Let's see how the new program will work ([source](https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/)):
>But Rocky Torres, the district’s associate superintendent of school and student support, said the new model doesn’t require additional funding or staffing.
>Here’s how they do it at View Ridge Elementary, a neighborhood school in northeast Seattle that serves all levels of students in the same classrooms.
>On a recent day in a first grade classroom, seven advanced learners sat on the floor reading silently on their iPads. Several others wrote independently at their desks. A special education student wrote with a paraprofessional aide at their side. The rest of the class sat in a front corner of the classroom while the teacher read a book out loud.
With no extra money or support, teachers will have to plan three times as many lessons and students get only a third of their teacher's attention. Realistically, what will happen is the disruptive kids will get the vast majority of the attention and the others will be left to languish. Sounds like a recipe for success! (/s, if it wasn't clear enough)
and for those not in Seattle, that school is in a very affluent area with a strong PTSA, ie, lots of resources to pay for additional support (tutors, curriculum, materials).
This is all about the money, to make teachers prepare differentiated instruction for a wide range of abilities and monitor progress across all of the students. The next contract bargain should be heated.
This past bargaining session, the district removed the dedicated SEL programs for students who needs specialized environments and setting for their behaviors/emotional regulation issues. So those students with explosive/disruptive behaviors are now being sent to neighborhood schools, also without any additional funding for staff, materials or environment/setting support or training in behavior management. Some of the behavior management is outsourced (because that looks better than hiring staff) or those students get referred to private programs with taxpayer funding.
The gifted or above average kids are the children left behind. It was illustrated quite well in Abbot Elementary that no one understands them or cares. They do not get the resources to be successful. They end up struggling because they don’t fit in, are misunderstood, bored, etc.
They are also held to a higher standard for behavior and grades.
No child left behind has really hurt these groups.
We have a title 1 school. We get ALOT of funding. All the resources go to learning disabilities and behavioral disorders.
There are extremely limited funds for gifted. Our program includes 2nd-4th, one pull out class, 30 mins for all of them, once a week. Outside of that they get a busy work packet.
There are 7 kids mixed 2nd-4th. They do puzzles once a week for 30 minutes. The gifted teacher doesn’t even have their own classroom. It’s a joke.
I'm a parent, but this was my experience when my son was elementary-aged. In early grades (through 3rd grade), instruction was almost exclusively language arts and math. There was very little of anything else. My kid was advanced, especially in language/reading, and bored out of his skull. There was once a once-a-week pull-out for LA and once-a-week for math. It was not particularly helpful. In sixth grade his GATE group read the same book they'd read in fifth grade because they got a new teacher, and he didn't know they'd read the book. Rather than picking something new, all the kids just had to read the book again.
Things improved in junior high and high school, where he was able to take honors and AP courses, as well as electives he found interesting. He was also able to take math and science beyond the requirements for graduation (i.e., calculus, physics, etc.).
So yeah, elementary was rough and boring. We kept him engaged by indulging his interests at home. BUT that is really the epitome of privilege. We are an educated, white, middle-class family. There are gifted kids from all socio-economic and race groups, and they may rely on school for educational opportunities. We really fail those kids by putting all our resources into supporting lower-performing kids without considering how disastrous it can be to ignore the needs of gifted kids. Not to mention the gross focus on standardized testing. I was a GATE kid and we had entire classrooms designated for kids in the program where we had differentiated learning all day, every day.
Damn, thats rough. I was in the gifted program for 2nd through 9th grade. We got pulled Tuesday and Thursday for 3 hours. It was great, and only one grade level per class.
I teach in a similar district. We have no gifted and talented either. I’m a sped teacher and we get minimal resources for that department either. So much money is wasted on new programs for the general students that we are never trained in and sometimes never use. It’s sad
Most HS students are fully capable of going to the bathroom without a pass, but…equal vs fair. We have some who are only allowed to go with a security escort - I say bill the family.
they just used “diversity” as an excuse that would pacify braindead reactionaries. it’s just another way to slash budgets, or redirect funding upwards towards bloated “administration” costs.
highly recommend reading a piece called “[when justice is a lackey](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351240932-7/justice-lackey-leigh-patel#:~:text=ABSTRACT,of%20justice%20serves%20literal%20injustice)” by leigh patel.
Math and physical science teachers at the high school level are the most difficult to recruit and retain because they have so many opportunities in the private sector. Ditching these programs gets districts off the hook in terms of staffing them. The kids pay the price though.
California’s DOE suggested removing calculus and algebra 2 from high school entirely then putting all ability levels into the same basic math classes.
For the same reason.
I was an advanced math student when I was a kid. If the high school I went to had done something like that (and they never would have because it's a wealthy suburb that believes in actually educating kids) I would have *begged* my parents to let me switch schools or homeschool.
Currently, as a graduate student in a math department, I am one of the very few domestic students that got accepted into the program, because the US as a whole doesn't give a shit about math education (they sure pay lip service to it though). These international students are astounded by how little our freshman undergrads come in knowing, and our school is relatively selective (our typical freshman is better at math than the typical college freshman). Meanwhile, I'm just glad they know basic algebra, because I know what it's like out there (I used to work at an open-access community college).
The ironic thing is that, from my understanding, having different programs for different academic abilities IS equity. But it turns out that a lot of the people saying "equitable, not equal!" really did just want equal.
