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    Joined: Jul 2016
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    The Seattle Public School District used to have an excellent gifted program that was designed by Dr. Nancy Robinson of the Robinson Center for Young Scholars of the University of WA. Robinson Center for Young Scholars

    The way it was originally designed by Dr. Robinson, SPSD offered a 3 tier gifted program:
    1) Academically Highly Gifted: Grades 1-12, 98th+ percentile in cogAT, 95th+ percentile in Achievement test ELA & Math. Full time, self-contained classrooms. Math is taught at 2 grade levels above current level.
    2) Academically Gifted (Spectrum): Grades 1-8, 87th percentile cogAT, 87th percentile ELA & Math. Full time, self-contained classrooms. Math is taught at 1 grade level above.
    3) Advanced Learning Opportunities: Grades 1-8, part time, in class enrichment.

    At some point in the last 3 years, option #2 and #3 were combined into a 2 tier system:
    1) Highly Capable: K-8, 98th+ cogAT, 95th+ achievement test, now offer "significantly accelerated curriculum" based on need
    2) Advanced Learners(Spectrum): K-8, 87th+ percentile cogAT and achievement, in class enrichment only.

    In the interest of equity, SPSD is now going through a district wide push to end the Advanced Learner/Spectrum program altogether, starting in elementary schools. One middle school is already moving ahead with the detracking starting in middle school:
    Seattle Schools End Tracking.

    Is this the beginning of a new nationwide trend or is this just for Seattle? How effective is in class differentiation anyway? Perhaps someone who has gone through such a gifted program or has a child who went through such a program can comment on its effectiveness so we can assess how much of a loss this is to the gifted children in SPSD.

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    It's happening in Maryland as well. Our school system is concerned because the magnet programs do not proportionally represent low-income students and some minority groups. While there has been talk about better publicizing these programs in neighborhoods typically under-represented, there is also lots of talk about eliminating them or drastically lowering the standards to be admitted. Some parents have written that the magnet programs are too expensive (due to an increased need for transportation) and that gifted students are already ahead and don't need any special treatment. We are concerned that the gifted programs may be eliminated in our area.

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    Val Offline
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    The de-tracking movement ignores the elephant in the room, which is that not all kids have the same cognitive ability. Poverty and stress make the problem worse, but dragging down the high-ability kids won't help the other ones. But I suppose that pretending it works serves a certain ideology.

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    I think the statistics on these changes would need to be carefully reviewed to determine how kids who were taken out of tracked gifted classes compare to kids who stayed in tracked gifted classes.

    To say the overall achievement of a general education classroom improves when you add gifted kids isn't a huge shock. I want to know how the gifted population fares.

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    Honestly no-one cares about the gifted kids. The assumption that having someone beside them who finds the maths absurdly easy will make a struggling student perform better is somewhat silly to my mind but it is taken as fact here.

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    We are not in Seattle, or anywhere close, but our district is obsessed with "equity" and throws around terms like "white privilege". They are closing down very high performing schools and busing kids long distances simply because having those schools in existence is not "equitable" (i.e. they are "too white" I guess). Meanwhile they are continually cutting special ed, nurses, support staff like psychologists, etc and giving themselves in administration very large raises. Superintendent is paid over $200k per year. How is that for equity?

    My kids have been in schools that do not track, and the whole class did the same work, and it's not a pretty picture. The district claims that everyone is working 1 year ahead in math and I'm sure it improves their overall scores, getting more kids into the "proficient" range, but that is still too simple for highly gifted students who are not going to show much progress from year to year if they start out high. In-class differentiation was an absolute joke. Teachers wanted so badly to believe that they were differentiating and make me believe it that they actually lied to me or withheld information about what my kids were doing. They seemed to resent the fact that I was asking for work for them at the correct level. One teacher even insisted that it wouldn't be fair to the other kids. Probably brainwashed by the administration about "equity". The simplest way for them to close the achievement gap is to bring the top kids down a few notches, especially White or Asian kids.


