Gifted Student Programs

In many US schools, there is a similar system: gifted programs (in elementary), pre-AP (middle school), and AP (high school) segregate the "gifted" kids from the rest.I think it actually helps the gifted students. A lot. The best teachers want to teach in the "gifted" track, because there is a lot more participation and interest, and they can move faster because they don't have to teach to the lowest common denominator.Unfortunately, while every student can learn,

You're missing an important point: there is a built-in ceiling to how good a child can be in a particular math class. There is only a finite amount of material taught and a finite amount of time. So any program like this is inevitably going to greatly reduce the variance as everyone gets pushed towards this ceiling. This isn't keeping gifted students below their potential. It's just not giving them special treatment by accelerating the class material for their sake. Which is the same as before.

I think much of the time what we have is "gifted parents".Some thoughts:Can school administrators reliably identify "gifted" students? Gifted in one subject? Averagely gifted?Should we remove the better able students from regular school, leaving the average ability much lower?If there aren't very high quality teachers available to teach "gifted" students, then what's the point? Conversely, if we had more very high quality teachers, wouldn'

You sound like you have an immense chip on your shoulder over this incident.All kids would likely benefit from a better form of teaching than the conventional school methods. However if you get a classroom of gifted children and you add a non-gifted child, the non-gifted child likely won’t be able to keep up at the same pace. There’s something to be said about segregating children with similar learning abilities so that the pace of the classes are at good levels for everyone in the class.

I have views on both sides of this:* On one side, I bounced between school districts as a military brat and was often labelled "gifted". Usually this resulted in me getting extra education. When it didn't, I was often bored, sometimes to the detriment of my education.* On the other side, in one district you had the lower math class, and the higher math class, and within the higher class each section would start with a pre-test to see what you already knew, and then split t

I'm not sure at the end of the day there's such a thing as 'intelligence', in terms of how we talk about it, like some sort of RPG stat. In my experience, kids aren't really 'smarter' than other kids, they have learning styles and brain patterns that match up with how the courses are run.Anecdotes, I know, but I was terrible at math compared to the kids in high school who could all just memorize and regurgitate (I have ADHD & very poor working memory, an

That's an ongoing debate with things like gifted-student programs as well, especially at the earlier stages of education. The pro is targeting students with material suited to their pace, so there aren't students going much more slowly than they could on the one hand, or being overwhelmed on the other. But the con is that the giftedness-segregation itself might produce a self-fulfilling prophecy, as students not in the gifted track aren't challenged with the advanced curriculum, and also lose th

You've hit the nail on the head with your comparison. That's exactly how I'd felt all these years in school. It's easy to see that putting an averagely intelligent person in a class for developmentally disabled children doesn't make sense, yet for many people it appears impossible that putting a highly intelligent person in a class for regular children might be anything less than optimal.I mean, it's crazy. If a child is special in any way, they'll probably get treated in a special way, ex

This is anecdotal, but in 10th grade I transferred to a charter school with no separate classes. The "gifted" students were in the same school as the students who needed extra attention.The end result was just that-- all of the attention was given to the students who needed it. The cirriculum was dumbed down, and the "gifted" students didn't learn almost anything.It was better for the students who needed help, and much worse for the students that didn't.I v

Yes. Typically these programs are just better learning environments. Why they are reserved for the very technically gifted is a flaw in out romanticized societal belief that genius is the only way incredibly things can happen. Atleast in my opinion. Everyone can be smarter than they are, it's been hard to argue the efficiency of typically schooling for the past century but there's obviously great room for improvement. A great start would be teaching kids how to be happy, or even improv