March 16, 2014

Giftedness

From the Boston Globe:
The poor neglected gifted child 
Precocious kids do seem to become high-achieving adults. Why that makes some educators worried about America’s future 
By Amy Crawford   
IN 1971, researchers at Johns Hopkins University embarked on an ambitious effort to identify brilliant 12-year-olds and track their education and careers through the rest of their lives. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, which now includes 5,000 people, would eventually become the world’s longest-running longitudinal survey of what happens to intellectually talented children (in math and other areas) as they grow up. It has generated seven books, more than 300 papers, and a lot of what we know about early aptitude. 
David Lubinski is a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, where the project has been based since the 1990s. He and his wife and fellow Vanderbilt professor, Camilla Benbow, codirect the study and have dedicated their careers to learning about this exceptional population.

In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists.

That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future, something previous research has not always found to be the case. But for that reason, perhaps surprisingly, it has also triggered a new round of worry.

Lubinski’s unusually successful cohort was also a lucky group from the start—they participated in the study in the first place because their parents or teachers encouraged them to take the SAT at age 12. Previous research into gifted children has shown that many, or even most of them, aren’t so lucky: They aren’t identified early, and they don’t necessarily get special attention from their schools. Even among Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth participants, the Vanderbilt researchers have previously found that those who weren’t challenged in school were less likely to live up to the potential indicated by their test scores. 
Other research has shown that under-stimulated gifted students quickly become bored and frustrated—especially if they come from low-income families that are not equipped to provide them with enrichment outside of school. 

I wonder if there are diagnostic tests that identify smart kids at risk of zoning out. Personally, I grew up about 400 feet from a public library, so I was never lacking in books to keep me interested. But then I wasn't very mathematically gifted. It's probably easier for a kid with strong reading skills who likes knowing stuff, whereas high end math and science skills may simply be more exotic.
“What the study underscored is the tremendous amount of potential here—they’re a national resource,” Lubinski says. “But it’s hard to separate the findings of this study from what we know about gifted kids in general. The genuine concern is, we know we’re not identifying all of this population. We’re not getting nearly enough, and we’re losing them.”

In the middle of the 20th Century, progressive thinkers like Harvard president James Conant and sci-fi author Robert Heinlein were obsessed with pushing society to come up with objective ways to find talent, especially among rural boys. After Sputnik in 1957, that became a national obsession for about a decade. And then people got bored, civil rights clashed with objectivity, the need to outcompete the Sovs declined, and so forth. So who is interested in finding smart nowheresville boys today? Caroline Hoxby, I guess.
... GIVEN ALL THE PRESSURES our education system faces, it seems almost indecent to worry about the travails of a small minority of very smart children. Understandably, federal and state education policy has long focused on more obvious problems that education can help address—problems such as the yawning gaps between the test scores of rich and poor students and between different racial groups.

Assuming education can help address those problems, which remains murky after a half-century of federal effort. In contrast, we do know that education really does work pretty well on extremely intelligent youths.
Tax dollars disproportionately go to help kids with learning disabilities and other disadvantages, because society generally agrees that they are most in need of help. 
In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which penalizes public schools that don’t bring the lowest-performing students up to grade level. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act regulates special education and provides schools with more than $11 billion annually. A provision of federal education law called Title I allocates some $14 billion to schools that have a higher proportion of students from low-income families, to pay for programs designed to keep them from falling behind.

The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up. What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward, an acknowledgment of being a fast learner. 
Not surprisingly, programs oriented toward gifted children get barely any federal funding. The Javits Act, the only federal law aimed at gifted students, pays for research and pilot education programs and is currently funded at $5 million, down from a peak of $11 million several years ago. 
... Olszewski-Kubilius, an education professor at Northwestern University, considers the latest Vanderbilt finding important to the cause. “It’s probably the best research we have that connects childhood giftedness with adult achievement,” she says. She chalks up the current disparity to an otherwise well-intentioned attitude, one that seems to be ingrained in American culture.
“There’s a fundamental belief, not just among educators but in general in our society—and the word ‘gifted’ doesn’t help—that, well, they lucked out by virtue of genetics. They’ve got something other people don’t have, and so they should just be satisfied with that. They don’t need any more.” 
Research, however, suggests that they do—or at least that they benefit from extra investment. Two recent papers based on data from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that, among young people with off-the-charts ability, those who had been given special accommodations—even modest ones, like being allowed to skip a grade, enroll in special classes, or take college-level courses in high school—went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents, and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn’t have these opportunities. In one of the studies, the Vanderbilt researchers matched students who skipped a grade with a control group of similarly smart kids who didn’t. The grade-skippers, it turned out, were 60 percent more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in science, math, or engineering. 
“If you look at the control group” in the grade-skipping study, says Lubinski, “they’ll say, ‘The curriculum was moving too slow, I felt bored, I was frustrated.’ Those kids still do better than the norm, but the ones who have their developmental needs met, they do much better.” 
But providing these smart kids with an education that matches their abilities is not as straightforward as it sounds. Politically, it raises the fraught question of whether our education system should be in the business of identifying and segregating elite students—an idea that has been tried and rejected before, for good reasons. 
For most of the 20th century, schools routinely divided students into advanced, average, and remedial categories, a practice called “tracking” that was largely discredited by research showing it only exacerbated inequality, especially inequality linked to race and class.

