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Egalitarians vs. gifted kids

DC-area educrats are worried. It’s the usual: The budding scholars in Alexandria’s gifted ­classes are bright and curious enough to make any teacher beam, but these days they’re also an emblem of what the school system calls one of its greatest failures: a lack of diversity among the academic elite. Most of the city’s students […]

DC-area educrats are worried. It’s the usual:

The budding scholars in Alexandria’s gifted ­classes are bright and curious enough to make any teacher beam, but these days they’re also an emblem of what the school system calls one of its greatest failures: a lack of diversity among the academic elite.

Most of the city’s students are black or Hispanic. Most in gifted programs are white.

This imbalance in classes tailored to gifted and talented students is echoed across the region and the nation, a source of embarrassment to many educators.

In theory, a racial enrollment gap in gifted programs should be easier for schools to close than a racial achievement gap. But in practice, experts say, there are many obstacles. Among them, they say, are testing and outreach methods that fail to ensure children from all backgrounds get an equal shot.

More:

Among local school systems, Prince William County’s has taken perhaps the most aggressive policy on diversity in gifted classes. It mandates that the demographic composition of the gifted program reflect the overall racial and ethnic makeup of the school system. To do that, Prince William has amended its identification process to ensure that it finds gifted students from a variety of backgrounds.

Ah. See, this is how it works. The egalitarians cannot stand that either a) intelligence appears to be maldistributed in the population, by race, or — what I believe is more likely the case — b) black and Hispanic parents are not nurturing their intelligent children in such a way as to develop their inborn giftedness. So the educrats are remaking the criteria of the gifted programs, and even, as in Prince William County, passing mandates, to compel the egalitarian outcome they prefer. After all, even if, by some fashion, the school system should genuinely find minority kids who are gifted who weren’t found before — this, as opposed to classifying not-gifted kids as gifted for reasons of social engineering — won’t they have to change the gifted instruction to accomodate kids who weren’t getting nurtured at home?

That may be something morally justifiable, but let’s not pretend that this is social engineering resulting in declining standards for the sake of egalitarian social goals. This is the sort of the thing the SWPL mind — which loves the concept of Gifted Children — cannot stand: it wants to be liberal and egalitarian, but it also wants to preserve educational advantages for its kids.

Me, I don’t care if the gifted classes are entirely made up of Asians and Jews, as long as the entrance tests were fair (and claiming that the outcome doesn’t Look Like America is not proof that the tests were unfair). It’s unjust to deny kids who are capable of succeeding at the highest level — whether by nature, nurture, or a combination of the two — a chance to do so for the sake of easing the social anxieties of the rest of us. Moralistic Therapeutic Pedagogy is a dead end.

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