Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters?
Posted on 10/29/2008 2:35:24 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.
The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes. In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians was also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics was lower.
Parents, teachers and principals involved in the programs say the new system has generated waste and frustration, with high-performing children in the smallest classes in a school system struggling with overcrowding.
“They took the knees out of a program that was working,” complained Christopher Spinelli, president of the Community Education Council for District 22 in southeastern Brooklyn.
For years, the Bloomberg administration has struggled to rationalize the gifted programs, long derided by critics as bastions of white privilege yet seen by many middle-class New Yorkers as a refuge from low-performing schools. In his 2005 State of the City address, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg promised to maintain all of the city’s existing gifted programs while creating more in “historically underserved districts.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I was identified as “gifted” in elementary school in the seventies.
What was one of the things they had us do?
LEARN FRENCH! LOL
Oh the pain, the pain.
Actually it was awkward, off the “smart kids” would go out of the class for part of the day. So you had that stigma.
I got nicknamed “Spock”. But I dug that.
Ugh, intelligence is now “white privilege”? Just because you’re doing such a lousy job at parenting that your kid can’t pass a standarized test doesn’t make the test racist! I’ve had to argue this with idiots who say that because minority kids do worse on the SAT, the SAT must be racist. I don’t recall having to state my race on my SAT test, though I do recall scoring points just for spelling my name properly.
Why havent they deemed them all gifted? Isnt it more important that children feel good about themselves?
Well, from our conversation I learned that the local HSs had completely done away with any advanced classes. No more "honors" classes, no classes where you could receive college credit for completion.
This woman has two exceptional daughters, the younger of which had already been put ahead a grade. Both of these girls ended up in the Catholic HS and she was extremely happy with the results. Both ended up being Valedictorian of their class.
Now, this is an extremely liberal woman, but her children's education was important enough to her to leave the public school system. That system lost a loyal and active member of their community because they decided that kids with high intelligence should not be given any more of a challenge than any other student.
They have to get rid of the "honors" type programs because it flys in the teeth of their prime belief that all people/cultures/choices are exactly the same. So, instead if you think that very intelligent kids should be challenged with more difficult material, believing that eventually all society will benefit from their expertise, you are a racist.
Welcome to the socialist system, welcome to Obama-world.
That calls for the "That's racist!" GIF.
To paraphrase Obi-Wan...Who’s more racist? The standardized tests or the people read the results of the standardized tests?
Most of the smart ones never made it to this country because they got away.
Bingo! It’s about parental involvement and expectations. Good parents demand that their children excel and don’t tolerate the culture of Death.
Liberal schools systems: spreading the stupidity around.
They also don’t point out that the gifted white kids tend to come from “better families” or are Russian immigrants. Schlub class white kids aren’t exactly being waved into the “gifted” programs (nor should they be), so the claim of white privilege is BS.
I have a friend who teaches a gifted class in Far Rockaway. (I know you’re a NYer.
They are not gifted at all, they are just the well-behaved kids. She did have one very smart boy and she advised the parents to get him out of there.
I am stressed, because while my bright daughter has been in Catholic school since Pre-K, we can’t afford the Catholic high school in town. We are looking at our public school options and are scared. I am thinking she might do Running Start (WA state program lets Jr’s and Sr’s do community college and get credit), as that saved me. However, I have heard they are trying to gut that, too.
I'm curious where this was. My experience has been that, even in very liberal areas (such as Montgomery County), if you have a high percentage of college-educated yuppie parents, the schools tend to be awash in advanced courses for the yuppie larva.
Black kids adopted into white families score as well as whites on IQ tests.
It all worked out in the end.
Homeschool bump.
One should never forgive a certain RINO Mayor for building low income projects back in the 1960s right on the beach, therefore condemning the eastern portion of the Rockaways to be Bed Stuy on the beach.
If the demo-rats economic plan is trickle up poverty, then their education plan is trickle up stupidity.
JoMa
My daughter was put into the LARC (Learning Activites etc. I forget, it’s been a long time) program in kindergarten.
All the parents had to go to a meeting with a child psychologist who explained that gifted children are those who dance to a different drummer. They don’t think like “normal”’ people. The giftedness is not just IQ, it is artistic talent and maturity. She said that it had been found that gifted children are more likely to become drug he’saddicts, alcoholics, suicidal. She said that LARC was a sort of intervention program to get gifted children together, coach them, and help them to shine.
My daughter is grown-up now and one day I asked her how the others kids turned out. She said some of them are druggies and alcoholics.
My daughter is fine though.
Many moons ago I was in a majority Black elementary school (Holy Cross, grades 1-8)Los Angeles, and remember testing grade 13 on the standardized tests (in the sixth grade)along with several other students
The reason: The nuns (Sisters of St Joseph)would lay a stick on you if you misbehaved and you would get more when your parents found out.
Plus the nuns drilled you on how to take a test ( “...don’t get stuck on one question....learn to budget your time)
Invaluable advice
75 percent of all children are above average.
It's all good.
I despised school. I was very, very bored. The teachers were drones. But we didn’t have AP or fast-tracking when I went.
I sent my daughter to boarding school in France for her last two years of high school. It wasn’t that expensive, it would have cost more money here. She was enrolled in the Baccalaureate program and that got her into an Ivy League Univ.
You see, some years back there was a controversy here in Federal Way when one of the "honors" students came to a school board meeting and informed the school board that although she took all advanced placement and honors classes, and was the high school valedictorian, when she got to the University of Washington she found herself unprepared for the college level science courses. She was interested in majoring in some sort of science career. Now, this girl was actually speaking to the school board to help them, perhaps, re-evaluate the program and improve it. The school board was not impressed and decided that the problem was (yes, you guessed it), her.
She was informed that not all students adjust well to college. Now, if their valedictorian can't "adjust" to college what are the rest of the graduates from this school system doing? After much discussion in the local paper and elsewhere, it was revealed that the "honors" classes had exactly the same curriculum and textbooks as the regular classes, it was just that you were in a class with other highly motivated students. No real extra challenge.
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