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I have worked through some of these types of issues on a personal level. I too believe that all students should have tons of opportunity and I also believe that if a parent makes a choice - whether that be a charter, private or other school - you are naturally going to have a more involved parent and more involved parents lead to more involved students and more involved students are more successful. I wish there was a way to duplicate that success for kids whose parents either don't have the ability too or choose not to make the educational choices for their children.

Having said that, I completely disagree with the fairness argument. It is not fair that everyone gets the same - we have that now with NCLB and that is inherently unfair because kids that are not going to get to the bubble are dismissed as well as those that are above the bubble.

What is fair is that everyone gets what they need and if my kid or any kid needs an accelerated curriculum, enrichment or more challenging curriculum, or learning in an enviroment with only his academic peers, so that he can learn work ethic, responsibility, study skills, goal setting, problem solving and sacrifice, then that is what is fair for him.

MoN - You have provided a nice summary of a prevailing view within my district. There is a term for this -- "social justice." Our kids' elementary school principal recently wrote her PhD thesis on this, and advocates a school model in which there are no "pull outs" or special programs of any kind that separate kids (beyond the classroom walls) by ability. She said to dh and I that teachers should be able to accommodate students at all levels, and pull-outs (for high or low achieving students) are a "crutch against bad teaching."

Our twins are in 5th grade and her model is working reasonably well in their classroom, which includes a wide range of abilities, from our kids who are hg+ to a child learning to sort objects by color. Thanks to Title I funds, there are two full time teachers in a class of 27 kids, plus various other adults including student teachers and aides.

I think it takes both exceptional skill and dedication (the latter amounts to something like a religious fervor in our school) to make this work, and it is hard for me imagine such success on a district-wide or national scale.

In fact, at the high school level, the inclusive classroom approach as currently implemented is at odds with state gifted statutes, and the district has been recently found to be out of compliance following a complaint to the state by a group of parents. This is a raging controversy here.....

I worked in GATE committee of our school district for a number of years. The term "Equal opportunity" sounds familiar. It was used quite often as a justification to scrap GATE program. Our school district used to have a standing alone GATE class in 4th and 5th grade (students above 95 percentile were identified and offered a slot in that class). "Equal opportunity" was used as a code word for something else, in our case, the personal conflict between the principal and the GATE coordinator.

I and other GATE parents fought long and hard to preserve the GATE program. The effort was not completely futile but only served to delay the demise of the program for a couple of years. At the end of it, I was so sick of the petty school politics I sent my daughters to other district. Many other parents followed. Now the GATE program in our district is only a shadow of what it once was. So sad.

Ahh yes, everyone should have an equal opportunity to get a lousy education. If your child isn't getting one, we need to make sure he can.

True. Why not? Good idea.
If nobody likes the gifted label that would make advanced learners just able learners. Does that make the lest able be called what?
(probably not something that would be very just or good for their self esteem and would probably make their parents worry needlessly).

Someone had posted a link on another thread:

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0697web/whiz.html

I especially like that the last paragraph in which Julian Stanley summarized why we, as a nation, needs to invest heavily on our gifted and talented kids. Using investment term, "over-weight" rather than "equal-weight".

Julian Stanley said:

"The fact is that the gifted pay off so handsomely for the country," he says. "The work of the world is done by routine people. I don't want to imply they're not crucial, but garbage collectors don't develop new garbage trucks. Those inventions come from talented people, especially those who have had education to develop their talents. Society develops enormously by capitalizing on their talents."

Here is another perspective on the social justice/equal opportunity issue. It is not the premise of social justice that *all* students have the same potential - it is that the *distribution* of potential is the same among different subgroups of the population. Take, for example, socioeconomic status as a variable. If you take two kids with very high academic potential, one from a well-off family and one from a homeless family, in most school systems the kid from the well-off family is far more likely to get gifted services for several reasons. Suppose then, the well-off kid is selected for services because of a parent request while the low-income kid does not. If this happens early on in schooling, consider the following two implications. In the TAG program, the identified and well-off kid learns critical skills by tackling true academic challenges and learns to self-identify as "smart," while the kid from the low-income family does neither. There is a feedback here for both kids that will amplify over time and will be hard to reverse later on. In our district, economic disparities fall for the most part along racial lines, so it is perceived as a racial issue as well. The differences may also be amplified by racial stereotypes held by the teachers the students encounter.

It is not clear that there is much possibility to change people's minds about this, as proposed above, or even that it is desirable. I have grown to have a lot of admiration for those I know in the school system who take the social justice perspective. They would agree with you that in a classroom of kids, each one has different learning needs that should be addressed, but they are working very hard to develop models to address those needs in an equitable way, a way that does not exacerbate the disadvantages an otherwise smart kid has no control over. They are by no means of a "no child gets ahead" mentality, but are in the trenches tackling multiple facets of a complex issue.

This is not how the real world works. People won't hire you or keep you as an employee if you don't pass whatever criteria are in place at work.

Would you put a beginning motorcyclist who can't afford a fancy bike in a class with people who've been racing bikes for three years and call it an equal opportunity? Of course not. He'd end up breaking some bones (not necessarily only his). This is exactly what we do when we put unprepared students into classes that they aren't ready for. And the "bones" that get broken are the standards (which change for the worse in order to get those unprepared kids to pass). Edumacators drive me nuts when they make these kinds of claims.

Another fallacy in Mr. Soifer's reasoning is that he assumes there are only two choices: run a computer programming class or don't. What about running two sections? One of them can do programming and the other can be an introduction to what computers are all about and what they do, with some Scratch programming taught at the end.

