[dzdt]

For whatever reason, the US public education system has not put much effort into identifying and nurturing gifted and talented students. Probably the current resurgance of the US in this contest is due to the rise of math circles, summer camp programs, and the like outside of the school environment. There was a good article about this last year when the US team won the IMO : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math...

[dominotw]

or as you can tell from the picture, high levels of Chinese and indian immigration in past couple of decades.

[flukus]

> Ankan Bhattacharya, Allen Liu, Ashwin Sah, Michael Kural, Yuan Yao, Junyao Peng, and coach Po-Shen Loh.Credit

I looked up the name of the most English sounding one, it's probably of Turkish origin.

[laxatives]

Almost all money flows to support the opposite tail, the lowest performing students. For example, No Child Left Behind, which every career educator I've spoken to believes set education in the US back a decade or more.

[jacobolus]

Almost all money flows to the worst performers? Not a chance.

About half of public school funding comes from local property taxes, and as a result schools in rich neighborhoods have dramatically better equipment, facilities, and staff levels/pay.

There are huge disparities in school funding from one district to another, and the folks who get screwed are in poor districts, both in remote rural areas and in predominantly minority neighborhoods in inner cities.

I found this nice map in a google search just now: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools...

* * *

The No Child Left Behind law was emphatically not about diverting extra money to poor performing students, I don‘t know where you got that idea.

[hueving]

Has nothing to do with poor/rich districts. It's within each school. The teachers spend more time (aka more money) dealing with poor performing students rather than spending more time with the better students.

[freyir]

He's saying resources are spent on the worst performing students. For example, classroom time spent getting the lowest performing students to pass the (relatively low) bar set by statewide exams.

[jacobolus]

That’s also nonsense, unless you’re talking about extra staff time spent on imposing power/discipline on people who don’t want to be there. In which case, sure... but what else would you propose the schools do? (Also, this doesn’t tend to help the students being disciplined all that much, in my limited anecdotal experience as an outside observer.)

Some students get extra support because they have disabilities or need extra language instruction. This is not about poor performance, per se, but rather about giving extra support to specific groups of students who obviously need it. This usually relates to state/federal law.

But your run-of-the-mill poorly performing student is given woefully inadequate support by understaffed and underfunded schools, just like everyone else. The way to fix this problem is by improving teacher pay, giving teachers more time during the schoolday but outside the classroom for self improvement and collaboration, properly supplying schools and fixing their facilities, and giving teachers more local autonomy and less bullshit standardized tests.

The best performing students tend to get tracked into special classes (“honors”, “AP”, etc.), have more direct relationships with teachers, are members of school-organized extracurricular activities, and so on. They speak up more often in class, interact with other academically motivated students. Perhaps most importantly, they generally have more considerably more external support (family help from better educated parents with more free time, private tutoring, out-of-school music/art/sport/etc. training, and so on).

[freyir]

NCLB set minimum performance requirements for basic skills. It tied school's funding directly to the performance of its lowest achieving students. In my personal experience, teachers regularly stopped their regular curriculum and focused exclusively on test prep in the weeks leading up to the statewide exams. Even in honors classes, where you'd expect every student to demonstrate basic reading and math proficiency, we stopped our normal studies and did test prep.

Did this have an negative impact on gifted program funding? Some educators definitely believe it did.

"In particular, NCLB does not require any programs for gifted, talented, and other high-performing students. Federal funding of gifted education decreased by a third over the law's first five years ... In other states, such as Michigan, state funding for gifted and talented programs was cut by up to 90% in the year after the Act became law."

[soundwave106]

I'd be surprised that teachers in advanced programs would actually stop to focus on state exams or NCLB type tests? Back when I went through IB (over 20 years ago, granted), the state test was almost an afterthought. Most of the people in those programs if I recall breezed through those tests in no time, and had the remainder half a day or so to leisurely do what they want. (Obviously instead a lot more time was spent preparing for the IB and AP exams).

