APS is failing my gifted child

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kids were tagged gifted in ES and had great experience at ASFS and DHMS. Push in services are more low key than pull out, but then kids get to pick more of what interests them.

They've stopped doing push in services, too. It's only services for all. No differentiation.

Great. The extensions should be available to everyone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

Thanks to NCLB.

APS is significantly underfunded so why are some parents expecting a highly personalized educational experience?

I agree with an earlier PP about letting the kids - even the “gifted” ones - have a more chill ES/MS experience. If you want all of the craziness of AAP and the race to nowhere then you’ll have to move to FCPS.

How is APS underfunded? Don’t we pay more per child than most jurisdictions?

https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/arlington/Board.nsf/files/D2WW4J839BAE/$file/FY%202025%20Superintendent's%20Presentation%20FINAL%20(331%20pm).pdf
"“Virginia school divisions receive less K-12 funding per student than the 50-state average,
the regional average, and three of Virginia’s five bordering states. School divisions in other
states receive 14 percent more per student than school divisions in Virginia, on average,
after normalizing for differences in cost of labor among states. This equates to about
$1,900 more per student than Virginia.” Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) estimates that annually APS is underfunded by approximately $51 million"


Plus the funding for capital projects is included in the operating budget.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

I mean, if you look at where the bulk of their money and effort gets directed, that’s certainly what it seems like. But I think that would be a rather embarrassing admission of institutional failure.

Can you imagine the motto? “Come to APS, where we will spend 13 years teaching your kid to pass a test that they probably could have passed after the first 8 or 9.”

I am very annoyed that APS has reassigned the former gifted teachers, now AACs, from supporting advanced learners to being directed to supporting all students. Most APS elementary schools have a large portion of gifted or advanced students (~30+%) and it was good having at leasr one person per elementary school who was tasked with making learning more appropriate and challenging for these students. There are lots of other teachers supporting students who need help passing SOLs, as well as it being the main classroom focus. And in the past, the main classroom teacher often got extra bandwidth to help those students when the gifted teacher was working with the advanced students. It's a shame APS has ditched this model and the AAC is now told to only work on materials and projects for the whole class and all learners. It's very anti-differentiation, when it is necessary and appropriate to differentiate. Ignoring gifted and advanced students isn't equitable, despite what APS admin is touting.

To those with middle and high schoolers chiming in, this is a new change as of last year and has had a big impact for my kids. Far less is being offered to challenge them than was available pre-covid.

The old policy had drawbacks too. Some kids were not identified who should have been. The AACs were too resistant to identification because it increased their caseloads. So students couldn't access those pullouts. Also the pullouts had no connection to the instruction in the classroom either.

Every single kid has at least 2 screening tests (NNAT and COGAT) and any kid with a qualifying score is considered and further evaluated. And APS schools have a large percentage of identified students, so it's very hard to imagine that under identification is a reason to end the program.

Besides, my statement was not about pull outs, but about APS ending push ins. They've effectively ended all gifted services, as AACs are no longer offering differentiation for advanced and gifted students.

Children of color have always been under-identified

Are there actual empirical test data on this? Or is it a percentage of population nonsense reasoning backed by some self-fulfilling equity agenda study?? I just read some studies and none of them said a bunch of high scoring children of color were being deliberately denied gifted services.

https://nagc.org/resource/resmgr/2020-21_state_of_the_states_.pdf

Table 15, PDF page 110

This table doesn’t show that gifted kids of color were denied services.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kids were tagged gifted in ES and had great experience at ASFS and DHMS. Push in services are more low key than pull out, but then kids get to pick more of what interests them.

They've stopped doing push in services, too. It's only services for all. No differentiation.

Great. The extensions should be available to everyone.

That's bunk. Advanced and gifted students shouldn't have to sit quietly and wait after they finish their grade level material while others take far longer to finish, remediate mistakes, review and re-review SOL content. It leaves very little, if any, time for enrichment if you can only do an enrichment activity when the whole class can participate. It also means that the enrichment activity can never go into advanced material, as that wouldn't be accessible to all. It's a situation where a fake attempt to be equal is inherently unequal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

I mean, if you look at where the bulk of their money and effort gets directed, that’s certainly what it seems like. But I think that would be a rather embarrassing admission of institutional failure.

Can you imagine the motto? “Come to APS, where we will spend 13 years teaching your kid to pass a test that they probably could have passed after the first 8 or 9.”

I am very annoyed that APS has reassigned the former gifted teachers, now AACs, from supporting advanced learners to being directed to supporting all students. Most APS elementary schools have a large portion of gifted or advanced students (~30+%) and it was good having at leasr one person per elementary school who was tasked with making learning more appropriate and challenging for these students. There are lots of other teachers supporting students who need help passing SOLs, as well as it being the main classroom focus. And in the past, the main classroom teacher often got extra bandwidth to help those students when the gifted teacher was working with the advanced students. It's a shame APS has ditched this model and the AAC is now told to only work on materials and projects for the whole class and all learners. It's very anti-differentiation, when it is necessary and appropriate to differentiate. Ignoring gifted and advanced students isn't equitable, despite what APS admin is touting.

