Reply to APS is failing my gifted child

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Not to put too fine a point on it, but APS has one goal with regards to its gifted students: to create a semblance of a program that appears to do something (so as not to lose too many of those students to private and other systems), while in fact doing as little as possible.

APS leadership, both the board and the superintendent, have made clear over and over again that their primary goal is closing the "achievement gap." That is the main metric by which they measure themselves these days. That is a noble goal. With the possible exception of adopting science-based literacy approaches, APS' efforts over the last five years have barely moved the needle.

[b]In that environment, it's clear that putting significant effort into improving the performance of the top 10-20% of students would be totally self-defeating. Whatever meager gains have been made in closing the "gap" by improvements in the lowest-performers will be wiped out by improvements in the top performers. [/b]

If closing the achievement gap is your organization's top priority, then a successful gifted ed program is indistinguishable from failure. [/quote]

The metrics that the state uses to test student performance are not open ended scores. It's not like the smart kids are going to 2x their scores while the not smart kids are only going to 1x theirs. SOLs only test for the standard curriculum, which is pathetically low. Like sped level low compared to a few decades ago. Some of the other standardized tests seem to have an artificial ceiling that some kids have hit, where I'm not sure if it's the teachers or the testing program preventing them from continuing. Even the PE annual tests (like the pacer test) in ES/MS were stopped before kids could "finish," in effect causing them to max out at a level lower than when they could have finished. I'm not sure if this is normal for all APS schools but it has been the case for at least more than one. We've been told multiple times by our kids that the teacher just made people stop. So I'm not sure if the ceiling of the smarter kids can be raised much higher in terms of the measurables. What APS seems to want to do is to stop teaching to the mid-tier and above average level kids so that they can close the gap that way (i.e., race to the bottom), instead of raising the level of the underperforming kids. I mean seriously, how hard is it really to teach normal kids to read and write? And if they're not normal, they need to be moved to separate classrooms or programs anyway because they're just stealing time and resources from the normal kids in the classroom.[/quote]

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