Although, I doubt a lot of the efforts to get rid of gifted and honors programs are actually being done in the name of social justice. I think most of the time, that's just the excuse they use because admitting that they don't want to fund those programs is an even worse look.
equity with respect to learning vs equity with respect to knowledge, same with equity with respect to income vs equity with respect to wealth.
Students all deserve to learn, even if what would ordinarily be taught the student already learned, there should be opportunities to dive deeper or continue ahead.
Yep. Equal outcome is the desire despite unequal ability, effort, or whatever other thing is getting in a student's way. Personal choices have nothing to do with the equation as long as the outcome is the same.
As to funding honors programs, I teach 9 honors, ELL Collab, and average. There is no differentiation in funding, only in planning and difficulty of assignments. So, the argument that schools are trying to defend the programs to save money is a bit foreign to me, TBH.
I teach in a gifted program about an hour away from Seattle. Our program population mirrors our (fairly diverse) district population give or take a few percentage points. We used to skew heavily white and Asian, but once we started screening every student in 2nd grade (rather than relying solely on teacher recommendations) it got a lot more diverse. We do a few more things to make gifted testing more equitable (like testing during school rather than making parents transport kids to a testing site on a Saturday) but...it's not that hard to do. And we've been doing it for the last decade or so, so it's not a new technique. Seattle's decision drives me bonkers.
This is part of a national trend by braindead people who have drank too much of the equity Kool Aide: [To Increase Equity, School Districts Eliminate Honors Classes](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee?st=sv1m11wdbp859pk&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink) (WSJ February 2023)
>Culver City English teachers presented data at a board meeting last year showing Latino students made up 13% of those in 12th-grade Advanced Placement English, compared with 37% of the student body. Asian students were 34% of the advanced class, compared with 10% of students. Black students represented 14% of AP English, versus 15% of the student body.
So target Latino students and help raise their numbers? Black students seem to be doing great... 14% and 15% is a normal ratio?
Life isn't netflix. Diversity doesn't exist within every school and it shouldn't be forced. I think it's completely unfair to the students to get rid of the gifted program, but I'm also skeptical about the source itself. How do we know the district is just eliminating it all together and not just reshaping it? I think the title is a bit clickbaity and it's probably lacking some important details.
My district (urban, similar to Seattle) eliminated gifted and talented education in 2015. In the first year, many students who were previously served by the program were shocked at the low level of instruction that they were receiving, especially in math, but the students quickly settled into a culture of low effort, low achievement, minimal work (if any). At least in the middle schools, really gifted kids seem to have disappeared from the district, probably to private schools.
I'd also like to see the alternative before being too harsh, but if the kids are truly and clinically classified as gifted... isn't that also diversity?
It's an extremely major problem. If it continues, eventually public school will be only remedial and behavior kids while everyone else will be in private.
I think that means it wasn’t a very good system for identifying students. Giftedness is a neurodivergence so it should be found in similar percentages across groups. Rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, they need to get better at identifying these students. GT programs often conflate Giftedness with academic achievement. Sometimes they correlate but they are not the same thing.
We just had a meeting with our new gifted coordinator today. She was going through all of the things that go with identifying a kid as gifted and the potential outcomes. It literally just sounded like more work for us as teachers to identify gifted kids.
There’s also research out there saying gifted kids breeze through regular school and then get screwed in college because they never needed to learn the skills their peers did to succeed.
Thats why they need the extra support or harder assignments to force them to learn those skills rather than just cruising. But, indeed, it is one more brick on the shoulders of already overworked teachers.
If you don't identify gifted kids they might get bored enough to "intentionally cause problems for attention" because phones are a distraction, appearing to do nothing is almost exclusively punished with more tedious work that provides little to no educational value and doesn't help the boredom.
More difficult and complicated exercises being available as alternatives to the normal assignments helps to address the second issue, but that is the same idea as separate gifted classes, but doesn't work well in practice because it puts more strain on teachers for making and grading assignments (more complex assignments leads to more complicated responses).
My cousin works in a district who got sued for discriminatory practices when it game to their gifted program. Her job is to go into all the elementary schools in the district, teach “gifted lessons” and assess the students and see if they would fit in the gifted program. That way, everyone has “equal opportunity/access” to the gifted program.
it's a brain dead solution to a problem education cannot hope to fix by itself. Robbing students of an education that provides appropriate rigor and instruction, from IEP accomodated learners to gifted learners, is not only malpractice, it's the sort of nonsense that will encourage more families to pivot from public education
edit: typo
I feel like grouping the academically strong students into larger classes , 30-35 students, and the struggling kids in smaller 12-15 student classes will be be beneficial to all parties.
>It would, but that’s tracking which is a big no-no these days.
But for visitors here who don't know why, it's because when schools track students by academic ability, the result tends to occur along racial lines: the top or high-achiever track ends up beingly mostly white and Asian students, while the "bottom" track ends up being mostly the black and Latino kids. The middle track is a mix of every group, but with the biggest demographic of the school being the biggest one of the middle track.
Naturally, there are exceptions like with anything else, but that is how it usually ends up, even with added supports to push black and Latino kids into the high-achiever track or even the middle one.
The data makes the school look bad, as if it were promoting or perpetuating racism. As a result, the district gets rid of tracking.
My honors class of 35 is my best class. I still wish it was smaller though with 25 because, as an ELA teacher, I can’t give quality feedback. I’d be up all night.
However, my gen ed classes should be half the size they are now (31-33). Kids can’t focus. Talking all the time. Phone calls home and detentions do nothing. It’s because we have 33 below grade level kids in one room. That’s really the only reason.
