensive through school, cheap violin lessons through the parks dept, and with the money my mother saved in school tuition she could spend on things like summer abroad programs in Europe. I got a full need-based scholarship to a fancy college, where I am sure I was in the bottom quartile if not bottom 10% of household income for students, but I found I could go to for toe for toe and them some with my wealthy roommates and classmates in cultural capital and educational preparedness.
I’m really not trying to brag, and I apologize if this sounds insufferable, because I recognize the accident of where I was born gave me a lot that most people don’t have, and many people have to make hard choices, like private school or a house with a yard, and outside of elite schools who are peeing themselves to give money to the not wealthy, college tuition is another ball game, etc. I just want to put out there that if, as a society, we agreed on different priorities, very many people would be much better off. In the US we conceive of social services as primarily benefiting the poor at a cost to the wealthy or even middle class, but it doesn’t have to be like that. I point to my personal life to show that the middle class can benefit immensely from great public services, and the wealthy can too! Great schools save thousands of tuition dollars for everyone, leaving people more money to by a third yacht, or whatever. (That is, my point is, I had such a privileged upbringing, I think more people should have this sort of opportunity too, and wouldn’t it be nice if we recognized that as a society.)
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no idea that was so long! sorry for the novel, folks.
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B.I.,
Portland has been very successfully running off its indigenous African-American population, hasn’t it?
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Amy P
Completely. Portland has an abysmal history of race. In more recent-ish history, in the 1970s, working class white residents banded together to prevent their neighborhood from getting destroyed by a freeway, only to have the city decide then to run it through the heart of the black neighborhood. In the past 10 years or so, white hipsters have pretty much pushed out most of the remaining black residents. Of course, as Portland has gotten less black (I would say whiter, but we have growing Asian and Latino populations) and wealthier, African Americans have become worse and worse off. A case in point, my elementary school now is surrounded by yoga studios instead of crack houses, but ironically, all the white hipster parents refuse to send their kids there, preferring charter schools, so the school has gone really downhill.
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If you track back through the multiple levels of cites, the study that is being referenced compared the kids who just get into the GT programs with the kids who just miss. http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/05/do-gifted-education-programs-need-reform.html and find that the kids who made the cut don’t see more of an improvement in test scores. That surprises me not at all.
I’m convinced that the main value of GT programs is that they stop a group of really bright kids from going on drugs or killing themselves. Seriously, I read “A Tribe Apart” (which is about a HS in Fairfax with a pretty good reputation) and concluded that I should be down on my knees every night thanking god that I had the chance to go to Stuyvesant.
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I agree with what I perceive as the tone of the comments to that blog post which is that gifted programmes, for the kids in them, can make a big difference to the kids themselves. Not always, of course.
I went to a high school where you wrote a standardized test + essay to get in – nerd school – and I have to agree with this: “Having a smarter peer group from time to time might help with the arrogance problem. There’s nothing like going to an environment where you’re just average to give a bit of perspective”.
It also helps in creating an environment where learning is cool – the kind of learning that asynchronous kids do where they get very obsessed about something for a while. I remember my friends’ obsessions like they were my own.
That said, I’m not sure you can argue the school paid off in Nobel Peace Prize winners – a lot of Rhodes scholars maybe.
But I think, given how bad my public elementary school experience was, the world would be short one pretty average adult, mom and editor ’cause I would not have made it at that rate.
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white hipsters have pretty much pushed out most of the remaining black residents.
Hipsters are annoying, but they aren’t that annoying.
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“If you track back through the multiple levels of cites, the study that is being referenced compared the kids who just get into the GT programs with the kids who just miss. http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/05/do-gifted-education-programs-need-reform.html and find that the kids who made the cut don’t see more of an improvement in test scores. That surprises me not at all.”
Ooo. That’s kind of a big deal, since traditionally the programs are regarded as being more crucial for the more unusually gifted kids, who might not fit in well in a conventional classroom.
I didn’t do anything gifted in school (there was no such thing in rural WA), but I just did an interview with my husband, who did a bunch of years of gifted education in Canada. In the early years (grades 5-8), it was mainly puzzles and creative activities. He says it was “fun to get out of regular programming” because “school is boring, or hard (like French).” He also liked that there were “more fun kids to interact with.” Academically speaking, his high school gifted program was more valuable. He had a supercharged Shakespeare-rich gifted HS English. Even more importantly, the high school made special arrangements for waiving prerequisites and allowing students in the gifted program to enroll in college classes. In my husband’s case, all that extra college credit helped put him on a trajectory where he earned two doctorates (one in math, one in philosophy) by 28. This has been very helpful.
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This is oddly related to the GAT discussion.
“The psychiatrist got into Tara Newmyer’s pants by convincing her that her daughter, known as LN, was “highly advanced” and needed to be pulled out of class for extra enrichment. This is how you make upper-class moms swoon these days; tell them their kid is “special” and offer to hook them up with the reading specialist.”
http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/stimulation-sidwell-style
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I’m a little ashamed to admit I read the complaint filed, but I want to know how a wealthy attorney has time to fly across the country every twice a week with her pre-K student, have an affair, and work a high powered job.
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One problem with the pull-out model (which is by no means the only way to do a GAT program) is that when you say a kid is gifted, you have to say gifted at what? I personally have a bear trap memory, while my husband has practically no memory at all. He went through school deriving formulas on exams because he couldn’t (or didn’t bother to) memorize them. As kids, we would have needed a very different educational approach. Some kids are musical, some kids have unusual spatial abilities (like Temple Grandin), etc. Nobody’s just “smart”–they’ll be smart in a particular way. That’s the essential challenge of gifted education–to do something helpful for children who are extremely diverse, and to do it with one hour a week.
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…I want to know how a wealthy attorney has time to fly across the country every twice a week with her pre-K student, have an affair, and work a high powered job.
Practice, practice, practice.
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