The "More" Child

Although I haven’t been posting at my normal steady pace, that doesn’t mean that I’m not keeping up with what happening out there in Ed World.  And there have been several ed threads/stories/blog posts in the last two weeks that you should be sure not to miss.

Jay Mathews on Gifted Ed

Reacting to news stories in late November that Virginia’s governor was calling for a review of gifted education in the state, followed by stories that Alexandria’s superintendent wants “more diversity” in its gifted programs, Jay Mathews let loose with a blog post:  Why Gifted Classes Are Not Enough:  The Warren Buffet Case.

These days, we have many fine teachers in the Washington area trained to help gifted children. Many parents are happy that their children have been designated gifted. But we have no data to show that such children wouldn’t be better off if they were just taken to the library and told to read anything they liked.

It triggered a flurry of responses, including mine:

Jay, Jay, Jay. As the others above have noted, please, stop with the idea that somehow parents love the label of “gifted” for bragging the rights. No, we want our children to receive an appropriate education. Fullstop. As Crimson Wife notes, we do it for the lowest end of the spectrum, so why should those on the other end receive any less or basically be told, sorry folks, we can’t help you, head to the library and homeschool. Not everyone can.

But I’ll call your bluff. I’ll head to the library and homeschool–but then don’t tell me I can’t use college courses or other supplemental courses in my homeschooling because the primary instruction has to be done directly by the parent (yes, this is how the State of Maryland is currently interpreting its homeschool regulations.) Parents of highly gifted-plus kids are being placed in an untenable situation. Fight for watered down “gifted” programs. Or opt out.

So Jay, I’m with you if you can crack the nut of persuading school administrators to TRULY meet the needs of gifted kids, namely giving accesss to middle school and high school courses in elementary and middle school, allowing distance education (CTY and EPGY and AoPS) and independent study–and not just slotting them the school system’s little age-proscribed conceptions of what gifted kids should get. But until then I will fight for every scrap of “service” I can wrest from the system.

Do check his post, and more importantly, the comments.

Testing Snafu at Thomas Jefferson High School

Thomas Jefferson High School was once again named the top high school in the US.  This on the heels of a flattering in a backhanded sort of way piece in the Washingtonian. But earlier this month there was trouble with TJ testing, as many booklets were found to be defective.  This sparked a healthy discussion in some quarters about why Fairfax County was using a custom designed (and no doubt more expensive) test rather than, say, the SAT.  (Be sure to check a reader’s comeback to Valerie Strauss:  “Valerie, spare me “your snarky column.”)

Middle School Tracking Study

The Fordham Institute issued a report on December 10th titled Tracking and Detracking: High Achievers in Massachusetts Middle Schools and it’s been churning its way through the blogosphere ever since.  (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here…  )  Among the key findings:

Middle schools with more tracks have significantly more math pupils performing at the advanced and proficient levels on state tests and fewer pupils at the needs improvement and failing levels. Conversely, detracked schools have more failing and needs improvement math students than schools with two or three tracks.

And

when socioeconomic status is held constant, each additional track in eighth-grade math is associated with a 3 percentage-point rise in students scoring at the advanced level. In other words, a school with 200 eighth graders that offers at least three levels of math is typically attended by twelve more students scoring at the advanced level than a detracked school of similar size and socioeconomic status.

I particularly liked Laura Vanderkam’s pithy response to a “tracking” critic:

Since Welner is so against ability grouping, I assumed that his classes at the University of Colorado must be open to all comers of all abilities. But it turns out that the University of Colorado at Boulder’s School of Education is very proud of how “ability grouped” it is, in the sense of being very selective to get in. As this profile page notes, GRE scores for doctoral candidates in the School of Education ranked 6th out of 190 schools around the country. I think one needs to take with a grain of salt the idea that young people should be subjected to completely heterogeneous classes when it comes from people who have put themselves in professional environments where everyone has done well on standardized tests.

Oakland Terrace Kindergartners to be Sent to Middle School Campus Due to Crowding

Local blogger Dan Reed of Just Up the Pike broke the story that MCPS has plans to send the kindergartners from chronically overcrowded Oakland Terrace to Sligo Creek Middle School next year.   Needless to say, parents are Not Happy.

And also hot… New York Times calls out the Jay Mathews AP juggernaut.  We need more cool nerds.  Shenk and Dobbs face off.

(Shenk is of the everyone-is-gifted school. Dobbs has put forth the idea theory of “orchid kids”…Motherlode “stole” (;-)) my insight that orchid kids bear striking similarities to gifted kids.) He says they’re not the same, but his blog I asked Dobbs “How does your hypothesis relate to Dabrowski’s theory of overexcitabilities?”  He wrote back, “thanks for drawing this to my attn. I want to return to the temperament/intelligence/giftedness issue, and this will help. I hope to get to it in the next week or two and post on it.”