The Real Problem With ‘Gifted’ Education
We should care more about actual efficacy in teaching.
;)
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Katie Arnold-Ratliff wrote a that lands on a headline claim I think is staggeringly wrong: either there is no such thing as a “gifted” child or else no way of reliably identifying one.
In making her case, she characterizes a as supporting her skepticism of giftedness.
Arnold-Ratliff notes that “” — her word — 12.3% of youth identified as gifted had achieved the standard of eminence used by the researchers. The standard they set for eminence, however, is very high: “full professors at research-intensive universities, Fortune 500 executives, distinguished judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.”
Twelve percent is obviously a pretty small minority, but that’s still wildly above the baseline level of achievement!
You also have to assume that for every award-winning journalist and writer, there are two or three schlubs like me enjoying decent career success without ever winning an award. Similarly, if you’re the C.F.O. of the 512th largest corporation in the United States or just a normal everyday medical doctor, that’s clearly an above-average level of achievement relative to the whole population.
So I think this critique of gifted and talented is wrong, and, as I’ve written before, the push to is extremely misguided, especially since there are the most valid critiques of how kids are identified for advanced math classes.
At the same time, I do think the NYC gifted and talented programming deserves criticism, though my complaint is roughly the opposite of the one that Arnold-Ratliff offered.
Precisely because you really can identify which kids are the most promising ones in a pretty reliable way, the mere fact that the graduates of a gifted program do well in life does not convey any information at all about whether the program is actually any good.
If you read accounts of what’s happening in G&T, you’ll see that it’s a lot of special activities that have nothing to do with basic principles like “give the smartest kids harder math problems so they learn more.” And the research on the causal impact shows not much is going on.
The level of fighting over who gets into this program and whether it’s unfair is wildly out of proportion to the scrutiny of its actual educational efficacy.
And unfortunately, this is the case almost everywhere in American education, whether it’s the link between “good schools” and property values, the practical operation of charter and public school choice programs, the tuition that people pay for private school, or the battles over who gets into exam schools or gifted programs.
Parents are just massively, massively under-rating the power of selection effects and wasting a lot of time, money and political capital.
Many selective programs have minimal impact
There happens to be a good recent scholarly treatment of the New York City G&T program in Jimmy Chin and Geoffrey Kocks’ paper, “.” They use two different methods (a regression discontinuity design centered on the qualifying exam cutoff and a lottery design) to look at causal impacts of being admitted to the kindergarten G&T program.
What they find is that G&T admits are more likely to end up going to selective middle school programs, so parents who perceive G&T as the first step on a ladder of selective educational experiences in the NYC public school system are onto something.
But do the kids actually learn anything extra? Well, no.
They find that “while G&T markedly changes the classroom environment, there is no impact on achievement using both empirical strategies, with precise and insignificant effects smaller than 0.04σ when pooling the designs.”
How about getting into those good middle schools, though — is that valuable?
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a study on that. But back in 2011, Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer looked at the pinnacle of selective public education in New York City, the specialized high schools where admission is based on standardized test results.
The way this works is that there are sharp cut-off points because admission is based purely on the tests. So kids with better test scores end up doing better in life, but we can use discontinuity designs to test whether this is a result of getting into the more selective schools or just a selection effect. “attending an exam school has little impact on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, college enrollment, or college graduation — casting doubt on their ultimate long-term impact.”
That paper is 15 years old, and at this point I would say it’s made zero impact on the political wrangling over these schools or anything else that’s happening in the city.
What’s interesting is that I don’t think this lack of attention to the question of whether NYC’s selective programs are any good at teaching reflects media bias or short-sightedness. The city’s parents appear to sincerely not care about this and are just desperate to send their kids to schools where the other kids are above average. Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg and Christopher Walters studied this in “” where they looked at how parents ranked high schools in their applications to New York’s public school choice system. The authors find that “preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.”
Education’s Lake Wobegon problem
Unlike in the G&T study or the specialized high schools study, the school choice paper did find that going to school with higher-achieving peers has modest but real benefits for learning.
Similarly, in “” by David Card, Eric Chyn, and Laura Giuliano, they look at an anonymous, large, urban school district that apparently everyone in the know believes to be Broward County in Florida. What they find is that being admitted to this county’s G&T program leads to better middle and high school grades and better odds of going to college — but no increase in standardized test scores. They also find that this effect exists only for boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. So parents are obsessed with peer effects over teaching effectiveness, and the peer effects are real — they’re just small.
What’s perverse about this is that exactly as you would expect, peer effects are most valuable for precisely the kinds of kids whose parents are least likely to be reading New York Magazine or obsessing over school rankings.
