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Above all, it's time to acknowledge that even top students may have college-readiness problems. Beyond the for-profit counseling industry that teaches kids how to check the right boxes to get into the most-prestigious institutions, many educators pay little attention to these students.</p>
<p>They should: Evidence suggests that academic talent is quite specifically diminished, not developed, by the school experience. A Fordham Institute study of how young American students testing in the 90th percentile or above fared over time found that roughly 30 to 50 percent of these advanced learners lost ground as they moved from elementary to middle school, or from middle to high school.
<p>This may also be the result of childhood IQ testing not being all that valuable or predictive. In the book Nurture Shock, there is a chapter about giftedness testing that marshals some evidence that most cognitive ability tests aren’t really predictive until a kid is about 12 years old. The information was in the context of questioning the validity of ability-testing kindergartners for admission into NYC magnet publics.</p>
<p>Sounds like a chicken-and-egg thing. Are the young gifted students not really gifted because of bad predictive tests, or did the schools break the young gifted students down? It would be a difficult study to collect enough data on students who test gifted and go up or down tracked against schooling choices and home environments.</p>
<p>My kids lost ground in HS sophomore year because they despaired of school ever being exciting again. Freshman year had the charm of novelty, but that wore off quickly at their large suburban school that focused on RIGOR. Rigor mortis was more like it for them. We made huge sacrifices to switch them to a small boarding school with small classes, enthusiastic faculty, non-competitive sports, and hands-on experiences. Their love of learning came back, and they were happy.</p>
<p>I remember feeling smartest compared to my classmates during the early elementary school years. It’s hard to compare during high school and college years since you’re having a bit of bias in the other students you’re taking classes with.</p>
<p>Zizzer, we had the same experience with our daughter, also a gifted student. She loved the novelty of 9th grade, and being able to choose her electives (well, sort of–the arts classes always seemed to meet at the same time as the honors classes). By 10th grade, she was burned out, not on the difficulty of the classes but on the workload itself. It became a matter of endurance just to survive the year. There was no question of thriving.</p>
<p>We pulled her out and sent her to a private Christian school with a much better work/life balance. Strangely enough, she got 5s on her AP exams, even though she received much less homework in those classes than she had in her honors classes at the previous school. Obviously, schools don’t need to give as much homework as they do. Quantity has become a substitute for quality and creativity in some of the more competitive public schools.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what to take from this. Is it that the students who make their way into the most selective schools aren’t the brightest learners equipped to take on university challenges because the top learners have stopped achieving and are not competitive for elite college admissions? Or is it that the top students are still comprised of the brightest kids but that they have not been educated appropriately to take on the challenge of higher education at the highest levels?</p>
<p>“Beyond the for-profit counseling industry that teaches kids how to check the right boxes to get into the most-prestigious institutions”</p>
<p>If it were about teaching kids to check boxes, everyone would have figured out how to do it. Some of us are challenging our best students to bring their work from strong to excellent. That said, I couldn’t agree more that there is too much time-wasting and boredom in school. I’m a radical Montessori type – in my view, it isn’t asking too much to have every student following a personal, individualized course of study.</p>
<p>Fifteen years ago, high schools still challenged their top students (or at least some of them did). They handed out As sparingly, were not afraid to kick students out of honours classes, and did not confuse excellence and mediocrity.</p>
<p>In a few short years, that all changed. Parents overrode the decisions to have their precious dumplings placed in (horrors!) college prep classes. To cite one example, my public high school has approximately 7/12ths of its freshman in the highest level English class. When that happens, the course work, classroom discussion, and expectations get dumbed down, and the smart students mentally check out. </p>
<p>I have little siblings who are going through the school system, and I see this first-hand. Once upon a time, my middle school’s high honours was given out to about 10% of the class; now, that number is upwards of 80%. Students think that they are all A students; their parents flip out when a teacher dare gives little Petunia a B; no one ever says, “Hey, your kid is neither brilliant nor a workaholic; how about aiming for a B+ in college prep?”. The smartest students suffer, and often don’t even know how ill-prepared they are.</p>
<p>Both things may be happening, but to different kids. </p>
<p>There’s also a third possibility:</p>
<p>“Bright” isn’t something that’s unchanging over time. A student who is outstanding in early elementary school may not be outstanding later on. And students who don’t excel in the early grades may blossom later.</p>
