The recommendation from the New York City School District’s “School Diversity Advisory Group” has sparked a national conversation, one that’s erupted right here in the Seattle Public School District. The NYC advisory group claimed that the best way to desegregate NYC schools was to eliminate most gifted programs. In their reply, the National Association for Gifted Children pointed out that NYC’s history of using a single test “actually exacerbated under-identification.”
Denise Juneau, the new superintendent at the Seattle Public Schools, is also pushing to phase out selective programs for advanced kids although she’s currently being blocked by two school board directors.
Juneau called the HC classes “educational redlining.”
Let’s all agree that the demographics of most gifted or Highly Capable programs in the nation—or in Washington state—don’t closely match the demographics of the districts at large. For example, in Seattle, the stats look like this:
| Group | District as a whole | In the HC program |
| White | 47% | 67% |
| Blacks | 15% | 1.6% |
Asians are roughly proportional in their representation while Latinx and Native American are not.
I admit, the numerical disparity between blacks and whites looks damning. I’m sure it does in NYC, too.
And I bet a big chunk of the difference has to do with zip codes, which has to do with the historic effects of redlining, which we aren’t going to fix with HC education policy.
The biggest thing you can do to help your baby improve intellectually is to talk to them, one-on-one, looking them in the eye, making connections, responding to them. That’s how you build neural pathways and lay the foundation for language acquisition and verbal development—the kinds of things that get tested for HC programs. (No, watching TV or listening to the radio doesn’t accomplish the same things at all.) As I wrote for a different CSTP publication in 2016:
What’s the biggest difference between kids entering school from rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods? 30 million.
Not dollars.
Words.
Children in high income families hear 30 million more words than children in low income families by age three.
I would love to have HC programs working with community groups to meet with preschool parents at church lunches, tribal centers, play groups—anywhere we can get people together for 10 minutes at a time. Talk about building verbal skills. Encourage reading aloud, even to infants. Share inexpensive toys that build creative skills.
Meanwhile, Seattle parents of HC students have joined with the Coalition for Gifted for two years and more to push the Seattle Public Schools to change their policies in ways that would increase the number of minority students in the HC program. So far, the district has rejected all the proposed suggestions. Honestly, it’s disingenuous for the district to act as if the only way to level the playing field is to dismantle the program.
Across the country I see districts and states moving to universal screening and local norms to achieve a more balanced identification process for their local gifted programs. Researchers advocate for using local norms instead of national standards. In one study, “going from national averages to school-specific averages quadrupled African American representation, nearly tripled Hispanic representation, and consistently improved the likelihood for both demographics to be identified as gifted.”
Where has some of the push-back against eliminating programs come from in the national gifted debate? One source has been the author of Closing America’s High-Achievement Gap, Andy Smarick. In his article for The Atlantic, he concludes that the panel in NYC is “a welcome advocate for half of the equation—that ‘every single child’ means every single child.” But, he adds, policymakers around the country “should also commit to the other half of the equation—[giving every child] ‘the best shot at reaching his or her highest potential.’”
Another source of pushback against the call to eliminate programs has come from people of color who want their children identified as gifted and who want them to have the opportunity to take advanced classes. As Jason Riley says in his WSJ article, “Not All Gifted Children Are From Affluent Families,” NYC’s mayor Bill de Blasio is giving up on poor minority kids and blocking their path to the middle class.
Finally, there’s great article about research-based ways to close the achievement gap. It’s by Robert Slavin, Director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University and Chairman of the Success for All Foundation. His bottom line: “The gap is a problem we can solve, if we decide to do so.”
Mark, it sounds like I might not be making myself clear. My top goal is making the playing field accessible to the whole student population. Seattle SD relies on parent or teacher recommendations and Saturday testing. North Shore SD moved to universal screening at school during the school day and has increased the number of minority students in their HC program.
States like Florida and Illinois are now using local norms to scoop the top students at their districts into the HC/gifted programs, never mind how they compare to national norms.
My dream goal is taking the show in the road to parents of preschoolers. People think that the way to increase a child’s test scores is with expensive tutors. But the best ways to increase test scores don’t cost any money at all. Anyone can talk to their child more. Anyone can read aloud more. Anyone can turn off the TV and play with their child more.
As for what we can do inside the schools, the last article I cited has the best practical advice. We actually had Rolling Readers in our school for years–volunteers who came in every week to read with students one-on-one. It was a delight to walk down the halls every day and see retired people, Navy personnel, and high school students sitting in tiny chairs next to little children reading aloud to each other. Our scores went up dramatically as our behavior problems declined.
Incidentally, those higher achievement scores helped drive the higher numbers of students who took HC classes in our middle schools.
That does make more sense. I misunderstood your post as being more about what kind of work can be done outside of schools. I do love the idea of brining in community mentors to read with kids. Shifts in instructional practice are also key.
I do think that families have a critical role, playing with kids, reading with them, etc., and while I’d like to agree with you that anyone can read more with their kids, anyone can turn off the TV and play more with them, and while promoting these are absolutely worthwhile, many families experience barriers to even these things we might take for granted as simple.
Efforts toward leveling the playing field prior to K (the 30 million words) is a great approach, but that still leaves me wondering what schools can and should be doing differently once kids step through our doors (whether they have read 30 words or 30 million words).
If our success with kids is reliant upon what happens outside our school doors, not inside them, I can see why the baby might be going out with the bathwater. What sorts of things can we do in our classrooms to close the gap so that kids can be accelerated toward accessing HC programs, regardless of what they are or are not entering with?