Quote Originally Posted by kc261 View Post
I REALLY don't get why this country doesn't place a higher value on education and child care.

One thing that is exceptionally frustrating to me is the budget cuts that have occurred in gifted education, due to the no child left behind laws forcing schools to focus on the kids on the bottom end of the scale. While I think it is good for kids that need extra help to get it, especially those that are on the bubble to be pushed up over the edge, I think it is horrendous that it is being done at the cost of our best and brightest.

Then again, if you believe some of the conspiracy theories about how the government wants us all to become sheep, it is no surprise that gifted education is taking budget cuts.

Last spring I sat through a 2 hour meeting all about how eliminating the gifted education at my daughter's middle school was actually going to be better for the gifted students. Supposedly they were going to be incorporating the gifted stuff into every classroom. Well, I didn't buy it then, and I definitely don't buy it after having seen it in action for about half of a school year now. My daughter always used to love the stuff they did in the gifted classroom, because often it was the only time when she wasn't bored. Now she's just always bored.

I can answer your question about why the budget on stuff like science and math isn't getting cut, even though other extremely important subjects like English are. Maybe 20 years ago or so, there was quite a bit of concern at how far behind other nations the US was in our math and science education. So some efforts were made to fix that. But did we fix it by improving our education system? NO! We just sacrificed one part to make a different part slightly less horrible than it was.

I'm all for the gifted classes! I was in GATE(Gifted and Talented Education) when I was in elementary school and it was so much fun. I was charting nautical maps in 4th and 5th grade.