Dismissing a Child's Complaint

Jessica Lahey, a fertile source of blog posts, has a column in the New York Times:

My Son calls School a Waste of Time

A parent writes in saying that her son calls school "too easy" and says it's a waste of his time.  What to do?  Here's the opening of Ms. Lahey's reply:

In my experience, two things could be going on here.

Your son could be a typical young adolescent, whining about the irritating and less than thrilling details of middle school life.

Why does anyone think it's OK to write this way about kids?  It used to be normal to speak this way about women ("oh, those little ladies, complaining about the right to vote!"), but feminists, quite rightly, put a big dent in it. We need a similar campaign for kids.  It's outrageous to propose as the first option that the child's complaints should be belittled and ignored.

Lahey goes on to give really terrible advice:

If, however, he really does yearn for more intellectual and educational challenge, congratulations. You have a motivated kid on your hands. Assuming he is completing the work he is being assigned and meeting the expectations of his teachers, you can go ahead and start talking with him about how to move toward a solution.

This is a familiar catch-22 to gifted kids and their parents; teachers won't allow a child to be considered "gifted" unless he's performing well on the work he's being given now.  The teachers are confusing "gifted" with "good student."  Many gifted kids are not good students, because, like this boy, they find schoolwork pointless and aren't interested in getting a good grade on work that they detest.  It's obnoxious to tell a child he has to perform correctly on tasks that he finds pointless before he'll have a chance to do something he might find meaningful.

Rich Parents Game the System

In the NYTimes, No Rich Child Left Behind.

The article's point, that rich kids have a huge advantage in college applications, is no surprise. The author is, however, clueless as to the cause.  From the article:

The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students.

Well, no.  The academic gap goes way beyond kindergarten.  I live in an affluent area, and what I see is an entire industry geared toward coaching and packaging rich kids to produce good-looking college applications.  Rich kids spend hours with tutors to learn how to write exactly the kind of essay that will score well on the SAT essay section.  They take exactly the kinds of extracurriculars that colleges want to see.  They are coached through every step in the application process.

There's an ongoing myth that rich kids succeed because their parents read them plenty of bedtime stories, teach them a good work ethic, and demonstrate commitment through a stable marriage.   Pshaw!  I say.  Any of those factors might be important, but it's just the beginning of how rich parents push their kids to succeed.

What really toasts my biscuits is the assertion that rich kids get ahead because they're genetically superior, as shown by their high IQs.  Are you kidding me?  These kids are coached for the IQ test!  That's how the gifted program in New York City works.

From the comments (as usual, better than the article):

from AlexJr60 of New York, NY:

Interesting article, but the writer's research obviously didn't include face-to-face interviews with parents of kids in elite private schools in New York and environs. The kids are programmed from dawn to dusk with every conceivable extracurricular coaching that could help them develop the faintest wisp of a talent of any kind. "Quiet Time" is a non-starter. They are trained to compete from the time they are toddlers; they are exposed to bright highly competitive classmates in school and camp and arts courses and language courses and on and on and on. Most of the parents start them on SAT-prep in the tenth grade. The really top preparation coaches earn as much as the kids' shrinks. The $165,000 income level cited, doesn't even come close to what is spent -- closer to that pretax, is the annual tab for a single kid in a private NYC school who goes to summer camp and has the usual lineup of extra help.

from Minerva19 of Rockland:

We have had an SAT prep program open up in our community. It was not until we enrolled our son that I realized just what an advantage the wealthy have. It didn't teach more math or critical thinking. It taught him how to game the test, when to guess, when not to, how to approach each section. He was able to raise his scores 100 points.

 from Lois Kuster of Lynbrook, NY:

One critical factor that increases the standardized test results of wealthy children is outside tutoring. This is not tracked in studies. Private tutoring starts in the early years of school and continues throughout high school. 

and a reply from Eric B. of Oxnard, CA:

Your post is much too kind. "Private tutoring", which evokes images of young people sitting at home with a tutor, studying subjects in general, very often amounts to joining prep courses offered (at high fees) by groups who have discovered what questions will be on entrance tests and asked in interviews, so the three- and four-year-old children of those who can afford these prep courses can jump ahead of other children. Those of us in the lower classes call this cheating. The rich call us resentful of our betters.

 from lizzie848 of nyc:

I live in Manhattan and work with students on their college application essays. I happen to have a sliding scale and work with kids at all income levels, but the affluent students I work with all have SAT tutors, even the very very brightest of them, and their parents are willing to spend upwards of $300 an hour - and sometimes - so I have heard - $1000 an hour - for this kind of tutoring. I heard of one family whose tutor came to the Southampton summer house to work with the child, and was paid $1000 an hour for all of his time there. I heard of one family that spent $250,000 on tutoring for their child over high school.

from Sharon of Leawood, KS:

So if a wealthy family hires a tutor to ensure their child does well on the SAT, how is that demonstrative of a "love of learning and study"? It's demonstrative of an attitude that success must come at any cost. 

from dclambert in NJ:

As a teacher in an inner city school & a private SAT tutor of the wealthy, I see this phenomenon on the ground.

