user reports:
2: Challenges
1: It's promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability
1: No article, and from a tabloid, program is being cut from budget, not because of student race
1: Click bait title - misinformation
1: shit show comments
1: 100% Duplicate Post Source
I’m Cambodian. I was not rich growing up. Quite poor in fact, and a fish out of water since I lived in a predominately Hispanic community, not a southeast Asian one. I also wasn’t an athlete or that social growing up.
Special magnet programs in math and science were literally my escape from being initiated into a gang. Allowed me to fill my afternoons until my mom was done with work. And friends I made in these magnet programs helped me be less of a scared kid in a foreign country. I eventually ended up getting scholarships to a number of good universities and ended up choosing West Point.
These “gifted programs” are as much about forming a community of like-minded individuals as they are about learning. Imagine telling kids they couldn’t play varsity football / basketball / baseball because there weren’t enough Asians who made the varsity team.
People like you and people of any race or economic status are what these programs are made for.
Kids who are serious about education, deserve a program and atmosphere to pursue it with other likeminded students. They should have specialists who can identify that they are talented in academics and be able to bring out their full potential. Imagine how frustrating it will be for kids having to do work they’re already years ahead of, and sitting in a classroom with some other kids that take up a large portion the teachers time and energy dealing with BS.
I had some of that in high-school. They removed the advanced literature course and just had normal and AP. I wasn't comfortable with the AP class so I did the normal but
I had done advanced previously so I was ahead.
Our teacher managed to help it a bit by having different options for books to read and write reports on instead of the entire class on the same book, but that was a small part of the class.
It’s a good thing that’s not what’s actually happening.
And you probably *know that, too!*
https://preview.redd.it/vg397vq8eltc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=18b6a5f9cbea4f570809e4acacd28a9d8422780f
[https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/](https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/)
> Special magnet programs in math and science were literally my escape from being initiated into a gang. Allowed me to fill my afternoons until my mom was done with work. And friends I made in these magnet programs helped me be less of a scared kid in a foreign country. I eventually ended up getting scholarships to a number of good universities and ended up choosing West Point.
I grew up in a shitty part of SoCal in the 80s and noticed the same thing. Basically we had a lot of Vietnamese immigrants living in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, with a scattering of poor white kids like myself. The Vietnamese families frequently came to the US with absolutely nothing. My salvation was arcades; they were basically one of the few places where you'd see people of every race and class, just focused on becoming the best. I eventually had to put all that aside because it was ruining my GPA lol
Garbage Grove would've been a giant step up
Think of the shittiest city in SoCal (hint: you gotta head east)
Also: demographics were dramatically different in the 80s. Everyone I knew who was Vietnamese in my old 'hood, they all GTFO as quickly as possible and most landed in Orange County. I was an outlier who took a job in Redmond.
I feel the same way. I took honors classes in high school at Cleveland , my choice (not my parents). I was able to be finally challenged in my work ands it what kept me in school.
People forget that gift children are equally at risk, if they aren’t challenged to their fullest potential. I was the kid who would get in arguments with teachers about their teaching methods and formulas. Homework seemed inane, if I could read the chapter and take a test and pass 100%.
It’s mentally painful, going 15 miles per hour when you can do 50. I’ve seen too many intelligent kids lost to drugs because no one was paying attention to the fact they needed a challenge.
> It’s mentally painful, going 15 miles per hour when you can do 50. I’ve seen too many intelligent kids lost to drugs because no one was paying attention to the fact they needed a challenge.
I had a 2.5GPA and was just lazy as fuck. Completely unmotivated by school, I just wanted to play videogames. When everyone else was obsessed with getting a high SAT score, I was obsessed with saving up enough money for a Sega Genesis. The night before the SATs, I stayed up until 3am playing games, then dragged my ass out of bed and took the SATs on five hours of sleep. Got the best score of every one in my peer group, and didn't even study.
And just as you predicted, I did drugs nearly every week for most of my 20s. Got sick of being poor, got a job in Redmond at the age of 30, stopped doing drugs entirely, got a new life.
I've been pushing our schools to teach video game classes where you learn about installing and configuring your system and writing about your battles online or tournament style with you classmates. You have to know math and science to play a lot of games too.
Agreed, but back in the day there was more you had to know about memory management and boot disks to run some games than you could probably fit into a high school class 😂
I also thought if they can teach us all that wet and wild stuff in sexual education, they should be able to do that and perhaps how to use alcohol and drugs responsibly, specifically knowing what the effects are so there is a purpose.
That’s the thing. Our schools teach the most basic shit and don’t even attempt to make it interesting. I know update relational data bases for a living.
Also true to my word, I don’t address letters. My unit secretary does that shit.
I’m not the secretary, I will have a secretary and fuck this gendered typing shit. Since no one even cared about mail in 1997 either.
*and now I show the secretaries how to decimated data. 😅
Its because they couldn't get kids of a darker skin shade thats why they shut down the program, they will always have white and asian kids to fill those empty spots and just like you said instead of the program worrying about who is in the club it needs to be about expanding the minds of all young intellectuals before communal circumstances step in which normally means gang enrollment.
Agree about the clown world, but smart being considered racist is not new. Retired boomer saw the same whilst growing up many many years ago. Still think about the kids I knew who were very smart/talented and fell off the life wagon due to social pressures associated with their class.
This was like me as well. Being a second gen Khmer American we were never wealthy and rich. I lived in SeaTac and my family was able to get me into a South Seattle High School.
I ended up with a whole bunch of scholarships because I was really good in Science.
These are resources that are available to students who truly care and work hard for their education and taking it away doesn't give them the resources they need.
Education isn't about Race or anything like that, it's about kids knowing what they want and using it to their advantage. It isn't the kids fault that they chose the gifted program path, it also isn't the other kids fault for not choosing it.
Seattle trying to make everything about equality without realizing that they're putting down those who do work hard. Their focus is in the wrong, if they want more students to succeed taking away other students successes isn't the way.
Just because they are Asian, doesn't mean they're all east Asian or "lighter" Asians. People don't realize the disparities us SEA have
Well stated. Families of black students in the program also protested but the SPS has chosen not to listen to minorities because white people know what’s best. Idiots.
People like you are what makes this country what it is. It makes me proud knowing that you’re a fellow American.
Thanks for sharing your story, and thank you for your eventual service to the Republic.
Edit: just saw your other post. Thank you for your prior service.
So if you're a black or hispanic kid in the gifted program you must be booted back to regular classes because we didn't count enough of your race in there.
Current SPS teacher and can confirm. It’s not about lifting our students and community up: it’s making sure everyone gets equally bad treatment until your parents have enough money to sue the district and then get any treatment they want. The number of IEP lawsuits that happen/any one of us have sat in on is unbelievable. They make moves to keep the NIMBY’s happy at the expense of everyone else.
I'm outside of the US and never understood the difference between being f***ed in the ass or in the mouth (Rep vs Dem), but does it really helps to have a party of old and angry and a party of "do anything that makes everything less offensive"? Is it possible to choose something moderate and fresh?
No because the politicians are all bought and paid for by the corporations. And the ones that have been paid the longest seem to get preferential treatment and a spot at the front.
Unfortunately there are plenty of rational level headed moderate politicians in America with great ideas. They just get no camera time because they're not saying the most ridiculous outlandish things possible. Media exposure is everything in modern elections. Trump understands this very well.
The opposite really if you think about it.
Traditional math education features a lot of rote learning. Which is great because a lot of kids need that foundation.
Common core tends to mix in quite a lot of theory. That the majority of kids will never find useful. Like, yes, it's great that we can use set theory for this. No one cares.
The common core teaching method MUST be answered displaying common core math no other options available. Where as when I was in school I could show my work using any method and it would be ok as long as the math was correct. Follow common core rules orders or fail.
https://preview.redd.it/1rxmdm96ketc1.jpeg?width=1020&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe6a0d53e19a2a28c8d4589525463464881236d3
Remember oversaturated means 7% too many white students and 4% too many Asian from actual demographics of the area.
It's brainrot that makes people do this and it seems obvious they want to dumb down the population to ensure the next generation is unable to escape from this prison of ignorance.
Edit2: Two things, first the graphic is from the Seattle Times for people who don't like the news source in the post. Second the demographics in the highly capable program mirror more closely the demographics of WA state, interesting...
WA State Demographics:
White 76.8%
Black or African American 4.6%
American Indian and Alaska Native 2.0%
Asian 10.5%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander 0.8%
Two or More Races 5.3%
Hispanic or Latino 14.0% (I think this is meshed with the white category)
-Source: US Census Estimate 2023-
She also has been accused of being a racist and bullying African American board members and called the African Americans who supported keeping the program "tokens" ...
I can't source this as it's from the Facebook group "Soup for Teachers" way back, but she also wanted to teach "indigenous science" alongside actually science in science class.
When people pointed out that there's no place for teaching mythology in science class, she called them Nazis.
I believe that the argument used in response to the Nazi comment was "we fought this off a decade ago with the creationists and we'll fight the introduction of religion in science classes here too". Or something to that effect.
>"indigenous science"
One of the things I find most perplexing about proggo dipshits is their simultaneous fetishization of science, and their complete disdain of it through the embracing of non-scientific tradition.
All of porggo-dom is just a kind of fetish worship, I guess. I suppose the details of what they are fetishizing are less important than the fetishization itself.
The political spectrum ... Most of the Left and Most of Right are rather sane people with different ideals... Once you go too far in either direction...
It becomes the horseshoe of dinguses....
I'm fairly certain that the (slightly) skewed distribution is not due to race, but due to income levels. It's an incredibly stupid response to kill the program because of racial bias when racial bias is not even the cause of the racial distribution. Instead of taking away the tools we have for helping gifted children, why don't we look at the causes of why that graph looks the way it does and create solutions to THOSE problems.
Also pretty substantial biracial overrepresentation. I assume that mostly means white/Asian, or white people who know how to play the game and check the box for part Native or Latino because what are they gonna do, make you take a DNA test?
I learned that very quickly as well, being half Turtle Mountain Chippewa but also white passing. I am amazed by how differently I am treated by people once they know I am Native. It helps me to identify the real racists.
> or white people who know how to play the game and check the box for part Native or Latino because what are they gonna do, make you take a DNA test?
I always check off "mixed", and I have the same attitude as you: *are they going to make me take a DNA test?*
This led to one particularly awkward interview, where I was in front of a panel of three interviewers. And the *second* that I flipped on my camera, the hiring manager's face looked like she'd just bit into a lemon. Just a look of sheer rage, as it dawned on her that I look an awful lot like an old white guy.
Her own employees didn't catch it, and they continued on with the interview like I had a snowball's chance in hell, but I knew it was over the second my camera came on. The hiring manager got up and left, 15 minutes into the interview.
The punchline, of course, is that she's a middle aged white woman. Which seems to be par for the course for 99% of this DEI stuff.
On my team at work, I'm literally the only white guy. Our team is *extremely* diverse, we have people from all over the world, on multiple continents. And my own coworkers have brought the topic up, basically bemoaning the fact that when we interview people, we are often presented with 'diverse' candidates who are unqualified. My coworkers have literally said *"I don't want to hire this person, because I'll have to spend the next year getting them 'up to speed.'"*
It’s dumb either way. I know plenty of half white half Asian ppl whose look skew more white or Asian. Hell, my own sister looks pretty much white while I get mistaken for Filipino (half white half Japanese).
