Here is another data point. Around here, a lot of the high schools have two AP tracks: Regular AP and “GT AP”. The curriculum is theoretically the same–they take the same tests at the end of the year. But in the GT class, they do more projects, more self-expression. Maybe read more advanced texts. They are explicitly not for the kids that are “smarter” or “more academically advanced”, they are for the kids who “think differently” because they are “gifted”. That’s the sort of thing that never sits right with me. It’s the same class. Why do you need to separate the elves from the humans?
I always feel like it’s a response to open enrollment and the idea that if a kid wants to try to step up their game academically, we should let them try. As soon as the AP classes started getting browner and poorer, they made an extra special AP class that they teacher got to handpick.
That’s super fucked up. It’s possible some kids will learn better through projects and others through lectures/reading, and if there are different classes set up to accommodate that difference, that’s great. But if one group is teacher-selected and disproportionately white, that’s just terrible.
It gets back to the OP title. I hate the historic racism of the field, and I also believe the field is necessary for many kids. Figuring out how to jettison horrible practices like that has got to be a priority.
I suspect part of the problem for minority parents (because it’s not just Black/African-American people who have issues with being under recognized) is not so much “don’t push the kids” as they don’t know how to push the kids. If no one in your family has even so much as finished high school how on earth would you know how to prepare/push a kid towards college?
I think that’s something many middle-class and higher on the socioeconomic ladder people just don’t get. Without a family culture/history/knowledge of how to prep kids for that sort of learning the kids start at a disadvantage and often continue to lag.
Even worse if you have a family culture that, for whatever reason, works against the sort of learning needed in today’s world. For example, I’ve known families where books are seen as useless clutter and there are NONE in the house - sure, you might need them for school, but as soon as you finish with a book, any book, into the trash it goes. And forget a library card - why waste time in a library? And so on. This is not going to help the kids in the long run, and yet these things still happen.
In some ways the internet can help with that. A kid from a family that hates books can now put e-books on their phone. And a kid from an environment like you came from, if they have access to the internet, can also access free learning on line. You just wind up hoping they don’t go down a bad rabbithole of some sort.
Thinking back to my 1960s–'70s childhood, I realize that the closest thing we had (that I knew about, at least) to GT academics was what was called “skipping a grade”. If the school agreed, you could just start the next academic year with a different cohort of students one year ahead of your previous cohort.
Does anybody do that nowadays, or is it disfavored?
My understanding is that the phrase magnet school was not originally coined to describe how it attracted smart kids. In the bad old days, magnets schools are meant to attract white parents not smart kids. But much like the term “grandfather clause” which was originally used to provide voting privileges to illiterate white people whose “grandfathers” had voted, the term magnet school is now widely understood to mean attracting smart kids rather than white kids.
When I think about how these sort of programs can help URM, I think MORE gifted programs would be better than less. Particularly local gifted programs. Sure that means that standards may be different from school to school but that’s OK, you don’t need homogeneity among gifted programs across the country.
I was in elementary school when they started tracking. I had skipped a grade before i was tracked. From my perspective, tracking is far superior to skipping a grade. If skipping a grade was more common, it would be OK but I was one of 2 or 3 kids that skipped a grade and the size difference would have become ridiculous if they skipped me 2 grades.
I don’t think skipping a grade is a big thing anymore.
The original idea was that magnets would create a sort of voluntary desegregation: rather than bus brown kids to white neighborhoods, create strong programs in brown neighborhoods that white children would also want to attend, and allow them to apply for admission. The school @bump 's sons attend (and my son attended) is still one of these, basically. They can work well, if the school makes a concerted effort to keep them integrated. One thing that can happen is the development of a “school within a school” where the “neighborhood” kids don’t mingle with the “magnet” kids.
I have one or two kids a year who were skipped. It is most common, IME, among children of fairly recent immigrants, who take a lot of pride in it and so push for it. It’s also common in that same population to have a kid who was pushed into Kinder early. African immigrants, specifically, often push to graduate a year early–though we don’t allow that at my current magnet. The conventional wisdom among Western/Americanized families tends to be that grade skipping/starting early/graduating early are not best practices. And I think that’s probably true within our current system.
Excellent conversation catalyzed by its well thought out OP!
