Posted on 11/24/2009 10:26:39 AM PST by LibWhacker
In Henrico County schools last year, African-American students made up 36 percent of the enrollment and 7 percent of the children who received gifted education.
Chesterfield and Hanover counties saw similar patterns the last school year.
Area school officials who provided the numbers acknowledge the disparities and say they've dug in with task forces, targeted programs and studies.
But last week, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine put the issue in the spotlight with an order to analyze disproportionately low representation of minority students in gifted education.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.timesdispatch.com ...
I think the pattern remains. Armstrong was a fine performer. Gershwin was a composer. Different skill sets. Performance is a more right brained effort, composing is more left brained.
My personal, anecdotal experience is that I do better as a performer playing the trumpet than attempting to compose music. As a software engineer, I'm capable of composing thousands of lines of code in my head. It takes hours...sometimes days to get my fingertips to commit that code to actual files. I enjoy considerable ease in conceptualizing 3D structures and spinning them any way I desire in my head. That makes a variety of analytic tasks much easier. Eventually, that analog exercise on the right side of the brain needs to be expressed in a left brained manner to convert to a paycheck.
Stupid, lazy and undisciplined. Uninterested in learning or behaving, although that pose probably actually is a defense mechanism to hide the fact that the vast majority are INCAPABLE of learning or behaving. It looks “cooler”, I suppose, to act like you don’t care.
There’s your “analysis”, Governor: short and sweet and TRUE—send me my check.
How about lack of support for academic effort and achievement within the Black community as the cause of the low numbers of ‘gifted’ Black students?
I’m going to go against the grain on this one - there is something to gain here, and the cost is likely to be small, depending.
My kids are all in GATE (Gifted and Talented Education), the local term for it. The district designates kids as GATE depending, in the case of the vast majority, on test scores in the California State tests. SOME kids can get in with various minority privelege options if their tests don’t quite meet the standard, but parents have to request it. Very few do. From what I have seen you will not get a rush of black kids into something like GATE. Parents and kids will have to be pressed into it, and its going to be a fight on that front.
There is no limit here for GATE or Honors classes in middle schools and high schools, because, frankly, there is no extra money provided for them. If anything these kids are way cheaper to educate than the rest. If you have enough Honors kids to separate out into a class then such a class is provided. If the class size isn’t quite enough, then some likely non-GATE kids are offered slots. It seems to work.
What happens to the somewhat above-average kids who get into GATE and Honors, or the “fillers” for Honors classes ? Well, its generally very good for them. Their grades may end up lower than they would in regular classes, where they would be the stars, but they learn a heck of a lot more. They also work in an environment dominated by high performing white and Asian kids. One of the big problems with black people is the anti-intellectual attitudes and the lack of discipline. These kids, being a minority in these classes among quite driven kids, pretty much get these problems driven out of them. “Peer effects” are very powerful.
Whats the downside for the rest ? Low or none as far as I can see. If the “best of the worst” is selected, one is getting the quite well-behaved non-disruptive slice of the black population. Its the behavior for the most part that keeps regular classes in chaos. And it does not bring down the level of the classes if there are only a few of these kids in them (say no more than 10%). There are always duds in every Honors class, who are smart and can do well in a screening exam but are otherwise unmotivated. These kids tend to be better than the duds, they tend to be motivated at least.
The key is numbers and selection. One needs a critical mass of the truly gifted or at least the way above average, and an objective selection of the “best of the worst”.
You’re right, we’re not allowed to talk about correlation between single parent homes and student achievement.
We’re not allowed to talk about parenting, upbringing, or any of that. we’re not allowed to make value judgements. We’re not allowed to say that children do best when raised by their mother and father together. We’re not allowed to make correlations between juvenile delinquency and the numbers of those kids who come from fatherless homes.
And, of course, we can’t talk about a seeming lack of respect or encouragement of academic achievement in too many people in the black community. That would be racist. Yes there are people of all races who don’t give a damn their kids schools, but it seems worse in the black community. But we’re not allowed to talk about any of that, so who knows. We’re not allowed to talk about a “ghetto” culture which abhors education.
It’s interesting to talk about contributing factors to social problems, but it’s frustrating when some obvious issues are not allowed to be discussed. Then the liberals stand around and assume it must be racism if there aren’t “enough” minority kids in certain academic programs.
But nobody says anything if a mostly white school has a mostly black basketball team.
