I spent two years working towards a MS in Teaching Science. Oh, if only I had completed my student teaching prior to wasting my time on those courses. I found that I loved teaching bright, interested, well-behaved children who were eager to learn. I did not fancy trying to keep the class clown under control, nor dealing with disciplinary problems that took away from the lesson plans.
I had learned the myth of Individually Prescribed Instruction. Boy, it sounded great to me. You take a pretest, see what you know; you are taught what you don't know, and take a test afterwards to see what you learned. What could be better than that? (If it existed.)
A school is a building; a good school is populated with students who value education based on their parents' expectations. Placing predetermined mix of politically correct students together is not a recipe for success.
28
This is a very confused article. It would have us believe that high-achieving students who are bored in regular classes would be best served by being in more mixed-achievement classes. How does that work?
Also, not every student who gets a spot in NY's specialized high schools had a family that spent $1000s on preparation. I gave my son a workbook. I have no idea if he opened it. It cost about $8. You minimize the achievement of bright talented students when you perpetuate this myth.
Well, it looks like this initiative is going to barrel through despite the unfairness to some, for the advancement of others. I look forward to seeing how these lesser-achieving students do in these very rigorous schools. My son was not especially happy in that competitive atmosphere!
23
This issue is predicated on the provably false idea that "giftedness" exists or that merit can be assessed by standard measures. Brilliance takes as many forms as there are stars in the firmament, and all should be nurtured and celebrated.
Every policy matter in current discussion assumes that elite schools are really, really good and that they should be available to more students (or not, depending on whose point of view). The schools are not the variable. It is the selection of students that creates the appearance of excellence.
All of the calls to serve the "gifted" or stop dumbing down classrooms (lowest common denominator) result in concentrating traditionally able students from privileged or motivated families in some schools, while relegating everyone else to other, usually poorly funded, schools. This is one basis of the charter movement: Use devious methods to sort out the students most likely to succeed and divert resources to their service, usually at the direct expense of traditional public schools. It is a quietly vicious game played best by folks like Eva Moskowitz and her oligarch pals.
The only conscionable approach is to fund all schools generously and provide a small, differentiated classroom environment to all students, where the so-called "gifted" and everyone else can learn with and from each other. That's the promise of American education. The problem? it costs money, and we are sufficiently swayed by propaganda that we won't spend it.
8
Public Resources are better spent on the struggling students. They will be the ones whose difficulty will only snowball. The public has a choice to spend some money now or spend much more later as these children become unemployable adults with the subsequent consequences. I am not concerned about the excellence gap. These children can be encouraged to use their skills to help others through tutoring their peers or expanding into other areas such as social service, art and communication. Breadth and depth. As far as the specialized high schools, I am in full support of Mr. DeBlasio. A single test is custom made for the well connected. Sharing old test questions and enrolling in the best test prep with private tutoring and great question databases. Anyone who has had a child go through the college testing process knows the drill or learns it the hard way.
1
Where did the idea come from, and why is anyone taking it seriously, that every academic environment should reflect the demographics of its surrounding community? This has become the ultra-left mantra, but it really makes no sense!
21
alas, no matter how its painted, it is the absence of rigor that corrupts education...lower standards and clever devices for framing deficits in fundamental studies (reading, writing, arithmetic) while neglecting skills that facilitate learning (study habits) and learned exchange (rhetoric and argument) have spawned "innovation," and costly "programs" defined rather by their regular failure and discard than enhancement of opportunity and real academic achievement.
anyone who has spent some time in college and university classrooms has seen the results...read the papers, listened to halting oral presentations, seen "research" that begins and ends with google and the essential unfairness to those who, for whatever reason, know how to prepare and express themselves.
most distressing is to see this lack of solid skills of inquiry and expression, habits of mind, if you will, unaddressed in teacher training, practically in the classroom work of degree candidates and theoretically in the development of pedagogical method.
19
Kids who have a dysfunctional family and/or can’t speak English are disadvantaged from the get go.
How far are we to lower the standards for the average and smarter children.
We have encouraged the folks who came for a better life to speak their native language and mostly their children are not English proficient. How can they keep up with the average students let alone the bright ones?
Wishing every child has equal potential is silly but each child should have the opportunity to maximize their potential.
It takes Family and an effective elementary Education.
For many children that’s not reality!
10
Retired elementary teacher here, I truly believe that every elementary school from kindergarten to fifth or sixth grade needs to have a program rich in hands-on math materials, classroom libraries, hoards of volunteers who pull students out of the classroom for one on one reading tutoring, vocal music, instrumental band during the day, social studies (maps, geography, history) artists in residence from exemplary programs like COMPAS, a state wide arts organization that supplies week long artist in residence, and then of course a solid program for students with EBD emotional, behavior disorders and especially counselors and social workers in the schools. Why can't a district follow a family from kindergarten on with family counseling in the family's home? If each school has it's sacred traditions, for each grade level, it can radiate it's community from within, for example, fifth grade week long overnight environmental education, evening science fairs, evening talent shows, community dinners, 4th grade revue (where students get to create skits about their year in the classroom to perform for parents at the end of the year). Teachers need to teach a variety of different methods, math partners, book clubs in reading for the superior readers in the classroom, extra reading group time for struggling readers. In the end, it is the individual person who will decide to go to college and stay there. I was the first Norwegian to get a college degree in my family in 1981.
