Thanks for posting this Lucy. I went and looked at TJ's blog post too. Wow. I find this a bit disturbing as well. I googled "Ruby K Payne" and found an article from 2006 by an assistant professor at Illinois State who is critical of Ms. Payne, but definitely more in tune with my feelings on this. Very interesting. She certainly is a controversial and very successful person, based on the results of a google search!
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/fram212.shtml

Lucy, first I want to thank you for your new blog to help provide more transparency. The more the better. And I want to thank you for trying to undo the damage that TJ Mertz tried to inflict on the District's beleaguered TAG Advisory Committee when he sicced the MMSD legal department on them to apply special rules to their gatherings that other MMSD working committees do not have to function under.

However, Lucy, I find it very disturbing that you would cite his blog as a reference. This to me is like citing Rush Limbaugh. While his blog does contain some accurate information, it is often reactionary, polarizing, and of the very nature that you protest is put forth by Ruby Payne.

On TJ's blog about Ruby Payne, he takes a short quote of Susan Winebrenner's out of context and uses this distortion to then lump her together with Ruby Payne to make a case against the former because of his own personal (rather hidden) agenda and bias. This really is an outrage, to group Winebrenner, whose work is founded in objective research, with Ruby Payne, in an effort to slander and dismiss her work on cluster grouping, which is not about race or poverty.

Thanks for the post Jill and for sharing your sentiment. I also read TJ's blog and the information in your link. My question is why was this book selected? only one? What other books were selected and discarded for consideration? Other research??? What's the purpose and is there a sequence of study and examination taking place? What's the goal(s)?

I hardly see T.J. Mertz as Limbaughnian. Many people consider SIS as reactionary and polarizing, but they'd be hard pressed to Rush-bait anyone here. T.J. raises a valid issue and just because you feel he might have poo pooed the TAG committee doesn't invalidate his opinion on Ruby Payne nor Lucy Mathiak's referencing it in her accurate criticism of some of the MMSD programatic foibles.

There are important issues surrounding programmatic and curricula foibles (like that word) described in Lucy's blog and experienced by any number of teachers in the district and people in the Madison community.

Fact is, not much research or writing has been done about giftedness and poverty, specifically, though that is changing.

For example, NAGC (in collaboration with the Center for Gifted Education, College of William and Mary) has a publication entitled "Overlooked Gems: A National Perspective on Low-Income Promising Learners." It's an edited volume (proceedings of a conference, actually), published in 2007. No, Ruby Payne is not one of the contributors.

FWIW, Payne is the second author of "Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty." The first author is Paul Slocum (Ed.D.). My memory is that the book is very, very applied and written at a very low level. It's main objective is to provide ways to see gifted potential in non-traditional places, by factoring environmental deficiencies and challenges into the assessment procedures. I'm not defending, just describing.

I imagine the practical nature of the book was appealing to the person/people who selected it. But to use it uncritically and without also studying other materials is clearly irresponsible.

On another matter raised by a previous commenter, the stories about how parents have been shut out of the ongoing process of developing and evaluating the TAG Plan and how the TAG Advisory Committee has been reconfigured and weakened to the point of all-but-nonexistence both need to be told publicly.