Actually, we have more than a little tracking, you are just not supposed to call it that. Also, it helps if you are in New York City, because civil rights concepts seem to mostly apply to hicks (although the new mayor claims he'll do something about that). For example, last week the top public science high school in New York, Stuyvesant, accepted 7 blacks, 21 Hispanics, 164 whites, and 680 Asians.
... WHILE EQUITY at the classroom level is important, Lubinski and others who study the gifted say that the issue goes beyond education to national competitiveness. “We’re living in a global economy now,” Lubinski says, “and there are only very few people of any discipline who push the frontiers of knowledge forward. This is the population who you’d do well to bet on.” 
Other countries are already making that bet. Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have national laws requiring that children be screened for giftedness, with top scorers funneled into special programs. China is midway through a 10-year “National Talent Development Plan” to steer bright young people into science, technology, and other in-demand fields.
 

69 comments:

Bill said...

I wonder if there are diagnostic tests that identify smart kids at risk of zoning out.

You don't need a diagnostic test. Just ask whether their parents are divorced.

Auntie Analogue said...


Boost America's gifted young? Don't hold your breath, as the Levellers are in charge and they show no inclination to surrender their whip hand on education, on legal and illegal immigration, or even on foreign policy.

Polymath said...

"For most of the 20th century, schools routinely divided students into advanced, average, and remedial categories, a practice called “tracking” that was largely discredited by research showing it only exacerbated inequality, especially inequality linked to race and class."

There's the mandatory dose of intellectual poison without which the liberal Boston Globe would never have published this story.

SQT said...

I tested well as a fourth grader and my parents were told they should move me up a grade- they chose not to because my older brother had been held back and they thought he would be too embarrassed to be in the same grade with a younger sister. Truth is I do believe I would have done better if I had been bumped up a grade. I did *ok* in school but I bet I would have done much better if I had been challenged. I can't complain too much- I am in the dreaded 1%. But still, I was a a lazy student and that does not instill good habits.

skuden tvoy dar said...

To predict social trends it helps to realize that smart kids who have been mistreated Will grow up wanting to rectify that. So will non-smart kids, but with less success. Semi-relatedly, I have known several actual successful smart people, and, except in quickly-regretted moments of enthusiasm, not a single one of them would have been willing to give up so much as one percent of their IQ for a Mickey Mantle swing or a Sandy Koufax fastball.
While this is often a good thing, I need not spell out the sad Machiavellian consequences in those cases where the people in question are not unwilling to sit in the councils of the wicked. (Proverbs chapter one, verse one).

eah said...

...especially if they come from low-income families that are not equipped to provide them with enrichment outside of school.

So what's the bigger problem in America? The fact that untold billion$ are wasted trying to educate lots of uneducable NAMs (a rapidly growing fraction of the population what will eventually outnumber Whites), or the fact that a relatively few smart NAMs might be "neglected"?

I'm having a tough time deciding.

Anonymous said...

Despite the impending doom of nuclear armageddon hanging over our heads, at least the cold war was probably better for developing talent. That, and as a genesis of good spy novel material.

Volksverhetzer said...

Norwegians are correctly diagnosed by the Swedes as eternal amateurs.

No matter what we do, Swedes do it better and more professionally, and that includes picking up talents and letting them thrive among equals.

Norwegians don't cater to talents at all, except in Sports and the Army.

Still Norway manage fine compared to Sweden, and I guess it is because catering to talent, also means brainwashing talent.

A bright Norwegian kid grows up learning that the masses are asses, and thus gets the confidence to think for himself, while a bright Swede gets smart teachers and classmates, thus learning that there are always somebody smarter than you.

Norwegian Black Metal - Swedish Death Metal illustrates this perfectly.

If you look at what is good for personal liberty in a society, I would go for the Norwegian method of forcing the bright kids to learn that the masses are asses.

Anonymous said...

"Other research has shown that under-stimulated gifted students quickly become bored and frustrated—especially if they come from low-income families that are not equipped to provide them with enrichment outside of school. "

I don't quite buy this. I doubt the variables are being held constant here. Sure, 2SD kids in the sticks or the ghetto fall through the cracks, but 5SD (99.99 percentile - which is what this study was ostensibly about)?

Can anyone seriously imagine that DeLeroy gets everything correct week after week, frequently helps his teacher with the difficult problems at the end of the chapter, and no one notices? Even the dimmest AA pedagogue would surely see herself on Oprah as the One who found the One.

But this is really the point of the columnist's observation: So rare are mere 2SD hen's teeth in certain environments that they are overburdened with expectation, and many understandably cop out. And then it's supposed to be a national tragedy?

Gilbert P.

Anonymous said...

SQT, I relate, and I believe I'm older than you. I now put it down to character flaws on my part. I can still blame my parents, but more from a genetic perspective. It's not satisfying on a pop-psychology level, but it's strangely liberating.

Gilbert P.

SFG said...

You do realize that little decade of promoting the gifted was what let the Jews into power.

Try that again and we'll have Chinese in charge, which isn't that bad unless you're competing with China, which we are.

Mediocrity may be the price America pays for diversity.

Anonymous said...

The working class kids may have the aptitude but not the grit or motivation to do as much with it. I suggest this as a grandson of working class folks who was tested as having 150 IQ at age seven or eight, who has made very little of himself. I have a brother and sister with similar test scores, one having finished a STEM PHd and the other one ABD, neither of whom are even as successful as I am.

How do you test sticktoitiveness and ambition? Other than comparing incomes at age 50. Dunno. Also, obviously, anecdote. But we've all known anecdotes like it.

Anonymous said...

Somewhat OT: I sometimes wonder if we need a Sailer plan for IQ in education. So many smart people still seem angry at the less smart for having disrupted their education by bullying and generally slowing the class down. Bryan Caplan once marvelled at the misanthropy of the smartest sneering at low IQ high breeders and basically told them to get over whatever happened in middle school. But the world is what it is. Fact is, people remain angry years later and it rips social cohesion apart.

