REPOST: Gifted, Talented and Separated

This article published in The New York Times explores how students in a school in New York City are divided by the gifted label--and race.

Image source: The New York Times

IT is just a metal door with three windows, the kind meant to keep the clamor of an elementary school hallway from piercing a classroom’s quiet. Other than paint the color of bubble gum, it is unremarkable.
But the pink door on Room 311 at Public School 163 on the Upper West Side represents a barrier belied by its friendly hue. On one side are 21 fourth graders labeled gifted and talented by New York City’s school system. They are coursing through public school careers stamped accelerated.

And they are mostly white.

On the other side, sometimes sitting for reading lessons on the floor of the hallway, are those in the school’s vast majority: They are enrolled in general or special education programs.

They are mostly children of color.

“I know what we look like,” Carolyn M. Weinberg, a 28-year veteran of P.S. 163, said of the racial disparities as she stood one day in the third-floor hallway between Room 318, where she and a colleague teach a fourth-grade general education class, and the one where Angelo Monserrate teaches the gifted class, Room 311.

“I know what you see,” said Ms. Weinberg.

There are 652 students enrolled at P.S. 163 this year, from prekindergarten through fifth grade. Roughly 63 percent of them are black and Hispanic; whites make up 27 percent; and Asians account for 6 percent.

This reflects the flavor of the neighborhood, and roughly matches the New York City school system’s overall demographics.

Yet in P.S. 163’s gifted classes, the racial dynamics of the neighborhood, the school itself and the school system are turned upside down.

Of the 205 children enrolled in the nine gifted classes, 97, or 47 percent, are white; another 31 of the students, or 15 percent, are Asian. And a combined 65 students, or 32 percent, are black and Hispanic.

In the 21 other classes that enroll the school’s remaining 447 students, only 80, or 18 percent, are white.

The disparities are most apparent in the lower grades.

Of the 24 students in Karen Engler’s kindergarten gifted class, one is black and three are Hispanic. Ayelet Cutler’s first-grade gifted class has 21 students, one of them black and two Hispanic. There are two blacks and two Hispanics among the 26 students in Athena Shapiro’s second-grade gifted class.

On a recent morning, a line of Ms. Cutler’s students moved from the classroom to the corridor, ahead of the general education class of Linda Crews. A string of mostly white faces and then a line of mostly black and Hispanic ones walked down the hall of a school named for a New York politician who sought to end inequities in education: Alfred E. Smith.

It was 11:25 a.m., and the classes wound their way to the cafeteria, a cavernous room at the school’s western edge. Once there, the children sat with those in their own class, each one at a separate long white table that, for a moment, froze the divisions.

For critics of New York City’s gifted and talented programs, that image crystallizes what they say is a flawed system that reinforces racial separation in the city’s schools and contributes to disparities in achievement.

They contend that gifted admissions standards favor middle-class children, many of them white or Asian, over black and Hispanic children who might have equal promise, and that the programs create castes within schools, one offered an education that is enriched and accelerated, the other getting a bare-bones version of the material. Because they are often embedded within larger schools, the programs bolster a false vision of diversity, these critics say, while reinforcing the negative stereotypes of class and race.

Despite months of repeated requests, the city’s Education Department would not provide racial breakdowns of gifted and talented programs and the schools that house them. But the programs tend to be in wealthier districts whose populations have fewer black and Hispanic children, and far more children qualify for them in affluent districts than in poorer ones.

For the full version of the Times article, click here.

Through writing, Ken Von Kohorn campaigns for academic excellence in the country.   Learn more about his works and advocacies from this Facebook page.

How to bring our schools out of the 20th Century

By Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe 
Read the full article here.

There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."

American schools aren't exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries and business, government and other education leaders releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.

Right now we're aiming too low. Competency in reading and math--the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing--is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here's what they are:

Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages"--not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Best Education In The World: Finland, South Korea Top Country Rankings, U.S. Rated Average

This article appeared in the Nov. 27, 2012 online edition of The Huffington Post. It discusses the report of education firm Pearson on what countries have the best education system.

The United States places 17th in the developed world for education, according to a global report by education firm Pearson.

Finland and South Korea, not surprisingly, top the list of 40 developed countries with the best education systems. Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore follow. The rankings are calculated based on various measures, including international test scores, graduation rates between 2006 and 2010, and the prevalence of higher education seekers. 

Pearson's chief education adviser Sir Michael Barber tells BBC that the high ranking countries tend to offer teachers higher status in society and have a "culture" of education.

The study notes that while funding is an important factor in strong education systems, cultures supportive of learning is even more critical -- as evidenced by the highly ranked Asian countries, where education is highly valued and parents have grand expectation. While Finland and South Korea differ greatly in methods of teaching and learning, they hold the top spots because of a shared social belief in the importance of education and its "underlying moral purpose."

