Progressives for advanced education
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Tracking (education)
15 min read
The article debates ability grouping and advanced education programs, which are forms of academic tracking. Understanding the history, research, and controversies around tracking provides essential context for the equity concerns raised about gifted education.
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Lewis Terman
12 min read
Terman pioneered gifted education in America and conducted the famous longitudinal study of gifted children. Understanding this history illuminates both the origins of gifted education and its problematic early associations with eugenics, which informs current equity debates.
In today’s edition of SCHOOLED, several friends on the left, including Jennifer Jennings and Constance Lindsay, offer ideas for making advanced education more palatable to a wider audience. Plus a round-up of recent posts by Jed Wallace, Tim Daly, Natalie Wexler, Dale Chu, Robin Lake, Mike McShane, Bibb Hubbard, Rick Hess, Robert Pondiscio, Chad Aldeman, Jim Cowen, and more.
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On Tuesday, I asked how we might make gifted education more palatable to the political left. (I talked about that on the Fordham podcast this week, too.) I offered three suggestions:
Call it “advanced education” instead of gifted education.
Address concerns around equity and bias by using “universal screening” to identify eligible students instead of parent or teacher recommendations.
Build initiatives in every elementary school in the country—including high-poverty ones—to serve their top 10 percent of students, at least.
I solicited ideas on what else we might do to get progressives to embrace advanced education in the early grades, just like they support expanding access to advanced courses in middle school and high school. And boy did y’all deliver!
Let’s group the suggestions into four buckets:
Rhetoric.
Nomenclature.
Program design.
Political strategy.
In terms of rhetoric, several of you had recommendations for arguments that might be persuasive to folks on the left, especially around equity and fairness.
Equity
An anonymous contributor writes:
...The concern from “the left” has always been about equity. Underneath are several smaller concerns related to resource allocation (e.g., why give more to kids who already have a lot? this takes away resources and time from kids who need more help, it’s just a way to keep rich (mostly) White people happy and in the district), plus the argument that gifted ed is just segregation of schools by another name.
The strongest argument from a “left” perspective for advanced learning in public schools is that less-advantaged kids are the ones that need it most. American schools could get rid of all honors courses, AP, etc. tomorrow and it would make very little difference in the life of a rich kid. Her parents would open-enroll her to a different district, go to a private school, lobby/run for school board and change the policy, or get private tutoring. Low-income families/those
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