In nearly every local system, white students are disproportionately represented, even though most gifted programs explicitly target students with natural talents and aptitude, which are spread evenly across racial groups and social classes.
That’s a bald-faced lie.
This isn’t a report, it’s a racist reportorial supporting the elimination of gifted programs, full of racial code phrases.
Experts say one factor that skews enrollment in gifted classes is intelligence testing.
Students living in poverty, particularly those whose parents are uneducated or speak English as a second language, are less likely to develop verbal skills measured by traditional intelligence tests. But that doesn’t mean they’re not gifted.
Assessments that measure spatial and mathematical intelligence as well as curiosity and leadership abilities are more likely to identify a diverse crop of gifted students, experts say.
Those aren’t “experts,” they’re test-bashing Marxists, and black and Hispanic supremacists. Because traditional intelligence tests are abstract, they contain as little cultural bias as possible. “Curiosity” and “leadership abilities” are subjective terms that are easily politically corrupted. Indeed, “leadership abilities” is such an established racial code term used by crooked college admissions officers as a euphemism for ‘utterly unqualified black or Hispanic applicant we’re letting in through affirmative action,’ that it came up in the New York Times’ Jacques Steinberg’s reports 10 years ago that became his 2002 book, The Gatekeepers.
Among them, they say, are testing and outreach methods that fail to ensure children from all backgrounds get an equal shot.
Paging George Orwell! What Sieff and his comrades really mean is that the programs are still somewhat merit-based, and that Sieff & Co. aim to gut them, in favor of a dumbed-down, racial and ethnic spoils system.
“In many ways, the district has been resegregated,” Superintendent Morton Sherman said.
Sieff repeatedly identifies meritocracy with “segregation,” in order to make the former appear repellently racist. He doesn’t quote a single “educator” or civilian who supports meritocracy, without which there can be no gifted program.
Intelligence tests have been tweaked.
Read: Corrupted.
The Fairfax County system and others in Northern Virginia have started an enrichment program that targets high-achieving minority students.
“Enrichment programs” are for mediocre students; not only do “high-achieving students” not need them, but such programs are harmful to gifted students. The programs are insufficiently challenging, and often entail additional hours of schooling for kids who have already left everything in the classroom during the normal school day, and need a break from schooling. Such “enrichment programs” are often geared towards black and Hispanic students, and are based on the influential but baseless notion that bombarding ordinary kids from those groups with more schooling will transform them into rocket scientists. It’s never happened, and it never will. But it will turn many kids against school, and anger them when, short of cheating, they fail to see the promised improvements.
Such programs are also disguised methods for pickpocketing predominantly white tax bases.
I have personal experience with “enrichment programs,” when my son, then in kindergarten was forced to attend one after school for 38 minutes, Monday through Thursday. In a couple of months, he went from loving school to becoming irritable and starting to hate it. Then his teacher informed me that he had tested one year above grade level, and didn’t need it. Over the school’s resistance—it got paid per head for every kid subjected to the “enrichment” each day—I wrote an administrator that he was finished with the program, effective immediately.
Among local school systems, Prince William County’s has taken perhaps the most aggressive policy on diversity in gifted classes. It mandates that the demographic composition of the gifted program reflect the overall racial and ethnic makeup of the school system. To do that, Prince William has amended its identification process to ensure that it finds gifted students from a variety of backgrounds.
That’s a dumbed-down, racial and ethnic quota system rigged to admit mediocre black and Hispanic kids, and deliberately excluding gifted white and Asian kids, i.e., the opposite of a merit-based gifted program. Not only is it racist, but it violates federal law, and is unconstitutional, in the bargain.
Fairfax’s “Young Scholars” program aims to find underrepresented minorities and get them into gifted classes. Some parents have voiced opposition to that initiative, claiming it shouldn’t restrict such services to a narrow population when thousands of students countywide might benefit from them. Still, Fairfax’s gifted program is overwhelmingly white and Asian.
This is designed to both confuse readers, and to make Sieff’s radically anti-merit position sound moderate.
