Well I just forked over my $2.95 per article to Education Week in order to read Laura Vanderkam’s article, Whatever Happened to Grade Skipping (Aug. 12)–and a response by Kay Williams, MCPS’s Director of the Division of Accelerated and Enriched Instruction, District Cited Does Does Have Options for ‘Acceleration‘ (Sept. 15). Laura writes about both in her blog post today, “Without Skipping a Grade.” I had to see what all the fuss was about.
In EdWeek Ms. Vanderkam wrote:
Even in the best of times, gifted education is controversial. Why your child and not my child? When the economy and school budgets get tight, the gifted conversation only heats up more, with parents anxious to hang on to any advantage their child might garner, and budget hawks eager to ax programs some see as expendable.
That phenomenon is playing out across the country…. In Montgomery County, Md., the debate is more existential, with the district considering abandoning its practice of labeling 2nd graders as gifted or not gifted.
That was enough to set alarms ringing over at MCPS’s $10 million PR office and trigger a response.
In her letter to Education Week, Ms. Williams argues that contrary to the impression created, “acceleration is already an integral part of the program options in Montgomery County public schools. The district’s systemwide model for acceleration ensures that students can access an appropriate, above grade-level curriculum every day without skipping a grade.”
Ms. Vanderkam (in addition to calling out the reliance on math as an example) rightly picks up on the unstated implication that there is something bad about a whole grade skip. She concludes
If Montgomery County has a systemwide model in order to ensure that no one need (horrors!) skip a grade, this seems to show that the prejudice is alive and well.
Oh my, is it ever. One needs look no further than the recent Singam case. Or just read my post on this subject earlier in the week. Or what happened with my other daughter when subject acceleration was suggested (Update: At her new (not MCPS) school my seventh grader is going to be reading, discussing and writing about Lord of the Flies–with the high school kids.)
MCPS’s attitude is all the more shocking when one considers that the people in charge of gifted education are philosophically (financially? bureaucratically?) opposed to a legitimate gifted education intervention that is supported by research and allowed by law. In fact Mr. Singam has been moved put together a little PowerPoint on the subject.
That’s where Ms. Vanderkam leaves off. But for MoCo gifted advocates, the real interesting stuff is the inside baseball examples Ms. Williams uses to make her case.
- Math curriculum (always with the math!). She notes that 48.8 percent of 5th grade students’ successfully completed grade 6 mathematics or higher in 2008-09, and similarly, 59.6 percent of 8th grade students successfully completed Algebra 1 or higher in 2008. “Successfully completed?” “Proficiency” is 60% on county tests.
- She notes that Montgomery County buses students whose needs cannot be met at the local elementary school to a nearby middle school, or to a center for the highly gifted. Personally, in my 10 years with a student in the system I have never met a kid who has bussed to middle school or high school. But all the apocryphal stories I’ve heard involve….Surprise!…math. As for the Centers, they are just for 4th and 5th grade, something people outside of Montgomery County wouldn’t know, but it sure sounds good. Ms. Williams makes NO mention of kids in middle school who need coursework at the high school level being bused to high school, and of course no mention of significant acceleration opportunities in language arts, science or social studies. A little William and Mary, a little Jr. Great Books, take some Mad Science after school, go the Smithsonian on the weekend. We’ve been over all this before.
- She states that MCPS provides “a continuum of services that includes offering the most challenging instruction in a setting that supports the social and emotional requirements of gifted learners helps the district meet all children’s needs.” Please. Don’t talk to me about “continuum of services.” Or about sensitivity to the social and emotional needs of gifted kids. If true, this blog and the GT listservs wouldn’t exist.
- She states that more students are reading earlier (although the gains slip), more are taking rigorous and challenging courses (open to question…more taking doesn’t mean the courses are truly rigorous), and more are taking APs .
And that last bullet point? That’s the issue. MPCS wants to make this about “more students.” But it’s not about the “more.” It’s about being open to the possibility–the very likely possibility given the demographics of the county–of the existence of truly exceptional students, “the few,” (dare I say a Special Population) who need “services” beyond the limited options in circumscribed age-based boxes that MCPS offers. It’s about having the flexibility, insight and humanity to recognize and meet the needs of these students. To acknowledge and allow that for some students, whole grade acceleration aka “skipping” is the appropriate “service.”