More on topic: Things get shunted into discussions of education that would be more productively discussed elsewhere. The crisis for the bottom 25%/40%/however we're measuring this is a matter of trade, immigration/culture/population/the economy. But we can't talk about that, because it would require hard choices and provoke vicious battles. So instead of structuring our economies so that the less skilled can earn what the free market demands, we try to shove them through the college track, subsidise businesses with cheap labour and then blame the victims.

The battles over education are so vicious because it's a dumping ground for a huge range of real issues. Aiding the highest achievers would be political suicide - not because it's a bad idea (it's obviously not), but because the less able are being systematically kneecapped by other forces. And because education is where rational discussion goes to die, all the fear and fury coming from that gets displaced into "how DARE you invest in our best and brightest when Deshawn in East Cleveland can't get a job?" It's a total non sequitur, but that's how political discussion is ordered these days.

Anonymous said...

In my experience, the "gifted" programs were populated by the children of parents who knew how (and who) to make their children's college application look better.

Then there were the kids who were well over the testing threshold, but didn't have the family structure behind them to make the school make any adjustments. Those were painful cases to look at, failure rates in that group are painfully high.

dearieme said...

We used to be punished if we were identified as clever. The bastards made us study Latin. Cruel and all too usual.

AMac said...

Uh, Steve, how does this momentary concern about the gifted and talented square with that plan to equalize outcomes by bonking high achievers on the head with a ball-peen hammer?

Perhaps our betters need to think some more about this. But not too hard.

Mr. Anon said...

Our society instead lavishes resources on the dregs: baby mams who are paid to spawn the next generation of thugs, and smart schools for dull children.

Anonymous said...

What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward,

Left alone in class! Hallelujah!!!!

I think the problem with your question is the fuzziness of "zoning out". Gifted kids might not--probably don't--all fail in the same way.

JayMan said...

Obviously, this is a situation near and dear to my wife and I with our son and our future children. This is something we have to consider when making many decisions...

Cail Corishev said...

Truth is I do believe I would have done better if I had been bumped up a grade. I did *ok* in school but I bet I would have done much better if I had been challenged.

Yep. Good work habits and self-discipline are far more important than whatever academics they might accidentally teach you. Smart kids shouldn't be in school at all, but if you're going to send them there, at least push them ahead enough that they're challenged and have to learn to work.

Truth said...

If IQ is immutable, what difference does it make?

There is no way to make dumb kids smarter, nor, smart kids.

Ed said...

The dolts that run our educational system are just too blinded by political correctness. They could use this identification tactic to discover talent among the minority poor.

In NYC the specialized schools announced their admission numbers for this upcoming freshman class. The numbers of Black/Hispanics admitted are pathetic. So now there is a movement to add additional criteria to correct the diversity problem.

Instead if watering down these schools how about developing 2nd and 3rd tier schools based on tests? You could have a school dedicated to those who score in the say the 80th percentile and above.

NYC talented & gifted program requires a kid to score in the 97th percentile. The Bronx routinely does not generate enough kids that score that high to support a TAG class. How about just take the top Bronx students irrespective of how they ranked city or nationally on the test? Take the top 200 students in the borough and put them in their own school.

keypusher said...

When they say in their study that bright kids who skipped a grade were matched with similarly bright kids who didn't -- did they match for conscientiousness also?

In school I was known as a very bright kid who did the least possible amount of work. I was never advanced a grade, but I don't think I ever demonstrated that advancing me a grade would be a good idea. I've been underachieving ever since. I have a hard time blaming anyone but myself for this.

Anonymous said...

In California our levellers have broad smiling Hispanic faces. They would prefer to pass a law designating all latinos as gifted.

Mr. Rational said...

Diana Moon Glampers, call your office.

newyorker said...

For some of us, the problem is not that there are too few blacks and hispanics, but there are too many asians. Asians some of whom are fresh off the boat, the spawn of tax cheats and ruthless gamers and cheaters on the entry test.

It was not always so. When my oldest attended bronx science in 2000, asians comprised 30% of the student body, very much overrepresented. When another of my kids attended 4 years later it was over half. It's gotten so that whites don't want to go there even if they qualify.

I would be ok with a frank allocation of slots by race, the highest scorers in each group go to these schools. It would not be perfect, but it would be an improvement.

Anonymous said...

How concerned do you suppose Amy Crawford, the Ivy-League reporter on this story (B.A. Cornell, M.S. Columbia), amycrawfordreporter.com/resume.html, really, truly is about "inequality linked to race and class"? Will she allow her own children to be slower-tracked with poor, black and hispanic kids in order to advance the cause of equality? Or will she make damned sure that her kids sit in classrooms only with other smart, affluent, white and Asian kids (with a smattering of smart, well-assimilated, "diverse" kids) - the same sort of education that I'm willing to bet she herself received when she was a schoolgirl?

The issue of tracking is "politically fraught" only in a very special sense. The general public has no idea that it is a political issue at all. I'll bet that 80% or 90% of the public, if asked, would say that tracking is perfectly natural and sensible. Everybody is happier and better-off that way: smarter kids don't want to be held back by less-smart kids, and less-smart kids don't want to be embarrassed by smarter kids.

Tracking is a "political issue" only in the sense that there are cells of political activists who have achieved power in institutions (particularly education schools) from which they are able to subvert the current system. In this context, "fraught" means "forced down the throats of a public that overwhelmingly doesn't want and doesn't approve of it."

Bill said...

Boston Globe says . . .
The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up.

Is that what happens? In what schools does that happen? Certainly not in high-SES suburban public schools like the ones I attended and like the ones my kids have attended.

