DoE seeks equality in AP, gifted classes
by Joanne Jacobs
November 19, 2014

Schools should be allowed to place students based on academic achievement, regardless of the resulting demographics in various classes.

There are two seperate issues. If there is an issue with performance in certain groups that should be worked on but not just by putting people in classes they don't qualify for. Of course IQ and achievement are not the same thing so maybe better idemtification and support earlier would help.

Just a few off the cuff comments...

The middle schooler who was not able to get into the class she wanted was left out due to a teacher not giving her a recommendation. Her grades were fine. This is not a product of tracking, more of a discrimination. Much like many of us have been on the receiving end of when we wanted our kids to get some accommodations. Perhaps there was a set number of kids per class and they had to draw the line somewhere. To assume it was racially motivated is a disservice.

Secondly, this: “But,” he writes, “schools serving more students of color are less likely to offer advanced courses and gifted and talented programs than schools serving mostly white populations, and students of color are less likely than their white peers to be enrolled in those courses and programs within schools that have those offerings.”

Well, of course! I live in a poor district and let me tell you money is the biggest factor on what can be offered. That and high stakes testing takes resources away from everyone because you have to have the good test scores or else. Poorer districts can be disproportionately minorities. Our school district looks to me (via eyeballing a classroom) to be about evenly split between whites and minorities. In my case, our district is extremely small and extremely poor. My state and locality aren't fond of funding appropriately (not the kids' fault).

Third, if the schools would let kids take the classes they may want instead of saying no, the kids would be forced to sink or swim. You never know until you try. Assuming a child is not up to the task is a disservice to all. Sometimes you have to work hard to pass a class. Sometimes you take a class and say, "hey, this isn't for me." You really don't get that option to drop a class until college level. They won't do this because (circling back to high stakes testing) having a risk of a higher failure rating is not good for being able to have good test scores overall for your school.

Finally (I realize this is so long!!!) if there were resources to truly and adequately address different learning styles/paces for each individual, this would be much less of a problem. My kids are math whizzes. That doesn't mean they should be frustratingly held back to stay with the herd. Conversely, a child who learns things more slowly and needs more repetition should be able to have that too.

I don't have a problem with ability grouping so long as a student or a parent can intervene to get put in a different track.

As an aside, my 8th grader told me before that her and her friends are so anxious about college because they were constantly told to think about careers, taking tests to determine abilities/interests, etc. My state requires this type of thing as part of the curriculum. While I agree that one should ponder the great what if -- what do I want to do with my life? -- one should not be 13 and freaking out that you don't know what you want to be. I told her not to stress -- a large number of college students change their major in the first year or two. Obviously they didn't know for sure what they wanted to do either!

This article from the Atlantic is worth reading to understand this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...ay-segregation-in-public-schools/382846/

The article mentions one type of remedy I've long advocated:

"There are also other ways to open up higher level classes to all students without completely ending tracking, says Daugherty, of the South Orange Maplewood School District. One is to standardize the system for testing into advanced tracks, rather than leave it to students and their parents. A few years ago, the district required all freshmen to take the AP English qualifying exam—and then followed up with the students who did well but did not enroll. Instead of making the test optional, favoring students and parents who are assertive and knowledgeable about the system, this system can help identify innate talent, the theory goes."

Indeed, that's the major problem. As long as subjective review is part of the process, then bias, either conscious or otherwise, will play a major role in that process.

Of course, if you're a member of the privileged group, and you want to exploit it, then it's not a "problem," per se.


We met DD's principal when she first took on the job during DD's first grade year, and in that meeting, she said that, in order to be successful, kids today need to know what their careers will be before they finish xth grade (can't recall exactly, but I think x=4 or 5). Said principal had already introduced herself as someone new to the education field, from a marketing background.

That's how I know cognitive dissonance is a thing, because her head didn't explode.

Well, if you'd pointed out the cognitive dissonance to her, she'd tell you that that is of course the newest thinking in the brand new land of market driven education and that all of your prior experiences as people who managed to get an education and to be adequately successful, thank you very much, without locking into a career mindset at age 9 have of course no clue what they are talking about.

