Debate on Gifted Education Policies

An honors English class was eliminated.

A program to support academically gifted students is ending.

Many schools are ending gifted and talented classes and have stopped

separating kids by ability. The reason?

To address, quote, "historical inequity."

All students will receive accelerated instruction in one classroom.

This is so misguided.

Mike Petrilli researches education.

You hear these equity people say, "Oh, we're against gifted education.

We're against advanced education." At the same time, they're upset that our

universities aren't very diverse. Well, guess what?

They're a big part of the problem. They are standing in the way

of kids of color and low income kids from getting exactly what they need in

elementary and middle and high school so they could compete.

Good morning, boys and girls.

Different level classes weren't always controversial.

When I went to school, testing and tracks-

Mm-hmm

... were pretty standard.

Because guess what? If you're gonna teach reading,

super hard to teach reading

to, uh, everybody if there's some kids who don't

know their letters and

other kids are already reading Harry Potter.

But then this education theorist wrote a book that criticized tracking.

Tracking students in school created these racially

segregated classrooms within schools.

Jeannie Oakes argued that the kids who get challenged tend to

be white and Asian

and middle class, and the others don't.

This led to a big anti-tracking movement, a big effort to get rid of the tracks,

to get rid of the ability grouping, to just say that kids should be mixed up

all

together all the time.

And supposedly teachers using differentiated instruction

can address different skill levels.

Differentiating instruction, as if that just means that magically you

can look out at 30 kids and figure out how to teach them all at

the same time.

If you separate them-

Mm-hmm

... disproportionate numbers of white and Asian kids-

Mm-hmm

... get that fast track education.

But it is not mostly about race. It really is mostly about

class, about struct- family structure, about culture,

uh-

Parenting

... about parent, yeah, about parenting.

Unfortunately, a lot of kids growing up in poverty

or near

poverty show up at school and they're way far behind.

Yet many of the Asian kids came from severe poverty.

Yeah.

And do well.

They do well regardless of how poor they tend to be. Culture matters.

Family matters. These things matter a lot.

Don't have an admissions policy based on a single test.

This activist helped persuade New York City to remove its gifted

tests. She argued the tests:

Exclude kids because they're poor.

Instead of using tests, teachers and others would recommend

which kids are fast-tracked.

Too many places say that the teachers make recommendations on

who should be in the

fast track, or the parents have to make

recommendations, and there's a lot of

evidence that those mechanisms are biased.

Tests are much less biased.

Studies do show testing leads to increases in minorities

in gifted programs. But at what age should this start?

For kindergartners, we should not have a gifted

and talented program that is

separating them on the basis of that assessment.

My mayor wants to get rid of gifted classes before third grade.

That seems reasonable, third grade.

It actually is reasonable. But here's the thing, you need to make

sure that you have something for kids, including kindergartners,

who show up highly advanced.

Getting rid of gifted classes hurts kids like these.

We're doing a truss bridge because triangles are the strongest shape.

The students designed, built, coded this satellite called TJ

Reverb by hand.

I thought why not use my creativity to make something that can help

the world?

Why not let smart kids excel?

It doesn't help any of us if kids are coming to school and

sitting bored in class because we're not teaching them anything new.

I wanted to interview anti-tracking activists to ask why is

equity so much more important than letting smart kids like

those excel? Not one would agree to an interview.

Ideologues don't want to debate the other side.

Somebody's gotta tell these ideologues, "I'm sorry, but this is none of your

business. You have this wrong." We are trying to see each

child individually and understand what they need in order to

learn something new today. Uh, and that

means paying attention to where they're at, where they're heading, and make sure

they get the challenge they need.