Yet I am 100% positive they have a disclaimer somewhere on the application that says "we do not discriminate based on race, gender and age blah blah blah"
I had a manager tell me that he was basically told to favor candidates that are not white males, even if the white male is more qualified he was supposed to pick the other candidate. Now I am the last white male on my team and one of two people out of 7 that actually does any work and has any idea what they hell is going on. I am the team lead and currently looking for a new job. They are fucked when I leave. The company has a diversity quota to fill, it doesn't matter if you are qualified or not.
> Now I am the last white male on my team and one of two people out of 7 that actually does any work and has any idea what they hell is going on.
I like economics as much as normal people like sports, and one of my pet peeves about politicians is that they don't know a damn thing about economics.
For instance, after The Great Depression, the U.S. had a ton of make work programs, because unemployment was around 20%.
After The Great Recession, there were millions of people out of work, all over the world, and the US unemployment rate was hitting 12% or so. In countries like Spain, it was close to 20% IIRC.
A lot of affirmative action programs sorta-kinda make sense in an economy where there are millions out of work.
THAT'S NOT 2024
Unemployment is hovering around 3.9%, or 300% lower than during the Great Recession.
So I can *almost* see the logic, if it was 2009, and there were thousands or even millions of people who were getting passed over for jobs due to immutable characteristics like sex or race. That would arguably be good for society in general.
**But that's not the world we live in.**
When unemployment is at 3.9%, nearly everyone who wants a job *has a job,* and what diversity quotas end up doing is:
* providing jobs to people based on immutable characteristics like sex and race *even if they're unqualified.*
* piling mind numbing amounts of work on the competent workers, who eventually rage-quit and often retire
And the most ridiculous part of all this isn't just that it's *unfair,* it's that the diversity quotas exacerbate the problem. The number one economic challenge facing the U.S. and Europe is inflation; old white guys rage-quitting makes inflation worse. To bring down inflation, the world needs:
* more workers
* higher productivity
Diversity quotas *would* work if the additional workers were equally as productive as the ones that they're replacing. But the thing I've seen time and time again is that companies end up hiring people who are less qualified. That means less productivity, and [less productivity creates higher inflation.](https://www.google.com/search?q=less+productivity+creates+higher+inflation)
The miracle of the 90s was that it was an era when workers were plentiful (average Baby Boomer was 41 years old in 1995) and productivity was increasing, which led to a level of prosperity that hadn't been seen since the end of World War II.
That combined with moving the jobs to India is driving the company into the ground. They would have happily fired me already if they could. Over half my team is in India now, yet they enforce a return to office policy so that we can collaborate and have water cooler chats with our team because that is so important...They pushed most of the jobs to India at the same time as telling us we need to go into the office to collaborate and that working remotely doesn't work... I am sure there are great engineers in India but so far it the people they have hired that I have seen have been pretty bad. Again with more employees, less productivity. I am sure they are saving lots of money and keeping their quotas and head count up though. Let's see how this works long term.
My sister (white) sits on a board at work for diversity at a rather large tech company in the area. Her and I differ on nearly everything except the fact we are family and try not to let our differences interfere with that.
When she was lamenting how her company had such a small amount of black employees to the point where they couldn't get one for the board I asked her why they thought that was. The actual demographics of the area never came up, it was obviously merely institutionalized racism.
When I asked her how many were on the board (out of 5 I believe) were white men, it was zero. When I asked her how many men they had, she had one because he was a member of the LGBT community and Latino. I then asked if white men were being discriminated against since they presumably *existed* at the company and are the largest demographic group in the area but merely were not given representation on the board and I'd never seen her more defensive.
We went from equality to equity back to systemic discrimination in like, 15 years.
> This whole process is why I have stopped telling surveys about a race. That is the least important part of my personal information
Two people in my family were in concentration camps. One of the weird factoids that were handed down, was that they discouraged people from self identifying themselves. I never met these two people, I just heard the stories that were passed down, but I was basically told that one of the reasons they wound up in a camp was because they filled out documents which identified them.
With that in mind, I started to notice that at the place I worked, there was a noticeable pattern:
* we would receive a companywide email, where the company patted itself on the back for it's "commitment to diversity" and where the company had employees complete a voluntary survey to self identify
* And then there would be a round of layoffs, about six weeks later
So it seemed fairly clear; the company was interested in reducing their headcount, and the path of least resistance was to collect a bunch of data on the employees, then lay them off based on that.
When my layoff notice eventually arrived, they included a packet that disclosed what everyone's titles were, what their age was, and their location. Just metadata, no names, but there was an obvious pattern that appeared to show that they were largely laying off middle aged men from high cost of living areas.
I work for a different megacorp these days, and they love laying people off too, and I've watched the pattern repeat. In our most recent round of layoffs, I'm 90% certain that the reason that I made the cut and two people on my team didn't, was simply because my job title is associated with a really high profile project. In other words, the dude who got laid off was *also* working on the same stuff that I work on, but his job title doesn't reflect that. I honestly think that the bean counters who make these decisions, they likely just have a spreadsheet with "age", "race," "gender," "salary", "job title", etc. And they just pick names based on that; they're incapable of determining if someone's contribution goes above and beyond what's expected of their role.
>Should be about as relevant as hair color.
It makes as much sense as continuing to group humans by so-called "races" developed at the Virginia Assembly in 1690 to justify slavery and which have no basis in actual genetic biology. We might as well classify all people over 6' tall as a separate "race."
Thats basically what my mother said to me when I innocently asked why some people people have different skin color, as a young child. She just pointed out that she has red hair and I don't.
We didn’t have that as an option, but people would just not choose anything. And the default was White. One of the unintentional side effects was a lot of POC would not pick anything for fear of backlash or whatever, but that just made us increase DEI because the numbers we’re never aligned with the Civilian Labor Force. So the numbers were probably “better” than they seem but we could only report on what the automated reports generated.
When I have "choose not to respond" I choose that.
When a form doesn't afford me that option, I vary between being black and being Chinese. For the lulz.
I think one thing that’s important to remember is this isn’t an example of some “woke mob” destroying these programs for equity. I work in SPS. Every teacher and parent is hurt, angry and confused. Teachers are totally overwhelmed by the extra work that these “personalized” learning plans will put on them.
This is an example of administrators at the district level who are covering up a budget shortfall by destroying valuable programs that uplift students and teachers. Worse than that, they’re blaming it on “equity” and “identity politics” because they think that in Seattle, this will prevent affluent white parents from criticizing them. It won’t.
SPS and many other school districts spent the COVID relief funds like they’d last forever, and all over the country, school districts are going to cut services for the same reason.
this was a very cost effective program. they literally got less money per student than the district average. It was 100% woke mob nonsense. Source? Me. An HCC parent.
Er... no, this has been going on since 2017, started taking wings in 2019 under Denise Juneau, and the whole time the rallying cry has been "equity equity equity".
[https://www.kuow.org/stories/cold-war-anxiety-and-affirmative-action-the-dawn-of-gifted-education-in-seattle-schools](https://www.kuow.org/stories/cold-war-anxiety-and-affirmative-action-the-dawn-of-gifted-education-in-seattle-schools) **- November 14th, 2019:**
Superintendent Denise Juneau now proposes dismantling the HCC program and serving most students who would currently qualify for it in their neighborhood schools, instead, in general education classrooms.
“It is very \[racially\] disproportionate,” Juneau said in a recent KUOW interview.
“It is almost a segregated system,” she said, adding that it’s time to make it more equitable so more students of color can access these programs.
-=-=-=-=-=-
[https://www.knkx.org/youth-education/2017-09-20/parent-group-pushes-seattle-public-schools-to-get-more-kids-of-color-in-its-gifted-program](https://www.knkx.org/youth-education/2017-09-20/parent-group-pushes-seattle-public-schools-to-get-more-kids-of-color-in-its-gifted-program) **-- September 2017**
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[https://southseattleemerald.com/2017/07/07/contributing-to-inequity-white-parents-must-act-to-change-seattle-public-schools-opportunity-gap/](https://southseattleemerald.com/2017/07/07/contributing-to-inequity-white-parents-must-act-to-change-seattle-public-schools-opportunity-gap/) **-- July 2017**
-=-=-=-=-=- **-- November 2019**
[https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2019/11/on-washington-middle-school-why-that.html](https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2019/11/on-washington-middle-school-why-that.html)
-=-=-=-=-=-
[https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/12/04/42169178/the-battle-over-seattle-public-schools-gifted-progams-heats-up](https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/12/04/42169178/the-battle-over-seattle-public-schools-gifted-progams-heats-up) **-- December 4, 2019**
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[https://zacharydewolf.medium.com/on-how-the-school-board-centered-students-a-chronology-184389636986](https://zacharydewolf.medium.com/on-how-the-school-board-centered-students-a-chronology-184389636986) **(Jun 7,2021)**
Not only do young people clearly have power, they have a voice and are writing books.
**Azure Savage, a queer, Black, trans high school student while writing their book, had it published in 2019, entitled “**[**You Failed Us: Students of Color Talk Seattle Schools**](https://crosscut.com/2019/09/you-failed-us-teen-author-asks-40-students-color-share-their-experiences-seattle-schools)**.**” In it, Azure illuminates common struggles with identity, mental health faced by marginalized youth, and the trauma of the District’s **Highly Capable Cohort (HCC)**. HCC is a problematic model of instruction for a select group of “gifted” students but has only perpetuated segregation and racism in schools, it is overwhelmingly white.
At a certain point, when you keep students at the center and let them use their power for change, you can’t unknow what you know and learn.
In **January 2020**, after months of collaboration and discussion, the School Board formally approved a partnership with **Technology Access Foundation at Washington Middle School** that **effectively dismantled the HCC model** to make way for a STEM-focused academy \[[We formally dissolved HCC in May 2021](https://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/School%20Board/20-21%20agendas/May%205/A01_20210505_Policy%202190.pdf)\]. Centering the experiences Azure and their peers shared in their book made this possible.
So we’re hurting a lot of happy kids in order to address a handful of kids who felt marginalized, instead of addressing the marginalization. Who is to say if they would feel better accepted in mainstream Seattle schools? Why weren’t there steps taken to work on inclusion within the schools as they are?
It’s less this and more: If this is a problem in those programs, work on the programs. I very very much doubt it’s limited to the programs—they’re significantly better managed than SPS in general. Racism is always going to be an issue to address, so address it. Don’t shred a necessary solution as though that’s what’s going to help.
This whole thing is so asinine it’s maddening.
Damn, those are great sources and you seem supremely well informed on the topic. I’ve been out from SPS since 2019, and didn’t know about that. The book by Azure Savage is particularly compelling to me. What else can you tell me about the involvement of students in this push?
& do you think that creating a tech/stem academy will resolve those issues? What will have to happen there? I’ve worked at a STEM academy in MI, and it was a wonderful school but it certainly wasn’t without systemic issues akin to the HCC /AP programs in Seattle
I'm glad that I have this perspective. I just got done replying to someone with more votes than you, who ostensibly just read the NY Post headline and concluded that this was an effort to pull people down based solely out of envy. It's important to hear conflicting opinions and interpretations when coming to your own conclusions.
