Open Advanced Coursework for All Instead of Gifted Programs
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that making advanced courses available to all students is a better approach than sorting students into gifted programs.
Key Takeaways
- Open access beats selection - Letting all students attempt advanced coursework is more equitable than pre-selecting 'gifted' students
- Gifted programs can be gatekeeping - Selection processes often reflect socioeconomic advantage rather than genuine ability
- High expectations for everyone - When rigorous courses are open to all, more students rise to the challenge than anyone expected
Transcript
think a better idea than gifted programs is advanced coursework at every level.
And I have to give some credit for this idea to Dale Chu over on Twitter, who also shared a New York Times article about the challenges of enrolling diversity in your gifted program that reflects the diversity of your student body rather than having it skew toward the more privileged families.
I think that is an inherent challenge for if the design of the program is that you test into it and only the most gifted, you know, the kids who get the highest score, maybe the top 1% on whatever assessment you're using, like if only those kids get into the gifted program, then we're always going to have this problem of it skewing toward wealthier families.
And the reason for that is that money affects kids' test scores.
The wealthier your family is, the higher you score on any test that we can give.
We don't really have any kind of ability to to test for, you know, high potential, high performing, but low income kids.
Money counts on anything that we can test.
And unless we're going to explicitly say, hey, we have 10 slots for rich kids and 10 slots for poor kids and 10 slots for middle class kids, like unless we're going to have some sort of quota system like that, we can't really use testing to and get any kind of socioeconomic diversity.
So I think the approach that we should take for the most part is to offer advanced courses.
If you want to take an advanced course, you can take it.
If you want to move up a grade in math, you can move up a grade in math or whatever the options that we want to make available are.
And the advantage there is that kids can challenge themselves, but it's not just, hey, do you happen to be wealthy?
And I think we have this idea that's wrong in education.
We have this idea that there are kids who are so just naturally gifted that they can rise above the constraints of, say, poverty or just not being wealthy and make it into that gifted program.
I think the reality is money matters so much on anything that we can test that anytime we have a test-based program, everybody who gets into it, almost everybody who gets into it, you know, disproportionately is going to have a fair amount of money.
I don't think there's a way to take money out of the equation, but if we have open enrollment, advanced courses, we can get around that and provide appropriate challenge for a lot of kids who may not have a ton of money, but who have the potential.
Let me know what you think.