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Seattle Public Schools shuts down gifted and talented program for being oversaturated with white and Asian students

https://nypost.com/2024/04/03/us-news/seattle-public-schools-shuts-down-gifted-and-talented-program/

I never wanted to start my day talking about politics. (Let alone race.) But after raising two DYS kids I’ve become radicalized (or conservative-ized). You wouldn’t have caught me dead reading the NY Post. I used to read The Guardian. But they’ve come for my kids. Its us vs. them. Gifted issues are like 100 (1000 for DYS) wolves and 1 lamb voting on what’s for dinner. We have to face the elephant in the hallway. Particularly vexing for California residents. The UC won’t even look at SAT scores. The UC has developed structural mechanisms to subvert Prop 209. Several local high schools individually have more NMSF than the entire city of San Francisco, or the entire city of LA proper, yet have trouble getting kids in to any UC. Parents are forced to send their kids far away and pay out of state tuition. I find myself talking with Nan Zhong, Edward Blum, Janice Fiamengo, and Richard Sander, and next Charles Murray and Bill Ackman. And reading substacks from Bari Weiss, James Lindsay, and Rob Henderson. Google any of them and you’ll see why my liberal friends won’t talk to me anymore. The ancient Chinese curse was “May you live in interesting times”. There’s a second one “May you have a gifted child.” The folks in Seattle need to read Facing Reality. All they’ve done is weaken a nation.

Just wanted to sound a wake-up call for the gifted. We’re on our own. Society is not our friend. As I pointed out in this forum years ago, we’re on a collision course with woke.

Well at least they're shutting down the whole program. Here, it's income based. Title 1 has GT programming. It sort of makes sense if you want to say that the lower SES schools have fewer high performing peers so special programming is needed. But this assumes that people won't move for the educational opportunities, either to private, a different district, or a title 1 school. Interesting to see how it plays out in a decade. But I can assure you that nobody can say that the GT program is full of white and Asian students here.

Yes, the same thing is happening to me. I've found that extremists on both sides stick to the facts if, and only if, the facts fit their narratives. In the case of education, arguments against biased college admissions policies and in favor of the abilities of very bright kids have evidence to back them up. So the right mostly sticks to facts in these areas because they don't have to lie. The left lies its way through every challenge.

One of my kids took two AP English classes and never read a single book. But the teachers did focus on "annotating," which I vaguely remember learning in 7th or 8th grade as an aside --- as in, "write a note in the margin or use a Post-It note if you think something is important." My kids spent weeks on this in 11th grade (!), and the more you wrote, the higher your grade. My daughter tried writing, "I am annotating this photocopy," over and over, atter she ran out of related notes, and she still got an A. So that became her approach to annotation assignments.

MLK's I have a Dream speech was turned into test prep fodder: in line x, when he says y, he was referring to ... a) this b) that...." They never read any of his books, of course.

I complained, and the principal told me, indignantly, that the teacher was 100% in charge of what she was teaching and no one had any right to question her methods.

And then there was the long-term math sub who told the kids, "Honors students can teach themselves" while she did her knitting.

SAT scores way past 1500 don't seem to matter for college admissions, but I also wonder if it's really such a good idea to spend 90-100K on a college that pushes ideology over facts.

As for California, the state colleges and unis here don't have enough seats in courses that are required for a degree. So good luck getting the classes you need, when you need them. Kids end up studying over the summer. This means they might have to live away from home, which cuts into time for paid employment and thus forces many to pay rent. This was problematic when we moved here in 1996, and it's much worse now. Some students have to live in their cars at UC Berkeley because they don't have dorm space. Yet they spend tens of millions of dollars on DEI programs that include what are essentially loyalty oaths.

An unsurprising situation for someone in the far right tail of the distribution of a population which votes democratically. Unfortunately, the majority usually vote for their immediate benefit(s) rather than consider that many of the benefits they enjoy are the fruits of the creativity and efforts of the few in that right tail.

Unfortunately, I don’t really see a solution - it’s difficult, even for the gifted, to make headway, when we spend our time trying to be productive for society, whilst the slightly-brighter-than-average group who hold power spend all their time plotting on how to extract more.