To those with middle and high schoolers chiming in, this is a new change as of last year and has had a big impact for my kids. Far less is being offered to challenge them than was available pre-covid.

The old policy had drawbacks too. Some kids were not identified who should have been. The AACs were too resistant to identification because it increased their caseloads. So students couldn't access those pullouts. Also the pullouts had no connection to the instruction in the classroom either.

This is why we need separate classrooms.

This is a joke comment right?

What joke? FCPS has AAP and TJ. Loudoun has similar. If you get the gifted kids out of the classroom, the gen ed kids would learn better, too.

No thanks to AAP. My friends in Fairfax Co absolutely stress about making sure their kids get in and then it’s terrible when one kid does but the other doesn’t. And they have to provide transportation. The school is made up of scattered kids and they don’t seem to have the close community we have at our neighborhood school in Arlington. If you want that then move there, but many of us do not want any sort of AAP system here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

Thanks to NCLB.

APS is significantly underfunded so why are some parents expecting a highly personalized educational experience?

I agree with an earlier PP about letting the kids - even the “gifted” ones - have a more chill ES/MS experience. If you want all of the craziness of AAP and the race to nowhere then you’ll have to move to FCPS.

How is APS underfunded? Don’t we pay more per child than most jurisdictions?

https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/arlington/Board.nsf/files/D2WW4J839BAE/$file/FY%202025%20Superintendent's%20Presentation%20FINAL%20(331%20pm).pdf
"“Virginia school divisions receive less K-12 funding per student than the 50-state average,
the regional average, and three of Virginia’s five bordering states. School divisions in other
states receive 14 percent more per student than school divisions in Virginia, on average,
after normalizing for differences in cost of labor among states. This equates to about
$1,900 more per student than Virginia.” Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) estimates that annually APS is underfunded by approximately $51 million"


Plus the funding for capital projects is included in the operating budget.

But FCPS Would have same shortfall compared to other states right?

[Anonymous]

I think it's all about the teacher. Not the school. You can move somewhere else and get a bad teacher who doesn't differentiate and the one in the classroom next door does. It's terrible. I wish there was an answer and that schools did a better job matching children with teachers who are a good fit or that they would put kids into leveled classrooms.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it's all about the teacher. Not the school. You can move somewhere else and get a bad teacher who doesn't differentiate and the one in the classroom next door does. It's terrible. I wish there was an answer and that schools did a better job matching children with teachers who are a good fit or that they would put kids into leveled classrooms.

This is true. The experience is only as good as the teacher. Some teachers have the ability,comfort level and willingness to provide differentiated instruction that meets kids where they are. Other teachers just don't get it or aren't willing to put in the work, no matter how much coaching they are provided.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

I mean, if you look at where the bulk of their money and effort gets directed, that’s certainly what it seems like. But I think that would be a rather embarrassing admission of institutional failure.

Can you imagine the motto? “Come to APS, where we will spend 13 years teaching your kid to pass a test that they probably could have passed after the first 8 or 9.”

I am very annoyed that APS has reassigned the former gifted teachers, now AACs, from supporting advanced learners to being directed to supporting all students. Most APS elementary schools have a large portion of gifted or advanced students (~30+%) and it was good having at leasr one person per elementary school who was tasked with making learning more appropriate and challenging for these students. There are lots of other teachers supporting students who need help passing SOLs, as well as it being the main classroom focus. And in the past, the main classroom teacher often got extra bandwidth to help those students when the gifted teacher was working with the advanced students. It's a shame APS has ditched this model and the AAC is now told to only work on materials and projects for the whole class and all learners. It's very anti-differentiation, when it is necessary and appropriate to differentiate. Ignoring gifted and advanced students isn't equitable, despite what APS admin is touting.

To those with middle and high schoolers chiming in, this is a new change as of last year and has had a big impact for my kids. Far less is being offered to challenge them than was available pre-covid.

The old policy had drawbacks too. Some kids were not identified who should have been. The AACs were too resistant to identification because it increased their caseloads. So students couldn't access those pullouts. Also the pullouts had no connection to the instruction in the classroom either.

Why would pullouts need to be connected to core instruction? According to the fall benchmark my elementary child is 4 grades ahead.
Find challenges or activities unrelated to core instruction that they wouldn’t get otherwise. I completely agree that tutoring should match core instruction, but I don’t understand why extension would need to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

Thanks to NCLB.

APS is significantly underfunded so why are some parents expecting a highly personalized educational experience?

I agree with an earlier PP about letting the kids - even the “gifted” ones - have a more chill ES/MS experience. If you want all of the craziness of AAP and the race to nowhere then you’ll have to move to FCPS.

