The line in the article that got me was, “… federal spending from the No Child Left Behind Act expected to top $24 billion this fiscal year and only $11 million targeted toward gifted and talented programs…” It’s the smart ones who will make the future, yet keep getting the short end of the stick. Other countries understand this and invest in their futures, but here it takes private investment here to get anything. Why are this country’s priorities always so screwed up?
Smart kids from all over the world head to Reno
At an early age, Misha Raffiee began soaking up knowledge and experiences that set her apart.
By the time she was 2, Misha could read and was playing the violin before she was 3.
The 11-year-old Reno girl is among those accepted by the Davidson Academy, a new public school for profoundly gifted students scheduled to opening the fall on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno.
Every child should be learning something in our schools every day, but very often our brightest students are not challenged in school,” she said. “They get very frustrated because they’re not learning.”
A 2003 study of high school dropouts found 10 to 20 percent of those who did not complete high school tested in the gifted range. That loss of gifted students is a loss to society, Davidson said.
It should be no suprise. First we open our bourders to mexicans.
Then we refuse to deport them. And now were paying 23.something billion to teach them english….
If you dont help the stupid ones then your going to keep opening the rift between those who are smart and those who are not. That being said I still dont suport NCLB, but still… Boy i wish we had that 8 trillion we are in debt by, then both groups could be happy.
Yup, it’s stupid.
When I was in high school many years ago, a history teacher whom I respected stopped me in my tracks when he asserted that he had sat down and calculated that the average SAT score at the school had remained constant over the years. I had asserted that the class 3 years ahead of my own was a smarter group of individuals. It took a while for me to realize why his statement was no surprise. The AVERAGE individual at the school was mediocre. So.. mediocrity was a constant. Big surprise. Had he calculated the average SAT scores among the top 5%, I think he would have found a big disparity.
You do have to be careful interpreting data, as the following sentence from the article shows: “A 2003 study of high school dropouts found 10 to 20 percent of those who did not complete high school tested in the gifted range. That loss of gifted students is a loss to society, Davidson said.” Well, I know someone who dropped out of high school early to attend college, and he wound up with a Ph.D. in physics– hardly a loss to society in my opinion, especially since we’re only cranking out about 800 physics Ph.Ds a year in the entire country the last time I checked. Incidentally, the high school was highly unsupportive of his decision to attend college. So how many of the 10-20% of gifted students who drop out do so in order to get on with their lives?
I agree that $11m/$24b inequity is a sad commentary on our priorities and does not promote optimism. Equally important is a larger portion of this funding earmarked to increase and compensate teachers, allowing managed teacher/student ratios that promote mentor/protege relationships. Increasing the number of instructors allows expanded level offerings wihtin a program to closely match student’s abilities within the sample . No child would be left behind at the expense of a gifted child.
“It should be no suprise. First we open our bourders to mexicans.
Then we refuse to deport them. And now were paying 23.something billion to teach them english….
Comment by Locke — 1/29/2006 @ 7:04 am ”
That is nasty, very Republican to blame their mistakes on others.
You might as well act like a French right winger and say that only white ppl are americans
Angel,
I don’t think the comment is nasty…evidently you aren’t in a “undocumented worker” state….. the schools can barely manage with the heavy workload of children of undocumented parents, who need a great deal more than just the basic education (language, free breakfast and lunch programs, etc.) It’s swamping the schools, and bankrupting the districts.
On Friday, my wife and I met with our daughter’s new Kindergarten teacher. I had difficulty accepting several things and ways they were being taught. In the end, however, it boiled down to one thing. The State set the curriculum and she had to follow it, including the material used.
The end result of No Child Left Behind is that states and schools now teach so the children can pass a test. They don’t teach how to think, or analyze, or ponder. If everyone could think back to their own school days and their favorite teacher. He / she / they encouraged you to think. To use your imagination. To discover for yourself. To go outside the classroom and see what is there. Those days are gone.
For decades we have had students that couldn’t cope with poorly trained teachers in structured settings. They failed, dropped out, and were absorbed into the workforce. No one noticed them gone except the schools that had gotten rid of all the square pegs for the round hole schools. Today we are noticing them as they become unemployable in a society demanding higher and higher education. It is these students that need the help. They are the ones that can’t stay interested in the school work or structure offered.
Instead, I hear talk about raising the minimum age for leaving school to 18 in our state. I hear about the state “Test Scores” and how our school fared. I hear about teachers being in short supply and burning out quickly in overcrowded classrooms. I hear stories that so many kids are dropping out, but not why. I also hear about all the pregnant teens being encouraged to drop out because they are a distraction.
Ok, a challenge. Outside of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, how many followers of this blog can point out something they learned in Grade or High School they use to this day? Or, even remember to this day? I assume most of the Dvorak readers have been out of High School for at least ten years.
I find it amazing how far apart we all can be on how to fix our school system. We can’t even decide what’s causing the problem, let alone how to fix it. How did we get in this position?
I think I will return to my favorite bugaboo, the Graduate Schools of Education. You’d think these place would be centers of innovation and research into the best way to teach our children. Instead they propogate and sometimes create the politically correct notions of “how our school ought to be”, with hardly any science to back it up.
That’s why nuns and priests can run a better school than all the credentialed “experts” in the public school system, just by doing what worked 50 years ago (or 200 years ago). Having the Spanish Inquisition as your disciplinary model helps, too.
Oh, yeah.
At my Catholic School, students were placed in 3 different tracks. 25% fast, 50% medium, 25% slower. I don’t know what it was like to be in the slower group, but at least they learned something.
Tracking has been abolished at most public schools due to “self-esteem” issues. Why is it shameful to recognize that people absorb information at different rates, and using different skills (verbal vs. visual, etc.). Restoring this approach would be a lot more effective, realistic, and efficient than overemphasizing individual attention and “mentoring”. When would a teacher ever have time for that? Maybe if you’re a student at Oxford paying your tutor/teacher directly, and not even then!