I just fundamentally don't understand why advanced placement classes need to be axed due to racial issues.
Why is this so hard? Just keep the accelerated education program. Then try to help the disadvantaged groups get better testing scores via assistance programs. The issue here is obviously the name of the program. Just change that!
And the effect will be the opposite of the intent - now only students wealthy enough to afford private tutoring or that have a stable enough home environment to self-study can pass AP exams. Wonder what races those students will be?
I'm admittedly talking my own book, having come from the lower end of middle class. I was also the runt of the litter and at the bottom of the social pecking order. Students of all races enjoyed looking down on me to feel better about their own situation.
I retired from working for other people at age 40. I credit gifted/AP courses in 8-12th grade for a significant portion of that. Did my racial background still advantage me? You bet. I had a stable home environment and low crime neighborhood.
Perhaps we should focus on how to offer children stable home environments and low crime neighborhoods.
I can't speak for other cultures, but non-wealthy first generation Asian immigrant parents consciously and constantly sacrifice their own well-being to afford tutoring and extra curricular for their kids.
That's certainly what I experienced at Lowell High, a San Francisco "test school."
I recall that in my AP Chemistry class, 100% of the students were Asian. Nothing kept non-Asian students from taking the class, except the desire to work hard and be there. (The other section had at least a few white kids.)
Because it's very embarrassing for 70% of the gifted students to be white when diversity, equity, and inclusiveness are the goals.
I would be willing to bet that most of the gifted students come from wealthier households and sharing the network effect of having high performing peers. It is almost impossible to distinguish racism from poverty and culture in the US.
Based on the description in the article, I assumed it was a form of "advanced placement" of students with better scores. It includes elementary school, middle school, etc so I wasn't entirely sure what to call it. My school did have AP courses in MiddleSchool though.
Ignoring the ideology - maybe, in a roundabout way, if this causes the middle-class and above to move their kids to private education in response, this will actually achieve its aims, in that the next time they sample gifted kids in public education, a larger percentage will be *ahem* "ethnically diverse"?
Title should be changed to the original “Seattle Public Schools” which better reflects that a few zealous school board members made this decision for one district rather than the state of Washington banning GAT programs wholesale.
I think this is a crazy reason to shut it down, but I'm curious about how the system works over there.
I'll describe the grammar school system here in Kent, which is adjacent to London. Over here they call the selective government schools "Grammar Schools". Grammar schools are free, and the top grammars send a comparable number of kids to Oxbridge as the top independent (aka Private for internaional readers, Public for British readers) schools. For reference the most expensive school in the area is also one of the most expensive schools in the country, at about £33K a year for day and £45K for boarding.
The year the kids turn 11, (year 6), they start the year with a test. It looks a lot like an IQ test, complete with silly questions like "what does this shape look like from this direction". There's also a bunch of standard stuff like arithmetic and vocabulary. It is a single sitting on a single day, so try not to be ill.
The thing is, and I didn't know this until after we got the results, almost every kid who gets in had a tutor for the test. My kid was getting fewer and fewer playdates after school in years 4 and 5, and I suspect this is why. Nobody admits to hiring a tutor for some reason, but everyone does it.
The kid then gets in anyway, and what do you find?
Most primary school kids were not privately educated, but most of his classmates came from private schools. He went to one, and this school has the highest representation in the new intake. I met the other parents, and it's just a selection of other private schools in the area. Maybe one or two from local state schools. I got my kid to ask, and sure enough everyone had a tutor.
In terms of ethnicity, it's pretty mixed. There's more Chinese/Asian kids there than I suspect there are in the local population. There's more Indian/Asian (Asian in the UK means India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka) kids there than I see in everyday life. There's a few black kids as well, and a lot of mixed kids. The majority is white, as you'd expect.
So if you care about race, you'd probably say it's nicely mixed. If you care about social mobility, I think you might be disappointed.
I'm from the SF Bay Area, not Seattle. But this sounds pretty comparable. There are a few merit-based programs in various regions of the US that I know about (SF, Chicago, New York), and their demographics are predominantly East Asian, South Asian, Jewish, and rich white kids. And yeah, those kids had tutors and after-school programs that prepared them for the entrance exams.
But where I am from this kind of test-based entrance is really rare. We used to have that in my kids school district, but not anymore. They switched the specialized schools for gifted students to be lottery-based instead of exam entrance. And guess what? After a couple of generations there's not much difference. My daughter's school used to be a special science-oriented "magnet" school (called a magnet school because it "pulls in" students from across the district who specially apply for it). Now it's really no different in practice than any of the other neighborhood schools.