I have read that there is a correlation between mathematical and musical ability.
Politics. I was a teacher in the ‘50s and ‘60s after Sputnik and before the passing of the Federal and Secondary Education Act. For a decade there was a great emphasis on science and math education. I taught math, Many people were flummoxed by the New Math and the New Science but I learned more than the kids did by studying them in National Science Foundation sumer workshops. For the first time, I “got” the concept of sequences and so understood the Calculus in a way I had not learned it before, when theytaught a more geometric approach. I also learned a way to teach geometry from a symbolic logic. Etc.
Well, a lot of that went away and the new matterial was drained out of the textbooks becaus they had a whole new group of kids—the kids—to handle, and most of them could not handle it. Indeed, their teachers were even less prepared to teach it than some of the white middle-age teachers had been. All felt as inadequate as I would feel after the PCs first entered the schools.
There is no American institution as political as the public—the government schools. Administration is no more than a form of appointive politics. So you give the politicians and their clients what they want or you don’t stay employed. We get “dumbing down” because that is the way administrators keep their jobs and publishers sell their books to schools. Just compare a Dolchiani textbook in 1965 with one in 1975/85. Just compare a geoetry textbook in the ‘50s with one in the ‘60s and then one in the ‘70s. Both those in the ‘50s and in the ‘60s had a kind of rigor, although different rigors, because of different “languages.” Those of the ‘late ‘70s lacked rigor. This is what the integration of the black population into the schools did to math and science.
I'm not gifted, so I'm going to need some help with your math...
From the article:
African-American students made up 36 percent of the enrollment and 7 percent of the children who received gifted education
So, what the article explictly states that 7 out of 36 African American students are 'gifted'
7/36 = 19.444%
Cow poop.
The term “gifted” should be banned unless the terms “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, or “dumbell” can be used to describe the opposite end of the bell curve.
I think they have already discredited “The Bell Curve” in our society of pseudo-science.
70 IQ is considered “gifted” for minorities. How’s that grab you. My dog could score that high.
Wouldn't that be actually Toro caca
No, it doesn't. It says that 36% of the total enrollment is African-American. It further says that 7% of the enrollment in gifted programs is African-American.
What they are trying to get at is if AA representation in the total population is 36% then, all things being equal, one would expect that their representation in the gifted classes would be around 36%.
But all things aren't equal.
Yeah, especially when it is mandated that everyone must be above average.
“From the article:
African-American students made up 36 percent of the enrollment and 7 percent of the children who received gifted education. So, what the article explictly states that 7 out of 36 African American students are ‘gifted’
7/36 = 19.444%”
Thats not correct. AAs are 38% of the students but receive only 7% of the gifted money. They want AAs to get 38% of the money since that is their proportion of the population.
For example: In a population of 100 students, 38 are black (38%). Of the 100 students, 10 are considered gifted, but only 1 is black. If the amount of money spent on gifted students is $100, only 10% is spent on blacks since that is their percent of the gifted. They see this as unfair since they are 38% of the total population.
Bottom line, they cant do math either.
Hope I’m not nit-picking ... but do you really mean 36% or 38%. I see where the population says 36% in the article, is your 38% a typo?
Back when grades actually meant something, a vast majority of the class worked to earn a ‘C’ or (average). They expected ~65-70% of the students to earn a C. Conversely, the number of ‘D’ students roughly equalied the number of ‘B’ students, and the number of ‘F’ students equalled the number of ‘A’ students.
Honor students (A + B grade) students were in the upper 10% of the population. and ‘A’ students were in the top ~4-5% of the distribution.
Thus, if you were in an honor’s class; you had to be at least a ‘B’ student; then MAYBE you would get in.
That's Hodar's math.
We are “not allowed” to discuss things because we have accepted premises, allowed ourselves to be intimidated, are cowardly and fear peer pressure, reprisals, threats. We want social acceptance over what we know to be the truth. In this way we are no different than the spineless politicians we rail against. It is hard to say things that are not popularly accepted, but by shutting up we lose our chance and even our right to shape our reality and our culture. We are bullied, but partly to blame for it perhaps.
It’s nearly inconceivable to me that gifted black children in districts that have gifted programs are being disproportionately ignored. To the contrary, I believe gifted black children are rarely overlooked in suburban schools such as Chesterfield.
I doubt there is a higher priority among the faculty/administration than identifying gifted minorities and giving them all the school has to offer.
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