10
Ah the eternal search for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity. Pretty soon it will be just lower the standards. Lower the standards. Lower the standards.
I was a gifted kid. All those "disadvantaged" children were my bullies. I actually left my high school and went to a rich white high school with an IB program because "disadvantaged" kids beat me up and called me a sissy and made me feel like killing myself. My dad woke me up at 4 am to drive me to a bus stop for a 2 hour bus ride to school. After I turned 16 I drove my $300 1982 Toyota Tercel to class and parked next to Jags and BMWs so I could get away from.those "disadvantaged" kids.
I got into MIT because I was segregated away with other gifted kids. My sister stayed at the original high school I was supposed to go to and Those same "disadvantaged" kids sexually assaulted her and destroyed her self esteem.
In IB at the rich white school I was segregated from all those kids and allowed to learn. Its how I got into MIT. I earned my place in IB. I wasnt rich and I grew up around all other poor "disadvantaged" kids. They tortured me and I feel bad for any group of gifted kids who get the standards lowered to allow in the "disadvantaged" kids who probably just beat kids up instead of doing homework. If they would have done their homework and wanted to learn they would pass those tests. I took the SAT 3 times until I got a perfect score. Those "disadvantaged" kids would never even sit through an SAT-prep class.
61
Let's hear it for DAD!
14
I understand your relief at finding a place where academic efforts are celebrated, but I feel bad that your experience so alienated you from the people you left behind. I wish there were some middle ground here because the success of our democratic society really depends having an educated public, not just an educated elite. Maybe finding that middle ground is what this article is all about.
8
The real issue is that some people are smarter than others. The left can't accept this fact!
“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
19
Here's the flaw in your argument. The many of the people being left behind are not less smart. Instead, they come from groups with less formal education and, perhaps, from groups where education is less valued.
This article is all about providing opportunities so that these individuals "should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group".
3
@SBaldwin, at some point, individuals need to seek out their own opportunities, whether that means studying for the test, or doing homework, or developing relationships with teachers - the system cannot be solely responsible for "providing opportunities" when individuals are unwilling to work hard enough to pursue them. Hand-outs never amount to anything other than continued hand-outs.
When are we going to focus on making our elite students more elite?
31
Right?
And woe to the teachers who dwell beholden to value added evaluation systems that require them to move students at the 98th percentile to the 99th to show growth.
8
Over the past decade, many schools did away with admission criteria for AP classes. Any student of the correct grade level, rather than only students who received certain grades, could take an AP course. The hope was exposing lower achievers to AP classes would provide beneficial.
The results were unsurprising. More students took...and failed...the AP. The number of ones (lowest score) increased out of proportion to the other grades. Analyses showed minority and poor students performing the worst.
In other words, you can put anyone in an AP class but you can't make that person perform. If that person lacks the academic foundation or, dare I say it, intellect to take a rigorous course, you're not achieving anything. This is partially why many DC schools are abandoning their AP classes.
38
True but you should also blame Jay Matthews who nearly singe handedly created a ranking system for HSs that was almost entirely based on the number (not the pass rate) of AP offerings and students passing. Only after many years did his system track pass rate. And it still doesn’t weight pass rate very much. It’s all about how many top tier offerings there are and how many kids are taking those tests. These are the easy to track metrics, designed by an elitist.
6
High achieving Students should be paid like they are School Staff when they have to take classes with low achieving Students who, might be doing better when they have classes with high achieving Students.
The high achieving Students are like Tutors or Teachers, as opposed to being Students. It should not be the Student's position to bring-up the low achieving Student's performance.
35
As a retired school teacher who has taught elementary, middle and high school level classes at low income community schools, I have a recommendation. Recognize talent and accomplishment of students and do not force kids who are ready for more interesting work to go back and visit lessons they mastered a year or more ago, because the rest of the class didn't. I am not a fan of accelerating kids through grades, but I do think gifted and talented classes that are based on the child and not the child's parent is part of the solution.
35
Through nobody's fault, it seems like we are having this conversation among fairly similar persons in terms of socio-economic status. To really move forward, it is important to include poor minority New Yorkers to get their input and an understanding as to why we are at this juncture today. But at $65 month for a subscription, I guess I understand why such participation is limited.
3
It is a self-contradictory concept.
A number of studies have found low performing students tend to do better if given the advanced textbooks placement books. Reason? They are almost always much better written and illustrated.
I have too many times discovered that my ‘dumb’, ‘flighty’ or ‘spaced out’ students were quite bright enough to act the way they were expected to be—second rate. But given really good books and assisted and coached in teaching, in teams of three or four, the subjects to the class, often soon were very bright.
Let us ask the finest professors in America to work with the best illustrators (Maurice Sendak was one) and writers the textbooks and workbooks they wish they had when they were in first and second grade. And others to write and illustrate, video and record, the materials for each grade. And prepare superb
Pulitzer Prize author David M Kennedy wrote a U.S. History textbook of ~860 pages that every student in the physics class I took over in late February was under the desk reading. The slowest were in their second reading! Most in their third. Some in their fourth. I asked. The students said “He clearly wrote the book he wish he had in high school! It is nasty, yet fair. And has the interesting arguments of both sides on almost every issue. It is wonderful to quote them to your parents on almost any american history issue.”
