Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Math Test Doesn't Add Up

This is unquestionably the ideal and what I discuss in this post is relevant mainly to outcome, but I think a few cautionary points about the potential pitfalls are worth mentioning.

In reality, not all schools are good at identifying and remediating deficits and weaknesses in typical and/or accelerated students and their ‘typical’ students may only be achieving slightly better than passing scores. Within such systems, a student whose marks decline from ceiling scores amongst peers of his/her age to ‘above average’ amongst the new cohort (presuming scores/marks reflect level of competency/mastery), may come to look upon the grade skip as a disservice. Therefore, in practice, if an intervention (grade skip) is being contemplated, whilst it goes against the ideal, I would very respectfully suggest that it may be more appropriate (for their long term success) to ensure that the candidate is competent across the entire range of requisite skills, rather than just able to achieve an aggregate score above a minimum benchmark used to determine which student(s) in the older cohort should be held back.

DS successfully compacted four years of high school maths into six months in Yr 7, via an online maths program that allowed him to skip topics if he could demonstrate competency in all of the skills relevant to each topic in question. At the beginning of Yr 9 he was offered grade skips to do physics & chemistry as senior science subjects, but he turned this offer down for the reasons I described above - he didn’t think there were adequate assessment tools to confirm that he was competent in all the prerequisite skills and since he didn’t know what he didn’t know, he wasn’t prepared to take on the challenge if it might create gaps of which he could remain unaware.

In an ideal world, of course, every student would be educated in their zone of proximal development, and thus would be more likely to have a healthy perspective on imperfection (and grades as a possible venue for such). If that were the standing practice, skipping, compacting and acceleration would not have to be associated with negative impacts on self-perceptions tied to grade performance.

This is why, from a systems angle, increasing flexibility and normalizing the (excellent) list of placement strategies posted above ought to be advocacy goals.

OTOH, dstricts, schools and humans all diverge from ideal, to varying degrees, which is why placement decisions are ultimately highly individual, and the result of balancing the unique and holistic needs of the learner (and their family) within the practical constraints of a given educational ecosystem. I've mentioned before that in my FOO, my parents placed us with a target of about 1.5 grade levels -below- our projected true instructional level, mainly to compensate for asynchrony (in EF and social-emotional development, principally, and to some extent in fine-motor). Even when homeschooling, we have sometimes had to make tradeoffs between what a child might be capable of learning under perfectly scaffolded conditions, and what family resources (tangible and intangible) will allow for in the moment.

Which, again, is why placement decisions are ultimately individual.

I'll add, too, that in an ideal world, all students (not only those seeking acceleration) would need to pass the end-of-course assessment to proceed to the next level, and would be offered access to remediation for any skill gaps identified in the process. I highlight this item on indigo's list (in the converse order) because in most systems, there is no remediation offered for skill gaps, nor is passing the end-of-course test required to pass to the next grade. Passing the course is, but that may be based on a combination of effort/participation grades and summative measures. I.e., passing in all of your homework on time but failing all of the tests may still be sufficient for a D.

Yes, thank you, great post! I agree, the implications and ramifications of implementation in real life may be quite different that what "equal opportunity" looks like on paper.

My post highlights that gifted may routinely get less than a fair share of educational resources and support in the government schools.

In order to not veer off-topic, I created a new thread discussing: Rather than capping the growth of pupils at the top (for example by implementing a policy requiring burdensome math testing for acceleration), might more be done to bring up the performance of struggling students?

Here is the proposed CA Mathematics Framework: Mathematics Framework - Mathematics (CA Dept of Education)

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

If you don't have time to read the whole thing, check out lines 414-448 in Chapter 1. Pretty awful.

Please do write to mathframework@cde.ca.gov about the proposed math framework, which aims to remove accelerated math pathways altogether. It will be decided mid-May, so they need to hear from folks now. Here is the CA Association for the Gifted position paper, to help frame a response: Gifted and Talented Services in Mathematics: Expanding Equitable Intellectual Access

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14nFxtWHGDscJOi0fPOSkGPDKoUWFCWi6iYkDoV30JJw/edit

The original local newspaper article (not sure how long it will stay online) was posted here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WkByKwr5VvJhVI8xdWcHMTYBGrv_945i/view

I’m glad I’m not in PAUSD, or SFUSD, but this is now a California wide, and really nationwide, issue. I saw, and posted, years ago that the woke would come for the gifted. Even before that, with all our gifts, we failed to craft a narrative to justify supporting gifted children in schools. Now our problem is exponentially worse. Thank god for Davidson, and a few other organizations, but our battle is now even more steeply uphill. We are pretty much on our own. I don’t see public schools as offering much more than day care and woke indoctrination and shaming. Home school, or move to Idaho, Texas, Singapore, or Israel.

I believe the narrative to justify supporting gifted children in schools is this:

Yes, equal opportunity has morphed to equal outcomes, substantiated by a variety of questionable grading practices, and now is morphing into a concept of equity which contains a retaliatory and non-negotiable demand that anyone deemed to have "privilege" must be shamed, treated as less-than (aka pariahs), and denied future opportunity. A culture of work ethic, merit, math-facts, science, and correct/incorrect answers is quickly falling by the wayside, replaced with a preference for valuing feelings and raising the practice of taking offense to an art form.

Related thread:
Thoughts on work of Drs E Frattura & C Capper? (Sept 2020)
Link -http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/247587/Thoughts_on_work_of_Drs_E_Frat.html#Post247587

Back to the topic of this thread... the Math Test... Allowing qualified students to accelerate in math is one way to meet the needs of gifted pupils, providing appropriate academic challenge in their zone of proximal development (ZPD), and quite possibly also with intellectual peers.

Adding a link to a related discussion thread, pertaining to limiting student ability to move ahead in math, on the East Coast of the USA, in Virginia: Virginia Eliminating accelerated math before 11th