I know a high-school teacher who had to stop mentoring practice teachers. The teacher taught only honors/AP classes and the students were much smarter/better-read than the practice teachers. When challenged (often) by the students, the practice teachers tried to BS/pretend (despite instructions to the contrary); usually resulting in the total melt-down of the practice teacher.

Teaching credentials are too often defined as education courses, not content courses. This is especially undesirable at the high-school honors/AP levels, where strong content knowledge is essential. I know a retired masters’-level engineer who volunteers as a calculus and physics tutor, but who is not considered to be a qualified teacher because he has no ed courses.

The second reason that the highly gifted often fail to achieve their potential is that the schools fail to intellectually challenge them, so they don’t learn how to work at learning and doing intellectual tasks. Out in the real world, if the job is easy even for a genius, someone else will have done it already. If you want to work out a new theory in Physics or design a bridge, it isn’t enough to know how to do the calculations, you’ve got to actually do them. For days on end. It’s not easy to develop that kind of work habits after 12 years of mind-numbing boredom and makework.

Finally, if teaching the gifted is expensive, you’re doing it wrong. Give them books, assign appropriate work, and come back later to evaluate the results and give feedback. But the teacher administering this program had better be much smarter than the average education major. And maybe you ought to start doing this before they’ve spent years relieving the boredom by thinking up ways to torture the teacher.

Plugging in the numbers, the original intent seems to be to allow somewhere between 2,640 and 6,600 students into the cluster program, and of those between 132 and 528 into the seminar program (with percentiles numbered 0-99).

The Voice article must have confused a few facts:
Roughly 5,500 students now qualify for Seminar programs, DiJiosia said. That equals more than 6 percent of the kids to whom the class is offered — a whopping percentage in light of the high testing bar set for Seminar.
The 5,500 figure sounds about right for the cluster program. The rest of the statement doesn’t even make sense– if 5,500 represents 6 percent, the class must have been offered to 92,000 kids.

I wonder if much of the preceding discussion hasn’t been over false figures.

However, you also can’t create a single curriculum which will serve the top 90% of the school population. The range of ability is too great. I don’t know if it is so much more expensive to educate gifted children than to educate kids who are not gifted. To a certain extent, I wonder if the assertion that “it costs too much to educate the gifted” is a reflection of existing misallocations of resources within schools. If the argument is that you need good lab equipment to educate the gifted, for example, I’d reject that, because I believe that you need good lab equipment to educate all children. If you need a textbook for an honors class, well, surely you need textbooks for all the students. Instead of ordering 200 textbooks for a grade with 200 students, order x advanced textbooks, and 200-x non-advanced textbooks, x being the number of advanced kids in a grade. It gets expensive when you try to differentiate within the classroom, because districts seem to hire aides in order to allow a teacher to work with smaller groupings within the classroom.

The argument that the top 5% are worthy of support is fine. You neglect to take into account that districts don’t have a uniform distribution of ability. A wealthy district with a well-known and respected gifted and talented program could well draw more families with gifted children than a district without a gifted and talented program. Schools near industries which rely upon a highly educated workforce will also have more really bright kids than rural districts. In order to support the top 5% of the national IQ range, in certain districts, the school would need programs for 15 or 20% of the population. It doesn’t mean that the school districts believe they are Lake Woebegon, it means that individual rational decisions have an effect in the aggregate. What about the towns which feed kids into Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, for example. I suspect, although I’m too lazy to Google it, that those towns would have a higher percentage of very able children, because their parents chose to move to towns which would give them a chance of attending TJHSST.

Yep, the engineers who design power transmission lines are pretty darn smart. But power transmission lines do absolutely nothing to transmit power unless they are actually built and energised. There may be far more people who can maintain a manufacturing plant, a computer chip, a wastewater treatment plant, or a nuclear power plant than can design one, but if no one actually bothers to build or maintain the plant then all that design work is irrelevant.

And if the plant is built poorly, or maintained badly, then resources are wasted too.

I can’t emphasize this point enough: without these folks, modern society wouldn’t work.
I agree with this point. What you are forgetting is that without the other 95% of society, modern society wouldn’t work (assuming that IQ is distributed amongst the working population in proportion to the school age population).

I’m not sure really how I can make this any more obvious. Yes, design is important and difficult. But all the brillant design in the world is no good if the people actually building and maintaining the products stuff up their jobs.

So paying extra attention to the top 10% of the NHS folks (the top 1% overall), even at the expense of the others (which isn’t what is being proposed), makes huge sense from a societal point of view.

No it doesn’t. What matters is the marginal return from extra attention.

[ 0.1% -> 1 per 1000; 6% --> 60 per 1000 ]

That being said, I think that the idea of having special classes for “one in a thousand” kids is silly in SD Unified – how many schools in the district have as many as 2,000 kids attending? [ Let alone in the same grade ]

Parent2, I’m not trying to measure who becomes successful as that may be defined; I’m trying to measure which kids end up benefiting society more. A lot of people have benefited society hugely but have died penniless.

Tracy W, I don’t think you realize how many key positions are held by the top 5% of IQ. Note that the top 5% includes far more than the gifted children who were the original subject of this topic, who I believe constitute less than the top 1%. But back to the top 5%. The several engineers running the solid waste treatment plant are in the top 5%. Doctors are mostly in the top 5%. A lot of the upper people in the pharma industry are in the top 5% (not necessarily managers), such as my brother and folks like Derek Lowe who has his own blog.

The electrical engineers who design the power transmission lines are in the top 5%, as are most engineers. Maintaining a system is not difficult, but designing one is. There are tons more people who can maintain a system than design one, whether the system is a manufacturing plant, a computer chip, a wastewater treatment plant, or a nuclear power plant. Of course, I’m biased towards engineers, although I’ll concede that scientists have their place.

Look at this another way, although things might have changed since my high school days. The National Honor Society (NHS) used to be composed of the top 10% of the high school. Take the upper half of those folks–that’s the upper 5%. I can’t emphasize this point enough: without these folks, modern society wouldn’t work. So paying extra attention to the top 10% of the NHS folks (the top 1% overall), even at the expense of the others (which isn’t what is being proposed), makes huge sense from a societal point of view.

Many factors lead to success. IQ, hard work, and drive to succeed are not sufficient. You need luck. You need adequate support, in terms of education and financial backing. Bill Gates is the definition of success in our culture, but people often overlook that he comes from a very successful and affluent family.

You need social skills and charisma. Intelligence won’t help if no one can stand to work with you. Most Nobel Prizes in the sciences are awarded to teams of researchers these days. Most companies have more than one employee.

Yes, our society should educate the brightest children to the greatest extent possible. I just do not accept that the best way to do that is to slam the door in everyone else’s face. You yourself stated that your IQ was measured at two different times as 120 and 155. In theory, that shouldn’t happen, which would mean that one (or both) of the tests were inaccurate. Now, should Rex the child be placed in the gifted box, because he has an IQ of 155, or the “hardworking, but not gifted” box, because he has an IQ of 120? Same child, in theory, same IQ, as it’s supposed to remain stable. Add in the propensity of affluent parents to game these tests, by subtle coaching and psychologist shopping, and you have a winner-takes-all method of restricting access to challenging education for all but the affluent and well-connected.