It's fine. Thanks to the intense IQ grinder effect of the tech and finance hives, we don't have many gifted students left to educate anyway. What few bright kids we have left learn to shut up and let Her speak, then if they're really smart avoid college debt and a life in a cubicle making some trust funder with an MBA richer.
If it makes you feel any better the GATE program was already retarded in the 80s and I'm sure the money is no better spent now. My time in it consisted of being free labor for some idiot's retarded art projects. I dropped out about the time she wanted to do an all singing, all dancing Three Little Pigs pageant.
If you want some real entertainment go down the conspiracy rabbit hole about it. Can confirm weird tests were involved, but apparently awakening psychic powers comes *after* the humiliation rituals. Being in the program is bad enough for your social status, can't imagine how far it would crater after dressing up as paper mache piglets in tights...
Finance is awesome. I was privileged to work in an industry where nerds are valued. I agree that gifted programs are silly, but we should offer smart children the ability to take calculus, and ideally linear algebra in high school. The dumbing down of math is a crime. We do waste too much on students who refuse to learn, but they should have the option of taking the math needed to do anything fun later in life.
I want to write something that adds to this, but all that comes to mind is wordless, seething rage. It isn't new, just another brick, not in the wall, but another stone weighing down our society, tied to us by our moronic government psychopathic criminal cartels ruining everything they lay hands on. While they are all disastrous, the nonsurgical lobotomies they have administered through the Dept of Ed, on the past three generations, is probably the most insidious.
Educating the gifted takes less money than babysitting the retarded. Just protect the gifted from the retards and provide a useful nudge now and then, and they'll learn.
Which is why not everyone should be in school, especially beyond a certain point. Institutionalized, perhaps, but at least then we could drop the pretense of “education” and just focus on what the mission actually is: keeping a population of feral morons under control.
School is the problem...the institution itself...even good teachers have difficulty because of how the system operates. Teaching kids how to learn on their own, how to pursue their own goals, not those of the state, is the answer. Public education is working as it should: it's preparing kids to be productive and obedient members of the state.
Add to this how much is spent sending police to rescue the "retards" from themselves, the fires the "retards" start in publicly subsidized housing, the welfare payments that went toward the "retards" children (while a different demographic was propagandized into not having children because feminism)...and they want reparations...
If we're calculating net financial impact at the group level, they owe everybody reparations. The meme comparing Detroit to Nagasaki/Hiroshima (what those cities looked like in 1945 vs what they look like today) exists for a reason.
Be careful under what legal bases these are accounted. The first time we had a program for gifted children, as it turned out they were indeed...'extraordinary'...or 'special' if you will. Especially the US has a long history of spending money on completely unrelated legal bases.
I don't want to rip on the dunces...many of them can't do anything about it. But it's still important to know, why they are so much cared for. Thing is, giftes children require much less care than the 'specials'. And it is a very much different care. I think it is reasonable to think that the ones teaching gifted kids should be talented teachers who care. In contrast, training someone caring for a moron is much easier.
It's one of the best modes to contribute the administrative bloat. The universities are struggling to train good enough teachers anyway, but a D+ level moron is perfect for the job. He will be also much more easier to control and the downward spiral continues.
Yes. I probably wouldn't be alive today if my parents hadn't pulled me out of school and home schooled me 4th through 8th grades, and then sent me to a private hippy prep school for high school. Intellectuals were getting the short end of the stick even 40 years ago, and it's a 100 times worse now.
The dunces/special needs have increased along with the vaccine schedule. Look at the growth of autism. These children have been injured/poisoned and special needs is the term used to describe the extra care it takes to support these children attend class. Yes, these children are retarded in their capacity to participate. Hence the role of class aids and special teacher training to break down the path to learning skills. School for these children is so very important.
I see the benefits for normal children as the scaffold of learning is better understood, teachers get better at teaching everyone.
Gifted need extension, access to mentors so they develop their interests. Structure to balance their academic and emotional intelligence.
Schools need motivated skilled professional teachers.
I say the children need to be included in the assessment of their teachers. Teacher Counselor receives the feedback and summarises the classes positive and negative criticism and suggests supports and/or accolades.
Unspoken in edworld is that IDEA provisions are basically a get-out-of-jail free card in the public schools. Kids with IEPs or 504 plans are essentially removed from the normal disciplinary processes. Sadly, they learn too late that all of the problems that cause their misbehavior are considered cured by the state when they reach 18 and (heavily disproportionately) enter the legal system.
1000% correct. The infamous "school to prison pipeline" is real, but not for the reason leftists think. By teaching low IQ, high time-preference, poorly socialized kids that they can do whatever they want without consequence, public schools help set these kids up for a lifetime of involvement with the criminal justice system.