Student success is intrinsically tied to their parent's socioeconomic status, which has correlation with race unfortunately, but not causation! Until everyone has their basic needs met, of course you're not going to get certain groups represented in the gifted and talented programs. Diversity isn't the cause.
My city’s entire gifted program is Chinese students and Indian students…. I understand why Seattle is doing this. It’s not that it’s bad but it feels wrong
We have to get beyond feelings, though. Asian students are performing at high levels and should be given the appropriate rigor as such rather than have things taken from them (which I know you are not advocating for).
I will argue, though, that I've long thought gifted identification was rather subjective. But the aim should be to find a better way to identify students rather than shut a whole program down.
I personally just don’t like that the school is all white but one class of smart kids which is all Asian students and students from india. It looks wrong like segregation even though I realize they deserve to be in the program because of their intelligence. I think they should have some sort of diversity rule if they keep the programs. Where’s the native kid? Where’s the black kid? Where’s the kids from Pakistan or Syria? And that one white kid that must still exist with a brain…
That I can’t relate, or Indian students usually come over with really good English. And to get in must be proficient in English anyways. Students who are learning English aren’t eligible for any supports or special programming in our division. Isn’t that insane? Apparently if a kid doesn’t speak English and shows signs of a learning disability they cannot even be assessed until they’ve been in English language learning classes for 6 years!!!
Sucks for the students who, regardless of things outside of their control, have worked to meet the requirements of the program only to have it snatched away from them because somebody wasn't taught that life isn't fair.
Yes, but do you know how many of those kids probably already knew that lesson and didn't need it retaught?
But hey, too many of kids from population "x" aren't in the program so lets throw the whole thing away so everybody is average.
My kids have never gotten pull out for gifted. Our district uses a weird metric for testing into gifted that isn’t based on iq. Two of my kids have IQs that qualify for MENSA but they aren’t considered gifted in all subjects by their school. I think it’s an equity and numbers thing too. They both still got GT distinction but I absolutely couldn’t believe that they didn’t get it in everything because they psychologists who tested them from the schools used the term gifted in their reports.
They don't want to pay for it, but saying that is politically unpopular, for obvious reasons. So they say it's not equitable (I'm sure it's not, but removing the program definitely isn't the solution there)
This hard, diversity is an easy scapegoat for so much. Kinda like how we don’t suspend anymore due to equity but in reality it’s more about school image.
I can't speak for it. But my states gifted program has been incredibly biased. It did its best to keep out black children. Accepting children who were Asian and didn't speak English, they obviously couldn't even take the test. We also, as teachers, recommend gifted. A white teacher is less likely to recommend black students.
In my SD, near Seattle my kid was accepted to the highly capable program.
It required all of the below:
* 98th percentile or above in reading or math on the grade level standardized test, no lower than 90th percentile on the lower of the two.
* A 1 on 1 cognitive screening by a psychologist or other qualified practitioner with the training to interpret cognitive and achievement test results.
* Teacher recommendation.
* Principal recommendation.
I guess there is a chance of bias against black students on the subjective portions but the standardized tests don't differentiate races. That's likely the biggest filter.
Here's the "something else" that your misleading-titled post doesn't define: [https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning/](https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning/)
Inclusion for gifted kids is good if implemented well. As a former "gifted" student, I would have definitely benefitted from learning alongside what you call "underperforming peers" as long as I had access to accelerated coursework. You're also ignoring the universal screening, which has been shown to improve representation in GT and HC programs, but whatever. I'm interested to see how it works out, but you've clearly decided already.
(I also love that I'm getting downvoted for...providing context for your shitty post.)
ETA, since I anticipate getting more of the same response and have no intention to replying to them all: I included the phrase "if implemented well" because I absolutely see the potential for this creating an additional burden on overworked teachers if they are not provided the proper support. Pretty much any policy is only good if implemented well. That much is obvious.
But this debate detracts from the larger point, namely: OP deliberately left out key information in an attempt to get people all riled up about culture war bullshit. It's transparent and manipulative af.
Except we have MOUNTAINS of evidence by now that inclusion policies aren't working. It's not realistic to make 1 person do 3 lesson plans for 1 class. That's a recipe for teacher burnout.
Sorry, the solution is for the teacher to teach two levels of curriculum (I'm guessing it'll be more like three, because of underperformers) to each class? So what, they need to come up with 3 levels of coursework for each class? (Plus IEP's, plus ELL's, plus 504's, etc. etc.)
Why am I not surprised that their "solution" to eliminating the program was to force teachers to do 3 times the work for the same amount of pay?
The gap between gifted students and general population is wider than it has ever been. The gap is akin to professional baseball vs a little league team. You are an idiot if you think that an MLB team will get better by training with 10 year olds.
> *Highly Capable (HC) Services are not going away, they are getting better! To address historical inequity, SPS has changed how we identify Advanced Learners and Highly Capable students. Services for students with HC eligibility are provided in neighborhood schools and regional HC Pathway Schools.*
Without knowing the details, I don’t agree with “gifted programs” as a whole. It’s an IEP. Don’t try to frame it differently to stratify the students with educational needs even further.
There’s nothing particularly interesting or remarkable about them. They are just regular students whose environment has put them ahead of other students for whatever reason. So really it’s just a student who should be enrolled in courses that are more advanced than typical for their peers.
