Reply to DC Begins School Boundary Study

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thank you for posting this. Tracking and "Gifted and Talented" programs are not the simple and perfect fix, and are a much more complex topic. Five or our six years ago there was a Book Club hosted at Stuart Hobson by the then Principal - we all read a chapter of a book and discussed it as a group. I later bought the book and read the whole thing, I highly recommend it. (Book is called Despite the Best Intentions, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22104174-despite-the-best-intentions) In addition to what the PP's text I pasted below, tracking and gifted programs can be problematic for a variety of reasons. When kids are tracked and placed at a young age, it it is hard for students to enter into those classes and tracks at a later date. A kid may not place in those programs for a lot of reasons (they were not at the school at that time, they transferred from another school and were behind, etc). Either way, unless it is done VERY carefully, tracking can exclude kids who are very capable from accessing quality instruction. After I read this book I started reading a bit more into it, and learned that the process for placing kids in tracked classes/Gifted programs can be a lot more subjective than I was comfortable with. Anyway, separate from this specific discussion/thread, I recommend the book, and I give the then Stuart Hobson principal credit for opening up his school/community to discussing this complex topic and trying to find the balance of how to make sure kids are challenged without excluding anybody. The chapter we read together was chapter 4 "It's Like Two High Schools".

[quote] It's a toxic history more than a bad rap. In the years after Brown v. Board, white Washington didn't just quietly accept integration. Rather, they fought it every step of the way with procedural ploys. One of them was gerrymandering attendance boundaries to separate students by race, and another was setting up tracking systems where all the white kids were in one track and all the Black kids were in another. It took roughly twenty years of lawsuits after Brown to fully dismantle official segregation. (I'm not saying the schools aren't segregated today, just that it's not done as a matter of policy.)

A lot of DCPS policy about things like boundaries and tracking came out of the settlement of those lawsuits. [/quote][/quote]

If you're looking for an example of a neighboring school system that doesn't rely on test-in GT programs to provide middle school challenge, look no further than Arlington, where I teach middle school.  In Arlington, advanced middle school students earn the right to take "intensive" (vs. honors) classes in 8th grade in science, social studies (geography for HS credit), English and math by having earned As in these subjects as 7th graders. DCPS, where I've also taught, always seems to be looking for a political viable excuse to duck out of offering advanced middle school students advanced classes outside of math. It's a misguided policy that still drives many UMC families out of DCPS middle schools, including Deal and Hardy.[/quote]

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