The US should adopt the education model that the much of the rest of the developed world uses: students test into A, B, and C schools. A schools are prestigious, rigorous, gifted. B schools are good. C schools are remedial. You cannot buy your way into the A school, you can only be admitted on the basis of your test scores.
Nigeria has been able to pull this off (or at least they used to). If they can (I've met some of their "A school" graduates who attended university in America and they were truly high-caliber), then there's no excuse for the USA not to. If someone objects by bringing up the "legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," I would just point to Nigeria and say, "Well, they do it, and they're the ones who sold us the slaves!"
I think you may have a serious problem with your analysis. The term "special education" is not limited to programs for students with mental or other disabilities. It refers to any student who needs any kind of services other than those provided by default. Including services for gifted students. Indeed, Pennsylvania refers to its gifted education programs as "Special Education for Gifted Students."
So that $1.4 billion for "special education" would appear to include programs for gifted students in a way that's impossible to differentiate from mentally disabled students.
Further, there is a recognized overlap between "giftedness" and "mental disability." A student with ADHD, anxiety, or on the autism spectrum is considered "twice exceptional" under relevant Pennsylvania guidelines.
So it's impossible to tell from the sources you're looking at (and, admittedly, probably impossible to tell from public sources at all) how much of that $1.4 billion is being spent on what.
You bring up a good point. I'll see if I can find anything more definite about how much is spent on each kind of program. Since gifted kids don't have protections under IDEA and since truly gifted programs tend to produce results that run contrary to DEI, I'm pretty sure that whatever the amount being spent on gifted kids actually is, it is still less (and probably quite a lot less) than what's spent on the cognitively handicapped. But good catch on the definition of "special education," so perhaps the situation is not quite as bad as I thought it was.
Oh, I guarantee you most of that money goes to kids with disabilities (and who aren't gifted). But I also guarantee you it's not just that line item separate from the main, undifferentiated "special education" budget.
It is a basic military precept that you do not reinforce failure. ‘Special Needs’ funding and the bureaucracy it creates, must be seen through the lens of what it does, not what it says it does. It is not about helping children, gifted or struggling, or solving the problem. No one in PA’s multi-billion dollar ‘Special Needs’ bureaucracy gains if the problem goes away. So it will not. They will, however, wave disabled kids at you the moment you question where the billions go and what actual improvement they buy.
I may be in the minority here, but this doesn't infuriate me. I don't expect the state to be able to educate anyone well, never mind gifted students. We're likely better off if the gifted strike out on their own anyway.
The fact that they're paying billions to babysit special education children is more distressing, but it feels less like an abomination and more like a necessary evil in our culture. Who else is going to watch and educate those children? I feel bad that so many families have to rely on public school as a safety net, but I'll feel worse when that net isn't there.
We need to focus on the students who want an education. Those who are disruptive should be allowed to drop out but with the certain knowledge that unless you have an IQ of 75 or less you'll need a high school diploma or hands-on vocational certificate to ever collect welfare. You drop out, you get cold and hungry, you go back to school. You become disruptive, you get expelled. Rinse and repeat. Because at some point that child needs to become an adult.
As for the context of the second video, who knows. These videos are a dime a dozen on Twitter now that Elon permits videos that contradict the BLM narrative to circulate freely. A mob of retarded narcissists, usually black, acting like animals. Bottom line, if you took a society of the type of folks in the first video and another society of the type of folks in the second video, the first society would be a million times healthier, more functional, more prosperous, etc. Yet the West keeps overpromoting the type of person shown in the second video while undermining the type of person shown in the first. Hence, the dysfunctional clownworld the West has become.
The paltry amount Pennsylvania currently spends on gifted education gets even worse when you consider what the budget used to be not all that long ago. Back in 2014, the state spent about $110 million on gifted education. ($110 million is still meager in comparison to the amount spent on special education, but it's much higher than what the $4.1 million the state spends today.) Why only $4.1 million today? I'm guessing these programs had their budgets slashed in the aftermath of Obama's gay-race-communism agenda and all the DEI of the post-BLM era. For 2014 totals, see https://lbfc.legis.state.pa.us/Resources/Uploads/10-23-14-PASA-PSBA-Gifted-Education-Presentation.pdf#:~:text=Pennsylvania%20public%20school%20districts%20annually%20expend%3A%20Over%20%24110,districts%E2%80%99%20expenditures%20for%20basic%20education%20for%20these%20students.
It's fine. Thanks to the intense IQ grinder effect of the tech and finance hives, we don't have many gifted students left to educate anyway. What few bright kids we have left learn to shut up and let Her speak, then if they're really smart avoid college debt and a life in a cubicle making some trust funder with an MBA richer.
