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't that go a long way toward fixing our education problems anyway?
Affluent and/or highly educated parents can easily skew the finding that their child is gifted.
Source: I went to a highly selective, private school outside the US (the inspiration for Hogwarts, fwiw). My kids go to public school in the US - one has been identified by the school as gifted (but doesn't want to participate in the gifted program), the other has not. Our school district receives something like 0.5% of the funding they get for special needs students, for their gifted program.
I have also taught coding in middle school. In my time in the class room I saw several students who came from higher income/higher educated households that performed well. I saw a big middle group who did ok. I saw several students who didn't care to do any work. I saw one student from a lower income demographic who showed uncommon promise in the subject. Given that evidence what am I to do with a gifted student budget assuming I have one? All I could do at the time was to approach the parent of that one student and give my feedback, ask that they consider encouraging his talents. I have no idea what happened after that. The other thing I could do is help the smart motivated kids from affluent families achieve even better results than their peers than they were already able to. I'm really not sure that would be a good use of my time and money..
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't that go a long way toward fixing our education problems anyway?
Affluent and/or highly educated parents can easily skew the finding that their child is gifted.
Source: I went to a highly selective, private school outside the US (the inspiration for Hogwarts, fwiw). My kids go to public school in the US - one has been identified by the school as gifted (but doesn't want to participate in the gifted program), the other has not. Our school district receives something like 0.5% of the funding they get for special needs students, for their gifted program.
I have also taught coding in middle school. In my time in the class room I saw several students who came from higher income/higher educated households that performed well. I saw a big middle group who did ok. I saw several students who didn't care to do any work. I saw one student from a lower income demographic who showed uncommon promise in the subject. Given that evidence what am I to do with a gifted student budget assuming I have one? All I could do at the time was to approach the parent of that one student and give my feedback, ask that they consider encouraging his talents. I have no idea what happened after that. The other thing I could do is help the smart motivated kids from affluent families achieve even better results than their peers than they were already able to. I'm really not sure that would be a good use of my time and money..