I don't know enough about this cut specifically, but I would be careful about making assumptions here. The vast majority of students in TAG programs are not really gifted, just bright and well prepared (you can read that as privileged if you want). I think it's fair to say that the public schools do not adequately serve the needs of lots of students. I would also expect that there are lots of bright and even gifted students in underprivileged communities who have a lot of ground to make up. I do not begrudge them the scarce resources of the public schools (even while I do think the schools could operate in ways that would better serve them). I often think the public schools are in a sort of triage situation trying to figure out where the money is needed the most. I think parents of gifted children ought to homeschool if they can. There is no question the schools won't really be able to meet the needs of their children, and frankly, public education was never really designed to do so. I really think the upper and upper middle classes ought to stop demanding that the public schools take money away from kids who have never had a chance. This may not be a popular opinion (don't scream to hard at me), but many parents of children in TAG programs could make other choices if they were willing to make the sacrifice.

Having spent a few more days thinking about this article, I not only find it shallow, but very distasteful. If the key to success is a deep sense of cultural superiority and a belief in your relative excellence compared to others, then that sort of success inevitable comes with a correlative belief in the inferiority and inadequacy of others. And, because this sense of superiority is defined culturally, then the sense of inferiority and inadequacy will be similarly overgeneralized. No wonder excellence won through such a divisive sense of one's own importance comes with the baggage of insecurity. If you fail to live up to your culture's inflated sense of itself you will fall into the pit of weakness and dereliction that defines those unspoken inferiors. I guess we would all be similarly driven if we were motivated by a deep seated fear of ending up as one of the "lesser" peoples. Yuck with a capital Y!! Isn't this the same thinking that has motivated the worst historical atrocities. I can't believe anyone would advocated trying to instill this desperation in your children. Does the success of one person have to be predicated on the failure of another? It is so elitist, myopic and desperate. Perhaps Chua would benefit from some anthropology and cultural sociology courses. There must be some alternative human definitions of success. I hope she doesn't make another fortune off this stuff.

I don't have much experiences with languages besides latin, but I am going to guess "because of." At least in latin, for the most part, the purpose of the word in the sentence is clear from the ending used. This is not the case in English. The same word can be used in multiple ways. Perhaps that explains the penchant for diagramming.

It just seems such a rat race childhood of drive and deprivation all to squeeze through the shrinking bottleneck of admissions to a few elite universities, make the right connections to secure the right positions that will allow you to maintain your status and income in a tiny little elite that is getting more and more exclusive and further and further away from the masses of the population. When did the idea of "middle class" become anathema? How can it be ruinous to finish in the middle of your high school class? We can't all be above average. There has to be room for the idea of a good life, well lived that is not defined by being at the top of the heap. IMO, a modest life lived with passion is so much more desirable than a desperate drive for status and economic success. I suppose I would not be homeschooling if I did not feel this way, choosing to live on just one income. I think it is inevitable that our children will choose paths different from what we expect. My oldest wants to be a dancer. It's crazy. It's an almost impossible goal, and even if she make it she will never be financially 'successful." She has given up almost everything else in pursuit of this goal. She claims she does not want to go to college. I can not live her life for her. I feel it is my job to give her an education that will give her options, but she knows that every choice involves sacrifices. I love her, and I will guide her, but as she gets older more and more of those choices will be hers. I may not agree with them, but she is passionate about her life and I think that has value over and above Chua's narrow definitions of "success."

Interesting article. I see it got lots of comments, although I did not yet read them. I have two initial concerns with their argument. First, it seems they are measuring success by income and/or SAT scores. I am not sure that would be my primary measure of success. Perhaps there is more to it in their book?? Second, they claim that anyone can cultivate these traits, but it seems quite daunting for an individual family to take on the task of cultivating a sense of cultural superiority, or economic insecurity. These things are pervasive across cultural groups because they are deeply ingrained. I do think you can teach impulse control but apparently that alone won't do the trick. The article reminds me a bit of Hilary Levy Friedman's book Playing to Win, where she talks about parents cultivating "competitive kid capital." Forget about what kind of human beings we really want to be. Just focus on the traits we need to be a part of the economic elite. These sorts of arguments always rub me the wrong way.

