Seattle shuts down gifted program for having too many white and Asian students
nypost.com
nypost.com
Why is this so hard? Just keep the accelerated education program. Then try to help the disadvantaged groups get better testing scores via assistance programs. The issue here is obviously the name of the program. Just change that!
I'm admittedly talking my own book, having come from the lower end of middle class. I was also the runt of the litter and at the bottom of the social pecking order. Students of all races enjoyed looking down on me to feel better about their own situation.
I retired from working for other people at age 40. I credit gifted/AP courses in 8-12th grade for a significant portion of that. Did my racial background still advantage me? You bet. I had a stable home environment and low crime neighborhood.
Perhaps we should focus on how to offer children stable home environments and low crime neighborhoods.
I can't speak for other cultures, but non-wealthy first generation Asian immigrant parents consciously and constantly sacrifice their own well-being to afford tutoring and extra curricular for their kids.
I recall that in my AP Chemistry class, 100% of the students were Asian. Nothing kept non-Asian students from taking the class, except the desire to work hard and be there. (The other section had at least a few white kids.)
Based on the description in the article, I assumed it was a form of "advanced placement" of students with better scores. It includes elementary school, middle school, etc so I wasn't entirely sure what to call it. My school did have AP courses in MiddleSchool though.
I would be willing to bet that most of the gifted students come from wealthier households and sharing the network effect of having high performing peers. It is almost impossible to distinguish racism from poverty and culture in the US.
I'll describe the grammar school system here in Kent, which is adjacent to London. Over here they call the selective government schools "Grammar Schools". Grammar schools are free, and the top grammars send a comparable number of kids to Oxbridge as the top independent (aka Private for internaional readers, Public for British readers) schools. For reference the most expensive school in the area is also one of the most expensive schools in the country, at about £33K a year for day and £45K for boarding.
The year the kids turn 11, (year 6), they start the year with a test. It looks a lot like an IQ test, complete with silly questions like "what does this shape look like from this direction". There's also a bunch of standard stuff like arithmetic and vocabulary. It is a single sitting on a single day, so try not to be ill.
The thing is, and I didn't know this until after we got the results, almost every kid who gets in had a tutor for the test. My kid was getting fewer and fewer playdates after school in years 4 and 5, and I suspect this is why. Nobody admits to hiring a tutor for some reason, but everyone does it.
The kid then gets in anyway, and what do you find?
Most primary school kids were not privately educated, but most of his classmates came from private schools. He went to one, and this school has the highest representation in the new intake. I met the other parents, and it's just a selection of other private schools in the area. Maybe one or two from local state schools. I got my kid to ask, and sure enough everyone had a tutor.
In terms of ethnicity, it's pretty mixed. There's more Chinese/Asian kids there than I suspect there are in the local population. There's more Indian/Asian (Asian in the UK means India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka) kids there than I see in everyday life. There's a few black kids as well, and a lot of mixed kids. The majority is white, as you'd expect.
So if you care about race, you'd probably say it's nicely mixed. If you care about social mobility, I think you might be disappointed.
But where I am from this kind of test-based entrance is really rare. We used to have that in my kids school district, but not anymore. They switched the specialized schools for gifted students to be lottery-based instead of exam entrance. And guess what? After a couple of generations there's not much difference. My daughter's school used to be a special science-oriented "magnet" school (called a magnet school because it "pulls in" students from across the district who specially apply for it). Now it's really no different in practice than any of the other neighborhood schools.
It all comes down to mixing up correlation and causality. Progressives said it's not fair that only rich white kids and model minorities are getting into these schools, as these schools setup the kids for a better life. Everyone should have that opportunity! So they make the entrance a randomized lottery instead of merit based. Only guess what? The schools had good outcomes because the student body was well-prepared kids with private tutors. Get rid of that factor and they revert back real quick to being regular schools just like any other.
> If you care about social mobility, I think you might be disappointed.
These people don't want social mobility. They want equal outcomes--there's no need to move through society if everyone is at the same level. And they do end up achieving that... by lowering standards for everyone.
I'm starting to suspect that "minority" really means one group of people. Model minorities are just everybody else.
>> The program is not going away, it’s getting better.
[1] https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning...
Im pretty liberal.
This is just dumb.
We are, as a country at a point where we cant have a conversation about this. About what is really going on, and actually fixing things. It's moments like these where I feel like I'm living in a copy of 1984.
How about you keep the dam gifted program and pour as much money into some schools where the kids have worse socioeconomic circumstances and give them the same leg up? That would be a SANE and RATIONAL policy...
The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy
Nothing of the sort would work
1. Pay teachers a living wage... Make it a 150k a year starting salary job. Make it competitive. Make it year round 8 hours a day full time.
2. Kids get NO home work. Half of HN cries that a 40 hour work week is too much... kids spend 30 hours a week in school and have more work at home. School is a job, you do your job at your job.
3. No more sports at school. Keep PE but no more football, baseball circle jerks.
4. More Shop, tech, Art and Music. You know gen z knows less about computing on the whole. It's not cell phones, they closed all the computer labs and stoped having those classes cause "digital natives". Bullshit. Also, no one knows how to weld, cut wood, fix a pipe, cook, balance a check register, budget (home economics)...
GenZ can't use the command line. I am with you on shop, art, music, cooking, etc. All of those things make more capable people. Project based learning should start from a young age. The kids need to learn with their whole selves.
These are progressives, not liberals. They don't want a meritocracy; they want equal outcomes for everyone. And realistically the only way you get that is by lowering outcomes for gifted achievers.
While I might take issue with shutting down a program to make a point, I grew up as a Jewish guy in the 1980s and faced racism and bullying on the regular. It truly made my life a living hell sometimes. As an adult, I've had to deal with things like openly racist co-workers. Now of course there's all the recent suggestions that I'm enabling genocide somewhere just by _being_ Jewish and/or for supporting Israel. Whenever someone says something like "The Jews...", it's probably racism. It feels like it.
In my opinion, the root of all these problems is a small bunch of bad actors who think it's okay to engage in antisocial behavior. They then convince others that it's okay to do the same thing, whether actively or by example. Society would be so much better off if people with antisocial tendencies could somehow be convinced to be pro-social.
Hoping to not get over political, but the western media is failing to separate the Israeli government from the Israeli people, the latter of whom have a sizeable portion that don't agree with the governments actions in Gaza.
It's sad and as you suggested, just fuels racism in the form of anti semitism. All it takes is one extreme to destroy an entire point of view.
Oh no, we can't do individualized learning in classrooms in 2024 because of resources and limited teacher support?
Could there be anything happening over the last four years that might change that balance in another four years?
This is bait.
The stark reality is that by the time this goes into effect the entire public school system is going to be struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing education environment with massive resources for individualized learning but a too slow institutional framework to catch up.
How districts organize their gifted students across geographic lines is like arguing about what color the Titanic is painted and if it might confuse orcas into bumping into it as the iceberg on the horizon gets closer and closer.
Humans lose their way all the time! Not all of them, fortunately; local extreme perturbations usually relax after some time, and merge with the general more-or-less-sensible background. (Not always, sadly.)
But "DEI" as currently implemented is either worse-than-useless virtue signaling (in corporate America) or the complete destruction of standards (in US schools and universities).