This will be old news to most of the readership of this blog, but I realize I’ve never written it down, so time to fix that.

Fill in the blank

Let’s begin by playing a game of “fill in the blank”. Suppose that today, the director of secondary education at your high school says:

“___ students just have to suffer.”

This is not a pleasant sentence. Fill in that blank with a gender, and you’d be fired tomorrow morning. Fill in that blank with an ethnic group, and you’d be fired in an hour. Fill in that blank with “special needs”, and you’d be be sued. Heck, forget “___ students”, replace that with “You”. Can you see someone’s career flashing before their eyes? How could you possibly get away with saying that about any group of students?

Those 500 hours

“Smart students just have to suffer.”
— Director of Secondary Education at Fremont Unified School District

This happened to me.

When I was a senior in high school, I was enrolled in two classes and would thereafter run off to take graduate math at UC Berkeley. (Notes here.) This was fantastic and worked for a few weeks, so I got to learn real analysis and algebraic combinatorics from some nice professors.

Then the school district found out, and called me in for a meeting. The big guy shows up, and gives me this golden quote. I was then required to enroll in five classes a day, the minimum number of classes required for me to count towards the average daily attendance funding for my school district.

And that is why, for three periods a day, five days a week, I was forced to sit in the front office, saying “Hi, how may I help you?”.

(I didn’t even get paid! Could’ve asked for a cut of that ADA funding. It didn’t all go to waste though; I spent the time writing a book.)

Everywhere Else

Since I’ve had fun picking on my school district, I will now pick on the Department of Education.

“While challenging and improving the mathematical problem-solving skills of high-performing students are surely every-day objectives of those who teach such students, it is not a problem, relatively speaking, of major import in American education.”
— Department of Education Reviewer

The point is that the problem of neglecting gifted students isn’t at the level of individual teachers. It’s not a problem at the level of individual schools, or individual cities. This is a problem with national culture. The problem is that as a culture we think it’s okay to say a sentence like that.

Replace “high-performing” with any adjective you want. Any gender, any social class, any ethnic group, whatever, and you will get a backlash. But we’ve decided that it’s okay to mistreat the gifted students, because no one complains at that.

(A lot of people have misinterpreted this section into a suggestion we should spend resources on top students. I think that claim is too strong and I’m not going to take a stance on it here. But the claim “we should not spend resources to intentionally harm top students with no benefit to anyone else” should be less controversial.)

Next Actions

So what can you do to change the national culture? As far as I can tell, this is mostly a lost clause. I wouldn’t bother trying.

The reason I wrote this post because I went through most of high school not really being aware of just how badly I was being mistreated. It’s actually really not normal for your school’s director of education to personally interfere with your education for nobody’s benefit.Maybe you could argue that the ADA funding was helping the school. However, I’m confident if I had offered to just pay out of pocket twice the amount of money the school was losing from my absence, they still would have said no.

What you can do (and should) is make small local changes. You can persuade individual schools to make exceptions for a kid, and frequently individual teachers will do what they can to help a gifted student as well.

Ask a lot of people: if one administrator says no, ignore them and ask another one. Be prepared to hear “no” a lot, but keep waiting for the one or two crucial “yes” moments. If push comes to shove, switch schools, etc. Take the effort to get this one right. (See 56:30-60:00 of this for more on that.)

Dear past self, yell a little harder at the big guy when he comes, maybe you can save yourself 500 hours as an office aid.