Harvard study: Are weighted AP grades fair?

Debra Viadero:

To encourage high school students to tackle tougher academic classes, many schools assign bonus points to grades in Advanced Placement or honors courses. But schools' policies on whether students should receive a grade-point boost and by how much are all over the map.

My local public school district, for instance, used to add an extra third of a grade-point to students' AP course grades while the private high school on the other side of town would bump up students' grades by a full letter grade.

Since students from both schools would be applying to many of the same colleges, and essentially competing with one another, it didn't seem fair to me that the private school kids should get such a generous grade boost.

That's why I was heartened to come across a new study by a Harvard University researcher that takes a more systematic look at the practice of high school grade-weighting.

He found that for every increasing level of rigor in high school science, students' college course grades rose by an average of 2.4 points on a 100- point scale, where an A is 95 points and a B is worth 85 points and so on. In other words, the college grade for the former AP chemistry student would be expected to be 2.4 points higher than that of the typical student who took honors chemistry in high school. And the honors students' college grade, in turn, would be 2.4 points higher than that of the student who took regular chemistry.

Translating those numbers, and some other calculations, to a typical high school 1-to-4-point grade scale, Sadler estimates that students taking an honors science class in high school ought to get an extra half a point for their trouble, and that a B in an AP science course ought to be counted as an A for the purpose of high school grade-point averages.

Waukesha West wins Wisconsin academic decathlon

Amy Hetzner:

Waukesha West High School won its ninth straight title Friday at the Wisconsin Academic Decathlon in Wisconsin Dells, earning a trip to next month's national competition.

The team scored 46,428.3 points out of a possible 60,000, placed first in the Super Quiz relay and earned the top team award for all 10 featured subjects, said decathlon director Molly Ritchie.

In academic decathlon, nine student teams go head to head in a series of tests on academic subjects, interviews and essays. Each team includes three students with A-grade averages, three with B averages and three C students.

Twenty teams competed in the state competition, based on their performance at local and regional events.

Gates Funds Aid University of Oregon's College-Prep Efforts

University of Oregon:

Developing a set of core content standards to prepare high school students with the academic foundation and skills necessary to succeed on any college campus is the goal of a new initiative at the University of Oregon.

Specifically targeted are the subject areas of mathematics and English, as well as a set of career-oriented two-year certificate programs.

David T. Conley, a professor of education and founder and chief executive officer of the non-profit Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), will lead the ambitious project, which is partially funded by a $794,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Seattle-based foundation announced in February a $19.5 million package of 15 grants to develop and launch new instructional tools and assessments to assure college readiness across the nation. Other support for the UO project comes from the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Ed chief: Agency to review equal access at schools

Bob Johnson:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday the federal government will become more vigilant to make sure students have equal access and opportunity to everything ranging from college prep classes to science and engineering programs.

"We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement," Duncan said on a historic Selma bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of a bloody confrontation between voting rights demonstrators and state troopers.

Duncan said the department also will issue a series of guidelines to public schools and colleges addressing fairness and equity issues.

"The truth is that, in the last decade, the office for civil rights has not been as vigilant as it should be. That is about to change," Duncan said.

Duncan spoke to a crowd about 400 people on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observance of "Bloody Sunday," the day in 1965 when several hundred civil rights protesters were beaten by state troopers as they crossed the span over the Alabama River, bound for Montgomery.

Patricia Travers, Violinist Who Vanished, Dies at 82

Margalit Fox:

At 11, the violinist Patricia Travers made her first solo appearance with the New York Philharmonic, playing Lalo's "Symphonie Espagnole" with "a purity of tone, breadth of line and immersion in her task," as a critic for The New York Times wrote in 1939.

At 13, she appeared in "There's Magic in Music," a Hollywood comedy set in a music camp. Released in 1941 and starring Allan Jones, the film features Patricia, chosen by audition from hundreds of child performers, playing with passionate intensity.

In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives's Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence.

Not long afterward, she disappeared.

Between the ages of 10 and 23, Ms. Travers appeared with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the New York, London and Berlin Philharmonics and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. She performed on national radio broadcasts, gave premieres of music written expressly for her and made several well-received records.

Gifted Education Quarterly

Spring, 2010 PDF, via email:

I would like to discuss a book which helps to inform educators and parents about gifted education in other countries from developmental, family and international perspectives. It is an excellent example of the increasing worldwide interest in studying and educating the most advanced students. By using the case study research method, Hanna David, Ph.D. and Echo Wu, Ph.D. have written fascinating accounts of Israeli and Chinese students who have demonstrated giftedness in public school classrooms and at the university level. David is a professor of education at Ben Gurion University in Eliat, Israel and Echo Wu is now teaching at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Their book, Understanding Giftedness: A Chinese-Israeli Casebook (Pearson, 2010, ISBN 981-06-8300-6), contains such research topics as a study of five gifted boys in one classroom, parental influences of three Chinese-American families on talent development, case study of a visually disabled young boy (seven years), conversation with a Chinese Nobel Laureate (chemistry), and case study of a gifted family emigrating from Russia to Israel. All of these studies are a clear demonstration of the forcefulness of gifted characteristics and behavior under sometimes severe pressures from cultural influences and learning disabilities. The book also serves as an inspiration to researchers who use the case study method for studying giftedness. In this sense, David and Wu follow the traditions of Piaget and other masters of child development who grounded their work in making systematic observations and carefully recording the individual child's intellectual development. I highly recommend that Understanding Giftedness be used as a model for further studies of the gifted mind.

An Interview with Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky

It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky recently.

We discussed a wide variety of topics, including Eagle's History (founded in 1982), curricular rigor, the importance of good textbooks and critical student thinking. I also found it interesting to hear Mary's perspective on public / private schools and her hope, in 1982, that that the Madison School District would take over (and apply its lessons) Eagle School. Of course, it did not turn out that way.

I've always found it rather amazing that Promega Founder Bill Linton's generous land offer to the Madison School District for the "Madison Middle School 2000" charter school was rejected - and the land ended up under Eagle's new facility.

Listen to the conversation via this 14mb mp3 audio file.

Read the transcript here.

Eagle's website.

Finally, Mary mentioned the term "high school" a number of times, along with $20,000,000. I suspect we'll see a high school at some point. It will take a significant effort.

Thanks to Laurie Frost for arranging this interview.

Rigorous college-prep (AP) classes skyrocketing in Washington state

Katherine Long:

A decade ago, most Seattle-area high schools offered just a handful of rigorous classes that provided a way to earn college credit while supercharging a transcript. And only students with top grades were allowed to sign up.

But in 10 years, the intensive, fast-paced Advanced Placement (AP) classes have skyrocketed in this state.

In 2008, fully one-quarter of Washington public-school seniors took at least one AP test during their high-school years, compared with 10 percent in 1997. In some schools, almost every student takes an AP class in junior or senior year.

And other schools around the state are moving fast to add AP classes and expand participation, in part because college admissions officials say the demanding classes do a good job of preparing students for higher education.

Many schools are encouraging all students -- not just the high achievers, but also average students and even those who struggle -- to take AP classes or enroll in other rigorous programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB).

Melissa Westbrook has more.

Failure rate for AP tests climbing

Greg Toppo & Jack Gillum:

The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams -- particularly in the South -- is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college's criteria.

MARYLAND: A model in AP access, achievement.

The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation -- and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.

Jay Matthews has more.

Audio: The 2010 State of the Madison School District

39MB mp3 audio. I recorded this from Monday evening's video stream. Unfortunately, the sound level was quite low. Notes and links on the 2010 State of the Madison School District here.

566K State of the District PDF.

Honor student world: Where all the students are above average

Maureen Downey:

Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don't hurt the feelings of kids who don't earn awards.

This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.

By Robert H.Wainberg:

I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.

In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be "too hard," not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.

Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.

What we fail to realize is that the concept of "survival of the fittest" still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more "adapted" to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.

Ah, yes. One size fits all education uber alles.

Advanced Pressure

New York Times Video:

The filmmaker Vicki Abeles features the stories of students and teachers of Advanced Placement classes and the pressures they face in our achievement-obsessed culture.

Berkeley High may cut lab classes to fund programs for struggling students

Marie L. La Ganga:

Trying to address a major ethnic and racial achievement gap, the school could divert funds from before- and after-school science labs filled mostly with white students. The plan has sparked debate.

Aaron Glimme's Advanced Placement chemistry students straggle in, sleepy. It is 7:30 a.m. at Berkeley High School. The day doesn't officially begin for another hour. They pull on safety goggles, measure out t-butyl alcohol and try to determine the molar mass of an unknown substance by measuring how much its freezing point decreases.

In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful.

Most districts would not argue with such a record, but Berkeley High's science labs are embroiled in a debate over scarce resources with overtones of race, class and politics.

Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs -- decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% -- and using that money to fund "equity" programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state.

Related: English 10.

What Makes a Great Teacher--Not Just for the Gifted, but for All Students

Carol Fertig:

The January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic features a noteworthy article titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? Although the article does not focus on gifted education per se, it is still worth a close read. The article discusses specific attributes that excellent teachers with exceptional track records tend to display in the classroom. (It is important to note that these attributes are based on research that was conducted by the nonprofit organization, Teach for America, which advocates for teacher reform. It is also important to note that the group's research focuses solely on teachers who work in underperforming school districts where the primary goal in the general education classroom is to get students to perform at or above grade level.) The article outlines several specific recommendations that the organization makes for recruiting and hiring successful teachers, particularly in underserved communities.

For those of us in the gifted education community, the traits identified in the article may be ones that we should perhaps consider first before we consider any additional teacher characteristics that might be specific to gifted education. (See my previous blog entry titled, Training and Competencies of Teachers of the Gifted.)

Elementary gifted ed made easy

Jay Matthews:

Two weeks ago I explored the possibility that high schools could challenge all students, gifted or otherwise, without having gifted programs. Quaker Valley High School outside of Pittsburgh, for instance, seemed able to create new opportunities for a variety of kids by ignoring standard procedures that had outlived their usefulness, such as homework requirements or rules against taking more than one course in the same period.

One wise reader said, in effect: Yeah, but that will never work in elementary schools.

As if by fate, I received an email shortly after from Susan Ohanian, a delightful teacher, speaker, author and blogger whose work I love, even when she is portraying me as a test-addled idiot. We may disagree on policy issues, but we have shared tastes about what good teaching looks and sounds like. In her email, she described how she brought a free-form gifted non-program to an elementary school in Troy, N.Y.

Here is what she said. Don't forget to take a look at her blog at susanohanian.org.

Tackling the Term Paper

Kristy (Christiane) Henrich, Marblehead High School Class of 2010

"Civil War Medicine" paper published in the Winter 2009 Issue of The Concord Review

Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length. I remember the dread that filled me as my A.P. United States History teacher, Mrs. Melissa Humphrey, handed out the assignment for the twenty-page research paper. She also passed around copies of The Concord Review as examples of research papers done well. For us, the first deadline was only a few weeks away. We had to have a thesis. It was then that I truly realized the depth of this academic adventure. My job was not to simply report on some topic in U.S. history; I had to prove something. I had to create an arguable thesis and defend it. I was overwhelmed.

I put the assignment in the back of my mind for about a week. Then, I began to think seriously about what I could possibly want to write about. I brainstormed a list of all times in U.S. history that fascinate me, ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I settled on Civil War medicine because of my plans to pursue a career in medicine. I figured this would be a great opportunity to gather more knowledge on my potential future profession.

Simply choosing a topic was not enough, though. I needed a thesis. So I began to search through books and online databases for any information about Civil War medicine. I gathered so much information that my head was spinning. I realized I had to narrow down my topic, and that this would be done by creating a specific, arguable thesis. Sifting through all the data and historical articles, I noticed that Civil War medicine was not as atrocious as I had always believed it to be. I had my thesis. I wanted to defend Civil War medicine by placing it in its own historical context, something many fail to do when evaluating it with a modern eye.

A few weeks later, approved thesis in hand, I stepped into the Tufts University library, the alma mater of my mother. The battle plan: gather enough materials, particularly primary sources, to prove my thesis. The enemy: the massive amounts of possibly valuable literature. I had never previously encountered the problem of finding books so specialized that they didn't end up being helpful for my thesis nor had I ever been presented with so many options that I had to narrow down from thirty to a mere fifteen books. Actually, I had never left a library before with so many books.

For the next few months, the books populated the floor of my room. Every weekend, I methodically tackled the volumes, plastering them with Post-it notes. The deadline for the detailed outline and annotated bibliography loomed. I continued reading and researching, fascinated by all I was learning. In fact, I was so fascinated that I felt justified using it as my excuse to delay synthesizing all of my information into an outline. With thousands of pages of reading under my belt, I finally tackled the seven-page map for my twenty-page journey. That was easily the hardest part of the entire process. Once the course was charted, all I had to do was follow it. Of course, it was under construction the entire way, and detours were taken, but the course of the trip turned out much like the map.

I thought printing out the twenty-page academic undertaking, binding it, and handing it in was the greatest feeling I had ever experienced from a scholastic endeavor. I remember being overjoyed that day. I remember sleeping so soundly. I remember the day as sunny. I'm not sure if it actually was...

Clearly, I was thinking small. I had no idea what my grade would be. At that point, I did not even care. I had finished the paper. I considered that a tremendous accomplishment. Eventually, the graded research papers were handed back. What had previously been my greatest academic feeling was surpassed. The grade on my paper was a 99%. I was overjoyed and thrilled that I had not only completed such a tremendous task but had completed it pretty darn well. I thought that was the greatest feeling.

I still needed to think bigger. I submitted my paper to The Concord Review on a whim this summer. I remember Mrs. Humphrey showing us the journals and praising their quality. She is a tough teacher, and I thought since she had liked my paper so much I should give The Concord Review a go. I was not counting on being published. I knew my chances were slim, and I knew I was competing with students from around the world.

This November, I received a letter in the mail from Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review. My paper was selected to be published in the Winter 2009 issue. That was the greatest feeling. I am a seventeen-year-old public high school student. I am also a seventeen-year-old published author. People work their whole lives to make it to this point. I feel so honored to have this recognition at my age. My hard work paid off far beyond where I thought it would. Thank you, Mr. Fitzhugh, for recognizing the true value of academic achievement and for reminding me why I love to learn.

Evaluating the Legacy of Civil War Medicine; Amputations, Anesthesia, and Administration

Public Comments on a Sales Tax Increase For Schools and TAG Problems at the 1/11/2010 Madison School Board Meeting

19MB mp3 audio file. TJ Mertz spoke in favor of a .01 increase in the state sales tax, dedicated to schools. There were also a number of pointed parent comments on the District's Talented and Gifted program.

Gifted Education Outrages

Jay Matthews:

My Dec. 10 column about that troublesome Washington area gifted child, future billionaire Warren Buffett, said our schools are never going to help such kids much. I said the gifted designation was often arbitrary and should be disposed of. Instead, we ought to find ways to let all kids explore their talents.

This produced a flood of comments on my blog. Many readers thought I was callous and daft. "Unfortunately, eliminating the label generally means that the schools give up doing anything for advanced learners," wrote a reader signing in as EduCrazy. Another commenter, CrimsonWife, said "if educators are fine with giving special attention and services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the low end of the spectrum, why is it so controversial to provide specialized services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the high end?"

Creativity in Schools in Europe: A survey of Teachers

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies: CACHIA Romina, FERRARI Anusca, KEARNEY Caroline, PUNIE Yves, VAN DEN BERGHE Wouter, WASTIAU Patricia - 1MB PDF:

An overwhelming majority of teachers are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge and that everyone can be creative. They also subscribe to the idea that creativity is a fundamental skill to be developed in schools, even if they are more ambiguous about how it can be taught, and less sure still about how it can be assessed.

Survey respondents were asked to express their opinion about how they view creativity, as a general concept as well as in the school context, on a scale of 5 ranging from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree'. The results are displayed in Figure 1.

Literature reports that very often people, including teachers, refer to creativity as being related exclusively to artistic or musical performances, as springing from natural talent, and as being the characteristic of a genius. These myths about creativity stifle the creative potential of students and create barriers to fostering creativity in schools.

To a large extent, the teachers that took part in our survey have an understanding of creativity which goes against such myths. Almost all teachers who took part in the survey are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge (95,5%) , and to every school subject. More than 60% are even strongly convinced of this. They confirm this view very clearly by disagreeing to a large extent with a statement restricting creativity to the realm of artistic and cultural expression (85%).

Madison School District Talented and Gifted Education Plan Update

Daniel Nerad, Superintendent of Schools Lisa Wachtel, Executive Director, Teaching and Learning Barbie Klawikowski, Interim Talented and Gifted Coordinator 260K PDF:

Identification Criteria - Several action steps within Goal 1 are based on the need for a clearly defined criteria and process to identify students as talented and gifted. The Talented and Gifted (TAG) Division staff has established and confirmed identification criteria including: 1) consideration of students' levels of academic performance; 2) grade level performance data employing the historical two-year above grade level as a marker; and 3) consideration of several student data sources, including input and information from teachers and family. Work will continue into the spring semester to incorporate these data sources to create a student profile and, pending individual student performance level indicators, a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for students.

Monitoring Model - TAG staff continues work with the Research and Evaluation Department to create a model for student data analysis to aid in identification. These models will be research- based and provide the information needed to make identification, programming, and additional diagnostic decisions pertaining to individual students. It has been determined that the Student Intervention Monitoring System (SIMS) can be used as the tracking and reporting system. It currently containing much of the student information needed, including assessment and other data from Infinite Campus, that will make up the student profile component of a TAG student report. T AG staff will use SIMS in the current form to develop student profiles and Differentiated Education Plans (DEPs). Next steps include customizing reports in SIMS to meet future documentation/Plan development needs=

AP Juggernaut

NYT: Room for Debate

Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachers released this year, more than half said that "too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads." Some 60 percent said that "parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don't belong there."

Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?

Kristin Klopfenstein, economist
Trevor Packer, College Board
Patrick Welsh, high school teacher
Philip M. Sadler, Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics
David Wakelyn, National Governors Association
Saul Geiser, Center for Studies in Higher Education

"The original point of the A.P. program was to make college-level study possible for advanced high school students.... But now, the A.P. program has been transformed to serve many more purposes.... The new uses of A.P. are not benign..."

"Advanced placement courses and exams are appropriate choices for students who have developed the knowledge and skills to study at the college level in high school. Of course, advanced placement is not a silver bullet if a district or school merely parachutes an A.P. course into a low-performing school without having fostered academic rigor in the grades prior to the A.P.... [T]eachers are right to insist on adequate student preparation for advanced placement work. But studies have indicated that teachers' preconceived notions of student potential are often at odds with student capability...."

"The original purpose of the Advanced Placement program was a noble one.... In the last 10 years, Advanced Placement has become a game of labels and numbers, a public relations ploy used by school officials who are dumping as many students as they can into A.P. courses to create the illusion that they are raising overall standards.... [T]he College Board is shamelessly pressuring public schools by creating the impression that A.P. courses are the only ones worth taking..."

"A Throwback" Review keeps light shining on high school scholars

Adam Sell:

The Concord Review is a one-man outfit run from a cluttered office on Route 20 in Sudbury.

Back issues of the academic journal featuring research by high school history students sit in stacks, and editor Will Fitzhugh keeps his computer in the corner so he can leave even more room for books.

Fitzhugh, 73, has been running the quarterly publication for 22 years in an effort to keep old-fashioned term papers alive and well. He thinks scholarly research at the high school level has declined, and students are arriving at college unprepared.

"I think we're doing the majority of public high school students a disservice,'' said Fitzhugh. "They get to college and are assigned these nonfiction books and term papers, and they flame out. The equivalent is sending kids to college math classes with only fractions and decimals.''

Yet Fitzhugh, who started the journal while on sabbatical from his teaching job in Concord (hence the name), can't find anybody to take over when he retires. He took no salary from the journal for 14 years, and even now averages only $10,000 a year.

"It's going to be really hard, there's no job security. But most people don't want to work for nothing, and they don't want to leave the classroom,'' Fitzhugh said. "I don't know how long I can keep going.''

Despite a perpetual lack of funding for his project--Fitzhugh said he's been turned down by 154 foundations--The Concord Review has persevered.

The number of subscribers has grown to more than 1,400, and its printing runs every three months range from 2,500 to 4,000 copies. Filling each issue are 11 articles that Fitzhugh picks from more than 200 submissions.

Papers come in from all over the world; the most recent issue features one from the American School of Antananarivo in Madagascar. Of the other 10 articles, seven were from students in private schools, which Fitzhugh said is roughly the average proportion.

And these are no simple book reports the students are writing. This issue includes papers titled "Rise and Fall of Cahokia,'' "Andersonville Prison,'' "Arquebus in Japan,'' and "Civil War Medicine.''

"Obviously it's been difficult in some ways, but I've been inspired by the work of the kids,'' Fitzhugh said.

One of those is Jonathan Weinstein. When he started writing a research paper for his Asian studies class at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Weinstein said, he expected it to come out around 10 pages, roughly the assigned length. But as he kept digging into information on HIV/AIDS in China, his paper grew.

"As I got into the topic, there wasn't any way to do a proper analysis without making it around 34 pages,'' Weinstein said. He started looking toward other avenues of publication, and settled on The Concord Review.

Sandra Crawford, Weinstein's teacher at Lincoln-Sudbury, hopes the recognition he got for his report might drive other students to attempt the same.

"I know it's made me think about when I have students do excellent papers, how can I bring those to a wider audience?'' Crawford said.

Though public schools contribute fewer of the papers Fitzhugh publishes, The Concord Review has a fan in Robert Furey, head of the history department at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School.

"It's an extraordinary opportunity for kids to have their work viewed by a wider audience,'' said Furey. "I think there needs to be a Concord Review to give the most serious history students the chance to have their work read.''

But not all teachers are sold. Todd Whitten, who teaches Advanced Placement courses at Burlington High School and was formerly a department head at Beaver Country Day School in Brookline, says the standards that The Concord Review sets are a throwback to a different era of teaching history.

"I think it's feeling more and more anachronistic,'' Whitten said. Term papers "are the way college works, it's a format that needs to be taught, but anecdotally, it's been taken over by English departments.''

Whitten said from his perspective, history and social studies departments aren't having students write Fitzhugh's style of paper anymore. "The focus is on being generalists, not specialists. You're trying to cover the surface of a lot of stuff,'' Whitten said.

For Fitzhugh, it boils down to showing that high school students are capable of outstanding academic work. The Concord Review is just one facet of his Varsity Academics initiative. If he can help inspire students to strive beyond their own expectations, even if The Concord Review folds, he will have done his job, Fitzhugh said.

"Athletics are performed publicly. Good academics are a secret.''

© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

=================

"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

Will Cleveland High School Become Seattle Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson's Crown Jewel or Albatross?

Nina Shapiro:

As Seattle Public Schools released new details about its latest transformation plan for perpetually-troubled Cleveland High School over the past week, there's been a collective eye roll among some teachers there.
"I've been here for 15 years and every other year we do this," says math teacher David Fisher, referring to a long string of ballyhooed overhauls that the Beacon Hill school has embarked on at the behest of the district.

One thing is different: The district is promising to pour money into this reinvention of Cleveland as the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It proposes to spend more than $4 million over the first three years, according to a report at last Wednesday's school board meeting by Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson. That's a lot of money for a school that is already up and running. (See the breakdown of spending on page 8 of this pdf.)

Melissa Westbrook has more.

Commentary on Madison's "High Fliers" and its Large Achievement Gap

Steve Rankin - via a kind reader's email:

Dear Editor: In the article "Racial Divide," you quote the Madison School District's Kurt Kiefer as saying "We celebrate the high fliers" and state that Madison has 57 National Merit semifinalists this year.

But did we "celebrate" them? Two were named last week in the Wisconsin State Journal, and they were named because of their disabilities. I could not find reference to the other 55 on the school district's website. (By searching madison.com archives, I did find a list of 62 from September, including private school students.) How many high school athletes did we celebrate this week, by posting their names, their accomplishments, and their pictures in the paper?

The State Journal names a male and female athlete of the week, and runs a feature story. When did we name a scholar of the week? A thespian? A musician? Do we cover the State Solo and Ensemble Competition as though it were newsworthy? How about math meets? Debate and forensics? Do we review high school plays with the same attention as weekly football games?

When academic and artistic pursuits are covered with even a quarter of the vigor with which we cover sports, when students of color are served by the district as gifted in fields other than athletics, when we let students know in a public way that we value them for those gifts and that hard work, then we can begin to talk about celebrating the high fliers, and then we can begin to scratch our heads about an achievement gap.

When we send the clear message to students, especially students of color, that they are of value to society for their entertainment value on an athletic field, we do not serve them or us.

Steve Rankin
Madison

State schools admit they do not push gifted pupils because they don't want to promote 'elitism'

Laura Clark:

As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.

Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.

Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.

In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.

Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.

Tracking/Grouping Students: Detracked Schools have fewer advanced math students than "tracked schools"

Tom Loveless:

What are the implications of "tracking," or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report's key findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.

Valerie Strauss:

A new report out today makes the case that students do better in school when they are separated into groups based on their achievement.

Loveless found that de-tracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than do tracked schools--and that de-tracking is more popular in schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Chester Finn, Jr. and Amber Winkler [1.3MB complete report pdf]:

By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are all but certain to follow. Assuming these courses hold water, some youngsters will dive in majestically and then ascend gracefully to the surface, breathing easily. Others, however, will smack their bellies, sink to the bottom and/or come up gasping. Clearly, the architects of this policy have the best of intentions. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a "gatekeeper" to future educational and career success. One can scarcely fault policy makers for insisting that every youngster pass through that gate, lest too many find their futures constrained. It's also well known that placing students in remedial classes rarely ends up doing them a favor, especially in light of evi- dence that low-performing students may learn more in heterogeneous classrooms.

Yet common sense must ask whether all eighth graders are truly prepared to succeed in algebra class. That precise question was posed in a recent study by Brookings scholar Tom Loveless (The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education), who is also the author of the present study. He found that over a quarter of low-performing math students--those scoring in the bottom 10 percent on NAEP--were enrolled in advanced math courses in 2005. Since these "misplaced" students are ill-pre- pared for the curricular challenges that lie ahead, Loveless warned, pushing an "algebra for all" policy on them could further endanger their already-precarious chances of success.

When American education produced this situation by abolishing low-level tracks and courses, did people really believe that such seemingly simple--and well-meanin --changes in policy and school organization would magically transform struggling learners into middling or high-achieving ones? And were they oblivious to the effects that such alterations might have on youngsters who were al- ready high-performing?

Related: English 10.

More Texas students taking, failing Advanced Placement exams

Holly Hacker:

Robust Advanced Placement programs are often seen as a seal of quality for high schools. And in its quest for excellence, Texas has seen an explosion of the classes that offer the promise and prestige of college credit.

But the latest data show Texas high school students fail more than half of the college-level exams, and their performance trails national averages.

Some say Texas failure rates are higher because more students from an increasingly diverse pool take AP classes here. But high failure rates from some of the Dallas area's elite campuses raise questions about whether our most advantaged high school students are prepared for college work.

More: Inequities found in Advanced Placement Course Choices.

Notes and Commentary on a Seattle STEM High School

Charlie Mas:

I attended the Cleveland STEM Community Meeting on December 4 with my wife and 8th grade daughter.

First, the important parts.

My daughter is excited about the program. To her it looks like a good mix of the academic challenge of Garfield with the more personalized instruction (and project-based learning) of NOVA. She got most excited when she saw a list of the possible classes in the Global Health Academy.

My wife and I are much more confident about the probability that the program will actually be there and that it will be something like what has been advertised.

There was a pretty good crowd of people there - I'd say about forty to fifty (not counting staff).

The folks from Cleveland who were there are excited about the program and have a very clear picture of the idea - the project-based learning, the integration of technology, the alignment between classes, the extended school day and accelerated schedule, etc.

The STEM program looks real and, to us, it looks good. They still have some things to work out. The schedule is inspired, but needs some tinkering. They haven't figured out how to get the student:computer ratio to the promised 1:1. They are still missing a lot of the curricular elements - they haven't found the puzzle pieces but they know what they have to look like.

AP success stories grow dramatically in Montgomery County Schools

Nelson Hernandez:

The number of Montgomery County students who took and passed Advanced Placement exams last spring grew by the largest margin since 2002, an increase fueled by the number of black and Hispanic students who took the test, school system officials said Tuesday morning.

In 2009, Montgomery students took 28,575 of the college-level exams, which are often used as a measure of a curriculum's difficulty and students' readiness for college. Students took 2,654 more tests than they did in 2008, the largest increase in seven years. Montgomery, the largest school system in Maryland, emphasizes the tests as a pathway to college, and Superintendent Jerry D. Weast hailed Tuesday's news.

"Montgomery County is already a state and national leader when it comes to AP, so a 10 percent increase in one year is a very significant jump," Weast said in a statement. "We have worked hard over the past several years to make AP available to more students and those efforts are paying strong dividends."

Report finds wide disparities in gifted education

AP:

When Liz Fitzgerald realized her son and daughter were forced to read books in math class while the other children caught up, she had them moved into gifted classes at their suburban elementary school.

Just 100 miles down the road in Taliaferro County, that wouldn't have been an option. All the gifted classes were canceled because of budget cuts.

Such disparities exist in every state, according to a new report by the National Association for Gifted Children that blames low federal funding and a focus on low-performing students.

