The "More" Child

Everyone does what he or she can. Some parents focus on their child’s classroom. Some slave away on the PTA. Some are just able to check their child’s backpack every night. Some blog .

And then there are the real heroes, the parents who sacrifice evenings and weekends to schlep across the county to attend meetings of obscure school board committees and subcommittees, who immerse themselves in the arcana of policy papers and budgets, and who do this long after their own child has left the school system. Translating it all for the rest of us.

One such person is John Hoven, who has been active on the local GT scene for longer than my kids have been alive. No doubt he was drawn into school issues by his son Niels, a precociously brilliant student who later found fleeting fame as a contestant on Beauty and the Geek. As far as I can tell, John Hoven is the Founding Father of the Gifted and Talented Association of Montgomery County. He was instrumental in writing GT policy in the 1990s, he’s a veteran of the math wars and the Singapore Math pilot study and the longtime go-to quote man for all things Gifted and Talented in DC area. I’m sure MCPS administrators can’t stand him.

So it was a huge shock when over the weekend he announced his resignation from the MCPS Accelerated and Enriched Committee which is in the process of overhauling the foundational Policy on Gifted and Talented Education. Here’s his resignation letter:

I am resigning from the Accelerated and Enriched Instruction Committee, because I have stopped believing I could perhaps make a difference.

The opportunity I saw when I joined the AEI Committee was the pending revision of the Policy on Gifted and Talented Education (last revised in 1995). I was instrumental in creating the current version, I understand its successes and shortcomings, and I had a strategy for fixing its deficiencies.

The problem today, as in 1995, was and is MCPS’s failure to provide appropriate instruction to gifted students in the regular classroom in grades K-8. To remedy that, the core strategy embedded in the 1995 policy revision was a mandate to articulate a scope and sequence of
accelerated and enriched learning objectives in math, science, reading/language arts, and social studies in grades K-8.

After two years of noncompliance with that mandate, the Board of Education asked, “Where are these objectives?” In response, MCPS complied in one subject – mathematics. They submitted an accelerated mathematics curriculum that specified a pace of one-and-a-half years of math per year, and this was formally adopted by the Board of Education.

MCPS refused to implement this accelerated curriculum – not so much as an email to school principals asking them to offer this to students. But GTA urged parents to ask their schools to provide it.

Here and there, teachers and principals agreed, and math acceleration became an accepted practice in MCPS. It’s mostly a frantic push to get 5th graders into Math A and B, rather than a steady accelerated pace starting in kindergarten, and the accelerated math curriculum no
longer exists (it was lost when MCPS revised the regular math curriculum in 2001), but there is at least an institutional acceptance of accelerated learning which was not present in 1995.

I count that as a modest success, and something to build on. My strategy this time around was to have the policy itself articulate the learning objectives, rather than try to get MCPS to comply with a policy mandate to do so.

In contrast, staff’s strategy this time around is to write a policy with no specific mandates of any kind. That has an understandable appeal. It gives them the flexibility to do anything they choose to do (or not do), without the annoyance of parents carping about noncompliance.

When I first began work on the AEI Committee, I heard committee members express a strong desire to improve gifted education in the regular classroom, and a strong desire for clearly articulated learning objectives. So I thought my strategy might have a chance. But I have not succeeded, and the draft policy does not include specific mandates of any kind. It does include “clearly articulated learning objectives” as a Desired Outcome, but the Committee is hardly willing to discuss what these objectives should be, and every suggestion is met with a flurry of objections. The April meeting of the AEI Committee demonstrated that in an especially disturbing way.

I had proposed the following specific mandate for the revised policy:

Subject to revision in accordance with Policy IFA, the accelerated and enriched scope and sequence of objectives for grades K-8 will be:
1. Mathematics. The typical accelerated student will progress through the regular math curriculum at a pace of roughly one-and-a-half years of math per year.
2. Reading/Language Arts: Full implementation of the William and Mary Reading/Language Arts Program, and an accelerated pace of instruction sufficient for the typical accelerated student to read two years above grade level by third grade.

After some discussion and debate, a compromise amendment was offered, stating that the Committee would recommend that this be included in either the Policy or the Regulations. That compromise was accepted by a majority vote of the Committee. I sensed that this was a fragile
victory, but I was stunned by the chairman’s subsequent restatement of the motion in the minutes:

“After discussion around the table regarding the inclusion of articulated learning objectives in the policy or regulation, most wanted the concept reflected somewhere.”

Clearly, MCPS staff is adamantly unwilling to articulate clear, specific, accelerated and enriched K-8 learning objectives. That strongly suggests they remain unwilling to provide accelerated and enriched instruction in the regular classroom in grades K-8. I don’t see a way around this. I hope someone else can, so I am giving up my seat on the committee.

John Hoven

What a loss.

MCPS seems to be hell bent on a path of “everyone is gifted” “it’s the services, not the label” track with little regard for the impact on the truly gifted (top 3-5%…as opposed to the 35-40% “gifted”) students in the county.