Houston, We Have a Problem..Outside Thurgood Marshall
A reader sent me this and said there were 2-3 of these around signage at Thurgood Marshall. I am told the Board knows about this.
I was kind of surprised to hear an HCC parent at Soup for Teachers say this: I agree with the sentiment (and I'm an HCC parent) but I wouldn't do it this way. Let's not shame kids.
Okay, HCC parents, do you think your child is enrolled in a "apartheid" program? Here's what the dictionary says (after explained it means "a state of being apart," an Afrikaans word.
"Apartheid was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation..."
There is no enforced separate in HCC. The program is open to anyone. The program is not just one race, there are many, many Asian students (despite attempts to make that sound like it does count which baffles me.) Of course, there is underrepresentation by black, Native American and Latino students and that needs to change. But apartheid?
I was kind of surprised to hear an HCC parent at Soup for Teachers say this: I agree with the sentiment (and I'm an HCC parent) but I wouldn't do it this way. Let's not shame kids.
Okay, HCC parents, do you think your child is enrolled in a "apartheid" program? Here's what the dictionary says (after explained it means "a state of being apart," an Afrikaans word.
"Apartheid was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation..."
There is no enforced separate in HCC. The program is open to anyone. The program is not just one race, there are many, many Asian students (despite attempts to make that sound like it does count which baffles me.) Of course, there is underrepresentation by black, Native American and Latino students and that needs to change. But apartheid?
Comments
Projections are always a gamble. However, I would not be expecting a spike in enrollment at Cascadia for year 1.
Yes, it is likely that some folks did not want to move, the year before another move and are waiting a year. However, there are also folks who will want to give it a year to see how the move sorts out. Additionally, the reduced class sizes for K-2 are very attractive and likely to cause K-2 families to wait until 3rd grade to transfer.
Switching costs are never easy and the one thing people people know for certain, AL Is always a gamble. Every year, there is a conversation about some type of split or move or something. HCC is not for the faint of heart.
Nobody would choose this continuous instability, if they didn't desperately need that service.
WM
That seems to be what people are advocating."
No, but that was an issue when HCC came in. TM lost Title One funds because their ratio of F/RL kids went down. For the school, depending on those dollars, it became an issue.
No one believes "concentrating poverty"is a good idea and why so many of us are against the way the district wants to create Cedar Park.
Reprinting for Anonymous (please, next time, give yourself a name per our guidelines:)
"A general note to those who feel compelled to criticize MW for having their words shared outside the confines of Soup for Teachers. SFT is a "closed group" of some 3000+ members. Please reflect on that. 3000+."
I printed what one teacher said (with her name) but someone ELSE put up another statement by another teacher (without attribution which I then asked for.) I try to read every single comment but occasionally something will get past me. I find it very trying to get blamed for something someone else said and someone else put up.
Borscht Eater, a rather gossipy comment without naming someone. Not going to stay up.Please refrain from attacks with no evidence.
The truth of the matter is there would be a net gain of dollars if TM obtained Title 1 status. The HCC PTSA money would move to another location and Federal funds would flow to TM. Many have "pointed that out".
Also avoiding the optics problem that Aprilia thinks is the only real problem with the giant cohort of mostly just well-prepared and prepped white kids whose parents wish to keep them away from struggling students, poverty stricken students and dark-skinned students.
In my opinion.
Hayseed
Yes, Title One money or PTA money? That's a good question.
WAC 392-170-078 Program Services
"Districts shall make a VARIETY of appropriate program services available to students who participate in the district's program for highly capable students."
Placement should be based on the needs of the individal child (HC law is not IDEA but has used many of its precepts). A tiny rural district will have less variety in services, and the law recognizes fiscal constraints.
Kellie, I am clueless about capacity. What you say about the correlation between capacity issues and the rise of HCC concerns makes sense. The concerns also correlate to the rise of Bernie Sanders, BLM, and a change in social awareness about the patterns of who keeps getting ahead and left behind, and a determination to break this cycle. I also think the SPS strike woke up many staff (and doesn't include me) and parents who have continued to collaborate and seek solutions to help all students in this system and not just those with power.
FWIW
If TM was converted to 100% general education, the title 1 funds would most likely be greater than pta funds. IMHO that is one of the reasons why the PTA works so hard and raised such an extraordinary amount of money.
That is once again, a failing on the part of the district to provide the funds for the students that need them. Families that choose HCC at TM are well aware of the demographics. If they wish to avoid that demographic, they don't choose the school, so your logic is completely backwards, as well as incredibly insulting.
Here is how Open Ears believes HCC would CHANGE a gen ed classroom:
*dominate class discussions
*derail teachers' lessons
*find unproductive ways to deal with the boredom
*completely check out
*Formerly happy gen ed kids would shut down, because, why bother?
