Some Hints for LAUSD w/r/t "Gifted" Students

Getting the funding to deal with "gifted" students shouldn't be hard: If, as your article tells us, they can find nearly $700 million dollars for "special needs" students, simply acknowledge -- or if necessary insist -- that gifted students have special needs.

And if there's any problem with the definition of special needs in whatever law is causing that kind of outlay, it shouldn't take anything more difficult than sneaking the expanded definition into a ballot Proposition that the abysmally educated California voters are bound to pass anyway: more persecution of cigarette smokers, perhaps, or an expansion of the ban on human consumption of horsemeat to include banning consumption of horsemeat by the visiting extraterrestrials so many of the voters apparently believe in. After all, if you can get away with banning horsemeat in the first place, and with doubling the price of cigars and pipe tobacco while nobody's looking, surely you can get away with putting something worthwhile past 'em.

The only remaining problem is, even with all that money, who's going to teach the gifted students? It's pretty clear LAUSD isn't bright enough to do so or they'dve figured out how to get the funding years ago.

Let me be so bold as to suggest that just as war is too important to be left to the generals, education is too important to be left to the Education majors. What's needed is a breakthrough in the concept of National Service, whereby the few remaining gifted adults are drafted for (one, or two, some years apart so as not to disrupt their careers unduly) one-year hitches to do the teaching while there are still enough left to allow some hope that we can reverse the "dummying down" spiral LAUSD in particular, and public educators in the rest of the state and in the rest of the nation in general, have been promoting for decades. Provided, of course, that there are enough gifted, or even competent, adults left in positions of authority in Education, and even worse Psychology, where the tests would presumably have to come from, to get the potential draftees identified, of course....

And lest anyone think I'm being "elitist", I hasten to add that, provided we can find enough of them, I'm all for using the gifted draftee-teachers to teach non-gifted students as well.

(If the Editor's really generous with the word-count, I'd add that as a victim of LAUSD's predecessor, which was apparently called the "Los Angeles City School System", I know all too well how bad things already were in what are now spoken of as the good old days in public education out here. In 1955, the year before I managed somehow to get into M.I.T. anyway, half a dozen of my science- and engineering-bound classmates and I were denied an after-hours, no credit for the students, no pay for the one good math teacher in the department, who had volunteered at my request, course in the Calculus on the grounds that "it wouldn't be democratic". And the sole "enrichment program" available to us during our entire high school stay was to pay our own quarters to take the bus to the Natural History Museum on Saturday mornings one year, to be talked at by the curators. So should anyone think I bear a grudge against public education in Los Angeles dating back to well before LAUSD starting making things even worse, you don't know the half of it, because I doubt even this much will see the dark of print so I'm certainly not going to add further horror vignettes even though I have 'em aplenty.)