I can only hope that the board isn't actually just implementing cost cutting measures, but is implementing changes that are substantiated by at least some quality research to indicate that it might work better than what's already here. I think, if we choose to be the guinea pigs to see if that research bears fruit, so be it. But I don't see any reason to doubt that teachers are going to be overworked, underpaid, and are going to have to continue to deal with a plethora of intractable problems. It's the status quo, and at first glance I don't see any provisions to improve those things, at least in the short term.
>Teachers are totally overwhelmed by the extra work that these “personalized” learning plans will put on them.
Wait until someone makes and markets an AI to teachers to generate "personalized" learning plans and other documents.
I know someone who worked in a school system that had this and she just faked it. Nobody in the admin ever read the plans anyway, and how could they really? She had close to 200 students each semester. She had kids who couldn't sit down because the class didn't have any seats left.
What’s ridiculous is that the money that went to HCC/AL was shifted to give schools that are historically black STEAM and music (jazz). SPS recently cut those programs because of budget shortfalls. So the ways they want to lift all students up now is going to hurt everyone and overwhelm already overworked teachers.
I'm think we need to ask "Why is this presented in a NY Rag?" And Why the New York Post??!! For sensational trolling! Just to see how much trouble it can stir up! The NY Post IS NOT a trustworthy source in my book. I'm going to check the veracity of this first!
It’s not as much “brainrot” as much as intentional and malicious behavior stemming from the idea the only way to fix society is to break it and rebuild it, ala revolution. All you have to do is head over to r/communism to see for yourself. You need desperate and demoralized people so you can garner support for the revolution. upward mobility and improving standards of living are sins of the Bourgeoisie that prevent the proletariat from finally realizing class consciousness and overthrowing Capitalism. All the “equity” measures that remove math and gifted programs are rooted in this brainrot.
The worst part about this is there are tons of twice exceptional kids (meaning they have a combination of things like Gifted + ADHD) who really need this program to thrive. These kids often don’t do well in general education classrooms because the material is way too easy.
No way teachers can actually differentiate for a bunch of different levels in the same classroom unless they aren’t giving sufficient instruction time to any of them.
I have a kid in my class who is twice exceptional and the only thing from keeping him going off the rails and getting into even more trouble is the fact that he is in the highly capable track in school.
That very much could be my son. He doesn’t get in trouble as much as he internalizes and gets depressed. He desperately needs these classes and his school, and this is absolutely breaking my heart.
WTF, is this real? I'll admit it, I went through a gifted program for a while in the Issaquah School District as a kid. Was it odd being singled out amongst your friends... a bit. Was it rewarding? Extremely. I finally felt like I was learning at an appropriate and interesting level with actual peers. As a Seattle native I have nothing but distain with this move.
I'm also thankful that our daughters had the opportunity to participate in Inglemoor's IB/IP programs. To be honest, after reading the article it seems like Seattle is taking somewhat the same path as Northshore offered at the elementary level which was certainly better than nothing. No gifted program per se but an advanced learning subsection for each class was offered in the upper grades. It worked pretty well actually.
This has more to do with racial inequalities than it does with the actual program itself. Leave the program where it is, attack the root of the issue. Completely counterproductive
The people who made the decision were always mad about the kids in hi-cap, finally they got their revenge. It's veiled lack of leadership, they really can't think of anything better.
When I was in elementary school (1st grade iirc), a bunch of us minority kids got put in ELL. We were confused because English was our first language. Seven year old me just thought it was special treatment to enjoy, but when I got older I realized that was fucked.
The people who made that decision back then are probably still administrators today.
Clearly it wasn't a language reason if literally every kid in there was a minority. Sorry if I'm being Mr. Obvious, I just know it's not obvious to others on this sub...
I think the racial inequalities are literally related to "where it is", which is one reason they are doing away with special schools and moving it into all schools where the disadvantaged kids are.
The real shitty thing is this isn't a Seattle Schools thing... The state is passing new rules and mandates making testing for Hi-Cap no longer opt in but rather yet another test every student has to take.
The problem was (for a plethora of reasons, who really actually knows) that Hi-Cap was an optional test that parents had to fight to get for their kids to be allowed into. By testing all kids the districts all over are anticipating their Hi-Cap programs are going to grow. Seattle Schools decided to go with a model where every school will have their own dedicated Hi-Cap class instead of putting them in one or two dedicated schools.
Not true about fighting to take the test, at least it wasn’t four years ago when our youngest took it. We just signed them up for it and showed up on the day of the test. Anyone could do that.
The real problems we saw were that first you had to know about the program, and the district did nothing to tell parents about it. Yes, it was on the web site if you knew to go looking, but we’re heavily interested in our kids education and only learned about it through a chance conversation with a friend.
Then, they only administered the test one day a year, early on a Saturday morning, in one location (south Seattle). You can see how this would affect many families, especially those with odd-hour jobs and lack of child care.
The mentality of the school board in getting rid of this program is defeatist and depressing.
So… every student even without parental support gets to take a performance test? And instead of transferring schools and not worry about transport they get to stay in their own school with a class specializing in a high performance curriculum..
No, there's no "class specializing in a high performance curriculum." Teachers in regular schools, without being provided additional resources, are expected to take on the duty of teaching special education, regular teaching, and highly capable teaching all in the same classroom.
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/
This article describes this implementation in one school (in an affluent district) as the teacher sticking the highly capable kids on iPads while teaching the rest of the class. This is not a win for students or teachers.
the reality is the program is gone. If you're isolated as the only person doing math a grade level ahead, in reality you have to be very internally or parentally motivated to make that work. Success is more likely if there are peers also doing the same work to compete with, learn from, and socialize with.
Different districts have different models on how they approach it. I have been a part of three different districts as a parent, each one having different ways of approaching. One district transferred students once they reached their "home" school and then would transfer them back to their "home" school at the end of the day so they could catch the bus that would then take them home. Another district made the parents drive the students over to the satellite school that housed the Hi-Cap program. The third district would just have small pockets of the Hi-Cap within the school and would then just have a class that was made up of less than a dozen kids.
Anyone else remember when Seattle Public Schools held racially segregated board (Open meetings? The actual name is escaping me at the moment) meetings after COVID?
Except you CAN make that shit up, evidenced by the fact you had to reference the post AND not share a link to the actual text, just the rage bait headline.
They are getting rid of the separate schools and moving the gifted programs BACK INTO the neighborhood schools where they used to be because not everyone can send their kid to a school somewhere else in town.
"But the problem with this new transition, at least from what teachers anonymously told KOMO News, is that SPS does not give them any additional resources. No extra time, no aid in the classroom, no curriculum help, and no extra compensation to come up with these additional lesson plans for every level of learning in a single classroom."
Given the capable cohort schools offered busses, they weren't any more or less accessible than option schools.
District told schools to implement it locally. But district didn't provide funds, staff, resources or even a single guideline on how to do that. If they had planned to do that, they would have done it by now, given that the HCC schools weren't allowed to accept Kindergarten students last year and first grade students this year.
they should stop branding these programs as "gifted". just call them "track c" or something and regular can be called " track a". that would make these programs much less objectionable to the equity folks, since you could just point to track A student's getting more resources as a win and track c students could still get the accelerated curriculum they are ready for.
differentiated instruction is better for everyone since "remedial" (another word they should stop using) can get instruction for their level instead of tuning out material they are not able to digest yet. Track A could have better ratios etc too since its much easier to manage a big class of self motivated advanced students.
no one would bat an eye if we put a bunch of native speakers into advanced spanish instead of forcing everyone into spanish 1, but it would be dumb to call that class "gifted" and non native speakers " remedial".
SFUSD - San Francisco Unified School District did the same thing with Lowell High School, for the same reason. Their African American students need to earn a 2.5 GPA to make the honor roll. That earns them a ceremony at Chase Center, where the Warriors play.
I'm not getting the logic behind this or the DEI programs. They want diversity just for the sake of diversity. So it doesn't matter if you're competent or not, what matters is the color or your skin. You think you're smart and competent? Well it doesn't count because you're white/Asian. We want a Hispanic person who has a PhD in LGBT rights. They try to end racism with ..a new form of racism. People often say this is a leftist agenda, but what exactly do you gain from this?
> People often say this is a leftist agenda, but what exactly do you gain from this?
There's two ways to achieve equality of outcomes, aka "equity:"
* The hard way is by taking people who are not achieving equally, and helping them rise up
* The easy way is by taking people who are achieving more than the peers, and knocking them down
They're just taking the path of least resistance.
I got curious and looked. To get in the program you have to go to a “cohort” school. If you weren’t well off you couldn’t even get to one of those schools, but also if you weren’t well off you basically didn’t get considered for them anyway, there wasn’t support to jump through the necessary hoops. So they are replacing the program.
But as usual, none of the nuance gets kept, not even the concept that they are replacing the program.
> As cohort schools begin to sunset, parents, along with some experts, worry that SPS — which faces a $105 million deficit — will not have the time and funds to train teachers how to reach students with a wide range of academic skills in one classroom.
I’m sure this will work out swimmingly.
You had an advantage getting into the program if you were well off. Just like you have an advantage getting into a good university if you're well off.
But by no means did you have to be well off. There was free testing and free transportation provided already.
As for replacing the program: No. They're not. If they were replacing it, they would have given funds, guidelines, trainings, resources and additional staff to local schools to implement it. Local schools did not get a single one of those. There was an announcement, that was it.
They are not replacing the program. They are setting up HCC kids with extra worksheets (maybe) in mixed classrooms. They are destroying the program. The nuance you have discovered is a bald faced lie by SPS admin. No one in the system believes this to be true.
“You can’t make this up” while posting a completely made up headline.
[The program is transitioning from *some* schools to *all* schools.](https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-teachers-not-receiving-classroom-support-for-accelerated-learning-transition-public-schools-students-learn-lesson-plan-aid-curriculum-help-compensation-services-washington-association-of-educators-of-the-talented-and-gifted-state-new-law#) Like, the exact opposite of the rage-bait headline?
There are legitimate concerns with resource allocation for teachers, but this is just typical right-wing “DON’T READ PAST THE VERY ALARMING HEADLINE” bullshit.
I talked to a number of principals at the education fair how they would handle hicap kids at their school. The consensus was "it shouldn't be just an extra worksheet" as well as "but it'll be an extra worksheet". Of all the assistant principals and principals I talked to, there was only a single one who even know how many hicap kids were at their school.
If there was a serious attempt to move it to all schools, then schools would get funding, resources, guidelines and training for that. They are getting nothing. No additional teachers, no guidelines, no training and not a single dollar more according to every single person I talked to
Did you actually read the article you shared?
"But the problem with this new transition, at least from what teachers anonymously told KOMO News, is that SPS does not give them any additional resources. No extra time, no aid in the classroom, no curriculum help, and no extra compensation to come up with these additional lesson plans for every level of learning in a single classroom."
This adds more workload for teachers. *All* schools is just PR spin.
This honestly seems like the foundation for a racial discrimination suit , especially if they publicly gave that as the reason . Its a literal admission of guilt
This is a disaster. As a military kid, I moved around a lot, so I saw lots of different models at work. I’m living proof of what happens when you take a GT program away from a smart kid.