The report, "State of the States in Gifted Education," hits at a basic element of the federal government's focus on education: Most of its money and effort goes into helping low-performing, poor and minority students achieve basic proficiency. It largely ignores the idea of helping gifted kids reach their highest potential, leaving those tasks to states and local school districts.

Alexandria rethinks gifted education: more diversity sought in classes Virginia also will study ways to boost minority enrollment

Michael Alison Chandler:

When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city's schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he's watching is gifted.

"Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is" by looking at the colors of the students, he said. "It shouldn't be that way."

Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled "gifted." Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.

Sherman, at the helm for a little more than a year, is bringing fresh attention to equity issues that have long confounded the small urban school system, where half of the 11,000 students live in poverty.

Minorities in gifted classes studied

Michael Alison Chandler:

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced Tuesday that the Virginia Education Department has launched a study of minority students' low participation in gifted education programs statewide.

African Americans represent 26 percent of the state's 1.2 million students but 12 percent of those in gifted education programs. Hispanics are 9 percent of the state's schoolchildren, but 5 percent of gifted students.

"Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities. . . . It's critical we assess any disproportionate barriers . . . so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate," Kaine said in a release.

NAACP officials have urged Kaine in recent months to address racial and ethnic disparities in new regulations for gifted education that he is expected to sign in the next few weeks. Some said a study does not go far enough to address their concerns.

Related: ""They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!"

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan Presentation Audio / Video

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan Presentation 11/17/2009 from SIS.

Click to listen or CTRL-Click to download this 32mb mp3 audio file. Much more on the Madison School District's new talented & gifted plan.

Thanks to Jeff Henriques and Laurie Frost for recording this event.

Blowback on Madison's "Talented & Gifted" Program: "TAG not a game Madison area schools need to play"

Sean Kittridge:

Bumper stickers are like tattoos for cars. They're gaudy, mighty tough to get off and, no matter how hard they try, rarely inspiring. We don't need goofy "coexist" decals to inform us that the person doing a mean 45 MPH in the passing lane is against religion-fueled hatred and wars. Of course that guy's against war. He's driving a Saturn Ion.

And we've just about had it up to here -- lower jaw area -- with those wretched honor roll notifications. "Oh really, Mrs. Johnson? Tommy's getting straight A's in middle school?" Somebody call NASA. Or, if nothing else, call B.S. Just wait 'til he starts listening to rap music.

But parents, as a species, aren't rational beings. After all, if they were, they would've put you up for adoption. Instead, they foolishly assume their child is The Great White Hope, with equal parts of Jim Brown, Barack Obama and Jesus Christ mixed in -- although, interestingly, none of them are white. In Madison, this wide-eyed parental belief that their genes will save the world is best represented by discussions surrounding programming for gifted youngsters.

As reported Monday in the Wisconsin State Journal, some area parents are becoming increasingly frustrated with the Madison school district's weak implementation of TAG programming. TAG, which stands for "talented and gifted," is class instruction designed to challenge more advanced students, and forever lost its credibility when it became loosely associated with a canned body spray. According to the article, the school district currently has eight and a half positions devoted to pushing TAG programming forward, and that's simply not enough to spawn effective change.

Fortunately, it's not necessary, especially when dealing with elementary and middle school students. Try and tell 9-year-olds they're gifted; they'll listen, but only after a good nose-picking and two minutes of straight laughter stemming from a joke that incorporated the word "butt."

Fascinating. The TAG initiative, from my perspective, ideally should lead to increased rigor for all students. That is obviously a contentious topic.....

Parents question focus and speed of Madison's gifted students program

Gayle Worland:

The parents of exceptionally bright students in Madison schools waited 18 years for a plan to raise the academic bar for their children. But now, they're really getting impatient.

Approved by the Madison school board in August, the district's new three-year plan for talented and gifted ("TAG") students already is raising questions from parents about focus and speed. The district's TAG staff, they note, consists of only 8.5 positions in a district of 24,622 students - and three of those positions are vacant.

"Change of a large system takes time," said Chris Gomez Schmidt, the mother of three young children who serves on the district's advisory committee for talented and gifted students. "But I think there's a lot of families within the system who are frustrated when they see that their students' needs are not being met. I think that families don't feel like they have a lot of time to wait."

The district's talented and gifted plan, which replaces a 1991 document, will be spelled out for the public Tuesday night in a community forum from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Hamilton Middle School, 4801 Waukesha St. The forum is meant to make the reforms understandable and "transparent" to the public, said Lisa Wachtel, executive director for teaching and learning for the district.

Community Forum to Introduce the New MMSD "Talented and Gifted" Education Plan

The MMSD is hosting a community forum to introduce the District's new "Talented and Gifted" (TAG) Education Plan.

Tuesday, November 17
6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Hamilton Middle School LMC (4801 Waukesha Street)

Superintendent Nerad, Teaching and Learning Director Lisa Wachtel, Interim TAG Coordinator Barbie Klawikowski, and MMSD TAG staff will be there. The focus of the forum will be to provide an overview of the new Plan and its implementation, as well as an opportunity for discussion.

All are welcome! Parents and guardians of K-12 students who are concerned that their children are not being adequately challenged are especially encouraged to attend.

Link to MMSD Talented and Gifted Division homepage (includes a link to the new TAG Plan):

http://tagweb.madison.k12.wi.us/

Link to parent-written and other supporting documents (see especially "Background and Rationale for the TAG Plan" and "Letter from Parents to the BOE in Support of the Plan"):
http://madisonunited.org/TAGplan.html

The new myths of gifted education

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (November 2, 2009) - More than 25 years after myths about gifted education were first explored, they are all still with us and new ones have been added, according to research published in the current Gifted Child Quarterly (GCQ), the official journal of National Association for Gifted Children.

Providing specialized and organized gifted education courses was a relatively new concept in 1982 when an article entitled "Demythologizing Gifted Education" was first published in GCQ. Research at that time found that certain myths were widely believed, such as the idea that the gifted constituted a single, homogeneous group of learners, or that just one curriculum would serve all equally.

In "The Myths of Gifted Education: A Contemporary View," the journal takes a new look at the current state of gifted education. Researchers found that all 15 of the 1982 myths are still with us, though some have been modified over time, and several new ones have emerged. A few of the now 19 myths in this special issue of GCQ include:

• Creativity is too difficult to measure


• Gifted education means having a program


• High ability students don't face problems and challenges


• It's "fair" to teach all children the same way


• Advanced Placement (AP) is an adequate secondary program

"Our hope is that this issue will stimulate lively discussion, critical thinking, and creative research in the field," writes guest editor Donald J. Treffinger. "We hope to help 'shake loose the grip' of some common myths and suggest promising directions for more productive foundations for inquiry and practice."

"The Myths of Gifted Education: A Contemporary View" a special issue of Gifted Child Quarterly (published by SAGE) is available free for a limited time at http://gcq.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue4. A Podcast interview with the editor about the differences (or not) in the myths since 1982 is available at http://gcq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/full/53/4/DC1.

Madison School District Strategic Plan: Nirvana by 2014/2015?

The Madison School Board recently passed the District's Strategic Plan. Superintendent Dan Nerad has now published a draft document outlining performance measures for the plan (this is positive). The 600K PDF document is well worth reading. Mr. Nerad's proposed performance measures rely on the oft criticized - for its lack of rigor - state exam, the WKCE. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction recently stated that "Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum".

A few highlights from the 600K PDF document:

• By 2014/2015 every Madison School District Student will be 100% proficient on the WKCE. "Flexible Instruction" is referenced for all students.
• The percentage of Madison School District high school students "participating in" advanced courses has declined over the past three years:

  Grade	2006/2007	2007/2008	2008/2009
  9	0.3%	0.4%	0.2%
  10	5.5%	7.3%	1.9%
  11	18.0%	18.1%	10.6%
  12	34.1%	34.3%	24.3%

  Related: WKCE Scores Document Decline in the Percentage of Madison's Advanced Students.
• The percentage of students scoring "C" or above for all courses will rise from 45 to 64% (6th to 12th grade; 2008/2009 school year) to all students (100%) in 2014-2015.

Related:

• Are MMSD Programs Effective, Who Knows?
• When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before.
• West High Math teachers on curriculum reduction.

Discussing these data is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, use of the WKCE does not instill much confidence, from my perspective.

via "Some States Drop Testing Bar" by John Hechinger.

Happy Halloween!

Community meeting to introduce the new Madison School District Talented and Gifted Plan

via a kind reader's email:

Tuesday, November 17
6:00 - 7:30 p.m. (this is the correct time)
Hamilton Middle School LMC
4801 Waukesha Street
Madison, Wi

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Talented and Gifted Division will host a community forum on November 17, 2009, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Superintendent Dan Nerad and Director of Teaching and Learning Lisa Wachtel will be in attendance.

The focus of the forum will be to provide the Madison community with an overview of the recently Board of Education approved Talented and Gifted Education Plan, followed by an opportunity for discussion.

Link to new MMSD TAG Plan: http://tagweb.madison.k12.wi.us/

More information from MUAE: http://madisonunited.org/TAGplan.html

Homework Day

Wolfram|Alpha:

Meet us here on October 21, 2009, for the first Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day. This groundbreaking, live interactive web event brings together students and educators from across the country to solve your toughest assignments and explore the power of using Wolfram|Alpha for school, college, and beyond.

A few links:

• How Computational Knowledge Helps Your Homework.
• Highlighted Topics in Calculus
• Algebra II Lesson Plan
• Highlighted Topics in Biology
• Creative Writing Lesson Plan
• Highlighted Topics in Geography

Worth checking out.

Palo Alto Schools Gifted & Talented Proposed Standards

Palo Alto Unified School District Gifted & Talented Program [219K PDF]:

Palo Alto Unified school district's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) provides educational opportunities that recognize the performance capabilities of gifted students as well as addresses the unique needs and differences associated with having these abilities. The goals of Gifted and Talented Education can be defined as follows:

• To provide students with opportunities for learning that maximize each students' abilities.
• To assist and encourage students to acquire skills and understanding at advanced academic and creative levels.
• To aid students in expanding their abilities to communicate and apply their ideas effectively.
• To engender an enthusiasm for learning.

Program Model
In elementary and middle school, the program model for GATE is differentiation within the mainstream classroom. In 2001, new legislation called for a change in GATE education. Rather than pull children from class for a different curriculum, all differentiation takes place within the context of standards-based instruction in the regular classroom. Teachers enrich and extend the core curriculum for gifted students by differentiating instruction, content, and process. Through differentiated assignments developed to meet their academic and intellectual needs, GATE students are able to explore and expand to their maximum potential. These differentiated curricular opportunities are available to all students, not just those who are formally identified. In middle school, students also have access to the Renzulli Learning System to allow them to individualize their education based on their needs, interests and creative abilities and to explore the curriculum in greater depth and complexity. Advanced math courses are available for the first time in 7th grade and continue through 12th grade. In high school, gifted students are able to take advanced, honors, and advanced placement courses in a wide variety of subjects.

Palo Alto School District Strategic Plan [780K PDF]

Madison School District's Gifted & Talented Plan.

Don't Leave Gifted Kids Behind

Lisa Virgoe:

Hey, kids, stay in school!

That oft-used refrain soon may have new meaning. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed extending the school day, lengthening the school year and adding Saturday classes. Their laudable goal is to prepare the next generation for adulthood in an increasingly complex world.

Is this the way to do it? For at least one group of students, the answer is no. Based on studies I have read, the dropout rate for gifted students is between 5 and 20 percent.

What scourge is stealing so many of our smartest kids? Extreme debilitating boredom coupled with agile minds that can't let them patiently wait for the end of class. If we lengthen their classroom hours, how many gifted kids are likely to stay?

To understand how boredom feels to these kids, imagine making a school's fastest runner sit in a chair next to the track all day, every day, while her teammates are racing past her. Imagine her frustration. Imagine how she's going to feel about running after a few days of that. Most likely, she'll walk off the field and never turn back. By dropping out, that's what these lost gifted children do. Many of the boys leave to get a job. Many of the girls leave pregnant.

Related: Late 1990's Madison School District Dropout Data and the recent Talented and Gifted Plan.

Gifted Student Is Being Held Back By Graduation Rules

Jay Matthews:

Anyone who wants to appreciate how strong a grip high school has on the American imagination -- and how clueless some school districts are about this -- should consider the story of Drew Gamblin, a 16-year-old student at Howard High School in Ellicott City.

Drew, a child so gifted he taught himself to write at age 3, craves a high school education and all that comes with it -- debate team, music, drama and senior prom.

After a series of inexplicable decisions by Howard County school officials, such as requiring him to stay in a Howard High algebra class he had already mastered, his parents decided to home-school him and put him in college classes. But Drew insisted on his high school dream.

So he is back at Howard, although it's not clear what grade he is in, and the school district is making it hard to enjoy what the school has to offer. He is being forced to take a world history course he already took at Howard Community College and a junior-year English course he took at home, as well as classes in other subjects he has studied.

Norman, OK School District Gifted Education Plan

Norman Public Schools:

The District shall provide appropriate educational services for "gifted and talented children" who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, musical, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic areas, and who require learning opportunities or experiences not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities. These educational experiences will be provided at each school through site-developed programs, which are in alignment with the mission of the District's Gifted Education Plan and goals of that plan.

Related: The Madison School District's new Talented & Gifted Plan.

Parents say Mass. puts low priority on education for gifted children

Taryn Plumb:

At age 3, Aurora Ghere began to read. Now 6, she delves into books that are usually fifth-grade fare, recently finishing "The Call of the Wild'' and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.''

She can also, her mother boasts, count to 1,000.

When the Gheres lived in Maryland, a screening in her school district identified Aurora as a gifted child.

But Green Meadow School in Maynard, where Aurora is in first grade, lacks programs geared toward gifted children. Though administrators have been supportive of Aurora's needs, her mother thinks schools in her town and elsewhere should do more.

"We could care less if our children got into Harvard or MIT,'' said Ghere. "We just want them to love school. School should be a joy.''

Will Advanced Placement Replace the SAT?

Jay Matthews:

This online column, now in its ninth year, used to be called "Class Struggle." When we shifted that name to my blog, including all three of my weekly columns plus my various rants and outbursts, and the more reasoned discourse of my Post education writer colleagues, we renamed it "Trends." It is a simple name, useful mostly to access our left-side-of-the-page archive of Friday online columns, but proves to be quite apt.

I love following trends in education, particularly those that involve favorite topics such as high-performing charter schools, college admissions practices, great teachers, weak-minded curricular fads and college-level courses in high school. We have two interesting trends in this last category, both having to do with the rise in influence of Advanced Placement, and to a lesser extent International Baccalaureate.

I have been accused of uncritically promoting AP and IB. I insist it's not true. I have written three books looking at these programs in detail. I think that makes me credible when I say they have done more to raise the level of high school instruction than anything else in the last two decades. But they have their flaws, such as the odd ways some schools motivate students to take the courses and tests. One of the two trends is the use of cash bonuses. That approach raises participation and achievement, both good things, but I still consider it troubling.

Madison School Board Talented & Gifted (TAG) Plan Discussion & Approval

There were several public appearances [4.1MB mp3 audio] Monday evening related to the Madison School District's Talented & Gifted plan. TJ Mertz, Kris Gomez-Schmidt, Janet Mertz (not related) and Shari Galitzer spoke during the public appearance segment of the meeting. Their comments begin at 3:13 into this mp3 audio file.

The School Board and Administration's discussion can be heard via this 6MB mp3 audio file. The previous week's discussion can be heard here. Madison United for Academic Excellence posted a number of useful links on this initiative here.

Finally, the recent Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys provides a useful background for the interested reader.

Six States in National Governor's Association Center Pilot Project See Rise in Number of Students Taking and Succeeding on AP Exams

NGA [Complete Report 1.6MB PDF]:

To maintain the competitiveness of America's workforce and ensure that U.S. students are prepared to succeed in college, states increasingly are recognizing the importance of offering a rigorous, common education curriculum that includes Advancement Placement (AP) courses. A new report from the NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) titled Raising Rigor, Getting Results: Lessons Learned from AP Expansion, has demonstrated that it is possible for states to raise rigor and get results at scale by increasing student access to AP courses.

The report looks at the efforts of six states--Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin--that received funding as part of the NGA Center's Advanced Placement Expansion project toincrease the participation of minority and low-income students in AP courses at 51 pilot high schools in rural and urban school districts.

"Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of smart, ambitious students have the ability, but lack the opportunity, to get a head start on college through AP courses," said John Thomasian, director of the NGA Center. "With nearly two-thirds of jobs in 2014 expected to require at least some college, this report demonstrates that increasing students' participation in challenging coursework bolsters their ability to compete in a highly skilled, 21st century workforce."

Madison East High School ranked "19th in this list of increases in enrollment by pilot school"



Related: Dane County High School AP Course Offerings and proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan.

Amy Hetzner has more.

Out of College at 17, and en Route to Law School at 19: A Father's Perspective

Jacques Steinberg:

We've published more than 100 comments on our post yesterday about Kate McLaughlin, the California teenager who has already graduated from college and is en route to law school.

Some of you applauded her accomplishments, and her family's willingness to allow her to fast-track her education. Others saw it as too much too soon. And still others weighed in on whether the law was an appropriate career choice. Many of you wrote that you could identify with Ms. McLaughlin.

Missing from the conversation -- other than in the original article in the Orange County Register -- were the voices of Ms. McLaughlin and her parents. Earlier today, though, we received a comment sent by Kate's father, John McLaughlin. We then had a brief phone conversation in which he told me that some of the criticisms posted by readers echoed those that have been lobbed at the family for much of his daughter's life.

Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad's memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:

Background
Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:

• Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;
• The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;
• An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;
• Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and
• A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.

Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.

There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD's commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.

MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.

Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:

Goal 1. Comprehensive Identification Process. Develop and maintain an equitable and inclusive identification process for students who exhibit gifted characteristics in the 5 domains.

Action Steps -Expand repertoire of assessment tools and improve use and implementation of existing tools. Ensure identification process is non-biased and serves to equitably identify students from underserved populations

Goal 2. Programming Options for Identified Students. Design and implement a continuum of systematic and continuous K-12 curricula and programming options in the five domains of giftedness in order to meet individual student needs.

Action Steps -Increase curricular rigor in all classes and increase advanced course options at the secondary level. Develop District-wide consistent grouping practices.

Goal 3. Individualized Student Planning. Develop and maintain a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for each identified student that systematically records assessments and plans.

Action Steps -Design a DEP with expanding capability for each TAG domain and corresponding program options.

Goal 4. Socio-emotional Support. Develop and maintain a system for meeting the socio-emotional needs of identified students.

Action Steps -Research, develop and collaboratively pilot non-academic supports to address the socio-emotional needs of identified students including underserved populations.

Goal 5. Professional Development. Facilitate the design and implement professional development opportunities for teachers, administrators and staff to support research-based best practices, expand the knowledge of current talented and gifted research and Wisconsin state laws and dispel misconceptions about talented and gifted education and students.

Action Steps -Facilitate collaborative professional development for target audiences including administrators and teacher leaders at all levels.

Goal 6. Use of Available Technology -Expand relevant technological capabilities to increase ease and efficiency of identification, creation and maintenance of DEP's and monitoring program accountability.

Action Steps -In collaboration with Research and Evaluation, design and implement an electronic DEP to interface with student data.

Goal 7. Consistent and Effective Communication Develop and maintain consistent and effective systems for communicating about talented and gifted education throughout the District and community.

Action Steps -Design Resource Guide, enhance web-based communications and provide regular updates to target audiences.

Goal 8. On-going Program Evaluation -Conduct an on-going evaluation to ensure program effectiveness and program alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.

Action Steps -Design an evaluation process to determine quality and effectiveness of TAG programming. Provide review and updates to target audiences at specified intervals.

Online education: Raising Alabama

The Economist:

An experiment in levelling the playing field

ON A sweltering day in Alexander City, Alabama, summer school was in full swing. Two girls were reading "Julius Caesar" as two others wrestled with maths. A boy worked his way through a psychology quiz, and a teacher monitored an online discussion with students from around the state: Was Napoleon the last enlightened despot or the first modern dictator?

This is not a traditional classroom scene, but it has become common enough in Alabama. The state has many small, rural schools. Because of their size, and the relative scarcity of specialised teachers, course offerings have been limited. Students might have had to choose between chemistry or physics, or stop after two years of Spanish. But thanks to an innovative experiment with online education, the picture has changed dramatically.

In 2005 the governor, Bob Riley, announced a pilot programme called Alabama Connecting Classrooms Educators and Students Statewide, or ACCESS. The idea was to use internet and videoconferencing technology to link students in one town to teachers in another. It was something of a pet cause for Mr Riley, who comes from a rural county himself. He was especially keen that students should have a chance to learn Chinese.

........

Joe Morton, the state superintendent of schools, points to the number of black students taking AP courses. In 2003, according to the College Board, just 4.5% of Alabama's successful AP students (those who passed the subject exam) were black. In 2008 the number was up to 7.1%. There is still a staggering gap--almost a third of the state's students are black--but the improvement in Alabama was the largest in the country over that period. "That makes it all worthwhile right there," says Mr Morton.

Holding one child back to make another child feel better

Andrea Hermitt

Personal story: When my son was in the first grade we had just returned to New York from New Orleans. About a month into the school year I realized that the work he was being given was identical to what he had done the year before. I decided a conference with the teacher was in order. I sat down with her and explained the situation thinking a teacher would know what to do. Instead she said to me "Do you want me to frustrate the other children?' My response was less than cordial. Any wonder why we homeschool now?

Stephanie Tolan, noted author well known advocate for extremely bright children , once said "You don't have the moral right to hold one child back to make another child feel better." To understand her reasoning behind the quote, you must understand that her youngest child was an extremely gifted child and that she has also spent a great deal of time working with the parents of gifted children and advocating for gifted children. An interview of Ms. Tolan tells of her child being humiliating in school as a result of his advanced intelligence.

Back to my story: I did not know, nor do I currently have documentation that my child is gifted, but I do know that the the first grade experience continued through his time in school, and even beyond that. The first grade teacher and administration acknowledged that not only did the child already know the material he was being given, but he also easily absorbed any new information they attempted to give. They held me off by promising to have him tested for the gifted program when the time was right. However, we moved south again, and the schools in GA refused to test him. No one would admit he was possibly gifted until the day I went to de-enroll him so he could be homeschooled. The teacher asked why I would take an obviously gifted child out of school. The look on her face after she realized what she said, made it clear that I didn't have to answer the question.

Realizing that schools are not created to cater to the individual child, is the key to parents creating the best education for their kids. This is not to say that homeschooling is the only solution to giving a child a customized education. This is to say that if parents don't supplement outside of the classroom, your child WILL BE disserviced. This is especially true if that child is bright, talented, or gifted.

Let's face it, schools are only given so much in resources. Because special education needs are much more apparent than gifted needs, it is the gifted students that lose out. For the most part, schools have not purposely committed a moral sin against the gifted child, but ignorance that you have committed a hit-and-run does not make the victim any less injured. Some one has to pick them up, and nurture them back to health. If the schools can't do it, then the parents must. Still we must continue to advocate for proper education of the gifted an advanced child.

Global Academy Presentation to the Dane County Public Affairs Council Audio / Video

Watch the May 27, 2009 video here, or listen via this mp3 audio file.
Bill Reis: Coordinator, Global Academy [Former Superintendent, Middleton-Cross Plains School District]

Dean Gorrell: Superintendent, Verona Area Schools

To a significant degree talented and gifted students in our schools are under-served. These students are often left to do it on their own, particularly if that talent is in only one or two areas.  Finally, there is something being done about that.  Not only is the Global Academy going to be a reality, but surprise beyond belief, eight area school districts, including Madison, are actually cooperating and going to be part of the Global Academy.  The presentation and discussion will focus on

What is the rationale and data to support this educational experience?
What school districts are involved and how will it be financed?
What students will be served by the Academy? How will students be selected?
What will be the curriculum and methodology for instruction?
Will these students be prepared for post high school education and work?
Will there be partnerships with MATC, other colleges and universities, community persons and organizations?
How will the students relate with their home schools?

Thanks to Jeff Henriques for recording this event.

Gifted education audit in Waukesha

Amy Hetzner via a kind reader's email:

In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.

Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.

At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.

But district officials acknowledge difficulty without speciality staff.

"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."

Gifted education audit in Waukesha

Amy Hetzner
Journal Sentinel
June 4, 2009

In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.

Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.

At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.

But district officials acknowledge difficulty without specialty staff.

"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."

In an April letter to Waukesha's superintendent, the DPI recommended the district refine its methods for identifying students as gifted and talented and provide professional development for staff on providing special services for such students.

The state audit was performed after a group of district parents filed a complaint last year alleging numerous deficiencies in Waukesha's program for gifted students.

One of those parents, Amy Gilgenbach, said she wishes the audit had focused less on policy corrections and more with what was going on in the program itself. She said the state agency should have looked into what happened to instruction due to the loss in staffing.

"At the elementary level, when you have already overburdened teachers with 28 or more kids in their classes and then expect them to take on added responsibilities without additional training or instruction, obviously you're not creating a good situation for GT students in those classes," she wrote in an e-mail.

"At the middle and high school levels, not having appropriate guidance and course selections and potential college and career paths is a huge pitfall for GT students."

WKCE Scores Document Decline in the Percentage of Madison's Advanced Students

For many years now, parents and community members, including members of Madison United for Academic Excellence, have expressed concerns about the decline in rigor and the lack of adequate challenge in our district's curriculum. The release this week of WKCE scores for the November 2008 testing led me to wonder about the performance of our district's strongest students. While most analyses of WKCE scores focus on the percentages of students scoring at the Advanced and Proficient levels, these numbers do not tell us about changes in the percent of students at each particular level of performance. We can have large increases in the percent of students scoring at the Proficient and Advanced levels because we have improved the performance of students who were previously at the Basic level on the WKCE, but yet fail to have any effect on the performance of our district's strongest students. This is the argument that we are improving the performance of our low ability students, but failing to increase the performance of our already successful students. An examination of the numbers of students who are performing at just the Advanced level on the WKCE provides us with some insight into the academic progress of our more successful students.

I decided to examine WKCE math scores for students across the district. While it is not possible to track the performance of individual students, it is possible to follow the performance of a cohort as they advance through the system. Thus students who are now in 10th grade, took the 8th grade WKCE in 2006 and the 4th grade test in 2002. Because there have been significant changes in the demographics of the district's students, I split the data by socio-economic status to remove the possibility of declines in WKCE performance simply being the result of increased numbers of low income students. Although the WKCE has been criticized for not being a rigorous enough assessment tool, the data on our students' math performance are not encouraging. The figures below indicate that the percent of students scoring at the Advanced level on the WKCE decreases as students progress through the system, and this decline is seen in both our low income students and in our Not Economically Disadvantaged students. The figures suggest that while there is some growth in the percent of Advanced performing students in elementary school, there is a significant decline in performance once students begin taking math in our middle schools and this decline continues through high school. I confess that I take no pleasure in sharing this data; in fact, it makes me sick.

Because it might be more useful to examine actual numbers, I have provided tables showing the data used in the figures above. Reading across a row shows the percent of students in a class cohort scoring at the Advanced level as they have taken the WKCE test as they progressed from grades 3 - 10.

Percent of Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring at the Advanced Level on the WKCE Math Test Between 2002 and 2008

Graduation Year	3rd Grade	4th Grade	5th Grade	6th Grade	7th Grade	8th Grade	10th Grade
2005							8
2006							8.8
2007						11	7.7
2008						5.6	8.7
2009						8.5	6.7
2010						9.2	8.4
2011		12			12.5	11.1	8
2012		9.7		10.4	9.5	8.2
2013		15.3	14.7	15.1	11.7	10.8
2014		12	13.6	16.1	13.2
2015	20.1	15	18	11.7
2016	15.4	17.1	18.4
2017	12.9	17
2018	13.8

Percent of Not Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring at the Advanced Level on the WKCE Math Test Between 2002 and 2008

Graduation Year	3rd Grade	4th Grade	5th Grade	6th Grade	7th Grade	8th Grade	10th Grade
2005							47
2006							41.6
2007						49	42.2
2008						33.8	51.5
2009						42	45.2
2010						47.7	45.1
2011		50			45.3	45	38.4
2012		43.4		50.7	53	45.7
2013		50.3	54.8	54.1	54.7	48.2
2014		49.6	56.7	60.9	53.5
2015	60	57.8	60.7	54.2
2016	55.6	56.3	62
2017	57.4	61.4
2018	55.6

While it could be argued that the declining percentage of low income students scoring in the advanced range on the WKCE are simply the result of a relatively stable number of Advanced ability students in this group becoming a smaller and smaller percentage as the overall numbers of economically disadvantaged students increases, an examination of actual numbers reveal an absolute decline in the number of low income students scoring at the Advanced level on the Math portion of the WKCE.

