Gifted programs in NYC public schools are a ploy to keep white, middle class families in the city.
Dan and Henry are talking about bloggers as public intellectuals. They reference an interesting article by Russell Jacoby in The Chronicle. Jacoby writes:
Of course personal sharing is not all he and others do in their
postings, but what is the net result? The Internet provides instant
communication and quick access to vast resources, but has it altered
the quality or content of intellectual discussions? Too many voices may
cancel each other out. Bérubé himself has given up regular blogging to
write books instead. Ortega y Gasset’s fear almost a century ago of the
"revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the
writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New
Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with
book lovers lined up to get the author’s autograph. The cartoon shows a
table and a queue, but authors line up to see "The Reader," who sits
behind the table. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments
on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while
everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last
year’s blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.
Sigh. Slightly discouraged, but still blogging…
Ms. Kopp and Mr. Barth are a power couple in the world of education,
emblematic of a new class of young social entrepreneurs seeking to
reshape the United States’ educational landscape by creating new
schools, training better principals and getting more smart young
teachers into needy classrooms.
I love Weegee, and A.O. Scott hated The Love Guru.
Tim Burke responds to the Deresiewicz article. While he thinks that Deresiewicz is romanticizing elite schools in the past, he does think that college could do a better job challenging students.
I’m watching Michelle Obama on the View.
Apt. 11d 
“Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten”
As opposed to daily newspapers?
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I found the article on Kopp and Barth interesting. Both are Ivy grads, that elite that becomes hedge fund managers, or so I’ve heard. (Btw, I’ve been obsessed with trying to figure out where Cioffi and Tannin, the Bear Stearns guys, went to college. Anyone know?)
However, it makes me wonder about the process by which these programs happened. Did the process happen because the ideas were inherently good/the best, or did it happen because of the access of these two people to elites with money/power/influence?
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I’ve been pressing hubby with those big questions, Wendy. He seems to think that there is no big picture. I think there’s not much difference between poker and the stock market. These guys were bluffing. (There’s one degree of separation between those guys and me, and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.)
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Do we think it’s a bad thing to keep white, middle class families in the city?
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From the NYT article:
“The move [to use standardized tests for Gifted programs] was controversial, with experts warning that standardized tests given to young children were heavily influenced by their upbringing and preschool education, and therefore biased toward the affluent.”
Isn’t that the point, though? Maybe the problem is calling the “Gifted” programs, like there’s something inherently better about them. Of course, there isn’t.
But the rich kids from the rich pre-schools who come into school already knowing how to read benefit from a different sort of education than kids who didn’t have those benefits. Children of wealthy parents who can better supervise homework time, and push PBS shows, likely learn at a faster rate, and can be advantaged from an educational system that recognizes that.
I know that my parents moved into a big city (not New York) when I was a kid solely because they knew there was a good public magnet school I could go to. Otherwise, they would have moved to the suburbs. You use “ploy” as if it were a trick of some sort, rather than an explicit selling point. The upper middle class don’t HAVE to leave in the city, and if you want them there to increase your tax base, you need to offer them want they want, or else they will chose the suburbs and private schools.
“Live here, and we promise we will give an appropriate education to your overly advantaged off-spring.” If you can’t make that promise, then people won’t want to live in your district.
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I generally assume that my city is actively trying to push middle class families to the suburbs. While probably not technically correct, this assumption has great predictive power.
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“Do we think it’s a bad thing to keep white, middle class families in the city?”
It depends on what you do to keep them. I presume that if we just started giving out a cash handout to them, you’d object.
And, Ragtime, the problem with your argument is that it leaves schools in the role of enhancing the inequities. If rich kids from rich pre-schools are educationally advantaged, then we should be doing more to provide that early childhood education to the poor kids. Otherwise, public schools become a public agency for defining and supporting class differences.
And, gifted programs that largely depend on that early education, and not on inherent talent (which I don’t think we can necessarily measure) short-change the poor kid, who didn’t have the advantage of early education, but could catch up, and excel with the best of the rich, with their early education, if given the opportunity.