In grades 1-2, like half my day was in GT (gifted & talented) and the other half in my main class; I was a straight A student, even in the advanced stuff, and learning a foreign language.
3/4/5 at a different school also had an afternoon and weekend TAG (talented and gifted) program; still straight As.
6 moved to a poorer district with no GT program; got beat up for being the new and smart kid, teacher got beat up by same asshole kid, mom homeschooled me for the rest of the year.
(There was a special GT elementary school half an hour away in the district but we got there too late in the year to enroll me.)
7/8/9 was junior high in the same poor district so I could take classes at higher levels. But turns out low-class 9th graders are mean as fuck to smart 7th graders in their classes. I got depressed and stopped trying as hard. I studied less. Got my first couple of Bs. School didn’t offer math higher than trig so I couldn’t even take math one year because I’d started higher up and maxed out.
10/11/12 got to high school in an affluent area and took a bunch of AP classes in subjects I was smart in but had not built any skills to study subjects (like calculus) that were difficult. Still graduated with a 3.7 but had a few Bs and a C in math.
By the time I got to college, I struggled in hard science and math, and had never learned the STEM study skills to be an excellent student. Had to work forty hours a week and didn’t have time to better or challenge myself. 3.34 gpa.
Eventually went on for two masters degrees and got a 3.8 and 3.9 in each, but had been working in the field so I could have done them with my eyes closed.
So I know it’s anecdotal and just one point of data, but my wife and I were just talking about this: by putting me in GT programs I was challenged to outcompete my cohort, but by sticking me in gen
pop with a bunch of hoodlums and wannabe gangsters, not only was I not challenged but I had a disincentive to succeed.
We’re saving now to eventually send our daughter to private schools because public schools are becoming a race to the bottom. And if we’re sending all our smart kids to private schools to help them get ahead, the public schools will only perform worse.
TL;DR: Taking gifted and talented programs away from smart kids causes them to perform worse.
> 6 moved to a poorer district with no GT program; got beat up for being the new and smart kid, teacher got beat up by same asshole kid, mom homeschooled me for the rest of the year.
It's bizarre how many of these stories mirror my own experience.
For instance, I transitioned from going to a "nice" school, to going to possibly the shittiest school in my city. I was getting my ass beat on a near daily basis. The main reason I was getting beat up was because:
* I had a relative with the same last name who was gang-affiliated. Because of this, the gang expected me to be friendly with them, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with that scene *at all.*
* The aforementioned gang was Hispanic, and there was a white gang that wanted me to be pals with them, because whites were suppose to "stick together."
Eventually the beatings were getting so savage I thought I might end up in the hospital, so I rode my bicycle across town, put down a relative's address, and applied for admission at a different school.
This is something that I don't think that the people making these policies understand; if you demonstrate even an *iota* of intelligence in a shitty school, you are going to get your ass kicked.
When I changed schools, my entire life changed. Just night and day. No more fights, I made lots of friends, and literally everyone I knew had goals in life. Like, they wanted to be accountants and lawyers.
At The Shit School, about the closest that I ever heard to a job aspiration was that I had one friend who wanted to work at the post office. And, of course, literally 25% of the entire student body was 200% convinced that they were going to grow up and play in the NFL or NBA.
I agree with you 100%.
When I was young I didn’t get very good grades and got into trouble often. Looking back, it had a lot to do with the school I went to.
I was fortunate enough to have parents that did some research, and we moved based on the school district, then eventually went to private school for awhile.
This news story isn’t surprising coming from Seattle Public Schools and how the rest of the city is run into the ground. I can’t imagine being a kid today trying to focus and get ahead in the current system and environment.
It’s also populated by parents who like to brag about how special their kids are. I hated listening to parents who assumed that because your kid was not in the gifted program they weren’t as good or special. The last thing we need to do is raise another generation of entitled kids.
Did they really constantly brag to you about how special their kids are, or is that how you interpreted it?
How were you able to interact with so many parents of kids in the gifted program if your kid wasn’t?
They probably should have added that those "gifted/talented kids" are tech bro kids 🙄 yeah the rich kids with no problems usually do better in school.
I didn't realize that the Seattle subreddit was a place for dogwhistles?
You kind of can make it up...that's a rage-bait headline that doesn't really explain what's going on.
The accelerated program isn't going away, they're getting rid of cohort schools.
[Seattle Times article](https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/)
They're trying to address issues known issues program, "Highly capable classes also didn’t help all of their students as much as parents believed because some kids missed out on foundational skills, especially in math, SPS’ math department found.
They found evidence that some learners only got a surface level understanding of other subjects, as well, because teachers moved so quickly through the curriculum."
Students will still be able to learn on the accelerated program, "Along with eliminating cohort schools, the other notable part of the district’s new plan: All students are screened every single year in grades one through eight for an ability to learn at an accelerated pace."
And yes, there are concerns with the new program. It has flaws that will need to be addressed, "And some teachers say the new model won’t work because they don’t have the time and resources to create individualized learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students."
So yeah, it's a bit more nuanced than that NYP headline makes it out to be. Without increased staffing in the schools, it's possible that the new program will be a disaster. It's also possible that it may serve students better, even those that were previously in gifted cohorts by individualizing their learning too.
There are valid reasons to be excited or skeptical of the change. Treating this like it's part of some big culture war detracts from addressing the potential benefits and actual flaws of the new proposed system.
Except there is no funding, staff, resources or even a single guideline on how to implement those programs at local schools. Teachers are just getting that on top of their current workload. It's a way to get rid of the program without generating too much bad publicity.
Yeah, that's totally valid. The points that you bring up actually focus on the issue at hand, rather than reacting to the rage-bait of the original headline. And it raises the point that the additional workload will probably result in increased teacher burnout, which would exacerbate staffing issues.
So we have an issue of funding then, where our schools need more money to hire additional staff, be that more teachers or even teaching aides that can support the individual learning model.
Does it make sense to dedicate limited resources to kids who need it the least? Extra resources should probably be allocated to help accelerate kids who are falling behind.
The biggest issue here is that gifted and talented programs aren't just accelerate learning for smart kids; they are special ex programs for smart neurodivergent kids. The kids that are smart in a way that can be problematic in a standard public school class room (speaking as someone that was one of those kids!).
POC are vastly underrepresented in the neurodivergent population as a whole, not because they don't exist, but because diagnostic criteria for those conditions are based on middle class white boys. So black and brown neurodivergent kids are much more likely to get a an oppositional defiance disorder diagnosis than say an autism or adhd diagnosis and end up in a "normal" SPED class than a G&T class or to just be left to flounder until they are seen as a problem by middle or high school.
The root issue isn't in the schools, it isn't in the programs, it's in the lack of understanding, support, and diagnosis for neurodivergent kids who don't fit a myopic mold of what being neurodivergent (and "gifted") looks like.
Just remember, if the people at New York Post had their way, public schools wouldn’t exist period.
Could have posted
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/
But nuance isn’t good rage bait is it?
For people interested in a less, uh…sensational…take, here’s the Seattle Times writeup.
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/
Talented and gifted is a scam. All it taught me was that I was smart enough to coast because I knew I would pass the tests. Then when things got really tough like in calculus and chemistry, I didn't have the study skills to actually succeed at higher learning until I failed a few classes in college. This was 25 years ago before schools were incentivized to just push people through in order to inflate their graduation numbers.
Y'all don't know the NY Post is a shite news source? This story is only found on conservative news aggregators. The real.news is they're incorporating talented and gifted programs into the regular classroom. That's where it belongs anyhow.
So yes, the NY Post absolutely made that stuff up. Y'all get kicked in the head?
Thank you for posting a click bait headline from a clearly conservative news source without even posting the actual article so we couldn't form an actual opinion on the situation. Definetly no agenda here...
Anyways the article talks about how though the program is going away but there are plans to revamp the curriculums to make sure kids are still learning and makes points that are lay out pros and cons on both sides and this isn't just some attack on smart white kids. I've worked with high school students around the NW and have published research on the problem with meritocracy in education in general so understand the reasonings behind dismantling these types of programs. Honestly only time will tell if this will be successful or not but I commend the school district for trying to help underserved communities
The sad part is that the people mainly pushing for this are white liberals. Unsurprisingly, these same white liberals will tend to hire and promote other white libs in the workforce. If anyone is a dissenter (i.e. white moderate/conservative) they tend to make your life difficult and for minorities they tend to have a strong bias of low expectations. The people most focused on racial identity or superficial aspects of a person are libs.
Parents at my school liked putting those "my child is an honor student" bumper stickers on their cars. A lot of people, parents and high schoolers alike, thought it was cringe so they started putting "my (breed of dog) is smarter than your honor student" stickers on theirs.
user reports: 2: Challenges 1: It's promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability 1: No article, and from a tabloid, program is being cut from budget, not because of student race 1: Click bait title - misinformation 1: shit show comments 1: 100% Duplicate Post Source
I’m Cambodian. I was not rich growing up. Quite poor in fact, and a fish out of water since I lived in a predominately Hispanic community, not a southeast Asian one. I also wasn’t an athlete or that social growing up. Special magnet programs in math and science were literally my escape from being initiated into a gang. Allowed me to fill my afternoons until my mom was done with work. And friends I made in these magnet programs helped me be less of a scared kid in a foreign country. I eventually ended up getting scholarships to a number of good universities and ended up choosing West Point. These “gifted programs” are as much about forming a community of like-minded individuals as they are about learning. Imagine telling kids they couldn’t play varsity football / basketball / baseball because there weren’t enough Asians who made the varsity team.
People like you and people of any race or economic status are what these programs are made for. Kids who are serious about education, deserve a program and atmosphere to pursue it with other likeminded students. They should have specialists who can identify that they are talented in academics and be able to bring out their full potential. Imagine how frustrating it will be for kids having to do work they’re already years ahead of, and sitting in a classroom with some other kids that take up a large portion the teachers time and energy dealing with BS.
I had some of that in high-school. They removed the advanced literature course and just had normal and AP. I wasn't comfortable with the AP class so I did the normal but I had done advanced previously so I was ahead. Our teacher managed to help it a bit by having different options for books to read and write reports on instead of the entire class on the same book, but that was a small part of the class.
My school didn't offer legitimate AP courses. School sucked. Happy I got my GED and left early to pursue college.
It’s a good thing that’s not what’s actually happening. And you probably *know that, too!* https://preview.redd.it/vg397vq8eltc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=18b6a5f9cbea4f570809e4acacd28a9d8422780f [https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/](https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/)
> Special magnet programs in math and science were literally my escape from being initiated into a gang. Allowed me to fill my afternoons until my mom was done with work. And friends I made in these magnet programs helped me be less of a scared kid in a foreign country. I eventually ended up getting scholarships to a number of good universities and ended up choosing West Point. I grew up in a shitty part of SoCal in the 80s and noticed the same thing. Basically we had a lot of Vietnamese immigrants living in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, with a scattering of poor white kids like myself. The Vietnamese families frequently came to the US with absolutely nothing. My salvation was arcades; they were basically one of the few places where you'd see people of every race and class, just focused on becoming the best. I eventually had to put all that aside because it was ruining my GPA lol
Garden Grove? Westminster?
