The excellent, the talented, the gifted must be held back, perpetually shackled to their incompetent contemporaries, so as to avoid offending those who believe in the doctrine of total equality. Seattle Public Schools shuts down gifted and talented program for being too White and Asian.
(twitter.com)
These people are STUPID!
https://xcancel.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/2041870332915601416
One has to wonder why this same standard isn't applied to athletics.
Athletics makes more money for schools than purely Academic programs. Hence they get treated as a golden goose and get all the funding.
My School literally remodeled the Gymnasium twice in the same year. While other parts of the building were quite literally falling apart
I was in the last GATE class in my school. After my senior year it was over. They just spent $1mil on an astroturf football field for a 9 man team they had to merge with another school to get enough players for.
Indeed. After I graduated they spent something like 500k on a new top of the line Weight and Exercise Room that no one but the Football Team was allowed to use.
The Athletic Teams seemed to be the district’s primary focus. Everything else was an afterthought. So no one seriously kept an eye on what was being taught. No one noticed when quality kept slipping.
Temporarily disregarding the multitude of other problems ailing modern education. We wonder where all our Teslas, Einsteins, Michelangelo’s etc. Are.
It might be worth considering if one of the problems ailing modern American education is the overemphasis on Sports. Some College Teams routinely make almost as much as the professional teams. The fact of the matter is most Student Athletes regardless of ethnicity aren’t going to ever be good enough to make careers out of it. No matter the amount of trainers, dieticians, and money you toss at the problem.
So why are we sacrificing the interests of the rest our Youth? Just so a handful of athletes may have mildly negligible better chances of making it professionally than they would have otherwise.
There was no such thing as a gifted or talented program back when I was in school. I was bored to tears through most of grammar school. I didn't learn anything new in 2nd, 4th, 5th, or 6th grades. Eighth grade is when my self-education began, as I then had access to a lot of books.
Yep
Acknowledging that people and ethnic groups are generally different at fundamental biological levels is essentially the kryptonite of enlightenment political theory. Because it directly undermines many of the presuppositions and declarations that various thinkers have made over the years about human nature and subsequently ideal governance.
As many of those presuppositions and declarations used European Christians as a baseline for justifying themselves and their broad application to the human population at large.
The past 200-300 odd years of Societal and Social Development. Have largely been fans of different versions of enlightenment political and philosophical theory. Trying to socially engineer society in such a way to pave over the gaping chasms real world observations about human nature, biology, behavior, and the differences in various factors such as intelligence. Open in their favored theories and presuppositions about the world. And subsequently prove their favored theories as the only correct ones.
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
Read it, unironically, in my junior high school Gifted Reading program. Very few stories have stayed with me the way Harrison Bergeron did, because I was horrified at the notion of retarding one's abilities in the name of equity. And yet, I am living this very existence 40-plus years later.
Quite horrifying wasn’t it. :)
I remember the prima ballerina shackled to the floor so she wouldn't outshine the others, and Harrison's father having the device that shocked him when he thought too much. Those things being a reality is much scarier than any horror movie.
Yep, all in the name of equality.
Harrison Bergeron was supposed to be science fiction
Sign I had posted in my science classroom for over 20 years, “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.”
No doubt. So many things these days have me saying, "Has no one read scifi before?"
:)
Race to the lowest common denominator…
Find a home schooled kid to explain it to ya…
Isn't that very raacis?? Believing that other kids cannot excel and achieve to standards??
Stop letting ghetto kids skip school and speak ebonics, for one thing.
I hope the non gifted teachers don't grade on a curve. Those damn Whites and Asians are going to screw up the mediocrity of that grading style.
I messed up the curve in 10th grade geometry class. I was mistakenly placed in a slower class, so I had a 100 average, and everyone else in the class failed.
User name checks out.
Exactly. I noticed in 3rd grade that everyone else seemed to have a secret rule book that I didn't have. That's also the year I was pulled out of class to take an IQ test. I got a school transcript, and it shows that I got 139. I was the only one in my classroom pulled. There was a girl pulled from the other 3rd class. I didn't know that until we compared notes at our 30th high school reunion. I first read about Asperger's in Wired magazine and took their test. If you scored above 20, you probably had Asperger's. I scored over 40 on the test. I have all the symptoms, except for understanding humor. Of course, I don't actually laugh at most jokes, mainly because I've heard all the types and usually know the punchline ahead of time. I do laugh when I hear an unexpected punchline. But I still can't tell when people are laughing with me or at me. That was a real problem in school.
The teachers are constrained by the administration. Last decade that I taught, our head principal expressed his disapproval with teachers “giving”68 and 69 averages (failing - but barely). Keep in mind that most good teachers will look at that average and think about how much effort the kid put forth in class, whether the kid had the opportunity to take a retest or complete extra credit, etc.
I, being the old fart that I am, recorded a 69 for a kid that had chosen not to retest or complete extra credit, and it was an easy class. Got called out by one of the assistant principals (not really called out, he asked why and already knew the answer) I point blank told him I wasn’t changing the grade because it was the grade the kid had earned.
On another note, some school districts tell teachers that they can’t give grades below a certain point (60 or 50). Which means you can have students that try and really struggle with a subject and also have the student that refuses to complete a single assignment and wind up making the same average.
Get your kids out of public schools that are being mismanaged.
Mamdani cut the gifted programs in schools the first week in office. Edit: He said he was cutting the gifted programs. I have not verified If he did.