Mix in the “gifted” kids
Tuesday, December 4, 2007Written by: Visionary Teacher
David Harsanyi provided some interesting commentary in this past Friday’s Post (
Let’s be honest. Most parents are under the mistaken notion that they’ve spawned gifted miracle children for the rest of us to be astonished by. My sense, purely anecdotally, is that most often kids with involved parents are the ones that achieve, while others tend to struggle.
Yes, Harsanyi, go for it. The vast majority of gifted students do not need a special program to separate them from the general population. The majority of “gifted” students are no smarter than the rest of us, they simply have been exposed to different opportunities. Every child deserves a good teacher who knows how to challenge her top students. And let’s face it. We need these “gifted” students to keep the bar high. Imagine if all schools were segregated based on baseline ability data. Forget about role models, students learning from each other, the benefit of different strengths and weaknesses in the same classroom. Where would we be then? Harsanyi goes on to state:
The parents of highly gifted overachievers are also spectacularly annoying. But they also get what they want. This sort of hyperactive, middle-class busybody-…-would be a perfect import to lower-income neighborhoods where schools struggle and parents often don’t have the time to be as involved.
That’s right. Let’s mix it up and strive for high results for all.
December 4th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I think Harsanyi and VT are hitting on a really complicated issue here. Obviously, the first and primary goal of an urban district like DPS, these days, must be to improve the wretched performance of schools for low income kids, and to hike graduation rates.
But, a successful urban district must also retain and attract some number of middle and upper income families’ kids. This may help in terms of socioeconomic integration, in raising average performance, and it is clearly important in terms of maintaining broader political interest in, and support for, an urban system by a majority of citizens.
This creates some difficult tradeoffs and tensions. Middle and upper income families have already left urban systems in large numbers, for suburban school, private schools, etc., which they see as better for their kids Attracting many of them back may require expansion of programs that are perceived to be “elitist” whether these are gifted programs, selective admission programs like DSA, IB programs, etc. So, on the one hand, you have to create desirable options to attract or retain middle and upper income kids.
But, if these options are completely separated “schools within schools” from the mainstream of the schools in which they reside, as some HS IB programs seem to be, or entirely separate campuses, they raise the question of whether there really is integration by class and race, and therefore benefits from re-attracting these kids.
Not an easy dilemma for policymakers or for parents. But, one that I think we need to be more honest about, and try to wrestle with. There must be some creative solutions that can balance these competing needs effectively.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
I hope this isn’t naive, but maybe one way to attract and retain middle- and upper-income families in urban schools is to appeal to their enlightened self-interest. They expect their kids to grow up to be the leaders of the future, but they also recognize that we live in an increasingly diverse city, state and nation, and that the world is becoming increasingly interdependent. So in order to succeed, even their high-achieving kids are going to have to learn how to relate to all kinds of people.
There is evidence that indicates that having high-achieving students help struggling students reinforces the learning of the high-achievers. In order to teach something you have to know it really well. When kids are given the responsibility of teaching, they work hard to validate adults’ faith in them. They also learn leadership skills. And when kids work in teams, they learn all those workplace skills that we keep hearing employers want.
If there are still parents out there who don’t want their white kids going to school with brown or black kids, they’re going to abandon urban public schools no matter what. But if other parents are really moving for reasons of educational program quality and not racism, they will respond to appeals based on quality. If the public schools played up their diversity as the advantage it really is, and developed programs that were explicit about using that diversity to help kids acquire “21st-century skills,” they might be able to convince some of those parents.
December 5th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
When you say “Imagine if all schools were segregated based on baseline ability data” i think, hmmmm, that sounds a lot like the American collegiate system (which is excellent) as oppossed to secondary education (which is not). Would you advocate making half the kids at Yale start attending the University of Conneticut in support of this idea to “keep the bar high?”
Equally nonsensical is the claim “The majority of ‘gifted’ students are no smarter than the rest of us, they simply have been exposed to different opportunities.” No, the idea of a simplistic label like “gifted” means they test better, which is a way of measuring what we generally (and simplistically) call smart. How they get to the point where they test better is nature, nuture etc. The point is they are there, and it is absurd to claim that there is no difference. Oh for Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average.