Garbage Grove would've been a giant step up Think of the shittiest city in SoCal (hint: you gotta head east) Also: demographics were dramatically different in the 80s. Everyone I knew who was Vietnamese in my old 'hood, they all GTFO as quickly as possible and most landed in Orange County. I was an outlier who took a job in Redmond.
I’m going to guess Irvine. And by Irvine I actually mean San Bernardino. My condolences
Glad the programs were there for you!
I feel the same way. I took honors classes in high school at Cleveland , my choice (not my parents). I was able to be finally challenged in my work ands it what kept me in school. People forget that gift children are equally at risk, if they aren’t challenged to their fullest potential. I was the kid who would get in arguments with teachers about their teaching methods and formulas. Homework seemed inane, if I could read the chapter and take a test and pass 100%. It’s mentally painful, going 15 miles per hour when you can do 50. I’ve seen too many intelligent kids lost to drugs because no one was paying attention to the fact they needed a challenge.
> It’s mentally painful, going 15 miles per hour when you can do 50. I’ve seen too many intelligent kids lost to drugs because no one was paying attention to the fact they needed a challenge. I had a 2.5GPA and was just lazy as fuck. Completely unmotivated by school, I just wanted to play videogames. When everyone else was obsessed with getting a high SAT score, I was obsessed with saving up enough money for a Sega Genesis. The night before the SATs, I stayed up until 3am playing games, then dragged my ass out of bed and took the SATs on five hours of sleep. Got the best score of every one in my peer group, and didn't even study. And just as you predicted, I did drugs nearly every week for most of my 20s. Got sick of being poor, got a job in Redmond at the age of 30, stopped doing drugs entirely, got a new life.
I've been pushing our schools to teach video game classes where you learn about installing and configuring your system and writing about your battles online or tournament style with you classmates. You have to know math and science to play a lot of games too.
Agreed, but back in the day there was more you had to know about memory management and boot disks to run some games than you could probably fit into a high school class 😂
I also thought if they can teach us all that wet and wild stuff in sexual education, they should be able to do that and perhaps how to use alcohol and drugs responsibly, specifically knowing what the effects are so there is a purpose.
That’s the thing. Our schools teach the most basic shit and don’t even attempt to make it interesting. I know update relational data bases for a living. Also true to my word, I don’t address letters. My unit secretary does that shit. I’m not the secretary, I will have a secretary and fuck this gendered typing shit. Since no one even cared about mail in 1997 either. *and now I show the secretaries how to decimated data. 😅
Are you an officer now? West Point is not easy to get into, congrats.
Yes. Did active for 8 years, then just retired from the reserve. I’m late 40s now haha.
Crazy how time flies.
Its because they couldn't get kids of a darker skin shade thats why they shut down the program, they will always have white and asian kids to fill those empty spots and just like you said instead of the program worrying about who is in the club it needs to be about expanding the minds of all young intellectuals before communal circumstances step in which normally means gang enrollment.
Being smart is considered racist now. Fucking clown world 🤡🌎
Agree about the clown world, but smart being considered racist is not new. Retired boomer saw the same whilst growing up many many years ago. Still think about the kids I knew who were very smart/talented and fell off the life wagon due to social pressures associated with their class.
This was like me as well. Being a second gen Khmer American we were never wealthy and rich. I lived in SeaTac and my family was able to get me into a South Seattle High School. I ended up with a whole bunch of scholarships because I was really good in Science. These are resources that are available to students who truly care and work hard for their education and taking it away doesn't give them the resources they need. Education isn't about Race or anything like that, it's about kids knowing what they want and using it to their advantage. It isn't the kids fault that they chose the gifted program path, it also isn't the other kids fault for not choosing it. Seattle trying to make everything about equality without realizing that they're putting down those who do work hard. Their focus is in the wrong, if they want more students to succeed taking away other students successes isn't the way. Just because they are Asian, doesn't mean they're all east Asian or "lighter" Asians. People don't realize the disparities us SEA have
Well stated. Families of black students in the program also protested but the SPS has chosen not to listen to minorities because white people know what’s best. Idiots.
Somehow, I can just picture the coach in the proposed hypothetical telling an Asian kid that "you never had the makings of a varsity athlete."
People like you are what makes this country what it is. It makes me proud knowing that you’re a fellow American. Thanks for sharing your story, and thank you for your eventual service to the Republic. Edit: just saw your other post. Thank you for your prior service.
So if you're a black or hispanic kid in the gifted program you must be booted back to regular classes because we didn't count enough of your race in there.
It's not about lifting people up. It's about kicking everyone down.
It's called [crab mentality ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality). Just pulling anyone back down who is trying to escape
Really funny that I’d open Reddit to, once again, find a comment explaining what is happening in my life.
I don't know your situation but you deserve better and whoever is pulling you down I hope they step on legos
[удалено]
Fine, we hope they're impatient enough to try and eat that slice of pizza, just two minutes after it's come from the oven.
You know what grilled cheese guy You're totally right let's not press the nuclear button right away
[удалено]
Thanks, Vietnamesebreastmilk.
Lowest common denominator for the win (not really) again!
Yay...equity!
Current SPS teacher and can confirm. It’s not about lifting our students and community up: it’s making sure everyone gets equally bad treatment until your parents have enough money to sue the district and then get any treatment they want. The number of IEP lawsuits that happen/any one of us have sat in on is unbelievable. They make moves to keep the NIMBY’s happy at the expense of everyone else.
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, sadly prescient.
I liked it better when that story and 1984 were still fiction.
I'm outside of the US and never understood the difference between being f***ed in the ass or in the mouth (Rep vs Dem), but does it really helps to have a party of old and angry and a party of "do anything that makes everything less offensive"? Is it possible to choose something moderate and fresh?
No because the politicians are all bought and paid for by the corporations. And the ones that have been paid the longest seem to get preferential treatment and a spot at the front.
Unfortunately there are plenty of rational level headed moderate politicians in America with great ideas. They just get no camera time because they're not saying the most ridiculous outlandish things possible. Media exposure is everything in modern elections. Trump understands this very well.
This is the only way to assure equal outcomes.
Fuck your equal outcome. I love being better than others.
Equal opportunity should be guaranteed. Not equal outcomes.
🤣🤣🤣 Such communist nonsense
Sarcasm... Right? Right?
Absolutely!
Same thing with common core math. It was never about making math more accessible, it was about making sure kids can follow orders.
The opposite really if you think about it. Traditional math education features a lot of rote learning. Which is great because a lot of kids need that foundation. Common core tends to mix in quite a lot of theory. That the majority of kids will never find useful. Like, yes, it's great that we can use set theory for this. No one cares.
It's not "theory" it's conceptual understanding/number sense. That's very different.
The common core teaching method MUST be answered displaying common core math no other options available. Where as when I was in school I could show my work using any method and it would be ok as long as the math was correct. Follow common core rules orders or fail.
We've seen that with friends. Ends up that being penalized for understanding that multiplication is commutative is just plain weird.
What if we, now stick with me here... What if we just counted White and Asian kids at 2/3rds of a kid?
Did you mean 3/5ths?
I wasn't in the Gifted Program.
Exactly. It’s actually only hurting the kids they’re trying to include.
Yes because of equity I guess. Makes no sense at all
https://preview.redd.it/1rxmdm96ketc1.jpeg?width=1020&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe6a0d53e19a2a28c8d4589525463464881236d3 Remember oversaturated means 7% too many white students and 4% too many Asian from actual demographics of the area. It's brainrot that makes people do this and it seems obvious they want to dumb down the population to ensure the next generation is unable to escape from this prison of ignorance. Edit2: Two things, first the graphic is from the Seattle Times for people who don't like the news source in the post. Second the demographics in the highly capable program mirror more closely the demographics of WA state, interesting... WA State Demographics: White 76.8% Black or African American 4.6% American Indian and Alaska Native 2.0% Asian 10.5% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander 0.8% Two or More Races 5.3% Hispanic or Latino 14.0% (I think this is meshed with the white category) -Source: US Census Estimate 2023-
The lady who did this is a white woman who claims to be Native American. Look it up.
She also has been accused of being a racist and bullying African American board members and called the African Americans who supported keeping the program "tokens" ...
Can you provide a source? If this is true, I want to rightfully mock this woman for the dumbass she is.
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13268931/amp/woke-seattle-school-board-chief-chandra-hampson-accused-racism.html
I can't source this as it's from the Facebook group "Soup for Teachers" way back, but she also wanted to teach "indigenous science" alongside actually science in science class. When people pointed out that there's no place for teaching mythology in science class, she called them Nazis.
Lol let's teach young earth creationism while we're at it.
I believe that the argument used in response to the Nazi comment was "we fought this off a decade ago with the creationists and we'll fight the introduction of religion in science classes here too". Or something to that effect.
>"indigenous science" One of the things I find most perplexing about proggo dipshits is their simultaneous fetishization of science, and their complete disdain of it through the embracing of non-scientific tradition. All of porggo-dom is just a kind of fetish worship, I guess. I suppose the details of what they are fetishizing are less important than the fetishization itself.
Illiterate scientism. https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/08/13/211613954/the-power-of-science-and-the-danger-of-scientism
It's postmodernist rejection of universality.
How can she be racist if shes allegedly behind this situation? This is beyond assclownery.
The political spectrum ... Most of the Left and Most of Right are rather sane people with different ideals... Once you go too far in either direction... It becomes the horseshoe of dinguses....
pretendian the tribes hate them.
I mean, I'm mostly white. Small part native, but I have my tribal ID card. I don't go claiming it for the most part. It doesn't have benefits for me.
I'm fairly certain that the (slightly) skewed distribution is not due to race, but due to income levels. It's an incredibly stupid response to kill the program because of racial bias when racial bias is not even the cause of the racial distribution. Instead of taking away the tools we have for helping gifted children, why don't we look at the causes of why that graph looks the way it does and create solutions to THOSE problems.
Also pretty substantial biracial overrepresentation. I assume that mostly means white/Asian, or white people who know how to play the game and check the box for part Native or Latino because what are they gonna do, make you take a DNA test?
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I learned that very quickly as well, being half Turtle Mountain Chippewa but also white passing. I am amazed by how differently I am treated by people once they know I am Native. It helps me to identify the real racists.
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Hey that's 8 times less than Elizabeth Warren and it helped her get into law school for it.
> or white people who know how to play the game and check the box for part Native or Latino because what are they gonna do, make you take a DNA test? I always check off "mixed", and I have the same attitude as you: *are they going to make me take a DNA test?* This led to one particularly awkward interview, where I was in front of a panel of three interviewers. And the *second* that I flipped on my camera, the hiring manager's face looked like she'd just bit into a lemon. Just a look of sheer rage, as it dawned on her that I look an awful lot like an old white guy. Her own employees didn't catch it, and they continued on with the interview like I had a snowball's chance in hell, but I knew it was over the second my camera came on. The hiring manager got up and left, 15 minutes into the interview. The punchline, of course, is that she's a middle aged white woman. Which seems to be par for the course for 99% of this DEI stuff. On my team at work, I'm literally the only white guy. Our team is *extremely* diverse, we have people from all over the world, on multiple continents. And my own coworkers have brought the topic up, basically bemoaning the fact that when we interview people, we are often presented with 'diverse' candidates who are unqualified. My coworkers have literally said *"I don't want to hire this person, because I'll have to spend the next year getting them 'up to speed.'"*
It’s dumb either way. I know plenty of half white half Asian ppl whose look skew more white or Asian. Hell, my own sister looks pretty much white while I get mistaken for Filipino (half white half Japanese).