If it makes you feel any better the GATE program was already retarded in the 80s and I'm sure the money is no better spent now. My time in it consisted of being free labor for some idiot's retarded art projects. I dropped out about the time she wanted to do an all singing, all dancing Three Little Pigs pageant.
Just looked up, what GATE is and it's basically the reason why I wrote that much more can handle the 'specials' than the gifted.
The fault is on us for thinking that the retards can truly comprehend the gifted.
If you want some real entertainment go down the conspiracy rabbit hole about it. Can confirm weird tests were involved, but apparently awakening psychic powers comes *after* the humiliation rituals. Being in the program is bad enough for your social status, can't imagine how far it would crater after dressing up as paper mache piglets in tights...
What's one more conspiracy rabbit hole when so many others have proven to be legitimate? Thanks for giving me one more to explore!
Finance is awesome. I was privileged to work in an industry where nerds are valued. I agree that gifted programs are silly, but we should offer smart children the ability to take calculus, and ideally linear algebra in high school. The dumbing down of math is a crime. We do waste too much on students who refuse to learn, but they should have the option of taking the math needed to do anything fun later in life.
They don't have calculus in high school anymore? Jesus christ, what are public schools even for. Don't answer.
I want to write something that adds to this, but all that comes to mind is wordless, seething rage. It isn't new, just another brick, not in the wall, but another stone weighing down our society, tied to us by our moronic government psychopathic criminal cartels ruining everything they lay hands on. While they are all disastrous, the nonsurgical lobotomies they have administered through the Dept of Ed, on the past three generations, is probably the most insidious.
Educating the gifted takes less money than babysitting the retarded. Just protect the gifted from the retards and provide a useful nudge now and then, and they'll learn.
Which is why not everyone should be in school, especially beyond a certain point. Institutionalized, perhaps, but at least then we could drop the pretense of “education” and just focus on what the mission actually is: keeping a population of feral morons under control.
Much of the increase is special education expense is due to putting special needs kids in public schools instead of institutions.
The better solution would be to have separate special schools.
Indeed, the general solution is to have more schools. The old one room schoolhouses had a lot going for them.
School is the problem...the institution itself...even good teachers have difficulty because of how the system operates. Teaching kids how to learn on their own, how to pursue their own goals, not those of the state, is the answer. Public education is working as it should: it's preparing kids to be productive and obedient members of the state.
Add to this how much is spent sending police to rescue the "retards" from themselves, the fires the "retards" start in publicly subsidized housing, the welfare payments that went toward the "retards" children (while a different demographic was propagandized into not having children because feminism)...and they want reparations...
If we're calculating net financial impact at the group level, they owe everybody reparations. The meme comparing Detroit to Nagasaki/Hiroshima (what those cities looked like in 1945 vs what they look like today) exists for a reason.
Be careful under what legal bases these are accounted. The first time we had a program for gifted children, as it turned out they were indeed...'extraordinary'...or 'special' if you will. Especially the US has a long history of spending money on completely unrelated legal bases.
I don't want to rip on the dunces...many of them can't do anything about it. But it's still important to know, why they are so much cared for. Thing is, giftes children require much less care than the 'specials'. And it is a very much different care. I think it is reasonable to think that the ones teaching gifted kids should be talented teachers who care. In contrast, training someone caring for a moron is much easier.
It's one of the best modes to contribute the administrative bloat. The universities are struggling to train good enough teachers anyway, but a D+ level moron is perfect for the job. He will be also much more easier to control and the downward spiral continues.
Yes. I probably wouldn't be alive today if my parents hadn't pulled me out of school and home schooled me 4th through 8th grades, and then sent me to a private hippy prep school for high school. Intellectuals were getting the short end of the stick even 40 years ago, and it's a 100 times worse now.
The dunces/special needs have increased along with the vaccine schedule. Look at the growth of autism. These children have been injured/poisoned and special needs is the term used to describe the extra care it takes to support these children attend class. Yes, these children are retarded in their capacity to participate. Hence the role of class aids and special teacher training to break down the path to learning skills. School for these children is so very important.
I see the benefits for normal children as the scaffold of learning is better understood, teachers get better at teaching everyone.
Gifted need extension, access to mentors so they develop their interests. Structure to balance their academic and emotional intelligence.
Schools need motivated skilled professional teachers.
I say the children need to be included in the assessment of their teachers. Teacher Counselor receives the feedback and summarises the classes positive and negative criticism and suggests supports and/or accolades.
Madness.
