![]() South Side also turned to the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, a Swiss-based program that offers a demanding high school degree. Related: Up to 3.6 million students should be labeled gifted, but aren’t But around the country, efforts to broaden access to accelerated classes and, in some districts, to mandate Advanced Placement classes for all students have been implemented without ensuring that students have the background material necessary to succeed. Taking such a systematic approach to shrinking the achievement gap may sound obvious. Students in these classes are pre-taught material, making them better prepared to understand material in their mainstream classes. ![]() Such coordination facilitates support classes that meet every other day during the school day, with one teacher for every six or seven students. Today, the school requires subject teachers in each grade to teach the same content at the same time. So, the district started by replacing separate gifted classes in elementary school with individualized, project-based “talent” classes for all students. Rockville’s administrators knew that removing academic tracks would be fraught. The experience stayed with Burris, and when she became South Side’s principal in 2000, she found like-minded educators worried about the damage tracking could cause and who, over the past decade, had started to dismantle it. Most were Black and Latino kids living in poverty. “There was a real culture that ‘We hate school and we hate language,’” Burris said. All had taken a foreign language the previous year and failed, and they knew that ending up in Burris’ class meant expectations had been lowered. Its students weren’t fooled by the elegant name. It was 1989, and as a new Spanish teacher in Lawrence, New York, Carol Burris was assigned an eighth grade class called Language for Travelers. In 2019 in New York City, a group commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio, The School Diversity Advisory Group, recommended doing away with all gifted and talented programs, while that same year Seattle attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate its programs as a way to alleviate school segregation.Īs school systems around the country work to address entrenched educational inequities, these experiments provide insights into the benefits and challenges of doing away with tracked classes and gifted programs. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger ReportĪround the country, gifted and talented programs have come under fire for exacerbating school systems’ already stark racial and economic segregation. ![]() Students in Bruce Hecker's 12th grade English class at South Side High School all study the same advanced curriculum. So now, some of South Side’s college-level classes, like Hecker’s 12th grade English, are not only open to all, but also required. In Rockville Centre, tracked classes also led to racial and economic segregation in a high school where a fifth of the nearly 1,100 students are Black or Latino and the rest of the student body is nearly entirely white.Įarly on, administrators found that many Black and Latino students and students from low-income families avoided the most challenging classes even after being given the option to enroll in them. This can have a long-term impact the rigor of high school courses has been found to be the No. Those assignments often became self-fulfilling prophecies even though they didn’t always accurately reflect students’ abilities. It was, instead, to avoid creating a caste system by assigning students to remedial, average or advanced classes before they’d had a chance to develop their academic potential. Upperclassmen can still choose to take more challenging math, science and foreign language classes. The goal wasn’t to eliminate all tracking, South Side Principal John Murphy said. More than 30 years ago, Rockville Centre began a gradual but determined effort to do away with gifted classes in its elementary schools as well as many of the tracked classes at the middle and high schools. Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report ![]() South Side High School in Rockville Centre, N.Y., eliminated many of its tracked classes. But your first thought is still to blame the dog.” His peers laughed in appreciation. “If you’re a kid and you break a vase,” one student reflected on the theme of scapegoating in Miller’s play, “you don’t get these concepts. The students Hecker called on hesitated, cleared their throats and said “um.” But when they did speak, their comments were clear and cogent. Occasionally, Hecker interrupted to encourage participation from a handful of students who receive support services to keep up with the class’s rigorous curriculum. The conversation that morning in December 2019 followed the lead of the seven or eight most vocal students.
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