Half-baked measures like NCLB (eg, make schools "accountable" and they will somehow improve magically) does nothing to resolve the "environment gap", which in my opinion is probably one of the most critical factors in academic performance these days.

[WildUtah]

American education is singularly obsessed with the gap between racial averages. Closing that gap is the priority.

Top performers are an afterthought. The USA can always import talent to build the future; there's no urgency felt to produce any here.

[cft]

That's fundamentally fear driven: best performing students do not riot or burn cities when out of work as adults.

[empath75]

Or you know, we think it's important that we spend money on disadvantaged kids because it's the decent thing to do.

[hueving]

There is no reason we should spend extra effort on kids that have that much difficulty learning or hate school that much. The kid isn't likely to come out that much better in the long run.

There isn't unlimited money for this, by choosing to spend more money on lost causes you are depriving the regular and strong students of money that could be used to enrich their education. If the bulk of effort is focused on the lowest 5% of students to the detriment of the other 95%, then it results in a worse education system overall.

People just aren't comfortable with the fact that some students will just not perform well no matter how many resources you throw at it.

[tluyben2]

> People just aren't comfortable with the fact that some students will just not perform well no matter how many resources you throw at it.

You aren't those 'people' nor are your kids; you would (or will) not be saying that. I'm not one of those people either but I work with these kids and with effort people improve a lot over the educational system. I have seen kids go from failures to successes by putting effort into them and we should strive for that. The elitist view you have is painful to read. I'm not talking about the pure geniuses as they will get the attention they need but neither are you...

[hueving]

Again, we don't have unlimited funds. By focusing so much energy on underperforming students you deprive the majority of resources that could be devoted towards making them better.

Yes, it sucks if you have a child with bad behavior or poor learning skills, but why is society expected to sacrifice their own children to attempt to fix yours?

It's similar to suggesting that all doctors only treat patients in the very worst conditions. A bomb goes off and the hospital spends all of their time on victims with no vital signs and ignores the people bleeding out because they still have vital signs.

I'm sorry my post pains you to read, but if you are getting that emotional about it maybe you aren't viewing things objectively?

[bluGill]

> There is no reason we should spend extra effort on kids that have that much difficulty learning or hate school that much. The kid isn't likely to come out that much better in the long run.

Source needed if you want to make that a fact...

I disagree. While I want to best students to get help to be better (they are the ones who can handled difficult but important fields, and can make the next breakthroughs to make my life better), I also do not want to be supporting the worst students in Prison or Welfare, as both are a drain on society. I'm willing to accept the kids with Downs syndrome (to name just one) will never have the mental capacity to amount to much, the next level up can at least support themselves if we give them help.

Low skill manufacturing jobs are gone and they will not come back. Robots are too cheap (even in places like China or India where labor is much cheaper than the US robots can still out compete humans for some tasks). The only chance those below average kids have is if we give them enough education now that they can handle a the simpler tasks that require a brain.

Science fiction can tackle the problem of what do we do when AI is "smarter" than humans. It is an interesting problem. The reality for the next half lifetime at least is AI will not be able to beat humans in many of the jobs that require an education. Thus I want everyone who could get an education to get one.

[hueving]

I'm not concerned about the brightest students, I'm concerned more about the middle of the bell curve. The US has to compete globally and if we let the majority languish while focusing on the left tail, the population is worse off on average.

This type of decline is hard to get out of because it's a negative feedback loop (poorly educated parents tend to poorly educate their children).

[dtornabene]

in what universe is that actually a factor? Pretty bizarre comment.

[sgc]

Not only is it bizarre, but not even true. Many terrorists are well educated, and in the end it is not a major factor.

https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/12/04/more-educa...

[allendoerfer]

The French terrorists of the recent attacks came from the Banlieue ghettos. It is not the education of individual people it is the existence of ghettos itself that is bad and causes crimes, terrorism and occasional car burnings. How else are we supposed to get rid of ghettos, if not through education?