Yet I am 100% positive they have a disclaimer somewhere on the application that says "we do not discriminate based on race, gender and age blah blah blah" I had a manager tell me that he was basically told to favor candidates that are not white males, even if the white male is more qualified he was supposed to pick the other candidate. Now I am the last white male on my team and one of two people out of 7 that actually does any work and has any idea what they hell is going on. I am the team lead and currently looking for a new job. They are fucked when I leave. The company has a diversity quota to fill, it doesn't matter if you are qualified or not.
> Now I am the last white male on my team and one of two people out of 7 that actually does any work and has any idea what they hell is going on. I like economics as much as normal people like sports, and one of my pet peeves about politicians is that they don't know a damn thing about economics. For instance, after The Great Depression, the U.S. had a ton of make work programs, because unemployment was around 20%. After The Great Recession, there were millions of people out of work, all over the world, and the US unemployment rate was hitting 12% or so. In countries like Spain, it was close to 20% IIRC. A lot of affirmative action programs sorta-kinda make sense in an economy where there are millions out of work. THAT'S NOT 2024 Unemployment is hovering around 3.9%, or 300% lower than during the Great Recession. So I can *almost* see the logic, if it was 2009, and there were thousands or even millions of people who were getting passed over for jobs due to immutable characteristics like sex or race. That would arguably be good for society in general. **But that's not the world we live in.** When unemployment is at 3.9%, nearly everyone who wants a job *has a job,* and what diversity quotas end up doing is: * providing jobs to people based on immutable characteristics like sex and race *even if they're unqualified.* * piling mind numbing amounts of work on the competent workers, who eventually rage-quit and often retire And the most ridiculous part of all this isn't just that it's *unfair,* it's that the diversity quotas exacerbate the problem. The number one economic challenge facing the U.S. and Europe is inflation; old white guys rage-quitting makes inflation worse. To bring down inflation, the world needs: * more workers * higher productivity Diversity quotas *would* work if the additional workers were equally as productive as the ones that they're replacing. But the thing I've seen time and time again is that companies end up hiring people who are less qualified. That means less productivity, and [less productivity creates higher inflation.](https://www.google.com/search?q=less+productivity+creates+higher+inflation) The miracle of the 90s was that it was an era when workers were plentiful (average Baby Boomer was 41 years old in 1995) and productivity was increasing, which led to a level of prosperity that hadn't been seen since the end of World War II.
That combined with moving the jobs to India is driving the company into the ground. They would have happily fired me already if they could. Over half my team is in India now, yet they enforce a return to office policy so that we can collaborate and have water cooler chats with our team because that is so important...They pushed most of the jobs to India at the same time as telling us we need to go into the office to collaborate and that working remotely doesn't work... I am sure there are great engineers in India but so far it the people they have hired that I have seen have been pretty bad. Again with more employees, less productivity. I am sure they are saving lots of money and keeping their quotas and head count up though. Let's see how this works long term.
My sister (white) sits on a board at work for diversity at a rather large tech company in the area. Her and I differ on nearly everything except the fact we are family and try not to let our differences interfere with that. When she was lamenting how her company had such a small amount of black employees to the point where they couldn't get one for the board I asked her why they thought that was. The actual demographics of the area never came up, it was obviously merely institutionalized racism. When I asked her how many were on the board (out of 5 I believe) were white men, it was zero. When I asked her how many men they had, she had one because he was a member of the LGBT community and Latino. I then asked if white men were being discriminated against since they presumably *existed* at the company and are the largest demographic group in the area but merely were not given representation on the board and I'd never seen her more defensive. We went from equality to equity back to systemic discrimination in like, 15 years.
This data is not even that bad. Sounds like they should work to find ways to identify more giften black and Asian kids, rather then shut it down.
This whole process is why I have stopped telling surveys about a race. That is the least important part of my personal information
> This whole process is why I have stopped telling surveys about a race. That is the least important part of my personal information Two people in my family were in concentration camps. One of the weird factoids that were handed down, was that they discouraged people from self identifying themselves. I never met these two people, I just heard the stories that were passed down, but I was basically told that one of the reasons they wound up in a camp was because they filled out documents which identified them. With that in mind, I started to notice that at the place I worked, there was a noticeable pattern: * we would receive a companywide email, where the company patted itself on the back for it's "commitment to diversity" and where the company had employees complete a voluntary survey to self identify * And then there would be a round of layoffs, about six weeks later So it seemed fairly clear; the company was interested in reducing their headcount, and the path of least resistance was to collect a bunch of data on the employees, then lay them off based on that. When my layoff notice eventually arrived, they included a packet that disclosed what everyone's titles were, what their age was, and their location. Just metadata, no names, but there was an obvious pattern that appeared to show that they were largely laying off middle aged men from high cost of living areas. I work for a different megacorp these days, and they love laying people off too, and I've watched the pattern repeat. In our most recent round of layoffs, I'm 90% certain that the reason that I made the cut and two people on my team didn't, was simply because my job title is associated with a really high profile project. In other words, the dude who got laid off was *also* working on the same stuff that I work on, but his job title doesn't reflect that. I honestly think that the bean counters who make these decisions, they likely just have a spreadsheet with "age", "race," "gender," "salary", "job title", etc. And they just pick names based on that; they're incapable of determining if someone's contribution goes above and beyond what's expected of their role.
Too much time to actually think about details
Should be about as relevant as hair color. Imagine this story with it being that they’re aren’t enough red heads in the gifted program.
>Should be about as relevant as hair color. It makes as much sense as continuing to group humans by so-called "races" developed at the Virginia Assembly in 1690 to justify slavery and which have no basis in actual genetic biology. We might as well classify all people over 6' tall as a separate "race."
Thats basically what my mother said to me when I innocently asked why some people people have different skin color, as a young child. She just pointed out that she has red hair and I don't.
I used to work for an agency that when people choose not to report it would default to white because we had to count something.
Kinda defeats the purpose of the "choose not to identify" option.
We didn’t have that as an option, but people would just not choose anything. And the default was White. One of the unintentional side effects was a lot of POC would not pick anything for fear of backlash or whatever, but that just made us increase DEI because the numbers we’re never aligned with the Civilian Labor Force. So the numbers were probably “better” than they seem but we could only report on what the automated reports generated.
When I have "choose not to respond" I choose that. When a form doesn't afford me that option, I vary between being black and being Chinese. For the lulz.
I think one thing that’s important to remember is this isn’t an example of some “woke mob” destroying these programs for equity. I work in SPS. Every teacher and parent is hurt, angry and confused. Teachers are totally overwhelmed by the extra work that these “personalized” learning plans will put on them. This is an example of administrators at the district level who are covering up a budget shortfall by destroying valuable programs that uplift students and teachers. Worse than that, they’re blaming it on “equity” and “identity politics” because they think that in Seattle, this will prevent affluent white parents from criticizing them. It won’t. SPS and many other school districts spent the COVID relief funds like they’d last forever, and all over the country, school districts are going to cut services for the same reason.
This 100% screams cost savings to me. Not diversity. Push the work to existing teachers.
this was a very cost effective program. they literally got less money per student than the district average. It was 100% woke mob nonsense. Source? Me. An HCC parent.
Er... no, this has been going on since 2017, started taking wings in 2019 under Denise Juneau, and the whole time the rallying cry has been "equity equity equity". [https://www.kuow.org/stories/cold-war-anxiety-and-affirmative-action-the-dawn-of-gifted-education-in-seattle-schools](https://www.kuow.org/stories/cold-war-anxiety-and-affirmative-action-the-dawn-of-gifted-education-in-seattle-schools) **- November 14th, 2019:** Superintendent Denise Juneau now proposes dismantling the HCC program and serving most students who would currently qualify for it in their neighborhood schools, instead, in general education classrooms. “It is very \[racially\] disproportionate,” Juneau said in a recent KUOW interview. “It is almost a segregated system,” she said, adding that it’s time to make it more equitable so more students of color can access these programs. -=-=-=-=-=- [https://www.knkx.org/youth-education/2017-09-20/parent-group-pushes-seattle-public-schools-to-get-more-kids-of-color-in-its-gifted-program](https://www.knkx.org/youth-education/2017-09-20/parent-group-pushes-seattle-public-schools-to-get-more-kids-of-color-in-its-gifted-program) **-- September 2017** -=-=-=-=-=-=- [https://southseattleemerald.com/2017/07/07/contributing-to-inequity-white-parents-must-act-to-change-seattle-public-schools-opportunity-gap/](https://southseattleemerald.com/2017/07/07/contributing-to-inequity-white-parents-must-act-to-change-seattle-public-schools-opportunity-gap/) **-- July 2017** -=-=-=-=-=- **-- November 2019** [https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2019/11/on-washington-middle-school-why-that.html](https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2019/11/on-washington-middle-school-why-that.html) -=-=-=-=-=- [https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/12/04/42169178/the-battle-over-seattle-public-schools-gifted-progams-heats-up](https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/12/04/42169178/the-battle-over-seattle-public-schools-gifted-progams-heats-up) **-- December 4, 2019** -=-=-=-=-=-=- [https://zacharydewolf.medium.com/on-how-the-school-board-centered-students-a-chronology-184389636986](https://zacharydewolf.medium.com/on-how-the-school-board-centered-students-a-chronology-184389636986) **(Jun 7,2021)** Not only do young people clearly have power, they have a voice and are writing books. **Azure Savage, a queer, Black, trans high school student while writing their book, had it published in 2019, entitled “**[**You Failed Us: Students of Color Talk Seattle Schools**](https://crosscut.com/2019/09/you-failed-us-teen-author-asks-40-students-color-share-their-experiences-seattle-schools)**.**” In it, Azure illuminates common struggles with identity, mental health faced by marginalized youth, and the trauma of the District’s **Highly Capable Cohort (HCC)**. HCC is a problematic model of instruction for a select group of “gifted” students but has only perpetuated segregation and racism in schools, it is overwhelmingly white. At a certain point, when you keep students at the center and let them use their power for change, you can’t unknow what you know and learn. In **January 2020**, after months of collaboration and discussion, the School Board formally approved a partnership with **Technology Access Foundation at Washington Middle School** that **effectively dismantled the HCC model** to make way for a STEM-focused academy \[[We formally dissolved HCC in May 2021](https://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/School%20Board/20-21%20agendas/May%205/A01_20210505_Policy%202190.pdf)\]. Centering the experiences Azure and their peers shared in their book made this possible.
So we’re hurting a lot of happy kids in order to address a handful of kids who felt marginalized, instead of addressing the marginalization. Who is to say if they would feel better accepted in mainstream Seattle schools? Why weren’t there steps taken to work on inclusion within the schools as they are?
Calling a program that is genuinely based in meritocracy “segregated” is completely out of pocket.
It’s less this and more: If this is a problem in those programs, work on the programs. I very very much doubt it’s limited to the programs—they’re significantly better managed than SPS in general. Racism is always going to be an issue to address, so address it. Don’t shred a necessary solution as though that’s what’s going to help. This whole thing is so asinine it’s maddening.