26 of America’s finest adult writers and 5 illustrators wrote the first and second grade book they wish they had when they were in those grades. Wonderful!
5
This is doubling down on identity politics, rather than creating new approaches to promoting learning for ANY student who might learn differently. This is exactly the kind of action that will create resentment for the under-served students who are admitted with less rigorous criteria, creating more doubt among those who encounter them in the future, wondering whether the student really deserved their credentials. It's a destructive approach that needs to end. Rather than lower the bar for some students based on identity, focus on tailoring teaching methods, pace, and venues for every student, including those who are not academically as inclined, regardless of race, and watch how an individualized approach to learning lifts all ships.
22
My children both attended and graduated from excellent public schools with a high degree of diversity in both race and economic backgrounds. At the end of grade 6, my daughter won a lottery place at a specialized school and turned it down. She seemed to know wisely that it wasn't something she was suited for or interested in.
We as adults need to make sure our dreams for our children's future, success and achievement doesn't force them into boxes or feeling inadequate if they don't excel. Excellence is great, but so is having happy, well adjusted children who enjoy their school years and have learnt useful life and social skills, as well as having passing their courses. Any child can have a great future despite their academic ability or results. Forcing uniform values and expectations of excellence and elitism upon them, when they can thrive and be happy in a normal school setting, doing well or passably, is not helping them.
Let's focus instead on making every school excellent so every student can be motivated to learn, thrive and feel they have had an excellent education and experience.
9
What we need in this country is more whole grade acceleration for the truly capable kids. Since this is so frown upon by the egalitarians running our schools, the 1 or 2 kids who skip grades always end up being the lonesome few who feel out of place socially. But if we have a cohort of kids who do this together, they wouldn't be so out of place.
Whole grade skipping is what many of the top 1% kids can handle. We should allow them to move through our K-12 quickly, skipping up to 3 grades for those most capable. It's a waste of talent to let these kids sit around and be bored all day long, especially in the elementary years.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
We are doing our most gifted kids a disservice by forcing them to learn in lock step with their age cohorts. Imagine piano or violin teachers doing that to all their students, no piano or violin prodigy will ever be discovered.
The report "A Nation Deceived" and its sequel, "A Nation Empowered" gave very compelling reasons for grade skipping, including saving taxpayers millions by allowing some kids to move through K-12 much quicker.
http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/Get_Report.aspx
I am in favor of scrapping our mostly enrichment (rather than acceleration) focused gifted ed and allow gifted kids to skip grade instead. Either that or simply raise our expectations for all kids, move all math and science curriculum 1 year ahead starting in K. Even better, both.
12
I agree. In high school the students move through the different levels and the classes have multi grades in them. This could certainly work in middle school. If the students meet the prerequisites they should be able to take the class. In elementary there are some schools that have intermediate grades for the students that can't progress so this could also work for the ones that accelerate. We need a more accessible system rather than assuming intelligence is something we can identify early and easily as though maturity or family stress has nothing to do with it.
3
There is clearly a lack of diversity City high school basketball teams. Clearly the tryouts are unfair to students who have not spent a lot of time practicing basketball. We need another system to make sure we have integrated basketball teams,
74
I’m also conflicted. I attended a high-performing public school where the community valued education over all else. However, I had attended a daycare and kindergarten at my mom’s workplace. The standards were much lower, so when I finally enrolled in my school district for first grade, almost all my classmates could already read while I could only write and recite the alphabet. My first grade teacher created three reading groups named after different candies. I was in M&Ms, the third, remedial group. To the extent that I was even aware of the different tiers, I didn’t feel bad at all; the environment was non-judgmental. By the end of the year, I had advanced to the top reading group.
Our schools are segregated by the inextricably linked factors of class and race. Integrating students from economically depressed, poor-performing schools with students in middle class, higher performing schools narrows (and, after a couple generations, would probably almost collapse) the outcome; the poorer students catch up to their peers much like I did.
But my experience taught me there must be different tracks, a belief that was only reinforced as I got older and started outperforming most of my peers. My high school had two or three tiers for almost every subject. I was always on the “honors” track, where teachers could move quickly and students pushed each other to excel. Without the honors courses, school would have been a joke.
Integrate schools, but do not eliminate tracks.
29
I agree. The public school in the south Bronx where I grew up was not very good. My grandmother scraped together the money for Catholic school tuition for elementary through 10th grade. In every grade there were 3 classes and we were separated by aptitude. Teachers were able to design a curriculum that fit our abilities. No one was rushed to catch up or left behind. Kids that needed additional help received it without being made to feel stupid. And those of us who were more advanced were able to take advantage of a more rigorous curriculum.
I will say that all of us had parents and grandparents that were not only willing to pay tuition, but also involved in the church community and PTA. We were not rich kids (a few were upper middle class) and the sacrifices our families were making for our education was not lost on us.
Parental involvement and expectations count for a lot more than most of the social engineering programs created by the government.
17
Given how wrong Charles Murray is in The Bell Curve, his predictions about the achievement gap not substantially narrowing no matter how much money put in and the rise of income inequality are prescient. Lucky guesses!
5
He wasn't wrong in "The Bell Curve". That's why his achievement gap prediction came true. Facts are facts no matter how uncomfortable they are. The book simply presents the statistics, the numbers. As I recall, neither the book nor the author drew any conclusions as to why the numbers fell out the way they did.