I understand that some people don't have the same opportunities that others do. It sucks. But we need to focus on letting people work at their levels (they'll probably learn more that way anyhow), so that they can reach a higher level when they're ready, rather than admitting children to programs regardless of readiness, and then patting ourselves on the backs because we "solved" the problem. Lack of opportunities results in part from lack of skills, and that problem won't go away when we put kids into programs they aren't prepared for.

I understand that these people may be trying to make things better, but they just make things worse. It's better to be honest and give unprepared kids work that is at their level and let them work at their own paces.

Consider the following logic:

(1) Intelligence is positively correlated with income and other measures that comprise SES.
(2) Intelligence is highly heritable. One finds estimates of about 75% in the U.S.
(3) Given (1) and (2), the children of high-SES parents are ON AVERAGE more intelligent than those of low-SES parents.

The idea that all subgroups have the same average potential is theoretically implausible, and it does not appear to be empirically true, either. There is an interesting graph
at http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/edunihilism-and-early-childhood/ in a post "Edunihilism and Early Childhood" by Matt Yglesias . Achievement test gaps between children of less-educated and more-educated mothers are largely in place by age 3. That does not prove the gaps are largely genetic, but it is suggestive.

Bostonian - 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. We can discuss the details of distributions, but that misses the point. 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.

Actually I think that a gap by age 3 is suggestive of environment. Remember that adoptive children's IQs follow their adoptive moms until they leave home. I saw huge differences in how I interacted with my son from birth to 3 just within my small local circle. Compared to how I treated my son, the other moms basically treated their kids like loaves of bread. Cute loaves that were very kissable, but...well, you get the picture. Of course, my son may have been more reinforcing of my interactive behavior than other toddlers. And as the children grew, I saw that they had certian advantages that my son didn't have - for example, they were excellent at waiting around, while my son had a rather short fuse for it, even though my son was in day care 20 hours a week since 7 weeks of age and did plenty of waiting there. You should have seen the pictures they took of him with sad, saucer-like eyes staring off vacantly into space. "Look that this adorable picture we took of your adorable boy, Mrs. Grinity!" ((shudder))

Sorry that I have no point here - just to say that I think both Genetics and Environment (including prenatal) have an effect on IQ in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Breastfeeding, for example, does increase IQ IF the child has a varient of genetics that allows BF to increase IQ. Chronic stress probably feeds back to the genome and turns off certian genes for 'relaxed exploration of the environment' that would normally be on.

One can think of lots of things that would prevent a child from reaching the upper level of their genetic potential range. Certian genes probaly protect one from particular environmental challenges. Isn't the whole complicated ball of wax amazing?

My guess is that all the current research is flawed in that so few people understand that for a positive reinforcer to be potent, it has to be potent to that particular individual. So putting a child in an 'enriched environment' and measuring that it didn't help is only strong evidence if the particular enrichments actually did provide positive reinforcement to that particular child. Not only positive, but more strongly positive than the other reinforcers in the environment.

Smiles,
Grinity

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.


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.

You've just described what seems to be one of the prevailing philosophies of the school district my DDs are in.

I agree this is a serious problem.



There is a large body of scholarly research on this - you can find some of it by doing a search on "unconscious bias."


Systematic testing may happen in some school districts, but not ours. Some (very little) testing happens, but only as a result of parent or teacher recommendation. Being a squeaky wheel matters.



Here are the arguments I've heard that say this strategy is unfair: the tests are not a perfect measure for what they're being used for. They can be gamed -- test preparation by a family with resources may get one child over the cutoff, while another is just under due to the environmental factors described above by Grinity. What if a kid is sick the day he/she takes the test? And a corollary to this is that the cutoffs are arbitrary from the perspective of which kids might benefit from the program. Is the kid in the 96th %ile really better off without the services those in the 97 %ile get? Not necessarily, it depends on the individual kids, i.e. factors beyond what the test measures....

I was gobsmacked. I had no idea the thinking was so extreme.

I was talking to two people about a classroom practice that claimed that narrowing the gap this way was great. Worse, the standard for "good students" was arbitrarily chosen and not even based on an objective measure.

I said, "But the good students didn't learn anything." One of the people I was talking to looked at me strangely and said, as though the point was obvious, "But they were already proficient." As though it was perfectly okay to let a group of kids sit in a class learning nothing for months. I said, "Well, what about becoming better than proficient? What about becoming outstanding?" No answer. Silence. Then I mentioned the arbitrariness of the standard and got more blank looks.

I'll add something else that I learned yesterday. I've learned that in public middle schools in California, you aren't allowed to go past geometry. I was told that there's no (standardized?) middle school test for Algebra II, and even though a public school can teach it, the student won't get credit for it.

(I hope I'm wrong; CAMom or anyone else, please correct me if I am).

Were these two people teachers?

Yes, they all were (the two I was talking to and the ones advocating the method of narrowing the gap).

This reminds me of the fish-feeding analogy that some corporate guy gave us when I was a manager at Petsmart. He was explaining why different kinds of fish need different kinds of food, but it works as well for kids and education. If you have a horse, a dog and a lizard, it doesn't matter what kind of food you feed them if you're feeding them all the same thing -- two out of three are going to starve to death. Feed them hay, the horse is happy and the other two die. Feed them steak, the dog is happy and the other two die. Feed them bugs, the lizard is happy and the other two die. Each one has to have his own diet in order to thrive, or indeed to survive. And you may protest, "but I feed them all every day! I give them plenty to eat!" but if they can't eat it, it is useless. Same with education.