It all comes down to mixing up correlation and causality. Progressives said it's not fair that only rich white kids and model minorities are getting into these schools, as these schools setup the kids for a better life. Everyone should have that opportunity! So they make the entrance a randomized lottery instead of merit based. Only guess what? The schools had good outcomes because the student body was well-prepared kids with private tutors. Get rid of that factor and they revert back real quick to being regular schools just like any other.
> If you care about social mobility, I think you might be disappointed.
These people don't want social mobility. They want equal outcomes--there's no need to move through society if everyone is at the same level. And they do end up achieving that... by lowering standards for everyone.
> The district began phasing out its Highly Capable Cohort schools and classrooms for advanced students in the 2021-22 school year due to racial inequities, the school district notes. [1]
>> The program is not going away, it’s getting better.
This one is a live grenade from a source that... likes to stir the pot and has some political leanings.
Im pretty liberal.
This is just dumb.
We are, as a country at a point where we cant have a conversation about this. About what is really going on, and actually fixing things. It's moments like these where I feel like I'm living in a copy of 1984.
How about you keep the dam gifted program and pour as much money into some schools where the kids have worse socioeconomic circumstances and give them the same leg up? That would be a SANE and RATIONAL policy...
I'd like to say I'm liberal, but I don't think this is liberalism at all. It's racism under the guise of "its the right and ethical thing" so people who challenge it as labeled as isms or ist, it seeks to divide and create invisible barriers where there shouldn't be any.
The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy
>> The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy
Nothing of the sort would work
1. Pay teachers a living wage... Make it a 150k a year starting salary job. Make it competitive. Make it year round 8 hours a day full time.
2. Kids get NO home work. Half of HN cries that a 40 hour work week is too much... kids spend 30 hours a week in school and have more work at home. School is a job, you do your job at your job.
3. No more sports at school. Keep PE but no more football, baseball circle jerks.
4. More Shop, tech, Art and Music. You know gen z knows less about computing on the whole. It's not cell phones, they closed all the computer labs and stoped having those classes cause "digital natives". Bullshit. Also, no one knows how to weld, cut wood, fix a pipe, cook, balance a check register, budget (home economics)...
GenZ can't use the command line. I am with you on shop, art, music, cooking, etc. All of those things make more capable people. Project based learning should start from a young age. The kids need to learn with their whole selves.
> The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy
These are progressives, not liberals. They don't want a meritocracy; they want equal outcomes for everyone. And realistically the only way you get that is by lowering outcomes for gifted achievers.
In some people's eyes, there's a certain fairness to lowering outcomes for everyone. Racism IS bullying. You can have an individual racist who bullies you, or you can have society be the racist who bullies you. Unfortunately, you can also, and often do, have both. It's also unfortunate, but just a fact, that some people, usually privileged people, won't understand getting the short end of the stick until it happens to them.
While I might take issue with shutting down a program to make a point, I grew up as a Jewish guy in the 1980s and faced racism and bullying on the regular. It truly made my life a living hell sometimes. As an adult, I've had to deal with things like openly racist co-workers. Now of course there's all the recent suggestions that I'm enabling genocide somewhere just by _being_ Jewish and/or for supporting Israel. Whenever someone says something like "The Jews...", it's probably racism. It feels like it.
In my opinion, the root of all these problems is a small bunch of bad actors who think it's okay to engage in antisocial behavior. They then convince others that it's okay to do the same thing, whether actively or by example. Society would be so much better off if people with antisocial tendencies could somehow be convinced to be pro-social.
> I'm enabling genocide somewhere just by _being_ Jewish and/or for supporting Israel.
Hoping to not get over political, but the western media is failing to separate the Israeli government from the Israeli people, the latter of whom have a sizeable portion that don't agree with the governments actions in Gaza.
It's sad and as you suggested, just fuels racism in the form of anti semitism. All it takes is one extreme to destroy an entire point of view.
Pretty much all the comments here, and the article itself, are living in some sort of fantasy world where the status quo is stable enough by 2028 for this to matter.
Oh no, we can't do individualized learning in classrooms in 2024 because of resources and limited teacher support?
Could there be anything happening over the last four years that might change that balance in another four years?
This is bait.
The stark reality is that by the time this goes into effect the entire public school system is going to be struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing education environment with massive resources for individualized learning but a too slow institutional framework to catch up.
How districts organize their gifted students across geographic lines is like arguing about what color the Titanic is painted and if it might confuse orcas into bumping into it as the iceberg on the horizon gets closer and closer.
Humans lose their way all the time! Not all of them, fortunately; local extreme perturbations usually relax after some time, and merge with the general more-or-less-sensible background. (Not always, sadly.)
