I’ve written often about my yeshiva (which then stopped at 9th grade) and its crazy experiment.
By the time I started, it had been around (using the old Oppenheim Collins Mansion for its operations) about 3 years. And, our class was huge- a little larger than the rest of the school- combined.
So, they broke us up into two classes. By IQ. The “dumb” class had an IQ of 120 or higher. The “smart” class registered over 140.
Those labels hurt a lot of my friends. They thought they were dumb- and it affected much of what happened with them and for them after we departed HANC.
Well, now, I just heard about the opposite experiment being done in city where I lived for some 13 years.
Yes, racism has been (and still is) a problem in Charlottesville. When my kids were entering school, elementary schools were being split up by grade so that segregation would no longer be the norm. (Not to mention the fact that there the Black high school and the White high school had just been merged when I first arrived in town. [Of course, most of the White kids then went to “private, Christian” academies. Because it’s just so Christian to be racist.])
So, what are the brilliant folks in Charlottesville doing now? To counteract the (resilient) bias in the 4300 kid system, they’ve elected to put 86% of the students in grades 3 through 11 into gifted programs. (That ‘compares’ to the 6% designation of such kids across the USA. Charlottesville had labeled 24.5% of the students gifted last year- but ¾ of those designees were White.)
The goal is to identify gifted minority kids. Now, the school system has some 44% of the census labeled as economically disadvantaged. The total census measures under 42% White students, about 30% Black, 13% Latino, 6% Asian, and 9% multiracial/other.
Now, we all agree that giftedness is color blind. But, it’s also not clear that gifted programs accelerate kids’ education.
And, it seems that this new design is “loosely” based upon the Schoolwide Enrichment Model. (Drs. JS Renzulli and SM Reis, University of Connecticut, developed this program about a decade ago.) The basic tenet of the system is to mesh gifted student selection and gifted teaching programs, with learning programs for each child. Which hasn’t seemed to be the case, since there has been a lack of significant benefits accrued to date for those who adopted this system.
Moreover, Charlottesville has no plans to create plans for individual students. Nor does it seem to have the financial resources to pull off this augmented program.
I fear that this will simply be window-dressing, with the school system appearing to break the biases of the past.
I hope I am wrong. But, I strongly doubt it.
Not sure how our schools do it now, but when Alex was in school, everyone in a grade was in the same grade, no “dumb” or “smart” kids. But they would give more challenging work in subjects for those who could excel. They didn’t hold anyone back to let the ones that needed more help “catch up” I remember Alex would also help out those that needed help in reading all her grade school years. Now they have classes in High School where students can take college classes and graduate high school with college credits.
Martha recently posted..It’s a SCAM
Sounds like a great program, Martha!