I find it puzzling the extent to which quite wealthy people will sometimes try to buy their kids’ way into Ivy League colleges. There is a to attending an elite private school versus a state flagship university that’s probably driven by the networking opportunities. But while I’m happy to believe that going to Harvard helped Ruben Gallego get to the United States Senate — a poor kid from Chicago was able to raise money for his first Arizona State House race in part because he met rich and well-connected people there — it’s obviously not the case that Jared Kushner became a top American diplomatic envoy thanks to his elite educational credentials.
More broadly, though, the promise of education is that it’s positive sum.
At the low end of the achievement spectrum, it would be better for everyone to live in a country where basic literacy and numeracy skills were universal. Obviously the largest benefits of obtaining those skills would accrue to the individuals who acquired them. But it’s broadly better for society to have skilled workers and swift communications. At the high end, if a promising kid is able to learn math and science and become an inventor, then everyone wins.
But we can’t give everyone above-average peers.
And families chasing those above-average peers has a lot of negative impacts. In the traditional public school system, access to specific schools is literally auctioned off via the real estate market. If “good school” in that context meant school that is good at teaching, that could become something that broadly inspired homeowners to care about the quality of their local school, driving big systemic improvement.
But since it just means school with above-average peers, we’re getting a zero-sum shuffle in which the families who would most benefit from higher-achieving peers can’t afford them. The charter school world features some very promising schools, but it also features systematic efforts by many of those schools to game the system and do de facto selection of their students. These violations of the spirit of lottery-based admissions happen because, at the end of the day, parents reward them. And for colleges and private K-12 schools where selection is the norm, that’s basically all that happens.
In the D.C. area, there’s a definite hierarchy of private schools, where Sidwell and Georgetown Day are “the best.” But this literally just means they’re the hardest to get into. The reason they’re hard to get into is they get the most applications and have the highest yield on their acceptance. They’re hard to get into because everyone wants to go there, and everyone wants to go there because they are hard to get into. There is zero evidence that they provide better education on a value-add basis than their “lesser” competitors or than schools you can attend for free.
And I mean literally zero! The parents who pay over $50,000 in tuition for the privilege of sending their kids there are sincerely not interested in this question. If they were, some evidence would exist. Maybe it wouldn’t be persuasive and maybe the studies wouldn’t be well-designed, but genuinely nobody cares!
We should try to teach kids appropriate material
I don’t really know how to get people to care more about the actual quality of education, but this really is something that we ought to care about.
Innate ability is very important, as literally everyone agrees in a non-school context.
My son is a very good swimmer, in large part because he’s very tall and strong for his age and has an impressive wingspan. But instruction and practice are also very important. Learning how to swim a legal butterfly, execute a flip turn or time a relay dive is not genetic. My son inherited many of these physical attributes from his mother, who I think clearly could have been a good swimmer. But she was never interested and never learned how to do any of that stuff.
Outside of formal K-12 schools, nobody thinks the right way to teach is to lump a bunch of people together based on their age and then have one teacher try to deliver a lesson to everyone regardless of what they already know. That’s dumb.
The practice of labeling some kids officially “gifted” invites toxic politics. But I think it’s perverse that progressive ideology has saddled so much of public education with an approach to teaching that nobody uses anywhere else. It’s kind of wild that the teaching profession is so suffused with this ideology that few stakeholders in the system seem to understand how impossible it makes their jobs.
It’s really important for kids to master basic reading skills. When they do that, they ought to be passed on to a new language arts class that focuses more on understanding texts and learning to write. If they haven’t mastered basic reading yet, they should keep being taught it until they know how to do it. At some point in your mathematical education, you’re supposed to learn fractions. You should keep doing fractions until you’ve learned them, but when you’re done, you should move forward. You’d expect to see different kids ready to learn basic algebra at different ages, which is fine — you should teach the material to the kids who are ready to learn it when they’re ready, regardless of their age.
Over the course of a normal education, different people will end up learning different amounts because that’s how life works.
When you’re lifting weights, you try to lift a bit more each week than you did previously. You don’t lift an age-determined average amount of weight regardless of how strong you personally are. And you won’t necessarily progress at the same speed as the person lifting next to you. And you definitely won’t get stronger just by working out in the gym whose clients are strongest on average.
Again, outside the K-12 school context everyone gets all this. Peers aren’t magic. In fact, if you’re a beginner, you probably need a bunch of explicit instruction that the real gym rats would find annoying and pointless — it’s better for everyone to be doing the workouts that are actually appropriate for them.
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