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Seattle shuts down gifted program for having too many white and Asian students
- google234123 3y agoThis is a beautiful example of why DEI must be defeated.
- hilux 3y agoYes. I strongly believe in diversity. But "DEI" as currently implemented is either worse-than-useless virtue signaling (in corporate America) or the complete destruction of standards (in US schools and universities).
- jimbob45 3y agoTitle should be changed to the original “Seattle Public Schools” which better reflects that a few zealous school board members made this decision for one district rather than the state of Washington banning GAT programs wholesale.
- woodpanel 3y ago[flagged]
- YugyDugan 3y ago[flagged]
- moshegramovsky 3y ago<< "Shut it down, the goyim know!") Are you trying to say that Jewish people are behind this? Naked antisemitism much?
- YugyDugan 3y ago[flagged]
- moshegramovsky 3y agoHow many Jews do you know?
- YugyDugan 3y ago[flagged]
- booleandilemma 3y ago[flagged]
- im3w1l 3y agoPretty sure India has caste-based DEI
- Almondsetat 3y agoHow is the caste system DEI?
- quantified 3y agoAren't there quotas for castes in government?
- slowmovintarget 3y agoThere's no equity, nor inclusion, sought for in a caste system. That term does not apply. Quotas are not the same.
- im3w1l 3y agoThey have programs to help historically disadvantaged groups. To give them equity. To include them. How is that not dei?
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y agoTo be fair, in Asian countries they have a different concept of things such as nationality and race, and often they are combined. Such as China, someone born to Chinese parents in America can be seen as both Chinese and American. If someone is born to two white Americans in China, they will not be seen as Chinese.
- Ekaros 3y agoAnd at the same time it is control tactic... If people spend all time fighting for and against DEI, they won't fight about class issues. Which are the true problem. So it is easy to throw some money at impressionable and loud people. Just so they focus on something inconsequential while being robbed blind.
- labrador 3y ago[flagged]
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y agoIt's just racism with the excuse that it's "progressive" or "liberal" when its not. Both sides of the political spectrum have extremes.
- lucioperca 3y agoIf they would really like to help urban poor people, they would need to fix housing, affordable childcare, food deserts etc.
- drewcoo 3y agoSo not education? Why do you claim that?
- nine_k 3y ago> Nearly 70% of the students were white. I bluntly don't get this. About 75% of the US population is white [1], and Seattle are is not particularly thickly populated by Blacks (unlike Southeast), Native Americans (unlike the Great Lakes area), etc. In other words, the program managed to bring in more racially diverse students than one would expect from average numbers. I also don't see any quotation saying that the particular racial makeup was the reason to alter the program. I suspect racial profiling in education might just be unlawful! [1]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/POP010220 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/POP010220
- tssva 3y ago“The student body at the schools served by Seattle Public Schools is 45.4% White, 14.8% Black, 12.6% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 13.3% Hispanic/Latino, 0.4% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.4% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. In addition, 12.3% of students are two or more races, and 0% have not specified their race or ethnicity.” https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/washington/districts/seattle-school-district-no-1-110808 https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/washington/districts/se...
- zer00eyz 3y agoThis one is a live grenade from a source that... likes to stir the pot and has some political leanings. Im pretty liberal. This is just dumb. We are, as a country at a point where we cant have a conversation about this. About what is really going on, and actually fixing things. It's moments like these where I feel like I'm living in a copy of 1984. How about you keep the dam gifted program and pour as much money into some schools where the kids have worse socioeconomic circumstances and give them the same leg up? That would be a SANE and RATIONAL policy...
