You mean twirling a basketball on your finger doesn't count as "gifted"?
Posted on 02/01/2014 5:09:20 PM PST by grundle
Another case of political correctness gone awry: a school in Brooklyn has decided to scrap its gifted and talented program after accusations that the program was not "diverse" enough.
Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.
“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas Park Corner.
The school is roughly two-thirds African American or Hispanic. Asian and white students account for almost 30 percent of the student body. Exact ethnic breakdowns of the Students of Academic Rigor program were not given, although the program was described by some as being "overwhelmingly Caucasian."
This move infuriates me. It would be insane for a school to cut its special education program for developmentally disabled students due to a "lack of diversity" among those who need the services. Students on both ends of the special education spectrum — either gifted or developmentally delayed — need the specialized classes to reach their highest potential as a student. It would be insane to suggest someone with an IQ of 70 (the benchmark for mental retardation) should be grouped in the same classroom with students with an IQ of 100 and treated like everyone else, and it should be considered equally insane to suggest that students who have an IQ of greater than 130 (gifted) need to be in the same classroom as average students to fill some sort of "diversity" quota. That is not fair to both the above-average students and the average students. Studies have shown that grouping gifted children with their non-gifted peers has a negative effect on both parties.
This is a bad move by PS 139. I hope the principal reconsiders her decision, and I hope the parents of children enrolled in the gifted education program are able to successfully advocate for their kids.
I’m sure the parents will solve that problem. All they need to do is remove the gifted kids from that school (that’s what private schools in liberal areas are for), and the remaining classes will be uniformly mediocre, as the principal wants.
In a sane America Mary McDonald would be the laughingstock of the public school system.
Don't you just hate these rat bastards?
Great idea! Let’s bring everybody down instead of trying to bring everybody up! /s
Couldn’t they find enough gay, lesbian, bisexual and transmutilated 5 year olds?
Well, everyone knows you can easily tell the diversity of a class by looking at the children’s skin color!!
/sarc
Yes...if a Black or Hispanic doesn’t come up with a cure for cancer then we’ll just all have to die of it. After all, not fair to let only certain types of people come up with life saving cures.
Really, it is just this ridiculous.
Are they going to cut funding for basketball due to a lack of diversity?
You hit the nail on the head.
I had to deal with that as a college teacher. We had some African-American students who were academically superior in THEIR school but got to the big community college (100,000 students) and CRASHED & BURNED.
I had this one African-American young man who was writing his Master's thesis. He asked me to read and correct it.
There were 50 (fifty) grammar, punctuation and spelling errors in the FIRST paragraph of his thesis.
I TOLD him to his face that he WOULD get his Master's degree because of his skin color. I also said that those who accepted his INFERIOR work were doing him a HUGE disservice.
He would produce work for people and those people would be APPALLED. EVERYONE would know that he got his "master's" degree solely because of his color.
I could tell that he didn't believe me but he was too polite to disagree. By now, he knows that I was right. TOO little, TOO late for him.
They lacked diversity because they didn’t have enough dumb kids.
They did the same thing way back in the 70s, too. The program was called IGC (Intellectually Gifted Children), and they scrapped it because there weren’t enough minorities who qualified.
Same story, different day.
Regards,
Why not use the gifted kids to help tutor the rest, under constrained circumstances. It seems to be all about personal pride and personal status at the expense of blessings. That’s why black people are so allergic to “acting white.”
The lib chickens is comin home to roost. They are so full of this diversity crap that they can’t help themselves.
You mean twirling a basketball on your finger doesn't count as "gifted"?
they should close the federal reserve for the same reason.
Why would the principal post the letter on Flickr?
That doesn’t add up to me.
Another reason to homeschool.
My son got caught in a whirlpool like this. More than gifted, he had to be in the “general population” when we moved from a state where he had been in the gifted classes. It was DEVASTATING for him. He was angry and depressed about it for a long time.
I thought the same thing.
The GT programs are usually the best run public ed programs. It forces the teachers to reach higher. Maybe that's why it was canceled - it was just easier to cry "lack of diversity" to gain acceptance vs. the teachers were too lazy or unable to qualify for teaching GT.
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