My impression of what makes the debate about gifted education and (to an extent) the new California math standards is the issue of the negative externalities in the decision to segregate high achieving students from the general population of students.
The linked articles cites some evidence that moving high achieving/gifted students have a positive effect on their math and ELA achievement. I don't believe that anyone is contesting that having a classroom for gifted students has a positive effect on their learning.
On the other hand, there is a growing concern of the negative externality of this decision on the other students in the larger school community. In other words, we know that having high performing peers have a positive effect on students learning (this is a positive externality of having a desk mate that is gifted). The theory goes that removing these gifted students from regular classrooms has a negative effect on everyone else that remains. Again, this is a process that makes intuitive sense.
The tough sell in this argument is that, at the end of the day, this remains an externality for gifted students. Helping your desk mate does not directly impact you and, in all honesty, might even hurt your chances for a perfect SAT score or of admission at a top university because you took a lower division courses than your peers that were scooped away to a gifted classroom. Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.
No. The better students are not some resource to be used for the benefit of the other students. They are clients in their own right and should be developed to the best of their abilities.
Regarding children as some kind of state resource is just wrong.
> Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
We know a big part of education success is home environment. You can surround a kid with Einstein schoolmates but if he's getting beat daily and not getting fed, it doesn't matter. Add in unsafe living conditions and no access to books and you have a disaster nobody but the kids parents can solve.
Why then should we harm the gifted? Why should we allow them worse outcomes because someone's parents are garbage? You aren't going to make a shitty parent into a capable one when they fundamentally don't care to begin with, no matter how many high performing students you drag down in the process.
On an individual basis my duty is to do the best I can do for my kids, and that is all I can do.
>Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.
It's a hard, if not impossible, sell to ask any parent to sacrifice their child on that altar no matter how competitive they are.
The linked articles cites some evidence that moving high achieving/gifted students have a positive effect on their math and ELA achievement. I don't believe that anyone is contesting that having a classroom for gifted students has a positive effect on their learning.
On the other hand, there is a growing concern of the negative externality of this decision on the other students in the larger school community. In other words, we know that having high performing peers have a positive effect on students learning (this is a positive externality of having a desk mate that is gifted). The theory goes that removing these gifted students from regular classrooms has a negative effect on everyone else that remains. Again, this is a process that makes intuitive sense.
The tough sell in this argument is that, at the end of the day, this remains an externality for gifted students. Helping your desk mate does not directly impact you and, in all honesty, might even hurt your chances for a perfect SAT score or of admission at a top university because you took a lower division courses than your peers that were scooped away to a gifted classroom. Parents/families need to make the decision to give up on the positive returns of gifted education in favor of potential learning outcomes for other students or even more remote, long term outcomes of (maybe) less crime or increased tax base 20 years after graduation. I am not sure if this is a viable demand to place on parents/families given how competitive society at large is.