Numbers of Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring Advanced on the Math WKCE Between 2002 and 2008

Graduation Year	3rd Grade	4th Grade	5th Grade	6th Grade	7th Grade	8th Grade	10th Grade
2005							42
2006							29
2007						57	32
2008						26	51
2009						43	40
2010						52	48
2011		64			73	64	52
2012		45		64	59	49
2013		74	87	89	71	69
2014		75	85	71	87
2015	126	96	113	87
2016	112	123	131
2017	86	121
2018	102

In the interest of thoroughness, I am providing enrollment numbers for the Not Economically Disadvantaged students in the MMSD over this period of time. Readers will see that the absolute numbers of Not Disadvantaged students have declined over the past seven years; this simply confirms what we already know (the increase in numbers from 8th to 10th grade reflect the influx of 9th grade students who have attended private schools for their K-8 education, e.g., Blessed Sacrament and Queen of Peace in the West attendance area).

Numbers of Not Economically Disadvantaged Students Enrolled Across Different Grade Levels in the Madison Schools and Taking the WKCE between 2002 and 2008

Graduation Year	3rd Grade	4th Grade	5th Grade	6th Grade	7th Grade	8th Grade	10th Grade
2005							1486
2006							1628
2007						1197	1451
2008						1259	1292
2009						1145	1218
2010						992	1188
2011		1026			1019	1054	1106
2012		1039		847	913	916
2013		1064	954	949	976	952
2014		936	974	939	883
2015	953	973	960	890
2016	894	881	847
2017	950	884
2018	913

Because the percent of students in this group scoring at the Advanced level has declined as well, there are two possible explanations for what has been happening. One explanation is that the district has had a relatively larger decline in enrollments of high ability students amongst this group of Not Disadvantaged students, what is often referred to as "Bright Flight". A more probably explanation is that the math curriculum, particularly in our middle schools and in 9th grade, does not adequately challenge our students and foster their intellectual growth regardless of their socio-economic background, and of course, it is possible that both of these factors are contributing to what we see here.

I should note that I have only examined the math data, and I don't know if the WKCE data for the other subject areas is as dismal. This would seem like an analysis that the District should be doing on a regular basis, but I encourage anyone who is interested to explore the performance of our students in reading or language arts. I also do not know the extent to which the Madison data merely reflects a similar decline in performance across the state. The members of the UW Math faculty that I have talked with in the past have expressed their concerns about the overall level of preparation from Wisconsin students, and our district's data may simply be a confirmation of the failure of currently popular constructionist approaches to adequately teach mathematical concepts. The statewide data is certainly worth exploring as well, and again I invited interested parties to visit the Department of Public Instruction WINNS website and download their own copy of the data.

I will say again that I find these data to be incredibly demoralizing, but perhaps we can take hope that our new superintendent and our School Board will use these data as a rallying point as they finalize a strategic plan and consider the recommendations of the Math Task Force. We have to find ways to raise the performance of all our district's students, and right now it appears we aren't meeting anyone's academic needs.

Expert panel says gifted students must be challenged

Wendy Owen, The Oregonian

For gifted children to succeed, they must be challenged, according to a panel of experts. Nearly 200 parents and educators filled the auditorium at Westview High School Thursday night to learn about the unique characteristics, best practices and identification methods for Talented and Gifted (TAG) students.

Gifted children lose their motivation when the work is too easy. Having never been challenged, they will lack the tools to deal with difficult work in the future, said Jean Gubbins, associate director of The National Research on the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut. Beaverton, Hillsboro and Forest Grove school districts sponsored the panel as part of an ongoing review of their own TAG programs.

The panelists also stressed the importance of grouping gifted students in middle school, at least during some lessons. "They need time with like-ability peers," said Hilda Rosselli, dean of the College of Education, Western Oregon State University. Educators should also seek out TAG students among English language learners, students from poverty and other under-served children, who are often overlooked as gifted, the panel said.

An Update on the Madison School District's Strategic Planning Process

The Madison School District's strategic planning group will meet next week and review the work to date, summarized in these documents:

• Curriculum Action Plan PDF
• Mission, Beliefs and Parameters PDF
• Organization & Systems Action Plans PDF
• Resource, Capacity Action Plans PDF
• Staff Action Plans PDF
• Student Action Plans PDF

Much more on the Madison School District's Strategic Planning Process here.

It is important to note that this work must be approved (and perhaps modified) by the school board, then, of course, implemented by the Administration.

Clever boys dumb down to avoid bullying in school

Jessica Shepherd:

Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown.

Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.

The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may "try to fall behind" or "dumb down".

One boy told researchers: "It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally ... then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn't come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling." This may in part explain boys' perceived underachievement, Francis said.

Wider testing to ID kids

Rhonda Bodfield
Arizona Daily Star

Even as schools across the state brace for sky-is-falling budget cuts, the Tucson Unified School District program for gifted and talented students is prepping for dramatic growth in the next school year.

The district plans to double the number of students it tests -- up to 10,000 -- and will send postcards to every family about testing opportunities.

As a result of state and federal requirements, it also will begin offering gifted classes for kindergartners and for juniors and seniors in high school.

Currently, parents request testing to see if their children qualify. That's a system that can be full of pitfalls in lower-income areas where parents miss the newsletter because they may be working two jobs, for example, or where language barriers might lead to missed deadlines, let alone confusion over how to access the program.

Proof of Anaheim math teacher's skill is in students' test scores

Carla Rivera:

The former engineer has won a national honor for his energetic commitment in the classroom. Last year his young charges, who think he may be the best math teacher anywhere, aced the AP calculus test.

Sam Calavitta presides over what may be the noisiest, most spirited math class in the nation.

He greets each student personally, usually with a nickname ("Butterfly," "Batgirl" and "Champ" are a few) and a fist bump. Then he launches a raucous, quiz-show-style contest.

Boys and girls line up on opposite sides of the room, Calavitta shouts out complex equations from index cards, and the opposing sides clap and cheer with each correct answer.

"State the anti-derivative of the secant function," Calavitta yells.

"The natural log of the absolute value secant x plus tangent x plus c," answers a student correctly.

Beautiful Minds

Joyce Kam:

There is a disconnect between high school and university that often catches out those unprepared for academic rigour. Not any more. Not if you are smart. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is inviting top high-school students worldwide to spend three weeks on its campus for a crash course interspersed with liberal doses of fun.
Its Talented Youth Summer Program aims to give students a foretaste of university life, cultivating essential university habits such as academic absorption and reflection, as well as insight into what makes the city tick.

"Programs for gifted children are rare in Hong Kong (administrative region, China), so we wanted to launch a pilot scheme since we have the right resources," said Helen Wong Hom- fong, the program's associate director. "We welcome students from all disciplines as long as they are willing to be challenged academically."

The university will, of course, be going all out to make a suitable impression on the bright young minds by relying on its traditional strengths, with Wong saying the program's main focus will be on the roles of science and technology throughout the history of civilization as they have always been the driving force.

"The curriculum consists of one core course on the main theme and one elective course, in addition to city tours and a talent show," she said.

End the pretense and let schools have real English

Kent Ewing:

The taxi driver spoke mangled English; I responded in mangled Cantonese. In the end, I got where I wanted to go, and he received his fare.

For both parties, then, the journey was a success. Moreover, in an elementary sort of way, it was an educational, even a cultural, experience.

But is this the future of English- language education in Hong Kong?

Happy as I was to arrive at my destination that day, I hope we can do better in Hong Kong's schools.

Indeed, in a classroom environment, I would rather lose my linguistic way entirely than find it through the development of a mixed-code patois that, in the end, will get me no farther in the real world than the confines of a Hong Kong taxi or wet market.

There is no question that Hong Kong beyond its small, elite class of political, business and educational leaders is a city that communicates with outsiders in a mixed code that ultimately amounts to really bad English with Cantonese thrown in when that bad English inevitably ends in total collapse.

Education philanthropist missing

BBC:

Sir Peter Lampl, the multimillionaire chairman of the Sutton Trust charitable foundation, went missing from his Wimbledon home on Sunday morning.

Sir Peter's disappearance is described by police as being "entirely out of character" for the 61-year-old.

Police in Merton said Sir Peter was last seen wearing a blue sweater and blue casual trousers.

Anyone with information of his whereabouts is asked to contact police.

When the Label Is 'Gifted,' The Debate Is Heated

Daniel de Vise:

A Dec. 16 article in The Washington Post reported that the Montgomery County school system might end the longtime practice of labeling students as gifted or not in the second grade.

The article ignited a fire within the local gifted-and-talented community. More than 300 people posted comments on http://www.washingtonpost.com, and 9,957 voted in an informal online poll on the merits of scrapping the gifted label. The latest tally was 54 percent in favor of keeping it, 41 percent saying dumping it would be a good idea.

The school system went to the unusual length of responding publicly to the article, clarifying that although the idea was under study, no decision had been made. Gifted policy is ultimately decided by the school board, whose members expect to take up the future of the label sometime this year.

The reaction illustrated the level of community interest in accelerated instruction and underscored the friction between advocates for the gifted and school system officials on a more basic question: Are the needs of advanced students being met?

New Data on AP's Impact

Jay Matthews:

On one wall of my cubicle is a large chart extracted from Tom Luce and Lee Thompson's 2005 book "Do What Works: How Proven Practices Can Improve America's Public Schools." It shows that a study of 78,000 Texas students found college graduation rates much higher for those who, while in high school, took Advanced Placement exams -- but failed them -- than those who took no AP exams at all.

At this point, you may be saying, "Huh?" We AP wonks are an odd breed. We often cite statistics that make no sense to normal people. But I will try to explain this one, and why it was greeted with such excitement by AP teachers four years ago.

AP courses are given in nearly 40 subjects. They allow high school students to earn college credit, or at least skip college introductory courses, if they do well on the final exams. Many AP teachers argue that students' grades on the three-hour exams, given in most U.S. high schools every May, are not as important as taking the college-level course and exam and getting a taste of college trauma. Many of their students who flunk the AP exam still report, when they come back to visit after their freshman year of college, that the AP experience made it easier for them to adjust to fat college reading lists and long, analytical college exams. They may have failed the AP exam, but by taking it, and the course, they were better prepared for the load of stuff dumped on them in college. When they took the college introductory course in the subject that had been so difficult for them in high school AP, they did much better.

The Texas study showing that failed AP students were more likely to graduate from college than non-AP students was thus greeted as proof that the AP teachers' view on this issue was correct. But the researchers who had done the work cautioned against putting too much weight on it. There were too many variables to reach hard conclusions.

Linda Hargrove, Donn Godin & Barbara Dodd 660K PDF Report.

More from Matthews:

On pages 35 and 36 of their report, the Texas researchers revealed what was for me the most interesting of their many new disclosures. They show that even students who only get a 2 on their AP exams after taking the AP course have significantly better college outcomes than non-AP students. Students who get 1s on the exam do not do better than non-AP students, but as I have often heard AP teachers say, they have no chance to build those students up to a 2 or a 3 unless they are allowed in their courses.

These are complicated issues. This study is not the last word. Critics of AP may say that these researchers' work is tainted by the fact that the College Board, which owns the AP program, paid them for their study. But there is no question they are reputable, independent scholars, and their data is there for all to see.

Related: Dane County High School AP Course Offerings: 2008/2009.

An Update on Madison's Small Learning Community / High School "Redesign" Plans

The Madison School Board recently received a presentation (25mb mp3 file) from the Administration on its plans for High School "redesign" and the use of the $5,500,000 Small Learning Community grant funded by our federal tax dollars. Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash along with representatives from the four large high schools participated in the discussion. The Board asked some interesting questions. President Arlene Silveira asked how this initiative relates to the District's "Strategic Planning Process"? Vice President Lucy Mathiak asked about opportunities for advanced students.

Related:

• More Than English 10: Let's REALLY Talk About Our High Schools
• Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater Halts East High School "Redesign"
• Madison School District Small Learning Community Grant Application
• Examining the Data from Earlier Grants, Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
• US Department of Education Response to Madison's 2007 Small Learning Community Grant Application
• Where Does the MMSD Get its Numbers From?
• More Than English 10: Let's REALLY Talk About Our High Schools
• Evaluation of the Small Learning Community Project at Madison West High School
• Links on West High School's English 10
• High School "Redesign" notes and links

The interesting question in all of this is: does the money drive strategy or is it the other way around? In addition, what is the budget impact after 5 years? A friend mentioned several years ago, during the proposed East High School curriculum change controversy, that these initiatives fail to address the real issue: lack of elementary and middle school preparation.

Gifted and challenged: When enlightening has to strike twice

Sarah Lemagie

Tyler Lehmann could read "Harry Potter" books before he started first grade, yet an anxiety disorder left him unable to speak to his teacher and all but one of his classmates in Woodbury. Simon Fink attends a school for gifted students in St. Paul, but Asperger's syndrome can make it hard for him to interact with peers and focus on lessons.

School can be tough for kids with challenges ranging from emotional disorders to ADHD or dyslexia. For gifted students, too, it's not always a cakewalk, between boredom and the sense of isolation that can result from being a "brainiac."

Then there are students such as Tyler and Simon, who fall into both categories.

Raising children with learning barriers is a task in itself, "but when they're bright and gifted and have a high IQ, it's even more frustrating, because the teachers just don't understand how to work with these kids," said Bloomington parent Chelle Woolley, whose 17-year-old son, Matt, was in fifth grade when he tested out for both giftedness and attention deficit disorder.

A growing awareness of so-called "twice-exceptional" or "2X" students, many of whom qualify for both gifted and special education services, is prompting some researchers to take a closer look at their needs. This fall, educators at the University of St. Thomas and four metro-area school districts are using a $490,000 federal grant to launch a five-year project aimed at developing better ways to teach 2X children, helping schools identify them and training teachers to work with them.

Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs

Elissa Gootman & Robert Gegeloff:

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.

The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data.

In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year's new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.

Parents, teachers and principals involved in the programs, already worried at reports this spring that the new system tilted programs for the gifted further toward rich neighborhoods, have complained since school began that they were wasteful and frustrating, with high-performing children in the smallest classes in a school system plagued by pockets of overcrowding.

Let Them be Themselves:
Seminar offers help, advice to parents raising gifted children

Doug Carroll, via a kind reader's email:

Jim Delisle tells the story of a bright little girl who went with her parents to buy a bicycle.

After the bike had been selected, the parents presented their credit card to complete the purchase.

"Don't you know the interest rate they charge on credit cards?" the girl said in a scolding tone. "If we wait until Christmas, Santa will bring it -- and it won't cost anything!"

The anecdote illustrates the challenges that can be involved in parenting a gifted child, who may be light-years ahead of the pack intellectually but all too typical in other respects.

A two-day seminar at Blue Harbor Resort and Conference Center, which concluded Friday, addressed issues specific to the development and education of gifted children and was attended by more than 300 schoolteachers, administrators, parents and students.

Curriculum Compacting: One way to help advanced students move ahead and learn at their own level.

Tamara Fisher:

Professional development. What thoughts and feelings do those words conjure up for you? Excitement? Boredom? A chance to improve your skills and learn new, interesting teaching strategies? Or a painful time of listening to someone talk about a topic you already know?

We've all been there--sitting in a required in-service class listening to someone go over Bloom's Taxonomy or some other concept or strategy that we've been using effortlessly for years. We grumble our way through the session, irritated that we have to sit on our butts "re-learning" a topic we could have taught just as well ourselves, if not better. Partly we're irritated because we have so much else to do! Many teachers would categorize a situation like this as wasted time.

Of course, not all professional development is like that. But I use the example because it is a great way to help teachers relate to what a gifted kid experiences when the material being taught in class is not at the right readiness-level for him or her. We don't like it when someone else puts us into that kind of a situation, yet we routinely do the same to the gifted students.

Answer not 'No Child Left Ahead'

Cincinnati Enquirer

Advocates for gifted education say states need three things in order to serve high-ability students well: a mandate to identify them, a mandate to serve them and the money to carry out those mandates.

Very few states have all three.

Ohio is one of a handful to only have one, a mandate to identify gifted children. Indiana is one of very few to do all three, after mandating identification and service last January and putting state funds into executing those mandates. Kentucky mandates service, but under funds.

Now Ohio is stepping up its gifted education program with new standards that set minimums for minutes-per-week and students-per-classroom in gifted instruction. But some parents and gifted educators fear that, with little state money attached, schools may shrink away from serving gifted students.

It's part of a long and contentious debate on if, when and how to serve brilliant students. And it's only gotten more divisive since No Child Left Behind forced school districts to focus harder on low-achieving students or face sanctions.

Gifted advocates say the move to make everyone proficient shortchanges students who can achieve much more academically. They say there's little incentive for students to push the upper levels of achievement, and that boiling the focus down to reading and math - on which most standardized tests focus - means gifted kids often lose time in subjects they love, like science and the arts.

Madison Schools' Math Task Force Discussion

25MB mp3 audio file from the September 8, 2008 meeting.

Links:

• Math Task Force
• Math Forum audio / video
• Lee Sensenbrenner on Connected Math

Complete 3.9MB PDF Report

World Class Writing

Michael Shaughnessy:

Over the past few weeks, much has been said by Senator Clinton, Michelle Obama and Senator Obama about "world class education". Those three words have resounded in all of their speeches of late. I would like to acknowledge some "world class writing" which has recently appeared in The Concord Review, edited by Will Fitzhugh.

Below are the papers, the authors, and the high school with which the student is affiliated or enrolled. We should acknowledge the teachers, and principals of these schools, as well as the parents of these fine "world class writers".

Congratulations to these fine young scholars on their exemplary research and writing.

Bessemer Process...Pearson W. Miller......Hunter College High School, Manhattan Island, New York.

Soviet- Afghan War...Colin Rhys Hill.......Atlanta International School, Atlanta, Georgia

Silencio!...Ines Melicias Geraldes Cardoso ...Frank C. Carlucci American International School of Lisbon

Jews in England...Milo Brendan Barisof...Homescholar, Santa Cruz, California

United States Frigates...Caleb Greinke....Park Hill South High School, Riverside, Missouri

Roxy Stinson....Elizabeth W. Doe....Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Massachusetts

Mary, Queen of Scots....Elizabeth Pitts....Charlotte Country Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina

Viking Gifts....Elisabeth Rosen....St. Ann's School, Brooklyn, New York

Hugh Dowding....Connor Rowntree...William Hall High School, West Hartford, Connecticut

Confederate Gold....Steffi Delcourt....Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia

Max Weber...Diane (Elly) Brinkley....Dalton School, Manhattan Island, New York

I daresay that social studies, history teachers and even history professors would learn a great deal about a variety of topics by reading these essays.Further, I would hope that these essays would serve as models of excellent scholarship and writing for high school students across America.

Madison Edgewood senior gets a perfect ACT, almost on SAT
6 Dane County Students Score a Perfect 36 on the 2007 ACT

Andy Hall:

Edgewood High School senior Matthew Everts recently learned he's just about perfect -- when it comes to the two major college-entrance exams, anyway.

Matthew, who hopes to attend a university on the West Coast, received a 36, the highest possible composite score, on the ACT.

He remembers feeling focused when he took the ACT in June, a week before tackling the SAT.

"I knew that if I did well I wouldn't have to take the test again," Matthew said Tuesday. "Not having to take a four-hour test is always a good thing."

On the SAT, Matthew received a perfect 800 on critical reading and math, two of the three SAT Critical Reasoning Tests, along with a 740 out of a possible 800 on the writing test.

Matthew also took the SAT in three subject areas -- chemistry, math level two and U.S. history -- and received a perfect score on all three tests.

Tamira Madsen:

(Adam) Schneider, who plays trumpet in the Middleton school band and is a member of the ecology club, expects to attend college and study biology at UW-Eau Claire or St. Olaf College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. He also plans on working toward a graduate degree in botany, doing field research and teaching once he finishes school.

Schneider is one of six Dane County students to post perfect marks on the ACT test during the 2007-08 school. Others who earned perfect marks were Mary Kate Wall and Matthew Everts from Edgewood High School, Axel Glaubitz and Dianna Amasino from Madison West High School and Alex Van Abel from Monona Grove High School. All the students were juniors when they took the test.

At the state level, 22 students received perfect scores on the ACT test last school year. On the national level, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of students that take the ACT test earn a perfect mark.

Meanwhile, six Madison Metropolitan School District students earned perfect test scores in 2006.

Unwrapping the Gifted

Tamara Fisher:

Varsity Academics
Hello from the Ice Cream Capital of the World!

On the morning of July 7, I had my TV on in the other room while I was getting ready for the day. I overheard an interview on the Today Show that Matt Lauer did with swimmer Dara Torres. The day before, she had managed to qualify for her fifth Olympics at the age of 41, even breaking an American record (for the ninth time in that event!) in the qualifying process.

Near the end of the interview, Matt asked Dara how she did it, noting his age and noting hers. (They know each other off-camera, it might be important to mention.) "When I turned 40," he said, "I had trouble going up stairs. I was winded more easily."

After describing her workout regimen and then outlining how she was proactively being regularly blood-tested to prove that she was doing all this cleanly, she said to Matt, good-naturedly and with a twinkle in her eye,

"And besides, you know, maybe I'm a little more athletically gifted than you are."

Chicago high school emphasizes fundamentals - and a world view

Linda Lantor Fandel:

Jordan Nolan didn't have to show up after school on a Friday in late May for a discussion about the invisible children of Uganda. Neither did about 30 other teenagers sprawled on couches and chairs in a classroom at Walter Payton College Prep High School in Chicago.

But after a brief presentation by four students, they engaged in a spirited, hour-long debate about just whose responsibility it is to try to end a civil war fought with kidnapped child soldiers.

The turnout wasn't surprising, not even at the end of a week near the end of the school year.

Not at a public high school that's an American showcase for how to prepare young people for a globally competitive economy in the 21century.

While the national and international conversation grows louder about how to define a world-class education, Payton is a real-life laboratory.

Meeting special needs through art

Pamela McLoughlin

Early in her career teaching special education, Beverly Levett Gerber once had an unusual mix of students; some had behavior problems, others developmental disabilities and some were gifted.
It was quite the challenge, but she knew how to achieve harmony.

“There were few things we could do together, but we could do the art work together at their rate and level,” Gerber said. “When you reach them at their level, they succeed.”

Gerber, a professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University who still teaches a course each semester, is a nationally recognized star in the fields of both art education and special education, most noted for combining the two seemingly divergent fields. Gerber taught at her alma mater, Southern, for 33 years before retiring from full-time work in 2003.

“Because of the uniqueness of the two fields coming together, I call myself a matchmaker,” Gerber, of Milford said with a twinkle in her eye.

Gerber’s commitment to the notion that art is a vehicle for special needs students to learn other subjects, to express themselves emotionally and show their level, has led to such groundbreaking progress in the field that colleagues from the National Art Education Association established The Beverly Levett Gerber Lifetime Achievement award to go each year to an outstanding art educator who works with special needs children.

Presidential Election Curricula for the Gifted

Carol Fertig:

As the excitement builds this fall with the upcoming election, teachers and parents will want to have good resources at hand to help gifted students understand the election process. Here are just a few resourses. If you have other good resources to share, please list them in the comments area of this blog entry.

Specific Curricula

Rutherford Public Schools in New Jersey has developed curricula for their gifted program, grades 7–8. The information is very general and includes objectives, course outline, curriculum content standards, assessments, resources, and activities.

One of the resources used in the Rutherford Public Schools curriculum is the Interact simulation The Presidential Election Process. Interact recommends this curriculum for grades 5–8. If you scroll down on this page, you will see that Interact materials were recommended in my June 28, 2008 blog entry.

Madison teacher's impact fondly recalled

Tamira Madsen

In his job as an educator, Ted Widerski left an indelible imprint on the lives of many Madison Metropolitan School District students. Friends and family are remembering Widerski as an exemplary teacher and person as they come to terms with his unexpected death at age 56 on June 29. Widerski suffered a massive heart attack at his Cambridge home.

Widerski was so influential to Bailey Wundrow during her prep years at La Follette High School that she followed in his footsteps and became a math teacher. Besides being Wundrow's homeroom teacher for four years, Widerski laid a strong foundation for Wundrow with math as she prepared to pursue an education degree at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wundrow, a 2002 La Follette graduate, recently completed her second year teaching math at Verona High School. She said Widerski set an example she wanted to follow. "He enjoyed what he did every day," Wundrow said. "He sold me on that end of teaching. He wrote me a letter of recommendation for (UW) Madison and I told him I wanted to teach. He always joked, 'I'll wait and when I retire and you graduate, you can have my job.' "

Widerski got a bachelor's degree in 1973 from UW-Madison and received a master's degree in math education from UW-Milwaukee in 1976. He taught in Green Bay and Waterloo and eventually became a school principal in Waterloo before starting in Madison 12 years ago. Widerski taught at La Follette for seven years and joined the school district's Talented and Gifted (TAG) program three years ago as a resource teacher. Widerski oversaw programming for talented students at the middle and high school levels.

He also was instrumental in creating the district's first MathFests, events that gave students the opportunity to compete individually and in groups to decipher math problems. Welda Simousek, who will retire in August as coordinator of the Talented and Gifted program, said her staff will create a fund in Widerski's name so the MathFest competition can be held on an annual basis.

Education: Where's the Pride; Where's the Shame?

William Falzett III

I live in a small town, the kind of town many parents seek out in an effort to raise their children away from the precocious material culture of the suburbs, and the tough third world neighborhoods in and around the cities. We have successfully escaped most of that stuff in our small town, but we have not been able to escape the creeping clutches of political correctness.

My daughter is in the third grade, and recently came home with an assignment to prepare a presentation about a famous historical figure. One of her favorite films "A Night at the Museum" includes a part about Sacajawea, the famous native American, working mother, and guide of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We suggested Sacajawea would be a good choice for her project. She worked on it over a two week period, researching on the Internet, reading a book we bought, and preparing visual aids. She was very excited about the project, and practiced the presentation over and over again at home. After her open house event, I asked what kind of grade she got on it, to which she flatly replied she had gotten 102, an A+. I was surprised by her lack of enthusiasm, so I asked how her grade compared to the other kids. She told me she did not know, because kids are not allowed to share their grades with other students.

A little probing exposed this as a politically correct "don't ask; don't tell" rule I have encountered many other times in speaking to the kids about school. Very simply it has no purpose but to ensure no one gets hurt feelings or diminished self-esteem over poor performance. The children are taught that expressions of pride for performance are bad, and there is no shame in performing poorly. Poor performance, mediocrity, and outright failure are all treated the same. Little or no effort is equivalent to diligence, and there is therefore little incentive in the system to perform. Kids learn they can get by doing the bare minimum. Curiously there seems to be no similar treatment of performance when it comes to school sports. The poorest performers are often cut from the team, while the gifted advance, often accompanied by extreme celebration, aggressive coaching, poor sportsmanship and in-your-face trash-talking. The message seems to be that to be good in sports is serious and worth bragging about, but being excellent in academics is not.

Gifted Programs in the City Are Less Diverse

Elissa Gootman and Robert Gebeloff

When New York City set a uniform threshold for admission to public school gifted programs last fall, it was a crucial step in a prolonged effort to equalize access to programs that critics complained were dominated by white middle-class children whose parents knew how to navigate the system.

The move was controversial, with experts warning that standardized tests given to young children were heavily influenced by their upbringing and preschool education, and therefore biased toward the affluent.

Now, an analysis by The New York Times shows that under the new policy, children from the city’s poorest districts were offered a smaller percentage than last year of the entry-grade gifted slots in elementary schools. Children in the city’s wealthiest districts captured a greater share of the slots.

The disparity is so stark that some gifted programs opened by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in an effort to increase opportunities in poor and predominantly minority districts will not fill new classes next year. In three districts, there were too few qualifiers to fill a single class.

No Child Left Behind may be a drag on the gifted

By Anya Sostek, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The school accountability movement is leaving the nation's most gifted students behind, according to a report released yesterday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The report, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB," uses scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to compare changes in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of students since the introduction of No Child Left Behind.

The good news is that NCLB seems to be making progress toward its goal of closing the "achievement gap," states the report: In fourth-grade reading, for example, NAEP scores for the bottom tenth increased 16 points from 2000 to 2007, compared to 3 points for the top tenth.

But what does the narrowing of that gap mean for students scoring at the top of the spectrum?

"The progress of our top students has been modest at best," said the report, noting that the focus of NCLB on bringing students to the "proficient" level might result in the neglect of gifted students who are already proficient.

"People can look at this data and say, 'This is great news,' and maybe that's what our national education policy should be," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute. "But you see that the performance of the high-achieving students is languid, and the question is whether languid is going to cut it in a global economy."

A Robin Hood Effect: Does the focus on students who are furthest behind come at the expense of top students?

Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas, Tom Loveless: High Achieving Students in the era of NCLB.

This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.

Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.

Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.

Locally, these issues have manifested themselves with a controversial move toward one size fits all curriculum: English 10 and mandatory academic grouping, High School Redesign and a letter from the West High School Math teachers to Isthmus. Dane County AP Class offering comparison.

Report Sees Cost in Some Academic Gains by Sam Dillon:

And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: "Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school -- we're not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive".

Download the complete 7.3MB report here.

Thanks to a reader for emailing the report.

Schools can't take gifted students for granted

Niki Paul

With the recent news about Salem-Keizer's talented and gifted program under scrutiny again, I would like to commend the parents for their continual push and voice. Too often, important issues in education are dropped because the matters are not repeatedly brought to light.

Gifted students deserve appropriate learning opportunities and academic challenges so that they may become talented. We certainly reward competent athletes. It would be unthinkable to eliminate varsity or college football; we value the process of preparing professionals. Should we not then strive to add to our society highly talented artists, exceptional engineers, literary geniuses and the like?