<p>We pulled out son out of his public high school early in his freshman year as he was already showing signs that the horror of his middle school years was going to be repeated. We put him in a small private all boys Catholic high school and he soared. His homework load went down considerably and there was no busy work but his classes were much more stimulating - at least for him. He had no AP classes at all, just honors. He has been very well prepared for college. </p>
<p>I think all the constant mandated testing and teaching to the test that public schools are required to do sucks the life out of a lot of students. You don’t have any of that nonsense in private schools.</p>
<p>I can see why that is true. I’m a senior in high school, and it’s just horrible. My public school teachers give so much homework, but we dont have hands on experience or deep thinking. I would have loved to go to a private school, but oh well. It would be better if less kids were in the AP classes. There are a lot of people in those classes that really shouldn’t be there, and it hurts everyone involved.</p>
<p>Marian, absolutely. But whether brightness emerges later or the qualities that distinguish the child in the early years fade, how does that help to understand the author’s points about college readiness?</p>
<p>There’s a lot of muddiness in the article. I get that the author is concerned about the level at which gifted students are instructed in the years that lead up to college. She doesn’t seem to address the fact that the kids she’s targeting aren’t necessarily the same kids that are vying for admission to the most selective universities.</p>
<p>Measuring a student’s intelligence is superfluous in elementary school. Back in my “Highly Able Program” in elementary school, we had a high school dropout and two kids that scored below 1300 on their SAT’s. Today, only one of us is in the top 10% of our high school.</p>
<p>Then, there is a “magic time period” (that usually occurs sometime between summer going into sophomore year and somewhere going into senior year,) where kids actually realize that they need to start getting more serious about their future. It only hits some kids, and it hits some harder than others. I can speak from experience; my sophomore year, I got a 137 PSAT and never read a book (still succeeded in AP classes,) and my junior year I got a 28 ACT without prep and have a genuine love for learning.</p>
<p>Please, do not misconstrue this as bombast, it’s just anecdotal.</p>
<p>^Probably hit me around early junior year, when I realized that I actually needed to get good grades. My standardized test scores didn’t change, though.</p>
<p>And I’ve also had a similar experience with my elementary school’s gifted program.</p>
<p>My eldest, mild aspie and not in the American system (so this may not count), was a typical “precocious” child. At 6, she was 4 years ahead of her classmates in all subjects except sports and art in which she was abysmal. At 10, she had read more books than the average college freshman but slowly started dropping subjects. At 16, she was average in everything except literature and languages.
Then, at 22, the pendulum started swinging back in the opposite direction, and she went back to university to take a double degree in economics and political science. She says that subconsciously she couldn’t stand seeing the other kids catch up and hated the idea of working hard at things that had been easy in the past, and that was why she put most of her energy into subjects in which she still excelled. It was only when she was more mature that she started to enjoy hard work.
I don’t know if this is the case for many precocious/gifted children, or if her story is more typical of the monomania that is one of the side effects of Asperger.</p>
<p>I’m going to ignore your comment about “a student’s intelligence is superfluous in elementary school” because there’s no proof that measuring someone’s IQ in elementary school is not accurate.</p>
<p>What I assume you’re missing or ignoring is that perhaps intelligence isn’t a 100% predictive measure of someone’s success. Perhaps, working hard actually helps as well.</p>
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Neither. There’s gifted people who do absolutely nothing because they don’t want to. Intelligence doesn’t imply (nor is it a causation of) a desire to learn.</p>
<p>The original article being quoted is actually an editorial and mostly seems to contain opinions and conjecture from the author. A ‘top student’ in middle school won’t necessarily be a ‘top student’ in h.s. or even college.</p>
<p>By the time you get to college, you will be placed with students with a wide variety of high school backgrounds. Some h.s. are more rigorous academically then others and how well one adapts to being in college certainly plays a role. The field you decide to specialize in once in college also plays a role as some academic disciplines are more challenging then others. Hard to talk in generalities. </p>
<p>Not exactly sure what the point of the original article was.</p>
<p>If 30-50% of the top 10% fall below that level later in school, is that necessarily a bad thing? It just means that there is some level of academic mobility in the school system. Some people go up, so some have to go down.</p>
<p>It’s a good thing. It shows that students can make up for earlier mistakes. Not all kids are so lucky to have parents, like the previous posters, who can send them to private schools where they can be nurtured if that’s what they need.</p>