Unfortunately, too many students now are spending enormous amounts of money remediating in the first two years of college what they didn't learn in high school. I would think most college math professors would rather see students who can actually do Algebra II than students who have "passed" higher level math and can't really do Algebra. The AP course has become necessary in part because a passing grade in a high school math class means nothing to a college. Nobody really knows what has been taught.

I don't disagree. I am not suggesting an end to the actual classroom, or to residential college, just an end to the idea that everyone goes for 4 (or more) years, gets their education and then they are done. Right now, the 4 year liberal arts college is not a financially sustainable model anyway. College tuition is too high, and while more and more people are expected to get a bachelors degree, fewer and fewer will be able to afford it. Something will eventually change. Just like most economists couldn't see the housing bubble while they were inside it, I think higher ed is in a similar bubble right now.

I suspect the entire model of 4-year college is on the way out. As was pointed out up thread, we are in a quickly changing economy and we don't really even know what skills our kids will need. When I entered college in 1985 we were still typing our papers on electric typewriters. It really wasn't that long ago. In the face of such rapid change we cannot expect to provide our kids with a skill set that will last them for the whole of their working lives. In my little fantasy of a perfect world, I would love to see higher education spread out over a lifetime rather than concentrated into four years. I was lucky to attend a liberal arts college and I loved the core requirements. They opened up a world to me that I had never had access to. I grew up in public school in central VA. My mother did not attend college and my father was the first in his family to attend college. He went to a state university and became an engineer, motivated entirely by the desire not to be stuck in the coal mines like his father. The whole idea of the "great conversation" was foreign to him. College opened up my world. That said, I would love to have a chance to do it again, now in my late 40s. I would get so much more out of that education. I saw this to be true when I taught at a branch campus of a state university. The older, returning students were so much more engaged than the younger students. They had so much more life experience to bring to the discussion. I think it would be great if employers could get out of the business of providing health insurance and focus those resources on continuing education. Philosophy professors could take auto mechanics and computer programing, Goldman Sachs employees could take seminars on global poverty, physicists could take art appreciation or philosophy of religion; factory workers could retool without stigma when their skills become obsolete…. Just a little fantasy.

I, personally, think this fabulous, and it is the kind of education that I am trying to prepare my children for. But, I think this very laudable ideal of participation in a global/historical conversation is butting up agains the ridiculous cost of education. It would be great if all our students could have this kind of education. But how much is it worth. College has always had dual purposes. For advantaged and wealthy students it is a way to expand their horizons, provide global and historical perspective and engage their minds. For many less advantage students it is a way to get a decent job and try to make it in this crazy, changing economy. But, how much is this liberal arts vision worth. How much debt are students expect to incur to be participants in this global/historical conversation. If having this fantastic perspective leaves you with $100,000 of student loan debt, is it still as valuable. I am really struggling with these issues as my oldest child reaches high school age.

Absolutely!! I think school reform is really in crisis because we really don't have any idea what we want education to do. It is going to be one of the major topics of eduction reform in the next 25 years. Homeschoolers are a bit of a vanguard here because we are already asking these questions.

I live in a school district where the Kindergarten cut off date is Jan.1, so my December and November dds would have been 4 years old for close to half of their kindergarten year. That was one of the factors in our decision to homeschool. When our district moved to full day kindergarten this year they explicitly argued that they needed the full day so that they would actually have time to do the traditional kindergarten things (arts, crafts, playtime, story time). The half-day kindergarten was so filled up meeting the academic requirements (which now include reading and writing), that they couldn't fit it all in. My ds (5) is in a full day (6 hour) outdoor education program one day a week and it is wonderful. I think it is modeled on those European outdoor programs. They are outside the entire time, no matter what the weather. I wish he could do it everyday!