While Sieff says nothing about hiring practices, his fellow Post political operative, Christy Goodman, launched a salvo to racially cleanse well-to-do Alexandria’s schools of white teachers last year. The powers of diversity had already succeeded at chasing so many white kids out of the city’s public schools that, in a city that is 56.2 percent white, only 25 percent of its school kids are white.
In the racial socialist playbook, after blacks have achieved some success in racially cleansing white kids from the public schools, the next step is doing the same to white teachers and administrators.
If Sieff and his comrades succeed at reducing gifted programs to a racial and ethnic quota system, they will demand the same of their staffing, which will mean radically incompetent black and Hispanic teachers, staffers, and administrators.
Since typical classes in most integrated public schools are radically dumbed down, gifted programs and magnet schools are the only thing keeping middle-class white and Asian kids in the public schools, because otherwise they will be robbed of a quality education, and their parents won’t stand for it. If Kevin Sieff and his comrades get their wish, they will run middle-class and even many working-class white and Asian families out of the public schools, turning those schools into black and Hispanic ghettoes. But what do Washington Post reporters and editors care about the public schools?
They don’t send their own kids to them!
P.S., Friday, November 11, 2011, 5:55 a.m.: Another affirmative action code word is “intellectual vitality.” Since under racial socialism real “intellectual vitality” spells social death, the phrase is an Orwellian exercise signifying intellectual conformity combined with membership in an unconstitutionally protected group.
Other such code words include “holistic” admissions rubrics, and the claim that students are sought who can apply ideas to everyday life, as if being on the slow side gave one the ability not only to understand an idea, but to better derive its practical applications to problems, than high-IQ students. (By that “logic,” we need to accept more applicants to engineering programs who are lousy at math.)
Note, too, the observation of an American Renaissance commenter:
20 — Detroit WASP wrote at 8:17 PM on November 7:
If there is no such thing as race, why are the measuring achievement by RACE? Oh, that’s right, when they bring up race, it is okay, when I do, I am a racist. I always forget that part !!!!!
As “Detroit WASP” observes, far from denying the reality of race, leftists violently deny or fanatically embrace race, based on expediency, because they actually believe in nothing.
Washington-area schools confront the ‘gifted gap’
By Kevin Sieff
November 6, 2011
Washington Post
The budding scholars in Alexandria’s gifted ¬classes are bright and curious enough to make any teacher beam, but these days they’re also an emblem of what the school system calls one of its greatest failures: a lack of diversity among the academic elite.
Most of the city’s students are black or Hispanic. Most in gifted programs are white.
This imbalance in classes tailored to gifted and talented students is echoed across the region and the nation, a source of embarrassment to many educators.
In theory, a racial enrollment gap in gifted programs should be easier for schools to close than a racial achievement gap. But in practice, experts say, there are many obstacles. Among them, they say, are testing and outreach methods that fail to ensure children from all backgrounds get an equal shot.
In Alexandria, where a bitter struggle to desegregate public schools ended a half-century ago, administrators have vowed over the next year to tackle the problem.
“It’s simply unacceptable,” said Gregory Hutchings, director of pre-K-12 initiatives for city schools. “These numbers tell us that we’re not serving all kids.”
At Cora Kelly Elementary School, Rosalyne Cameron teaches seven gifted fourth-graders, all of them engaged in the kind of high-level inquiry considered a hallmark of gifted education. Last month, Cameron launched a discussion about modern art by asking the class, “What is art?”
The philosophical volleying commenced.
“Anything can be art,” one said.
“No, it has to be beautiful,” another responded.
“It has to be beautiful and interesting,” a third said.
The debate continued, getting increasingly heated.
Four of Cameron’s students are white, two black and one Hispanic. In the city’s elementary and middle school gifted program, 61 percent are white, 17 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian.
By contrast, 25 percent of Alexandria’s 12,000 students are non-Hispanic white. About 5 percent are Asian, 31 percent are Hispanic and 34 percent black.
Alexandria is debating how to diversify gifted classes without sacrificing rigor. That pursuit could raise questions such as how intelligence is measured and the function of a program catering to the academic elite. “It’s all on the table,” Hutchings said.