NY, especially, is rife with stories of people cheating (for real, by having early access to tests, or re-testing) in order to advantage their children in systems like this. It’s also one of the motivations for 2E (twice exceptional, which means both gifted and some form of learning disability).
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Oh, and regarding the mortgage debacle. I have a theory. My theory is that great rewards ==> cheating. I think every significant “bull” financial market has been followed by disasters. We then find particular individuals who crossed over some legal line (reading the news articles, I suspect a highly iffy legal case to come) and try to blame them for it, while still arguing that the system itself is sound.
But, my theory is that any system that has huge payoffs will result in cheaters, and that the proportion of cheaters will go up with the size of the payoff. Some cheaters will have broken the law; others will have managed to skirt it; we’ll do little to catch them, and we’ll make new rules. Ultimately, though, we’ll repeat the whole cycle with some other huge gains + big scandal (savings and loan, enron, stock option backdating, mortgage industry . . . ). It’s kind of like performance enhancing drugs and athletes.
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Oh, and regarding the mortgage debacle. I have a theory. My theory is that great rewards ==> cheating. I think every significant “bull” financial market has been followed by disasters. We then find particular individuals who crossed over some legal line (reading the news articles, I suspect a highly iffy legal case to come) and try to blame them for it, while still arguing that the system itself is sound.
But, my theory is that any system that has huge payoffs will result in cheaters, and that the proportion of cheaters will go up with the size of the payoff. Some cheaters will have broken the law; others will have managed to skirt it; we’ll do little to catch them, and we’ll make new rules. Ultimately, though, we’ll repeat the whole cycle with some other huge gains + big scandal (savings and loan, enron, stock option backdating, mortgage industry . . . ). It’s kind of like performance enhancing drugs and athletes.
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BJ, not providing an education that the middle class sees as suitable for its children makes things even more inequitable. Those parents with resources leave and instead of a gifted program that will be available for those disadvantaged kids who do qualify, the program just isn’t there.
I’m not arguing for cash-payouts to get good students in public schools, but your comment reminded me of why I don’t have any student loans. Paying for good students (e.g. merit-based scholarships) is nearly ubiquitous at universities below the top tier.
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Much as I dislike the wording choice when discussing middle-class families staying in the city, Ragtime makes the point: people with resources don’t have to stay in the city. They don’t have to contribute to institutions that are also available to those with no resources. I don’t see why this is such a terrible thing, trying to keep people mixed in terms of income.
And in terms of pre-kindergarten education, at least in Chicago, it’s almost universal. Does your kid go to Head Start or a private pre-school, or the increasingly more common CPS tuition-based pre-school? Any way you slice it these kids are going into programs before kindergarten. I just don’t see the huge advantage for “rich” kids. If anything the people who are at the biggest disadvantage are those in the middle: who don’t qualify for Head Start but can’t afford pre-school.
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If rich kids from rich pre-schools are educationally advantaged, then we should be doing more to provide that early childhood education to the poor kids.
Certainly, but that’s just another example of providing different educational structures for people, based upon their backgrounds. The “poor” go to Head Start. Maybe that can be improved, but from what I know, there’s very little evidence that it produces results as is. The rich go to Le Petite Bebe Pre-School (or whatever). Maybe the rich are teaching their pre-schooler skills that are not pedagogically necessary to teach a pre-schooler, or maybe some parents just choose a more “academic” pre-school, and other choose a more “fun” pre-school for personal, philosophical reasons.
But, in the end, kids are going to show up one day in first grade, and they will have very different ranges of knowledge and abilities, due to a combination of innate and environmental factors (which pre-schooling may help mitigate, but not eliminate). And once they are there, the school has to take them as they are, and educate them based on their current needs and abilities. And in many cases that requires putting those who enter with the biggest advantages (whether innate or environmental) into classes that don’t re-hash what they have already mastered. It also means not mixing in poorer kids with lower test scores — even if they are the innate geniuses of the lower classes who have been stymied only be environmental factors — because they would be unprepared won’t succeed in that situation.
