

Are Top Students Getting Short Shrift? - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/02/are-top-students-getting-short-shrift/acknowledging-the-trade-offs-in-differentiation

======
mdasen
_Life_ is short-changing those who are not top students.

We like to think of education as an equalizing part of our society. No matter
how poor you are, you can go to K-12 (or nearly all those grades) and get
educated. Likewise, we generally try to accommodate people regardless of
income at the third level - especially at elite institutions whose endowments
can carry them. However, education isn't socially equalizing.

Smart people generally learn easier and an hour of teaching them creates a
bigger difference than an hour of teaching someone less smart. So, if we
allocate the same resources to the smart and the less smart, we're creating
inequality. In effect, we're taking people who had the most inherent
advantages and giving them even more advantages. This gets quite pronounced at
the third level. While different school districts have different resources
K-12, our elite universities have vastly more resources than our mid-range
ones. Not only that, but they become a network for those who are already
advantaged to meet the other advantaged people.*

Is a smart person slighted by getting less attention in school? I would argue
no. I personally like living in a society that's a little more equal - one
that helps those with fewer inherent gifts to achieve more while also helping
those with great gifts, if just a little less. I also acknowledge that there
are benefits to me of helping those who have a little more trouble achieving
to become more educated.

Yes, it can be annoying when one sees those who don't put in the work, don't
learn as easily, or act out being given extra attention/help/resources.
However, this isn't that different from our tax system. The Republican
argument against taxing the rich more is that they created that income and
should get to keep it. However, some of what we achieve isn't our own. We have
gifts that we have received from birth that are unequal. Likewise, we see the
"lazy" and "trouble-making" students in much the same light that people on
public benefits are painted by politicians. Society is taking resources from
us and spending it on them?!? How outrageous!

So, do I feel like we have gotten the short shrift? Sometimes (I'm only
human), but I try to remember that I've been blessed with so many advantages
(being born into a rich, western economy, having a high ability to learn
things, having the time and resources to study things, etc.). Would you trade
your intelligence or ability to concentrate for the additional resources
offered to those with less? If you were to sit down today and design how the
educational system should allocate resources knowing that your intelligence
would be randomly re-assigned afterward, would you allocate more resources to
the smart (knowing you might not be smart afterward)? I'm not posing the
question as a hypothetical with a clear answer - I genuinely believe that
people have to explore this in their own conscience.

I don't like paying taxes either, but I see a certain fairness in it - I've
been blessed with gifts that are not entirely my creation. But it's completely
reasonable to find it incredibly annoying - those are resources that could be
used to help smart adolescents achieve better things. Still, I'm not sure it
would create a society that I'd rather live in.

*In this case, "advantaged people" doesn't mean economically advantaged, but intellectually advantaged. For example, Harvard doesn't generally care if you came from money, but isn't generally taking people who don't have a lot of intellectual advantages.

~~~
godarderik
> Smart people generally learn easier and an hour of teaching them creates a
> bigger difference than an hour of teaching someone less smart.

While in principle I agree with this, I think there are many other factors
that figure into a student's success in school that his "intelligence."
Students may have different aptitudes for different subjects, care more about
certain things than others, or have access to better resources.

> So, if we allocate the same resources to the smart and the less smart, we're
> creating inequality.

This assumes that both the smart and less smart students both pay attention
diligently for the one hour session.In reality, when confronted with a topic
that is trivial for them, a smart student will often learn the concept in
twenty minutes and spend the next forty minutes sitting there bored. In
contrast, the less smart student, assuming they care, will have the full hour
to learn the material and ask any questions they have. In the end, they will
both have learned the same amount. For this reason, education can be said to
be equalizing.

> Is a smart person slighted by getting less attention in school? I would
> argue no.

I would argue that there's no moral distinction between paying more attention
to a less smart person or slighting a smarter person. Are you punishing them
for being born smart? Restraining the potential of smart kids in order to make
society "more equal" seems quite unfair to me.

> In this case, "advantaged people" doesn't mean economically advantaged, but
> intellectually advantaged

Except that there's a remarkably strong correlation between the two.

~~~
lurker19
Do note the difference between "giving someone less free stuff" and "punishing
someone". Schools do not prevent students from seeking other educators.