I had a few teachers like the ones described. My kids have had a few teachers like the one described. Mostly, though, 1) they have fairly strict no reading policies and 2) they react very badly to questions like "then what do you want me to do?"

De facto, what gifted students are required to do is STFU and daydream. Though, of course, you get punished if you're too obvious about doing that, too.

So, I think the policy of benign neglect the Globe fantasizes about would be a step up from what we have now.

Bill said...

The Boston Globe said . . .
For most of the 20th century, schools routinely divided students into advanced, average, and remedial categories, a practice called “tracking” that was largely discredited by research showing it only exacerbated inequality, especially inequality linked to race and class.

So, there's less tracking today than "for most of the 20th C?" Is that what we are supposed to take away from this?

Seems like total BS to me. During grade school and middle school, we had virtually no tracking in my youth. There were special ed classes, and there were special remedial reading/math programs for the total blockheads. In high school, there was a vocational track for the future auto mechanics and a college prep track for everyone else.

In my kids' schools, there is informal tracking beginning in grade school, with the sorting of students among teachers noticeably not random---there are smart rooms and dumb rooms. These don't exist on paper, but everyone knows they exist in reality.

In middle school, some subjects have two tracks "regular" and "advanced" and some subjects have three tracks "regular," "advanced," and "accelerated." In high school, the three tracks have different names, but they are clearly there on paper and in reality.

And this ignores all the tracking that happens before anyone walks into a school. It looks to me as if the sorting among school districts and among neighborhoods within school districts is intense and becoming more so every year.

I don't believe that my experiences are unusual, because I talk to other people of similar age who have had similar experiences.

Oh, and tracking is supposed to exacerbate inequality.

Anonymous said...

From the blog post: "The Javits Act, the only federal law aimed at gifted students, pays for research and pilot education programs and is currently funded at $5 million, down from a peak of $11 million several years ago."

Compare that with the $55 million recently spent by a single city (Chicago) on "violence-reduction" among African-Americans. Clearly misplaced priorities.

By the way, much of that $55 million was parsed out to "community" groups, and was then stolen or simply "disappeared."

Fellow Traveler in Berkeley said...

In the school districts hereabouts, the 'gifted' kids who finish their work early aren't rewarded with the freedom to do their own reading; they are instead used as TAs and tasked with helping the middle-of-the-road students to finish, while the teacher puts most of her efforts into trying to get the dullards to make progress, or dealing with the kids who need a lot of disciplinary intervention.

The Oakland Unified School District has a Kafkaesque policy of only expending G&T program dollars on schools that have a high percentage of kids who qualify for free breakfast & lunch, rather than, say, at schools where there are actually significant numbers of G&T kids.

Anonymous said...

"a practice called “tracking” that was largely discredited by research showing it only exacerbated inequality, especially inequality linked to race and class."

Not surprising. The more interesting question to me would be did the bottom cohort do better than they do now even though the gap between the top and bottom was higher.

Anonymous said...

Ok, so here we go. How many commenters will claim to have been identified as gifted children.

And how many will claim to have been bored and underchallenged and have since used that as an excuse for any manner of underachievement.

. . . raising both hands . . .

Anonymous said...

"there are only very few people of any discipline who push the frontiers of knowledge forward. This is the population who you’d do well to bet on."

Which makes it odd that both the US and the UK have an actively dysgenic population policy, paying low-IQ people to raise many children, importing low-IQ people (who also raise many children) and encouraging high-IQ women to prioritise their careers.

sunbeam said...

I was thinking of something earlier that relates to this.

Look, most people know about the Grapes of Wrath and all those Okies who migrated to California during the Depression (which has been running in reverse for a few years now).

But I started thinking about it. Hypothetically speaking say we had a kid who was part of that migration, or whose parents were.

This hypothetical kid grows up in California, in some major city. He does well in school, goes to a service academy or the UC system, then goes in the military and perhaps becomes an astronaut, or rises in the ranks till he too gets some scrambled eggs on his cap.

No one would bat an eyelash at that story right? I'd be willing to wager it is a story that has happened, though I do not know of an example.

But say that kid or his family had stayed in Oklahoma, in a depressed farming community of a couple hundred to a couple thousand.

What do you think the odds are that his career trajectory would have been duplicated?

We know it isn't impossible, as Eisenhower and Nimitz can attest too. (Though I'm not too sure those particular stories have been duplicated since)

Just saying that no matter what you do, it is much easier to get to some places from some places, than if you start somewhere else.

Let's say you were that mathematical hayseed savant that was a character in a couple of Heinlein stories.

How much will he do with that in rural Mississippi or Alabama?

It really just doesn't help with anything. There are no prizes to win, no payoff at all to having that kind of talent in that venue.

It might even be a negative. You might get your ass kicked because you "talk like a fag."

There is an obvious prejudice against "the brutes" by the educated, and this goes back a long way. But there is also one against intelligent people in a background where people aren't. And the nail that sticks up tends to get hammered down.

Just saying there might be more than genetic reasons why we probably won't see a Silicon Valley company founder who had the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia as neighbors when he was a kid.

Pretty hard to concentrate on your Westinghouse Science prize entry, when no one gives a damn, no adult wants to help (or could help), and there is no apparatus for helping you and pushing you along (as I would presume an elite private school or the Bronx High School of Science would have).

Once upon a time a clever individual who was illiterate, but could come up with elaborate mechanisms could make a better mousetrap and found an industry, or at least do very well.

Those days are past.

Similarly if we have some guy who does serious math on his own, as guys like Maxwell did, well they aren't going to be self-taught anymore.

Anonymous said...

@JQT

Obviously your less talented older brother would be doing worse than you.