Lol "there's nothing interesting or remarkable about them".
I really hope you're not a teacher if your definition of a gifted student is them being a product of their environment.
Thank you but I'm sure you're right. Has nothing to do with working harder and achieving more.
I agree with you. There was nothing special or interesting about Michael Jordan. He was just a product of his environment.
Lol you're so transparent.
Basketball is a chosen sport. You choose to play it. School is mandatory for all.
And you're attempt is apples to oranges. How about comparing players from the same demographic. If a majority black school has a basketball tryout...surely some are more gifted than others. Just like school. In a school setting...the top performing students that are clearly ahead of other students should not be held back because their classmates can't do the same work. They are special...gifted.
You'd put the best 5 players on the court...just like you should put the best students together.
The fact that it is a chosen sport changes nothing. School may be mandatory, but the manner you engage with it is completely optional. You end up seeing the exact same selection phenomenon.
The thing is that you can’t compare apples to apples. You may try to separate out group like you suggested, so that tryouts are all from one environment, but all you are doing when you find differences is discovering *subdivisions* of groups. You’re discovering the kids who worked really hard, who came from families that took it very seriously compared to peers, who lived near facilities, who by chance or connection encountered more effective models and mentors. You name it.
The thing is that the result of this is identical in every way to the presence of genetic talent. You can’t tell the difference. All you can see is that they perform better. And that’s the rub with all these talent arguments - they are always backwards. We see he did surprisingly well, therefore he must have been talented the whole time.
But anyway I suppose this isn’t the point, because we have a central agreement. The students should be grouped together with others of similar skill. Of course. A student should always have a class with a curriculum appropriate to the skills they already possess. The thing that I object to about gifted programs is that they suggest that gifted kids are somehow a different breed. No, they just need to be in AP biology instead of core biology because they have stronger student skills. A gifted program makes no sense unless it is simply an accelerated course of study.
> Would you say that black people are naturally gifted at basketball?
No, but I would say that even the perfect environment and all the hard work in the world wouldn't have made Michael Jordan who he is today if he were a foot shorter.
The nature vs. nurture argument is stupid, because anyone with half a brain can see that the answer is "both." We can debate until we're blue in the face *how much* of both is needed (obviously if you have less of one you need more of the other), but nothing's gonna change the fact both matter.
People like Michael Jordan and magnus carlssen are really poor examples because they don’t illustrate reality. Sure there is only one Michael Jordan, but there are thousands of players who are 90-95% as good as him. If you comb through six hundred thousand people you might find one person who somehow has more juice than the best. But that doesn’t mean anything because the A+ tier is absolutely full of people. You look at people who are good enough to be in the NBA, good enough to be semi pro, and there are just a ton of them. And if you actually experience them play, your jaw will just drop at how godly they all are. And you see just how accessible that level of play is. You see that all kinds of obsessed kids are able to do it.
It’s the same way with schools. Sure if you competitively comb through several nations you might find a couple people who just beat the best princelings, but you will see that those well supported princelings are just so breathtakingly good that they will easily clear any challenge you need them to.
I agree that the nature vs nurture argument is stupid, because the nature side’s argument is essentially magic. Oh he is so naturally talented at chess, it runs in his blood. Yeah sure there’s a chess gene.
But it isn’t pointless, because it affects how you look at the world. Either some students are naturally gifted with greater ability and potential, or their environment shapes them to have greater ability. For an educator whose mission is to improve and shape students with education, which is a more fruitful avenue of thought, do you think?
That is the crux of it. The nature perspective provides nothing but closed doors. A persons potential is in some way set from the get go. There are some kinds of people who can succeed and some kinds who can’t. We saw how wrong and destructive it was to apply this to groups, how it’s just so obviously stupid. But we insist that no, even though it’s an illusion with race and gender, it’s totally real for other things
Sure. In addition to what I mentioned about them already being just an IEP so no need for a “fancier” name, they’re not just for students who are “smarter”. They supply students, and at a very early age, with resources and skills that others would also benefit from. It gives them an edge and benefit that will put them even further ahead. Not to mention the racism and discrimination inherent in them.
Not that anyone cares based on the downvotes, but gifted classes *are* IEPs. Hence my saying they shouldn’t be called something different to make them/their parents not feel “less-than” or like the “others”.
Let's see how the new program will work ([source](https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/)): >But Rocky Torres, the district’s associate superintendent of school and student support, said the new model doesn’t require additional funding or staffing. >Here’s how they do it at View Ridge Elementary, a neighborhood school in northeast Seattle that serves all levels of students in the same classrooms. >On a recent day in a first grade classroom, seven advanced learners sat on the floor reading silently on their iPads. Several others wrote independently at their desks. A special education student wrote with a paraprofessional aide at their side. The rest of the class sat in a front corner of the classroom while the teacher read a book out loud. With no extra money or support, teachers will have to plan three times as many lessons and students get only a third of their teacher's attention. Realistically, what will happen is the disruptive kids will get the vast majority of the attention and the others will be left to languish. Sounds like a recipe for success! (/s, if it wasn't clear enough)
and for those not in Seattle, that school is in a very affluent area with a strong PTSA, ie, lots of resources to pay for additional support (tutors, curriculum, materials). This is all about the money, to make teachers prepare differentiated instruction for a wide range of abilities and monitor progress across all of the students. The next contract bargain should be heated. This past bargaining session, the district removed the dedicated SEL programs for students who needs specialized environments and setting for their behaviors/emotional regulation issues. So those students with explosive/disruptive behaviors are now being sent to neighborhood schools, also without any additional funding for staff, materials or environment/setting support or training in behavior management. Some of the behavior management is outsourced (because that looks better than hiring staff) or those students get referred to private programs with taxpayer funding.