18
Do these studies include Latino immigrants? Latino children born in the U.S. to immigrants? Latino children born in the U.S. to U.S.-born Latinos?
Each cohort is bound to have different outcomes. My high school was 11% Latino. Almost all were immigrants, and half didn’t speak English. Most of their parents didn’t speak English, had little-to-no formal education, and, like many of our immigrant ancestors, worked constantly to get by. The rest of my school was mostly second, third, and fourth generation.
These cohorts are apples and oranges. Moreover, Latinos are significantly more likely than their White peers to be immigrants or children of immigrants. Therefore, to compare outcomes of Latino and White students without taking generational status into account is a glaring flaw that will lead to counterproductive policies. Unfortunately, ostensible experts—and journalists—keep repeating it over and over and over again.
5
We live in a district where 15% of the kids are the children of low income/low educational attainment African American parents, and most of the rest are children of parents with multiple advanced degrees, often from one of the top 20 universities in the country.
All kids are mixed economically and racially in every single classroom through 9th grade.
By 3rd grade, less than 10% of the AA kids meet the minimum state standard in English Language Arts or Math. It just gets worse from there. Sitting in classrooms with engaged kids with rich home environments does not rub off. This is despite 4 months of black history month in every school; strong emphasis on black leaders, authors, music, etc; and every other attempt to make the kids feel better about themselves. Something else is needed, because this isn't working.
44
There is some old research that suggests the rub off effects only work the other way around, with 75% low social status and 25% high social status. (I‘ve seen that work and I’ve also seen that fail, btw.) But your point is s good one, that the “rub off” assumption/method isn’t sufficient. I could write volumes about why I think this usually doesn’t work. This isn’t the space for that, though.
7
Closing the achievement gap should focus on exactly that, bring the ones who struggle up, not bring the top down !!
This is reminiscent of giving a participation trophy to everyone, down playing achievements of those who can...
There is got to be a better system.
23
It’s about bringing up the strugglers AND the ones that are bored/need a further push. I heard of a school administrator saying, recently, that the way to close the gap was to do the minimum for the top kids (enough for their growth scores to still be positive and nothing more) and shift any/all resources to the bottom. It’s not really a zero sum game. People have to get past this idea.
2
Writing about a wealthy white suburban school district. Son recommended for advanced Chemistry and truly earned his seat in the class. Worked hard the first quarter to adjust to a truly wonderful demanding teacher and rigorous curriculum. Two thirds of the students were in the class due to parental demand not necessarily academic merit . Of course at the end of the quarter his section was changed to academic or regents Chem and the one third of the class who earned their spot had schedules disrupted to move to new sections with different teachers. Please don't engage in social engineering with my child's future. He was annoyed so the lesson for him was how to take your complaint up the chain of command respectfully but assertively. Ultimately nothing changed for him other than due to his diligence the powers that be acknowledged they made an error in judgement and it was modified going forward. These are complex problems that did not lend themselves to simple solutions particularly from individuals who do not have their feet on the ground. I'll give you a research study to say anything you want.
17
I once worked in a squeaky wheel district like that where it was all about parental social capital. The administration needs to assert bedrock hard guidelines on who gets in and how and who doesn’t. They obviously don’t care to stand up to the rich clientele to do that. Frankly it really doesn’t matter in a science class like that to the kid’s future unless that’s going to be his major, so I’m glad he had the chance to learn about negotiation, bureaucracy, and social capital nightmares at this age and with something that has only medium stakes attached to it.
2
1) The trending word now, is Brilliance. Excellence is a word that will not be used in the Future, Brilliance will be used instead. This article is not up-to-date.
2) Mixing Students of varying education levels together in classrooms was never good for the Valedictorian. In the Future, tracking will become very detailed and refined. High achieving Students will not be mixing with non academic low achieving Students. Also, high achieving Students will not be mixing with Students who are achieving more than the high achieving Students. There will be more of a focus on Brilliance. Finding those Students who are at the very Top, not just in the high category. And, putting more Students on The Brilliant Track. -----
There are not enough Brilliant IQ Scores coming-out of the Ivy League, for example. They are just remaining in the high achieving category, or worse. I say worse because Students get caught-up with many Ivy League groups and people who are not academic, certainly not brilliant, so their potential suffers. It is a shame.... "what could have been".
1
Thanks for the satire. It is very reasonable as a comment. In all seriousness to #2, however, research does show that ability grouping in math is necessary to some degree if the top-to-bottom variability of the class is too high. This is true even down to like 2nd grade. Less true, by far, in other subjects.
2
I remember when I was studying to become a teacher (which I gave up on as Bush's all children left behind came into law) and all of the exceptional education courses were for kids who had major disabilities and never high achievers. All teachers need to know how to handle a variety of students.
10
They do need this. But this is usually considered second order compared to just holding the ship together in the first place. There are two states in which you can have an IEP for giftedness. TN is one of them.
2
Why don’t we have an official program that tests students, flags the most elite of the elite of any background at a young age and then gets them into the best possible programs unless they decide to voluntarily terminate? True genius is not 2400 on the SAT. You cannot tutor it. It is there or it is not. We need to identify, protect and nurture our true geniuses. Leave No Genius Behind could be the program. I watched the recent streaming movie with a Jeremy Irons about the Indian scholar, a person with intuitive knowledge of the most complex math problems, in the 1920’s that lucked into being identified. We cannot afford to let those people get away.
