alt Hacker News> I have very deep lived personal experience with being a gifted child and having gifted children. I know what sorts of resources they need.
The fact that you are explaining that because you have experienced TWO situations, you are in a position to know better than people wo have way more experience, with a way more diverse set, shows that the main problem is you acting like a "Karen".
> I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.
First, you realise the conclusions I've presented are obtained by studies in plenty of different countries. Are you saying that somehow every education system all over the world (including the ones that did not do the mistakes you pretend is the proof they are unreliable) are all incompetent?
> ... when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task
How many children have you taught? Because from what you said, it was ONE. You have no idea of the diversity of students, you have never experienced student for which your approach crashes and burns lamentably.
But, yeah, you are an armchair educator on the internet, so, obviously you know wayyyyyy better. You even say something (which is: it's better to have classroom separated by levels) that a simple google search demonstrates is terribly simplistic, and even risk bringing everyone to the bottom.
> So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them?
That argument is the level of "how can the earth be round, I see it flat around me".
I don't care about your specific kid. You base all your conclusion on this single data point. The studies are looking at thousands of gifted kids, and conclude that mixed classrooms are better, including for the high performing ones. Maybe not for your kid, but then you are asking to bring everyone else to the bottom just for your special kid.
Also, your kid is not even on the top of her class. There is no way that the teacher don't provide tasks also for the smart ones as they are a big fraction of the classroom. But you will tell me that you know exactly what the teachers are providing, despite not being in the classroom, just because "I know better than them".
It's not really two situations. As one might guess, my entire social network is also filled with gifted people. Most people I know have graduate degrees. I live in an expensive neighborhood where it's pretty normal for parents to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. One of the other moms characterized her child as behind and felt he was in need of help because he was only 87th percentile.
Do you have any experience as a gifted child? Or are you an educator defending the system or something? It's incredibly easy to find stories about how much gifted kids hate school and how bored they get being in genpop classes covering the same topics over and over for a decade straight because their classmates somehow never learn it. Guidance from our state on identifying children with disabilities (which covers giftedness) literally talks about how gifted children have a risk of becoming bad students and developing behavioral problems because they get so checked out. This is not some unknown thing.
I'm telling you what the school communicated to me, and what's on the worksheets that come home with her. Like I said, I actually suspect that the ranking here is incorrect because the testing methodology is kind of poor (they basically measure who's extremely good at the first six weeks of kindergarten instead of who's operating at a 2nd-3rd grade level), but I'm taking their claim at face value, saying that my kid isn't top of the pack. Taking that for granted makes the entire system seem even more absurd since that means there's an entire class worth of kids that could essentially skip multiple grades for instruction while remaining together socially. So why don't they do that?
And I know they don't do that, because I know who the kids are in her class who scored at the 99th. I talk to the parents. They get a 30 minute pullout every other day, but still also participate in the same hours of math and reading instruction that everyone else gets (learning their alphabet or counting single digits). During the pullout time, my kid is told to sit quietly and color so the teacher can focus on helping the lower performing kids. I also know from the parents that this has been an ongoing issue for years. I know from the school that if you don't ask about it, they just won't even tell you, and even when you do ask, they stay pretty cagey. e.g., my kid scored a little higher on her reading than she did on math, when I asked what they do in the pull-out group, she mentioned that they do leveled readers (which I've come to learn from parents are at a lower reading level than my daughter is at), and just didn't mention the math group, which, again, I've come to learn does exist from talking to other parents. I asked whether they could at least give my daughter the same work that the other kids are doing while she sits quietly and she said no, but I could send her to school with a workbook or books from home that I provide. I asked if they would let her go to the library outside of the scheduled every-other-week time, and she said no. So basically, I can do the entirety of the work myself to figure out the curriculum to provide her, and the school will be useless in that area.
Which is what I already planned for. I've been through this system myself, so I know that they'll be useless, but at least let the smart kids sit and play games with each other or something. That's really the only reason she's there in the first place.
I already know that gifted kids are not at all prioritized, but it's just wild for me to see somebody in the wild defending this. Like if I told you that my kid were struggling to learn her alphabet when she's in third grade, and that they were saying they weren't going to try to get her any kind of help, and they were just giving her the same work as the other third graders that she has no hope of comprehending, would you have the same attitude? And if 20% of the school were operating at that level, and I said, hey, maybe let's group them all together so they can get the help they need since we don't have the resources for them to have individual attention, you would say that's not a good idea?
This is the level of insanity on display. I'm literally asking for discrimination in the sense that I am given less. I ask that fewer resources go to my child, and you push back on it. Because that's how deeply ingrained this idea of everybody being equal is within some people. You know she would do better, and you can't see that happen.