Two comments that fit in somewhere -
First. It makes little sense to me to address disparities, to “reduce the gap”, by bringing down the top. No one would suggest that as the approach for disparities in medicine: reduce them by making medical care received more by the whiter and wealthier worse. We address disparities by providing better access to quality care to all and determining and then addressing the systematic aspects that prevent it. Such need also be the case for educational disparities. Identify and address the clear institutional and other structural factors that prevent maximizing educational outcomes for all.
Second. In my day in my school we had individualized reading programs where we each had colored folders that we worked on. We were in the same class but working on different levels. It may be time to reimagine the structure of our current systems to allow for more individualization and the complete disruption of our educational systems may provide an opportunity for doing so - integrating on-line instruction hybridized with in-person time in different ways. The “lecture” portion might be best at home online with lecture materials that to some degree allow proceeding at different paces within the same class, and the in-class time is spent doing what is now considered homework, with teacher spending time as a resource for individual and small group problem solving and project help, as well as students helping each other. This “flip model” got popularized a bit by the Khan Academy a few years back, limited to no small degree because the technology was not there. We are for obvious reasons closer to that level now.
The ability to proceed at individualized paces with online resources shared broadly, just as much to poorer as wealthier districts, not just in magnet schools to those who qualify but based on automatic constant reassessments as they work through the material, with teachers having more time to do individualized assessments and respond more to each child’s questions in real time in person, would reduce, I think, some of the inequities inherent of current structures.
Professional educators and parents, am I completely off-base on that assessment? As kids return to in-person more and teachers across the board have become more savvy about the distance portions of teaching, is this indeed a chance to make this sort of change to best help every child get their full year of education for a year of school, challenged to their just right level as much of the time as possible, even perhaps some of the time having separate subject gifted tracks that unite kids virtually across districts? It would not be a cure all to be sure. Some of the structural issues are outside of the school. But it does seem like it could move the inequity bar quite a bit. Or am I missing something very obvious?
While I appreciate the idea, I’m not really seeing that happening. At least where I am, the concerns we’re desperately trying to address with tech are threefold:
Making sure kids’ social/emotional needs are being met.
Making sure kids stay engaged.
Making sure kids are making some progress toward educational goals.
These are all fantastically difficult to achieve during a pandemic. I’m not sure how much energy we’re able to give toward individualizing instruction during this time.
Some teachers are doing kickass at it: I know teachers who are conducting classes mostly through small groups based on assessments, because they can better meet needs that way. Second grade at my school, for example, has six small groups for phonics instruction. Four of them are like 6-7 kids each and meet with a classroom teacher for remediation. The remaining 35 kids in the grade level are those who don’t need remediation; they meet with me in two classes of 17-18 kids each, and I’m doing some grammar study with them. But this is the sort of differentiation we’d be doing in person anyway.
I think we should reconsider how we structure school. But while I get the impulse to make remodeling suggestions while the building’s on fire (“we’re going to have to rebuild anyway”), the capacity just isn’t there right now.
The gifted mystique is horribly toxic. Even among adults if you go on the average message board and ask “who else here was Gifted and Talented in school?” people will come out of the woodwork to agree that they were. Many will share stories of how they were smarter than the teachers, the classes - everything. Indeed, if my calculations are correct, only me and 8 other people on the internet were not.
Should the truly gifted get challenged? Sure. Should everyone else? You bet.
I like the idea that you are in the classes for your appropriate level. We did that in both sixth and seventh grade. I was tops in English (and, what a surprise) read and did more interesting stuff than some of the lower groups, and was in level 5 out of 10 in math, which is accurate. Science and Social.Studies, however, were not separated out. My high school sent the really gifted in math to the University.
I confused the hell out of the Gifted/Talented program in my district because I was way, way ahead in anything language-based (I was reading at a college level by age 8 and had my first story published when I was in high school) but was behind in math. Very behind. Four years in “remedial math” behind.