Any mass-production or limited-resource system will be relatively more
beneficial to someone than someone else, and there are many incompatible but
defensible ways to measure benefit.

~~~
godarderik
Yes, I agree, there is an important distinction between those two things.
However, schools still aren't providing each student an opportunity to reach
what their potential allows. From my personal experience as a student, I learn
new things in many of the classes that I take, yet the information is taught
at such a slow pace that it become mind numbingly boring. By forcing smart
students to be in classes with their less intelligent peers, schools are
imposing a ceiling on what level these students can reach. Even after being a
year ahead in nearly all of my subjects, I still feel like I could be so much
further than where I am today if I had had better, faster-moving instruction
in elementary and middle school.

------
godarderik
This is absolutely true. As a current sophomore in high school, I can say that
this is how it has been for my entire educational career. It was more of a
problem in elementary and middle school, where I bored to tears by how slow
the classes were moving. It has gotten somewhat better since I've entered high
school, where I have been able to test out of classes so that I'm now a year
ahead in mostly everything. However, even in my honors and AP classes, the
struggling students get the majority of the attention, and I have to make a
point to ask thoughtful questions to expand my learning that the teacher may
not have covered.

What's really sad about this is that what it has done to the motivation of
some of my friends. Being in classes with lower performing students also means
that you are surrounded by their attitudes, which are usually not too
favorable towards learning, and by extension, school. This creates a sort of
stigma around learning that its something that you "have to" do and it's very
uncool to do on your own.

I have channeled my frustrations about school towards learning programming and
other topics outside of school, but it's sad to see many of my friends,
equally as capable as me, become totally turned off from learning by being in
clases with people who don't care. They barely resemble the curious and
inquisitive children they used to be.

------
Duff
Absolutely. My jr/sr high school transitioned from the old-fashioned "tracked"
strategy to the current, mixed trend when I was in 8th grade.

The result: lots of downtime for me. The idiots continued to be idiots, except
that parents complained about "elitist" teachers. In response, the school
board dumbed things down. I had to spend most of my time in one class
transcribing a team-mate's paper, because he didn't know how to write.

The hack that schools introduced to deal with this is AP classes. So you let
the top 10% of students (or best connected) get a quality education, while the
rest of the proles spend 6 months reading "Where the Red Fern Grows"

------
civilian
Yup. As a top student in K-12, I really disliked how the trouble-makers (who
had no discipline, repeatedly acted out, etc) seemed to get coddled by the
teacher. It seemed like a disconnect, and like the trouble makers actually had
a stronger connection than I did, and of course it also slowed down the speed
of learning in the classroom. (In college, where attendance was optional and a
large amount of learning happened outside of the classroom, it was much less
of an issue.)

It's actually kind of a problem for me now. I have very little empathy for
people that I perceive to be the kind of people who wasted my time in
elementary/middle/high school.

~~~
Volpe
I think you need to look at it bigger picture. Ask yourself, why they are not
disiplined, and why they repeatedly act out?

This notion that people are born smart, and others are just born morons, is a
false dichotomy.

We shouldn't be asking the question "Should we seperate dumb kids from smart
ones?" we should be asking the much harder question of "what socio-economic
issues are causing there to be a divide in the the first place, and how do we
combat that?"

------
Zimahl
Of course top students get screwed. It's a fundamental problem with schools in
general, a flaw in design.

The main problem is that we set grades by age and not skill. This causes a
couple problems. Kids might be better serviced by staying behind a grade, due
to something as simple as maturity. The flip side is that the 'smarter' kids
for their age, those who are able and ready to move up can. Right now,
educators are hesitant to do either, especially given how it is frowned on to
hold a kid back by parents. So they just move them on, put them into remedial
classes that move slower. How are you supposed to catch up when you are moving
slower? The more able are just stunted into sitting their while the teachers
help the slower kids.

The system is designed as a lose-lose scenario.

~~~
inuhj
Is it still possible to be held back a grade in the US? I've heard stories of
it happening in the distant past but I've never seen it happen. Usually they
get promoted to the next grade and placed in special ed or remedial classes.

~~~
kenjackson
It's generally largely frowned upon nowadays -- largely for social reasons. I
recall talking to some folks in Texas about this, and they said, if you could
hold kids back for academics, a lot of parents of football playing boys would
push to do that. You'd probably see a lot of 18 year old freshman QBs in high
school.

~~~
jff
I knew a guy who transferred schools halfway through his senior year because
it put him far enough back that he could play another year of high school
football.

There are some really strange motivations out there.

~~~
kenjackson
Yeah. There's a term called kindergarten redshirts, where parents hold their
child back to be older for athletic reasons. You end up with these weird
kindergartens with some boys just about to turn 7 and all the girls are 5.

------
lurker19
Is this a problem only for smart poor kids in regions with no magnet/exam
schools?

My parents moved to one of the wealthier (per-household) cities in America
(not the wealthiest neighborhood; they had a professional services small
business on the high end of work-for-a-living income from paying customers,
and a few assistants in their employ) and my seemingly ordinary high school
was one of the best neighborhood schools in the country in terms of student
performance, non-crime, etc.