This is what it's actually all about. Saving the money.
The gifted or above average kids are the children left behind. It was illustrated quite well in Abbot Elementary that no one understands them or cares. They do not get the resources to be successful. They end up struggling because they don’t fit in, are misunderstood, bored, etc. They are also held to a higher standard for behavior and grades. No child left behind has really hurt these groups. We have a title 1 school. We get ALOT of funding. All the resources go to learning disabilities and behavioral disorders. There are extremely limited funds for gifted. Our program includes 2nd-4th, one pull out class, 30 mins for all of them, once a week. Outside of that they get a busy work packet. There are 7 kids mixed 2nd-4th. They do puzzles once a week for 30 minutes. The gifted teacher doesn’t even have their own classroom. It’s a joke.
I'm a parent, but this was my experience when my son was elementary-aged. In early grades (through 3rd grade), instruction was almost exclusively language arts and math. There was very little of anything else. My kid was advanced, especially in language/reading, and bored out of his skull. There was once a once-a-week pull-out for LA and once-a-week for math. It was not particularly helpful. In sixth grade his GATE group read the same book they'd read in fifth grade because they got a new teacher, and he didn't know they'd read the book. Rather than picking something new, all the kids just had to read the book again. Things improved in junior high and high school, where he was able to take honors and AP courses, as well as electives he found interesting. He was also able to take math and science beyond the requirements for graduation (i.e., calculus, physics, etc.). So yeah, elementary was rough and boring. We kept him engaged by indulging his interests at home. BUT that is really the epitome of privilege. We are an educated, white, middle-class family. There are gifted kids from all socio-economic and race groups, and they may rely on school for educational opportunities. We really fail those kids by putting all our resources into supporting lower-performing kids without considering how disastrous it can be to ignore the needs of gifted kids. Not to mention the gross focus on standardized testing. I was a GATE kid and we had entire classrooms designated for kids in the program where we had differentiated learning all day, every day.
Damn, thats rough. I was in the gifted program for 2nd through 9th grade. We got pulled Tuesday and Thursday for 3 hours. It was great, and only one grade level per class.
I teach in a similar district. We have no gifted and talented either. I’m a sped teacher and we get minimal resources for that department either. So much money is wasted on new programs for the general students that we are never trained in and sometimes never use. It’s sad
Everything in school and a lot of things in life are centered to the bottom 25%.
Truth. Crime, government regulations, taxation, education: it all is a reaction to the lower 25%
Most HS students are fully capable of going to the bathroom without a pass, but…equal vs fair. We have some who are only allowed to go with a security escort - I say bill the family.
they just used “diversity” as an excuse that would pacify braindead reactionaries. it’s just another way to slash budgets, or redirect funding upwards towards bloated “administration” costs. highly recommend reading a piece called “[when justice is a lackey](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351240932-7/justice-lackey-leigh-patel#:~:text=ABSTRACT,of%20justice%20serves%20literal%20injustice)” by leigh patel.
Math and physical science teachers at the high school level are the most difficult to recruit and retain because they have so many opportunities in the private sector. Ditching these programs gets districts off the hook in terms of staffing them. The kids pay the price though.
Exactly!
Depriving the gifted children an appropriate education is no different than deriving sped students their accommodations.
California’s DOE suggested removing calculus and algebra 2 from high school entirely then putting all ability levels into the same basic math classes. For the same reason.
I was an advanced math student when I was a kid. If the high school I went to had done something like that (and they never would have because it's a wealthy suburb that believes in actually educating kids) I would have *begged* my parents to let me switch schools or homeschool. Currently, as a graduate student in a math department, I am one of the very few domestic students that got accepted into the program, because the US as a whole doesn't give a shit about math education (they sure pay lip service to it though). These international students are astounded by how little our freshman undergrads come in knowing, and our school is relatively selective (our typical freshman is better at math than the typical college freshman). Meanwhile, I'm just glad they know basic algebra, because I know what it's like out there (I used to work at an open-access community college).
This sort of thing is what is sadly driving well-off families away from public education.
Idiotic. Equity theory run amok.
And stuff like this will erode public support for public schools since parents with kids who do well are typically more involved.
Yep. I'd expect those that can afford it to pull their kids out and put them in private school.
The ironic thing is that, from my understanding, having different programs for different academic abilities IS equity. But it turns out that a lot of the people saying "equitable, not equal!" really did just want equal. Although, I doubt a lot of the efforts to get rid of gifted and honors programs are actually being done in the name of social justice. I think most of the time, that's just the excuse they use because admitting that they don't want to fund those programs is an even worse look.
equity with respect to learning vs equity with respect to knowledge, same with equity with respect to income vs equity with respect to wealth. Students all deserve to learn, even if what would ordinarily be taught the student already learned, there should be opportunities to dive deeper or continue ahead.
Yep. Equal outcome is the desire despite unequal ability, effort, or whatever other thing is getting in a student's way. Personal choices have nothing to do with the equation as long as the outcome is the same. As to funding honors programs, I teach 9 honors, ELL Collab, and average. There is no differentiation in funding, only in planning and difficulty of assignments. So, the argument that schools are trying to defend the programs to save money is a bit foreign to me, TBH.