School districts do not worry about their gifted students because from them, districts get better attendance, great test scores and graduates. School leaders view the parents as an annoyance and tune out their voices whenever possible. Yet the message has been sent and stands clear: Gifted and talented students are a special population needing special services.

What happens to bright, active learners when they aren't challenged is they challenge the system. The underperforming gifted and talented become intellectually depressed in an academic environment that fails to challenge them. They are the "too smart for their own good" students who can pass every test without doing any of the time-filling work created to fill mandatory seat time.

When a gifted learner senses that learning opportunities are absent, he or she responds with challenging behavior. Wouldn't it be wiser for teachers to be in the place of challenging learners rather than creating and managing challenging behaviors?

Again, district and schools respond to the needs of gifted and talented learners with blank stares, especially at the high school level. Students who attend, pass state tests and graduate do not arouse the attention of bureaucrats. Teachers cannot implement what is not programmatically available. They need tools, resources and time to challenge learners.

Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire

Kurt Gutknecht:

Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.

"I didn't see this happening," she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.

In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.

Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.

By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.

"We had sworn that we'd never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid," Olsky.

Parents question proposed changes to Pennsylvania's gifted-student regulations

Susan Snyder:

Pennsylvania is taking steps to make gifted education available to more students, but that has done little to quell long-standing tension between parents and school districts over how the state's brightest are educated.

The proposed changes on course to become final this summer make clear that districts must use more than an IQ score to identify gifted students - as most other states do.

The state sets a 130 IQ as the trigger for gifted education and allows districts to choose the other criteria, such as teacher recommendations and classroom work.

Just how much impact the clarification will have is uncertain. State officials had no estimate of how many more students would be identified or the potential cost to districts.

While most area school administrators interviewed said they already use more than an IQ score to evaluate students, education advocates disagree.

May 21, 2008 Congressional Hearing on Math Curriculum

Via a kind reader email: House Committee on Education & Labor:

The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing to examine a recent report released by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel on the state of math education and instruction in the United States. Among other things, the report found that the nation's system for teaching math is "broken and must be fixed" if the U.S. wants to maintain its competitive edge.

Skip Fennel's wide ranging testimony can be read here [66K PDF]:

However, I would add that at a time of teacher surplus at the elementary school level, it is perhaps time to scrap the model of elementary teacher as generalist. Why not have specifically trained elementary mathematics specialists starting from day one of their career? Our country can’t wait until such specialists are graduate students.

Francis "Skip" Fennell is Professor of Education, McDaniel College and Past President, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Notes and links on the recent NCTM report.

Garden City New York School Board Seeks to Expand AP & International Baccalaureate Opportunities

Stephanie Mariel Petrellese:

The AB/IB Committee, co-chaired by Drs. Prendergast and Bacotti, and comprised of administrators, teachers and three parents, conducted a comprehensive study of the current AP program and researched the possibility of implementing the IB program. They then compared the two and presented their recommendations to the Board.

"It is clear that some of the issues that we realize are out there with AP programs may in fact be addressed by a rigorous IB program," said School Board President Kenneth Monaghan. He gave the example of the study of world language. Many students do not pursue foreign language study at the AP level because the course and exam are recognized to be extremely difficult and students are concerned with how it might affect their overall grade point average.

"It's not that the AP program is irrelevant. It's not," he continued. "Nor is it a matter of whether or not the IB program is more relevant. The question is whether or not the two together, or in combination, may balance out each other's shortcomings and help us devise a program which has greater relevance for our students going forward, in particular for the vast majority of our students who are going on to collegiate work. We want to make sure that they are as prepared as possible."

The committee will take their research to the next level by establishing contacts with other high-performing districts that are offering the IB program and expanding the number of parents on the committee. Committee members plan to attend a Guild of IB Schools of the Northeast orientation seminar in Commack on June 7th and file an official "Intent to Apply" interest form with the International Baccalaureate Organization. After they file the interest form, teachers and administrators will be allowed to attend professional development Level 1 workshops. The committee will report back to the Board in the fall.

Related:

• Garden City, NY School District
• Garden City Demographics
• Notes and links on Madison's proposed High School redesign.
• Dane County AP course offering comparison.

I'm glad Garden City included three parents and some teachers on their AP/IB committee.

Football, Dartmouth and a Third Grade Teacher

George Vecsey:

Williams, 53, is not just any retired player. He has been a shining light of the N.F.L., his name even floated around when the commissionership was open a couple of years ago. And he won awards for citizenship and sportsmanship while playing in two Super Bowls.

Before the 1982 Super Bowl near Detroit, not far from his childhood home in Flint, Mich., he told reporters how he had been underachieving in the third grade until his teacher, Geraldine Chapel, sent him off for tests that proved he was quite smart but hard of hearing. The hearing improved, and so did his self-image and his schoolwork.

Williams majored in psychology at Dartmouth and was all-Ivy linebacker for three years as well as an Ivy heavyweight wrestling champion. Undersized at 6 feet and 228 pounds, Williams merged his intelligence and his outsider’s drive to make the Bengals.

Are gifted students getting left out?

Carla Rivera

Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren't even identified -- especially in low-income and minority schools.

If you reviewed Dalton Sargent's report cards, you'd know only half his story. The 15-year-old Altadena junior has lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.

Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation's classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.

With schools under intense pressure from state and federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind to raise test scores of low-achieving pupils, the educational needs of gifted students -- who usually perform well on standardized tests -- too often are ignored, advocates say.

Nationally, about 3 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students are identified as gifted, but 80% of them do not receive specialized instruction, experts say. Studies have found that 5% to 20% of students who drop out are gifted.

There is no federal law mandating special programs for gifted children, though many educators argue that these students -- whose curiosity and creativity often coexist with emotional and social problems -- deserve the same status as those with special needs. Services for gifted students vary from state to state. In California, about 512,000 students are enrolled in the Gifted and Talented Education program, which aims to provide specialized and accelerated instruction.

But many gifted students who might benefit from the program are never identified, particularly those in economically disadvantaged communities, advocates say. Legislation sponsored by state Sen. Louis Correa (D-Santa Ana) aimed at training teachers to identify gifted students from low-income, minority and non-English speaking families stalled last year after estimates found that it could cost up to $1.1 million.

What to Do With Gifted Students?

Jay Matthews:

I received a letter a few weeks ago from a mother in Prince William County, home to one of the Washington area's big suburban school systems. It starkly captured the parental frustration at the heart of the national debate over what to do with very gifted students. I ran her letter, with a short response, in my weekly Post column, "Extra Credit," in which I answer reader mail. That column produced so many letters that I decided to lay out the debate in this column, using the limitless space of the Internet. I have not been very sympathetic with parents of gifted kids. Some of the reaction below echoes things I have said. But I find it difficult to justify forcing Nancy Klimavicz's son to spend valuable time on busywork. If anyone has any good way out of this impasse, e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com.

Dear Extra Credit:

I've started this letter many times over the past several months. After my gifted son received rejections from Virginia Tech, James Madison University and William and Mary, I figured it's time to warn other parents. If you have a very bright student, home-school him.

My son was reading a college-level book in third grade when the gifted education specialist recommended just that. Academically, we figured he'd learn and grow regardless of the environment, but his weakness was social interaction with his peers. We believed childhood should include high school sports teams and clubs, and we remembered being influenced by one or two teachers who were passionate about their subjects. We decided to leave him in public school.

Gifted or not, challenge students to reach higher

Des Moines Register

Nicholas Colangelo is director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, Iowa City, established in 1988 at the University of Iowa. His hands-on experience includes teaching middle-school social studies in New York and serving as an elementary-school counselor in Vermont in the 1970s. Four years ago, he co-authored with colleagues the report "A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students."

Q. The alarm has been sounded that U.S. students are not prepared for the growing global competition they face. But is that true of this country's brightest students? Are our most gifted students being challenged with sufficient rigor?

A. When it comes to matching top students to top students, we are probably pretty close. But what concerns me is that the top students in the United States do not necessarily get the challenge they need across the board. It really is about ZIP code. We have taken for granted that our top students are getting what they need. If we gave our top students more opportunities to take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate and other [accelerated opportunities], they would reveal they are capable of doing much more than we think.

Q. Has the federal No Child Left Behind law affected the ability of schools to challenge all students to excel?

A. As far as I'm concerned, the No Child Left Behind law has done nothing on behalf of high-ability students. Essentially, No Child Left Behind has focused on kids below a standard, ignoring kids above that standard. You should have no law that makes a portion of the students invisible. They are all our kids, and they all deserve our attention and energy.

Pennsylvania Plans to Boost Gifted Programs

Joe Smydo:

The state Board of Education today will consider a new process for identifying "gifted" children and beefing up the monitoring of gifted programs, steps advocates say would help provide a mind-stretching education for the state's top students.

Under the current law, students are classified as gifted if they score at least 130 on an IQ test and meet other criteria, such as performing one or more years above grade level and excelling in one or more subject areas.

The proposed change would classify students as gifted if they meet the IQ threshold or meet multiple other criteria. Advocates said the change is needed because IQ tests don't always flag gifted students, particularly those from disadvantaged homes, children with disabilities and deep-thinkers who don't do well on timed tests.

"There are many school districts that will look at that and say, 'If you do not have the magic number, you are not in,' " said David Mason, president of Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education and a retired York County school administrator.

Advocates said they didn't consider the potential change a watering down of eligibility criteria or something that would swell the ranks of gifted students. About 70,000 of the state's 1.8 million school-age children receive gifted services, according to the state board.

School Cell Phone Policy

Samara Kalk Derby:

As it stands, Madison school district policy strictly forbids students from having cell phones in school. The Student Senate will recommend to the School Board next month that phones be allowed to be used before and after school and during lunch.

"I don't know many teenagers who would like to be separated from their cell phone," said Laura Checovich, 17, president of the Student Senate and a student at West High School.

"Right now, the current policy is that you could be expelled just for having one in your backpack or in your pocket. We thought that was pretty drastic and thought it needed to be looked at again," she said.

Some students leave their cell phones in their lockers, but Checovich estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of students keep their phones in their pockets or backpacks, which is prohibited under current school policy.

The School Board directed the Student Senate in December to research and recommend potential changes to district policy on cell phone use in schools. The Senate's recommendations will be confined to policy in the high schools. The Senate will present its findings to the board at a 5 p.m. meeting April 14 at La Follette High School.

Gifted Kids Blog: Unwrapping the Gifted

Tamara Fisher:

I have a pet peeve. Well, my sister would tell you that I have more than one pet peeve … but when it comes to the education of gifted children, there’s something that really irritates me. I have a few examples that will help me to explain and illustrate…

A month or two ago, a tiny article appeared deep in an area newspaper with the headline, “Chancellor wants math, science program for elite high schoolers.” The article stated that the chancellor at Montana Tech (an excellent engineering, math, science, and mining school) is considering creating a residential program for about 40 of Montana’s top math and science students. They would be dual enrolled in high school and college for the two year program. The students would be selected based on test scores, interviews, and recommendations, and would have to be Montana residents at least 15 years old. An anonymous donor is willing to help significantly with the program’s costs.

While many, if not most, of you live in states where Governor’s Schools and other such similar options are available for some of your gifted students, nothing of the sort exists here in Montana. To my knowledge, this would be the first option of its kind in my state.

I excitedly read the little article until I came upon the last paragraph. And that’s when my ears started steaming: “Concerns include the effect on local school districts if their top students transferred to the program at Tech. Districts’ financial support is based partly on the size of enrollment, and outstanding students often help to boost schools’ composite scores on standardized tests.”

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Waukesha Restores Gifted Program Chairperson

Amy Hetzner:

Taking advantage of a $700,000 saving from its newly settled teachers contract, the School Board on Wednesday reinstated the School District's chairperson in charge of gifted education for the 2008-'09 school year, a position it voted in January to cut.

Retention of the leadership post was done at the urging of parents of gifted and talented students, who argued that the district might otherwise violate state law requiring school systems to designate someone to oversee such programming for students.

The chairperson is the district's last employee solely devoted to gifted education in the district, following the board's elimination of its gifted teaching staff for the current school year. Keeping the position is expected to cost the district about $100,000.

In addition to reinstating the post for next school year, School Board members urged administrators to advance a proposal to distribute $2,000 to each district school as stipends for advocates who could work with parents and teachers on issues related to gifted education.

'Acting Black' Hinders Gifted Black Student Achievement

NASHVILLE, Tenn., March 6 (AScribe Newswire) -- Gifted black students often underachieve in school because of efforts to "act black," new research has found, offering insights into the achievement gap between black and white students in the United States and why black students are under-represented in gifted programs.

"Part of the achievement gap, particularly for gifted black students, is due to the poor image these students have of themselves as learners," study author Donna Ford, professor of special education and Betts Chair of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, said. "Our research shows that prevention and intervention programs that focus on improving students' achievement ethic and self-image are essential to closing the achievement gap."

The research, one of the first to examine the concept of "acting black," was published in the March issue of Urban Education. Ford and co-authors Gilman Whiting and Tarek Grantham set out to determine how gifted black students achieve compared to their white counterparts, what can be learned about the achievement gap by studying these students, and how gifted students view "acting black" and "acting white." They surveyed 166 black 5th- through 12th-graders identified as gifted in two Ohio school districts.

"Many studies have been conducted about students, with little information collected from them," the authors wrote. "It is with students themselves that many of the answers and solutions to underachievement, low achievement, and the achievement gap may be found."

Most of the students were familiar with the terms "acting white" and "acting black." They described "acting white" as speaking properly, being smart or too smart, doing well in school, taking advanced courses, being stuck up, and not acting your race. Terms they used to describe "acting black" were having a "don't care" attitude, being laid back, being dumb or uneducated and pretending not to be smart.

"Tragically, only one student (surveyed) indicated acting black was positive. Instead, the gifted black students? believe that acting black means lacking in intelligence, placing a low priority on academics, speaking poorly, behaving poorly, and dressing in ill-fitting clothes," they wrote. "The gifted black students clearly hold negative stereotypes about blacks, namely their attitudes, behaviors and intelligence."

Sixty-six percent of the students surveyed reported knowing someone who had been teased or ridiculed for doing well in school, while 42 percent reported being teased for this reason themselves. The authors found discrepancies between students' attitudes and their behaviors-students expressed belief that school is important and a key to success, but may not behave that way in the classroom.

"This is because they don't want to be associated with the stigma attached with achieving and doing well; plus they try to keep up with friends and don't want to be singled out or 'played,'" one of the students wrote. The authors also found that while black students agree that hard work in school leads to success, they do not necessarily believe that this holds true for black people.

"This doubt and second-guessing may result in the child believing that an education benefits or pays off for some groups but not others, namely, blacks," the authors wrote. "Some of these students, specifically if discouraged, believe that hard work is a waste of time and energy given the reality of social injustices."

To address these issues, the authors argue for counseling to help battle peer pressure, stereotypes and poor self-esteem, and suggest promoting an achievement ethic in schools through posters, speakers, symposiums and mentoring programs. "Because these students are black, these posters, speakers and mentors should include black people," they wrote. "A multicultural curriculum must hold promise for improving students' image of themselves and people of color as scholars."

This work cannot end at the school doors, the authors argued, but also must extend into the home. "Families are urged to connect their children with mentors and role models who are academically oriented and who have a positive racial identity," they wrote. "Adults of the family must also see themselves as role models and personify a strong work ethic-an image of school being important and an image of resilience."

"The achievement gap is real, the achievement gap is complex, the achievement gap is stubborn; we - educators and families - must be just as stubborn and diligent in our efforts to eliminate the gap."

An Interview with Todd McIntyre: About www.AppliedGiftedEd.com

Michael Shaughnessy:

3) What information are most parents and teachers seeking the most?

The first thing that parents want to know once we start talking about their situation with the district is whether or not they are crazy.

Oftentimes the situation the parent describes to me during an initial conversation defies any sort of logic - for example, the 3rd grade child is two or three grades above level in several, perhaps all, his or her courses.

The educational services the gifted child needs are not offered or even discussed with the parent because the district holds a vague concern about some future social experience such as the Senior Prom or driving a car. Parents often aren't sure how to respond effectively to those sorts of statements.

The second thing parents want to know is what they can do about it. There are many options available, but there is a specific order in which any of the available options should be done.The starting point for the initial conversation is always the same: What are the gifted child's present levels of educational performance? Phrased another way, the starting question for advocacy is this: How much of the district's curriculum does the child already know?

At my Intermediate Unit and district-oriented trainings, teachers and administrators want to know about present levels of educational performance testing. Districts tend to make this kind of testing more complicated than it needs to be. Teachers and administrators also want the regulations and requirements explained to them in practical day-to-day terms

www.appliedgifteded

It isn't smart to cheat our brightest pupils

Len LaCara

You don't need to be an Einstein to know Ohio is cheating its most promising students.

Last week, The Plain Dealer wrote a story about the sorry state of gifted education in Ohio. Consider these facts:

• 31 states require school districts to provide special services for children identified as gifted. Ohio does not, even though a sixth of its pupils have that classification.
• Three-fourths of the state's gifted students receive no special services, according to the Ohio Department of Education. Many of the rest only get partial services.
• Ohio spends more than $8 billion a year on educating students. But less than 1 percent of that amount - roughly $47 million - goes toward gifted education.

Does this strike you as, well, smart?

History Enrichment Opportunies and Summer Programs

Carol Fertig:

In writing this blog, I quite often find that I get a question for which I am not the best person to compose an answer. This was the case here; so I turned to Sandra L. Berger, the author of our recently published, The Ultimate Guide to Summer Opportunities for Teens.

I'll post Sandra's Response below. Because the parent posing the question was from Michigan, that state is slightly more represented in the response.

The following programs will have information and/or sponsor courses that may interest your son. This is not a complete list, but it should give you a good start. Please do not be put off by the word "gifted" in the program titles. The term describes a program, not a child. These programs often include a diversity of children who are interested in advanced topics.

One in Five US Dropouts May be Gifted

Alison Kepner:

They are bored -- so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration.

Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don't know how to study.

They are the nation's gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don't serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Statistically, 20 percent of U.S. school dropouts test in the gifted range, said Jill Adrian, director of family services at the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit founded by philanthropists Bob and Jan Davidson out of a concern that the nation's most gifted and talented children largely are neglected and underserved.

Related: "They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" by Laurie Frost & Jeff Henriques:

Two of the most popular -- and most insidious -- myths about academically gifted kids is that "they're all rich, white kids" and that, no matter what they experience in school, "they'll do just fine." Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.

When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved

This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.

Prufrock's Gifted Child Information Blog

When I took my first serious history course in college, the president of the university (a history buff himself) spoke to our class and encouraged us to submit our papers to various journals for publication. Being rather inexperienced, it had never occurred to me to submit anything I had ever written to anyone for publication. In my mind, I was "just" a student and couldn't imagine anyone being interested in what I wrote.

Now it is possible not only for serious college students to publish their work, but it is also possible for serious high school history students to publish the papers that they have researched. The Concord Review gives young people this opportunity. The Review is the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic expository research papers of secondary history students. Papers may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, foreign or domestic.

Many of these young authors have sent reprints of their papers along with their college application materials. Their research has helped them to gain admission to some of the nation's (and world’'s) best universities.

High school teachers also use The Concord Review in their classes to provide examples of good historical writing. What a wonderful opportunity for students to see the work of age peers who have taken their work seriously.

Included on The Concord Review Website [www.tcr.org] are over 60 sample essays for both students and teachers to view so they can get an idea of the quality of work accepted.

At this site, you will also find information about The National Writing Board, an independent assessment service for the academic writing of high school students of history. Each submission is assessed by two readers who know nothing about the author. These readers spend more than three hours on each paper. Three-page evaluations, with scores and comments, are then sent, at the request of the authors, to Deans of Admissions at the colleges to which they apply.

http://resources.prufrock.com/GiftedChildInformationBlog/tabid/57/Default.aspx [RSS]

Pennsylvania to revamp gifted education

Melania Hughes:

They're not mentioned under No Child Left Behind. They're not assisted by federal funding or programs.

Gifted students in Pennsylvania must rely on the state Department of Education to make sure public schools challenge them intellectually.

So with changes proposed to the state's gifted education regulations, known as Chapter 16, a network of parents and advocates are weighing in.

As they see it, the changes being reviewed in Harrisburg don't go far enough.

''The state board missed an opportunity so far in making any meaningful difference to help parents and schools avoid conflicts,'' said Jay Clark of Lancaster, a parent of two gifted children who has testified before legislative committees about the proposals.

'No Child' Law May Slight The Gifted, Experts Say

Daniel de Vise:

Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.

Proponents of gifted education have forever complained of institutional neglect. Public schools, they say, pitch lessons to the broad middle group of students at the expense of those working beyond their assigned grade. Now, under the federal mandate, schools are trained on an even narrower group: students on the "bubble" between success and failure on statewide tests.

Teachers struggling to meet the law's annual proficiency goals have little incentive, critics say, to teach students who will meet those goals however they are taught.

"Because it's all about bringing people up to that minimum level of performance, we've ignored those high-ability learners," said Nancy Green, executive director of the District-based National Association for Gifted Children. "We don't even have a test that measures their abilities."

Academic Achievement

By Michael Strand

Critics with a bent for sarcasm, for years, have derided the No Child Left Behind law by giving it what they think is a more descriptive title.

No Child Allowed Ahead, they call it.

And it's not hard to see why. Newspapers and news magazines across the country have documented state after state and district after district gutting or eliminating millions of dollars in funding for programs for their highest-achieving students, diverting that money into programs for low-achieving students in order to meet the mandates of the law.

"I don't think we've seen a tremendous change in our district, for which I'm grateful," said Salina School Board president Carol Brandert, who later described the situation as "fortunate."

If Brandert -- a former English teacher well-known for being a stickler for using the right word -- is using words that sound oddly passive, there's a reason.

The question of cutting programs for top students has never come up, she said.

When Kay Scheibler first started heading the gifted program at Salina Central High School, 13 states mandated programs for top students. Today, Kansas is the only state with such a mandate.

"It's mandated, so we're not going to see any major changes without some legislative action," she said.

"We're unique, one out of 50," confirmed Kansas Commissioner of Education Alexa Posny.

State law regarding those formally identified by their school as gifted closely parallels that for special education students, even using the same terminology -- gifted students have an "Individual Education Plan."

Madison United for Academic Excellence Meeting on Charter Schools

Please join us at the next Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on Monday, October 29, at 7:00 p.m. in the Wright Middle School LMC, 1717 Fish Hatchery Road. Our guests will be Paula Sween and Dory Witzeling from the Odyssey-Magellan charter school for gifted students in grades 3-8 in Appleton and Senn Brown of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. Ms. Sween was one of the founders of the Odyssey-Magellan program. She is currently the TAG Curriculum Coordinator for the Appleton school district. Ms. Witzeling is a teacher and parent at the school.

All are welcome!

A gifted student on ID'ing giftedness

Amy Hetzner:

In addition to hearing testimony at three public hearings in August, the state Department of Public Instruction also accepted written statements through the end of the last month on its proposed changes to the rule guiding the identification of gifted students in Wisconsin [PDF File].

Tucked among those 16 pages of comments was this perspective (with some editing for space):

“I am a fifteen-year-old home schooled student, and currently a full-time special student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I spent nine years at EAGLE School of Madison, and one year at James Madison Memorial HS (MMSD).

“I also belong to two organizations for gifted students: Cogito (cogito.org) and Gifted Haven (giftedhaven.net). Cogito is run by the Center for Talented Youth, an organization sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. It is primarily populated by math- and science-oriented kids and teens who live in the United States, and who participated in a talent search in middle school. Membership is by invitation only. (I am not an active member of the community.)

The Achievement Trap: How American is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families

Groundbreaking report just released by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Here is the September 10, 2007, press release:

MAJOR TALENT DRAIN IN OUR NATION'S SCHOOLS, SQUANDERING THE POTENTIAL OF MILLIONS OF HIGH-ACHIEVING, LOWER-INCOME STUDENTS, NEW REPORT UNCOVERS

Current education policy focused on "proficiency" misses opportunity to raise achievement levels among the brightest, lower-income students

WASHINGTON, DC - A disturbing talent drain in our nation's schools, squandering the potential of millions of lower-income, high-achieving students each year was exposed today before the U.S. House of Representative's Education Committee. New research cited at the hearing shows that students who demonstrate strong academic potential despite obstacles that come with low incomes, are currently ignored under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

Alternative NCLB legislation being debated in the Education Committee hearing today includes provisions that could, for the first time, hold schools accountable for the academic growth of students performing at advanced levels. The report cited in the testimony -Achievement Trap: How America is Failing 3.4 Million High-Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families - is a first-of-its-kind look at a population below the median income level that starts school performing at high levels, but loses ground at virtually every level of schooling and suffers a steep plummet in college.

"No Child Left Behind's successes in demanding greater accountability for reversing poor achievement among low-income students are laudable and should be continued," testified Joshua S. Wyner, Executive Vice President of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which wrote the report with Civic Enterprises. "But we are missing an important opportunity to promote high achievement for all students, no matter what their income and background. The needs of high potential and high-achieving students should not be pitted against the educational needs of underachievers."

Overlooked under the No Child Left Behind law, these 3.4 million extraordinary students are larger than the populations of 21 individual states and largely representative of the race, ethnicity, gender and geography of America as a whole. The report's authors say the faulty assumption that these students don't need help to achieve at high levels is causing an enormous, but preventable talent drain in our nation's schools. As a result, the top 25 percent of students are disproportionately higher-income.

K-12 findings:

**Even before they enter first grade, lower-income high achievers are off to a bad start - only 28 percent of students in the top quarter of their first grade class are from lower-income families, while 72 percent come from higher-income families.

**From first to fifth grade nearly half of the lower-income students in the top 25 percent of their class in reading fell out of this rank.

**In high school, one quarter of the lower-income students who ranked in the top 25 percent of their class in eighth grade math fell out of this top ranking by twelfth grade.

**In both cases, upper-income students maintain their places in the top quartile of achievement at significantly higher rates than lower-income students.

Tanner Mathison, a student featured in the report who is now a freshman at Dartmouth College studying medicine, said: "There are a ton of smart, low-income students in this country who do not have someone to speak for them - no one to get them access to the programs and enrichment they need. In modern society we tend to associate monetary gains with success, and sadly with this paradigm, we often fail to recognize that academic talent can rest within lower-income students."

College and graduate school findings:

**The significance of a college education is underscored by our nation's growing knowledge economy, which demands more than a high school degree. More than nine out of ten high-achieving high school students attend college, regardless of income level-a great success at a time when only 80 percent of all twelfth graders enter postsecondary education.

**Although high-achieving lower-income students are attending college at impressive rates, they are less likely to graduate from college than their higher-income peers (59 percent versus 77 percent). In addition, lower-income, high-achievers are:

--- Less likely to attend the most selective colleges (19 percent versus 29 percent)

--- More likely to attend the least selective colleges (21 percent versus 14 percent)

--- Less likely to graduate when they attend the least selective colleges (56 percent versus 83 percent)

--- Much less likely to receive a graduate degree than high-achieving students from the top income half.

"These extraordinary students are found in every corner of America and represent the American dream. They defy the stereotype that poverty precludes high achievement. Notwithstanding their talent, our schools are failing them every step of the way," said John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises and a co-author of the report.

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is a private, independent foundation established in 2000 by the estate of Jack Kent Cooke to help young people of exceptional promise reach their full potential through education. It focuses in particular on students with financial need. The Foundation's programs include scholarships to undergraduate, graduate, and high school students, and grants to organizations that serve high-achieving students with financial need.

Civic Enterprises is a Washington, D.C.-based public policy development firm dedicated to informing discussions on issues of importance to the nation.

West and Memorial lead state in National Merit scholars

Susan Troller:

wo Madison high schools easily outpaced any other high schools in Wisconsin in the number of students who qualified as semifinalists for the 2008 National Merit Scholarships. Thirty-one students at West High School qualified and 24 qualified at Memorial in the prestigious scholarship competition.

Schools with the next highest numbers of semifinalists were Mequon's Homestead High School in Ozaukee County with 17 semifinalists and the University School of Milwaukee with 16 semifinalists.

Four students at East High, two students at La Follette and one student at Edgewood also qualified for a total of 62 National Merit semifinalists from Madison.

Other Dane County high schools with qualifying students include Middleton (10 students), De Forest (5 students), Monona Grove (3 students), Verona (3 students), Oregon (2 students), Sun Prairie (2 students), Mount Horeb (2 students, including a student who is homeschooled), Deerfield (1 student) and Waunakee (1 student).

Bringing Diversity to New York Elite High Schools

by Christine Kiernan

Luis Rosario just completed fifth grade but he already thinks about attending an Ivy League college. And he would seem to be on his way. He won first prize in his district’s fifth grade science fair, scored high on the state math test, gets straight A’s and is fascinated by robotic sciences.

His mother, Judith Pena, wanted to get him into a program to prepare him for one of the city’s specialized high schools. Then she learned about the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering. ”This is even better,” she said. And so, next month Luis Rosario will join the first sixth grade class of Columbia Secondary, a new select school in upper Manhattan.

Columbia Secondary is aimed at top students like Luis, students who one would expect to attend an elite public high school. But over the years the so-called specialized schools have not attracted a large number of gifted black and Hispanic students. In fact, over the past decade, the percentage of students from the city’s large black and Hispanic population who attend these select schools has decreased significantly.

