Seattle Public Schools Ending Programs for Gifted Students
“Critics argued the students in HCC did not reflect the diversity of the community.”
This is all about the progressive concept of equity. Some students do better than others and we can’t have that.
Jason Rantz writes at KTTH Radio:
School district takes next step in ditching Seattle gifted program
Privileged progressives, donning their white knight armor, are in the next phase of a plan to end Seattle Public Schools’ gifted students program — known locally as its Highly Capable Cohort (HCC). They complained the HCC was too white.
HCC separates academically gifted students from others via different classrooms or entirely different schools. But in 2020, white Seattle school board directors voted to terminate the HCC over the objections of parents. HCC will be completely phased out by the 2027-28 school year.
Outraged more by the success of white and Asian students than by the untapped potential of black and Hispanic pupils, progressives would rather drag achievers down than elevate everyone. These self-proclaimed saviors boast on social media about tackling inequities, oblivious to the harm they inflict. Indeed, the program to replace the HCC, and be implemented in every classroom, ensures that gifted students will be unchallenged, struggling students will escape the attention they deserve and teachers will be overwhelmed. In other words, everyone will be equitably harmed.
Why did Seattle Public Schools gifted program end?
Critics argued the students in HCC did not reflect the diversity of the community. The move was prompted by Black Lives Matter activism.
In 2018, three years after Seattle Public Schools (SPS) hired an “equity specialist” to address so-called racial inequities, the students HCC served 13% multiracial, 11.8% Asian, 3.7% Hispanic and 1.6% black. (By 2023, it was 20% multiracial, 16% Asian, 8.2% Hispanic and 3.4% black.) Critics argue that because the HCC didn’t match the district’s diversity, the program was irredeemably racist and needed to be dismantled.
But parents, including those who are black, Asian and Hispanic, argued against closing them down. They argued that SPS should work harder to identify minority students who are eligible for HCC, rather then kill the program entirely.
One father pleaded that the Seattle School Board “consider the disservice you would be doing to the minorities that are already in the HCC program.” He argued that the gifted program “does more for Black children, particularly Black boys, than it does for their peers.”
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Comments
“Outraged more by the success of white and Asian students than by the untapped potential of black and Hispanic pupils, progressives would rather drag achievers down than elevate everyone.”
Isn’t this the essence of socialism/leftism?
Maleducation requires students to be reduced to the lowest common denominator, yielding nothing but mediocrity via gutting merit.
You don’t see this in schools in other countries, where the students will overwhelm our students on the global stage.
The left needs stupid, ignorant and compliant people, sheep in other words, that, lacking any critical thinking skills, will accept any pablum the government chooses to offer up.
And they dare to call themselves “educators.”
But this is nothing new. Nurturing the exceptional has always taken a backseat to babysitting the incapable, even in most non-public schools. Thinking back over just the programs that I have seen come and go, those years are littered with proudly announced “gifted and talented” programs that didn’t even make it through one school year — and the cut was always because the short-bus social club needed more money. One suspects this is how the kakistocracy ensures its own reproductive survival.
If memory serves, these programs were FOR EVERYBODY so that the financially disadvantaged amongst us WOULD NOT BE LEFT BEHIND.
Oh, the ironies……..
The wealthy will always be able to pay for “Gifted And Talented” instruction for their own children.
It is the financially disadvantaged children who now have roughly zero chance to excel in Washington .
“Democrats — making things better. Again.” (h/t Chris Plante)
Again, white liberal elitist leftists suppressing non-white minorities in the name of equality. More Dems carrying on the traditions of Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Robert Byrd.
Applications to the elite, private Lakeside School – where Bill Gates graduated- jump.
Coincidentally, the son of a childhood friend lives in Seattle. He is a graduate of an elite boarding school and an elite university, In 8th grade, he took the initiative to get into an elite boarding school because he didn’t want to end up at State U. (He was enrolled in a very good public educational system.) He and his wife are black. I wonder what their opinion is on the ending of the Seattle gifted program.
Go to home schooling while you still can.
Harrison Bergeron was intended to be satire. Unfortunately, the Seattle school board treated it as a how-to manual.
How about a little equity on the basketball team? Many decades ago in NY City, it was called the IGC program for intellectually gifted children. Seattle could use the same letters for intellectually grifted children.
Teaching all students to the lowest level of the class is not a good thing.
I just finished watching Silicon Valley for the third time. I guess that they didn’t get the diversity in casting memo.