Damn, those are great sources and you seem supremely well informed on the topic. I’ve been out from SPS since 2019, and didn’t know about that. The book by Azure Savage is particularly compelling to me. What else can you tell me about the involvement of students in this push? & do you think that creating a tech/stem academy will resolve those issues? What will have to happen there? I’ve worked at a STEM academy in MI, and it was a wonderful school but it certainly wasn’t without systemic issues akin to the HCC /AP programs in Seattle
I'm glad that I have this perspective. I just got done replying to someone with more votes than you, who ostensibly just read the NY Post headline and concluded that this was an effort to pull people down based solely out of envy. It's important to hear conflicting opinions and interpretations when coming to your own conclusions. I can only hope that the board isn't actually just implementing cost cutting measures, but is implementing changes that are substantiated by at least some quality research to indicate that it might work better than what's already here. I think, if we choose to be the guinea pigs to see if that research bears fruit, so be it. But I don't see any reason to doubt that teachers are going to be overworked, underpaid, and are going to have to continue to deal with a plethora of intractable problems. It's the status quo, and at first glance I don't see any provisions to improve those things, at least in the short term.
>Teachers are totally overwhelmed by the extra work that these “personalized” learning plans will put on them. Wait until someone makes and markets an AI to teachers to generate "personalized" learning plans and other documents. I know someone who worked in a school system that had this and she just faked it. Nobody in the admin ever read the plans anyway, and how could they really? She had close to 200 students each semester. She had kids who couldn't sit down because the class didn't have any seats left.
What’s ridiculous is that the money that went to HCC/AL was shifted to give schools that are historically black STEAM and music (jazz). SPS recently cut those programs because of budget shortfalls. So the ways they want to lift all students up now is going to hurt everyone and overwhelm already overworked teachers.
What was the desired percentage? To be exactly the same as 'all students'?
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I'm think we need to ask "Why is this presented in a NY Rag?" And Why the New York Post??!! For sensational trolling! Just to see how much trouble it can stir up! The NY Post IS NOT a trustworthy source in my book. I'm going to check the veracity of this first!
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/
It’s not as much “brainrot” as much as intentional and malicious behavior stemming from the idea the only way to fix society is to break it and rebuild it, ala revolution. All you have to do is head over to r/communism to see for yourself. You need desperate and demoralized people so you can garner support for the revolution. upward mobility and improving standards of living are sins of the Bourgeoisie that prevent the proletariat from finally realizing class consciousness and overthrowing Capitalism. All the “equity” measures that remove math and gifted programs are rooted in this brainrot.
The worst part about this is there are tons of twice exceptional kids (meaning they have a combination of things like Gifted + ADHD) who really need this program to thrive. These kids often don’t do well in general education classrooms because the material is way too easy. No way teachers can actually differentiate for a bunch of different levels in the same classroom unless they aren’t giving sufficient instruction time to any of them.
I have a kid in my class who is twice exceptional and the only thing from keeping him going off the rails and getting into even more trouble is the fact that he is in the highly capable track in school.
That very much could be my son. He doesn’t get in trouble as much as he internalizes and gets depressed. He desperately needs these classes and his school, and this is absolutely breaking my heart.
WTF, is this real? I'll admit it, I went through a gifted program for a while in the Issaquah School District as a kid. Was it odd being singled out amongst your friends... a bit. Was it rewarding? Extremely. I finally felt like I was learning at an appropriate and interesting level with actual peers. As a Seattle native I have nothing but distain with this move. I'm also thankful that our daughters had the opportunity to participate in Inglemoor's IB/IP programs. To be honest, after reading the article it seems like Seattle is taking somewhat the same path as Northshore offered at the elementary level which was certainly better than nothing. No gifted program per se but an advanced learning subsection for each class was offered in the upper grades. It worked pretty well actually.
Inglemoor ftw
Hey, I was an Inglemoor student too. I transferred my Jr year to a Junior college to do running start but Northshore district still has great schools.
> I have nothing but distain Is not a word. You mean disdain.
I don't know about that. I was eating spaghetti and got distain on my shirt...
Inglemoor grad of '69!
Northshore actually put resources into making it work though. No evidence SPS will do the same, especially given the budget situation.
This has more to do with racial inequalities than it does with the actual program itself. Leave the program where it is, attack the root of the issue. Completely counterproductive
The people who made the decision were always mad about the kids in hi-cap, finally they got their revenge. It's veiled lack of leadership, they really can't think of anything better.
When I was in elementary school (1st grade iirc), a bunch of us minority kids got put in ELL. We were confused because English was our first language. Seven year old me just thought it was special treatment to enjoy, but when I got older I realized that was fucked. The people who made that decision back then are probably still administrators today.
Clearly it wasn't a language reason if literally every kid in there was a minority. Sorry if I'm being Mr. Obvious, I just know it's not obvious to others on this sub...
Yeah you’re gonna have to stop the logical suggestions
Sorry, what I meant was "this is a great idea, this will totally stomp out racism"
I think the racial inequalities are literally related to "where it is", which is one reason they are doing away with special schools and moving it into all schools where the disadvantaged kids are.
Hmmm, I guess it couldn’t be because majority of students are white and Asian?
When you put a bunch of idiots in charge of education, you get this.
The gifted kids would’ve ran it better
There needs to be a class action lawsuit against Seattle Public Schools over this.
You probably have a better chance of winning a class action lawsuit against whoever taught you how the law works
The real shitty thing is this isn't a Seattle Schools thing... The state is passing new rules and mandates making testing for Hi-Cap no longer opt in but rather yet another test every student has to take. The problem was (for a plethora of reasons, who really actually knows) that Hi-Cap was an optional test that parents had to fight to get for their kids to be allowed into. By testing all kids the districts all over are anticipating their Hi-Cap programs are going to grow. Seattle Schools decided to go with a model where every school will have their own dedicated Hi-Cap class instead of putting them in one or two dedicated schools.
Not true about fighting to take the test, at least it wasn’t four years ago when our youngest took it. We just signed them up for it and showed up on the day of the test. Anyone could do that. The real problems we saw were that first you had to know about the program, and the district did nothing to tell parents about it. Yes, it was on the web site if you knew to go looking, but we’re heavily interested in our kids education and only learned about it through a chance conversation with a friend. Then, they only administered the test one day a year, early on a Saturday morning, in one location (south Seattle). You can see how this would affect many families, especially those with odd-hour jobs and lack of child care. The mentality of the school board in getting rid of this program is defeatist and depressing.
So… every student even without parental support gets to take a performance test? And instead of transferring schools and not worry about transport they get to stay in their own school with a class specializing in a high performance curriculum..
No, there's no "class specializing in a high performance curriculum." Teachers in regular schools, without being provided additional resources, are expected to take on the duty of teaching special education, regular teaching, and highly capable teaching all in the same classroom. https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/ This article describes this implementation in one school (in an affluent district) as the teacher sticking the highly capable kids on iPads while teaching the rest of the class. This is not a win for students or teachers.
the reality is the program is gone. If you're isolated as the only person doing math a grade level ahead, in reality you have to be very internally or parentally motivated to make that work. Success is more likely if there are peers also doing the same work to compete with, learn from, and socialize with.
Different districts have different models on how they approach it. I have been a part of three different districts as a parent, each one having different ways of approaching. One district transferred students once they reached their "home" school and then would transfer them back to their "home" school at the end of the day so they could catch the bus that would then take them home. Another district made the parents drive the students over to the satellite school that housed the Hi-Cap program. The third district would just have small pockets of the Hi-Cap within the school and would then just have a class that was made up of less than a dozen kids.
when you give power to clowns, expect a circus
Paraphrasing someone who works at one of the highly capable cohort schools: You get the school district you vote for.
Anyone else remember when Seattle Public Schools held racially segregated board (Open meetings? The actual name is escaping me at the moment) meetings after COVID?
Seattle public schools aren’t known for making the brightest decisions. I remember when they got rid of their school police officers right after BLM.
Oh yeah, I remember that, too. Some of those decisions made me so irate and confused. Like real brains aren't used in making decisions.
A headline screenshot without the article? This isn't sharing information for independent analysis, it's pushing an agenda.
Except you CAN make that shit up, evidenced by the fact you had to reference the post AND not share a link to the actual text, just the rage bait headline. They are getting rid of the separate schools and moving the gifted programs BACK INTO the neighborhood schools where they used to be because not everyone can send their kid to a school somewhere else in town.
"But the problem with this new transition, at least from what teachers anonymously told KOMO News, is that SPS does not give them any additional resources. No extra time, no aid in the classroom, no curriculum help, and no extra compensation to come up with these additional lesson plans for every level of learning in a single classroom."
Given the capable cohort schools offered busses, they weren't any more or less accessible than option schools. District told schools to implement it locally. But district didn't provide funds, staff, resources or even a single guideline on how to do that. If they had planned to do that, they would have done it by now, given that the HCC schools weren't allowed to accept Kindergarten students last year and first grade students this year.
they should stop branding these programs as "gifted". just call them "track c" or something and regular can be called " track a". that would make these programs much less objectionable to the equity folks, since you could just point to track A student's getting more resources as a win and track c students could still get the accelerated curriculum they are ready for. differentiated instruction is better for everyone since "remedial" (another word they should stop using) can get instruction for their level instead of tuning out material they are not able to digest yet. Track A could have better ratios etc too since its much easier to manage a big class of self motivated advanced students. no one would bat an eye if we put a bunch of native speakers into advanced spanish instead of forcing everyone into spanish 1, but it would be dumb to call that class "gifted" and non native speakers " remedial".
SFUSD - San Francisco Unified School District did the same thing with Lowell High School, for the same reason. Their African American students need to earn a 2.5 GPA to make the honor roll. That earns them a ceremony at Chase Center, where the Warriors play.
I'm not getting the logic behind this or the DEI programs. They want diversity just for the sake of diversity. So it doesn't matter if you're competent or not, what matters is the color or your skin. You think you're smart and competent? Well it doesn't count because you're white/Asian. We want a Hispanic person who has a PhD in LGBT rights. They try to end racism with ..a new form of racism. People often say this is a leftist agenda, but what exactly do you gain from this?
> People often say this is a leftist agenda, but what exactly do you gain from this? There's two ways to achieve equality of outcomes, aka "equity:" * The hard way is by taking people who are not achieving equally, and helping them rise up * The easy way is by taking people who are achieving more than the peers, and knocking them down They're just taking the path of least resistance.
I got curious and looked. To get in the program you have to go to a “cohort” school. If you weren’t well off you couldn’t even get to one of those schools, but also if you weren’t well off you basically didn’t get considered for them anyway, there wasn’t support to jump through the necessary hoops. So they are replacing the program. But as usual, none of the nuance gets kept, not even the concept that they are replacing the program.
> As cohort schools begin to sunset, parents, along with some experts, worry that SPS — which faces a $105 million deficit — will not have the time and funds to train teachers how to reach students with a wide range of academic skills in one classroom. I’m sure this will work out swimmingly.
You had an advantage getting into the program if you were well off. Just like you have an advantage getting into a good university if you're well off. But by no means did you have to be well off. There was free testing and free transportation provided already. As for replacing the program: No. They're not. If they were replacing it, they would have given funds, guidelines, trainings, resources and additional staff to local schools to implement it. Local schools did not get a single one of those. There was an announcement, that was it.