There are families where the parents tend to favor less gifted offsprings. Like Rain Man, such behavior is detrimental for the family's continuous success.

countenance said...

Why do I get the feeling that the whole point of this article is to complain that the top 0.01% of 12-year old math geniuses aren't black/Hispanic enough?

Anthony said...

Bill:
I wonder if there are diagnostic tests that identify smart kids at risk of zoning out.

You don't need a diagnostic test. Just ask whether their parents are divorced.


Not true. I was one of those kids who somewhat zoned out, and my parents are still together. Probably better to check the IQ of the teacher, and their egalitarianism.

DR said...

What's the point of being gifted when human achievement and ambition is derived and vilified. The most economically productive members of society are taxed at rates of 50% or higher and demonized as being the "wicked 1%". Ultra-intelligent thinkers who produced the most sophisticated and advanced financial in the history of the world are denigrated as "banksters". Tech industry visionaries who change the world are lambasted for not creating enough jobs or paying enough taxes.

Free market libertarians are the group today concerned with actually structuring society for the purpose of human achievement and its requisite byproduct economic growth. Both the socialist left and the alt-right fawn all over about how bad the ambitious and intelligent are, and how the peasant classes need more redistribution.

RS said...

> Free market libertarians are the group today concerned with actually structuring society for the purpose of human achievement and its requisite byproduct economic growth. Both the socialist left and the alt-right fawn all over about how bad the ambitious and intelligent are, and how the peasant classes need more redistribution.

Tyler Cowen espouses a modest version of the 'banksta' hypothesis you reject. He's not exactly alt-right.

The real determinants of human achievement are simply eugenesis/dysgenesis/statigenesis. (Having seen your handle around IIRC, you probably know this in your heart - if you really are so intelligent.)

A lesser determinant is having a traditional society where life tends to be meaningful for natural reasons of cultural, communal, and ethnic kinship, and one is thus aided in asserting one's higher drives over one's baser drives as much as possible.

Thus far, bourgeois capitalists have shown no interest in biologically improving human beings, and profound interest in denaturing organic or traditional societies. So on my scorecard they're (A.) just as good as the nonclassical liberals (B.) bad.

Anonymous said...

"How do you test sticktoitiveness and ambition?"

My old head teacher called it "stickability" - alas I've never had it. My wife has, but only one of our kids seems to have picked it up.

Anonymous said...

"The most economically productive members of society are taxed at rates of 50% or higher and demonized as being the "wicked 1%"."

The most "economically productive" seem rather good at not paying much tax at all.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/03/14/1799862/buffett-gets-the-better-of-everyone-version-4762/

"Note that Mr Buffett’s stake in Berkshire, worth $63bn, is about a fifth of the company’s $305bn market capitalisation. The value of that perfectly legal piece of tax avoidance to him personally is $80m.

Yet it has passed largely without comment that the very rich man who says he would like higher taxes on the rich has pulled off a deal designed entirely to avoid a large tax bill. America’s favourite billionaire indeed"

Marc B said...

"I wonder if there are diagnostic tests that identify smart kids at risk of zoning out".

There were several teachers along the way who took me aside as if I may have been one of those zoners, frustrated with my lack of diligence. Unlike the vast majority of iStevers, I never cared enough to work hard in school and did the bare minimum to maintain a low B/high C by doing homework assignments. I didn't learn how to study until college, and making the Dean's list wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

Bill said...


DR has a point in a backwards sort of way. As he says, what we have right now is an IQ meritocracy. The guys in charge are boomers with Ivy degrees. Back when they were going to Ivies, getting in was by doing well on the SAT, which, at the time was really a IQ test.

What our IQ meritocracy has got us is an evil elite utterly convinced of their excellence and rectitude and devote to enriching themselves at everyone else's expense.

SQT said...

@JQT

Obviously your less talented older brother would be doing worse than you.

There are families where the parents tend to favor less gifted offsprings. Like Rain Man, such behavior is detrimental for the family's continuous success.


My brother's situation was unique because his educational challenges had more to do with poor health than anything else. He was in and out of the hospital for the first seven years of his life and never seemed able to catch up despite being pretty smart.

I *was* lazy in school but still a fairly high achiever. But I think most of us always know we could do so much more with our natural abilities if it wasn't so easy to follow the path of least resistance; high IQ or not. That's totally on me and not my parents.

Cail Corishev said...

I was one of those kids who somewhat zoned out, and my parents are still together.

Same here: hard-working parents, still together, traditional values, and I spent school perfecting my procrastinating skills.

I think it's partly just who you are. But self-discipline is a skill you have to learn. I think too many people think your ambition/sloth ratio is just something you're born with, like color blindness or the ability to carry a tune, but you have to learn it. If you have some laziness in your nature, and you spend your childhood tossing assignments together on the way to school and getting straight A's and plenty of praise for what feels like just showing up, that's a bad combination. You never need self-discipline, so you don't learn it.

Anonymous said...

There are quite a few Asian Tiger Parents out there giving their gifted kids all kinds of Gifted Education. When possible they seek out schools with appropriate tracks, but when necessary they do it themselves. Their kids dominate the elite levels of math competitions.

Check out the names on the lists below.

2013 USAMO Winners and Honorable Mentions
http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AMC/usamo/2013/13_USAMO_WinnersHonorableMentions.pdf

2013 USAJMO Winners and Honorable Mentions
http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AMC/usamo/2013/13_USAJMO_WinnersHonorableMentions.pdf

MathCounts is the premier math competition for middle schoolers. They used to put the names of the top 70 or so at the National Competition online, and lately the names on those lists have been overwhelmingly Chinese, with many of the rest other Asians. It seems those lists are no longer up, and I'm guessing it's because they don't want the lists used to make HBD observations. You can see the names of the national champions at the link below, but the top-70 lists are much more dramatic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcounts

Sheila said...