While educators across the country face the same problem, Alexandria is particularly sensitive to racial questions. In the 1950s, the city resisted early efforts to allow black students into public schools, firing employees who disagreed.
As the school system today redoubles efforts to boost minority achievement, officials see the “gifted gap” as a hurdle to that aspiration.
“In many ways, the district has been resegregated,” Superintendent Morton Sherman said.
To get into a gifted class in Alexandria, the first step is generally a parent or teacher referral. Sometimes candidates are identified through high state-test scores. Then, candidates are typically given tests that measure intellectual and academic aptitude.
In recent decades, local school agencies and state and federal governments have wrestled with how to define gifted students. Intelligence tests have been tweaked.
The referral process in many districts has changed. But many gifted classes remain stacked with white and Asian students.
“It’s a national problem,” said Joyce VanTassel-Baska, an education professor at the College of William and Mary, “and in some districts it’s extremely hard to make progress.”
Hutchings, a product of Alexandria schools, remembers thinking that gifted classes were “off-limits.” As a black student, he said, he noticed that the classes “didn’t include any kids that looked like me.”
That was more than 20 years ago. Hutchings worries that not much has changed. He’s now crisscrossing the city, holding town-hall-style meetings about the gifted program and who might be eligible for it.
“There are parts of the city where parents have never considered that their kids might be gifted,” he said. “No one has ever told them. That needs to change.”
Among local school systems, Prince William County’s has taken perhaps the most aggressive policy on diversity in gifted classes. It mandates that the demographic composition of the gifted program reflect the overall racial and ethnic makeup of the school system. To do that, Prince William has amended its identification process to ensure that it finds gifted students from a variety of backgrounds.
The Fairfax County system and others in Northern Virginia have started an enrichment program that targets high-achieving minority students.
Fairfax’s “Young Scholars” program aims to find underrepresented minorities and get them into gifted classes. Some parents have voiced opposition to that initiative, claiming it shouldn’t restrict such services to a narrow population when thousands of students countywide might benefit from them. Still, Fairfax’s gifted program is overwhelmingly white and Asian.
Gifted programs vary from place to place. Some local schools provide “gifted centers,” others an hour of special instruction per day.
In nearly every local system, white students are disproportionately represented, even though most gifted programs explicitly target students with natural talents and aptitude, which are spread evenly across racial groups and social classes.
Experts say one factor that skews enrollment in gifted classes is intelligence testing.
Students living in poverty, particularly those whose parents are uneducated or speak English as a second language, are less likely to develop verbal skills measured by traditional intelligence tests. But that doesn’t mean they’re not gifted.
Assessments that measure spatial and mathematical intelligence as well as curiosity and leadership abilities are more likely to identify a diverse crop of gifted students, experts say.
“We used to think that gifted meant students who could read and write at an early age. That’s changed,” said Carol Horn, director of gifted education in Fairfax. She said that Fairfax has learned that using a variety of assessments can help broaden the pool of gifted students.
Some experts say that the parental- and teacher-referral process leads to uneven representation. Many parents might not refer children for testing because they are not familiar with gifted programs. Without a teacher or parent referral, most students are not fully evaluated.
In Alexandria and elsewhere, officials have started a campaign to recast the referral process, encouraging more parents to recommend their children and training teachers to consider a wider range of criteria.
First-grade teacher Sheila Walsh said she looks for students who are not just academically advanced but able to make connections between their studies and the world around them. In such moments, the Alexandria teacher says to herself, “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with this little person.”
She typically finds about two of those students a year. For those who are found, the payoff is clear.
“I used to get bored in my class. Everything moved so slow,” said Jawad Adams, 9, a black student in Cameron’s fourth- grade class at Cora Kelly Elementary. “Now things are up to speed.”
Taxpayer-funded mandatory public education is unconstitutional. Sending one's child to public school is de-facto child abuse. Home school or private school. Abandon the cities and their schools to the "people of color" and defund the tax base for them. http://johntaylorgatto.com/index.htm
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