Pshaw! All the good-plated principals know that the really successful kiddies are interning in their summers at 6 in their chosen field! Child labour is the way of the future.

And on topic, I'd like to point out, as usual, that the composition of gifted classes that actually serve the gifted has no bearing on the experiences of 98% of the student population and is thus completely negligible for the purposes of discussing whether tracking or unequal access to higher level classes within any one school disenfranchise the non gifted low SES kids among the 98%, who may make up between 40 or 50 % of that population and up to 100% of a high poverty school.

Whoah-- indeed.

I will also say that WE have felt like salmon swimming up a swift stream when we tell our DD (3+y accelerated, and in that 'upper' track achievement-wise) that NOOOOOOO, she does not need to have it all "planned out" for herself at 15 years of age, and certainly didn't need to at 8 or 9. In spite of what the world seemed determined to tell her.

Chester Finn "is a former professor of education, an educational policy analyst, and a former United States Assistant Secretary of Education." (Wikipedia)

Punishing Achievement in Our Schools:
Advanced students suffer from the “disparate impact” of witch hunts by the Office for Civil Rights.
by Chester Finn
National Review
November 25, 2014

This is absolutely mind-boggling. If anyone needs a reason why one party should not be in power for too long, this is it.

If the DOE tried this at our schools, I would my children to a private school in a heartbeat, and I am sure that anyone who could afford to would do the same.

Does anyone at the DOE have the brains to realize this will *increase* segregation rather than decrease it? And as a result, put a greater number of poor students together in low-performing schools, making it harder for intelligent students there to learn the skills and discipline needed for college?

Article by outrageously biased source produces outrage. Nothing to see here.

I agree that the writer has some very serious ideological constraints that make him untrustworthy (e.g. "contempt for the constitution"). But that doesn't make him wrong about certain problems in the US education system (the stuff Bostonian quoted). We all know how our system punishes its most capable students ("no acceleration for you!"). Our schools also pretend that their weakest students aren't as weak as they actually are, and ignore the reasons for the disparities. Not that this guy is necessarily going to be interested in that last point; I don't expect him to be talking about IQ depression created by poverty and lack of access to healthcare anytime soon.

That said, we also have a lot of folks who don't like to talk about the fact that too many American teachers don't have a solid understanding of what they're teaching. You can't teach what you don't know.

We seem to have replaced meaningful approaches to addressing these problems with equity! policies, which mandate artificial "balance" into AP or honors classes or algebra for all in 8th grade. When unqualified students are encouraged or pushed to take honors classes, either the standard of instruction falls or, as a group, the unqualified kids perform poorly. For examples of the standard of instruction falling, consult any Big Education math textbook published in the last ten years.

And we end up with high failure rates on college math and English placement exams, high rates of remediation, and college dropouts, and everyone wonders what happened.

Saying that everyone should go to college sounds nice, but part of what's driving this movement is the outsourcing of skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the name of profits, the reduction of free high school voc-ed programs, and the lack of a living minimum wage. But why worry about any of this stuff when you can just fill out a form saying that your school has 15% group x students, and 15% of group x students are enrolled in honors trig? So what if half of them would learn more in a lower-level course? It's all about appearances.

So you end up with one group of students being underchallenged and undertaught, or another group being confused and presumably feeling like failures when the deck was stacked against them from square one. Talk about squandering minds across the board, regardless of how you arrange the board (even if you arrange it randomly).

The other side of this coin is top-tier college admissions arms races. Yes, these problems are linked. They all derive from the unfairness in our system that gets worse, not better, when we force artificial non-solutions into it. When everyone has to compete for increasingly scarce resources or jobs or whatever, behavior will become increasingly self-centered, and the people most in need of meaningful help will be least likely to get it. Thus, Muffy goes on a voluntourism trip to [insert exotic tropical poor place], thus ensuring that she will have great copy for her college essays. Meanwhile, kids in the inner city get thrown out of school and maybe arrested at age 14 for minor offenses that would earn Muffy a lecture from the principal.

I'm not saying there's a magic solution to unequal educational outcomes. I'm saying the opposite: the situation is extremely complicated, and fixing it will take a lot more than creating Equity! policies or claiming that Arne Duncan and our president are contemptuous of the US Constitution.