Under the banner “strength in diversity,” Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering will try to change that. The school, a partnership of the Department of Education and Columbia University, is aggressively recruiting black and Hispanic students and plans to try out new methods to achieve a more equitable racial balance.

Proposals won't close book on gifted kids

Some see little change in picking top students
Amy Hetzner

Frustrated in her efforts over the years to have her son's academic abilities recognized, Gina Villa-Grimsby finally asked the Oconto Falls School District to provide her with its criteria for identifying gifted students.
What she got was its policy on how to appeal decisions in such cases.

Soon after, she began home-schooling her 12-year-old son, Rodrigo. And, through networking with parents of other gifted children throughout the state, she learned that her situation was not unique.

"There are amazing gifted programs in some school districts and none in others," Villa-Grimsby said. "There are amazing identification procedures and tests and programming in some school districts and not in others."

Some proponents of gifted education in the state were hoping a change in state rules regarding how gifted students are identified would help address such complaints.

The change was ordered by a Dane County judge earlier this year, and public hearings on the state Department of Public Instruction's proposed rule for the identification of gifted children are set for the week of Aug. 20.

But some parents and educators who have studied the DPI's proposal wonder if the new rule, which instructs public schools to use "multiple measures" validated for identifying students in five areas of giftedness, is that different from the one found inadequate by the court.

How Schools Get It Right

Experienced teachers, supplemental programs are two key elements to helping students thrive

Liz Bowie
Baltimore Sun
July 22, 2007

Tucked amid a block of rowhouses around the corner from Camden Yards is an elementary school with a statistical profile that often spells academic trouble: 76 percent of the students are poor, and 95 percent are minorities.

But George Washington Elementary has more academic whizzes than most of the schools in Howard, Anne Arundel, Carroll and Baltimore counties.

These students don't just pass the Maryland School Assessment - they ace it. About 46.2 percent of George Washington students are scoring at the advanced level, representing nearly half of the school's 94 percent pass rate.

An analysis by The Sun of 2007 MSA scores shows that most schools with a large percentage of high achievers on the test are in the suburban counties, often neighborhoods of middle- and upper-middle-class families. But a few schools in poorer neighborhoods, such as George Washington, have beaten the odds.

Statewide, Howard County had the highest percentage of students with advanced scores, and Montgomery and Worcester counties weren't far behind.

Of the top five elementary schools, two are in Montgomery County, two in Anne Arundel and one in Baltimore County.

Whether they are in wealthy or poor neighborhoods, schools with lots of high-scoring students share certain characteristics. They have experienced teachers who stay for years, and they offer extracurricular activities after school. Sometimes, they have many students in gifted-and-talented classes working with advanced material.

Bubble Kids Benefit

David J. Hoff

A new study out of Chicago suggests that low-achieving and high-achieving students haven't benefited from No Child Left Behind.

When comparing changes in Chicago students' test scores pre- and post-NCLB, researchers Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach found a "strikingly consistent pattern" in the test scores of students with lowest-achievement test scores. They scored "the same or lower" under NCLB's accountability system than they did in the 1990s under the Chicago's accountability measures.

When looking at gifted students, the researchers found "mixed evidence of gains" in the NCLB era.

Kids in the middle--the ones closest to proficiency--performed better under NCLB than they did before.

This study lends credence to common critiques of that law encourages teachers to focus on the so-called bubble kids--the ones that are close to reaching proficiency.

Students Swim In Knowledge of Aqua Biology Class

Susan Troller
The Capital Times

You can't blame them for screaming, even if it does scare the fish.

The high school students in Paul du Vair's aqua biology summer school course have learned to be extraordinarily game as they explore and record scientific data about Lake Mendota and its Six Mile Creek tributary. But there are a few things that make even these field-tested young ecologists shriek or howl out loud.

Like when they emerge from Lake Mendota or Six Mile Creek with blood-sucking leeches firmly attached to their legs. Or when they are hauling nets through waist-deep, murky water and big dark shapes bump against them. Or when they are wading along and suddenly step deep into a hidden, muck-filled hole.

The 20-odd students who are part of du Vair's three-week summer enrichment biology class are not faint of heart, and they don't complain much. Like generations before them, they are taking part in a Madison institution, the only summer school enrichment course that has survived mostly unchanged from the 1960s.

Paul du Vair is the legendary TAG Biology teacher at Madison East High School.

No Child Left Behind setting below-average goals

Mary Wolf-Francis

When Margaret Spellings visited the Southeast Valley this spring, she was asked to respond to the question about the effects of No Child Left Behind on the average and above-average students.

Her response was frightening.

Spellings declared that No Child Left Behind is about the "vast, vast number of young Americans who lack the ability to be successful in our country. That is our prime directive, our highest priority."

The highest public education official in our country essentially stated that public schools should be dedicated to below-average students. This may be seen as a call for all parents of average to above-average students to run, don't walk, to their nearest private school.

Spellings takes it a step further by defining the problem as related to race, saying, "We're only graduating half of our Hispanic and half our African-American students on time."

Did I hear you say public education is dedicated to underachieving students of color? Political correctness aside, these are not the only students who lack the ability to be successful. Would you be surprised if we told you that many of our best and brightest students fit this category?

As many as 40 percent of all gifted students are underachievers, according to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, and between 10 and 20 percent of all high school dropouts test in the gifted range.

Consider, then, that many other populations of students are being left behind, especially as funds are diverted into meeting the mandates of this narrow legislation.

Assessment of the Madison School District's TAG Program in 1992

A look at the MMSD's TAG program in 1992.

Dr. Susanne Richert (Consultant) [9.5MB PDF]:

I was requested to conduct an evaluation. However, very little quantitative data on student outcomes were available and, given the time-frame, none could be gathered. I, therefore prefer to call this a qualitative criterion-referenced assessment. However, more than sufficient quantitative formative (as opposed to summative) data and extensive qualitative data were gathered. This qualitative criterion-referenced assessment is based on criteria generated by the literature on the education of the gifted. These are included in the appended list of references; most especially, in this order of priority: Richert, Cox, Van Tassel-Baska, Renzulli, Roeper, Kaplan and Tannenbaurn.

Clusty Search: Dr. Susan Richert.

Accelerated Biology Update: "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics"?

When last I wrote about the status of Accelerated Biology at West HS, I was waiting to hear back from Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. I had written to Pam on June 8 about how the promised second section of the course never had a chance, given the statistical procedure they used to admit students for next year.

On June 11, I wrote to Pam again, this time including Superintendent Rainwater. I said to them "I do hope one of you intends to respond to [my previous email]. I hope you appreciate what it looks like out in the community. Either the selection system was deliberately designed to preclude the need for two sections (in which case the promise of two sections was completely disingenuous) or someone's lack of facility with statistical procedures is showing." I heard back from Art right away. He said that one of them would respond by the end of the week.

On 6/13, he did, indeed, write:

Laurie,

I finally have time to reply to your concerns. In our meeting I agreed that selecting an arbitrary number of 20 students for accelerated biology was not fair. I agreed to examine this and develop a process that would allow all students who meet a set criteria to be provided the accelerated biology class. I used two sections as an example. Obviously it would be just as wrong to set an arbitrary 2 sections as it would be to set 20 as an arbitrary number. Our intent was to set a cut score on the placement test and allow everyone who met the cut score to be enrolled in the class. After reviewing the previous years test data we selected the mean score of the last student admitted over the past several years. I understand that you believe that is not the way to select. However, I am very comfortable with this approach and approved it as the means of selecting who can be enrolled. Thank you for your continued concern about these issues. Please feel free to bring to my attention any other inequities that you see in our curriculum.

Art

I quickly replied, twice. Here is my first reply (6/13):

Quickly, I have one question, Art (and will likely write more later). Each year, four slots are reserved for additional students to get into the Accel Bio class in the fall. These might be students who are new to the District, who didn't know about the screening test in the spring, or who want to try again.

Were the screening test scores of students admitted into the class in the fall included in the selection system used on this year's 8th graders?

Thanks,
Laurie

(SIS readers, the reason why it is important to know if the fall scores were included is that it is highly likely that the scores of the students who enter the class in the fall are lower than the cut score used for selection purposes in the spring. It is simply too hard to believe that four students scoring higher than the cut score would magically appear each fall.)

Art wrote back simply (6/13):

There are two slots remaining.

I wrote back again (6/13):

My question is about the set of scores that were used to determine the cut score for this year. Were the scores of students admitted into the class in the fall over the past several years included in the set of scores used to determine this year's cut score? Art, parents would like to see all of the test scores from recent years -- that is, we would like to see the frequency distribution of all scores for each year, with the cut score indicated and the scores of the fall entires into the class included.

Laurie

Meanwhile, my second initial email (6/13) consisted of a forward to Art of the email he wrote to me on February 12, with a cover line:

Art, see below. FWIW, there is no ambiguity or equivocation in your email here. --L

Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 08:04:40 -0600
From: "Art Rainwater"
To: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: Re: West HS follow-up: Accelerated Biology

Laurie

We have followed up with Ed and there will be an additional Advanced Biology class.

Art

After seeing a copy of his own email, Art replied (6/13):

Laurie,

Creating two accelerated biology classes solely for the sake of having 40 students taking the class is no different than having a class for 20 students arbitrarily selected. If you feel that I broke some promise to you based on this email I am sorry. The responsibility for these decisions is mine and I am going to make the one that I feel is in the best interest of the district. I believe this decision is fair and removed the arbitrary nature of the previous class selection.
My decision is final.

Art

I have not yet written back, but here is what I will say: "Art, I do feel you broke your promise to me. I also feel you broke your promise to future West HS students. Selection based on high scores is not "arbitrary." And 40 is no more or less "arbitrary" a number than 20. "Arbitrary" means "for no particular reason." But you had a reason. For whatever reason, you (or someone) wanted to make sure there was only one section of the class after all. If you (or that same someone) had wanted there to be two sections of the class, then you (or they) would have come up with selection criteria designed to insure that outcome."

Meanwhile, I forwarded Art's emails to the three other West parents who attended the meeting with him in January. To a one, we recall the same thing very clearly, that Art agreed there should be a second section of Accelerated Biology at West due to consistently high interest and demand at the school and in order to create greater access to a particular learning opportunity, the same expanded access there is at the other high schools. My best guess is that Art ran into unanticipated and powerful opposition to a second section in some key places at West and so is now changing his story.

In my mind, I keep going back to how poorly the Accelerated Biology screening test was publicized at Hamilton; how the Hamilton staff were told by the West counselors to "downplay" the opportunity to the students; and how that West staff person responded so carefully, "IF there is need for a second section, then the current teacher has been asked to teacher it." All that, combined with a selection procedure that so clearly guaranteed only one section's worth of eligible students (a point that no teacher or administrator seems to understand).

Now I'm hearing that at least some parents of students who did not get into the class are reluctant to say anything because they fear repercussions from the West staff.

Mission accomplished? I guess so, though it depends on what your mission is.

Interestingly, today's SLC grant focus group at West included a long discussion of the fact that we have no PTSO officers for next year and what sort of parental frustration and dissatisfaction with the school might account for that.

Accelerated Biology at West HS Stands Still

I have a friend who is fond of saying "never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence." These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS -- and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town -- have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.

I first became aware of Accelerated Biology just over three years ago, when my oldest son was a second-semester 8th grader at Hamilton MS. Somehow, I learned that then-West HS Principal Loren Rathert was going to be eliminating the single section of the course that had existed for some number of years. I contacted Mr. Rathert and put the word out to 8th grade parents (and others) whom I thought would care. We wrote to Mr. Rathert and the School Board and the single section of Accelerated Biology was saved, at least for the time being. My son got into the class and had -- in a word -- a phenomenal learning experience.

For two years, the status of Accelerated Biology did not affect my family directly. And yet, by maintaining contact with the teacher and with families I know in the grade levels between my two sons, I stayed abreast of any threats to the course and I continued to lead advocacy efforts to keep Accelerated Biology intact (if not expanded). Along the way, I learned that East HS and LaFollette HS offer two or three sections of TAG/Advanced Biology (the roughly analogous course goes by different names at the different high schools), depending on yearly demand and need. (Memorial has structured its science curriculum differently, such that all 9th graders take an integrated science course; however, beginning in 10th grade, Memorial students have access to TAG and even AP science classes.) In stark contrast, the selection method at West has always been that interested 8th graders take a screening test for admission into Accelerated Biology and the top 20 scorers get in. (Four spaces have historically been reserved for a variety of "late entries" into the class.) My understanding is that the science faculty at West are as intensely divided over the very existence of Accelerated Biology as the West English faculty were over the creation of English 10. Arguments from the community that student interest and demand (and, most likely, ability) are very high (well over 100 8th graders typically take the screening test each year) and that the selection process makes the course unnecessarily selective have fallen on deaf ears. Ditto the cross-school comparison and educational equity argument.

Nevertheless, this year seemed like the right time to advocate again for a second section of Accelerated Biology at West. On a personal level, my second son was an 8th grader at Hamilton. On a broader level, there has been much talk about our high schools this year, including the needs of the District's highest ability students and important gaps in cross-school equity. Thus in December, my husband and I met with Superintendent Rainwater to talk very specifically about our younger son, his educational needs, and how West was going to meet them. Then in January, several current and future West parents met again with Art to discuss the situation at West for "high end" learners and how the SLC restructuring and concomitant curriculum changes (specifically, the 9th and 10th grade core courses) were not serving these students well. As a result of this meeting (and other behind-the-scenes advocacy efforts), West expanded and improved its system for allowing students who are advanced and talented in language arts to skip over either English 9 [rss] or English 10 [rss] (their choice). As well, in an email dated February 12, 2007, Superintendent Rainwater told me that he had followed up with West Principal Ed Holmes and that there would be an additional section of Accelerated Biology at West next year. Needless to say, this was all very good news. (Unfortunately, the dissemination of information about both of these learning opportunities was handled very, very, very poorly. I hope things go better on that front next year.)

Seventy-seven incoming West 9th graders took the Accelerated Biology screening test at the very beginning of May. This is significantly fewer test-takers than in any previous year since I have been keeping track. It is unclear if the very poor publicity and communication with parents contributed to the lower turnout.

Fast forward to this past week. After the June 4 PTSO meeting, my husband (the West PTSO Treasurer) had reason to email the Accelerated Biology teacher about PTSO funding for an incredible Earth Watch trip she is taking eight students on to Brazil this summer. As a postscript, he asked her about Accelerated Biology. She told him to contact Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash about it.

Jeff and I both wrote to Ms. Nash for an update (especially since we had heard through the grapevine that there was only going to be one section of the class after all and that the West administration didn't want the notification letters to go out until after the school year was over.) Here is my email of June 5:

Hi, Pam. We have been told by the folks at West to direct our questions about Accelerated Biology to you.

As you well know, Art and Ed have promised us two sections of Accelerated Biology at West next fall. Interested 8th graders took the screening test at the very beginning of May, over a month ago. Presumably, the tests have been scored. And yet, we have been told that the West Guidance Department does not want the letters to go out until after the school year is over. As the saying goes, "what's up with that?"

An update from you would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Laurie

And here is Pam's reply:

Laurie-
Acceptance letters went out today, June 6.

Pamela J. Nash
Assistant Superintendent
for Secondary Schools
Madison Metropolitan School District

I wrote back and thanked her for getting back to me. But the next day, June 7, I wrote to her again:

BTW, I assume there will be two sections of the class?

On June 8, I received this reply:

Laurie-

As you know, West High School has always had only one section of accelerated biology and used a floating score on the screener to keep it to one section. We were prepared to have two sections if scores warranted such a move. We took the median score used over time and made that the cut off. In order to have two classes we would have had to dip 20 points below that median.

That was not reasonable given the rigor of the course.

Pam

In addition to posting this email correspondence and thoughts about it on the Madison United for Academic Excellence list serve (where -- needless to say -- others shared their reactions), I wrote again to Pam Nash:

Pam,

1. What is the range of scores on the screening test? I ask this question because the range provides context for understanding what 20 points really means on the screener.
   
   
2. What are the numbers/scores that have identified the top 20 scorers in the past several years? (Can you simply list them out for me?)
3. What was the score used this year?

Pam, I think the selection method may have guaranteed that only one class worth of students would make the cut.

Think about it. If you use a measure of central tendency (in this case, the median -- though I wonder if you actually meant the mean) on the distribution of numbers that has cut off the top 20 scorers over the years, assuming that the same test instrument was used and that the distribution of test scores over the years has been fairly similar, then wouldn't that number -- the median cut-score -- tend to identify the same number of students for admission this year as have been identified in previous years?

Or think of it this way --

Say each year the 85th percentile score (approximately) is used to identify those top 20 students who will be allowed into the Accelerated Biology class. If you create a distribution of the 85th percentile scores over the course of several years, compute a measure of central tendency for that distribution, and then use the resulting number as the cut score for a new distribution of scores (that is, this year's scores), you will cut off approximately the top 15% of the new distribution.

I think the only way that this would not happen -- that is, the only way that more students would have been identified this year (enough for two sections) -- is if the distribution of this year's scores was very negatively skewed (i.e., included a lot more high-scoring students than previous years' distributions).

If my reasoning is correct, then the second section Art assured us would happen back in February never had a chance. As well, "rigor" is being defined as "that which is done by the top 20 students over the years," and not by the course or the screener.

It seems to me that the priority was not to create a second section of Accelerated Biology; the priority was to maintain the status quo and to not allow more students access to greater intellectual challenge.

I hope you will reconsider this decision.

Laurie

And that, folks, is where it currently stands, though I have remembered that -- at the time of the screening test -- a parent I know was told by someone on the West staff, when she asked about who would teach the second section of Accelerated Biology, "if there is a need for a second section," the teacher of the first section had been asked to do it. "If there is a need for a second section ... ?" Hmmmmm.

I promised a cross-school comparison, aimed at putting my frustration with these recent events at West into sharper relief. Here it is. About a month ago, an East HS friend wrote this to me:

Laurie -- It has been a wearing year in a number of respects, so I want to pass along a couple of positive things I learned at last night's East High United meeting. First, despite the allocation cuts, Alan Harris cobbled together the funds for a position that is half-time literacy coordinator and half-time TAG coordinator. Since I gather it's been awhile since schools have been putting new resources into TAG, this seems notable. Also, Alan also said that East would be instituting an AVID program next year. I hadn't heard of this but it sounds great -- it identifies about 25 kids from each freshmen class with some academic promise but who have been underachieving, and who typically would be the first from their families to go to college. It works with the kids to improve their study skills and other habits with the goal the by their junior and senior year they'll be taking TAG and AP classes and will then go on to college. It's the best way to attack the achievement gap -- help kids in the middle or lower pull themselves up to the top. Here's a link I found to a website the described the program. So a few rays of sunshine cutting through the clouds.

Doesn't the AVID program (not to mention a school-based half time TAG coordinator) sound incredible? Wouldn't it be a welcome addition at any of our high schools?

In that vein, I'd like to say that practically every substantive letter I have written to the Superintendent, School Board and West HS administration about "TAG" issues over the past several years has included a plea to expand access and diversity of participation. I know that many other West area parents have made similar arguments, pointing out time and time again that when these learning opportunities are taken away, it is the high ability and high potential students of color and poverty who suffer the most (a point that research confirms). I would also like to remind readers that Jeff and I are the ones who first brought Donna Ford to Madison in early 2005 and that we are the ones who brought and have kept the District dropout data from the late 1990's into public view. I also recently thanked Jim Z for reminding us of the words of the West math teachers in their April, 2004, letter to the editor of Isthmus:

Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority ... talent earlier and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined "success" as merely "producing fewer failures." Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?

I guess my bottom line here is that I do not understand first, how West can get away with what it is getting away with and second, why there are these fundamental and frustrating differences between the attitude and programming at our high schools? Parents and teachers at East have made it clear that they do not want to become like West. West parents and teachers have been sounding an alarm over the 9th and 10th grade core curriculum and arguing for an expansion of West's most rigorous learning opportunities, combined with substantive efforts (starting well before high school) to identify and support high potential learners from all backgrounds. And yet the differences between the schools persist. It's probably paranoid to wonder if maybe the Administration is working to maintain the East-West differences (and the East-West stereotypes) for its own "divide-and-conquer" purposes. Right?

In October, 2005, MUAE guest speaker Jan Davidson encouraged us to be "pleasantly persistent" in our advocacy work. I have tried hard to do just that. But I must say, it's feeling pretty difficult to maintain that attitude right now.

West HS English 10: Time to Show Us the Data

According to the November, 2005, report by SLC Evaluator Bruce King, the overriding motivation for the implementation of West's English 10 core curriculum (indeed, the overriding motivation for the implementation of the entire 9th and 10th grade core curriculum) was to reduce the achievement gap. As described in the report, some groups of West students were performing more poorly in English than were other groups of West students. Poor performance was defined as:

1. not electing to take the more rigorous English electives offered at West during 11th and 12th grade and
2. failing one or more English classes.

The current West 10th graders -- the first class to take English 10 -- has almost finished two semesters of the new course. As well, they registered for their 11th grade courses several weeks ago. Seems to me it's about time to take a look at the early data.

I would like to know what English courses the current 500 or so West sophomores signed up for for next year and if the distribution of their course selections -- broken down by student groups -- looks significantly different from that of previous 10th grade classes? When final grades come out later this month, I would also like to know what the impact of the first two semesters of English 10 has been on the achievement gap as defined by the "grade earned" criterion.

Thinking about the need to evaluate the impact of English 10 brings to mind the absence of data on English 9 that became so glaringly apparent last year. [English 9 -- like English 10, a core curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes -- has been in place at West for several years. And yet, according to Mr. King's report, it is not clear if English 9 has done anything to reduce the achievement gap in English among West students. (More precisely, according to email with Mr. King and others after the SLC report was made public, it is not clear that the impact of English 9 on the achievement gap at West has even been empirically evaluated. Readers may recall that some of us tried valiantly to get the English 10 initiative put off, so that the effect of English 9 could be thoroughly evaluated. Unfortunately, we failed.)] I would like to know what has been done this year to evaluate the impact of English 9 on the gap in achievement between different groups of West HS students.

Bruce (King), Heather (Lott), Ed (Holmes) and Art (Rainwater), I do hope you will soon "show us the data," as they say, for West's English 9 and English 10. And BOE, I do hope you will insist on seeing these data asap.

While we're at it, what do the before-and-after data look like for Memorial's 9th grade core curriculum? (In contrast to West, Memorial implemented only a 9th grade core curriculum. TAG and Honors classes still begin in 10th grade, as does access to Memorial's 17 AP classes.)

With the District in the process of applying for a federal grant that may well result in the spread of the West model to the other three comprehensive high schools, we should all be interested in these data.

So should officials in the Department of Education.

MPIE and MUAE Update

As some of you may recall, back in December, I posted a few questions to the members of Madison Partners for Inclusive Education. As a result of that posting, several members of each group have met a couple of times in order to try and make personal connections and identify areas of shared concern and potential joint advocacy. It is too early to say how that effort is going. I, personally, am ever hopeful that we can find the patience and persistence needed to build a foundation of mutual understanding and trust, a foundation upon which we can ultimately work together for all children.

I would like to share a recent exchange from the MUAE list serve (where MPIE members have been welcome since the get-go -- in fact, more than one are longtime MUAE list serve members). In response to a post about one of the BOE candidates, an MPIE member wrote the following:

I would like to clarify something that was misstated in a recent post. Madison Partners for Inclusive Education (MPIE) does NOT promote or endorse COMPLETELY heterogeneous classrooms ALL the time. The group does not think completely heterogeneous classrooms all of the time is in the best interest of children with disabilities. Their website goes on to explain their philosophy: http://www.madisonpartnersforinclusion.org/whatisinclusion.html Thank you for understanding this and clarifying in future posts.

I then replied:

Thanks for the clarification, though I really think we are in agreement on this point. Certainly the inclusion decision for students with disabilities should be a flexible one, based on the specific nature of the disabilities, the specific educational needs, and the family's preference for their child. Most of us know, for example, about IDEA and the K-12 IEP process. We know, too, that our high schools offer alternative classes and other learning options for those students with disabilities for whom the "regular" classes are not appropriate.

I am sure we get sloppy with our language, at times; but our language errors are surely inadvertent, mostly because -- like all parents -- we are simply thinking about our own children, whether or not they are thriving, and whether or not their needs are being well met by our schools. We are guilty of being good parents. Nevertheless, we apologize.

The fact is, we do not want much of anything to change for students with disabilities. (We would like to see the state and federal governments pay a larger portion of the tab for special education -- can we encourage your group to take the lead on that issue at the local level?). We support all of the flexibility, all of the options, and all of the tailoring of educational programming that goes on for them during their years in the MMSD. MUAE stands absolutely with MPIE on that, as I see it (though obviously I really can't speak for everyone). We are your partners there.

We ask the same of you.

I wonder, will you be our partners in getting our children's educational needs met in the same way that the needs of students with disabilities are met? Just as you do not think placement in completely heterogeneous classrooms all of the time is in the best interest of children with disabilities, so do we think such placement is inappropriate for our children. Full days spent in "regular" classrooms does not necessarily meet our children's educational needs any better than it does your children's needs. We are told the District is committed to giving each student the appropriate "next level of challenge." And yet too many of us know (or have) "formerly bright" students who have become turned off to school as a result of too many years of insufficient challenge and chronic boredom. They are miserable. They are in pain. They are not growing well at all. Meanwhile, our advocacy efforts on our children's behalf are too often met with disdain, deception and complete stonewalling. We do not yet have the same legal foundation on which to stand as you do.

We at MUAE are simply asking for the same flexibility -- in thinking, in approach, in educational opportunity and in classroom placement -- for the District's highest potential, highest performing students that students with disabilities experience. Nothing more; nothing less.

Can you and the other MPIE members support us in that position as wholeheartedly as MUAE members support you in yours? (That's really the question I was asking of you in my SIS post a while back.)

I hope so.

Better Serving Gifted Students of Poverty

The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has just published the proceedings of their recent conference on high potential learners of poverty. The book is called "Overlooked Gems: A National Perspective on Low-Income Promising Learners" and includes chapters by Donna Ford, Alexinia Baldwin and Paula Olszewski-Kibilius.

To download or order a free copy of "Overlooked Gems," go to www.nagc.org and click on "New at NAGC: Conference Proceedings."

Also on the NAGC website, a brief article by Paul Slocumb and Ruby Payne entitled "Identifying and Nurturing the Gifted Poor". Slocumb and Payne are the authors of "Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty."

Previous post on academically talented MMSD students of color and poverty: http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/01/theyre_all_rich.php

Article on the negative effects of detracking, especially for high achieving students of color and poverty (cited by U.W. Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies Adam Gamoran, Ph.D., in his chapter "Classroom Organization and Instructional Quality"): "If Tracking is Bad, Is Detracking Better?" by J. E. Rosenbaum (American Educator, 1999).

Talented Students On Hold

Kristen Stephens and Jan Riggsbee

DURHAM - In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush called on Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), saying "We must increase funds for students who struggle...and make sure these children get the special help they need." But NCLB, as it is currently implemented, largely ignores another important group that is struggling -- gifted and talented students.

Our society typically views struggling students as those who are disadvantaged by ability or demonstrated achievement level -- those students not meeting proficiency levels for their respective grade.

However, gifted and talented students struggle because they sit in our classrooms and wait. They wait for rigorous curriculum. They wait for opportunities to be challenged. They wait for engaging, relevant instruction that nurtures their potential.

And, as they wait, these students lose interest in their passions, become frustrated and unmotivated from the lack of challenge their schools' curricula provide them. As a result, they become our lost talent.

Gifted student feels Left Behind

Dave Toplikar
January 30, 2007

Lawrence ninth grader to speak up for high achievers during Capitol visit.

As No Child Left Behind policy is reviewed this year, there is one group of students some think may have been left behind — those who are high achievers.

“Most of the time I’m stuck in regular classes,” said Dravid Joseph, a ninth-grader at West Junior High. “Sometimes I’m bored with what I’m doing there.”

Partially for that reason, Dravid will join a contingent of some of Kansas’ most gifted students who will travel Wednesday to Topeka to advocate for specialized classes for more than 15,000 of their peers across the state.

Similar stories from Wisconsin and beyond:

The 'No Child' Law's Biggest Victims? An Answer That May Surprise, Education Week, June 23, 2004

Gifted students losing lifeline. Parents, advocates decry budget cuts, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 20, 2004

Schools facing tight budgets, leave gifted programs behind, The New York Times, March 2, 2004

Don't punish gifted students to aid those struggling , Peoria Journal Star, Jan. 12, 2004

Brain Drain: Initiative to Leave No Child Behind Leaves Out Gifted; Educators Divert Resources From Classes for Smartest To Focus on Basic Literacy; Blow to Bright Minority Kids, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 29, 2003

Gifted Minority Student Left Behind, Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 8, 2000

Disadvantaging the advantaged, Forbes, Nov. 21, 1994

Posted by Laurie Frost at 8:49 AM | Comments (2) Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas

West High School PTSO Meeting of 08-Jan-2007

The West High School PTSO met on January 8, 2007 with featured guest West teacher Heather Lott,
coordinator for the Small Learning Community grant implementation. The video below only includes Heather Lott's presentation and questions that followed. It does not include other portions of the meeting such as Dr. Holmes report of the West Principal, nor reports from West PTSO officers.

