#like yeah it kinda sucked and i valued my academic abilities way fucking more than i should have

[literallyaflame]

so basically “the gifted kid” is a smokescreen for increasing and/or affirming white privilege/white supremacy?

i’m not the right person to explain this at great length, so i won’t, but—intelligence testing has a long and complicated relationship with classism and racism. gifted (and other sped) programs rely on that testing.

that’s as far as i’m willing to explain as a non-expert, lmao. if you want to know more, there’s about 573857 pages of research/opinions/documented personal experiences available for you to sift through, both within and outside of ‘academic’ circles. here’s an excerpt from the abstract of a case study on the topic:

“We show how gifted and talented status meets the criteria of white property interests and is defended by recourse to law and policy. Efforts to improve identification of students for gifted services reveal that the implicit operation of these Interests is an important reason why identification practices favoring white and middle-class children have been resistant to change. Dismantling underlying white property interests in gifted and talented identification is a necessary, though not sufficient step, toward a more just educational system.” [DOI]

i haven’t read this case study in full—i’m just using it to point out that this is a prominent, ongoing discussion. in my opinion, this should be a much larger part of the “former gifted kid” conversation, but alas

#i was a poor kid and i only got shuffled into GT because of a very specific set of circumstances #my teachers were resistant to it lmao #all the kids they nominated themselves were white AND well off AND often had parents’ with good social standing #and because it was an overwhelmingly white & well-off bunch #it was a shitty environment for anyone else #by the end of it the kids who didn’t ‘belong’ didn’t pursue the advanced track in high school #meanwhile the kids in sped were basically getting tortured and the kids in between were subject to all kinds of nonsense #i can’t imagine looking back at all that and thinking ‘wow. the real evil is that i was held to a higher standard’ #like yeah it kinda sucked and i valued my academic abilities way fucking more than i should have #but #in hindsight i’m one of the lucky ones #*parents why the hell did i make that possessive smh #clearly my gifted education was worthless anyway /j