Welcome, and I'll pass that along to the person through whom I learned of it. 
- Edit 1
- Edit 1Before modification by Joel at 07/01/2011 02:20:23 AM
I'm still reading through it, but I have a few remarks already:
The phenomenon of inventing disorders to increase a child's test-taking time is one I'm glad to have mostly escaped (apparently fairly narrowly) in primary and secondary education, but I have seen it at college. We did have parents who forced the school to admit their children into gifted and talented programs, which just hurt everyone involved. They just couldn't understand that gifted and talented programs are as much "special education" as are programs for those with learning disabilities; it really was all about the status.
Speaking of college, I have the dubious privilege of going to a school routinely cited as one of the biggest grade deflaters in the country. It certainly increases the worth of our academic experience, in my opinion, but it can be a problem for those going into industries where the beginning pay scale is based on GPA.
The phenomenon of inventing disorders to increase a child's test-taking time is one I'm glad to have mostly escaped (apparently fairly narrowly) in primary and secondary education, but I have seen it at college. We did have parents who forced the school to admit their children into gifted and talented programs, which just hurt everyone involved. They just couldn't understand that gifted and talented programs are as much "special education" as are programs for those with learning disabilities; it really was all about the status.
Speaking of college, I have the dubious privilege of going to a school routinely cited as one of the biggest grade deflaters in the country. It certainly increases the worth of our academic experience, in my opinion, but it can be a problem for those going into industries where the beginning pay scale is based on GPA.
I'm reminded of Aristotles claim to the effect that knowledge for its own sake is the most important. As with so much else, the increasing value of knowledge has made the appearance of knowledge more desirable; to those who confuse the causes and symptoms of success real intelligence is often trivial, but being PERCEIVED as intelligent indispensable. Based on my brief experience with UT it can cut both ways: Parents may force their average children on HS G&T classes, but college natural science classes are just as likely to fail 40% of students due to the "standard curve" and the desire to "weed out" inflated enrollment rather than inability to master the course content. From their perspective an argument can be made that they're simply leveling the playing field to offset all the students who graduated HS with high honors not because of their brilliance but because of their parents insistence.