There should be equal access to advanced programmes. If your grades meet the criteria or are within the top x students for x places them you should get in.

Some may say the centerpiece and raison d'être for the article by Chester Finn is this 37-page document by Department of Education Office of Civil Rights dated October 1, 2014.

The document and a companion document also linked in the article reference disproportion (disproportionate, disproportionately, and disproportionalities) regarding GATE programs, honors and AP courses, and extracurriculars known to benefit college-bound students. A footnote states:

I say if you meet the requirement they shouldn't just have one or two sections of ap whatever that people are competing for a seat in the class ...if there are more that meet the requirements add another section...if not enough for a full section then fill it up with kids who have a high desire and were just at the cut off with the ability to place them in another class if that doesn't work after the first few weeks.

Two sides of the story:

Yes, there definitely is an issue with inequality in distribution of advance classes.

Now, are we going to make it so that football/basketball program have equal distribution of student bodies? GATE/ TAG admission is by exam which is the same as tryout for sports team. You are among the best to make the team, then, you get in. I agreed that there should be more resources for advcance classes and more open opportunities for AP classes for those who are able.

The problem is that too few low-income students meet the requirements for AP or Honors-level classes.

The problem is not that the classes use an application process and that there is discrimination in admissions.

There's lots coming out of the Dept. of Education that I philosophically disagree with. However, there's little that I see in a quick skim of the DoE memo or the consent decrees following the framework it establishes that really match the Chester Finn article in National Review. The main concern is equity of access and none of the cases have been about the DoE requiring a school to remove tracking or honor classes. I'll quote the criteria:

"While differentiation among schools in a district may serve important educational goals, OCR evaluates whether students of different races in a district are able to equally access and participate in a comparable variety of specialized programs whether curricular, co-curricular, or extracurricular. The selection of schools to offer particular programs and the resources made available for the success of those programs may not disproportionately deny access to students of a particular race or national origin. Also, the policies for recruitment and admission to particular schools or programs, both within and across schools, should not deny students equal access on
the basis of their race."


Note first that there is recognition that differentiation has legitimate purposes. When they identify racial disparities in participation they then.

1. Check that the criteria are neutral.
2. Confirm that the tracking etc. serves a legitimate educational purpose.
3. Analyze if there are other equally effective criteria that would be less discriminatory.

A sample outcome would be advising one district to uniformly apply its selection process for GATE programs and educate all the personal on the process so they know all the criteria or asking another to review whether there any racially based barriers in their advanced courses. Given discrimination in the past I don't have an issue with investigating whether unequal outcomes are racially motivated. Some kind of watchdog still seems necessary.

Well-stated, Benjamin.

When the lack of opportunity is the result of the fact stated by Val (that too few minority students can demonstrate their READINESS for such coursework)-- then simply providing them with those courses is not going to solve much of anything.

Slapping an AP calculus course into an inner city high school where the majority of students struggle to pass algebra I? WHY?? What on earth can that possibly do but convince already-struggling students that they deserve to be excluded because they lack ability?

Better to fix the structural problems that have resulted in that outcome to begin with. Access to coursework isn't the elephant in the room.

I wasn't reacting to the Chester Finn article but to parts of the DOE press release, such as this snippet:

"As part of the agreement, which the district agreed to enter prior to any OCR compliance determinations, the district committed to take specific actions to ensure that it is providing an equal opportunity and equal access for black students to participate in its college and career preparatory programs, in particular its advanced courses and enrichment programs, IB program, AP courses, honors courses, and dual enrollment courses."

While the words sound fine at face value, those of you who work in highly regulated fields immediately understand that the best thing for the school district to do is to lower the standards for the AP courses. The regulators have already presumed guilt, and they will be happy if the percentage of minority students increase, and they will be highly unhappy if the school district comes back with a "we reviewed our procedures and decided they are fine and non-discriminatory as they are."

Have you ever worked in a highly-regulated field? Because I have and do, and I immediately understand no such thing.