Our older kid tested off the charts at age 6, went to private school, and was skipped two grades (not consecutively). To this day he blames us for any perceived social lack, whereas we agonized over the decision and did what all the expert's books said was "best" for a kid of his IQ. He was an exceptionally high achiever (and generally happy kid) through the the middle of 6th grade, and then simply stopped doing any work whatsoever.

He's now your classic underachiever. My husband and I are still together, and while not upper class, our son had all the trappings of a comfortable middle class upbringing. Some teachers were stellar, and some were incredibly hostile and resentful. It still comes down to him in the end - as someone else said, how do you measure motivation and perseverance?

Cail Corishev said...

That's totally on me and not my parents.

Same here. Parents had no idea what to do with a smart kid 40 years ago anyway, and the only people homeschooling then were the Amish and a few commune dwellers. And even if they could have done more to challenge me, I sure can't blame them for anything after I was old enough to realize the situation and could seek out my own challenges.

Cail Corishev said...

Sheila, sounds familiar; 6th grade was where I hit the wall too. Until then, I'd been content to daydream through classes and do the work to make the teachers happy. My 6th grade teacher was a hateful woman who resented a kid smarter than her (not just according to me), but I probably would have gotten bored with the process at some point anyway.

I'd say it's not just how do you measure perseverance, but how do you instill it? Generally, whether you're talking about sports, academics, or some other work, by practice and being pushed. If you work at something regularly, and it's difficult but you get better, and new challenges arise as you overcome old ones, it becomes a habit.

But how do you mentally challenge a kid that much and keep escalating it when he has a 160 IQ, especially within the school framework? Bumping him up a couple grades isn't going to help for long, because if he can handle being with those kids now, he'll be leaving them behind next year. It probably can't be done without pulling him out and setting him on his own program, and throwing in any extra subjects he's interested in to keep him busy.

Mike said...

I tested well in elementary school, skipped a grade, was able to graduate high school early and went off to college at age 16.

My experience of the public educational system was in a small town, almost completely white and Christian. It was probably a "good" set of schools, but nothing outstanding. The sense I had then and still have of it is that not only many of my fellow students, but not a few of the teachers, were resentful and hostile. Despite grade-skipping, I found school to be mostly boring busy-work and the constant emphasis on team sports to be without interest. The principal benefit of the skipped year was that I was able to avoid spending that much more time in those stifling and inhospitable environs.

If I had not had two loving and intelligent parents, both well educated (Dad had a PhD, Mom a MFA), with a house full of books, I probably would not have learnt half of what I know. The great advantage of what is called giftedness seems to me mainly to have been in the ease of becoming an autodidact.

Any significant efforts to cultivate the gifted in the public educational system have been and will continue to be doomed by the prevailing atmosphere of egalitarianism and the sense that it is somehow "unAmerican" to educate a small group of young people, whatever be the basis on which they are selected, for positions of social, economic, and political leadership. Thus the gifted (and their families) are left to fend for themselves. Some make it to such
positions, while the talents of others are wasted.

Anonymous said...

Why in hell would any gifted child EVER want a PhD in engineering? You do engineering because you LIKE to do engineering --- that is if you are at all GOOD at engineering, anyway. (There ARE engineers for whom the world would be better off if they had stuck to selling shoes instead of going into engineering.) But if you get more than a Bachelor's degree in engineering, the next thing you find out (unless you own your own company which takes LOTS of money instead of a PhD degree) is that you DON'T do engineering. You get promoted into being a manager who sits at a desk supervising other engineers who DO do the engineering! YOU, in contrast, spend YOUR time explaining simple minded things like "why aren't we on schedule" to a bunch of idiot MBA's who don't understand engineering at all BUT DO run the company!

I specifically turned down a suggestion by my college advisor to stay and get a Master's degree for this very reason!

Kurt

Cail Corishev said...

Oh, and tracking is supposed to exacerbate inequality.

It's bound to make the difference in ability more obvious, which is what matters to them. If you divide a class up into smart, average, and slow thirds, the smart group will learn faster and keep getting further ahead every year. The "inequality" will be a lot more obvious than it would've been if they'd been randomly mixed together.

Mixing them together might slow the smart ones down a little, since they aren't getting advanced materials to work with, so that's a bonus.

Anonymous said...

So how much ink do you think will be spilled bemoaning the apparent lack of whites among Stuyvesant entering class?

Also, the whole rural talent search idea is probably a good idea in terms of maximizing a very rare resource. On the one hand, getting enrichment activities to these kids should be easier than ever today. On the other, educators are competing with all sorts of hi-tech, no substance distractions and parents who can't be bothered to instill a sense of discipline.

Chicago said...

One problem I experienced is that the majority of grammar and high school teachers are limited people, ranging from mediocre to just average. There's probably plenty of wonderful ones out there somewhere but I didn't meet them. They're able to stay ahead of the eight year olds but around the age of twelve to thirteen children start to come into a semi-adult level of intelligence where some actually start to pull ahead of the teacher. The teachers can't offer anything more and act as a brake, making everything boring as well as being vaguely hostile.

Anonymous said...

The teachers can't offer anything more and act as a brake, making everything boring as well as being vaguely hostile.

It's worse when the principal is hostile and acts as a brake.

Sooner or later parents of White, smart, and otherwise allegedly "privileged" children will start attaching audio and possibly video recorders to their kids' clothing and document the hostility that comes to their offspring.  Then they will have iron-clad evidence when they sue for educational malpractice or even make charges of direct or contributory child abuse.

ben tillman said...