We have loads and loads of really smart people. They can be our politicians and CEOs. They, late bloomers and people with above average drive, ambition and social skills can make their own way through the regular system. They will succeed. True genius is special. We do not get many shots at that asset driven by the low probabilities in the genetic pool.
9
This is the stated goal of many gifted pullout programs, id’ing such kids in elementary school. But yet there are a LOT of minorities that still do not get nurtured through those years in the ways necessary.
1
The teachers in math, science and written/verbal communication might have something to learn from football and basketball coaches when it comes to spotting and developing champions who win college scholarships and make it into the pro level.
12
About a third of physics, bio and math teachers have no college degree in the subject they teach.
I recall explaining terminal velocity to my science teacher in Grade 9.
10
The goal of the educational system is probably not to produce the 0.1% anymore than it to attend only to the bottom 25% or the top 7%. It is probably more of a girl to attend to lifting up everyone to their highest potential- whatever that may be.
In some localities the shortages in those subjects are actual better than they used to be, and still your data is true.
So one simple action Bill de Blasio could do: require all middle schools in the city to offer SHSAT tests and assign test prep resources via middle school libraries. His current plan requires a change in state law. Why not act?
11
Because using a single criterion is research-proven to be a wrongheaded way to go. It absolutely produces worse aggregate results. So widen the criteria set. And that’s what he’s doing.
Do we want to focus on the well prepared or those who are less prepared but have what it takes and perhaps more “intelligent?” For example, an Asian kid who is enrolled from a young age in a range of math classes and other extracurricular activities (perhaps cram schools) is probably more likely to perform well on the Specialized HS test relative to a minority (myself) student who is informed of the test and given a book to study the summer prior to the test Alas, I was admitted to BX Science and the rest is history. What about similar minority students who don’t have the resources and perhaps don’t make the cut off. Are they less intelligent (highly doubtful) just less “prepared”. Should the specialized HS seek out students similar to me and therefore seek out some of the best students or continue to base admissions off of a test that rewards those who are well prepared but may not truly have the goods.
1
There are numerous studies that assess the improvement students receive from 'prep' courses versus a simple review test. The expensive prep courses provide almost no measurable improvement over a basic self-study review for high performing students.
The students that truly lose out are not those who can't pay for prep - it is the ones with parents and teachers so disengaged that they don't even get a heads-up about a basic prep before writing.
4
Your argument and related studies suggest that early childhood and related activities don’t help to improve performance. I think the parents who enroll their kids and the industry that create such activities would dispute your assertion. Frankly studies have shown music lessons, chess and debate have a beneficial affect on outcomes. I believe it’s causation but your assertion is based on correlation. The marginal minority kid that isn’t enrolled in these activities that perhaps scores just below the cutoff may have more natural ability than the kid that did.
2
In the 1960s I did some of the earliest research on busing black children from Boston public schools to the white suburbs. The stresses (travel time, hostility, overt racism, increased academic competition) on the black kids were substantial, but even worse was the fact that the Boston schools had not remotely prepared their students to compete at the same grade levels as their peers in the suburbs.
Integration is a worthy goal, but it makes no sense to dumb down the entrance criteria for NYC's specialized schools in order to meet some politically-defined and arbitrary racial quota. Doing this will lead to failure for many or even most of the students so admitted, and will force many teachers to teach down to the lowest common denominators. Specialized schools will also need to set up tutorials and remedial classes for the "challenged" students, which will require more funds and personnel.
All of the above steps may result in a few more minority students making it into and through the specialized schools; however, many of these students will then be stigmatized as the product of affirmative action rather than having been selected on merit.
Unfortunately, de Blasio's plan will cause many parents whose qualified kids are shut out of the specialized schools to move to the suburbs or send their kids to private school.
The (very expensive) answer is not to water down the selection criteria for the specialized schools, but to improve all schools. Now that would be leadership.
49
Way back in the 1960s I did some of the earliest research on busing black children from Boston public schools to the white suburbs. The stresses (travel time, hostility, overt racism, increased academic competition) on the black kids were substantial, but even worse was the fact that the Boston schools had not remotely prepared their students to compete at the same grade levels as their peers in the suburbs: the Boston kids were almost certain to do poorly academically.
Integration is certainly a worthy goal, but it makes no sense to dumb down the entrance criteria for NYC's specialized schools in order to meet some arbitrary or politically-defined racial quota or balance. Doing this will set up for failure many or even most of the students so admitted, and will force many teachers to teach down to the lowest common denominators.
Another likely reaction will be for the specialized schools to set up a series of tutorial and remedial classes for the "challenged" students, which will require additional funds and personnel.
All of the above steps may result in a few more minority students making it into and through the specialized schools; however, many of these will then be stigmatized as the product of affirmative action rather than having been selected on merit.
The (very expensive) answer is not to water down the selection criteria for the specialized schools, but to improve all schools.
4
I agree. But I would also counter that the current NYC plan is not akin in precise terms to lowering the test syandards. It is an acknowledgment that they shouldn’t be using one single indicator. That has led rob gaming the system (do your think the $$ spent on test prep really mean those kids are certainly better than someone that gets a similar score and the same grades?). Hence the need to use more than one data source- such as the state tests. The rubric must be published though, and adhered to.