I really, really, really hated the expectation that I be “smart” in EVERY subject. I wasn’t. I was terrible at math. It wasn’t for lack of trying. At one point I was spending hours every night on trying to make it work AND spending my lunch hours in tutoring with my math teacher and it just Did. Not. Work. I can learn math and once I do learn a concept it sticks, but it’s very, very slow and my ability to calculate is still very slow. I’ll get to the answer, but it takes me 2-3 times longer than the average person. (The worst is when someone tries to “help” me, which just makes me lose my train of thought completely. Let’s just say I have a visceral understanding of why trying to finish a sentence for someone who stutters is the opposite of helpful, even if I don’t’ stutter.) Maybe these days it wouldn’t be so bad because of calculators but we didn’t have those when I was in school, it was before they became ubiquitous. Thank goodness for my physics teacher - he figured out the reason I was failing tests wasn’t because I was getting wrong answers, it was because I was running out of time - every answer I did get to was correct, it was just taking me so long to get to them the test would end when I was only halfway through. So he started letting me stay into my lunch hour to finish tests and my grade went from failing to an A - except we had to be really, really quiet about it because this was before the days of making such accommodations.
Then there was the battle with my useless high school counselor over soccer. (A counselor who, among other things, berated me for not trying hard enough in math because a smart girl like me should be in AP calculus and not going a second round in Algebra II, never mind that THREE math teachers at the school had already told him I should not be put in the honors track for math and why) His feeling was that I should be in yet another academic and screw sports. My parents felt that AP English, History, and the highest level available of French were enough heavy enough a load and wanted me to be in sports because 1) kids need exercise and 2) most important, it was the one area of the school’s social life where I fit in at all and they felt that was just as important as being book smart.
That high school counselor has always been a prime example for me of someone who doesn’t really understand kids who are outliers. He just did not comprehend how someone really smart in one area wasn’t really smart in all areas - if they weren’t, it was because they just weren’t trying hard enough or being rebellious. Every other adult in my life acknowledged my problems with math had nothing to do with how hard I was working or how much effort… it was because my mind just did not work well with math. Why? Who knows. The problem was that that one counselor had the ability to make my life miserable despite the support of both my parents and my teachers. I’m still angry at him for how he accused me of being lazy and not trying when I was doing my hardest.
Ranks right up there with, earlier in my schooling, I would be accused of “cheating” on some homework assignments because what I produced was “too good” for someone my age. Uh, yeah, way to encourage a student… but that was before the whole Gifted/Talented thing took off. Back in the days when girls weren’t expected to be too smart, and were just going to grow up, get married, and have kids anyway.
But one possible explanation (obviously among others) is simply cultural. A test – even a decently designed one – is not necessarily going to measure future potential even if it’s accurate about current knowledge.
By my reading, the OP leans into a cultural explanation in at least some posts, for example here:
But I wouldn’t personally agree that a test is “broken” because it’s designed to assess the current state of affairs rather than a plausible future.
I would, however, be hesitant about relying exclusively on a single test to the exclusion of other possible metrics. Hell, even some “objective” tests can be gamed to some extent by privileged parents. Tests like the AP allow more time for students with certain learning disabilities. And wouldn’t you know it? Expensive private schools can be just overflowing with students who have been to compliant doctors who have been willing to diagnose extra test time a learning disability that could be facilitated with more test time.
As a precautionary measure, this has to be diagnosed well in advance, even years, before test registration. But the parents know this extremely well.
Objective tests are clearly useful.
But it’s also worth trying to cast a wide net, rather than accepting a single score as somehow dispositive of everything. There are schools whose entrance guidelines span a large dimension of variables – MANY of them objective evaluations – but which also weight by region or socioeconomic status.
Ideally, we’d of course want to offer highly academic coursework to all students who desired and were capable of such instruction.
For a second let’s just play the fantasy game (if you don’t think it’s too much a hijack). To me the racial and class inequities of gifted education are a manifestation of the broader structures, not a cause of them. Having gifted education is not necessarily racist or classist; it reflects it instead. Accept that eliminating the opportunity from those who get it is not the ideal solution. Let’s at least play with what could be real world possible ways that allow for all to have better access to the real goal: every student at every level being challenged just right in every subject with equal access for all.
Would the proposal I suggested, if able to be implemented, move us closer to that goal?
Then in terms of when. No you don’t rebuild during a fire. But rebuilding after the fire is a chance to update the design. Chicago was reimagined after the Great Fire. It didn’t get built again overnight but planners and architects used new technologies to do something other than just do the same thing with steel instead of wood. The pandemic has forced less inequitable home internet access that students can use. Can systems be rebuilt “after the fire” in ways that leverage that to decrease the inequalities that manifest in gifted education?