    Anyway, this report was done by the Fordham Institute about high achievers and whether they stay high achievers. It looks at NWEA MAP data. I am not sure how unbiased this group is (politically very conservative) but some of the data is interesting.
    https://www.nwea.org/research/innov...galleries/high-flyers-maintain-altitude/

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    Originally Posted by Val
    The de-tracking movement ignores the elephant in the room, which is that not all kids have the same cognitive ability. Poverty and stress make the problem worse, but dragging down the high-ability kids won't help the other ones. But I suppose that pretending it works serves a certain ideology.
    If we are talking about ignored elephants ...

    If scores on IQ tests had the same distribution for various income groups and races, there would be less resistance to using IQ scores or proxies to select students for gifted programs or selective colleges. But there are substantial differences, as documented by scholars such as Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen.

    It will be difficult to preserve meaningful gifted programs or honors classes as long as it is assumed that they must be demographically representative of the general student population.


    "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell
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    Originally Posted by LoveSunnyDays
    In the interest of equity, SPSD is now going through a district wide push to end the Advanced Learner/Spectrum program altogether, starting in elementary schools. One middle school is already moving ahead with the detracking starting in middle school:
    Seattle Schools End Tracking.
    From the cited article:

    Quote
    Some Seattle schools end ‘tracking’ in push for equity and success
    By Claudia Rowe
    Seattle Times staff reporter

    Dismal school results have persisted so long for many black and Latino students that some observers believe the problem is virtually unchangeable, due to a mountain of social, economic and historical forces no teacher can reverse.

    But a longtime educator in New York state says those theories are wrong, and her research is influencing teachers in Seattle. Specifically, at Garfield High School, where honors classes traditionally are filled with white and Asian students, while general-education classes are mostly black and Latino.

    “We reached a point where we can no longer just say, ‘Oh, well.’ The racial segregating that has happened, that’s very uncomfortable for us,” said social-studies teacher Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser, explaining a new plan to combine ninth-graders of varied academic records into what the school is calling honors-for-all English and social-studies classes this fall.

    The move, known as de-tracking, has startled many parents, who learned of it through a recent Seattle Times story on race and education. But teachers at Garfield had been discussing it all year, Neufeld-Kaiser said.

    Many were inspired by the work of Carol Burris, a principal at South Side High School in Rockville Centre, N.Y., who found that slower classes — and their reduced expectations — perpetuate low achievement.
    Burris is the author of the book "On the Same Track: How Schools Can Join the Twenty-First-Century Struggle against Resegregation" (2015).


    "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell
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    Originally Posted by KJP
    To say the overall achievement of a general education classroom improves when you add gifted kids isn't a huge shock. I want to know how the gifted population fares.
    In fact, the research suggests this oft-repeated truism simply ain't true. Studies of tracking, streaming and grouping tend overall to suggest - shock - that kids learn best when grouped with learners at a similar level and need. When you remove a layer of higher-performing kids from a class, the next level tends to improve their results noticeably.

    Sitting next to people for whom the task is notably easier does not inspire and motivate, it just depresses.

    If you've ever watched the escalating anxiety level of a 2E kid in a classroom where all the other kids are finding a skill increasingly automatic and easy, but your kid is still working just as hard as ever, and so increasingly struggling to keep up as the class moves on.... well, same effect, I would imagine.

    Teaching differently and using appropriate curricula to meet the specific needs of the learners is what ultimately seems to matter, in almost every study. In theory, you don't need to stream to do that: it's the content that matters, not the delivery mechanism. In practice, though, differentiating within a mixed class is rare, and has yet to be documented as happening in a substantial form that meets the requirements of differentiation's own proponents. Grouping of some form is the only practical way to put kids together with similar needs, so the teacher can spend their time addressing those needs.

    Doesn't seem like rocket science, does it?

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    Originally Posted by Platypus101
    Grouping of some form is the only practical way to put kids together with similar needs, so the teacher can spend their time addressing those needs.

    Doesn't seem like rocket science, does it?
    Since "differentiated instruction" can bridge any gap in ability or preparation within a class, we should abolish age discrimination in our schools and put children in grades 1 to 5 together in classes, at random. smile

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