Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update:   there's a new movie out about a gifted child called...Gifted. Also, thank you to reader NE Parent for this link to a NY Times article on finding more gifted students of color.  It makes for fascinating reading.

Here's the link . Eligibility criteria and forms are available beginning on September 1st, 2016 at seattleschools.org/advlearning.

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...

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...

Dual-language in Washington State - a view from Seattle Globalist. A MacArthur Genius award went to an educational researcher , Angela Duckworth.  From Ed Week: Educational research psychologist and former teacher Angela Duckworth has devoted her career to understanding traits beyond IQ or test-taking abilities that predict a student's success— including grit and self-control. It is perhaps her own possession of these traits that helped lead the MacArthur Foundation to name Ms. Duckworth as one of this year's 24 MacArthur Fellows .   Duckworth and her colleagues began by developing ways to empirically measure grit and self-control. Even when controlling for cognitive ability, the presence of these traits were important predictors of success. Unlike simple measures of IQ or natural intelligence, these are traits that can be taught. From Ed Week, an article , Misdiagnosis in the Gifted (sure to start a fight here but I hope not).  As information f...

From Education Week : Next week ( July 21-27, 2013 ) marks National Parenting Gifted Children Week , a time of focused awareness and advocacy regarding the needs of gifted children. The week, which is listed on the National Special Events Registry, is sponsored by SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted) and coincides with SENG's annual conference , taking place this year July 19-21 in Orlando, Florida. One feature of this year's celebration is an offering of four free webinars about parenting gifted children. (Each of the offered webinars certainly has helpful insights for teachers, administrators, counselors, and other education and mental health professionals, too.)

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...