We’ve already seen proposals in multiple areas to switch to lotteries to determine entry to specialised schools. Now Boston is suspending entry to its advanced learning program.
Yet again equity in education means holding back the more able students. Why is it that these initiatives always involve changing schools or programs that get good results, rather than trying the fix the ones that are failing?
That is a questionable statement. All over NJ, they work hard to fix bad schools. Some of it sometimes looks like throwing money into a pit, but in a lot of cases there has been a mark improvement in schools that were lagging for decades.
Even Camden has been showing improvement.
Your linked article I think explains well enough why Boston is taking such a drastic measure.
A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
I’m glad to hear that. Maybe this is something that doesn’t get reported on as much because it’s an ongoing project.
Not really. It explains why they might want to look at reforming the program. But no one benefits from shutting it down altogether, and poorer kids who would have been in the program will suffer.
What I don’t understand is why, if the demand for specialized schools is so large, they don’t convert more of them. The all-academic HS I went to was open to anyone who was willing to take on the extra work. Most didn’t. And, sigh, there weren’t very many Blacks.
We have a local high school that’s for high-performing students. It’s open to anyone who wants to join, but the expectations are clear: teachers assign lots of work and grade hard. I was talking recently about it to someone involved in its administration. She spoke of an outreach effort to students of color, both for this program and for honors/AP courses. The outreach was successful; but the outreach was canceled due to lack of administrative support.
I agree that we need more such programs, and they should be open, with caveats, and students should be allowed to try them out and then transfer out without shame. As someone who works in AIG and who gets so frustrated with the status beliefs people have, that advanced programs are something “deserved” or “earned” rather than “needed,” I’d much rather we see it as meeting a need of certain kids, rather than as privileging kids. If a kid believes that normal school work won’t suffice to move them forward, that they need a more rigorous program, I think that by default we should believe them.
I wish more people had your view that it’s a need rather than a status thing. It shouldn’t be about enrichment or projects or whatever. Those should be available to all kids. It should be about allowing kids to go at an appropriate pace and have access to more advanced and specialised subjects if that would benefit them.
It’s a good question. Maybe that costs more, maybe it’s a longer term project, maybe they want to take advantage of the reputation of existing schools. Or in some cases, the people pushing these changes are more interested in eliminating a visible racial disparity than in improving education.
I wish society would grasp that equality isn’t about pulling people down, it’s about lifting people up.
By this logic, people like Einstein, Edison, Newton, Hawking and so forth should have been discouraged from maximizing their intellectual potential. After all, they’re pulling away and ahead of their lesser-brained peers. Stop the inequality!
You mean inequity. But we can’t all be Einstein or Hawking, no matter how good an education we get. The only way we can make people equal is to hold back everyone who’s getting ahead.
Did you try reading the article you cited in your OP? Nowhere in this thread, AFAICT, have you acknowledged that the proposed suspension of this program is a temporary (and partial) one-year pause, largely due to pandemic issues.
During the pause, the school district is proposing to determine how to address the program’s issues with equity problems and the decline of interest in the program among most schools in the district.
Immediately contact every elected official in your school district and tell them that you are quite willing to pay additional taxes so every student who wants to attend the advanced program can. Put your money where your mouth is STS.
My district is also delaying evaluation for enrichment education this year. Because of the pandemic it is difficult to evaluate all students fairly (some are working remotely, some are in-person, none are in a “typical” classroom setting).
Somebody decided to conflate (or accidentally conflated) the fact that COVID is wreaking havoc with student evaluation with the fact that this program has equity concerns.
One should notice that the headline in the link @DemonTree provided (“Citing Racial Inequities…”) is not the headline at the actual site currently, which now has two independent clauses - one about the suspension of testing and one about the racial issues. It sounds like the Superintendent made one claim in the initial article (the one about how the pandemic revealed additional racial inequities) and then had to clarify when the article made it seem like that was the primary cause of the pause.
Yeah, the article I linked to yesterday was very different. @Kimstu, it says “Following publication of this story”… looks like they added these ‘clarifications’ in later, after I read and linked the article. The first few paragraphs are different, the later ones are the same as far as I recall. Seems kind of dodgy to edit the original with no acknowledgement except about the headline.
It doesn’t work that way where I live. There are no funds allocated for gifted children and no guidelines on how they should be supported. It’s all up to individual schools. The result is that politics, journalism, and all the top jobs are dominated by people who went to private schools.
Please don’t copy us, it sucks for gifted kids and it sucks for social mobility.
Yeah, very. It’s one of the areas with digital news that is most difficult to track. Some sources are good at adding comments indicating where something changed. The only one I see in that article is:
Either way I think that the point regarding racial inequities in gifted education are good ones, and I think there have been a few very good threads on this board recently about that topic. I don’t think this particular news story has much to add to it.
