“Advanced learning” is under fire in Seattle, reports Katie Herzog in The Stranger. Superintendent Denise Juneau has proposed dismantling what’s known as the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC). A group called Equity and Access to Support Every Learner (EASEL) charges the plan would violate a state law requiring advanced learners have access to accelerated instruction.
Photo: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay
The district has a huge achievement gap separating white and Asian-American students from everyone else, notes Herzog. Students who score in the top 2 percent are placed in separate classrooms. Two-thirds of gifted students are white, 12 percent are Asian, 4 percent Hispanic and less than 2 percent black. Looking at total enrollment, white students make up 47 percent, Asians 12 percent, Hispanics 12 percent and blacks 15 percent.
Schools with HCC classrooms “are essentially segregated by race, with white and Asian students in some classrooms and black and brown students in the rest.”
Last month, the school board rejected a district plan to replace HCC at a South Seattle middle school with a new program open to all students.
HCC parents fear the idea will be back, writes Herzog. But other parents want more for general-education students.
“My main issue with HCC is that is offers to some kids what you could be offering to everybody,” says Matt Halvorson, the parent of a fifth grader in general ed and the publisher of Rise Up For Students, a blog commenting on equity in Seattle Schools. “We can do differentiated learning and give everyone valuable experiences that validate their genius and recognize them as special, which everybody is. HCC, as it is, exacerbates existing gaps on racial and socioeconomic lines.”
Those who support gifted education are considered racist, an HCC teacher told Herzog.
“It’s very clear that if you support gifted services and if you’re not calling these kids ‘privileged white racists,’ you get frozen out,” the teacher told me. “I’ve been doing this for seven years and there has not been one training to even teach teachers what giftedness is and what it isn’t. They think it’s privilege, but it’s actually a form of neurodiversity.”
Dismantling the program and mainstreaming the gifted students could work, the teacher says, but it would not be cheap. “It would require halving the class size. You would need extra assistance, three to four different curriculums in the same class, and we would have to change the school day because we can’t do that kind of teaching in 50-minute periods. There’s a way to do it, but it would be massively more expensive.”
Last week, a task force of parents, educators and community members recommended going beyond test scores to consider classroom performance and high interest in a subject area to identify gifted students, reports Dahlia Bazzaz in the Seattle Times. In addition, the task force proposed comparing the test scores of students of color and those learning English to similar students, rather than to all students considered for advanced learning.
HCC parents and teachers support testing all students for the program to identify advanced students who might otherwise be missed, writes Herzog.
Mynique Adams, a member of EASEL, was one of the few black students in Seattle’s original gifted program, Horizon, created to stem white flight. She and her husband had to request HCC testing for their son, even though he tested well above grade level. Adams believes white teachers have low expectations for students of color.
Now a fourth-grader in an HCC class, her son is no longer bored in school, says Adams.
She complains that Juneau “hasn’t talked to HCC parents of color. We are here. We are not unicorns. We exist. . . . It’s really, really troubling that the district wants to eliminate these programs in the name of black and brown children when they haven’t even talked to the parents of color to see what is going on.”