The Seattle Times, today, is running a story entitled, ‘Seattle’s gifted program seen as ‘elitist.’” Am I misunderstanding something or is elitism not the purpose of a gifted program?
What the article is really complaining about is not that the program is too ‘elitist’ but rather that it is too white. It is pointed out that 75% of the gifted program is white compared to only 40% in the district at large. I agree that this does show massive disproportionality but not in the way the article implies.
69% of Seattle is white, showing a slight over representation, but considering that whites score much higher on standardized tests than blacks and Hispanics and only a little lower than Asians this is not too surprising. Demographics and Test Scores.
The shocking story is that only 40% of the districts ‘gifted’ students are white when 73% of the district is white. This shows an enormous demographic discrepancy that dwarfs the 69%-75% gap inside the city. I have no problem with putting whoever is the most academically qualified into the gifted program even if that means that only 10% of the program is white but it seems very unlikely that this is what’s happening. It seems more likely that, in the name of diversity, non-whites are being given special preference. What is most disturbing about this is that Seattle seems to desire replicating the district, likely meaning that they intend to discriminate against white students. This angers me because racial discrimination is wrong no matter who it is leveled against.
Update:
It appears that my outrage was premature. Commenter Jeremy alerted me to the fact that while 69% of Seattle’s population is white a smaller portion of the public schools’ students are. According to a survey of Seattle elementary students (85.7% participation) only 35.8% consider themselves to be white. This of course totally obviates my earlier point. It certainly appears that Seattle’s APP program is not racially representative. That said, I would oppose making changes solely to engineer the racial makeup of the program. I think participation in elite programs should be determined solely on academic merit not based on ethnicity. That said, if children from wealthier families are able to get into the program basede on anything other than merit the program enrollment procedures require serious revision. Survey.
Thanks Jeremy for your correction.
Interesting observation.
The report which was presented to the district was lengthy and complicated. It contained a lot of suggestions on academics and vision in the program, paths to deal with growth, and several suggestions on helping explain advanced learning to parents in Seattle schools.
APP is more out of whack than you might think. While 69% of the population of Seattle as a whole is white, only 42% of the students in Seattle Public schools are.
As the parent of a child in APP, I am happy with the program, but the makeup of the school is a little brain-bending. In addition to the racial demographics, an inordinate percentage of the parents are professionally employed and have advanced degrees. The school is skewed not only racially but economically as well. I’ve remarked it doesn’t look like Seattle, it looks like the top 10-15% of Seattle.
Anyhow, buried in that big thick report were some suggestions on how to get more minority (read: Black and Hispanic. Asians are already well-represented) into the program.
The author of the Times article, being lazy, dialed in on this and wrote an article that all but accuses the APP program of institutional racism, which I consider to be unfair.