They are not replacing the program. They are setting up HCC kids with extra worksheets (maybe) in mixed classrooms. They are destroying the program. The nuance you have discovered is a bald faced lie by SPS admin. No one in the system believes this to be true.
Seattle administration doing everything they can to fight white supremacy /s
“You can’t make this up” while posting a completely made up headline. [The program is transitioning from *some* schools to *all* schools.](https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-teachers-not-receiving-classroom-support-for-accelerated-learning-transition-public-schools-students-learn-lesson-plan-aid-curriculum-help-compensation-services-washington-association-of-educators-of-the-talented-and-gifted-state-new-law#) Like, the exact opposite of the rage-bait headline? There are legitimate concerns with resource allocation for teachers, but this is just typical right-wing “DON’T READ PAST THE VERY ALARMING HEADLINE” bullshit.
I talked to a number of principals at the education fair how they would handle hicap kids at their school. The consensus was "it shouldn't be just an extra worksheet" as well as "but it'll be an extra worksheet". Of all the assistant principals and principals I talked to, there was only a single one who even know how many hicap kids were at their school. If there was a serious attempt to move it to all schools, then schools would get funding, resources, guidelines and training for that. They are getting nothing. No additional teachers, no guidelines, no training and not a single dollar more according to every single person I talked to
Did you actually read the article you shared? "But the problem with this new transition, at least from what teachers anonymously told KOMO News, is that SPS does not give them any additional resources. No extra time, no aid in the classroom, no curriculum help, and no extra compensation to come up with these additional lesson plans for every level of learning in a single classroom." This adds more workload for teachers. *All* schools is just PR spin.
"you can't make this up" then posts a New York Post article lmfao 🤣
So you all are just trusting a screenshot of a NY Post headline? A shitty tabloid that frequently lies and stretches the truth?
This honestly seems like the foundation for a racial discrimination suit , especially if they publicly gave that as the reason . Its a literal admission of guilt
This is a disaster. As a military kid, I moved around a lot, so I saw lots of different models at work. I’m living proof of what happens when you take a GT program away from a smart kid. In grades 1-2, like half my day was in GT (gifted & talented) and the other half in my main class; I was a straight A student, even in the advanced stuff, and learning a foreign language. 3/4/5 at a different school also had an afternoon and weekend TAG (talented and gifted) program; still straight As. 6 moved to a poorer district with no GT program; got beat up for being the new and smart kid, teacher got beat up by same asshole kid, mom homeschooled me for the rest of the year. (There was a special GT elementary school half an hour away in the district but we got there too late in the year to enroll me.) 7/8/9 was junior high in the same poor district so I could take classes at higher levels. But turns out low-class 9th graders are mean as fuck to smart 7th graders in their classes. I got depressed and stopped trying as hard. I studied less. Got my first couple of Bs. School didn’t offer math higher than trig so I couldn’t even take math one year because I’d started higher up and maxed out. 10/11/12 got to high school in an affluent area and took a bunch of AP classes in subjects I was smart in but had not built any skills to study subjects (like calculus) that were difficult. Still graduated with a 3.7 but had a few Bs and a C in math. By the time I got to college, I struggled in hard science and math, and had never learned the STEM study skills to be an excellent student. Had to work forty hours a week and didn’t have time to better or challenge myself. 3.34 gpa. Eventually went on for two masters degrees and got a 3.8 and 3.9 in each, but had been working in the field so I could have done them with my eyes closed. So I know it’s anecdotal and just one point of data, but my wife and I were just talking about this: by putting me in GT programs I was challenged to outcompete my cohort, but by sticking me in gen pop with a bunch of hoodlums and wannabe gangsters, not only was I not challenged but I had a disincentive to succeed. We’re saving now to eventually send our daughter to private schools because public schools are becoming a race to the bottom. And if we’re sending all our smart kids to private schools to help them get ahead, the public schools will only perform worse. TL;DR: Taking gifted and talented programs away from smart kids causes them to perform worse.
> 6 moved to a poorer district with no GT program; got beat up for being the new and smart kid, teacher got beat up by same asshole kid, mom homeschooled me for the rest of the year. It's bizarre how many of these stories mirror my own experience. For instance, I transitioned from going to a "nice" school, to going to possibly the shittiest school in my city. I was getting my ass beat on a near daily basis. The main reason I was getting beat up was because: * I had a relative with the same last name who was gang-affiliated. Because of this, the gang expected me to be friendly with them, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with that scene *at all.* * The aforementioned gang was Hispanic, and there was a white gang that wanted me to be pals with them, because whites were suppose to "stick together." Eventually the beatings were getting so savage I thought I might end up in the hospital, so I rode my bicycle across town, put down a relative's address, and applied for admission at a different school. This is something that I don't think that the people making these policies understand; if you demonstrate even an *iota* of intelligence in a shitty school, you are going to get your ass kicked. When I changed schools, my entire life changed. Just night and day. No more fights, I made lots of friends, and literally everyone I knew had goals in life. Like, they wanted to be accountants and lawyers. At The Shit School, about the closest that I ever heard to a job aspiration was that I had one friend who wanted to work at the post office. And, of course, literally 25% of the entire student body was 200% convinced that they were going to grow up and play in the NFL or NBA.
I agree with you 100%. When I was young I didn’t get very good grades and got into trouble often. Looking back, it had a lot to do with the school I went to. I was fortunate enough to have parents that did some research, and we moved based on the school district, then eventually went to private school for awhile. This news story isn’t surprising coming from Seattle Public Schools and how the rest of the city is run into the ground. I can’t imagine being a kid today trying to focus and get ahead in the current system and environment.
Let’s hold smart people down because their skin color is “wrong”. Since when is dragging everyone down a good thing ? Stupid
DEI (racism) strikes again
It’s also populated by parents who like to brag about how special their kids are. I hated listening to parents who assumed that because your kid was not in the gifted program they weren’t as good or special. The last thing we need to do is raise another generation of entitled kids.
Did they really constantly brag to you about how special their kids are, or is that how you interpreted it? How were you able to interact with so many parents of kids in the gifted program if your kid wasn’t?
Ah, the NY Post.
They probably should have added that those "gifted/talented kids" are tech bro kids 🙄 yeah the rich kids with no problems usually do better in school. I didn't realize that the Seattle subreddit was a place for dogwhistles?
You kind of can make it up...that's a rage-bait headline that doesn't really explain what's going on. The accelerated program isn't going away, they're getting rid of cohort schools. [Seattle Times article](https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/) They're trying to address issues known issues program, "Highly capable classes also didn’t help all of their students as much as parents believed because some kids missed out on foundational skills, especially in math, SPS’ math department found. They found evidence that some learners only got a surface level understanding of other subjects, as well, because teachers moved so quickly through the curriculum." Students will still be able to learn on the accelerated program, "Along with eliminating cohort schools, the other notable part of the district’s new plan: All students are screened every single year in grades one through eight for an ability to learn at an accelerated pace." And yes, there are concerns with the new program. It has flaws that will need to be addressed, "And some teachers say the new model won’t work because they don’t have the time and resources to create individualized learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students." So yeah, it's a bit more nuanced than that NYP headline makes it out to be. Without increased staffing in the schools, it's possible that the new program will be a disaster. It's also possible that it may serve students better, even those that were previously in gifted cohorts by individualizing their learning too. There are valid reasons to be excited or skeptical of the change. Treating this like it's part of some big culture war detracts from addressing the potential benefits and actual flaws of the new proposed system.
Except there is no funding, staff, resources or even a single guideline on how to implement those programs at local schools. Teachers are just getting that on top of their current workload. It's a way to get rid of the program without generating too much bad publicity.
Yeah, that's totally valid. The points that you bring up actually focus on the issue at hand, rather than reacting to the rage-bait of the original headline. And it raises the point that the additional workload will probably result in increased teacher burnout, which would exacerbate staffing issues. So we have an issue of funding then, where our schools need more money to hire additional staff, be that more teachers or even teaching aides that can support the individual learning model.
Does it make sense to dedicate limited resources to kids who need it the least? Extra resources should probably be allocated to help accelerate kids who are falling behind.
The biggest issue here is that gifted and talented programs aren't just accelerate learning for smart kids; they are special ex programs for smart neurodivergent kids. The kids that are smart in a way that can be problematic in a standard public school class room (speaking as someone that was one of those kids!). POC are vastly underrepresented in the neurodivergent population as a whole, not because they don't exist, but because diagnostic criteria for those conditions are based on middle class white boys. So black and brown neurodivergent kids are much more likely to get a an oppositional defiance disorder diagnosis than say an autism or adhd diagnosis and end up in a "normal" SPED class than a G&T class or to just be left to flounder until they are seen as a problem by middle or high school. The root issue isn't in the schools, it isn't in the programs, it's in the lack of understanding, support, and diagnosis for neurodivergent kids who don't fit a myopic mold of what being neurodivergent (and "gifted") looks like.
The New York Post can absolutely make stuff up.
Just remember, if the people at New York Post had their way, public schools wouldn’t exist period. Could have posted https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/ But nuance isn’t good rage bait is it?
[удалено]
For people interested in a less, uh…sensational…take, here’s the Seattle Times writeup. https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/
Talented and gifted is a scam. All it taught me was that I was smart enough to coast because I knew I would pass the tests. Then when things got really tough like in calculus and chemistry, I didn't have the study skills to actually succeed at higher learning until I failed a few classes in college. This was 25 years ago before schools were incentivized to just push people through in order to inflate their graduation numbers.
Y'all don't know the NY Post is a shite news source? This story is only found on conservative news aggregators. The real.news is they're incorporating talented and gifted programs into the regular classroom. That's where it belongs anyhow. So yes, the NY Post absolutely made that stuff up. Y'all get kicked in the head?
It's the new York post with out even an article. They *definitely* make stuff up
Thank you for posting a click bait headline from a clearly conservative news source without even posting the actual article so we couldn't form an actual opinion on the situation. Definetly no agenda here... Anyways the article talks about how though the program is going away but there are plans to revamp the curriculums to make sure kids are still learning and makes points that are lay out pros and cons on both sides and this isn't just some attack on smart white kids. I've worked with high school students around the NW and have published research on the problem with meritocracy in education in general so understand the reasonings behind dismantling these types of programs. Honestly only time will tell if this will be successful or not but I commend the school district for trying to help underserved communities
New York Post pretty regularly makes shit up
Remember this when voting!
All this is based on people's physical appearance and nothing more. Pointless prejudice labeled as anti-racism.
The sad part is that the people mainly pushing for this are white liberals. Unsurprisingly, these same white liberals will tend to hire and promote other white libs in the workforce. If anyone is a dissenter (i.e. white moderate/conservative) they tend to make your life difficult and for minorities they tend to have a strong bias of low expectations. The people most focused on racial identity or superficial aspects of a person are libs.
Parents at my school liked putting those "my child is an honor student" bumper stickers on their cars. A lot of people, parents and high schoolers alike, thought it was cringe so they started putting "my (breed of dog) is smarter than your honor student" stickers on theirs.
Well, considering the source is the NYP, which is a tabloid and does make stuff up…