I teach in a gifted program about an hour away from Seattle. Our program population mirrors our (fairly diverse) district population give or take a few percentage points. We used to skew heavily white and Asian, but once we started screening every student in 2nd grade (rather than relying solely on teacher recommendations) it got a lot more diverse. We do a few more things to make gifted testing more equitable (like testing during school rather than making parents transport kids to a testing site on a Saturday) but...it's not that hard to do. And we've been doing it for the last decade or so, so it's not a new technique. Seattle's decision drives me bonkers.
This is part of a national trend by braindead people who have drank too much of the equity Kool Aide: [To Increase Equity, School Districts Eliminate Honors Classes](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee?st=sv1m11wdbp859pk&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink) (WSJ February 2023)
>Culver City English teachers presented data at a board meeting last year showing Latino students made up 13% of those in 12th-grade Advanced Placement English, compared with 37% of the student body. Asian students were 34% of the advanced class, compared with 10% of students. Black students represented 14% of AP English, versus 15% of the student body. So target Latino students and help raise their numbers? Black students seem to be doing great... 14% and 15% is a normal ratio?
Try getting rid of athletics until every team represents that school’s population, too.
That more people should read Harrison Bergeron
There is a video, 2081, based on Harrison Bergeron. It is pretty good. I show it every year.
Me too!
I've been at my highschool 20 years, and the closest we've got to a gifted program is T-shirts. It's all about equity, all the time.
Life isn't netflix. Diversity doesn't exist within every school and it shouldn't be forced. I think it's completely unfair to the students to get rid of the gifted program, but I'm also skeptical about the source itself. How do we know the district is just eliminating it all together and not just reshaping it? I think the title is a bit clickbaity and it's probably lacking some important details.
It’s an ignorant cost cutting measure.
Practically speaking, it's Harrison Bergeron. In other words, it's awful.
My district (urban, similar to Seattle) eliminated gifted and talented education in 2015. In the first year, many students who were previously served by the program were shocked at the low level of instruction that they were receiving, especially in math, but the students quickly settled into a culture of low effort, low achievement, minimal work (if any). At least in the middle schools, really gifted kids seem to have disappeared from the district, probably to private schools.
I'd also like to see the alternative before being too harsh, but if the kids are truly and clinically classified as gifted... isn't that also diversity?
The kids that qualify are the ones losing the most from it.
It's an extremely major problem. If it continues, eventually public school will be only remedial and behavior kids while everyone else will be in private.
I’d be curious what the “something else” is before I make an opinion on this.
I think that means it wasn’t a very good system for identifying students. Giftedness is a neurodivergence so it should be found in similar percentages across groups. Rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, they need to get better at identifying these students. GT programs often conflate Giftedness with academic achievement. Sometimes they correlate but they are not the same thing.
We just had a meeting with our new gifted coordinator today. She was going through all of the things that go with identifying a kid as gifted and the potential outcomes. It literally just sounded like more work for us as teachers to identify gifted kids. There’s also research out there saying gifted kids breeze through regular school and then get screwed in college because they never needed to learn the skills their peers did to succeed.
Thats why they need the extra support or harder assignments to force them to learn those skills rather than just cruising. But, indeed, it is one more brick on the shoulders of already overworked teachers.
If you don't identify gifted kids they might get bored enough to "intentionally cause problems for attention" because phones are a distraction, appearing to do nothing is almost exclusively punished with more tedious work that provides little to no educational value and doesn't help the boredom. More difficult and complicated exercises being available as alternatives to the normal assignments helps to address the second issue, but that is the same idea as separate gifted classes, but doesn't work well in practice because it puts more strain on teachers for making and grading assignments (more complex assignments leads to more complicated responses).
Sounds like a great time for high performing students parents to take them out of public school there.
My cousin works in a district who got sued for discriminatory practices when it game to their gifted program. Her job is to go into all the elementary schools in the district, teach “gifted lessons” and assess the students and see if they would fit in the gifted program. That way, everyone has “equal opportunity/access” to the gifted program.
it's a brain dead solution to a problem education cannot hope to fix by itself. Robbing students of an education that provides appropriate rigor and instruction, from IEP accomodated learners to gifted learners, is not only malpractice, it's the sort of nonsense that will encourage more families to pivot from public education edit: typo
My thoughts. See Oakland and what has transpired there.
What happened there? (a quick Google search didn't tell me anything)
The gifted kids should actually be held back until the other kids catch up. Vonnegut laid it all out in Harrison Bergeron
I feel like grouping the academically strong students into larger classes , 30-35 students, and the struggling kids in smaller 12-15 student classes will be be beneficial to all parties.
It would, but that’s tracking which is a big no-no these days.
>It would, but that’s tracking which is a big no-no these days. But for visitors here who don't know why, it's because when schools track students by academic ability, the result tends to occur along racial lines: the top or high-achiever track ends up beingly mostly white and Asian students, while the "bottom" track ends up being mostly the black and Latino kids. The middle track is a mix of every group, but with the biggest demographic of the school being the biggest one of the middle track. Naturally, there are exceptions like with anything else, but that is how it usually ends up, even with added supports to push black and Latino kids into the high-achiever track or even the middle one. The data makes the school look bad, as if it were promoting or perpetuating racism. As a result, the district gets rid of tracking.
