Reply to DCPS Policy on Talented & Gifted & Acaemic Magnet Middle School Programs...Questions for You

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Reply to "DCPS Policy on Talented & Gifted & Acaemic Magnet Middle School Programs...Questions for You"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP I think you miss the point of 23:28 about the impact of what you are proposing.  First of all it would not pull all of those kids, only those kids whose parents cared leaving a lot of poor kids with crappy opportunities.  You may argue not that different from the status quo, but frankly one I think would ratify the current in inadequacies in ways I think would be lousy for schools.   While I get why it can suck being smart in a poor urban school where learning is not necessarily aspired to, I lived it in Denver inner-city school, I also know schools can track and promote these students, question on that front is will.  To me the bigger issue raised by one of the PP posters is maybe consolidating the middle schools so you can get sufficient scale to increase rigor. [/quote]

I disagree entirely. There seems to be a sense across the board here that poor kids come from homes with parents that don't care about their education. Nothing can be further from the truth. I've often seen the kind of smugness on this board (a deep need in privileged people to feel like they are better than the rest of the riff raff) that insinuates that kids who come from better educated and more affluent families are smarter. That is false. There is a skewed sense that if a kid tests better on standardized tests, if they have been drilled enough, if they have been exposed to more then they are therefore smarter. 
That keeps everyone who "counts" in their ivory towers.

Kids with opportunities and exposure may be able to differentiate Bach from Beethoven and parrot ideas about post-modernism, but that doesn't qualify as gifted. Giftedness come from insight and creative problem solving in addition to rote learning. There are ways of testing giftedness at the raw level where privilege would be less of an asset in determining whether or not a child was eligible. At my magnet school I had friends whose parents were drug addicts, washed toilets for a living and lived on welfare. They lived in the poorest and most downtrodden neighborhoods and they had just as much if not more integrity and wit in their little fingers than most...and they were hungrier and worked harder. 
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