One could certainly raise a family in that school zone on an engineer and
teacher's salary if one would forgo a big house and new car lifestyle.

~~~
tokenadult
_regions with no magnet/exam schools_

Most regions of the United States (and perhaps of some other English-speaking
countries) are regions without magnet or exam schools to concentrate able
students for challenging programs. I had a lot of praise for my state's
practice of allowing public school open enrollment in a recent HN comment,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064665>

but even at that there is NO middle school (as contrasted with an elementary
school) in my state actively selects students for their demonstrated readiness
to take on a challenging academic program. Meanwhile, the expectations for
AVERAGE learners in several countries are higher than they are for gifted
learners in most parts of the United States.

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

(See Exhibit 1.1 on pages 34 and 35 for an excellent data chart on academic
achievement in different countries.)

I'm glad to hear that there are places where parents can find a suitable
school just by moving their residence, but not everyone can move their
residence, and those schools are nonexistent in whole states of the United
States. And even at that, it's debatable whether those schools are really up
to a world standard of academic performance.

After edit: Another comment under the submitted article here is quite correct
that the core idiocy here is the idiocy of dividing up students into grades by
age, which is actually a rather recent practice historically, and a practice
that never had a favorable research base showing that it was effective for
learning.

<http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html>

But my FAQ on this subject immediately above cites sources from a CENTURY ago,
which are still widely ignored, about how idiotic it is to divide up students
by age into school grades, and I'm still learning about sources from various
eras that agree with that conclusion, all ignored by educational planners.

------
microtherion
I attended a rural K-12 school, where one teacher taught 3 grades in the same
classroom. Sometimes, while the teacher worked with one grade, students of the
second grade would help the students of the third with their class work. The
"gifted" program was that occasionally you were allowed to grab advanced
homework out of a closet.

I can't really say that this has held me back later in life.

------
equark
There's a terrific paper by Christopher Jencks in _Ethics_ called "Whom Must
We Treat Equally for Educational opportunity to Be Equal?"

<http://www.cems.uvm.edu/~sweaver/educationalequality2.pdf>

His point is that equal opportunity is not as easy to define in education as
you might first believe. It's worth reading before claiming to know the
answer, in my opinion.

------
mhlakhani
I don't consider myself much better than average. However, it seems that a lot
of time was wasted in school going over simple concepts multiple times just so
the whole class could get it. That made it seem like a waste of time.

Sadly, the trend has continued into University here (Pakistan).

------
jseliger
Answer: maybe. Daniel Singal wrote a 1991 _Atlantic_ article on the subject
called "The Other Crisis," which asks the same question:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.ht...](http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/educatio/singalf.htm)
.

I suspect the bigger problem in K - 12 education at the moment is simpler: the
system isn't really able to optimize teachers at all. For more on this, see
the article collected here: <http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-
doesnt-get> .

------
patrickgzill
Yes, absolutely. (from my experience and those of my relatives)

------
Volpe
Anyone else reading the OP (and these comments), think it's completely
elitist?

A bunch of privileged kids wanting more privileges... LOL. Right, we should
tax the poor more, and the rich less as well (oh wait...)

------
michaelochurch
Two ways to take this. Is the purpose of school to _educate_ students at
maximal effectiveness? Or is it to _train_ them for the real world (i.e.
corporate jobs, many of which require people to do work below their level of
intellectual ability)?

If it's the first, then yes, absolutely, because differences in learning speed
are substantial and kids are going to get bored in classes catered toward the
slowest learners.

If it's the second, then no, not really. Why? Because most "real world" jobs
involve a slow track where one doesn't get to do the interesting stuff until
one has put in time and paid dues. Saying, "I shouldn't have to pay dues
because I'm smart and already know how to do more interesting work", in the
first 6 months of a job is not a way to succeed.

If we want to train obedient, dues-paying workers, we _should_ be putting them
in classes that bore them, setting the track speed according to the slower
learners in the class, and making them do mountains of repetitive, uninspiring
busywork.

I would prefer the tracked, "elitist" system from an educational perspective,
but the reality is that 95% of "real world" life is conforming to rules and
expectations designed according to the least skilled and most untalented
people. If the role of school is to make people successful in the workplace,
tracking could be argued (though I would disagree with such an argument, on
the basis that education has long-term subtle payoffs that mere training does
not) to be a disservice to students.

~~~
grandalf
Well put.

The purpose of the US educational system is a combination of daycare, cultural
assimilation, and vocational training.

The top students end up going to Harvard where they get vocational training to
work in the banking industry or government, the bottom students start with
basic daycare until they eventually end up on welfare, in the prison system,
or fighting in Iraq.

This accounts for the range of people with IQs of 80-120. Generally speaking,
the existing social and geographical partitions of society result in
individuals from each subgroup feeling as though they "belong" in their
cohort.

Sometimes there are outliers... people with higher IQs or aspirations that are
not vocational in nature, or simply large amounts of intellectual curiosity.
These people do not fit into the system as a whole, and some are able to excel
(perhaps finding a niche academic area) while others innately rebel against it
and do rather poorly in school, often end up being self-taught engineers,
inventors or entrepreneurs.

It's crucial to realize what the intent of the US educational system is before
we critique it. Considering its goal it is a tremendous success.

------
rsanchez1
When you try to force everyone to have equal results, naturally the top-tier
gets brought down. High school really sapped my motivation, from my
perspective why work hard when you don't have to? So adjusting to college was
rougher than it should have been. It would've been easier if teachers pushed
me according to my abilities in high school.

~~~
hugh3
I went to a selective school, where it was like this for _everybody_. They put
all the smart kids into one school, but didn't actually give us work that was
any more challenging than you'd get at another school. Too much brains plus
not enough challenge equals a culture of laziness. Competitive laziness. It
was okay, at my school, to do well, provided that you didn't actually put any
work into it.

------
drivebyacct2
As someone who is only a couple years out of high school, yes, abso-frigging-
lutely, and as much as the top comments here touch on some practical
implementation matters, teachers are frankly too over-worked to be able to
care.