- ChocolateGod 3y agoI'd like to say I'm liberal, but I don't think this is liberalism at all. It's racism under the guise of "its the right and ethical thing" so people who challenge it as labeled as isms or ist, it seeks to divide and create invisible barriers where there shouldn't be any. The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy
- zer00eyz 3y ago>> The liberal thing to do would be to push for a meritocracy Nothing of the sort would work 1. Pay teachers a living wage... Make it a 150k a year starting salary job. Make it competitive. Make it year round 8 hours a day full time. 2. Kids get NO home work. Half of HN cries that a 40 hour work week is too much... kids spend 30 hours a week in school and have more work at home. School is a job, you do your job at your job. 3. No more sports at school. Keep PE but no more football, baseball circle jerks. 4. More Shop, tech, Art and Music. You know gen z knows less about computing on the whole. It's not cell phones, they closed all the computer labs and stoped having those classes cause "digital natives". Bullshit. Also, no one knows how to weld, cut wood, fix a pipe, cook, balance a check register, budget (home economics)...
- sitkack 3y agoTotally agree. GenZ can't use the command line. I am with you on shop, art, music, cooking, etc. All of those things make more capable people. Project based learning should start from a young age. The kids need to learn with their whole selves.
- camdenlock 3y agoIs this parody? Or has our civilization truly just lost its way?
- nine_k 3y agoIt's a bit of sensationalist reporting. Humans lose their way all the time! Not all of them, fortunately; local extreme perturbations usually relax after some time, and merge with the general more-or-less-sensible background. (Not always, sadly.)
- slekker 3y agoThis will get flagged in 3..2..1.. the comment section is already a cesspool :^)
- TomSwirly 3y agoAnd the New York Post is not a reliable source.
- throwpl 3y ago[flagged]
- istultus 3y agoIgnoring the ideology - maybe, in a roundabout way, if this causes the middle-class and above to move their kids to private education in response, this will actually achieve its aims, in that the next time they sample gifted kids in public education, a larger percentage will be *ahem* "ethnically diverse"?
- Prickle 3y agoI just fundamentally don't understand why advanced placement classes need to be axed due to racial issues. Why is this so hard? Just keep the accelerated education program. Then try to help the disadvantaged groups get better testing scores via assistance programs. The issue here is obviously the name of the program. Just change that!
- Nomadeon 3y agoAnd the effect will be the opposite of the intent - now only students wealthy enough to afford private tutoring or that have a stable enough home environment to self-study can pass AP exams. Wonder what races those students will be? I'm admittedly talking my own book, having come from the lower end of middle class. I was also the runt of the litter and at the bottom of the social pecking order. Students of all races enjoyed looking down on me to feel better about their own situation. I retired from working for other people at age 40. I credit gifted/AP courses in 8-12th grade for a significant portion of that. Did my racial background still advantage me? You bet. I had a stable home environment and low crime neighborhood. Perhaps we should focus on how to offer children stable home environments and low crime neighborhoods.
- Freedom2 3y ago> wealthy enough to afford private tutoring I can't speak for other cultures, but non-wealthy first generation Asian immigrant parents consciously and constantly sacrifice their own well-being to afford tutoring and extra curricular for their kids.
- hilux 3y agoThat's certainly what I experienced at Lowell High, a San Francisco "test school." I recall that in my AP Chemistry class, 100% of the students were Asian. Nothing kept non-Asian students from taking the class, except the desire to work hard and be there. (The other section had at least a few white kids.)
- readthenotes1 3y ago
- kromem 3y agoPretty much all the comments here, and the article itself, are living in some sort of fantasy world where the status quo is stable enough by 2028 for this to matter. Oh no, we can't do individualized learning in classrooms in 2024 because of resources and limited teacher support? Could there be anything happening over the last four years that might change that balance in another four years? This is bait. The stark reality is that by the time this goes into effect the entire public school system is going to be struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing education environment with massive resources for individualized learning but a too slow institutional framework to catch up. How districts organize their gifted students across geographic lines is like arguing about what color the Titanic is painted and if it might confuse orcas into bumping into it as the iceberg on the horizon gets closer and closer.
