But it starts with embracing notions of excellence and giftedness, not by trying to tear them down.įrederick M. Those in the worlds of charter schooling and school choice should support efforts to launch and expand schools that offer gifted or advanced instruction, especially in communities where such options are hard to find. Now that remote learning has become omnipresent, every qualified high school student should have ready access to a full slate of Advanced Placement classes. At a time of seemingly intractable ideological debates, this is an agenda that offers broad, practical appeal and is full of opportunities to pursue both equity and excellence. Three years ago, in the “Culturally Responsive Equity-Based Bill of Rights for Gifted Students of Color,” a group of academics argued that “gifted students of color” need skilled gifted educators, gifted programs committed to recruiting and retaining them, and access to gifted programs and services like Advanced Placement and magnet schools. Parents like the promise of these programs, especially in low-income communities where they want their kids to enjoy the same opportunities for rigor and advancement that are available elsewhere. Phi Delta Kappan reported last year that 83 percent of adults think it appropriate to use test results when determining eligibility for “special” academic programs. The public is comfortable, perhaps surprisingly so in our equity-conscious age, with merit-based selectivity. Most Americans support these programs but they also want to be confident that they’re rigorous, inclusive, and fair. Children should have the chance to be retested and admitted to gifted programs at multiple points all kids should be tested be tested for eligibility, or at least given the opportunity and schools need to develop on-ramps into and off-ramps out of gifted programs. These issues deserve to be addressed, but that can be done without dismantling gifted education. The second is that the results are used to sort students into gifted programs for all of elementary school. One is the fact that gifted admission is based on a test given to 4-year-olds. In New York, two concerns have a lot of merit. Researchers have indeed raised important, legitimate concerns about the fact that minority students are less likely to be selected for gifted programs. There are, of course, real issues to address with gifted education. Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing?” math teacher Colin Seale has noted: “I often get the side-eye when I mention gifted education and equity in the same sentence shutting down gifted programs only deepens the inequities for brilliant, underrepresented students of color and adds another barrier to unlocking their genius. It’s low-income students who will get lost along the way. After all, when schools abandon gifted learners, affluent families have options: They’ll move their kids to private schools or pony up for tutors, enrichment programs, and online courses. Unfortunately, de Blasio-style attacks on gifted education are likely to disappoint on all of those grounds. If one accepts that people are born with an array of talents, and that students and society benefit when schools cultivate those talents, the conversation about gifted education should be how to do it fairly, responsibly, and effectively. Given that nearly every student is now gifted, the district announced a new model in which gifted students will no longer receive specialized instruction and in which “gifted resource specialists” will instead be placed in conventional classrooms to provide instructional support. Down the road in Charlottesville, the school district changed its protocol for identifying gifted students, reporting this summer that 86 percent (that’s not a typo) of students in grades three through 11 are now deemed gifted. News, eliminated its admission exam last year due to concerns that the school had too many Asian students and not enough black and Latino ones. ![]() In Fairfax County, Virginia’s famed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school ranked as the nation’s top high school by U.S. At the same time, Nobel laureate David Card has concluded that “a separate classroom environment is more effective for” gifted learners-especially those who are disadvantaged. Of course, gifted programs should be inclusive and should be reformed as necessary to ensure that.
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