Are you speaking about gifted instruction, or about accelerated academic instruction? Because the two things are very different, and I think people are blurring that distinction.
Differentiation with options for acceleration just means that you assess kids and give them the opportunity tp pursue academics at an accelerated rate. It doesn’t really differentiate between “hard workers who are willing to put extra time in to a subject” and “kids who pick it up more easily than their peers”.
“Gifted” instruction says that there is a quality, “giftedness” that manifests in wildly different ways–academic acceleration, intensity of spirit, creative expression–and that these students need different modes of instruction than others because of something fundamentally different about their cognitive processes. GT programs start with the process of identifying this quality.
You can be in favor of one or both or none of these, but they reveal some very different ideas about what you are doing and how it should work. At it’s worst, it leads to really horrific elitism. For example, at the high school level, the opening up of AP classrooms has revealed that we had vast amounts of untapped potential that was being systematically kept out of advanced academics by people that thought they knew what a “smart kid” looked like. On this board, I have had bare-knuckles fights with people that told me that an “honors” class can’t be an “honors” class if there are weak students in the room: that it’s an “honors” class because of the kids that are in it, because of the exclusionary nature of a selection process, and that the actual curriculum taught is not what differentiates it.
On the other hand, at it’s best, the acknowledgement of “giftedness” has allowed a reexamination of certain things–that behaviors that were previously seen as negatives might better be understood as differences or even strengths–that gifted kids benefit from project-based approaches, the element of choice about what they study, tolerance for different processing approaches. And that is a good thing.
However, I am not convinced that gifted students benefit from a broader approach to learning more than “normal” kids. I do know that a lot of the best innovations in teaching these last 25 years have come from increased inclusion of 2nd language learners and SpEd students in the regular classroom. It turns out that a lot of the solutions worked out by teachers focused on those populations–or developed by teachers now tasked with these more challenging populations–have turned out to be really effective for the rest of the student population as well. I feel like that’s true of “gifted” education as well: it’s not that gifted kids are really more likely to have affective behaviors that do not work well in a traditional classroom, it’s that in “gifted” children, those behaviors were recast from “problems” to “challenges” and eventually into “innovative approaches”. I don’t want to deny them to “gifted” kids–I want to see them extended back into the regular classroom. But they are resource intensive, and there is a feeling out there that the gifted kids “deserve” those resources because they “need” them.
As a small example: my whole teaching career, I’ve faced parents, fellow teachers, and even administrators who will argue that AP classes need to be smaller because “those kids” need more individual attention. This claim is used to justify capping the number of AP seats at a lower level, which keeps them more exclusive. Now, as someone who has been teaching classes at all levels for nearly 20 years, I will tell you that’s just crap. It’s not that the AP classes won’t benefit from being small–of course they do. But not more than the on-level classes. As an AP teacher, I’ll take 36 AP students over 36 on-level kids any day. Students in both classes would be better off if they class were 24–but the marginal difference is far greater for the on-level class. But the idea persists that you can stuff on-level kids in like cattle, but AP deserves better.
I guess I am suggesting that in this discussion people differentiate between “services offered only to GT identified kids” (making identifying those kids the main priority) or just having advanced academic opportunities for students who want to be involved–obviously, with increasing ability to self-select as they age up. I hope you can see, @DSeid , that that makes a big difference in how I respond to your post–because I don’t know if you are suggesting reorganizing school for all students or to focus in identifying more GT kids and then reorganizing society for them.
My hope is that more fully implementing latter also allows better for the former. I do not believe them to be mutually exclusive.
Had not you pishposhed the idea of some ineffable quality of “giftedness” earlier?
I am proposing adapting your school’s approach broadly via the “flip model” - using the online portion as lectures that not only can be handled at different speed, but ones that adapt based on performance into different versions (similar to some degree how testing for giftedness can adjust into harder questions based on performance on a first set) - and using in person instruction time for collaborative work, inclusive of what currently gets labelled as homework and group projects, with teachers using their time more to answer specific questions. Modified perhaps by some inter-school resource interactive classes available via a Zoom-style resource.
