There is nothing happening in New York City's “gifted” classrooms that couldn't be mastered by any child with a good teacher. So why is so much of it denied to those students not given that label?
Here's an axiom: all people fall along a distribution of cognitive ability. The debate is over the shape of that distribution. Your argument that "there is nothing happening in New York City's 'gifted' classrooms that couldn't be mastered by any child with a good teacher" is implicitly an argument that the distribution has a hard cutoff below a certain level. There is simply no evidence for that in the intelligence research, which is probably the most robust and replicable subfield of research within psychology.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that different kids have different cognitive abilities, mostly clustered around the mean but a few well above and a few well below. Acknowledging this allows us to better serve the kids at both extremes. I think the reason it's so hard to have this conversation is that we conflate cognitive ability with innate human or moral worth, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other.
All students need one yes. But those that are extremely gifted and don't get one seriously contemplate suicide and many commit it. This article should just say our education systems suck and are not educating. Stop handing out free passes to torture children.
Here's an axiom: all people fall along a distribution of cognitive ability. The debate is over the shape of that distribution. Your argument that "there is nothing happening in New York City's 'gifted' classrooms that couldn't be mastered by any child with a good teacher" is implicitly an argument that the distribution has a hard cutoff below a certain level. There is simply no evidence for that in the intelligence research, which is probably the most robust and replicable subfield of research within psychology.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that different kids have different cognitive abilities, mostly clustered around the mean but a few well above and a few well below. Acknowledging this allows us to better serve the kids at both extremes. I think the reason it's so hard to have this conversation is that we conflate cognitive ability with innate human or moral worth, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other.
All students need one yes. But those that are extremely gifted and don't get one seriously contemplate suicide and many commit it. This article should just say our education systems suck and are not educating. Stop handing out free passes to torture children.