The video of the meeting is 117MB, and 1 hour and 27 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.

Lott presented an overview of the three-year Federal SLC grant (Year 1, 2003-2004; Year 2, 2004-2005; Year 3, 2005-2006), what changes were begun in the year prior and the changes and goals for the 2006-2007 school year, post-SLC grant. She emphasized that the SLC plan would take 7 years to "complete" and that the remaining 4 years would need to be funded. The 3 year federal grant paid her salary and for professional development only. Budget cuts for the 2006-2007 year and continuing fiscal problems in the district will hamper making the desired progress.

When asked how much, minimally, West would need make acceptable progress in the implementation of the SLC plan, Dr. Holmes suggested $20,000.

She also presented data showing discipline improvements and academic achievement improvements over the SLC years.

Discussions also included the topics of differentiation and heterogeneity, and general discussions from parents of incoming West students on the social aspects of the small learning communities.

Slides for Heather Lott's presentation are in PowerPoint and PDF for your convenience.

View from the MMSD Student Senate

At its November 21, 2006, meeting, the MMSD Student Senate discussed many issues of interest to this blog community (e.g., completely heterogeneous high school classes, embedded honors options, etc.). Here is the relevant section from the minutes for that meeting:

Comments and Concerns:

regular classes don’t have a high enough level of discussion

students who would normally be in higher level courses would dominate heterogeneous class discussions

bring students up rather than down

honors classes help students who want to excel to do so

array of advanced and regular classes in every subject

honors and AP classes are dominated by a certain type of students (concerning ethnicity, socio-economic status, neighborhood, family, etc.)

honors within regular classes -- response to whether or not regular students are an integral part of the class:

not isolating
discussion level is still high
homework is the same (higher expectation for essays; two textbooks)
teachers don’t cater to one type of student in discussions

there’s a risk of losing highly-motivated students to private schools

being in a classroom with students of similar skill levels is beneficial

teachers teach very differently to honors/advanced/AP students than they do to regular students

least experienced teachers are given to students who need the most experienced teachers (new teachers get lowest level classes)

sometimes split classes will be divided so that the honors students will be doing work in the front of the classroom while the regular students are doing lab work in the back

the problem is with the average classes

won’t help anything to cut TAG classes

mental divide among students in classes where honors and regular students are in the same classroom

more behavioral problems in regular classes (possibly more behavioral problems) à cycle teachers through so that one teacher isn’t stuck with the same type of student for an extended time

college is a factor to consider

Main problems to bring to BOE:

• higher standards for all students *
• division within classes creates too many boundaries *
• not bad to keep advanced classes in some disciplines *
• voluntary peer education *
• colleges consider accelerated course loads (factor to consider) *

*Group majority

On December 4, 2006, BOE Student Representative Joe Carlsmith made a presentation about recent MMSD Student Senate activities to his BOE colleagues. Here is the relevant portion of the BOE Regular Meeting agenda for that date:

Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous class grouping; Multi-level divisions within classrooms at West.

Voted consensus, though no official motion, on the following:

1. We need to work toward higher standards at all levels.
2. Motivated teachers result in motivated students.
3. Total elimination of TAG or AP classes would be detrimental to the overall curriculum.
4. Honors or AP divisions within classes create too many barriers between students.

When I asked Joe if Item #4 referred specifically to embedded honors options, he replied: "We came up with item four as a general consensus on a discussion we had specifically about West's embedded honors program." In other words, as he explained to me on the phone, the Student Senate does not support embedded honors options in our high schools because of the divisions they create within a classroom.

I have invited Joe (and the other members of the Student Senate) to come to the Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on January 23 (7:00 in Room 209 of the Doyle Building) because our focus that evening will be our high schools. As well, we will have at least one student and one parent from each of our four high schools present at the meeting, prepared to give a brief update on what's been going on at their school and to answer any school-specific questions that might come up.

Madison United for Academic Excellence, 12-December-2006 Presentation

The Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) meeting of 12-December-2006 offered a Question and Answer session with Madison Director of Teaching and Learning, Lisa Wachtel, and Brian Sniff, District K-12 Math Coordinator.

A list of questions was prepared and given to the speakers in advance so they could address the specific concerns of parents.

The video of the meeting is 130MB, and 1 hour and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.


The topics covered during remarks and the question and answer sessions were accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation (here in PDF format), highlights of which are

• Changing demographics in the school district
• Listing of Superintendent's Goals for comprehensive review, as set by the Board of Education
• K-5 Math Standards, Resources, and role of Teaching and Learning
• Professional development for K-5 teachers
• 5th Grade Math Assessment Pilot project for advanced students
• Middle school math, 6th to 8th grade
• Math certification of middle school math teachers, with an extended discussion of the statistic that only 5% of middle school math teachers are math certified, comparing Wisconsin to bordering states
• WKCE tests and testing in general
• Discussion by audience of recent studies and trends in math preparation for college

A few questions for MPIE members ...

I have a few questions for Barb and the other members of MPIE. I hope one or more of them will take the time to answer.

As I look over the course catalogs for the four high schools, I see that each school has both a Special Education Department and an English as a Second Language Department (although they may not be called exactly that at each school). Each of these departments in each of the four high schools offers an extensive range of courses for students who qualify and need the specialized educational experiences offered within these departments. Many of the courses offered by these departments fulfill graduation requirements and so can be used as curriculum replacement for the "regular" courses.

Here are my questions:

1. Does MPIE advocate having the District dismantle the Special Education and English as a Second Language Departments in our high schools? (I assume the answer is "no.")
   
   
2. Does MPIE advocate having the District deny high school graduation credit for any and all courses offered within these departments, so that truly ALL students will be required to take 9th (and -- at West -- 10th) grade core courses at our high schools? (Again, I assume the answer is "no.")
   
   
3. If MPIE advocates full inclusion, why aren't the answers to the above two questions "yes -- absolutely, yes"?
   
   
4. Does MPIE advocate getting rid of all advanced, honors, accelerated, TAG and Advanced Placement classes at our four high schools? In 9th grade? In 10th grade? In all four grades? What is your vision with regard to advanced and accelerated classes?
   
   
5. Please help me understand the logic that says it's O.K. to have entire departments within each high school devoted to the specialized educational needs of some groups of students (not to mention adjustments to high school graduation requirements designed to meet those students' needs), but it is not O.K. to have even a few sections of classes aimed at meeting the specialized educational needs of other students? (IMHO, this way of thinking is really best described as a belief in "selective inclusion.")
   
   
6. Can you see the inherent illogic, inequity and unfairness of that position?
   
   
7. How do you decide which groups of students with specialized educational needs get to have their educational needs met and which groups of students do not?
   
   
8. It seems to me that a big part of the answer to that question should come from the research done from the perspective of the group of students under consideration. Do you agree or disagree with that premise?
   
   
9. Are you aware of the consistency (of findings, of conclusions, of recommendations) within the literature on how best to meet the needs of high performing students (a.k.a. "best practices")?
   
   
10. Why does MPIE prefer the policy of getting rid of advanced high school classes over the policy of working with all K-8 students (and their families) in such a way as to increase the diversity of the students in those classes?
    
    
11. What do some middle and upper middle class parents of children with special education needs find so threatening about the thought of having their schools meet the educational needs of high ability, high performing, even academically talented students with the same thoughtfulness and commitment that they meet the needs of students with other special educational needs?
    
    
12. Are you aware that MMSD and national data indicate that approximately 20-25% of high school dropouts are academically gifted and have a demonstrated history of high academic performance? (In our District, that number is significantly higher at West HS than at the other three high schools and a disproportionate number of the "high performing" dropouts throughout the District are poor and minority students.) How do you understand those data and what do you think should be done about the situation?
    
    
13. Have you read this American Psychologist article on "the two tails of the normal curve," co-authored by nationally recognized experts on the educational needs of students in each of the two "tails"? http://psych.wisc.edu/henriques/papers/two_tails.pdf If so, what do you think of it?

Would any of you would be willing to meet over coffee to talk about how we can work together on these issues and to see if we can find common ground?

One Small Step in the Right Direction at West HS ...

In light of recent events regarding curriculum and other issues in our high schools, there has been a small step in the right direction at West HS. Superintendent Rainwater announced at our 11/29 MUAE meeting that he has been in discussion with West HS Principal Ed Holmes about providing West 9th and 10th graders who are advanced in language arts the opportunity to skip over English 9 and/or English 10. Advanced placement decisions will be based on grades, teacher recommendation, writing samples, WKCE scores, and ACT/SAT scores. Details will be worked out by Mr. Holmes, the West English Department and District TAG staff.

This small -- but important -- change brings West more in line with Memorial, the only other high school that has a core English 9 curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes. Every year, four or five academically advanced Memorial freshmen are allowed to go into English 10 -- specifically, English 10 Honors. (FYI: Unlike West, Memorial has honors classes in 10th grade; as well, 10th graders can take some of Memorial's 17 AP classes.) East and LaFollette, of course, have two or three levels of ability/interest-grouped classes for freshman (and sophomore) English -- called regular, advanced and TAG at East and regular and advanced at LaFollette -- and will continue to have them for at least the next two years.

If you are the parent of a West area 8th or 9th grader who is advanced and highly motivated in English, you might want to consider having your student take either the ACT or SAT through the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) in order to support a request for single subject acceleration. There is still time to register for the MATS online: http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/mats/index.html

IMPORTANT NOTE: As I see it, this development does not in any way mean we should slow down our lobbying efforts vis a vis the BOE and Administration to get them to make West more like the other high schools -- in terms of course offerings and other oportunities for academically advanced students -- during the two years of the high school redesign study introduced by Superintendent Rainwater at the 11/27 BOE meeting.

Video of 29-Nov-2006 MUAE Meeting with Supt. Rainwater

The Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) meeting of 29-November-2006 offered a question and answer session with Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater. After opening remarks by Jeff Henriques, the Superintendent summarized his goals, rationale and approach to the high school redesign project, and discussed his prior experience as a teacher and principal.

The video of the meeting is 183MB, and 1 hours and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.

The topics covered during remarks and the question and answer session are

• Assessment, differentiation, grouping, school redesign
• Differentiation training in elementary school
• Investment in training, coaching, Teaching and Learning
• What to do when teacher refuses to differentiate.
• Evaluating Teachers
• Student assessment and WKCE
• Maintaining quality control and teacher skills
• Lighthouse schools
• Differentiation in Math
• Limits of flexible grouping
• View of NCLB
• Math curriculum and its evaluation
• Evaluating differentiation
• Assessing high achieving students
• NCLB and the growth model
• West English 9 and 10
• Using WKCE to inform instruction

More Than English 10: Let's REALLY Talk About Our High Schools

First, I want to say BRAVO, RUTH, for putting it all together and bringing it on home to us. Thanks, too, to the BOE members who overrode BOE President Johnny Winston Jr's decision to table this important discussion. Finally, deepest thanks to all of the East parents, students and teachers who are speaking out ... and to the many West parents, students and teachers who have also spoken out over the past few years.

As we begin what will hopefully be a thoughtful and thoroughgoing community-wide conversation about what's going on in our high schools, I'd like to clear up some muddiness about what's happened at West in the past few years. I think it's important to have our facts straight and complete. In doing so -- and in comparing what's happened at West to what's now going on at East -- I'd like to draw on the image of an animal experiment (that apparently never happened). In one condition, a frog is put into a bath of cool water, the temperature is gradually raised to boiling, and the frog dies without a struggle. In another condition, a frog is put into a bath of boiling water, immediately jumps out, and lives to tell the tale. As I see it, West was put in the first condition. The administration implemented small changes over the course of several years, with the ultimate goal of turning 9th and 10th grades into two more years of middle school. Students and parents were lulled into thinking that everything was O.K. because, hey, what's one small change? East, in contrast, has been put in the second condition. There, the administration seems to have the same goal of turning 9th and 10th grade into two more years of middle school, but has introduced all of the changes at once. Like the frog placed in the boiling water, East has been shocked into strong reaction.

So what's been going on at West? Advanced learning opportunities have been gradually whittled away, that's what.

This year, as everyone knows, West HS implemented it's new core sophomore English curriculum, English 10. (Did you know that West has also implemented a single Social Studies 10 curriculum this year? More on that in a moment.) It is also true that some of the old English electives (perhaps 5 or 6 -- not the dozen that was recently reported somewhere else on this blog) are no longer offered at West. That's because they have been "rolled into" the single English 10 curriculum. Not necessarily a bad thing.

All West sophomores are now required to take English 10. West sophomores used to be able to choose their English courses from (almost) the full range of English electives. (Certain honors electives required the permission of the student's 9th grade English teacher.) Within English 10, students may elect to take an "embedded" honors option. From what we have heard from current sophomores and their parents, the implementation of this embedded honors option (which also now exists in biology and 10th grade social studies) has been highly variable across teachers. We have heard about one teacher who discouraged her students from taking the honors option because it was just more work. Another teacher, we have been told, lets her students sign up for the honors option but makes no distinction between the honors and non-honors students in the class, in terms of course work requirements. Yet another class we've heard about has 10 honors option students and is essentially functioning as an honors section because of the high level of student-led discussion. It does not appear that anyone is overseeing the implementation of the embedded honors "program" in English 10. Of course, West does not have a full-time TAG coordinator, as is being proposed for East.

Some other details --

While taking the required English 10 course, West sophomores can also take certain additional English electives (mostly the lower level, less challenging ones). Yes, that would mean taking two English courses in one or both semesters of 10th grade.

Finally, this year, a very small number (7 out of 500-plus) of West sophomores were "instepped" over English 10 and allowed into the full range of English electives as 10th graders. These accelerated placement decisions were, for the most part, based on these students' 8th grade WKCE scores in reading and language arts (taken during the first semester of 8th grade). Interestingly, 9th grade students were not allowed to use their 8th grade reading and language arts WKCE scores in order to be "instepped" over English 9. In fact, no West student is allowed to test out of English 9 anymore, although it used to be that some advanced 9th graders were allowed to skip over the second semester. In contrast, at Memorial -- the only other MMSD high school with a single 9th grade English curriculum right now -- 4 or 5 freshmen are allowed to skip English 9 and go right into English 10 Honors each year.

It is important to note that the chief reason the West community was given for the implementation of English 10 was, in a nutshell, the achievement gap. (Indeed, the achievement gap was the rationale for the entire Small Learning Communities initiative.) We were told that certain groups of students have high failure rates in English, as well as low participation rates in the more challenging English electives at West. The hope was that English 10 would boost these students' achievement and self-confidence, such that they would voluntarily elect to take the more challenging English electives as juniors and seniors. The thing is, West's English 9 was similarly intended to close that achievement/participation gap and -- according to a November, 2005, report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King -- there is no evidence that English 9 has had an impact on what is clearly a very serious problem. That absence of evidence is why West parents pleaded with school and District officials last year to stop plans for implementing English 10 and instead take the time to evaluate and fix English 9. No one listened -- at West or "downtown" -- and West went ahead with its plans.

I mentioned that West has also implemented a single 10th grade social studies curriculum this year. The single curriculum replaces the three "flavors" of 10th grade social studies that used to exist. (West sophomores used to be able to choose between courses with a greater emphasis on a particular time in history -- e.g., the Middle Ages or the Ancient World.) A few years ago, there was also an integrated English-Social Studies option. It, too, has gone away. The overriding reason why these courses have disappeared is that they produced ability grouping; that is, higher performing and more highly motivated students were self-selecting into certain courses and not others, creating ad hoc honors classes. This was seen as a problem. The solution was to get rid of the classes.

I also mentioned that embedded honors options are now available in biology and Social Studies 10. I have not heard anything about how they are going. I do know, though, that many people see the embedded honors option in regular biology as a threat to the single section of Accelerated Biology that parents have had to work so hard to save in recent years. In contrast to the situation at West, the number of sections of Advanced/TAG Biology offered each year at LaFollette and East are adjusted to meet demand.

The SLC initiative has been "blamed" for many of the curricular changes that have been implemented at West -- though no one has ever explained to us why we couldn't have honors sections of many of these courses in each of the four SLC's, a plan that would increase the accessibility of honors courses and could easily be combined with efforts to increase the diversity of the students who take honors classes. (Actually, I've heard that some high-level administrators favor that plan. I am hoping they make their preference known soon.)

In any event, there are several important issues in all of this:

1. There is an absence of adequate school-based and/or District-based data supporting the specific changes being implemented (West) and proposed (East).
   
   
2. There is an absence of adequate evidence from the empirical literature supporting the specific changes being implemented (West) and proposed (East). (Why, even UW Professor Adam Gamoran told the Superintendent and BOE last January that they are operating on "belief." And did you know that research consistently shows that the students who are hurt the most by "de-tracking" are poor and minority students of high ability?)
   
   
3. It is not clear how the bulk of these changes are going to help the huge percentage of high school students in our District who are reading below grade level and who, therefore, are at risk for poor performance and less learning in most any other course they may take.
   
   
4. There has been an all-but-complete absence of adequate community dialogue about these issues and changes. The community has not been allowed to have a meaningful impact on the planning. There has been only the appearance of partnership. This is because plans have been presented to community members (sometimes even BOE members) after most of the decisions have been made. We are asked to "tweak" and "ask clarifying questions" only. At West, the stonewalling by District officials was more than severe.
   
   
5. The appropriate District professionals (for example, TAG staff) and their expertise have not been included in a respectful, substantive, meaningful way.
   
   
6. There is a cross-high school equity issue regarding how students of similar high ability and motivation are treated and what educational opportunities are made available to them. (State and federal mandates -- as well as the District's fear of litigation -- insures far greater equitability of educational services for other groups of students -- which is not to say they are necessarily well-served.)

As the East community experiences and reacts to a concentrated version of what the West community has experienced, dribbled over the past several years -- and especially as the BOE, the press, and even the District Administration take greater notice than ever before of what we are all saying to them, East and West -- I am hopeful that the tide may be turning, and that meaningful dialogue is about to begin.

Board of Education meeting of 30-Oct-2006

The October 30, 2006 Board of Education met to discuss a series of resolutions, and approve the final 2006-07 MMSD Budget, and approve the AFSCME Local 60 contract.


The video of the meeting is 210MB, and 2 hours and 30 minutes long. Click on the image at left to watch the video. The video contains chapter headings which allow quick navigation to sections of the meeting. The video will play immediately, while the file continues to download.

Public Appearances
There was a public appearance by Barbara Lewis who expressed concern over the apparent change in policy of MMSD in granting high school credit for courses taken at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Both Superintendent Art Rainwater and Director of Alternative Programs Steve Hartley discussed the issues with the Board and clarified that the policy statement which Ms. Lewis had received, and which apparently was being misinterpreted by some high school staff referred only to Independent Study. The Board, noting confusion of parents, school staff and themselves, requested that these issues be placed on the Board agenda as soon as possible.

Agenda Item #4
Resolution supporting expenditures for school security be placed outside the revenue caps.

Agenda Item #5
Resolution supporting language by the Superintendent and other superintendents that the State adopt the Adequacy Model for school funding.

Agenda Item #6 - Discussion and Approval of 2006-2007 Budget
This portion of the meeting begins at approximately 20 minutes into the meeting and continues until the Board votes to approve the tax levy amount at 2 hours into the meeting. Final approval of the full budget is rescheduled for a later meeting. The discussions included issues of fund equity, the fund reserve, the unexpected decrease of State support, liquidation of earnings on Chavez building funds, changes in the budget necessary to offset decrease in State support, and the minimum decisions the Board needed to make to meet budget deadline.

Agenda Item #7
Approval of the AFSCME Local 60 contract, in which the District and Union agree to a health care package containing only HMOs, saving the District significant healthcare costs, in exchange for a generous wage increase.

New Glarus Parent Files Request for Summary Judgement On Behalf of Gifted Education in Wisconsin

State gifted education advocate and Madison attorney Todd Palmer recently filed a request for a judicial "summary judgement" in the matter of "Todd Palmer v. The State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and Elizabeth Burmaster." As he explained it to me in layperson's terms, a summary judgment "is a procedure wherein a party (me) asks the judge to render a decision based on the record. I am essentially arguing that the factual issues here are undisputed, therefore the judge can render a decision without a trial. I have every expectation that this motion will decide all relevant issues (one way or the other) and therefore we will avoid a trial. The state (DPI) must respond to my motion on or before 12/1/06." Todd expects a decision from Judge Nowakowski sometime in January, 2007.

The complete document has been posted on the Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) website -- http://madisonunited.org/documents/pld_061101_brief_in_supp_MSJ1.pdf

Here is the Introduction:

This case is about a state agency purposely ignoring statutory mandates that require educational opportunities to be provided to an entire class of underserved and at-risk children -- specifically those labeled as "gifted and talented."

At their core, the issues before this Court are straightforward: Can a state agency ignore a legislative directive to promulgate rules governing this underserved class of children? Alternatively, can a state agency unilaterally transfer this rulemaking responsibility to local units of government in contradiction of a clear legislative directive? The clear answer to both issues is no.

Here, these issues arise in the context of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's ("DPI") failure -- for nearly 20 years -- to promulgate rules which implement and administer the gifted education mandates set forth in Wis. Stat. 118.35(2) and 121.02. In these two statutes, the Legislature clearly directed DPI to:

1) "BY RULE establish guidelines for the identification of gifted and talented pupils." See Wis. Stat. 118.35(2).

2) "PROMULGATE RULES to implement and administer" the legislative mandate that each school board "provide access to an appropriate program for pupils identified as gifted or talented." See Wis. Stat. 121.02(1)(t) and (5).

3) "PROMULGATE RULES to implement and administer" an auditing program to ensure that school boards are providing gifted students with access to appropriate programs. See Wis. Stat. 121.02(2) and (5).

To date, DPI has not promulgated rules meeting these directives. Instead, DPI has perpetuated a regulatory environment for nearly two decades whereby Wisconsin's 426 school boards have had: (a) no rules for identifying the gifted children within their district which require specialized services; (b) no rules defining what specialilzed educational services must be provided to these students once identified; and (c) no rules defining how DPI will unilaterally audit school boards to ensure compliance with these gifted education mandates.

In the absence of these rules and DPI's total abdication of its responsibilities, school districts have largely ignored their obligations owed to gifted children and many are openly planning to severely cut or altogether eliminate gifted programs in the future. This is a serious situation. Former State Superintendent of DPI, Herbert Grover, described the status of gifted education in Wisconsin as follows:

Research continues to show that, as a group, gifted and talented children are the most underserved pupils in public schools. Too often, these pupils are ignored, restricted, or underachieving and, if not part of the typical dropout statistics, have become in-school dropouts.

In order to educate yourself about the status of gifted education in Wisconsin, I encourage you to read the entire brief.

For additional background, here is the link to a previous entry about Todd's March, 2006, lawsuit against the DPI:
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/03/new_glarus_pare.php

Link to the DPI Gifted Education home page: http://dpi.wi.gov/cal/gifted.html

Pouring Water

When I'm doing the very best I can
You're pouring water
On a drowning man
You're pouring water
On a drowning man

“Pouring Water on Drowning Man”
Dani McCormick & Drew Baker
Download file">Listen to James Carr’s version

This is the second of a series of farewell posts to this blog. My original intent had been to wait till the final posts to directly address the reasons contributing to my decision to leave this forum. I’m still going to post those, but Barb Lewis’ comment on the first in this series is such a perfect example of one of the contributing factors that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to interrupt my plan and explore the pervasive poison culture that has come to dominate here and to a lesser extent MMSD (and maybe educational) politics and advocacy in general. For those who need it spelled out, I’m drowning in disgust with this culture and Barb Lewis’ comment is the titular water.

Barb Lewis wrote:

Once again the position of most TAG advocates is misunderstood. What many of us would like to see are programs which actually try to identify and serve ALL talented and gifted kids, not just those who have the good luck to be born to parents who are well-educated themselves and have the financial resources to help them be challenged outside of school if necessary. It is precisely the children you mention, who have no books or even homes, who are being most underserved now by MMSD's almost nonexistent TAG programs. They are the ones who would benefit most from being nurtured and encouraged at an early age, so that they might actually make it to Calculus.

I am sick and tired of people telling me (or anyone else) what I (or anyone else) understood or misunderstood, believe or think. This is especially true in cases like this when the words I wrote and presumably are in front of them give no support their assertions and in fact support an interpretation to the contrary. If something isn't clear, ask for a clarification. I do, often.

Inevitably this happens when someone (in this case me) posts something that doesn’t 100% agree with the commentator’s views. Go back and read what I wrote. I did not say a word about TAG parents concern for children in poverty. Everything I wrote about TAG advocates was to praise them. I did imply (and believe) that if your educational priorities center on children in poverty, then TAG programming should not be the primary way to address their needs. If you believe differently I would guess you are woefully and perhaps willfully ignorant of the circumstances of children in poverty and the educational research about addressing these circumstances (please note, this is a guess, if the guess is wrong, please correct me and explain why you believe differently. That is a discussion I’d welcome). What Barb Lewis posted was a subtle straw man attack. She did not engage what I wrote (I would welcome a discussion of that line dividing desires from needs), she put words in my mouth and used them to attack me.

The irony here is that in fact I agree with Barbra Lewis that part of the answer is reaching out to include children in poverty and other underrepresented groups in TAG and other advanced programs. It is one reason why I support “some TAG programming.” It is why I wrote about the need to “create opportunities for children who have no books in their homes or no homes at all.”

More importantly, I have (as I have noted on this site) advocated for this in my work on the MMSD Equity Task Force. I drafted the original language of the following material from the Task Force Interim Report (the final language is a collaborative effort):

(Under Guiding Principles)
The district will eliminate gaps in access and achievement by recognizing and addressing historic and contemporary inequalities in society.

(Under Implementation Strategies)
Open access to advanced programs, actively recruit students from historically underserved populations and provide support for all students to be successful.

I make no claim to any special or original authorship of the definition of Equity offered by the Task Force, but I think it also speaks to these issues:

Equity assures full access to opportunities for each MMSD student,
resulting in educational excellence and social responsibility.

What is so sad and awful about this is that instead of seeing the potential and seizing the opportunity to build a coalition to work toward achieving the goals we share, there is an inclination to see the worst in those who don’t share all your goals or strategies and (unfortunately) attack them.

TJM

Pro-referendum leader doesn't care about parents of TAG students

From the list serve of the pro-referendum group, Communities and Schools Together (CAST):

We have at least three people willing to translate into Spanish (anyone for Hmong?). I think that the "newsletter blurb" and the FAQ are musts. Do we want anything else? I'll get these started with the volunteers on Wednesday or Thursday.

At the Wright PSO meeting one of the things that really got me was a father who talked at length about "so little money for the children." I thought about how many of these families have made such great sacrifices for their children's futures, leaving their homes, coming to strange country, struggling with language... that to them it is a no brainer to spend a bit more for the schools. We hear about "Bright Flight," but when it comes down to it I care a lot more about giving these immigrants what they came for than I do about catering to those who threaten to move out or go to private schools. I think I share their values more and know I want what they have to offer for our shared future.

Sorry for getting on the soapbox, but it was very moving to hear how simple the referendum question appeared to them. Like anyone else they wanted the figures and the details, but when they heard them there was no question where they stood. Hell, it seems simple to me too. (emphasis added)

It's a sad comment from a leader of a group which supposedly advocates for quality education for all kids. (No one on the CAST listserve called him on his statement. Does his thinking represent all of the leadership?)

I won't invade the writer's privacy by revealing his name; however, if he has any courage in his convictions, he'll post his thinking behind his comment.

I'm voting NO on the referendum.

The Midwest Academic Talent Search

Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) is hosting an informational session about the Midwest Academic Talent Search (MATS) program run by the Center for Talent Development (CTD) at Northwestern University.

The MATS provides an opportunity for academically advanced students in grades three through nine to take an out-of-grade-level standardized test. Students in grades three through six may take the Explore test (essentially an ACT designed for eighth graders); students in grades six through eight may take the SAT test; and students in grades six through nine may take the ACT test. For students who routinely hit the ceiling of their district and state level tests, an out-of-grade-level test may be the only way to truly know what they know. Test results may be used for advocacy purposes, as well as to access a wide array of advanced educational experiences across the country.

Our guest speaker for the evening will be Carole Nobiensky, longtime staff member and Director of Programs at the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth (WCATY).

Please join us on Wednesday, September 27, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street.

Acting White

Donna Ford, Ph.D., and Gilman Whiting, Ph.D., both of Vanderbilt University, are two leading African American education scholars who have dedicated their professional lives to the issue of minority achievement. Professor Ford is a nationally recognized expert in gifted education, multicultural education, and the recruitment and retention of diverse students in gifted education. Professor Whiting is a nationally recognized expert in African American male achievement and under-achievement. Professors Ford and Whiting made a two-part visit to the MMSD earlier this year, the result of an invitation from Diane Crear, recently retired MMSD Special Assistant to the Superintendent for Parent-Community Relations. As part of their program for minority parents, Professors Ford and Whiting talked about the research that attests so clearly to the importance of books in the home, reading to our children, talking with our children in intellectually stimulating ways, and taking an active interest in our children's educational experience. They also showed the following segment from a June, 1999, episode of ABC's "20/20." The segment is entitled "Acting White" and was filmed at our own Madison East High School. It is thought-provoking, to say the least, and generated a lot of discussion amongst those in the audience last March when it was shown. We offer it to SIS readers for their thoughtful consideration.