The study aims to help policymakers and school leaders identify key factors that lead to successful educational outcomes. The research draws on literacy data as well as figures in government spending on education, school entrance age, teacher salaries and degree of school choice. Researchers also measured socioeconomic outcomes like national unemployment rates, GDP, life expectancy and prison population. 

The report also notes the importance of high-quality teachers and improving strong educator recruitment. The rankings show, however, that there is no clear correlation between higher pay and better performance. The bottom line findings:

  

1. There are no magic bullets: The small number of correlations found in the study shows the poverty of simplistic solutions. Throwing money at education by itself rarely produces results, and individual changes to education systems, however sensible, rarely do much on their own. Education requires long-term, coherent and focussed system-wide attention to achieve improvement.  

2.       Respect teachers: Good teachers are essential to high-quality education. Finding and retaining them is not necessarily a question of high pay. Instead, teachers need to be treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine.  

3.      Culture can be changed: The cultural assumptions and values surrounding an education system do more to support or undermine it than the system can do on its own. Using the positive elements of this culture and, where necessary, seeking to change the negative ones, are important to promoting successful outcomes.  

4.      Parents are neither impediments to nor saviours of education: Parents want their children to have a good education; pressure from them for change should not be seen as a sign of hostility but as an indication of something possibly amiss in provision. On the other hand, parental input and choice do not constitute a panacea. Education systems should strive to keep parents informed and work with them.  

5.      Educate for the future, not just the present: Many of today's job titles, and the skills needed to fill them, simply did not exist 20 years ago. Education systems need to consider what skills today's students will need in future and teach accordingly.

To be sure, South Korea's top spot doesn't come without a price. Stories of families divided in the name of education are all too common, to the extent that the phenomenon has bequeathes those families with a title of their own -- kirogi kajok, or goose families, because they must migrate to reunite.

But America's average ranking doesn't come as a surprise. A report recently published by Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance found that students in Latvia, Chile and Brazil are making gains in academics three times faster than American students, while those in Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia and Lithuania are improving at twice the rate. Researchers estimate that gains made by students in those 11 countries equate to about two years of learning.

What gains U.S. students posted in recent years are "hardly remarkable by world standards," according to the report. Although the U.S. is not one of the nine countries that lost academic ground for the 14-year period between 1995 and 2009, more countries were improving at a rate significantly faster than that of the U.S. Researchers looked at data for 49 countries.

The study's findings echo years of rankings that show foreign students outpacing their American peers academically. Students in Shanghai who recently took international exams for the first time outscored every other school system in the world. In the same test, American students ranked 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading.

A 2009 study found that U.S. students ranked 25th among 34 countries in math and science, behind nations like China, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Finland. Figures like these have groups like StudentsFirst, headed by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, concerned and calling for reforms to "our education system [that] can't compete with the rest of the world."

Just 6 percent of U.S. students performed at the advanced level on an international exam administered in 56 countries in 2006. That proportion is lower than those achieved by students in 30 other countries. American students' low performance and slow progress in math could also threaten the country's economic growth, experts have said.

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Viewpoint: The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

This article discusses how the 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform, written by Andrew J. Rotherham and published on November 08, 2012 by TIME.com.


The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools. In other words, Nov. 6 left the country with an education mandate as unclear as the electoral mandate overall. Still, what happened in various states will influence what happens in Washington during President Obama’s second term. Here are four key education issues to watch:

Standards for teachers and students
The biggest omen for the Obama Administration is, ironically, the defeat of a high-profile Republican, Indiana state schools superintendent Tony Bennett. He has been a quiet Obama ally, most notably in the fight to reform teacher evaluations and develop common academic standards in all 50 states. The latter effort didn’t endear him to conservatives, and Bennett’s Democratic opponent said she’d pull the state out of the standards initiative. Bennett also angered teachers’ unions with his blunt talk and his support for one of the toughest teacher-evaluation laws in the country. This left-right convergence led to Bennett’s losing on the same night that a conservative Republican won the governorship, and that doesn’t bode well for Obama’s centrist approach to education reform. Or for that matter, for GOP leaders on these issues, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who has championed many of the initiatives that got trounced on Tuesday night.

In other Republican-on-Republican violence, Idaho schools chief Tom Luna wasn’t on the ballot, but all three of his big education-reform measures were roundly defeated by voters in this solidly red state. Luna, who is a Republican and also the president of the Council of Chief State School Officers, the national organization representing state education agencies, had pushed hard for initiatives that would have instituted merit pay for teachers, weakened collective bargaining and mandated more online education and use of laptops in public schools. All bombed at the ballot box, despite an influx of donations to support them from out-of-state donors including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Meanwhile, South Dakota voters rejected a new state law that would have incorporated test-score data into teacher evaluations, added merit pay and weakened teacher tenure. The bill had passed the state’s legislature by just one vote, and defeating it was a top priority of teachers’ unions.

