Dear Dr. Superintendent,
Thank you for attending the Elementary School's parent meeting last week. I just spent some time reading and contemplating the report from the City Schools Efficiency Survey.
I note that when asked to prioritize district services, 6% of respondents ranked gifted services as their top priority. According to the state data released this fall, about 6% of District students receive gifted services. I feel it is reasonable to conclude that nearly all of the families whose children receive gifted services see it as having such value as to outweigh even maintaining class size.
Furthermore, I note that 44% of the district students qualify as gifted according to state rules. Offering college-level coursework is ranked as #1 or #2 by 46% of respondents. I wonder if this a signal that the district is indeed underserving its gifted population.
Sincerely,
The Mom Advocate, PhD
Associate Professor
STEM field department
My University
I just sent the following to the superintendent of the school district, cc'd to the director of intervention services (including gifted). In an effort to show that the district is being wise with its funds, it sent out a community survey on ways to cut spending. It asked respondents to rank the relative importance of 6 things: class size, gifted services, college-level coursework (AP & dual enrollment), use of technology in the classroom, arts & performing arts, and sports, clubs & extracurriculars. More than 1800 people responded. The results of the survey were recently posted. My response:
5 Comments
The Mom Advocate
1/27/2014 05:24:35 am
That's one of the weird things about gifted ID in this state. There are three factors at play here, the first is that gifted ID is (1) >= 95th percentile in cognitive OR reading OR math, (2) once gifted, always gifted, so if you hit any one of those three ever, you are counted in the gifted population, and (3) the state mandates screening of all students in 2nd, 3rd, and 5th.
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The Mom Advocate
1/27/2014 05:27:55 am
Also, I've often wondered, but about 1/3 of kids are a year older when they start kindergarten. My sense is that these kids tend to do very well on the reading and math screening in 2nd grade, and then fizzle after that. You can see this in the state testing data where there's a way to search scores by school according to all sorts of different subgroups. The reading scores go down when looking at the kids IDd gifted in reading, but don't go down for those getting gifted services.
Undoubtedly, the high-performing adult population has something to do with it. We have schools like that in our district, though a lot of those families choose not to use the GT Centers because their peer group means classroom instruction tends to be targeted to kids of similar ability. That said, students who qualify for the GT Centers here need to qualify across the board. Students who qualify in one area get an Advanced Learning Plan and receive services in their neighborhood school. One of the other perks of the GT Centers is that there's a big focus on the socio-emotional aspects, and I think that's why a couple of kids who could otherwise be at a high-performing school in an expensive neighborhood (homes $600k and up in one; homes $800k and up in another) are in our GT Center.
The Mom Advocate
1/28/2014 02:20:03 am
Wow, tons of meat in that comment. Thanks. ;)
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AuthorSTEM Prof. Mom of 2 extraordinary kids in public school. @StemMomAdvocate Archives
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