This.
Some have posited that the problem should be solved by making sure that the criteria are rigorous and objective.
Experiences in the various states of Germany (the country mentioned in the Atlantic article as having the most intricate and established tracking systems) have shown that the most rigorous and objective criteria are correlated with the best results but with the least SES equity. All correlation and no causation of course, but the few states where access to the highest track is almost equitable by SES are also almost two years behind according to the OECD PISA data.
Academic readiness is a problem to be tackled at pre-school level, not when the kids are 17.

The journey to academic readiness begins in the womb, with health care, nutrition, and third trimester speech all noted as positive environmental influences. Their lack, plus parental stress, are all noted as negative environmental influences. All of these are themselves influenced by SES.

Strictly speaking, it begins with parental education and maternal nutrition LONG before conception...I was looking at it from an education policy viewpoint. There are larger social issues education policy can't ( and IMNSHO, shouldn't, and shouldn't be expected to) tackle, but from preschool age onward, high quality compensatory education policies do have a good track record.

I have worked in two highly regulated fields, one involving licensed radio frequency communications, and currently in finance. You may want to give the docs another read.

Agreed.

Agreed. However, age of the mother, relationship status of the mother, birth weight of the baby are all factors in the child's future success, including academic and relationship success.

Do you have a source to share, which informed this belief?

Here is a source which does not seem to agree with your assertion:
and A high level of interaction and child-led exposure to academics can be provided outside of the context of a preschool program. For example, in a family environment, informal play group, etc.

No thanks. I don't see the value in trying to parse a DoE press release as if it were a policy document, for reasons that should be obvious (it ain't policy). And I'm certainly not interested in the low-EQ, un-nuanced, absolutist interpretation of a non-policy document from National Review.

Having worked for companies in both of those fields you mentioned, plus food service, I still find your observation that compliance audits are "guilty until proven innocent" to be incomprehensible. Do you feel the same way if, for instance, in the process of operating a motor vehicle, an officer asks to see your driver's license?

Yes, if parents are informed and motivated:

To Help Language Skills of Children, a Study Finds, Text Their Parents With Tips
By MOTOKO RICH
New York Times
November 14, 2014

We clearly see the world from different perspectives. I'm speaking at the macro level and you are speaking at the micro level. When the head of the regulatory department comes to me and says that the FCC wants to us to halt sales on a major product because they have decided a previously approved internal part now causes unlawful interference due to a changed interpretation of the rules, it is not in any way analogous to a traffic stop. It matters when the cost of fighting in terms of lost sales and legal fees far exceeds the lesser penalty they offer if we don't fight.


Anyway, this is getting off topic, so I will stop.

Yes I realised I was wrong. Well at least I wad only right if prior to that students had equal access. I am low income so I forget that the fact I had a good education offsets the income a lot for my kids. I can't always send them to stuff but I can discuss science and maths.

Eta. Although in the case being discussed it did sound like the decision was not made on grades.

I have always thought it would be fun to insist all sports teams be made up of an equal mix of low, middle and high performing players. Surely if it is beneficial in academics it should be beneficial in sport?

Well, there are the usual suspects, the abecedarian project, the perry project, all rather dated of course. The problem with Head Start results is twofold:
One, even if results are good in the short term, they do not last into third grade. Which begs the question: just what kind of school did the kids go to after Head Start? Four years of high poverty low quality schooling surely destroy any gains a kid might have made in one year of Head Start!
Two: what defines a high quality program? If you factor in SES composition, Head Start, like any preschool program designed for low SES children, CANNOT be high quality. For this, I refer you to "socioeconomic diversity and early learning" by Jeanne L. Reid, in The future of school integration. It's not just instructional quality or student teacher ratio.
Majority middle and high SES preschool classrooms can keep the average skills gap present at preschool entry (one standard deviation in language, three fourths of a standard deviation in maths) from at least widening. If you at least want to keep it that way, you have to make sure that children remain in in majority middle and high SES classrooms through out their schooling (which does not have to affect gifted programs, by design intended for 2% of the student population, at all). You will then not get equity in distribution by the time AP classes come around, but you will get better numbers.
You cannot get full equity unless you get perfect equity in both SES and intelligence of course. Khmer Rouge communism might get us there, nothing less. One would wish policy makers realized that.