I consider my eldest daughter “gifted”, but if we moved to Mexico City next month and enrolled her in school, I’d have to think she’d have to be put in remedial classes because she doesn’t speak Spanish.
I’m all for “closing the achievement gap,” but the way to do that is to close the achievement gap, not to put unprepared kids into gifted classes and then pretend that the achievement gap is closed.
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“And in many cases that requires putting those who enter with the biggest advantages (whether innate or environmental) into classes that don’t re-hash what they have already mastered. It also means not mixing in poorer kids with lower test scores — even if they are the innate geniuses of the lower classes who have been stymied only be environmental factors — because they would be unprepared won’t succeed in that situation.”
Amen. I think the high-falutin’ technical term is “the zone of proximal development” Over at Wikipedia, they say that “The zone of proximal development” (зона ближайшего развития), often abbreviated ZPD, is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. It is a concept developed by the Russian psychologist and social constructivist Lev Vygotsky.” I haven’t studied this myself, but presumably the idea is that it’s very important to figure out exactly where a child is and what he knows before stuffing knowledge into him. Previous experiences and preparation mean that different children will get different amounts of learning out of the same educational opportunity. It’s as if we had a big jug and we were pouring it into cups of different sizes. The smaller cups won’t be able to take in as much liquid as the bigger cups, no matter how much we pour over them. It’s wasted effort to keep pouring, rather than stopping and attempting to expand the vessel (i.e. aiming the instruction at the level of the actual child). When I’m doing stuff with my older child at home (math now or reading in the past), the academic task needs to lie within that zone of proximal development and she needs to be able to experience lots of success while being challenged and moving forward. Some people would say that purposely creating (as is standard American practice) a mixed level group with six grades of reading level in a single room sabotages the teacher and makes it very nearly impossible to be addressing each child within their zone of proximal development.
I’d add that from what I hear, a lot of “gifted” education is nothing to write home about.
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Funny how quickly the qualifying students morphed into “rich kids from rich pre-schools.” I’m just a hick from the ‘burbs, but even I’ve heard that the “rich” in New York don’t send their kids to the local public schools. Given the high cost of living in NY, aren’t these “rich” kids really middle class kids?
As an outsider, like Amy P, I’d also like to know what the gifted programs provide participants. Is the curriculum accelerated in comparison to a garden variety NY public school classroom? How does it compare to a suburban classroom? If it’s comparable to a classroom in a “good” suburban district, why does the system need to limit access to a few students?
On the other hand, let’s suppose that the “gifted” programs are real gifted programs, that is, presented at a pace suited to the top 5% of the population. I can think of few things more harmful to a student than to be placed in a classroom in which he or she feels “stupid”.
Why do the NY city schools fill their gifted tracks so early? Can a student change schools at a later point? In general, I have observed that, the later the entry point to schools, the higher performing the schools can become. In our neck of the woods, the private middle schools are more challenging than the K-8 schools. The private high schools are even more competitive, and the elite universities, well, we’ve all heard of perfect applicants being turned away. My theory is, the later the intake point, the better the schools can select for talent. The preschool and kindergarten screening instruments don’t seem to be as effective as the SAT. Does the performance on a standardized test at 4 determine a child’s educational trajectory? That doesn’t seem fair.
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“As an outsider, like Amy P, I’d also like to know what the gifted programs provide participants. Is the curriculum accelerated in comparison to a garden variety NY public school classroom? How does it compare to a suburban classroom? If it’s comparable to a classroom in a “good” suburban district, why does the system need to limit access to a few students?”
I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before here, but a gifted teacher posted over at parentalcation.blogspot.com a while back, describing in detail a year-long project in which his/her gifted class went over to a local cemetery (in all sorts of weather), collected data from tombstones, and analyzed the data. It seemed like a cool project, but first of all it didn’t sound like the material was out of reach for non-gifted children, and secondly, if I had been the parent of one of those children, I would have been extremely resentful at the project eating up the entire year. That would go double if I were the parent of a child gifted in some specific area that the project didn’t address.
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