Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion DoE seeks equality in AP, gifted classes

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.