Progressives are becoming increasingly annoying with their diversity fixation. You cannot merely will equal outcomes between groups.
45
My younger son was in the elementary gifted program in our district, which is reserved for the top 2% of kids. The class inundates kids with busy work, and skips a year ahead in math. The top 1/3 of the class were bored to tears at the slow pace, but the remaining 2/3 could barely keep up. Adding kids who do not belong will only further slow down the class to the point where it no longer makes sense to have a gifted class at all, but I guess that's what our social engineers are after -- either everybody's gifted or nobody's gifted, equal outcome at all cost.
In our district the gifted class goes away in middle school and high school, and kids are allowed to self-select into advanced math and science(skipping 1 to 2 levels ahead) and honors lit. My older son who did not test into the gifted program in elementary school chose to skip ahead in MS math and science. Now in HS he is taking the same classes as the kids who were in the gifted program, and getting just as good if not better grades.
My younger son dropped out of the gifted program to homeschool because he was tired of learning nothing, and now aces all his classes in HS, incl. AP's.
Sometimes I really wonder about the point of gifted ed. Sounds like it's much ado about nothing. I think I actually prefer the self select by subject method in MS and HS. Why not do that in elementary as well? Just allow kids to skip ahead in math starting in K, and forget this whole gifted ed brouhaha. It's not worth it IMO.
8
The tiny nation of Singapore is widely considered to have one of the top Gifted Ed Program's in the world. They screen students in 3rd grade and start their gifted program for the top 1% in special schools 4th through high school. Their gifted program consists mostly of enrichment. In addition, they also identify a group of "Exceptionally Gifted Students" which by their definition is about 3 out of 100,000 kids. These kids are given a PEP or Personalized Education Plan.
One thing that the Singapore DOE highly emphasized is for parents to *not* test prep their kids for gifted program screening. They believe test prep will skew the results of the test and end up putting kids who are not really gifted in the gifted program, which will end up doing them more harm than good as they have difficulty keeping up.
https://www.moe.gov.sg/education/programmes/gifted-education-programme/g...
The book "Five Levels of Gifted" discusses the different levels of giftedness. A typical gifted class will have at least 4 levels of kids in it. In my son's gifted class which relied on a combination of CogAT and ITBS, you can quickly tell which kids were test prepped in. They were the kids who struggled the most and often ended up being the biggest trouble makers in class as they couldn't keep up. I've heard of kids who were retested up to 4 or 5 times by their parents until they got in. Why parents do this I have no idea. Retesting should not be allowed.
13
I would guess parents do this because the schools their children attend do not offer challenging academic work to students outside of the gifted program.
This is the case in my district, and it’s the result of conscious decisions made by administrators in the name of equity. Equalizing the percentage of students in each racial group who pass the state exams is the overriding goal of the system.
1
You are on target. In most of the US the pullout gifted programs are cruddy attempts to make sure certain families don’t bolt for other schools. They don’t have high impact. In regards to the disservice of having high variability of student levels in the same class- some schools just aren’t staffed in a way that they can solve this. Sometimes they are aware and it may not even be social engineering... the school may simply not have an easy way to staff the needs of high, middle, and low with the number of teachers they have.
3
My niece informed me yesterday that several of her working class friends at Santa Rosa High do not bother with more than one or take no AP class per year, because they cannot afford the test fees going to the College Board. The lengthy process to prove financial need means that at most they will get help for one test. This lack of access then negatively affects their college applications which are also expensive, as are the fees to take SATs and have them sent to multiple colleges. Many do not apply to colleges at all, and instead go to the excellent but oversubscribed junior college which takes 3-4 years to obtain all the classes for what should be a 2 year degree and then a stepping stone to state universities. These inequalities perpetuate and accentuate our rapidly dividing society of haves and have-a-really-hard-timers. True equality of opportunity requires that we invest in all our citizens, especially the young .
23
Really?
Appears your daugjter's friends do not listen to School Counselors or even College Admissions Officials.
1. if student qualifies for free OR reduced lunch, they qualify for FREE ACT/SAT which provides the student with college application fee waivers.
2. if qualified F/R lynch then qualify reduced AP Test fee; less than $20.
Appears more may be behind friends desire to not take AP classes.
20
What makes you think the daughter's friends have access to school counselors or even college admissions officials?
1
Back in the day where I grew up it was a big deal for the school to find money to pay for everyone’s PSATs for sophomore and junior year. But they did it. That school had better results because of it, I feel. Now, in Nashville TN this past year they paid for all the AP and IB tests. Remarkable increase in access and pass rates. Admittedly way higher overall number of failures, but only because access was up so much. This coming year- bad budgeting means that funds for these tests barely escaped the meat grinder and were added back only by the city council at the 11th hour. Funding this is one of the most no-brainer things to do if you can. It is a shame that it’s often axed in the name of other budget priorities.
2
Looks as though it goes to show us that we aren't all equal when it comes to intellectual endowment. Maybe instead of trying to pretend otherwise, we should figure out how to make our meritocracy a little more concerned with equal distribution of the rewards for work.
28
You start off by asking us to consider 2 fifth graders, one struggling and the other bored. And somewhere in this story you cite Mayor de Blasio as trying to do something to help the bored one.
Meanwhile you ignore the mayor's recent move to "reform" middle schools that have required students to achieve 3's or 4's on state achievement tests for entry.