Our district has a very good gifted education program K-12, from what I can tell, but it does struggle to identify as many kids as it would like. They are trying to move away from the rigid IQ-test based assessments to include paradigms like creativity and flexible thinking to both capture more students and attempt to remove whatever implicit biases may still linger in these tests. That level of interaction with students (particularly at the 1st-grade level where we do our first assessments for the program) is impossible at this time due to COVID.
It does sound like there are real problems in the program, what with that and the falling uptake. I’m still concerned what sort of solutions someone who calls themself an antiracist will come up with, based on previous form, but suspending the test due to Covid isn’t unreasonable. It’s been very unfortunate for all kids’ education, but especially those whose parents are less able to give them support at home.
From the quotes I see, it appears this is about 5th and 6th graders. My own personal experience as part of the talented and gifted program (TAG) at that age was that it was something different than the advanced classes you got later on. It was more that you’d be pulled out of class once a week for a few hours to go into a different class that was structured different from the classroom, and more self-learning focused. The things I remember actually learning as a group were that we’d fill out a logic puzzle, going around picking modules and learning from them, and the one time we were given dialup access to the Internet for free. (This was technically available to all students, but most didn’t know about it.) The classes felt a lot more like the old Montessori stuff I’d been used to, as that’s where I had gone to school for Kindergarten through fourth grade.
And that actually is why I almost didn’t make it in. There was such a bias towards those from that school that they underplaced me. It wasn’t just the TAG stuff–they also put me in the math class for slower learners for a day before they figured out math was my best subject. (I had actually maxed out the math curriculum at my old school, actually. They didn’t have algebra there, so I’d learned to do square roots by hand.)
I only got in because my teacher could see me in class, and could see that I had what it takes. I was frankly very much a teacher’s pet, absorbing information like a sponge and clearly enjoying learning. She could tell that taking me out of class for those few hours wouldn’t harm me, and that I was looking for more things to learn. And she was right–until computer class in sixth grade, TAG was the highlight of my week.
So I do understand both aspects of this. I understand why they’d need to observe students to see if they would benefit from TAG, and I understand how unconscious biases could slip in so they’d want to look in on it. I remember the studies showing that, despite equal performance by black students, they would be judged by teachers are less intelligent than their white peers. I remember the same sort of thing about acting out—the same behaviors by black students were seen as more severe–even by black teachers.
It makes sense that this could play a factor in evaluations, especially since the evaluation isn’t IQ alone, which was never something I had trouble with. And it was never a reward for the best students, either.
That was the pizza party you’d get every quarter if you had all As and less than four missed homework assignments. Or the little card you got for getting at least As and Bs (and I think could miss more homework) that entitled the student (or their parents) to discounts all around town. And likely Book-IT pizzas you got one once a month for reading enough books. Those were rewards.
I’d also like to give advice about these sorts of articles, to avoid getting caught flatfooted when they get changed out from under you or get debunked. These types of stories where people are harming the children or “progressives going too far” and such are a dime a dozen as part of outrage fuel. Even if the organization isn’t themselves biased or outrage bait, the more outrageous claim is more likely to make the news. But they just so often turn out to not be nearly as bad as they seem.
So it’s good before accepting them to do just a basic check. Is there an interpretation where this isn’t as bad as it seems? And really try–act as if you’re on a message board and you are trying to debunk someone who has said something you vehemently disagree with.
To me, at least, this one was a pretty easy one. They gave what was most likely the primary reason why they were pausing the program–the pandemic. And it wouldn’t really make a lot of sense to pause the existing program just because they were considering retooling it. You can look at what was actually quoted, and see the least horrible thing it could have meant.
And, yes, I know this strategy applies to the other side, too. If we see, say, an upsetting story about obvious racism/sexism/etc where everyone involved has acted unreasonably, we should employ the same strategy.
But I have definitely noticed this one more. In fact, while I’ve seen some situations where people were actually that racist, I’ve yet to see a situation where the “PC gone too far” story has been reported entirely accurately.
I’m sure they exist, but they’re overwhelmed by the other stuff. It’s just so common. I won’t speculate why, other than to say that outrage gets more shares and thus more clicks.
It’s a whole different world… like, how can you ‘max out’ a curriculum? It’s the curriculum. Everyone learns the same things at the same time.
That makes sense, but shouldn’t affect IQ type tests. And yet it’s the tests that most of these school districts want to move away from, because they aren’t producing the desired results. In this case if it’s a school based program, maybe they need to just take the top X% of students in each school rather than having an arbitrary cut off.
It’s quite hard to take into account a quote that isn’t there. But I’ll try and work on my precognitive skills for next time.