And, purportedly, teachers would have SO many more IEPs and 504s with those four HCC students...
Gen ed classrooms already have all of this stuff, and when Open Ears goes onto say that HCC teachers are somehow better suited to handle the hub-bub, I had to laugh:
"...there is value in having a program where teachers take all this in stride as part of the territory."
Ummm....Gen ed teachers already handle ALL levels and abilities. HCC, in theory, handle far fewer levels.
I'm sure gen ed teachers could take a couple HCC students in stride: they deal with all the things Open Ears mentions on a daily basis.
Unless Open Ears is implying HCC teachers are better than gen ed teachers?
In theory HCC classrooms actually handle the same number of levels(more), as the very highest achieving students are many, many years ahead, and are supposed to be being served, and a gen ed classroom is only handling a few levels, at most a year ahead. In practice, I dunno. I find it to be a similar spread in what they teach to, not less, though, no. The classes are all too big, hard to say what would happen with healthy class sizes.
-sleeper
Gen ed teachers in, say, 10th grade have students who are six grade levels behind and two ahead: eight grade levels. HCC (AP or IB...) would have, what, grade 11-16 for five levels.
And I don't think the inclusion of a couple of HCC students would make a huge difference, though as I said I see your point.
Overall, I agree that the ideal is to meet all students at their level but (and this argument is an echo of one years ago...) gen ed classes don't have that luxury.
We need more remedial classes as well as HCC, or better yet get rid of grade levels all together. I understand HCC advocating for classes appropriate for their levels; let's do that for ALL students.
And maybe I'm just too sensitive, but as I noted earlier, a couple of posters have written that HCC is an escape from gen ed; combine with the hint from OE that HCC teachers are somehow better able to handle a hectic classroom and the whole thing takes on that whiff of elitism that is deadly to HCC's cause.
We ARE all in this together...
Or go private.
: )
In elementary school there's mostly just the one classroom, so that setting makes a bigger difference for what curriculum you are able to access in all subjects. We could be more flexible in high school.
I try to avoid deciding whether students should have services based on whether I like all their parents' reasons. I mean- some parents at neighborhood schools and in SPED are not nice (maybe they got that way because the district is frustrating. Certainly some HCC parents have), but I read the research and try to listen to the thoughtful people, and it is clear that we should have these services. I'm also sure these lines are deeply drawn, and at this point even perfect behavior from HCC parents would be criticized. I watch other programs advocate, even clumsily, and be forgiven for far greater missteps. Probably because they aren't doing this every year like HCC, as the distric uses it as a capacity widget. Sort of a Hillary Clinton problem.
-sleeper
Literally apartheid, no. But it's an uncomfortable reality to inhabit, for sure.
My son's giftedness/disability presented in some rather school-unfriendly ways when he was younger. Working within the system as I do, over the years I have seen African American boys punished more harshly (or punished at all) for similar behaviors. My son got a therapist. My students get detention and worse. No, it's not apartheid, but it's not awesome, either.
He is 12 now, and he benefits tremendously from HCC at Hamilton. He asked me the other day whether it's true or not that the Black Lives Matter movement wants to end HCC. (Apparently he'd heard this from someone at school?? Yikes.) I told him that the Black Lives Matter movement mostly just wants African American people to stop being killed with impunity. But we also had the trickier conversation about how our relative privilege indirectly helped him access HCC in the first place.
He's able to accept that without feeling threatened or bad about himself. He's able to have a nuanced conversation about these things. He understands that acknowledging our privilege doesn't diminish our accomplishments. I'm glad to have had this talk with him and I hope it will be the first of many such complicated and thought-provoking conversations.
Improve advanced learning for all K-2, create special pilot programs to identify and nurture low-income gifted students early, add more HCC classes/cohorts at option schools around the city, keep some self contained sites for those who need it.
Fix AL
"Thank you "Floor Pie"...acknowledging white privilege is a great first step, and working together to eliminate bias and institutional racism is necessary."
Fix AL-- I did not read this as "white privilege". How do you know this person is not Asian? I think we should all talk about economic and other sorts of privilege. Recent data (Reardon, Standford) is focusing on an increasing economic inequality in relation to the achievement gap. There is also a large achievement gap growing between middle & upper income students of all colors, especially in affluent cities where the affluent offer their kids more resources. The achievement gap between blacks & whites differs depending on the location in the US & income level. The gap between blacks & whites has narrowed overall the past 30 years. But gap between Rich & poor has greatly grown. In some areas there is a small gap between blacks & whites, but income is more similar in those areas.
"The black-white achievement gap was considerably larger than the income achievement gap among cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s, but now it is considerably smaller than the income achievement gap. This change is the result of both the substantial progress made in reducing racial inequality in the 1960s and 1970s and the sharp increase in economic inequality in education outcomes in more recent decades."
