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No child should be actively excluded based on a metric like race or gender, just like no student should be deliberately included because of race, gender, class, or any other metric that a parent could use to coerce a school to place their child in a gifted/magnet class. That should be common sense. Kids should be placed in the gifted/magnet track because of performance, and performance alone. I don't believe that a meritocracy is racist, sexist, or biased in an unfair way. Placing students in classes where they may under perform, and excluding kids who would perform well in an accelerated program are unfair, and a meritocracy mitigates both of these problems. The article raised a good point about schools that marginalized groups would attend don't have a gifted program, precluding them from even participating. That can be addressed a couple different ways. Either redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present, or mandate the presence of a gifted program in all schools. There will, of course, be differing quality of the program from school to school, which would favor the former course of action. Having gone through the "gifted program" through elementary and middle school, I can say that the only real differences I felt weren't related to curriculum, we were taught essentially the same things, with slight differences. 1. Smaller class size. In a class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, there was maybe 25 kids.
2. Less rowdy/troublemaking classmates. Made for less distractions.
3. Less busywork. The routine of getting a packet every night for homework was not something I had to suffer through like many friends I had that weren't in an accelerated program. I don't believe you will ever truly eradicate inequities within public services, and the cost of private services, especially in education, preclude many from participating. That said, we should strive to mitigate them. My fear is that the steps taken to mitigate inequity will just move the availability of opportunity from one group to another, where the true solution is increasing the availability for all groups, and let performance be the selector of who is admitted to gifted/accelerated programs. |
I am a bit hesitant of this. One valuable thing you get by having geographical schools is the same friends in and out of school. If you have friends at school but they are too far to hang out with or do homework with it can be bad for the kid learning social skills.
Mandating gifted classes as you mentioned seems better.