The "reform" is that 25% of the seats will be set aside for poor students who score 1's (below basic) or 2's (basic) on state achievement tests.
In other words, his "reform" is to take the solution you're advocating and turn it into the problem you present.
Well done, all!
65
Based on the data in the article, I don’t think you can know the percentage of 1s and 2s that will result. I would contend it will be less than what you indicate. Your point is well taken nonetheless. No one is telling, yet, how low the bar might go. It will be important for a rubric to be issued that explains how the various factors will be taken into account. I’m. It sure if that will be forthcoming or is more like fairy dust.
I’ve always believed that the best school system is one where every school is a community school — one that provides enriching, challenging academics to all of that communities’ students, but also meets specific needs and interests of the community in general (whether that means day care, flexible hours, jazz band training, a specialty library collection, after-school chess, etc).
3
Amen to this! Balance us important and is usually only found when the PTO is also strong. But these schools are the lifeblood of America and their success or failure is ultimately to success or failure of America overall.
1
Liberals once exalted standardized tests as a sure way to evaluate merit. Unfortunately, now those tests fail to produce a racial mix that reflects the population. So, the tests are now racist, and racial groups are entitled to places in elite schools based not on individual achievement, but racial group makeup.
In aid, universities shift to "soft" admissions criteria, like personality, that just happen--just happen--to disadvantage Asians and, to a lesser extent, whites. Using a "holistic" method of selecting applicants is the perfect way to engage in social engineering. By definition, "holistic" requires intensely subjective determinations and no assurance of consistent application.
Why, in olden times, such determinations were used to exclude Jews. Imagine that! The left has come a long way, baby.
92
Not, I think, most liberals. Look at the comments in the Times -- most of us are pretty scathing about this kind of thing. It's to the left of what I'd regard as liberal.
17
I don't know what the test looked like, but my five year old daughter walked into a room with a stranger and answered some questions and apparently did a good job because she scored in the 99th percentile for both reading and math. and now she is at a selective enrollment elementary school in Chicago that is arguably the best in the state. . .and her class mates look almost nothing like her.. she is one 7 Caucasians out of 30 in the class.. .and in fact, the class roster looks and reads like the city of Chicago. . . I do not know if testing at age 5 is the right way to go, but somehow her teacher was able to meet each kid where they needed and now they all are headed to first grade, where they will learn 2nd and 3rd grade material - always staying at least a grade ahead. . . its one thing Chicago does right!
16
Same thing happened to my kids. They tested into the 99th percentile on an IQ test (don't remember the name), and landed in a public school classroom that I always called a "mini-UN". There were kids from Mexico,Iran, Egypt, India, China, Japan, Switzerland, etc (at least ethnically, but often the parents were recent arrivals).
But guess what? Did all that diversity count for our district's court-ordered desegregation? NO! They brought in some woman from Boston who ran her numbers based solely on black vs non-black. Since my daughter's class had only two African American kids, it wasn't considered "diverse" enough under federal law, even though the girl from India was actually darker than the African American girl.
The school system was forced to raise the % participation of African American students in the GT program. They did it by forcing most of the non-black students out of the program through various means like moving them to schools in such bad neighborhoods the parents dropped out of the program fro safety reasons. Many chose home school. With lower overall numbers, the same exact number of African American GT students equalled a larger % of the GT program and the federal govt was happy. Nobody did anything to increase the actual number of black GT students.
There's only one kind of diversity this country is interested in and it isn't the kind promoted by the United Nations.
16
This is good to hear because what is often considered the best school in IL is the Stevenson HS just north of Chicago and its demographics DO NOT look anything like Chicago. (Students also consider it to be a school with enormous pressure for success, while also being rewarding.) So if you are finding similar quality IN Chicago that reflects the actual demographics of Chicago, then I think that is wonderful.
1
Yes, Ann, diversity has come to mean something else. That is our experience as well. And it certainly never means diversity of thought. That idea itself is considered "toxic."
I never found it difficult to identify my best students. And the best example was in an accelerated history class. They were graded solely on their essays. And there were four that consistently stood out for the quality of their thought. Because the class was 50-50 black-white. we talked a lot about racial issues. And if you want to motivate Southern kids, that's a good way to go. Two of my top students were white, two were black. I wasn't surprised by the excellence of three of them. But a second black kid who wrote like English was a foreign language, consistently wrote with feeling and insight. Who knew? I was teaching a history class, not an English class. And this girl had what it takes. She got an A for the year, which surprised me but not her.
9
I am not criticizing the thesis of this story. However, regarding this study "nations that did less ability tracking until the ages of 15 or 16, keeping children of all abilities together longer, had higher academic performance overall.": there is no way to know if this is a causal relationship or not. Perhaps these countries had a more homogeneous population, fewer non-native language speakers, etc, to start with. Obviously, if that were the case, you would expect "higher academic performance overall," no matter how they did tracking, or not.
37
Is the higher academic performance referenced based on average test scores or the percentage of students with results in the highest score band? This makes a big difference.
1
I am quite doubtful of that study myself. Singapore has one of the most admired education systems in the world, and they take their gifted program very seriously. Kids are screened in 3rd grade and start the gifted program in 4th grade(age 9) all through high school, which to them ends at age 16. They also screen for Exceptionally Gifted Children, no more than 3 out of 100,000, who were given personalized learning plans.