LOL! Yes it would be fun to see the faces. I promise next time this comes up in real life, I'll try it out. Problem is, there is so much ideology in these debates, and these ideological folks just have no sense of humour...

Seriously, the one difference is that while most of us couldn't care less about raising standards for low skilled people in sports, we do all of us have a stake in raising standards in academic skills related to employment prospects. There may have to be some trade off.
It is related to the debate about how much inclusion of special needs children regular classrooms can take without damage to educational outcomes for the regular kids. I will of course work to have my youngest special needs child mainstreamed as far as possible, but I am perfectly aware that among those regular healthy kids, there will have to be those who could turn out to be the super qualified neurosurgeons my child needs to maintain his quality of life, and I would not want to disrupt their education in any significant way,

If you live in a country with Little League, you have seen this sports experiment. While it might be rather harmless in a sport like swimming, in baseball and softball, it is downright dangerous. (I realize that puffin was likely being facetious about the sports, but just a warning about doing this...)

Little League is a great place for kids to start, but for the most part, Little League is not good baseball/softball. In the last twenty years or so, some trophy hunting coaches realized this and decided to get together groups of travel players to play the "tournament ball" part of Little League - you see the 11 and 12 year old kids in Williamsport each year in the Little League World Series (and there are other World Series for other ages, held elsewhere) - with the goal of making it to the World Series.

The bad part is that to play tournament, you must play in majority of the regular season Little League games in your town league. Think about the older age groups - high school kids - and the mix of kids who just want some fresh air and to socialize in with kids playing travel and active in the college recruiting process. A few years ago, one kid ended up with serious facial fractures and she was rushed into emergency surgery. She is fine now (and in fact, attending an Ivy - very bright kid), but the point is, this is not a good experiment.

While I hear words like "toxic" for gifted kids in bad environments, typically mixing in with NT kids does not result in physical harm. Mixing gifted athletes and low ability athletes has some bad results.

I don't agree with mixing in low ability students with AP ability students, and we really don't see that happening where we live. There are plenty of very bright kids, and there are three other levels of classes (honors, college prep, academic) to serve the other kids. It will be interesting to see the average AP score at our HS this year, as they instituted a new policy of "take an AP course, must take the AP test". I think the percentage of kids taking an AP test boosts your HS ranking in US News and World Report. In the past, about half of the kids took an AP exam, and the average score was 4+. We'll see what happens.

Psychological harm is being discussed when a "toxic" environment is mentioned. Resources such as those found at SENG, Great Potential Press, Prufrock Press, and Magination Press - American Psychological Association (APA) are often brought to bear. Whether wounds are physical or psychological, there may be some which heal well and others which may have lingering effects.

With changes to AP, a year-over-year comparison will be apples-and-oranges at best.

At what point would you consider the disruption to their education to be significant?

Are you suggesting that children whose parents read to them and converse with them thereby aiding the child's ability to learn... should be subject to a type of sensory deprivation in preschool to assure they do not continue to learn... because other children effectively living with sensory deprivation at home... may gain compensatory benefits in preschool... and the ultimate goal is not the continued growth of each child but outcomes which are identical?

Are you suggesting that you would like to see things move in this direction? This was a massive genocide. Do you see gifted children benefitting from implementation of such measures?

Well, my personal frame of reference so far is a child with a major physical disability and (so far) an expressive language delay, but clearly bright and with an easygoing personality, so if I felt that a high achiever or even a gifted program was the right fit for his academic needs, I'd expect a program to work around the minor inconveniences a wheelchair or a walker and the need to catheterise himself at fixed initials would bring. Some of these children with language delays develop little speech, necessitating an iPad, some slurred speech, necessitating more time for oral contributions, which might make quick thinking and quick talking gifties impatient. I would not consider that a significant disruption, other parents might.
Locally, there has been a huge debate about a child with Down syndrome whose mother insisted on mainstreaming him into a high achiever program in middle school because that was where most kids from his high SES elementary school happened to be moving on to. The kid would throw backpacks and crayons, lie down on the floor and snore when not adequately stimulated, and was reading and doing maths at about a first grade level, which necessitated an aide in the classroom (30 kids) teaching him a differentiated curriculum at all times, except for the times when the aide wouldn't be there (roughly for one period a day) when the middle school classroom teacher would have been expected to come up with something on their own. The school refused, saying they were not adequately resourced and the proposed plan would be too disruptive. The debate went all the way up to prime time national television. I think in this instance the school was right.