- lordnacho 3y agoI think this is a crazy reason to shut it down, but I'm curious about how the system works over there. I'll describe the grammar school system here in Kent, which is adjacent to London. Over here they call the selective government schools "Grammar Schools". Grammar schools are free, and the top grammars send a comparable number of kids to Oxbridge as the top independent (aka Private for internaional readers, Public for British readers) schools. For reference the most expensive school in the area is also one of the most expensive schools in the country, at about £33K a year for day and £45K for boarding. The year the kids turn 11, (year 6), they start the year with a test. It looks a lot like an IQ test, complete with silly questions like "what does this shape look like from this direction". There's also a bunch of standard stuff like arithmetic and vocabulary. It is a single sitting on a single day, so try not to be ill. The thing is, and I didn't know this until after we got the results, almost every kid who gets in had a tutor for the test. My kid was getting fewer and fewer playdates after school in years 4 and 5, and I suspect this is why. Nobody admits to hiring a tutor for some reason, but everyone does it. The kid then gets in anyway, and what do you find? Most primary school kids were not privately educated, but most of his classmates came from private schools. He went to one, and this school has the highest representation in the new intake. I met the other parents, and it's just a selection of other private schools in the area. Maybe one or two from local state schools. I got my kid to ask, and sure enough everyone had a tutor. In terms of ethnicity, it's pretty mixed. There's more Chinese/Asian kids there than I suspect there are in the local population. There's more Indian/Asian (Asian in the UK means India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka) kids there than I see in everyday life. There's a few black kids as well, and a lot of mixed kids. The majority is white, as you'd expect. So if you care about race, you'd probably say it's nicely mixed. If you care about social mobility, I think you might be disappointed.
- adastra22 3y agoI'm from the SF Bay Area, not Seattle. But this sounds pretty comparable. There are a few merit-based programs in various regions of the US that I know about (SF, Chicago, New York), and their demographics are predominantly East Asian, South Asian, Jewish, and rich white kids. And yeah, those kids had tutors and after-school programs that prepared them for the entrance exams. But where I am from this kind of test-based entrance is really rare. We used to have that in my kids school district, but not anymore. They switched the specialized schools for gifted students to be lottery-based instead of exam entrance. And guess what? After a couple of generations there's not much difference. My daughter's school used to be a special science-oriented "magnet" school (called a magnet school because it "pulls in" students from across the district who specially apply for it). Now it's really no different in practice than any of the other neighborhood schools. It all comes down to mixing up correlation and causality. Progressives said it's not fair that only rich white kids and model minorities are getting into these schools, as these schools setup the kids for a better life. Everyone should have that opportunity! So they make the entrance a randomized lottery instead of merit based. Only guess what? The schools had good outcomes because the student body was well-prepared kids with private tutors. Get rid of that factor and they revert back real quick to being regular schools just like any other. > If you care about social mobility, I think you might be disappointed. These people don't want social mobility. They want equal outcomes--there's no need to move through society if everyone is at the same level. And they do end up achieving that... by lowering standards for everyone.
- mrkeen 3y ago> The district began phasing out its Highly Capable Cohort schools and classrooms for advanced students in the 2021-22 school year due to racial inequities, the school district notes. [1] >> The program is not going away, it’s getting better. [1] https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning/services-and-programs/service-delivery/ https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/advanced-learning...
- snehk 3y agoIs it gonna be the good racism™ where it's against asians and whites?
- MrSkelter 3y agoIn Northern states gifted programs were created to allow for racially segregated schools within schools following Brown vs. Board of Education. Most gifted programs still essentially enable that. It’s worth noting that American kids in gifted programs are considered utterly average when they travel overseas. The idea that a huge chunk of kids is somehow so extraordinary that they need to be educated separately is farcical. Like skipping grades the system really exists to make college applications easier for a specific segment of society.
- int_19h 2y agoSpecialized schools like that exist in many countries other than US.
- zephrx1111 3y agoRacists are the people who think of race, talk about race, and act based on race.