For most of the 20th century, schools routinely divided students into advanced, average, and remedial categories, a practice called “tracking” that was largely discredited by research showing it only exacerbated inequality, especially inequality linked to race and class.

The author is a lunatic or misanthrope. Tracking is supposed to make a difference. Research showing it makes a difference does not discredit it; it lends credence to it.

Only a lunatic or misanthrope could object to tracking, which without a doubt leads to better instruction for students at each level. Absolutely no one opposes tracking on the grounds that it is not good for the children being tracked.

Moreover, inequality is not something that can be "exacerbated", because it is not something bad.

How concerned do you suppose Amy Crawford, the Ivy-League reporter on this story (B.A. Cornell, M.S. Columbia), amycrawfordreporter.com/resume.html, really, truly is about "inequality linked to race and class"? Will she allow her own children to be slower-tracked with poor, black and hispanic kids in order to advance the cause of equality? Or will she make damned sure that her kids sit in classrooms only with other smart, affluent, white and Asian kids (with a smattering of smart, well-assimilated, "diverse" kids)....

What I hear you saying is that sending one's child to a private school constitutes "tracking", and that's a great point.

Chief Seattle said...

Yup, the country invests heavily in its retards and losers. Meanwhile any top University math program is 60% foreign and 35% immigrant. But who needs them while we have a strong dollar to prop up mortgage brokers, car dealers, and real estate agents.

Anonymous said...

Surprised no discussion of Terman and the long term tracking of the "Termites", with exceptional IQ's, over 80 years.

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=40678

M said...

“There’s a fundamental belief, not just among educators but in general in our society—and the word ‘gifted’ doesn’t help—that, well, they lucked out by virtue of genetics. They’ve got something other people don’t have, and so they should just be satisfied with that. They don’t need any more.”

I wonder how much this varies with how much we see education as something to help children get more money and status as adults, versus advancing human knowledge and producing people who will serve the community as a whole.

Because, I mean, who really gives a shit about helping some smart White kid who'll end up rich end up richer?

I don't. I give a shit about advancing human knowledge, but smart kids living in fancier pants houses and increasing the heights of SWPL bullshit, not really.

M said...

What's the point of being gifted when human achievement and ambition is derived and vilified. The most economically productive members of society are taxed at rates of 50% or higher and demonized as being the "wicked 1%". Ultra-intelligent thinkers who produced the most sophisticated and advanced financial in the history of the world are denigrated as "banksters". Tech industry visionaries who change the world are lambasted for not creating enough jobs or paying enough taxes.

Everyone lambasts Steve Jobs, oh wait they don't even at all ever my mistake.

Although Steve Sailer did lambast the height of human productivity that was that car sharing iPhone app. So maybe that's what you mean.

Your other example is the bankers - well, I'd rather be in the intellectual company of Steve Hsu on this one... Someone who has at least enough intelligence to realize that "sophistication" and "complexity" and "enriching financiers" shouldn't be the actual ends of the financial system, rather than means to ends.

If a person cares about increasing complexity and "sophistication" for its own ends (rather than as a means to discover truth or the good of the people as a whole), there's no real good field they "belong" in.

Perhaps crafting fashion for our current batch of aristocratic offspring?

Anonymous said...

Really bright kids are at tremendous social risk from their parents.

I had a class-mate who was chronically beaten by his father because his grades were too high. After scoring 49th in the nation on the NMSQT he beat him so raw he needed medical attention. The matter was rolled forward: at 17 ½ years of age he was deemed impossible to intervene for.

As for myself, Wonderlic placed me as 'out of range' – IQ unknown. I was the first person to ever score a perfect 100 on their (industry specific) test. The next highest had been 93, a score normed to be past 175.

My cume file stacked 4” thick by the time I was a senior in high school. It was the thickest, by far, of the entire system – 10,000,000+ files. Every teacher I'd ever had felt compelled to write a thesis on me.

One teacher followed me from the 4th grade to the 5th grade. The spinster was fixated on me. This took the form of hazing and corporal punishment. My nightmares shook the bed.

My 6th grade teacher was so intrigued at my potential that she reworked the last two-weeks of the school year for the sole purpose of estimating just how bright I might prove to be. (Admitted to this before the end.) Using standardized testing materials suitable for high school seniors at prep schools, or some such, she wrote me up as being, in so many words, 'out of range.' College level reading interests, autodidact in the extreme, knowledge base typical of bright high school seniors...

My test scores in the sciences were ejected from 'the curve' as they were too far out of the distribution.

I'm the initiating researcher behind one of the most impactful science Nobels of the 20th Century. (A full litany would remove any shred of anonymity.)

As a teen, my hobby was to invent, on paper, all kinds of new stuff. I was constantly encouraged by my parents to stop it... "just drop it!" It was their emphatic belief that kids can't invent anything. As you may suspect, my notions were over their heads. I was frightening.

As you might imagine my parents can't stand me. Like my class-mate, noted above, their energies and passions have focused on frustrating me as best they can.

This general lack of harmony within the home embittered my siblings. Our mother inspired their scholarship by shaming, with my abilities used as a goad. She was so relentless, such a harridan, that her whip-tongue forms their primary adolescent memories. This was balanced by an arrogant preening when ever the extended family got together.

In this manner she was able to mar most of my inter-personal relationships, though her ambit encompassed all.

A terrible childhood led, naturally enough, to a sabotaged college endeavor. This took active and passive forms: no financial support and the prevention of any scholastic aid. (Neither would sign the financial disclosure statement required.)

Consequently no suitable jobs were open to me, they were all being vectored through the university's job program – of which I was locked out. I was also unable to get into upper division laboratory courses because they were also funded under scholastic aid controls.