Video

For more on the work of Drs. Ford and Whiting, here are two recent papers:

Ford, D. Y. & Whiting, G. W. (2006). Under-Representation of Diverse Students in Gifted Education: Recommendations for Nondiscriminatory Assessment (Part 1). Gifted Education Press Quarterly, 20(2), 2-6.

Moore, J. L., Ford, D. Y., & Milner, R. (2005). Recruitment Is Not Enough: Retaining African American Students in Gifted Education. Gifted Child Quarterly, 49, 51-67.

The Complex Relationship Between Nature, Nurture, and Intelligence

After the Bell Curve
David L. Kirp
The New York Times

When it comes to explaining the roots of intelligence, the fight between partisans of the gene and partisans of the environment is ancient and fierce. Each side challenges the other’s intellectual bona fides and political agendas. What is at stake is not just the definition of good science but also the meaning of the just society. The nurture crowd is predisposed to revive the War on Poverty, while the hereditarians typically embrace a Social Darwinist perspective.

A century’s worth of quantitative-genetics literature concludes that a person’s I.Q. is remarkably stable and that about three-quarters of I.Q. differences between individuals are attributable to heredity. This is how I.Q. is widely understood — as being mainly “in the genes” — and that understanding has been used as a rationale for doing nothing about seemingly intractable social problems like the black-white school-achievement gap and the widening income disparity. If nature disposes, the argument goes, there is little to be gained by intervening. In their 1994 best seller, “The Bell Curve,” Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray relied on this research to argue that the United States is a genetic meritocracy and to urge an end to affirmative action. Since there is no way to significantly boost I.Q., prominent geneticists like Arthur Jensen of Berkeley have contended, compensatory education is a bad bet.

But what if the supposed opposition between heredity and environment is altogether misleading? A new generation of studies shows that genes and environment don’t occupy separate spheres — that much of what is labeled “hereditary” becomes meaningful only in the context of experience. “It doesn’t really matter whether the heritability of I.Q. is this particular figure or that one,” says Sir Michael Rutter of the University of London. “Changing the environment can still make an enormous difference.” If heredity defines the limits of intelligence, the research shows, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached. And if this is so, the prospects for remedying social inequalities may be better than we thought.

Study: Gifted Students Become Bully Magnets

Bullying in the gifted-student population is an overlooked problem that leaves many of these students emotionally shattered, making them more prone to extreme anxiety, dangerous depression and sometimes violence, according to a Purdue University researcher.

In what is believed to be the first major study of bullying and gifted students, researchers found that by eighth grade, more than two-thirds of gifted students had been victims. Varying definitions of bullying in other studies make comparisons difficult, although the prevalence here is similar to findings in a few other studies.

"All children are affected adversely by bullying, but gifted children differ from other children in significant ways," says Jean Sunde Peterson, an associate professor of educational studies in Purdue's College of Education.

"Many are intense, sensitive and stressed by their own and others' high expectations, and their ability, interests and behavior may make them vulnerable. Additionally, social justice issues are very important to them, and they struggle to make sense of cruelty and aggression. Perfectionists may become even more self-critical, trying to avoid mistakes that might draw attention to themselves."

Read the entire article here.

MMSD Cross-High School Comparison -- continued

I recently posted a comparative list of the English courses offered to 9th and 10th graders at Madison's four high schools. The list showed clearly that West High School does not offer its high achieving and highly motivated 9th and 10th grade students the same appropriately challenging English classes that are offered at East, LaFollette and Memorial.

Here is the yield from a similar comparison for 9th and 10th grade Social Studies and Science.

Social Studies -- Ninth Grade

East: U.S. History 9, TAG U.S. History (U.S. History or TAG U.S. History required)

LaFollette: Exploring U.S. History, Challenges of Democracy (a.k.a. Advanced U.S. History) (Exploring U.S. History or Challenges of Democracy required)

Memorial: American Experience 1 and 2, 9th grade elective -- .25 credit course "Interdisciplinary TAG" (American History 1 and 2 required)

West: U.S. History (required)

Social Studies -- Tenth Grade

East: World History, TAG World History, Ethnic Studies, Social Psychology (consent of instructor required for 10th graders only), American Politics and Government (World History or TAG World History required)

LaFollette: World History, Civilizations (a.k.a. Advanced World History), Challenges of Democracy, American Women's History, AP European History, AP Psychology (World History or Civilizations required)

Memorial: World History, World History AP, American Politics Today, International Relations and National Security Issues, Women In U.S. History, The Ancient World, Modern European History AP (World History required; World History AP can replace World History)

West: Western Civilization 10, Tools for Success in the Social Sciences (World Civilization 10 required)

Science -- Ninth Grade

East: Biology I, Biology 9 for Talented and Gifted (number of sections depends on demand)

LaFollette: General Biology I, Honors Biology I (number of sections sections depends on demand)

Memorial: Integrated Science, 9th grade elective -- .25 credit course "Interdisciplinary TAG" (Integrated Science required)

West: Biology (embedded honors option available beginning 2006-07), Accelerated Biology (one section of 24 students, regardless of demand)

Science -- Tenth Grade

East: Chemistry, Chemistry for Talented and Gifted, Earth Science 1, Earth Science 2, Biology I, Physical Science Chemistry, Physical Science Physics, Advanced Laboratory Science

LaFollette: General Biology I, Honors Biology I, Practical Biological Science, Biology II, Physical Science, Practical Physical Science, General Physics, Math Physics 1 and 2

Memorial: Earth Science 1, Fundamentals of Biology, Biology, General Physics, Chemistry in the Community, Math Chemistry, Chemistry AP, Aircraft Construction (Biology AP is available to 11th and 12th graders -- Biology is not a pre-req for Biology AP)

West: Biology (embedded honors option available beginning 2006-07), Biology II, Earth Science, Chemistry, Chemistry in the Community

I have asked the District and West High School administrations to please explain to me how the more limited course offerings at West fulfill the District's legal responsibilities to the school's academically talented and highly motivated 9th and 10th grade students, under the requirements set forth by Wisconsin State Standard t.

I have also asked if the District has plans to "re-design" our four high schools with an eye on equity of educational opportunity, in the same way the District's eleven middle schools were evaluated this year. I have asked if the plan is to bring West in line with the other three high schools or vice versa.

Stay tuned for more.

When Ability Grouping Makes Good Sense

By James J. Gallagher

I am posting this article from 1992 given the recent debate on one size fits all classrooms. Professor Gallagher makes the point that the argument that homogeneous grouping hurts no one is clearly false: research consistently shows that high ability students do better when they are in classes with similarly able peers.

The recent educational literature has been filled with discussions of the effects of ability grouping, tracking, etc., and new virtues have been found in the concept of heterogeneous grouping of students. The homogeneous grouping of slow-learning children does not appear to be profitable, but the homogeneous grouping of bright students is a very different matter, and often ignored in these discussions. (See "Tracking Found To Hurt Prospects of Low Achievers,'' Education Week, Sept. 16, 1992.)

The goal of heterogeneous grouping appears to be a social one, not an academic one.(emphasis added) The desirability of that goal needs to be argued on its own merits, which I believe to be considerable. The argument is clouded, however, by the insistence of the proponents that nothing is lost in academic performance by such grouping. This position is clearly false, in my judgment, as it applies to bright students. Apart from the meta-analyses which indicate substantial gains for gifted students grouped for ability, there is a small matter of common sense.

Do we improve the skills of our Olympic swimmers by asking that they take time to teach nonswimmers how to swim? Is our plan for preparing the next John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors to ask them to play tennis with novices? Are our graduate classes more stimulating if we combine the most sophisticated students with beginners, or will we put the sophisticated student to sleep while we try to bring the new students up to speed? How many teachers, given a choice, would take a class with a range of five grade levels of performance in it compared with one that would have two grade levels?

The attempts to draw from the ability-grouping literature a favorable reading on heterogeneous grouping of bright students are disingenuous, to say the very least. They fall short on the following counts:

* Different curriculum. If the gifted students are learning about the Fall of Rome in their special class, how do you compare their performance with gifted students in the heterogeneous classroom? This has often been handled by measuring the two groups on their knowledge that they have both been taught. If the groups achieve equally on that measure, then the gifted group is clearly ahead since they know as much as those in the heterogeneous class, and in addition, have their special knowledge of the Fall of Rome.

* Measuring instruments. Standard achievement tests have often been the measure by which ability grouping is tested. But gifted students clearly bump their heads against the low ceilings of these tests and, therefore, you cannot easily determine how much they really know. The recent move to authentic assessment may help this problem considerably.

* Failure to use personal perceptions. One of the strongest and clearest judgments against heterogeneous grouping is easily available, if seldom used. You merely have to ask the bright students what they think of the two different settings. The statements of gifted students of crashing boredom, of idleness, of lack of challenge are the most eloquent evidence in favor of some form of ability or performance grouping.

* International comparisons. The failure of our best students to keep pace with top students in other countries, documented by the work of Harold Stevenson and others, should surely give people pause before they design an educational setting that seems to insure a less-than-optimum performance from our most capable students.

All of these factors are easily perceived. Can it be that the advocates of heterogeneous grouping want to believe so strongly in their position that they prefer to ignore what is obvious to a first-year graduate student or any knowledgeable parent? Those suggesting, or even wishing, to mandate heterogeneous grouping are following an unfortunate recent American belief that "We can have what we want most, at no cost or sacrifice.'' We would almost have to send our political and educational leaders to the dictionary to find the definition of "sacrifice,'' since it is so little used in present dialogue.

The honest argument should be over whether the social goals which are presumably attained through heterogeneous grouping are so important that they are worth the cost of lower academic performance from our brightest students. That is the true question and it can be argued on the basis of values and desired outcomes. To believe there are no costs to what we wish to accomplish is to engage ourselves in unproductive, wishful thinking.

Let us come to the issue of the disproportion of minority students in programs for students with special needs, gifted or retarded. The only reason why people would assume that the demographic proportions in special classes for gifted or retarded youths should come out even to their proportions in the society is to believe that intelligence is a factor fixed at conception--an obvious untruth. The proper solution to these disproportions is not to eliminate programs for the gifted, but to enhance the learning environments and opportunities for children who are at risk for less favorable developmental progress, so that more capable students from all economic and cultural backgrounds will qualify for advanced work, as they surely would.

Our sense of justice and equity requires no less, and the future of our society may well depend upon it.

James J. Gallagher is the Kenan Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

New Glarus Parent Files Gifted Ed Lawsuit Against DPI, DPI Superintendent Burmaster

New Glarus parent and Madison attorney Todd Palmer has filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and DPI Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster for their failure to promulgate rules for the identification and appropriate education of Wisconsin's 51,000 academically gifted students, as is required by Wisconsin state law. Here is the press release; a link to the lawsuit itself may be found at the end.

Todd will be joining us for the beginning portion of our Madison United for Academic Excellence meeting on Thursday, March 23, at 7:00 p.m. in Room 209 of the Doyle Administration Building. We will also be discussing the INSTEP process and the District's new TAG education plan, currently under development. Come share your experiences and offer your input. All who care about rigorous curriculum and high educational standards are welcome.

CONCERNED PARENT FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION CONCERNING GIFTED AND TALENTED EDUCATION

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 13, 2006

On March 2, 2006, a lawsuit was filed in Dane County Circuit Court against the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster. The lawsuit challenges DPI’s failure to promulgate rules to govern public school districts in educating pupils identified as gifted and talented.

At present, DPI estimates that there are over 51,000 Wisconsin school children enrolled in Wisconsin’s public schools who are gifted and qualify for special educational programs. However, Wisconsin lacks a comprehensive, objective and clearly defined set of rules to ensure that all 426 school districts in our state meet the needs of these students. A recent Legislative Audit Bureau investigation demonstrated that in the absence of these rules, the needs of these gifted and talented students are not being met. According to DPI, this problem is only getting worse.

DPI has acknowledged that, “Wisconsin state law requires school districts to establish programs for these pupils, but the fiscal pressures facing many school districts has led a growing number of them to severely curtail or eliminate these programs.” DPI has acknowledged that gifted students are the most underserved pupils in public schools and that “too often, these pupils are ignored, restricted or underachieving and, if not part of the typical dropout statistics, have become in-school dropouts.”

On November 29, 2005, approximately 200 parents filed a Petition with DPI asking that DPIcreate rules to ensure that the educational needs of gifted children are being met. By letter dated February 1, 2006, DPI refused to issue those rules. The March 2, 2006 lawsuit challenges DPI’s denial of that Petition and asks the Court to order that DPI create these rules that are required by state law.

According to Todd Palmer, a parent and the attorney who filed the lawsuit, “Many school districts simply ignore the needs of gifted and talented students because adequate rules are not in place to define appropriate programs for these children and to ensure those requirements are enforced.”

According to Palmer, “Recent surveys show that 60% of the Wisconsin school districts plan to cut or altogether eliminate their talented and gifted programs despite the statutory mandate that requires these programs to be offered to students.” He believes this state’s problem is exacerbated by a lack of federal funding for gifted education, “recent estimates predict that only 3/10 of a penny per $100 spent on education in this country is devoted to gifted children.”

###

Media Contact:

Todd Palmer
DeWitt Ross & Stevens S.C.
608-252-9368
tep@dewittross.com

Link to Todd's lawsuit: http://tagparents.org/documents/DPIsuit.pdf

Link to the DPI Gifted Education home page: http://dpi.wi.gov/cal/gifted.html

It's INSTEP Season

Are you concerned that your MMSD K-12 student is not being adequately challenged in one or more academic content areas? Perhaps s/he needs an INSTEP.

An INSTEP is an "Individualized Student Education Plan." It's like an IEP ("Individual Education Plan"), except that it's for high performing students. (IEP's are for students with special education needs.) For any given student, an INSTEP can be done in a single curricular area or in multiple curricular areas. Now is a good time to request an INSTEP because it will insure that no time will be lost in meeting your child's educational needs next year.

It's been said that the INSTEP is one of the District's best kept secrets. Find out all there is to know at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/tag/html/

To request an INSTEP -- or to simply explore the possibility that your child may need one -- all you have to do is contact the appropriate District TAG ("Talented and Gifted") staff:

Rosy Bayuk -- rbayuk@madison.k12.wi.us -- 663-5230
(Emerson, Franklin, Leopold, Lincoln, Mendota, Midvale)

Kerry Berns -- kberns@madison.k12.wi.us -- 663-5230
(Elvehjem, Gompers, Hawthorne, Kennedy, Lakeview, Lindbergh)

Leah Creswell -- lcreswell@madison.k12.wi.us -- 663-5221
(Allis, Lowell, Nuestro Mundo, Orchard Ridge, Randall, Thoreau)

Rebecca Finnerud -- rfinnerud@madison.k12.wi.us -- 442-2152
(Glendale, Lapham, Marquette, Sandberg, Schenk)

Bettine Lipman -- blipman@madison.k12.wi.us -- 442-2153
(Chavez, Crestwood, Falk, Huegel, Muir, Stephens, Van Hise)

Ted Widerski -- twiderski@madison.k12.wi.us -- 663-5221
(all middle schools and all high schools)

Welda Simousek -- wsimousek@madison.k12.wi.us -- 663-5245
(District TAG Coordinator)

The TAG staff are an invaluable resource for the entire District. They are the only educational professionals in the District who are trained and experienced in both the appropriate assessment of advanced learners and in curriculum differentiation (theory and practice). They also know a lot about the social and emotional needs of academically talented children.

Uncomfortable with the word "gifted"? No need to be. No need to even use it. Just think of a performance distribution (one for each academic content area) and ask yourself if your child is in the top 15-20% of the distribution (the top 16% is one or more standard deviations above the mean). Ask yourself if they are advanced by two or more grade levels? Finally, ask yourself if you think your child is truly being challenged at school. Don't forget to ask your child a few questions -- Are they learning new material? Does the pace of learning feel about right for them? Are they regularly bored in class because they already know the material, it goes too slowly or there's too much repetition? Etc.

Further discussion of ability grouping postponed

The continued public discussion of "some" versus "no" ability grouping originally scheduled for tonight's Performance and Achievement Committee meeting has been postponed. Instead, according the the District website, the agenda for tonight consists of a 2005 Summer School report and 2006 budget recommendations.

In response to a suggestion that the discussion has been postponed because U.W. Sociology Professor Adam Gamoran's January 30 presentation to the Performance and Achievement Committee had not provided the "green light" on heterogeneous grouping that the BOE had hoped for, BOE President Carol Carstensen wrote, "I am not putting off the discussion on heterogeneous classes because of any information, pro or con, from any of the presentations so far. I have always said that this should be a complete discussion - and that the Board should not rush into any decisions. I am hoping that we can continue these discussions in May and early June." Ms. Carstensen also reminded us that Shwaw Vang is chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee.

In expressing our disappointment at this turn of events, we reminded Ms. Carstensen that as the BOE makes sure not to rush into any decisions, individual schools continue to make and implement curriculum decisions and individual families continue to make educational decisions for their children. (We perhaps should have also noted that as the BOE is careful not to rush into things, the District-wide middle school redesign plan moves forward with the core assumption of three years of complete heterogeneity in all curricular areas except math, where quite a lot of good thought has been given to the problem of how to meet the full range of educational need. It seems important to ask why the same level of thoughtfulness and responsiveness has not been brought to our middle schoolers' educational needs in the areas of language arts, social studies and science.)

If you would like to communicate with Ms. Carstensen and her BOE colleagues your own disappointment or frustration with this postponement -- or perhaps your own plans to move, go private, or home school your child -- please send an email to comments@madison.k12.wi.us. Because Mr. Vang tends to not check his email, feel free to call him at home -- 240-3552.

Finally, here is the summary we compiled for Ms. Carstensen -- at her request -- of the research on the effects of ability grouping on the academic performance and academic self-esteem of high ability students. The summary also contains a few articles on the performance and self-esteem of the remaining students when the highest performing students are allowed to leave the otherwise heterogeneous class. We have strongly encouraged Ms. Carstensen and Mr. Vang to invite U.W.-Whitewater Professor Pam Clinkenbeard and U.W.-Madison Professor Corissa Lotta to address the BOE on these issues. Both are nationally recognized experts on the educational (PC) and counseling (CL) needs of gifted students. As we wrote to Ms. Carstensen, "[we provided you with a summary of the research], but Pam and Corissa could really bring the literature to life for you and your BOE colleagues, as well as answer any questions you might have. Both of them are excellent speakers."

The Gap According to Black

Bridging the Achievement Gap: Positive Peer Pressure - Just the Push Students Need to Succeed
Cydny Black:

The decisions we make, especially as adolescents, are influenced by the people who surround us, and by how we feel about ourselves. I’ve found that the encouragement of my friends and family, and the examples they set, have a lot to do with my academic success. My friends challenge themselves and encourage me to do the same. This concept is known as peer pressure—a term that often has a negative connotation. In many situations, however, peer pressure can be positive and powerful. Positive peer pressure can give students the push they need to succeed.

It occurs to me that friends who value academic success help give us the support we need to do well. Not only does it help to have friends who push us to do better in school, but these friends also help us to feel better about ourselves.

In school, I notice that many students who are not making the leap over this gap are students who are surrounded by negative reinforcements. These students often lack friends who value education. Negative friends don’t challenge themselves by taking difficult classes, or holding Thursday night study sessions. Negative friends don’t work with you to prepare for final exams.

So what can we do? For all the students reading this who are succeeding in school, my advice is to step out and lend a helping hand to those who are not as successful. Be a supportive classmate, and more importantly, be a good role model. Promote the idea that getting good grades does not mean you’re acting “white” or “selling out” and it definitely does not mean you’re nerdy.

Advanced Classes Open Doors for Minorities

School district works to boost participation

By Kelly McBride

The path toward post-secondary education formed naturally for 18-year-old Wekeana Lassiter.

Her mom always emphasized the importance of learning. An older sister attends college at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. And Lassiter is a studious Green Bay Preble High School senior with aspirations of becoming an architect.

If college was a given, the Advanced Placement courses that are preparing her for it — as well as allowing her to earn college credit — made just as much sense for Lassiter, who will attend UWM in the fall.

"Originally, why I took AP classes was to get credit," said Lassiter, who is enrolled in AP physics and AP calculus. "Now that I'm in them, they're really difficult, (but) it's awesome. You get kind of a feel about how college classes are going to be."

But the doors that have opened for Lassiter, who is black, have in many cases stayed closed for some of her peers, say officials in the Green Bay School District.

Minority participation in AP courses continues to lag behind that of their white counterparts, with a lower percentage of minority students, by about 15 percentage points, taking AP courses than that of whites during 2004-05, data show.

But the figures are improving, and district officials say new initiatives can help alter the disparity.

"Why We May Have to Move ..."

I received a copy of this personal essay -- a letter to the Administration and BOE -- last night. The author said it was fine for me to post it, if I thought it was worth it. I most definitely think it's worth it because it so poignantly describes a family's real life experience and frustration in our schools ... not to mention their agony over whether or not to move elsewhere.

Our kids are in 5th, 4th and 1st grades. I am really very concerned about our son going into sixth grade next year. He has some special education needs related to Asperger Syndrome, such as sensory defensiveness and skills to do with what some have called "theory of mind" (self-control, recognizing and assessing others' points-of-view and feelings, anger management). I love the idea that Spring Harbor is smaller because of his sensitivities to light, personal space issues, noise levels and the like. I do not like that they are relatively inflexible in meeting special needs otherwise because they are small and missing some services - or severely limited - due to space and spending constraints. I also do not like that we would have NO options as to who his special ed case manager/teacher would be, because there is essentially one person to cover it all for each grade, whether or not they display and apply the kind of flexibility that being a "cross-categorical" special ed teacher demands.

His teachers at XXXXX have generally managed to meet his needs relative to AS pretty well, but they are kind of at a loss as to what to do with his obvious degree of intellectual ability because they can only address so many different needs at once, and for him, it has repeatedly come down to crisis management. He has had very competent and caring teachers much of the time, but when there are a variety of academic levels and associated needs in one classroom, some of them just can't keep more than about half of the class engaged at any one time. His 4/5 teachers (for example) have been teriffic, but his 2/3 teacher(s) did not understand him or his needs at all (for example, including one of his special ed teachers (!), they had no idea of his level of intellect and thought that when he had nervous breakdowns and "meltdowns", he was "misbehaving" and needed "consequences for his misbehaviors"). Our 4th grade daughter skipped over first grade, going from Kindergarten to second (after not having been allowed to start Kindergarten "early" even though she could read and do basic math). Even then, as far-and-away the youngest in a 2/3 class, she was a 2nd grader grouped mainly with 3rd graders in most areas (hurrah for her teacher for daring to group them and reach out to all levels!!), and was at loose ends by the beginning of 3rd grade because all of her academic peers were gone (on to 4th grade). It is a very good thing that her teacher thought she was the best thing since sliced bread, or her fidgeting, non-linear thought patterns and concomittant anxious perfectionism in 3rd grade would have alienated the poor woman completely. That teacher continued to let her go as far as she wanted to in math (with one boy as a peer there), occupy her own spelling group, and read as much as she could on the side while also keeping up (easily) with the highest book group/reading group the teacher could run (she felt they needed at least three people to read the same book and try to discuss it at all!). When our daughter was working on other subjects during other groups' discussion times, she did her own work well and listened to the groups going on around her enough that she used to blurt out answers during reading groups other than her own. Her teacher used to joke that she was in ALL the (5) reading groups! For science, they were as cramped as everyone else by the standardized "blahness" of Foss, because that is what they have to use, and it does not allow any room at all for creativity and differentiation by even the best teachers (much less by a typical elementary teacher who generally feels that science is their shallowest subject).

Now, in 4th grade in a 4/5 class, she has a teacher who cannot seem to differentiate to save her (or my daughter's) life. She has all of the kids on the same page in the same math textbook at the same time, in her fourth grade math. Thank God we finally approached the teacher she teams with across the hall and who teaches the 5th graders from both their classes math, and worked out to have our daughter switched over to there by Thanksgiving - but it took months and she was a basket case mentally and emotionally, from not being challenged at all in math, and having the naughtiest kids around assigned seats next to hers (so she could "calm them down" and "help them", I'm sure), resulting in a complete lack of concentrated work time to do the work in the first place. She literally is on medication for the stress and anxiety resulting from being in this class. And she is too damn nice to share what she shares with us with her teacher, because she wants everyone to like her. So it sounds like we are claiming she feels this, that and the other, even with her trying to soften the blow with "well-kind-ofs" or, "it's-been-better-latelys" when we do get in to see her teacher with her along.

I am so tired. I am tired of being the brass, obnoxious mom who seems to think only her kids are gifted (which is not true - I teach special ed myself, and I know what brilliance lurks behind some learning disabilities and what level of boredom and frustration being some emotional disabilities), and I am tired of having to come up with all the suggestions for solutions and new ideas myself. At least they have been willing to try those suggestions recently, but I honestly don't think they understand that we are not harping on our daughter to "be the best" and "work more", and expecting that the teacher concentrate only on her and her needs. Anyway, I am just tired. If I am going to do most of the instruction myself, then at least I should be homeschooling her or be her "learning coach" for virtual schooling, and get some of the credit for it. On the other hand, I also hate to take her out of our school now, because they need more kids like her who care and work hard, not fewer!!

I am sorry: I know you have heard all this a million times. I believe in quality public education and I hate the thought of everyone with kids who need more challenge than is typical out of our public schools. But I also need to do what's right for my own kids. I don't know how much to tell of what to whom, and not have them just think I am yet another annoyed white upper-middle class parent who thinks her children are the smartest around and just wants all the educational services to go to them. I am not, and I don't.
I meant it when I said I almost cry when I start thinking about all this junk, and let it start getting to me. I know what it is like myself, to be a really bright (okay, "gifted") kid who is afraid to show it because everyone will think you're stuck-up or just a complete geek that no one would ever want to spend time with in any circumstance beyond allowing you to do all the work on a "group, cooperative learning project". And my teachers were largely supportive of me - I hate to think of what would have happened to me if I had not gotten the support I needed from my teachers and my school(s). Especially my daughter who reminds me so much of me - I don't want her to end up with even more insecurities and emotional problems than I had to go through. (said with a rueful smile, but at least 75% seriously)

I know what it is like as a teacher to have 21 kids with 21 wholly different sets of needs, staring at you and expecting help in learning what they need to know, day after day. It is bad enough when you have seven 7th graders in a reading class, ranging from two who cannot even identify letters and sounds, all the way through two who can "read" at a low third grade level but not understand more than half of what they read. When I think of trying to meet their needs at the same time as trying to meet the needs of ten other learners who range from "average", through "gifted" and on into "highly gifted/genius" levels...? I can't sleep at night trying to imagine that! It is hard enough trying to actually engage learners at levels "only" five to two grade levels below expectations. Trying to engage learners from typical through gifted in the same class at the same time, is almost impossible, even if you DO know how to differentiate well. And teachers are not paid enough for the kind of planning time that would take, on top of what they already work at teaching and planning for classes of learners even close to the same abilities.

Noted Educator Donna Ford is Coming to Wisconsin

Dr. Donna Ford, Vanderbilt University Professor and nationally known speaker on gifted education and multi cultural and urban education issues, will be visiting Wisconsin this March.

In conjunction with the MMSD Parent Community Relations Department, Dr. Ford will be presenting a workshop for parents entitled "Promoting Achievement, Identity, and Pride in your Children" on March 8, 2006 from 6:00—8:00 p.m. at the Double Tree Hotel, 545 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI. For more information and to register, contact Diane Crear at 663-1692 or dcrear@madison.k12.wi.us Space is limited. Please make your reservation no later than February 20, 2006

Then on March 10 and 11, the Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted (WATG) is proud to have Dr. Ford as the featured speaker for their spring event for educators and parents:

On Friday afternoon, March 10, Dr. Ford will speak on "In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms that Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds" in Janesville.

Friday evening, March 10, Dr. Ford will address parents and educators on the topic of "Parenting for Achievement and Identity" in Milwaukee.

Saturday, March 11, Dr. Ford will present an all day workshop in Milwaukee on "In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms that Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds." This is a learning and application experience designed specifically for use in the urban/suburban classroom!

For more information and to register go to www.watg.org .

Donna Y. Ford is Betts Chair of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University and teaches in the Department of Special Education. She was formerly a Professor of Special Education at the Ohio State University (OSU). She teaches courses in gifted education, and focuses extensively on students in urban communities. Prior to coming to OSU, she was an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Virginia, and a researcher with the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Dr. Ford also taught at the University of Kentucky. Professor Ford earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Urban Education (educational psychology) (1991), Masters of Education degree (counseling) (1988), and Bachelor of Arts degree in communications and Spanish (1984) from Cleveland State University.

Dr. Ford consults with school districts nationally, and conducts research primarily in gifted education and multicultural/urban education. Specifically, her work focuses on:

1. Recruiting and retaining culturally diverse students in gifted education
2. Multicultural and urban education (e.g., creating multicultural literature and culturally responsive learning environments)
3. Minority student achievement and underachievement;
4. Increasing minority family involvement in schools and their children's education.

Her work has been recognized by various professional organizations: Research Award from the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies; Early Career Award from The American Educational Research Association; Early Scholar Award from The National Association for Gifted Children; and the Esteemed Scholarship Award from The National Association of Black Psychologists.