Wealthy families spend a fortune on their children's education & support in ways that would probably shock the middle class.They have tutors for each subject, hw coaches, etc. They invest at least one year in SAT preparation.

The "meritocracy" is a scam.

IQ vs. Achievement

From a comment to a NYTimes article, After Number of Gifted Soars, a Fight for Kindergarten Slots:

Nancy, PA

I teach gifted kids, albeit at the secondary level, and what's described here doesn't sound like "giftedness" to me. Truly gifted children are often NOT high achievers - they're much more likely to be the oddball dreamers, the ones who are disorganized, the ones who don't necessarily behave, who refuse to cooperate because they don't see the point of what they're asked to do. In my experience, there's actually an inverse relationship between IQ and school achievement. The brighter the kid, the more turned off by school he or she tends to be. Which is why gifted kids need special programming - not a curriculum aimed at eventually getting them into Ivy League schools (although some of my students do end up there, even though we're a small, relatively poor, rural high school), but one aimed at intellectually engaging them and stimulating their natural sense of wonder.

Bright Kids in Public Schools

From Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind, by Deborah L. Ruf:

In order to deal with the wide array of learners in a classroom, teachers generally teach to the top of the lowest one-third of their mixed-ability class. By doing this, they don't immediately lose those at the bottom, and yet they still manage to hold some attention from the average group in the middle ... When teachers refine their instruction to a lower, more repetitive level in order to increase the chances of a higher overall passing rate and higher composite scores for the class as a whole, the brightest students must sit through additional repeated instruction while gaining nothing from it. These children can frequently pass tests without having any instruction in the material, and they score high despite the lack of attention. Teachers think they don't have to worry about these children. The teachers' attention is entirely consumed by those whose failure would be noticed and by which they are judged. Who can blame them?

... Throughout the intellectual range, children face learning challenges; a variety of learning disabilities are recognized and accommodated in our schools. Parents who have two special-needs children -- one a learning-disabled child and one a gifted child -- are often amazed at how much easier it is to get help for their disabled child while their gifted child loses interest in school.

Children with learning disabilities are by law provided specialists to work with them on a regular basis ... By comparison, intellectually gifted children almost never receive such consideration and accommodation and are seldom given instruction at their own level and pace. In districts that do provide something for gifted children, the programs are minimal, usually part-time -- one hour a week in a class with other gifted children -- with a specialist teacher traveling between two or more schools.

... Unfortunately, while mainstreaming helps disabled children, this practice has negative consequences for gifted children. Although it can help to motivate slow learners, it discourages rapid learners by holding them back; they aren't allowed to learn as fast or as far as they might. Many times, gifted children are placed in cooperative learning groups with other children in which the gifted children do the majority of the work and help others in the group rather than learn at the level that would fit their intellect.

Inclusion Isn't Working

Imagine you're a public school teacher. You've got a class of 25 kids. The class has been carefully "balanced", so you've got 3 gifted kids, 3 kids with diagnosed learning disabilities, and 2 kids with behavior problems, plus 17 others all over the wide range in between. How much attention do you think you'll give the quiet, introverted, gifted kid?

Now add to your sorrows that NCLB is putting tremendous pressure on all teachers to prove their students are "proficient" on a state standardized test. Your state has been quietly dumbing the test down in a (successful) attempt to boost scores. As a result, any child with above average abilities walks in the door on the first day of class able to score proficient, so they don't need any more preparation. But the below-average kids, with enough coaching, might eke out a few more points on the all-important test.

And this is why teaching in the public schools is consistently aimed at below-average kids. The test that was meant to be a floor has become a ceiling. Nobody bothers to teach beyond it.

Even during my own childhood, back in the late Jurassic, it was no fun to be a bright, eccentric kid in the public schools. I was bored to the point of almost hallucinatory daydreaming. I could not bear to do the work I was given because it seemed like such an insult, so I was written off as lazy and defiant. Teachers said, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink!" Looking back, I say, "what water?"