Seattle Schools Community Forum

As we all know, trying to understand how gifted education in SPS is presented is a losing proposition.  The District has this three-tier system that, on paper, looks somewhat orderly.  But, brush off the cobwebs on this old plan, and you find that:

Why, what it is, how to make it work and methods of implementing it.  A reader requested this thread. Two items to note.  Most of the searches on inclusion and education are around Sped students.  But yes, there is a whole subset of research on inclusion and gifted education.  I found a very good article about inclusion and gifted education that could be a the blueprint for going forward in SPS.  But SPS has not revealed what they are doing or why so it's hard to know if there is planned change for HC or just change. Let's start the discussion .

I came across two articles recently on gifted students.  One is quite good, the other somewhat useful but over the top (and the tone is distracting from the content, in my opinion). NOW, to start, if you don't agree that there are gifted students or the need for gifted education, please don't comment.   Because many readers here already know that conversation. Tomorrow we will find out what the Advanced Learning Taskforce has to say about how Seattle Public Schools might view these students and their programs.  This work may or may not guide what changes the Board approves district staff to do. I offer these articles as both educational and thought-provoking. Nearly every "gift" that a child has can come with/have a double-edge to it.  For example, athletes are only as good as their health/lack of injury.  Gifted kids have the ability to go faster and farther but often have behaviors that backfire on them from this ability. No one has a better child o...

The New York Times has an excellent series of articles called Room for Debate where they have various experts write an essay for or against a subject.  Their latest is about gifted education .  I didn't read each article thoroughly but two things did stand out. Professor Bruce Sacerdote had this to say: My paper with fellow economists James West and Scott Carrell examines peer effects among students at the Air Force Academy. We found that students benefit from their peers, but that these peer effects disappear if the group is comprised of the highest ability and lowest ability cadets. My work with economists Scott Imberman and Adriana Kugler examines peer effects from the arrival of Hurricane Katrina refugees in receiving schools. We discovered that high ability students benefit the most from high ability peers. And an experiment in primary schools in Kenya, researchers found that grouping students into classrooms based on prior achievement benefits al...

Work is continuing of the first of two Advanced Learning Taskforces.  I have only been able to attend one meeting (on November 5th) but it was a good one.  The oversight and facilitation of this Taskforce is quite different from the last one and for the better. Here's a link to the AL webpage ; details of the meeting schedule,minutes and PowerPoint presentations are available at the bottom of the page. The facilitator, Barbara Grant, is great.  She keeps people on task, keeps a careful eye on the clock and provokes expanded thinking.  Interim director Stephen Martin organizes the meetings and the agenda but wisely keeps out of her way. It was noted that in late January, there is some kind of gifted institute at Whitworth University (by Spokane) about ongoing issues in identifying gifted students that several members of the group were to attend. The meeting I attended had two good presentations.  One was by Dr. Roger Daniels who works in the AL office on...

A LOT of info in these links.  And a reminder - don't like gifted education, on principle or in specific?  Don't read this thread.   I offer this as information, not to start a fight.  There will be no comments on this as it is purely informational. Back to School Means Back to Segregated Gifted Programs for Some: New Book with Solutions.  From PRWeb: Vanderbilt education professor Donna Y. Ford has made it her mission to end segregation in gifted programs—a mission she’s not backing down from without a fight. Her recently released book, "Recruiting and Retaining Culturally Different Students in Gifted Education" (published by Prufrock Press Inc. this summer), details Ford's participation in a 2013 court case in which one Illinois school district was accused of discrimination against Hispanic students in its gifted program (the full report of the court case was released to the public in July 2013) and provides solutions for schools looking to ensure...

I had heard of this but never checked it out before - the online Visual Dictionary .   It could be helpful (and fun) for kids who are visual learners.  If only we had known this sooner about Michelle Rhee .  Interesting article from John Merrow- Who Created Michelle Rhee?  Turns out, all of us.  From Ed Week , School Board Transparency in the Digital Age. As online and digital interactions increase, so too does public concern that officials have more opportunities to violate state open-meetings and open-records laws meant to prevent them from communicating secretly. Maryland is among several states that are taking other steps to bring such laws into the 21st century. The legislature set up a joint committee on transparency and open government in 2011 to examine how Maryland can promote government transparency—in the state capital, Annapolis, and locally. Committee members evaluate current policies and practices on meetings and records and make recommendat...