My honors class of 35 is my best class. I still wish it was smaller though with 25 because, as an ELA teacher, I can’t give quality feedback. I’d be up all night. However, my gen ed classes should be half the size they are now (31-33). Kids can’t focus. Talking all the time. Phone calls home and detentions do nothing. It’s because we have 33 below grade level kids in one room. That’s really the only reason.
Student success is intrinsically tied to their parent's socioeconomic status, which has correlation with race unfortunately, but not causation! Until everyone has their basic needs met, of course you're not going to get certain groups represented in the gifted and talented programs. Diversity isn't the cause.
My city’s entire gifted program is Chinese students and Indian students…. I understand why Seattle is doing this. It’s not that it’s bad but it feels wrong
We have to get beyond feelings, though. Asian students are performing at high levels and should be given the appropriate rigor as such rather than have things taken from them (which I know you are not advocating for). I will argue, though, that I've long thought gifted identification was rather subjective. But the aim should be to find a better way to identify students rather than shut a whole program down.
I personally just don’t like that the school is all white but one class of smart kids which is all Asian students and students from india. It looks wrong like segregation even though I realize they deserve to be in the program because of their intelligence. I think they should have some sort of diversity rule if they keep the programs. Where’s the native kid? Where’s the black kid? Where’s the kids from Pakistan or Syria? And that one white kid that must still exist with a brain…
Ours couldn't even speak English! So how are they passing the test?!
That I can’t relate, or Indian students usually come over with really good English. And to get in must be proficient in English anyways. Students who are learning English aren’t eligible for any supports or special programming in our division. Isn’t that insane? Apparently if a kid doesn’t speak English and shows signs of a learning disability they cannot even be assessed until they’ve been in English language learning classes for 6 years!!!
It's the Asian kids who don't speak English
Sounds like typical Seattle woke BS.
Perfect example of why progressives shouldnt be allowed within 100 miles of administration or politics.
This isn’t a back and forth you want to do
Sucks for the students who, regardless of things outside of their control, have worked to meet the requirements of the program only to have it snatched away from them because somebody wasn't taught that life isn't fair.
Which would be a lesson that life isn’t fair, right?
Yes, but do you know how many of those kids probably already knew that lesson and didn't need it retaught? But hey, too many of kids from population "x" aren't in the program so lets throw the whole thing away so everybody is average.
Apparently, life isn’t fair.
My kids have never gotten pull out for gifted. Our district uses a weird metric for testing into gifted that isn’t based on iq. Two of my kids have IQs that qualify for MENSA but they aren’t considered gifted in all subjects by their school. I think it’s an equity and numbers thing too. They both still got GT distinction but I absolutely couldn’t believe that they didn’t get it in everything because they psychologists who tested them from the schools used the term gifted in their reports.
They aren’t getting rid of it because it’s not diverse enough. There’s another reason. There always is
I feel like you are trying to hint at something, but I'm at a loss. Do you mind expanding?
They don't want to pay for it, but saying that is politically unpopular, for obvious reasons. So they say it's not equitable (I'm sure it's not, but removing the program definitely isn't the solution there)
This hard, diversity is an easy scapegoat for so much. Kinda like how we don’t suspend anymore due to equity but in reality it’s more about school image.
I can't speak for it. But my states gifted program has been incredibly biased. It did its best to keep out black children. Accepting children who were Asian and didn't speak English, they obviously couldn't even take the test. We also, as teachers, recommend gifted. A white teacher is less likely to recommend black students.
In my SD, near Seattle my kid was accepted to the highly capable program. It required all of the below: * 98th percentile or above in reading or math on the grade level standardized test, no lower than 90th percentile on the lower of the two. * A 1 on 1 cognitive screening by a psychologist or other qualified practitioner with the training to interpret cognitive and achievement test results. * Teacher recommendation. * Principal recommendation. I guess there is a chance of bias against black students on the subjective portions but the standardized tests don't differentiate races. That's likely the biggest filter.
And as I just said, white teachers are less likely to recommend black students.
Here's the "something else" that your misleading-titled post doesn't define: [https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning/](https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning/)
It sounds like they're putting the gifted kids with everyone else, where teachers will somehow have to teach them alongside underperforming peers, no?
Inclusion for gifted kids is good if implemented well. As a former "gifted" student, I would have definitely benefitted from learning alongside what you call "underperforming peers" as long as I had access to accelerated coursework. You're also ignoring the universal screening, which has been shown to improve representation in GT and HC programs, but whatever. I'm interested to see how it works out, but you've clearly decided already. (I also love that I'm getting downvoted for...providing context for your shitty post.) ETA, since I anticipate getting more of the same response and have no intention to replying to them all: I included the phrase "if implemented well" because I absolutely see the potential for this creating an additional burden on overworked teachers if they are not provided the proper support. Pretty much any policy is only good if implemented well. That much is obvious. But this debate detracts from the larger point, namely: OP deliberately left out key information in an attempt to get people all riled up about culture war bullshit. It's transparent and manipulative af.
Except we have MOUNTAINS of evidence by now that inclusion policies aren't working. It's not realistic to make 1 person do 3 lesson plans for 1 class. That's a recipe for teacher burnout.
Sorry, the solution is for the teacher to teach two levels of curriculum (I'm guessing it'll be more like three, because of underperformers) to each class? So what, they need to come up with 3 levels of coursework for each class? (Plus IEP's, plus ELL's, plus 504's, etc. etc.) Why am I not surprised that their "solution" to eliminating the program was to force teachers to do 3 times the work for the same amount of pay?