Personally I am also eye-rolley over the specialness of giftedness, other than as a statistical identification. A child sigma outlier for a specific channel will need special individualized opportunities to stay challenged and engage, to have work at that level. And a child lower than average also needs to have work just at their cusp, not too much higher nor too much lower, to stay engage and to enjoy the process. That is true for ALL of us from infancy into old age! Too easy is boring, too hard is frustrating, we all enjoy and benefit from the Goldilocks just right. We also ALL benefit from having experience failing sometimes, from being wrong and dealing with it. And from having contact both with some number of others who process as we do, and those who do not.
How exactly do you identify this version of “giftedness” rather than academic acceleration?
If giftedness is some ineffable quality, how the heck do you eff it?
Most of the programs I have seen merely rest for current academic achievement. There is some correlation between that achievement and giftedness but it’s a little like trying to determine someone’s weight by measuring their height.
In my experience the effort to identify “potential” ends up being mostly good at identifying white kids with involved (PTA?) parents who barely missed the cut off.
If you were searching for truly gifted kids, the little man tates of the world, would you be able to fill a single classroom in most school districts?
The specialize high schools in NYC do exactly this. One test and the top ~900 kids get into stuyvesant, the next ~800 get into bronx science, the next ~3000 get into one of the other specialized high schools based on their score on this single test.
I think everyone already has a pretty good idea of what the cons are to this method. But there are some pros, let me lay out some of the pros.
Application to specialized high schools is extremely easy. I filled out a postcard where I simply ranked my preferences, took the test, showed up for school. My parents didn’t speak english and would never have been able to navigate a complex application process. This makes the admission process more accessible to the children of poor or illiterate parents.
No subjectivity. You cannot buy, cajole, lobby or influence your way into these schools. You can use your wealth and privilege to better prepare for the exam but frankly the best public high school in nyc is only the 7th or 8th best school in the city. If you have the means, you send you kids to trinity not stuyvesant. There are other screened high schools in nyc that use subjective factors and they are predictably, whiter, wealthier and have lower standardized test scores. The test is a very g-loaded test and a $20 barrons book that gets you familiar with the test structure gets you most of what you will get from test prep.
The test is objective and fair. There is this notion drifting around that test makers today still use analogies using words like regatta. The entire science of psychometrics is laser focused on this sort of thing. If tests were so culturally biased in favor of white wealthy kids, stuyvesant wouldn’t be mostly poor, mostly minority, mostly immigrant kids.
There is no perfect measure of man. Every method you come up with has its problems but when we are making tradeoffs between imperfect systems, we should not be influenced by our desire to achieve a particular end result. We might as well do away with the notion of an evenly applied selection method and just pick the people we need to achieve our desired result.
I feel like as long as we believe that there is this binary split between “gifted” and “normal” kids that is inherent, it won’t permeate to the general population: there will be some Booker T Washington attempts to help the “Talented tenth” of the under-represented populations, but people will stay protective of their perceived special status and resent any attempts to democratize it. So if someone wants to argue we need to stick to that model, but just do better identifying the GT 10% or so, I am going to resist it.
The issue with the “flipped classroom”, more than anything, is that it’s hard to keep kids engaged and they suck at time management. I am using videos these days, and I think they work better than lecture–at least over Zoom. I may well keep them next year for certain types of material (for my sake, only having to read-and-explain, read-and-explain writers like Hobbes or Wollstonecraft once, instead of 5 times in a row, is a miracle) but I rarely assign them to watch the video on their own time. We come into Zoom, I walk them through what we are going to do, I release them to watch the video ,and then they come back. If I do videos next year, when they are in the room with me, we will still watch them during class–because I don’t really think they will time-manage enough to watch them on their own. And these are literally some of the most mature, self-motivated learners in the country.
Basically, I think if in most cases a math teacher, say, flipped the classroom, the kids who watched the videos and re-watched the videos as needed would be vastly better off. But now the kid who never did his homework is the kid who never watches the videos, and he’s totally lost all the time. The best the teacher can do is force him to watch the videos in class while she works with the rest of the kids.
The flipped classroom model is really intriguing, and certainly the crash course in technology-assisted teaching we’ve all had this last year has changed my pedagogy and opened up some intriguing possibilities. But it’s not simple and it’s not clear at all how it would scale. I couldn’t make 3 levels of video for each work we read. I don’t have time. And I don’t think I could teach off of some set of videos someone else made: the whole idea of having a teacher develop a curriculum is that it’s tailored to your school, your context, your kids.