If a school has gifted schoolchildren, capable of taking accelerated courses, what do you do with them? Provide a program of accelerated courses, or hold them back and ignore/stifle their capabilities?
The answer seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Children should, to the greatest extent possible, be taught at their capability levels.
But not at P.S. 9, an elementary school in Brooklyn, NY. The educational geniuses over there, determined to celebrate diversity and fight racial injustice, have decided this is an ugly, unfair concept and intend to wipe it out.
Excerpted from Jillian Jorgensen’s article at NY1 news:
As the city grapples with how to better integrate its schools, one Brooklyn elementary school has a suggestion: Getting rid of its gifted and talented classes.
“A test that kids sit for when they’re three or four is not a measure necessarily of their academic capacity, but really a measure of the access to resources that they’ve had,” said Kirsten Cole, co-chair of the school’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
P.S. 9’s school leadership team voted to send the proposal, which would phase out the program starting in 2020, to the district superintendent for his consideration.
The school, in Prospect Heights, is diverse. Cole said black students are underrepresented in gifted and talented classes.
“As the neighborhood has gentrified, the G&T track has gotten more and more white, more and more affluent,” she said.
Most parents at the meeting were in support. But one said other alternatives, like his proposal to add diversity screening to gifted and talented classes, hadn’t really been part of school discussions on the issue.
The school leadership team didn’t recommend his proposal, with some saying gifted and talented classes are problematic by their very nature.
“I think that these programs foster a sense of entitled in these students that is not beneficial to the students themselves over the long term,” school leadership team member Andrew Case said.
There you go. Solve the issue of some children being better learners than others, by making sure every child learns at the lowest rate.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Then everyone will get the same “education” and the world will be in perfect racial harmony.
OK, enough fantasy. Now a little reality.
If you had a gifted child, and/or a child more receptive to learning than average, how would you feel about this? How fast would you be looking for somewhere else to send your child besides P.S. 9.
There certainly is validity to the premise that an unfair “capability” test should not be used to make educational determinations. But the answer to that issue is to replace it with a fair one, not to pretend that all students learn at the same, lowest-common-denominator pace.
If it is true that Black elementary school children are less able to get into gifted programs, create programs that address the discrepancy; remedial programs aimed at raising the learning curve for those children. Don’t take down the gifted children.
A note to Andrew Case: if you think gifted programs are not beneficial to students, maybe you’d like to explain the beneficial consequences of telling gifted students that their abilities don’t matter and won’t be recognized.
And then there are the racial aspects.
Decent people hope that all races are treated equally. That children in the same circumstances, whatever their color, are treated in the same way.
With that in mind, what do you think it does for racial harmony if, for example, White parents of a gifted child are told “Not as many Black children learn at your child’s rate, so we’re making sure your child will learn at their rate? Do you think they’ll be happy? Thankful? Ready to dance in the streets for the school’s idea of racial equality?
What do you think it does for Black parents who have gifted children, and are told the same thing? Do you think they’ll be happy about/thankful for the “equality” it provides, or just as angry as the White parents will be for exactly the same reason – that their gifted child is being denied the educational level he/she is capable of?
Simply stated, this is nuts. And guaranteed to exacerbate, not lessen, racial animosity in the bargain.
A racially inspired “dumb education down” concept of education may work in a social justice warrior’s mind, or in a comic book story. But not in real life.
Watch it drive the gifted children out of P.S. 9.