This situation was somewhat balanced by diverting my meager teenage earnings into their checking account.
“The Royal Tenenbaums” hit close.


I would venture that most of the talented kids in America have experiences more like mine than not.

Our mass culture does not celebrate talent. It emotes on the self-destructive, the aberrant, even the pitiful.

So, we have “No Child Left Behind” – a scheme that must surely slow down the convoy to the speed of the slowest ship.

And, where they exist, high performing schools are being shut down... so as to punish the elites.

The only ones to suffer by such panders must be non-elites, of course. The kind of souls known in the historical record such as:

Edison, Tesla, Feynman, Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, et. al.

Come to think of it, how many astounding thinkers came from wealth? Not many.

Alogon said...

Right, because ambition and concientiousness, by golly one's whole value, can be measured by an instantaneous snapshot of middle life. Get a grip, dude.
Glad you male more than the smart kids, I am sure you offer lots of value to the world whatever you do.

Truth said...

"Why do I get the feeling that the whole point of this article is to complain that the top 0.01% of 12-year old math geniuses aren't black/Hispanic enough?"

Because you're illiterate?

Mike said...

M wrote:

"Because, I mean, who really gives a shit about helping some smart White kid who'll end up rich end up richer?

"I don't. I give a shit about advancing human knowledge, but smart kids living in fancier pants houses and increasing the heights of SWPL bullshit, not really."

This is not an argument against taking special pains with the education of the gifted. You would do better to focus on the content of their education.

Societies will be governed by elites no matter how much devotion they purport to have for egalitarianism or the common man. If the elite are negligently educated, or educated according to superficial, vicious, or plainly evil principles, the society over which it presides will suffer the consequences.

Since the existence of a governing elite is inevitable, would it not be better if they were brought up to be a virtuous elite? This was historically the purpose of elite educational institutions, and it has been forgotten. Your complaint reflects the kind of elite that our society, which does not view the formation of good character as an appropriate function of the educational system. Our elite are a mixture of plutocrats and nomenklatura, not aristocrats in the original sense (hoi aristoi = the best).

It was reported that after the Enron fraud came to light, some members of the Harvard faculty, shocked at the involvement of holders of their MBAs in the scam, suggested that there ought to be mandatory ethics classes in the Business School. The saddest thing about this is that those proposing it failed to see that any such course at a post-graduate level could only be considered remedial in nature. It is a devastating admission of institutional failure.

Kris Eton said...

My child would be considered 'gifted.' He taught himself to read after 6 weeks of being in the low-level kindergarten class. He entered kindergarten with almost no knowledge of the alphabet and no desire to learn it (from his mother, anyway).

In first grade, his teacher wrote me a 2-page rant about how frustrated she was with my child's 'attitude.' He wouldn't raise his hand to answer a question, but would roll his eyes or make comments about another child's incorrect answer (oops, I raised a sarcastic smart kid). I thought it was strange that a 30-something teacher let a 6-year-old frustrate her so badly she claimed she had to 'leave the room' to get a hold of herself!

The library had rules about which books a child was allowed to select...in other words, 1st graders could only choose from the 1st grade shelf (stupid, I know). I fought hard to get him higher level books to read...the teacher would not help.

In the 4th grade they skipped him up a grade. I think this worked because not only was he ready for the work, he was socially more mature than his peers. Now he is in high school and is doing very well. He doesn't want to take 'harder' courses and cruises along in the regular curriculum getting almost straight A's. He has started to notice that it might benefit him to take more challenging courses, as he complains about the slowness of some core classes and the immaturity of his peers and/or their slow pace of learning that drives him crazy.

His goal at 13 is to get a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, so that he can be called 'Doctor.' LOL. Gotta love the motivation!

After school he teaches himself programming 'for fun.' He is the kid that will go places. I am excited to see where he ends up.

M said...

Mike Societies will be governed by elites no matter how much devotion they purport to have for egalitarianism or the common man. If the elite are negligently educated, or educated according to superficial, vicious, or plainly evil principles, the society over which it presides will suffer the consequences.

This is of course useful and natural, but an extreme emphasis on it is a rather Confucian concept.

In the West we tend to believe that the knowledge they are being monitored, are replaceable with a large pool of near equals at any time and serve at the pleasure of the people (from whom they have low social distance) are all better ways to keep elites honest than striving to select for or inculcate "virtue" and then leave the "betters" to it.

A "Chinese" emphasis on educating the powerful and ensuring they are the most educated and tested over continuous monitoring, contact and punishment of the powerful is an awful thing to happen to a society. Passes in ethics classes are only so much paper.

Jeffery said...

I think the "Western" model of low social distance and constant monitoring between elite and commoner only works in small societies. The Chinese model isn't really Chinese as it's a matter of necessary in a highly populated society. The top 1% in a population of 1 billion is not the same as the top 1% in a population of 10 million. Laws alone are not enough to constrain such people, because in practice it's much easier to break laws (especially when it comes to white collar crime) and get away with it than to prove the crime.

The traditional Chinese model of meritocracy is as much about co-opting the intellectual elite as it is to identify the best to run the country. Consider one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, the Taiping rebellion, was launched by an exam student who got frustrated at failing the exams. Clearly it would have been better if he joined the system instead of rebelling against it. The typical peasant is relatively harmless, the dangerous one are those who are low born but nevertheless have the talent to organize and plan a rebellion. Identifying the talented among the low born and separating them from the masses early is not just about cultivating talent, it's important for political stability. When really smart people start plotting to take down the system, then you are going to have serious problems.

Anonymous said...

Please explain why you were not able to qualify for merrit based scholarships, private or public? They would not be based on your parents income