How is APS underfunded? Don’t we pay more per child than most jurisdictions?

https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/arlington/Board.nsf/files/D2WW4J839BAE/$file/FY%202025%20Superintendent's%20Presentation%20FINAL%20(331%20pm).pdf
"“Virginia school divisions receive less K-12 funding per student than the 50-state average,
the regional average, and three of Virginia’s five bordering states. School divisions in other
states receive 14 percent more per student than school divisions in Virginia, on average,
after normalizing for differences in cost of labor among states. This equates to about
$1,900 more per student than Virginia.” Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) estimates that annually APS is underfunded by approximately $51 million"


Plus the funding for capital projects is included in the operating budget.

Arlington Schools are not underfunded. They county literally spends $25,811 per student each year. https://www.apsva.us/wp-content/uploads/sites/57/2024/09/FY-2025-Reporting-Per-Pupil-Costs-per-SB-Policy-D-9.1.pdf

[Anonymous]

My post above probably came across as snarkier than I meant it to- and I’m not necessarily advocating for pull out services, but more to just say that kids should have options to do extensions that are more than just a slightly harder version of what they are doing in the classroom. And with a push in model, I think it’s hard for that to be anything other than more worksheets (though tbh that’s better than nothing)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:APS is failing other parents' non-gifted kids, too. You're not special.

APS only job is to get kids to pass the SOLs. Period.

I mean, if you look at where the bulk of their money and effort gets directed, that’s certainly what it seems like. But I think that would be a rather embarrassing admission of institutional failure.

Can you imagine the motto? “Come to APS, where we will spend 13 years teaching your kid to pass a test that they probably could have passed after the first 8 or 9.”

I am very annoyed that APS has reassigned the former gifted teachers, now AACs, from supporting advanced learners to being directed to supporting all students. Most APS elementary schools have a large portion of gifted or advanced students (~30+%) and it was good having at leasr one person per elementary school who was tasked with making learning more appropriate and challenging for these students. There are lots of other teachers supporting students who need help passing SOLs, as well as it being the main classroom focus. And in the past, the main classroom teacher often got extra bandwidth to help those students when the gifted teacher was working with the advanced students. It's a shame APS has ditched this model and the AAC is now told to only work on materials and projects for the whole class and all learners. It's very anti-differentiation, when it is necessary and appropriate to differentiate. Ignoring gifted and advanced students isn't equitable, despite what APS admin is touting.

To those with middle and high schoolers chiming in, this is a new change as of last year and has had a big impact for my kids. Far less is being offered to challenge them than was available pre-covid.

The old policy had drawbacks too. Some kids were not identified who should have been. The AACs were too resistant to identification because it increased their caseloads. So students couldn't access those pullouts. Also the pullouts had no connection to the instruction in the classroom either.

Why would pullouts need to be connected to core instruction? According to the fall benchmark my elementary child is 4 grades ahead.
Find challenges or activities unrelated to core instruction that they wouldn’t get otherwise. I completely agree that tutoring should match core instruction, but I don’t understand why extension would need to.

i

I guess they don’t need to be connected but it was weird not to have any connection at all. The pullout was only once a week so it would be some odd random thing that had nothing to do with what they were doing at all in the classroom. Then when they got back to the classroom, they had missed the actual lesson and had to make it up. Why couldn’t the pullout have done a deeper or more difficult version of the lesson that the rest of the class was doing?

But maybe this appeals to you?

[Anonymous]

“Gifted” kids throughout history have grown up as orphans, or were charged with farming 70 hours a week, they lacked books to read, lived through smallpox or Spanish flu, were sometimes enslaved.

If your kid is the marvel you seem to think, he’ll be fine. Part of genius is the drive to pursue all the amazing things your mind is capable of.

If your gifted kid is brought to tears by the boredom of his third grade spelling test, he’s not Penske material. Deal with it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:“Gifted” kids throughout history have grown up as orphans, or were charged with farming 70 hours a week, they lacked books to read, lived through smallpox or Spanish flu, were sometimes enslaved.

If your kid is the marvel you seem to think, he’ll be fine. Part of genius is the drive to pursue all the amazing things your mind is capable of.

If your gifted kid is brought to tears by the boredom of his third grade spelling test, he’s not Penske material. Deal with it.

Then what can be said of all the wasted time and resources devoted to some (most? yours?) of the other kids who aren't even allowed to fail classes they're obviously not smart enough to pass because honesty and reality are not allowed in academia anymore. We all know they'd be better served learning life skills in a dedicated school that will benefit them more in life than a standard classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:“Gifted” kids throughout history have grown up as orphans, or were charged with farming 70 hours a week, they lacked books to read, lived through smallpox or Spanish flu, were sometimes enslaved.

If your kid is the marvel you seem to think, he’ll be fine. Part of genius is the drive to pursue all the amazing things your mind is capable of.

If your gifted kid is brought to tears by the boredom of his third grade spelling test, he’s not Penske material. Deal with it.

This definition of "gifted" worked 100 years ago because back then schools were willing to exclude the bottom 10% of students who were disruptive and uninterested in learning. The result was a classroom capable of maintaining both high standards and discipline, and the need for any kind of differentiation disappeared for anyone but a genuine prodigy.

People don't want to admit it, but differentiation and inclusion go hand in hand. Otherwise you end up with what we have now, which is the worst of both worlds.