The OECD study focused on countries that are already rich and relatively homogeneous, like many European countries, Japan or South Korea. It is not a suitable model for a multi-racial country like the US.
The most urgent need for acceleration for gifted kids is usually in the elementary years, when the disparities are at the highest. If these kids are not accelerated, they will end up stagnating, bored out of their minds, and tune out school early on. By high school or college when the real challenge hits, they often fall apart because they've never really been challenged. We need to let gifted kids accelerate from early on. Not waiting until 15 or 16.
4
Three points:
(1) yes, these countries do or did have more homogeneous populations to begin with.
(2) many countries in europe teach subjects such as math at one to two grade levels above where the US schools teach these subjects. It's not really difficult to see why they achieve more on standardized tests.
(3) many countries, especially in europe, do some serious sorting of students starting in middle school and not later than high school. French middle schoolers all take an exit exam that determines not only which high school they go to, but what they study there. The "Bac" is the French HS exit exam and there are about four different versions of it, depending if you are on the college track, technical ed track, or vocational/apprentice track.
After elementary school, your entire future is determined by a test in these countries. And in France you don't even get a HS diploma unless you pass one the "Bac" tests. No Bac, no diploma, probably no job. But their work force is highly trained and their college students are well prepared. Unlike in the US, where it's hard for chemical plants and auto repair shops to find HS grads qualified enough to be hired without remedial math and reading. Research how easy it is to find good hires for plumbers, welders, carpenters, etc. Many US high school grads can't do basic math well enough to find a job as a carpenter! With all the tracking tests in Europe, that sort of thing just doesn't happen.
7
Funny. The statement "The solution, according to Professor Plucker and other advocates, is to put high-achieving and high-ability students in advanced classrooms for their strongest subjects, but not for every subject." follows exactly what used to be done in New York City High Schools, at least in the 1950s through 1970s. It works. It is unfortunate about dropping SAT scores - They truely are an independent measure and of help for kids who are bored with class, and thus get poor grades, but actually know stuff.
19
Exactly. The current system has been hell on bright poor students because in the name of political correctness is eliminates an opportunity to have their intelligence identified or be presented with a challenging curriculum of the kind that wealthy students take for granted.
Sadly, the SAT has been dumbed down and no longer correlates highly with IQ, basically leaving intellectually gifted students -- whose academic performance in an ordinary classroom decreases above IQ 120 because of boredom -- with an opportunity to demonstrate their gift. Even a gifted student who gets straight A's can't do that because the standard high school curriculum is too easy; the kids who do best are those who have that 120 IQ, high enough to be smarter than most of the kids but not high enough to be bored.
11
Something like this is long overdue. Studies show that federal mandates to focus on the lowest-performing students harm the highest-performing students. And the OECD study doesn't account for countries like the United States in which there is enormously cultural diversity.
We need to find the most talented children in inner city schools and give them opportunities to study at an appropriate pace in an environment free from anti-intellectualism and classroom disruption.
At the same time, we have to identify those students early on. The Asian quota proposed by Mayor Bloomberg is the wrong way to go around it, since the students so chosen will be inadequately prepared and either fail in at the elite schools or drag the school down with them as the teachers are forced to devote their efforts to remediation.
Let us get to these kids early, but let us select them on the basis of actual talent and ability to work and behave rather than political pretense of the kind that gave us the disaster of open admissions at City College.
16
By finding exceptional students "early," you may miss those due to behavioral issues that are also exceptional. As an educator__and parent__it's important for the whole student to be educated. Some brilliant kids have poor social skills; instead of us vs. them let's develop inclusive communities of learning that give space for kids to bloom and excel.
1
Jill, my point was that you have to identify those kids early. Otherwise, by the time they're in junior high school, unless they're geniuses, they aren't going to have the necessary knowledge and skills to make up for lost time.
Of course if a student has been getting straight A's, he or she can probably still benefit from an enrichment program.
Kids who are bored often act out. Thus, we should be looking at the "bad" kids to see if the problem is being bored vs. being bad. I've worked with kids with behavior problems for many years now; when I get down to brass tacks with many so-called bad kids, I find a kid who needs more to do in the classroom. Often setting up a program to challenge them eliminates the "bad" behavior. Convincing schools to try this can be an act of God, but when it works, it works very well.
3
We keep trying to reverse engineer strong families through school. That will never, ever work. We need to work to build strong families, and schools will improve. As the family goes, so goes the nation.
65
I was bored in school all the way through college. I was first challenged when I went to law school. My children were very bored in school as well. I tried to enrich their lives with extra reading, museum trips vacations but this didn't relieve the school problems. AP programs were very light weight! My son dropped out at 17 and enlisted in the Army where he prospered. My experience in school personally and with my children is that teachers were focused on the strugglers and left the bright to do the lessons as best they could.
29
Yes, to some extent. But it's also true that some of these kids will succeed if taken out of a cruddy school or an undemanding curriculum. The key is to find out which ones and that can't be based on racial or ethnic quotas, it has to be based on aptitude testing, classroom performance, and teacher recommendations.
3
None of those engineered components to finding talent are in vogue, though. The charter movement has a tight grip and the vogue idea is that parental desire to move those kids needing something more will fix most problems. In practice this fixes it for some kids but not everyone. A technocratic solution is going to be elusive under the current vogue, though.