I suppose this is one way to look at it, but many students do not receive a free public education according to their needs and abilities. Math seems to be the area where many public schools offer the most rigor. Students at many public schools can take up to calculus. I see the offerings in other areas - history, literature, geography, music, arts, vocational skills, computer science etc - to be much weaker than the standard offerings in math. It is also not clear to me why we identify students who are strong in math and/or language arts as the "strong" students. Schools really only pay lip service to the idea of different kinds of intelligences. Many students go outside the school system to enhance their education. I have a dd who spends six hours a day in pursuit of a performing arts career. I would in no way expect to find that kind of education in the school system. Nor do students who excel in music find a free education adequate to their needs and abilities in the public school system. I guess I would see students who are strong in math as luckier than most, and I see no reason why STEM students should not expect to have to pursue their academic passions in an extracurricular fashion just as music and arts students do. Ultimately, I think this raises the larger question of the purpose of public school, and that's a much bigger debate. But, I don't think the requirement of Alg II is a hill to die on. Seems to me it would be much better to focus on much more rigorous primary mathematics. Many of the students who struggle in high school math do so because their elementary math education was so weak. Higher level math is easily available for those who decide they want it. Students who get a strong foundation in arithmetic and algebra have the freedom to continue with math if they later decide it is necessary. So if the resources that go into getting kids through precalculus and calculus could go into training and developing stronger elementary mathematics teachers then I think that would be a good thing.

I have also found my 13yo dd has slowed down quite a bit with math. She can work steadily for 60-90 minutes and not complete a full assignment. This usually seems to correlate with increased written output. As she gets further along in Algebra and geometry there are many more steps to each problem and she is expected to show her work. She is quite good at mental math, but she often has trouble copying problems correctly and transcribing the work she does in her head. She is dyslexic and has this problem with almost all written output. We started her 8th grade math book in November, and she is still on chapter two. I have just decided to make peace with her pace. As long as she is working steadily, I would rather see 4 problems done correctly than 10 problems with mistakes. It's so hard to tell whats going on with kids emotionally and developmentally.

I think this is right. The Clifford thing is a red herring. It was just at that meeting with the principal that homeschooling was suggested and she began to consider it as a real possibility. Prior to that I think she thought of homeschooling as something admirable but really only possible for people who were not working (like me). There had been some discussion of skipping a grade, but her daughter was already a young third grader. So while linguistically precocious, skipping grades may have been a challenge in other ways. The school was not a good fit for that child, but it did take quite a bit of agonizing to come to the decision to homeschool.

I guess it's time for me to sheepishly admit that I have been a member and reading here for many years and have never posted. But, now that Jennifer has "outed" me…... The NYT piece was written by my sister. Aside from a couple of PhDs, our situations are quite different. I have been homeschooling for many years. I have three children, the oldest is 13 and none of them have ever been to school. I am not a "working" homeschooler. I left my academic job one year prior to getting tenure in order to stay home with my oldest child. So I have been out of the workforce for more than a decade. My spouse is a teacher and we live very modestly on one income. I am homeschooling full time and honestly it's all I can do to school three children. I can't image keeping up a job at the same time. Jennifer, on the other hand, is quite new to homeschooling. She is homeschooling her oldest child only, and continuing her professional career. So, I think the identity of "homeschooler" is something she is still getting used to. Jennifer started the blog and roped me into contributing. I was hesitant at first but have actually come to enjoy it. There are clearly two voices on the blog (we don't always agree), and I think you can see the differences in our posts. Just have to say that I feel like I know all of you already. I have gained so much incredible knowledge reading here and I really think this board represents the best of modern homeschooling. The voices here are diverse and unique, but everyone is committed to providing a quality education and raising decent human beings. So here is a long overdue thank you! Now I have to go work on a signature and overcoming my natural introversion ….