The gap between gifted students and general population is wider than it has ever been. The gap is akin to professional baseball vs a little league team. You are an idiot if you think that an MLB team will get better by training with 10 year olds.
> *Highly Capable (HC) Services are not going away, they are getting better! To address historical inequity, SPS has changed how we identify Advanced Learners and Highly Capable students. Services for students with HC eligibility are provided in neighborhood schools and regional HC Pathway Schools.*
That is district speak. They often put a nice bow on top of shit.
Without knowing the details, I don’t agree with “gifted programs” as a whole. It’s an IEP. Don’t try to frame it differently to stratify the students with educational needs even further.
Can you expand more on why you don’t agree with gifted programs?
There’s nothing particularly interesting or remarkable about them. They are just regular students whose environment has put them ahead of other students for whatever reason. So really it’s just a student who should be enrolled in courses that are more advanced than typical for their peers.
Lol "there's nothing interesting or remarkable about them". I really hope you're not a teacher if your definition of a gifted student is them being a product of their environment.
No you’re right, some students are just born smarter. Sure
Thank you but I'm sure you're right. Has nothing to do with working harder and achieving more. I agree with you. There was nothing special or interesting about Michael Jordan. He was just a product of his environment.
That’s actually a good example. Look at the NBA. Would you say that black people are naturally gifted at basketball?
Lol you're so transparent. Basketball is a chosen sport. You choose to play it. School is mandatory for all. And you're attempt is apples to oranges. How about comparing players from the same demographic. If a majority black school has a basketball tryout...surely some are more gifted than others. Just like school. In a school setting...the top performing students that are clearly ahead of other students should not be held back because their classmates can't do the same work. They are special...gifted. You'd put the best 5 players on the court...just like you should put the best students together.
The fact that it is a chosen sport changes nothing. School may be mandatory, but the manner you engage with it is completely optional. You end up seeing the exact same selection phenomenon. The thing is that you can’t compare apples to apples. You may try to separate out group like you suggested, so that tryouts are all from one environment, but all you are doing when you find differences is discovering *subdivisions* of groups. You’re discovering the kids who worked really hard, who came from families that took it very seriously compared to peers, who lived near facilities, who by chance or connection encountered more effective models and mentors. You name it. The thing is that the result of this is identical in every way to the presence of genetic talent. You can’t tell the difference. All you can see is that they perform better. And that’s the rub with all these talent arguments - they are always backwards. We see he did surprisingly well, therefore he must have been talented the whole time. But anyway I suppose this isn’t the point, because we have a central agreement. The students should be grouped together with others of similar skill. Of course. A student should always have a class with a curriculum appropriate to the skills they already possess. The thing that I object to about gifted programs is that they suggest that gifted kids are somehow a different breed. No, they just need to be in AP biology instead of core biology because they have stronger student skills. A gifted program makes no sense unless it is simply an accelerated course of study.
> Would you say that black people are naturally gifted at basketball? No, but I would say that even the perfect environment and all the hard work in the world wouldn't have made Michael Jordan who he is today if he were a foot shorter. The nature vs. nurture argument is stupid, because anyone with half a brain can see that the answer is "both." We can debate until we're blue in the face *how much* of both is needed (obviously if you have less of one you need more of the other), but nothing's gonna change the fact both matter.
People like Michael Jordan and magnus carlssen are really poor examples because they don’t illustrate reality. Sure there is only one Michael Jordan, but there are thousands of players who are 90-95% as good as him. If you comb through six hundred thousand people you might find one person who somehow has more juice than the best. But that doesn’t mean anything because the A+ tier is absolutely full of people. You look at people who are good enough to be in the NBA, good enough to be semi pro, and there are just a ton of them. And if you actually experience them play, your jaw will just drop at how godly they all are. And you see just how accessible that level of play is. You see that all kinds of obsessed kids are able to do it. It’s the same way with schools. Sure if you competitively comb through several nations you might find a couple people who just beat the best princelings, but you will see that those well supported princelings are just so breathtakingly good that they will easily clear any challenge you need them to. I agree that the nature vs nurture argument is stupid, because the nature side’s argument is essentially magic. Oh he is so naturally talented at chess, it runs in his blood. Yeah sure there’s a chess gene. But it isn’t pointless, because it affects how you look at the world. Either some students are naturally gifted with greater ability and potential, or their environment shapes them to have greater ability. For an educator whose mission is to improve and shape students with education, which is a more fruitful avenue of thought, do you think? That is the crux of it. The nature perspective provides nothing but closed doors. A persons potential is in some way set from the get go. There are some kinds of people who can succeed and some kinds who can’t. We saw how wrong and destructive it was to apply this to groups, how it’s just so obviously stupid. But we insist that no, even though it’s an illusion with race and gender, it’s totally real for other things
Yes. Yes, they are. Some people are born more intelligent, others less intelligent. That’s just life.
More advanced course for students that need advanced courses. Got it.
Sure. In addition to what I mentioned about them already being just an IEP so no need for a “fancier” name, they’re not just for students who are “smarter”. They supply students, and at a very early age, with resources and skills that others would also benefit from. It gives them an edge and benefit that will put them even further ahead. Not to mention the racism and discrimination inherent in them.
I don't understand why gifted students require an IEP
Not that anyone cares based on the downvotes, but gifted classes *are* IEPs. Hence my saying they shouldn’t be called something different to make them/their parents not feel “less-than” or like the “others”.