However judging by MCPS actions and rhetoric, it doesn’t want to see these students (hence elimination of the term “gifted” in the proposed revision of Policy IOA). And it doesn’t seem to want to serve them. Newsflash: If the majority of students is doing “advanced” level work, maybe we need to recalibrate what “grade level” is here in Montgomery County and restore some sanity to the whole “gifted” discussion.
Update 9/21/09: Here’s part of the comment I posted over on Laura’s blog:
On the one hand MCPS can be commended for having the gifted services that it does. But when those “services” become a straight jacket that deny acceleration as a viable educational option for some children, and holds them back, it’s a problem. When gifted services morph into a belief that “everyone is gifted” then we have problem. Yes, raise the bar. But don’t in the process ignore the legitimate needs, the very existence of, gifted students.
It would be incredibly useful to have the absolute statistics from the “global screening” or any out-of-level tests. How many profoundly gifted students are there in MC? How many highly gifted?
Yes, accommodations need to be designed for individual children, but what is the total demand for these accommodations and services? And the statistics need to include the children at the many fine private schools in the area.
With the huge size of the MCPS student population and the fascination of the bureaucracy with numbers, this should be a no-brainer.
BTW, your children are contributing to the level of transiency in the local schools. C. might be counted 3 times, leaving the love school, leaving the HGC, and then leaving her middle school. That’s an interesting idea.
Agreed. Putting the data out there would be incredibly constructive–and could actually be in the interest of MCPS. Laying it out there and allowing us to deal with facts might quiet some of the parent advocate sturm and drang. However by being so secretive, parents are left to trade anecdotes and spin conspiracy theories in the dark. If MCPS is “all about the data” then let’s have at it and let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah, we’re the bad family. And we pulled a child right before the MSAs too.
This isn’t really related to the previous comments, but it is related to the original post and the subject of grade skipping in general. Although I consider myself an advocate of gifted education, I still have reservations about grade skipping. For one thing, what many gifted kids need is an accelerated program that continuously moves at a faster pace than a regular class. Grade-skipping puts kids in a more advanced class that moves at a normal pace, which to the extremely gifted, is slow.
My second complaint is that it fosters no cohesiveness or sense of community among very gifted kids. When I was in school, if I could have chosen between being put in a class with older kids or being put in a class with other gifted kids (and I mean really gifted kids, not the mildly gifted crowd that so often ends up in those programs), I would have definitely chosen the latter, because then I would have been with kids who were both age and intellectual peers. I would have been normal. Because EG and PG kids are so rare in the general population, attempts by the public schools to create programs that cater to them specifically will be thwarted if most of them choose not to participate and to skip grades instead. Such programs are virtually nonexistent anyway, but there’s no way the schools would consider them worth the expense if they didn’t get full participation from the few students who qualified. If a school considered creating such a program, but canceled it because most of the qualifying students preferred the prestige associated with grade-skipping and eventual early high school graduation, what would happen to the few qualifying students who needed it, and for whom whole-grade skipping was, for one reason or another, not a viable option? Would they have any opportunities available to them that would enable them to get both an advanced curriculum and regular, face-to-face interaction with intellectual peers studying the same subjects? If schools consider grade skipping a good option for some highly gifted students but not others, what options will be available for those “others”?
Since it requires a really enormous district to put together a class of the top 0.1%, there are almost no such programs. Those that do exist often involve such long commute times that it is not clear that there is sufficient benefit to justify the travel time.
Programs set up for the top 5% (about as selective as most districts can get and still have enough students to form a class) don’t do much for the EG kids, who need to skip and then get placed in a top-5% program.
Both acceleration and clustering are needed interventions—they are rarely competing options.
How are they not competing options? I am aware of the difficulties in putting together programs arranged specifically for highly gifted students; that is my point exactly. Any such programs would have to have full participation. If some qualifying students opt out because they would rather skip grades, students who can’t skip grades (for example, because of grossly uneven intellectual development) have no options left that would enable them to spend time with intellectual peers. The only way these two options are not competing options is if we assume clustering highly gifted students is so impractical as to be impossible and that grade skipping combined with clustering for less gifted students is the ONLY options available to the highly gifted — in which case, highly gifted students who cannot skip grades have zero options anyway.
The moderately gifted get clustered, the more highly gifted get skipped and then put in the gifted cluster. Skipping does not move kids out of the gifted cluster, just changes what level they are in. Thus, no competition.
If the kid can’t handle the gifted level after skipping, then they are not ready for a skip.
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