Originally Posted by amylou
I was responding to another poster who suggested that those who promote equal opportunity think that *all* kids have equal potential, and I presented another perspective because the people I know who promote social justice do not think this.

Yet I've met many educators (not my friends; people on many committees and panels I've been on) who DON'T think the way you mentioned. I've been horrified at some of the stuff I hear, such as:

  • (In reference to pre- and post-tests of a certain skill) If you raise the scores of lower performers while allowing scores of higher performers to stagnate, you've narrowed the achievement gap, and this is great!
  • Basing entry to a class based on prerequisites (including passing a test) is elitist!
  • We need to make the introductory classes less demanding so that more students will take them!
  • We should encourage students who failed an introductory class to go into this discipline for a living! They just need opportunities to succeed, and they will!

What I'm saying is that there are a lot of people out there who do believe in ideas that are just wrong.

Originally Posted by amylou
It is just the kind of argument that you make above that leads to racial stereotyping in schools that discriminates against individual kids. There is a well documented phenomenon of average characteristics of a group being applied inappropriately to individuals. The strategies schools use for identifying gifted kids are far from perfect in this regard.

I'm interested; can you provide references for this?

AFAIK, all kids get the same test for giftedness. My kids aren't in public schools, so I could be wrong. But my impression was that everyone takes the same test at the end of 3rd grade or so, and the ones who get a certain score get into the gifted program. I agree it's not perfect, but it doesn't seem super-biased...except:

It seems reasonable to set the cutoff as a percentile rank for an area (say, per school or small group of neighborhood schools where results are similar, rather than all of New York City). Everyone who scores above some cutoff (~97th percentile?) is admitted to a local gifted program. The ones who are past the 99th should get services that are different from the ones in the 97th-99th.

This seems reasonable if your goal is to create an appropriate learning environment for kids who learn faster than the kids around them, and that's the top ~3% of the environment that they're in, as opposed to an environment that predominates on another side of the city, which they're not in.