Unions didn’t win everywhere, however. In Michigan, which Obama carried, voters rejected a measure that would have expanded collective-bargaining rights for teachers and other workers. Bottom line: Just as we saw in Wisconsin last year, organized labor is not viewed sympathetically by many voters from either party, but teachers’ unions can still pack a punch when their back is against the wall. No one wants to be perceived as offending teachers. And that message won’t be lost on state and local elected officials — who will all be on the ballot in the next few years — as they debate how much risk they’re willing to take to carry out the President’s agenda.

Charter schools
Publicly funded charter schools were the night’s big education winner, scoring two hard-fought victories on opposite sides of the country. In Georgia, after the state supreme court struck down a charter-school law as unconstitutional, reformers took their case directly to voters, who by a decisive 58% to 41% margin approved a modification to the state’s constitution that will enable a special commission to authorize charter schools. In Washington, voters narrowly approved a referendum allowing the creation of charter schools, after rejecting similar initiatives in 1996, 2000 and 2004. Charter-school supporters like me see these wins as a sign that giving families more choices in education is no longer a question of if but of when and how.

Immigration reform
Maryland voters passed a state version of the controversial DREAM Act, granting in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants at public colleges and universities, provided they meet certain conditions. Long stalled in Congress, the measure sailed through on the ballot, with 59% of Maryland voters in favor of it and 41% opposed. That lopsided result, along with the growing importance of Latino voters in national politics, should embolden skittish politicians elsewhere in the country to help Obama tackle the issue of comprehensive immigration reform.

Education spending
The other big issue, in addition to immigration reform, that the President will face early in his second term is the deficit. In California, the prospect of additional education budget cuts helped prompt voters to pass a temporary increase in sales and income taxes. Fiscally, California is running on fumes, but the difficulty of doing something about it previews the coming debate in Washington over balancing spending cuts and tax increases to get the federal budget under control.

The fiscal cliff will now dominate politics in Washington. But the real education story of the 2012 election is the fragility of the reform consensus and the high-wire act the President and Republican reformers have ahead of them.

Ken Von Kohorn: The state of public school systems

Ken Von Kohorn image credit: gabrielzamoramoreno.files.wordpress.com

As a non-fiction writer, Ken Von Kohorn focuses his attention on topics that concern American education and politics.

Few would admit that public school systems need reform. But with documentary films such as “Waiting for ‘Superman’” exposing some of the failures of the American public education system, one cannot help but ask, “What are the top issues facing the U.S. public school system today?” Below are two of the major ones:

Bullying

Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior among school children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. According to the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% of students in grades 9 to 12 nationwide experienced bullying.

Ken Von Kohorn image credit: anotherway.org

Though laws have been in place to protect children, socio-political writers, like Ken Von Kohorn, note that there is still much work to be done to stop bullying in schools. School administrators, teachers, and parents must also work together to address bullying, which has a profound effect on young minds.

Poverty

Economic woes have hit the educational system, too, as statistics reveal that most of the 7,000 students that drop out of school everyday live at or below poverty level. Despite the efforts of some schools to provide less fortunate students with the basics, sadly, there is not enough to go around, according to administrators.

Much has been said about the state of U.S. public school systems. But the bottom line is, reforms are needed for the children’s sake.

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Ken Von Kohorn and BBBS: Helping children overcome adversity

Ken Von Kohorn is an investment specialist and writer. Also a philanthropist, he has maintained a partnership with the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, helping children reach their potential and succeed in the future.

Ken Von Kohorn Image Credit: www.accesspointkids.com

Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) is America’s largest donor- and volunteer-supported mentoring network. It helps children achieve measurable success in various areas of learning, such as in music, arts, and academics. The organization also teaches them to follow the rules established by the society, develop self-confidence, and build diplomatic relationships with others.

With a support system that comprise parents, schools, corporations, and professionals, BBBS carefully pairs children (“Littles”) with screened volunteer mentors (“Bigs”) and comprehensively monitors each one-to-one mentoring session throughout its course to ensure exemplary outcomes.

Ken Von Kohorn Image Credit: Spotkidsspeech.com

Ken Von Kohorn is an avid reader of journalism books. He allots time to read the works of such non-fiction writers as Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, Paul Johnson, and Robert Caro.

BBBS aims to help children—especially those facing adversity—earn at least a high school diploma, veer away from juvenile delinquency, and secure job opportunities in the future. This goal has been the cornerstone of the organization’s century-old history. With about 350 agencies across the country, BBBS serves nearly 630,000 children, volunteers, and families.

“We have known all along that Big Brothers Big Sisters’ mentoring has a long-lasting, positive effect on children’s confidence, grades, and social skills,” says Karen J. Mathis, former BBBS president and CEO, “…and the results of this impact study scientifically confirm that belief.”

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