This has large policy implications. Parents who are educated (of all colors) and can navigate systems and offer another privilege as well.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may13/vol70/num08/The-Widening-Income-Achievement-Gap.aspx
- TW
Someone upthread talked about being far behind when they got to college. We had a similar experience with moving from public elementary to private middle school.
We need to fix that gap. That's why we had open choice, site based management, and all the wonderful, unique programs we used to have in Seattle. They made the some of the things you can find in private school available to people who can't afford private school. Oh, and our schools were more integrated then too. SPS has gotten much worse in the years since NSAP with respect to this gap, and compared to local suburban districts. That includes modest and diverse districts like Shoreline, that still has alternative and gifted options.
I have a friend whose child attends Lakeside. She chose to send him there because they have a well thought out curriculum designed to meet the needs of the whole child. Isn't that the minimum one should expect from a school system? Compare this to SPS - which lurches from crisis to crisis with no real consideration of the affect on children.
Examples:
Stubbornly choosing to geo-split hundreds of children next year without reconsidering whether it's necessary when the effect of this disruption on each individual child will be huge.
Changing the elementary math curriculum without providing sufficient training for teachers, then rendering the new curriculum unusable in a fit of pique at the school board.
Making huge programmatic and scheduling changes at the whim of the superintendent or school staff without consulting parents.
We're at a school with a strong, sensible principal now but I don't feel it's safe to entrust my child's education to these people once he is ready to move on from elementary school.
Achievement gaps are larger in districts...where parents on average have high levels of educational attainment; and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment.
...In another paper posted with the data, Reardon and colleagues focus on how geography correlates with disparities by race and ethnicity. The researchers identify large white‐black achievement gaps in such major school districts as Atlanta; Auburn City, Alabama; Oakland, California; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; and Washington, D.C. They also find significant black-white gaps in a number of smaller school districts that are home to major universities: Berkeley, California; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Charlottesville, Virginia; Evanston, Illinois; and University City, Missouri.
And another important point: Reardon noted that the testing data have a small margin of error. “The data should not be used to rank school districts whose performance differs only slightly,” he said.
http://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/29/local-education-inequities-across-u-s-revealed-new-stanford-data-set/
-still reading
I'm not a fan of open choice and site based management - but at least they forced schools to try to please parents. "
Lynn, I have a slightly different interpretation of open choice and site-based management. Open choice allowed parents to choose schools aligned with their values and goals for their kids' education. Therefore, parents were more likely to be happy with what they got - like when parents choose private school. Site based management gave principals more control of their school and a good principal and teachers could do amazing things with that autonomy.
I don't expect schools to try to please parents - nor would I want them to. I expect that would lead to the loudest, most demanding parents getting what they want and leaving others in the dust. - CapHill Parent
Here are some more links on the subject:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/
http://hechingerreport.org/growing-income-achievement-gap-overshadows-race/
Here is a recent article (2016) in which a new data set was examined. It is hopeful on in that it shows a decrease in achievement gap between rich & poor students. However, the gap is still wide and at the current pace would take 60 years to narrow. However, there is evidence programs that educate the public about importance of early childhood ed, quality preschool programs plus low income families obtaining computers, spending more time with kids (reading, museums etc)might be making a difference.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/08/26/low-income-kindergartners-are-closing-the-achievement-gap-reversing-a-decades-old-trend/
TW
-TW
I don't know how you get over that road block. I have tried in my way by telling the story of my kid, who suffered from suicidal depression in gen ed elementary and has largely recovered and learned to love school in HCC. But that got me accused of making it all about myself, white fragility and tone policing. OK--the first part is fair enough, I guess. But I don't know where to go from here. I'd like to be part of the solution, but the existence of this program is life or death for my kid, and I would bet it could be life or death to another non-typical HCC kid out there whose parents haven't figured out how to help them access the program.
How can we work together and make this better for all kids?
OK
SPS has many faults, but it should not be compared to private schools like Lakeside. Lakeside is an easy school. It doesn't have services for SM4 or ELL students. It doesn't have Interagency students. It can serve high functioning 2E.
Lakeside is not what HCC should strive to be. Lakeside is not and never will be an inclusive school. It strives to be more inclusive and I'm happy to see Lakeside works hard at raising awareness, being honest about its privilege, having affinity groups, and providing scholarship to some students.
SPS takes them all.
Mayberry
I would tell you the same about Nova. That school saves lives. They have built a culture of acceptance AND great academics in an alternative program. Same for Intergency so yes, programs DO save lives.
Floor Pie, nice to hear from you again.
I think we have covered this topic for now but I just wrote Part One on Race so dive right in.