Unspoken in edworld is that IDEA provisions are basically a get-out-of-jail free card in the public schools. Kids with IEPs or 504 plans are essentially removed from the normal disciplinary processes. Sadly, they learn too late that all of the problems that cause their misbehavior are considered cured by the state when they reach 18 and (heavily disproportionately) enter the legal system.
1000% correct. The infamous "school to prison pipeline" is real, but not for the reason leftists think. By teaching low IQ, high time-preference, poorly socialized kids that they can do whatever they want without consequence, public schools help set these kids up for a lifetime of involvement with the criminal justice system.
The US should adopt the education model that the much of the rest of the developed world uses: students test into A, B, and C schools. A schools are prestigious, rigorous, gifted. B schools are good. C schools are remedial. You cannot buy your way into the A school, you can only be admitted on the basis of your test scores.
Nigeria has been able to pull this off (or at least they used to). If they can (I've met some of their "A school" graduates who attended university in America and they were truly high-caliber), then there's no excuse for the USA not to. If someone objects by bringing up the "legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," I would just point to Nigeria and say, "Well, they do it, and they're the ones who sold us the slaves!"
I think you may have a serious problem with your analysis. The term "special education" is not limited to programs for students with mental or other disabilities. It refers to any student who needs any kind of services other than those provided by default. Including services for gifted students. Indeed, Pennsylvania refers to its gifted education programs as "Special Education for Gifted Students."
https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pacode?file=/secure/pacode/data/022/chapter16/chap16toc.html
So that $1.4 billion for "special education" would appear to include programs for gifted students in a way that's impossible to differentiate from mentally disabled students.
Further, there is a recognized overlap between "giftedness" and "mental disability." A student with ADHD, anxiety, or on the autism spectrum is considered "twice exceptional" under relevant Pennsylvania guidelines.
https://www.giftedpage.org/resources-for-twice-exceptional-students/
So it's impossible to tell from the sources you're looking at (and, admittedly, probably impossible to tell from public sources at all) how much of that $1.4 billion is being spent on what.
One suspects that's on purpose, but there you go.
You bring up a good point. I'll see if I can find anything more definite about how much is spent on each kind of program. Since gifted kids don't have protections under IDEA and since truly gifted programs tend to produce results that run contrary to DEI, I'm pretty sure that whatever the amount being spent on gifted kids actually is, it is still less (and probably quite a lot less) than what's spent on the cognitively handicapped. But good catch on the definition of "special education," so perhaps the situation is not quite as bad as I thought it was.
Oh, I guarantee you most of that money goes to kids with disabilities (and who aren't gifted). But I also guarantee you it's not just that line item separate from the main, undifferentiated "special education" budget.
It is a basic military precept that you do not reinforce failure. ‘Special Needs’ funding and the bureaucracy it creates, must be seen through the lens of what it does, not what it says it does. It is not about helping children, gifted or struggling, or solving the problem. No one in PA’s multi-billion dollar ‘Special Needs’ bureaucracy gains if the problem goes away. So it will not. They will, however, wave disabled kids at you the moment you question where the billions go and what actual improvement they buy.
Where is John Galt when you really need him?
Elon Musk? Time will tell.
Certainly possible. I don’t know of anyone else that has the wealth, platform, and apparent ability to save our country.
I may be in the minority here, but this doesn't infuriate me. I don't expect the state to be able to educate anyone well, never mind gifted students. We're likely better off if the gifted strike out on their own anyway.
The fact that they're paying billions to babysit special education children is more distressing, but it feels less like an abomination and more like a necessary evil in our culture. Who else is going to watch and educate those children? I feel bad that so many families have to rely on public school as a safety net, but I'll feel worse when that net isn't there.
We need to focus on the students who want an education. Those who are disruptive should be allowed to drop out but with the certain knowledge that unless you have an IQ of 75 or less you'll need a high school diploma or hands-on vocational certificate to ever collect welfare. You drop out, you get cold and hungry, you go back to school. You become disruptive, you get expelled. Rinse and repeat. Because at some point that child needs to become an adult.
https://open.substack.com/pub/aporiamagazine/p/beyond-iq-the-consequences-of-ignoring?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=47x6qk
also, care to give some deeper context with the second video?
That's a great post you linked to!
As for the context of the second video, who knows. These videos are a dime a dozen on Twitter now that Elon permits videos that contradict the BLM narrative to circulate freely. A mob of retarded narcissists, usually black, acting like animals. Bottom line, if you took a society of the type of folks in the first video and another society of the type of folks in the second video, the first society would be a million times healthier, more functional, more prosperous, etc. Yet the West keeps overpromoting the type of person shown in the second video while undermining the type of person shown in the first. Hence, the dysfunctional clownworld the West has become.