She has published more than 100 articles. Dr. Ford is also the author of Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students (1996) and Multicultural Gifted Education (1999). She has made more than 200 presentations at school, state, and national conferences. Donna has received more than $13,000,000 in grants.

Donna is a former board member of the National Association for Gifted Children, and has served on numerous editorial boards, such as Gifted Child Quarterly, Journal of Negro Education, and Roeper Review. She is a member of dozens of professional organizations, including the National Association for Gifted Children, the Council for Exceptional Children, and the American Educational Research Association.

Fragile Futures: Risk and Vulnerability Among Latino High Achievers

Patricia Gándara
Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service
December 2005

The achievement gap usually refers to the chasm between low- and higher-performing students. But, as this study makes clear, disparities are just as pronounced among separate groups of high-achieving students. For example, in 2002 the top fifth of Latino test-takers scored means of 598 and 646 on the SAT verbal and math sections, respectively. Their white peers’ mean scores were 65 points higher on the verbal section and 74 points higher in math. Yet of the hundreds of studies reviewed for this report, hardly any “acknowledge… that high-achieving students might need support and that this support might differ from what is needed by their lower-achieving peers.” It’s tempting to think that smart youngsters, regardless of socio-economic situations or ethnic backgrounds, will turn out just fine. But as these data show, that’s not always true. Bright Latino students, who often come from low-income families and have parents with little education, are particularly susceptible to becoming frustrated or discouraged with schoolwork and the school environment. These kids require just as much encouragement, support, and instruction as their lower-performing peers, albeit in different ways. They, too, need goals, and information on where academic achievement can lead (college). But too often, they don’t receive it. Even when Latino students earn good grades in high school, register for the SAT (not an insignificant step), and do well on the exam, many still make poor college decisions. We cannot address achievement gaps by continuing to ignore these bright youngsters.

Notes from Performance & Achievement Meeting on Ability Grouping

At this past week's meeting, Adam Gamoran from the UW Center for Educational Research spoke to the Board about ability grouping. Dr. Gamoran talked about how ability grouping often ends up grouping students by race and SES because these students enter school having had different early childhood experiences and different educational opportunities (recall Donna Ford discussing the number of books in the homes of low income and middle income families).

Dr. Gamoran noted that there are often differences in the classroom experiences of high and low ability groups of students in regards to teacher expectations, academic rigor, and teacher ability.

He also emphasized that there is no simple solution to the achievement gap. Heterogeneous or homogeneous grouping by themselves will not reduce the gap in achievement. However, there are some clear cut solutions that are obvious according to Dr. Gamoran.

1. No more dead end classes like general math for the low ability students;
   
2. high academic expectations for students of all ability levels; and
   
3. teachers should not be assigned in a way that results in only the newest and least experienced teachers working with the low ability students, in other words, all students deserve quality instruction.

In discussing heterogeneous grouping, Dr. Gamoran noted that differentiation is hard work for teachers, and they need a lot of support and training in order to be successful.

Dr. Gamoran also shared an example of a school where heterogeneous grouping was successful. This was a school that was 51% free and reduced lunch, but because the school had a strong, dynamic leader and had gotten grants, they were able to recruit a top notch staff. Not only was the principal able to select which teachers worked in the school, but approximately half of the student body had to go through an interview process to get into the school, so this magnet school was selective about its teachers and its students. Class size was kept to 15 students and instruction went at a fast pace. Students who were struggling were expected to attend tutoring sessions on Saturdays. I think there was an expectation that parents would be involved in their student's education, but I am not sure about that.

Obviously the situation in the Madison schools is different from this ideal, and that's why I think it is important for the Board and the administration to hear from students and parents what it is like in the classroom. I should add that Bill Keys was very annoyed that the Board was even discussing this issue because he believes that the Board has no place in the classroom. According to Mr. Keys this is the responsibility of the teachers and administrators and they know better than the members of the Board what should be done in the classroom. However, I would argue that the teachers and administrators don't know any better than the Board does about what happens in the classroom, and they certainly don't know what it is like for high ability students in those classes. Those of us who have sat around the kitchen table while our children talk about their boredom, frustration, and lack of challenge need to help them understand and make our voices heard.

MAUE School Board Candidate Forum

Madison United for Academic Excellence [www site] held a Madison School Board candidate forum Tuesday evening, January 17, 2006. Maya Cole, Michael Kelly, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira participated (election website). Candidate statements and questions appear below:

Opening Statement video What strategies/ideas do you have that can elevate academic success for ALL MMSD students while avoiding the pitting of parent groups against each other? [Video] What is one of the most important things you want to accomplish as a board member? [Video] Many people in our group are concerned that the District's single-minded strategy for closing the achievement gap is to eliminate "high end" learning opportunities and give all students -- regardless of ability, motivation or interest level -- the same curriculum, delivered in completely heterogeneous classrooms. They see this approach being enacted, for example, in the West HS "small learning communities" restructuring and they fear that it will permeate and determine the results of the middle school redesign effort. Do you think that this is a sound strategy for closing the achievement gap? [Video] As a Board what oversight is currently in place to assess whether the district is sufficiently meeting the academic needs for gifted students? Do you believe the current oversight is sufficient? In particular for both the student population as a whole and on an individual student basis: How is/should progress be measured in the gifted context? [Video] The school district is once again faced with the dilemma of cutting between 6-10 million dollars from the budget. Where do you think these cuts should come from in the budget? Please tell me where the money is going to come from without suggesting that state or federal funds are not important for all programs. [Video] How would you address the often heard complaint that special education programs drain too much money from the budget? (Jeff): I later provided some additional information for this question: there are approximately 5000 special education students in the district and special education programs and services account for more than $15 out of every $100 that the district spends. [Video] Almost three years ago, during the public comments section of a budget-focused BOE meeting, a parent was asking the BOE to put "TAG" ("talented and gifted") services on the "do not cut" list. In response, a BOE member said to him, "Friend, this has nothing to do with minority students. Why should I support it?" Q: How do you react to that assertion/position/logic? Do you think the "TAG" dollars have anything to do with the District's minority students? [Video] Can you name five good things about the Madison [public] schools? [Video] Jeff's closing remarks: [Video]

The seven stupid arguments for cutting gifted education

Michael F. Shaughnessy recently interviewed Frances R. Spielhagen about Gifted Ed in the new millennium. Dr. Spielhagen has engaged in both funded and non-funded education research and policy analysis. As an Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow in 1991-1992, she explored perspectives of achievement among gifted females, ages 9-26. She continues her work on acceleration policies in mathematics, working in collaboration with Dr. Joyce Van Tassel-Baska, of the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Dr. Spielhagen has recently spoken out against cuts in gifted education, and has identified "seven stupid arguments" that are offered as explanations for cutting gifted education.

# 1: All children are gifted

#2: It is not fair to offer special services for gifted students.

#3: Gifted students learn on their own.

#4: Gifted programs are elitist.

#5: Gifted programs are racist.

#6: Gifted children are weird.

#7: Why bother? Gifted students pass the state tests.

You can read the entire interview at EducationNews.Org.

Clarification of plans for 9th and 10th grade science at West HS

If you were at the West HS PTSO meeting last night (report to be posted soon for anyone who was unable to attend -- the topic was an update on the SLC initiative by SLC Coordiator Heather Lott), then you know that the question of what 9th and 10th grade science will look like next year and thereafter was left somewhat unanswered. I had the following clarifying email exchange with West HS Principal Ed Holmes today:

Dear Ed,

I am writing to ask for clarification about your plans for 9th and 10th grade science in the coming years.

Very specifically, there was considerable confusion last night about Chemistry. Will there would be "Chemistry" and "Chemistry in the Community" next year ... or not? You and Heather seemed not to be in agreement, and we noticed afterward that the document Heather handed out described 10th grade science as "TBA," which was confusing, and worrisome.

Also, in response to a parent question, you said there would be Accelerated Biology next year, that there would be "no changes" in science next year. Can we trust that?

All in all, the science situation was left in a bit of a muddle, so I am asking you to please go on record here and make it very, very clear what the plans are for next year and what the plans/hopes/goals are for the years after next.

1) Will there be Accelerated Biology next year, yes or no?

2) If yes, how many sections of Accelerated Biology will there be next year?

3) What will the procedure be for getting into Accelerated Biology for next year?

4) What is your plan for Biology -- your vision, your goal, your intention -- in the years after next?

5) Will both "Chemistry" and "Chemistry in the Community" be offered next year, as separate classes (i.e., not a blend of the two within the same classroom, somehow) ... or not?

6) What is you plan for Chemistry -- again, your vision, your ultimate goal, your hope -- in the years after that?

Please, Ed, if your plan is to ultimately have only one form of biology offered at the 9th grade level and only one form of chemistry offered at the 10th grade level (with perhaps only what you're calling an "embedded honors" option available in each course for the brightest and most motivated students) -- if that is your vision and what you are working towards -- then I ask that you be straight with us about that right now.

Thank you.

Respectfully,
Laurie

P.S. I still feel like we parents have never been given an adequate explanation (empirically supported, not just rhetoric) as to why you refuse to have an honors/accelerated section for each 9th and 10th grade course (i.e., English, science, social studies) per each of the four SLC's. (I assume that's how it's done for math?) A plan like that -- combined with efforts to increase the diversity of the students in these honors/accelerated sections -- would make a huge difference in how this turns out for West, in the end. Perhaps you could provide an answer to that question now?

Laurie,

In response to your questions regarding next years course selections:

1) Yes, there will be Accelerated Biology.

2) There will be one section of Accelerated Biology.

3) The procedure for getting into Accelerated Biology will be the same
as in years past. There will be an exam given to determine who will be
in the Accelerated Biology class.

4) Next year there will be an honors option embedded in the
traditional biology class for students who opt to take honors level
biology. My plans are to continue with the aforementioned system for
offering Biology at West. I do not foresee a change in what we offer at
this time.

5) Yes, both Chemistry and Chemistry in the Community will be offered
as separate classes.

6) At this time I do not foresee a change in the way we offer
chemistry at West.

The courses listed above are found in next years Program of Study book.
The book has gone to print and has been returned to us. I do not plan
to change what we have printed and will be disseminating to the public.
If you are interested in a copy of the 2006 -2007 West High Program of
Study book they are available in Theresa Calderon's office, Highland
SLC.

I will most likely be out of town over the next several days on matters
of a personal nature. I will respond to any further questions you might
have upon my return.

Thank you for your continued interest and concern.

Ed Holmes, Principal
West High School

Ed,

Thank you so much for your speedy reply ... and for the clarification. It is much appreciated.

Needless to say, I am happy to hear that you do not foresee any changes in either biology or chemistry in the coming years. (Please correct me if I have misunderstood.)

I am also happy to hear about continued accelerated and honors options in biology and the continuation of the math-rich course in chemistry, all of which are needed by many West students. As I have said many times, I truly believe this is the better course for West to chart in order to insure the school meets its professional and moral responsibility to the full range of students -- and to insure that those students who need accelerated and honors options do not leave the West attendance area. It also makes the educational opportunities at West more like those at our other three high schools, a form of equity that is at the heart of the middle school redesign effort.

I will ask you again to please consider offering accelerated and honors classes within each SLC for English and social studies, as well.

Safe travels,

Laurie

"They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!

Two of the most popular -- and most insidious -- myths about academically gifted kids is that "they're all rich, white kids" and that, no matter what they experience in school, "they'll do just fine." Even in our own district, however, the hard data do not support those assertions.

When the District analyzed dropout data for the five-year period between 1995 and 1999, they identified four student profiles. Of interest for the present purpose is the group identified as high achieving. Here are the data from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Report from May, 2000:

Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved

This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.

Characteristics of this group:

• Grade 5 math scores - 84.2 percentile
  
• Male - 55%
  
• Low income - 53%
  
• Minority - 42%
  
• African American - 31%
  
• Hispanic - 6%
  
• Asian - 5%

Put in words, more than one-quarter of the District's dropouts during the second half of the 1990's had exhibited high academic achievement early in their school careers. (The report actually uses the word "astounding" to describe these students' previous achievement.) In addition, over half of this group of early achieving dropouts were poor, more than two-fifths were minority students, and almost one-third were African American. (Note: this number - 27% - is roughly comparable to what is found nationwide regarding the percentage of dropouts who have tested and/or performed in the gifted range -- that is, across the nation, gifted students don't do "just fine" no matter what happens to them in school.)

During this same time period - the second half of the 1990's - the percentage of MMSD high school students who were from low income families was about 16% and the percentage who were minority was about 25%. Thus low income and minority students were significantly over-represented in this high achieving group of dropouts (53% versus 16% and 42% versus 25%).

Point: The best way to insure that poor and minority students of high academic ability are not "lost" is to work at finding them in the first place, and then to support and follow them throughout their school careers - i.e., to have in place a broad-based system of early and ongoing identification (one that does not require parental advocacy), as well as a set of ongoing support and retention strategies.

Point: The best way to insure that all students of high academic potential have equal access to adequately challenging learning opportunities is to have enough of these appropriately rigorous learning opportunities, in all of the District's schools and at all grade levels.

To the extent that "high end" learning opportunities and District services for high potential students decrease, it hurts all academically talented students in the District. That goes without saying. But these data suggest that as those services and programming are eliminated, we may be doing particular harm to those academically talented students who come from less advantaged backgrounds. These students are less likely to have parents who can advocate effectively for them, thus they are less likely to have access to the ever shrinking pool of appropriately rigorous learning opportunities available in our schools. These students are also less likely to have parents who can provide them with opportunities for advanced learning outside of school, not to mention transfer them to private school, when their learning needs are not met in the public system.

A case in point: West High School

Because of the curricular changes currently occurring at West High School -- changes which threaten the historically broad range of challenging courses West has offered its high end learners -- we'd like to draw your attention to a further breakdown of these data, from the same District report:

High School	Group 1 dropouts (% of total dropouts for that school)
East	25.9
La Follette	23.8
Memorial	23.4
West	32.4

Put in words, from 1995 to 1999, West had a significantly higher percentage of dropouts who exhibited high academic achievement early in their school careers than did any of the District's other three high schools, each of which had about the same percentage of Group I dropouts. (Note: 32.4% is also significantly higher than the national estimate.) There is no reason to assume that the demographic characteristics of West's Group I dropouts are significantly different from those of the District-wide group of Group 1 dropouts -- that is, it is likely that many of the West Group 1 dropouts were either minority students, from low income families, or both. This suggests that as West contemplates getting rid of ever more "high end" courses (arguably as a result of the Small Learning Communities initiative), they may be moving in the wrong direction -- assuming that the goal is to maximize minority achievement, as opposed to simply minimizing minority failure. As 10 of West's 18 math teachers put it in an April, 2004, letter to the Isthmus:

It seems the administration and our school board have redefined 'success' as merely producing 'fewer failures.' Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community? (bold, italics and underline added)

A recent report from the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable speaks to the complexity of the challenge of closing the achievement gap while also maintaining a commitment to high academic standards for all -- and the importance of keeping the big picture in full view.

Conclusion: The two most popular myths about "high end" students is that they are all rich, white kids and that no matter what they experience in school, "they will do just fine." The above data from our own district illustrate well just how untrue those two statements are. Students of high academic potential come in all colors and from all cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. To think otherwise is, quite simply, racist. Furthermore, students at any point along the performance continuum disengage from school when they feel misunderstood, unappreciated, and poorly taken care of by their schools. In that regard, "high end" students are no different from any others.

Note: Unfortunately, the 2000-20004 dropout data have not been analyzed in the same way the 1995-1999 data were and we have been told that there are no plans to do those analyses. A request has been made to reconsider that decision.

Additional note: According to a December, 2004, MMSD Research and Evaluation report, the District-wide high school dropout rates for the years 1995 -1999 were 21%, 17%, 19%, 18% and 19%, respectively (average equals 19%). For ease of computation, consider a West high school class of 500 students. Given an average 19% dropout rate, that means 95 students not graduating each year, more than 30 of them with a history of high academic performance - including 15 - 20 academically talented poor and/or minority students.

Final note: The percentage of West students who are minority and the percentage who are poor have both increased significantly since the late 1990's. Currently, the West student population is approximately 24.9% low income (compared to 14.6% in the late 1990's) and 35.8% minority (compared to 26.3% in the late 1990's). This may well mean that even more poor and minority students of high academic potential are not graduating.

Bottom line question: Are we really prepared to sacrifice so many potential scholars and leaders of color?

Laurie Frost & Jeff Henriques

Now THAT'S Excellence and Equity!

Beautiful Minds: An Innovative Math Program Helps Change the Face of Gifted and Talented Education

By John O'Neil (from NEA Today, January, 2006)

"Friendly fractions" are the day's topic, but Alison Foley's 20 fourth-graders can't dig into that concept until they've tallied and graphed their favorite desserts. Votes for ice cream, brownies, cake, and cookies—even a lone vote for cannoli—go up on the board.

"What about ice cream cake?" one student asks. "If we were doing a Venn diagram, we could put that in the intersection," Courtney offers. Soon, desks and chairs are pulled aside and Foley's kids use yarn and their bodies to make a human pie chart illustrating their data, then go on to calculate what fractions result when you add various categories together.

Foley's math curriculum—which presents concepts several years above grade level—isn't the only thing unusual about her classroom at Smith School in West Hartford, Connecticut. Smith is one of 10 schools in Connecticut and Kentucky piloting an innovative project, Mentoring Mathematical Minds (Project M3), aimed at identifying children in grades 3–5 capable of handling advanced mathematics. Developed at the University of Connecticut, the program is designed to expand the population of students typically served by gifted and talented programs. Sure enough, look around Foley's classroom—which draws students from Section 8 housing as well as million-dollar homes—and you'll see students as diverse as their favorite desserts, with Black students elbow to elbow with Hispanic, Asian-American, and White pupils.

National figures on gifted education programs suggest such diversity is unusual. Data collected by the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights show that White and Asian students are typically overrepresented among programs for the gifted, while other minorities tend to be underrepresented.

The University of Connecticut project is part of a movement to broaden the scope of gifted and talented programs, which in some communities are fighting for survival. Some advocates for gifted programs say the federal so-called No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), which mandates that schools raise all students' performance to minimally acceptable standards, has school officials focused on average or underachieving learners.

"Teachers who used to teach AP are now teaching remedial reading instead," notes Jane Clarenbach, director of public education and affiliate relations for the National Association for Gifted Children. More bad news: President Bush has proposed eliminating federal Jacob Javits grants, which support research on gifted education (including programs like Project M3).

While research consistently shows the advantages of offering gifted students content tailored to their needs, many buy into the notion that it's not necessary—they say gifted kids will do just fine, even without special curricula. Indeed, with NCLB pressures mounting and district budgets tight, some see gifted programs as offering extra resources to kids who already have all the advantages.

But Clarenbach and others argue that forcing gifted students to march in lockstep with their peers holds them back. Nine-year-old Courtney would probably agree. She spent part of last year in Smith School's regular third-grade math class, and part of the year receiving Project M3's enriched curriculum. Looking back at her grade-level math work, Courtney recalls, "I'd just zip through it in five minutes and have to wait half an hour for everyone to finish. It gave me headaches when I had to do the same things over and over again, honestly."

Clarenbach points out that the issue can be further complicated because the gifted population itself is diverse. For example, some gifted students excel in a single content area but are weak in others; some even have learning disabilities. Still, that doesn't mean areas of strength should be ignored. Project M3 Director Kathy Gavin, who works at the Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Connecticut, cites the example of one student who was almost held back in second grade because of reading difficulties, but who it was thought could benefit from the M3 program. The student was placed in it and "has excelled," she says.

Broadening the Pool

Without a special math program like Project M3, the talents of children like Courtney, a vivacious African-American who has already mapped out her life's goals, might go unchallenged. Kathy Gavin says she's met an urban principal who told her flat-out, "I don't have any gifted kids in my school." But Project M3 helps find them. Kids are selected based on multiple criteria, including a special assessment of nonverbal math ability, which measures such things as spatial sense and reasoning, and standardized tests when available. Teacher recommendations and prior grades also factor in. Opening up the selection process (gifted programs in the past often selected students based on IQ scores alone) has allowed students with less obvious talents to benefit, says Gavin. Once they're in, kids take four units of about six weeks each, with content pitched several years beyond grade-level standard: the fourth-graders in Foley's class, for example, studied a unit on algebra in which they solved for variables. The lessons focus on conceptual understanding, with lots of time for reflection and discussion.

Early results show that the program has promise. Students taking the M3 curriculum at the 10 schools where the program is being piloted have posted "significant gains" on standardized math tests compared with control groups, with lower-income students recording the highest gains, says Gavin. Alison Foley's fourth-graders were among those who showed gains, and, to her relief, her kids also swept through their district-level tests. She had worried about the results, because the M3 curriculum was such a departure from the standard (and tested) math curriculum in the district.

Foley sees other benefits too—especially for girls who traditionally have been underrepresented in advanced math programs. In regular math classes, boys tend to be more assertive, blurting out answers, while girls hang back. In the M3 classrooms, students often work in pairs and discuss solutions, Foley says, and that helps girls rehearse their answers and support their thinking.

Students like Mariam are benefiting. When the class began, says Foley, "Mariam was overshadowed by the other kids, especially the boys." But as the year went on her confidence grew. In a recent algebra unit, she argued her point against the entire class—and she was right, says Foley. "That was a huge step for her, and now she has become, in a subtle way, a leader."

Courtney, who pronounces Project M3 "just awesome," appreciates being in a class with kids who share her passion for numbers. "The difference between this class and the others is that the kids in the other math classes do it for the rewards, because they're going to get gum or chocolate or something," she says. "And when they come out of math, they look so unhappy! But when we come out of math, we have smiles on our faces because we love it."

Scouting For Talent

Look around your classroom. Could bored Brittany, loquacious Lakisha, or rambunctious Robert benefit from gifted education services? Here's how to find out:

* Know the signs. Gifted students often demonstrate advanced performance in one or more disciplines and abstract or complex thinking. They may also have an increased ability to make connections and see relationships. Varying your assignments can bring out the best in some students: For example, try letting kids show what they know through skits, poems, or dioramas.

* Pre-test. Find out what students know before you teach a new topic. Both formal assessments (quizzes or interest inventories) and informal (observations or class discussion) can help you identify students who require enrichment activities or an accelerated pace.

* Watch for clues. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. A kid who seems bored or disinterested (even acting up) may, in fact, need more challenging work. Talk with the child, a parent, or his or her former teacher to track the behavior pattern and address the issue.

* Allow for differences. All students have academic strengths and weaknesses. A gifted student who excels in science may struggle in writing. Try to make sure students are working at the appropriate level of challenge in each subject area to ensure their growth.

Link to article for those who want photo and charts:
http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0601/gifted.html

West Moves Ahead With English 10 Restructuring

West High School has decided to move ahead with their curriculum reduction plan. The school has posted a document explaining the changes on their website. The one concession that the school has made to parents is their decision not to require students to give up time at lunch in order to earn an honors designation. Instead, there will be an embedded honors component where students will be expected to complete more complex assignments and take more challenging exams. Support for struggling students will now occur in the classroom as well.

From the document:

The staff training necessary for full implementation of the tenth grade English program will include:
• The basics of how to differentiate in the classroom. What is really meant by differentiated instruction? How is it successfully implemented at the high school level?
• Best practice strategies for supporting struggling learners in the heterogeneous classroom.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: A Look at the Educational Histories of the 29 West HS National Merit Semi-Finalists

Earlier this semester, 60 MMSD students -- including 29 from West HS -- were named 2006 National Merit Semifinalists. In a 10/12/05 press release, MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater said, "I am proud of the many staff members who taught and guided these students all the way from elementary school, and of this district's overall guidance and focus that has led to these successes."

A closer examination of the facts, however, reveals that only 12 (41%) of West High School's 29 National Merit Semifinalists attended the Madison public schools continuously from first grade on (meaning that 59% received some portion of their K-8 schooling in either private schools or non-MMSD public schools). Here's the raw data:

NMSF #1: Wingra K-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #2: Franklin-Randall K-5th; Wright for 6th; Hamilton 7th-8th

NMSF #3: Midvale-Lincoln, K-5th; Cherokee

NMSF #4: Denver public schools (magnet Montessori school) K-6th; Hamilton 7th-8th

NMSF #5: New Orleans parochial school K-8th; New Orleans public high school through 11th

NMSF #6: Libertyville, IL, public schools ("extremely rigorous") through first semester 10th

NMSF #7: Franklin-Randall, K-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #8: Van Hise, K-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #9: Van Hise, K-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #10: Starkville, MS, public schools K-8th

NMSF #11: Japanese school for K; Glenn Stephens 1st-4th; Van Hise for 5th; Hamilton

NMSF #12: Franklin-Randall, K-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #13: Madison Central Montessori through 3rd; Shorewood 3rd-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #14: Lincoln-Midvale through 4th; Eagle 5th-8th

NMSF #15: Eagle K-8th

NMSF #16: MMSD through 9th; home schooled beginning in 10th

NMSF #17: Leopold though 4th; Eagle 5th-8th

NMSF #18: Lapham K-2nd; Randall 3rd-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #19: California private school through 5th; Hamilton

NMSF #20: Midvale and Van Hise; Hamilton

NMSF #21: Seattle public schools (TAG pullout program) through 7th; Hamilton for 8th

NMSF #22: Unknown private school K-1st; Eagle 2nd-8th

NMSF #23: Lincoln-Midvale K-5th; Cherokee

NMSF #24: Madison Central Montessori through 4th; Eagle 5th-8th

NMSF #25: Shorewood K-5th; Hamilton

NMSF #26: Queen of Peace through 5th; Hamilton

NMSF #27: West Middleton through 4th; Eagle 5th-8th

NMSF #28: Montessori pre-K through 2nd; Shorewood 4th-5th; Eagle 5th-8th

NMSF #29: Shorewood K-5th; Hamilton

Looking at the sample in a little more detail, we find the following:

• Elementary school (K-5) history: 31% attended private school for three or more years (an additional 21% attended non-MMSD public schools for three or more years -- total: 52%).
  
  
• Middle school (6-8) history: 28% attended private school for two or more years (an additional 14% attended non-MMSD public schools for two or more years -- total: 42%).
  
  
• K-8 schooling history: 28% attended private school for five or more of their K-8 school years (an additional 17% attended non-MMSD public schools for five or more of their K-8 school years -- total: 45%)

Although we do not have K-8 attendance data for the entire class, it seems unlikely to think that almost 30% of current West seniors attended private school for five or more of their pre-high school years. Thus on this single demographic variable, the 29 West National Merit Semifinalists are probably different from their classmates, generally.

Descriptive data like these are certainly interesting, though they often raise more questions than they answer. And of course, they don't prove anything. Nevertheless, with 45% of the West HS National Merit Semifinalist sample attending non-MMSD schools for over half of their K-8 years, it is recommended that the District temper its sense of pride in and ownership of these very accomplished students.

Many thanks to each of these fine young people for speaking with us on the telephone. Congratulations and good luck to each and every one of them!

THE HANDBOOK OF SCHOOL COUNSELING: COUNSELING THE GIFTED AND TALENTED

Below is an excerpt from the book entitled: THE HANDBOOK OF SCHOOL COUNSELING: COUNSELING THE GIFTED AND TALENTED. It has not yet been published (so you get to read it first). It is written for school counselors, who I believe are very integral to student success. The authors of this book are Corissa C. Lotta, PhD; Barbara A. Kerr, PhD; and Erica A. Kruger, MS. I have been corresponding with Dr. Lotta at the University of Wisconsin-Madison regarding the use of on-line curricula for gifted students. Enjoy.

Introduction

Gifted and talented students are some of the most rewarding and challenging students for the school counselor. It’s surprising, then, that these students are so seldom discussed in counseling training programs, despite evidence that these students are at-risk for negative academic and social-emotional outcomes, including underachievement, drop-out, stress, and depression (Colangelo & Davis, 1997; Kerr, 1991; Lovecky, 1993; Moon, Kelly, & Feldhusen, 1997; Silverman, 1994). While there is a great deal of literature and research on gifted students, very few school counselors have been required to demonstrate proficiency in these topics in the course of their education and training. Of course, this does not mean that they will not encounter these students in their school counseling work – gifted students are in every school at every grade level. It does, however, mean that school counselors may not have the knowledge required to identify and support this population, nor the ability to recognize the importance of providing services that address their specific needs (Adams-Byars, Whitsell, & Moon, 2004; VanTassel-Baska & Baska, 2000).

The Unique Academic and Social/Emotional Needs of Gifted Students
The importance of being knowledgeable about these students is illustrated by the following vignettes. Although identifying information has been changed, each of these scenarios is based upon actual individuals with whom the authors have worked in a counseling setting.

Matt, a 3rd grade Caucasian student at a small suburban elementary school, has a history of excellent school performance. He is well-liked by all of his teachers, involved in extracurricular activities, and appears to have friends. A recent phone call from Matt’s mother, however, indicates that Matt has been increasingly withdrawn and has been having difficulty sleeping.

Anita is a 5th grade Latina student at a medium-sized urban elementary school who has been referred to the school counselor due to frequent absences and issues with homework completion. Teacher reports about Anita’s performance are inconsistent. Most teachers report that Anita is struggling, but her math teacher notes that Anita’s work is often excellent, although at times it is often incomplete or not turned in at all. Anita is in a pull-out English Language Learner (ELL) class.

Jackie, a 7th grade African American student at a large urban middle school, has been referred