But "DEI" as currently implemented is either worse-than-useless virtue signaling (in corporate America) or the complete destruction of standards (in US schools and universities).
I bluntly don't get this. About 75% of the US population is white [1], and Seattle are is not particularly thickly populated by Blacks (unlike Southeast), Native Americans (unlike the Great Lakes area), etc. In other words, the program managed to bring in more racially diverse students than one would expect from average numbers.
I also don't see any quotation saying that the particular racial makeup was the reason to alter the program. I suspect racial profiling in education might just be unlawful!
“The student body at the schools served by Seattle Public Schools is 45.4% White, 14.8% Black, 12.6% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 13.3% Hispanic/Latino, 0.4% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.4% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. In addition, 12.3% of students are two or more races, and 0% have not specified their race or ethnicity.”
It's extremely easy to criticize the terrible philosophy represented in the article (which I haven't read due to the source, but am taking at face value for the purpose of this reply because the philosophy exists) without resorting to petty fallacious gotchas. Almost nobody says "race doesn't exist" in the literal sense, or without the purpose of criticizing the way we use the word. This is like calling somebody a hypocrite for saying "beauty is only skin deep" and also using the phrase "beautiful mind". It's a pointless word game.
And regardless, what is "that philosophy"? You're making up a bucket and putting people in it who might not agree with each other. That's a very common political fallacy - pointing at any two disparate ideas from the same 50% of the political spectrum and calling "hypocrite".
Well if there is a more perfect illustration on why society in 2024 cannot have a reasonable and intelligent discussion about anything, I can’t name it. “I’m not going to read it…but I am going to comment on it anyway” is intellectually lazy.
Just go read the article, then comment. Don’t be afraid of words, you can still think for yourself even when you read things in sources that might occasionally write things that you disagree with…
Q: Explain to me why people of a certain school of thought say that race is a made up social construct and human races don't exist, but then people of that school of thought make decisions based on race, such as banning gifted classes because there are too many of one race and not enough of another
A:This is a complex and sensitive topic. I'll aim to provide an objective overview of the arguments and perspectives involved.
The idea that race is a social construct, not a biological reality, is supported by many scientists and social theorists. They argue that the genetic variation within racial groups is greater than the variation between them, and that racial categories don't map neatly onto genetic clusters. Instead, the argument goes, race is a social and historical construct - an arbitrary way of categorizing people that has shifted over time and place based on superficial characteristics like skin color.
However, even if race isn't "real" biologically, it has very real social, economic, and political ramifications. Centuries of racial discrimination and oppression have created stark inequalities between racial groups in areas like wealth, education, health outcomes, etc. Those who want to ban gifted classes or implement other race-conscious policies argue that colorblind policies aren't enough to undo those inequities. They believe proactively favoring historically disadvantaged racial groups is necessary to level the playing field.
Critics argue that even if the intention is to remedy past racism, making decisions based on race is itself a form of racism that reinforces racial essentialism and division. They say individual students should be judged as individuals, not primarily as members of racial groups. Some argue that factors like income, not race, should be used to promote equity and diversity.
Fundamentally, there's tension between the view that racial disparities stem from unjust social structures that need to be intentionally re-engineered, and the classically liberal view that government and institutions should be colorblind and treat everyone as an individual. Smart people of good faith come down on different sides of that debate.
These are thorny issues without easy answers. Historically, racism has done immense harm, and racial inequities persist today. At the same time, enshrining race-based policymaking risks unintentionally reinforcing racial divisions and treating people as representatives of racial groups rather than individuals. In my view, the path forward is to strive for a society of true equal opportunity while being mindful of not unduly burdening or discriminating against individuals in the process. But I respect that others may see it differently. Open and empathetic dialogue to understand each other's perspectives is essential.
And at the same time it is control tactic... If people spend all time fighting for and against DEI, they won't fight about class issues. Which are the true problem. So it is easy to throw some money at impressionable and loud people. Just so they focus on something inconsequential while being robbed blind.
In Northern states gifted programs were created to allow for racially segregated schools within schools following Brown vs. Board of Education. Most gifted programs still essentially enable that. It’s worth noting that American kids in gifted programs are considered utterly average when they travel overseas. The idea that a huge chunk of kids is somehow so extraordinary that they need to be educated separately is farcical. Like skipping grades the system really exists to make college applications easier for a specific segment of society.
Why is this so hard? Just keep the accelerated education program. Then try to help the disadvantaged groups get better testing scores via assistance programs. The issue here is obviously the name of the program. Just change that!