In DS8s classroom, there is a kid with (diagnosed, but unacknowledged and certainly untreated) ADHD and most likely unacknowledged dyslexia, who has turned into the class bully. He was almost expelled in first grade for vandalizing school bathrooms, is disruptive every single day and influences other kids as well so that the whole class now has a reputation as a troublemaker class and occasionally shares punishments, even though there is clearly one ringleader and a few followers who manage to disrupt the whole classroom. DS happened to have to do a science presentation with him because on the day the teams were formed, DS was away sick and this kid was away doing detention. DS freaked out every morning while they had to do the work saying F never focused, never did a thing, making him prepare almost everything (poster, cue cards) himself, and when the were supposed to practice, he'd do things like throw down the cue cards, saying they had broken their legs or needed to go to sleep, when actually reading, reading so softly or badly that DS couldn't tell where he was at on the cards, or just run away saying he'd rather do maths now. Because of many disruptions, their presentation was moved up 6 (that's six) times, they were the last to finally be able to hold it to the class, and DS says no one could understand a word of what he read.
DS was a mess the whole time. They got a B for the teamwork part, DS got a B for his presentation part, kid F got a D, so DS got a B overall out of it, the other kid a C. I am sure DS learned a lot about how hard it is to work with a kid with ADHD, and I am sure the other kid could raise his science grade, but I am sure DS learned next to nothing either in academic content or in actual teamwork management or presentation skills. If I didn't need that teachers goodwill for subject acceleration and hadn't been in and out of hospital with my special needs youngest, I might have interfered. (All the work was to be done in school, no parent input, so we could nt have interfered without raising a major fuss).
That's what I think is unreasonably disruptive to the little learning even an HG+ kid can expect in an elementary classroom.
DS now says he wishes the boy were removed from the class. I am not that far, but think the parents must be forced out of denial.

I provided you with a source that states that as long as all aspects of high quality are provided (composition and instructional quality, among others), high SES children benefit as well and show continued growth. It also show that all kids show more growth in a classroom completely made up of high SES kids, which is why many high SES parents prefer private schools or public schools in low SES neighbourhoods. There is no free lunch, and there will be always some trade off if classrooms mostly reflect society at large. The question is, how much trade off does a society need in by order to maintain social cohesion and continued economic growth? Personally, And you may say somewhat selfishly, I believe that for gifted kids, the inherent sociioemotional dangers of languishing in a classroom without peers are too big. For, say, the top 25% or so of high achievers/mildly gifted kids in a regular mixed SES classroom, who would have, say,4 to 8 peers? Debatable.

Indigo, I am not sure what you are trying to do, but I am beginning to find it offensive.

I am trying to seek clarification on your post, and the relevance of those ideas to gifted issues.

Getting back to an earlier point I made, the outsourcing of manufacturing and other unskilled or semiskilled jobs has made this problem much more acute. Another part of it is that the jobs in those categories that remain here now pay below a living wage. This is all part of the education mess we have and drives the "everyone should go to college" foolishness.

and Some may suggest that "more growth" occurs due to appropriate level of support in the home. Rather than academic growth, intrinsic motivation, delayed gratification, and other traits which correlate with success being directly derived from the classroom experience alone, these may be developed and sustained outside of school. For example, role modeled on family.

Some members of this forum might wish to take advantage of a board feature. One might do this by following the following directions:

User list, click on first letter of user name, click on user, click ignore this user

If one does this, it might lead to not being as upset about what the ignored poster writes.

And please play nicely we don't want everyone who can confront us banned.

I was thinking April fools joke for the sports teams. Maybe a new ministry for sports equity. My kids are young so so far it is all fun type teams. Also they are fairly good at sport. I agree no-one much cares about the stragglers in sport but it is to the advantage of society that everyone find a physical activity they like and keep doing after school. Most people dont like things they are made to feel bad at.