Don't Shut Down the Gifted Program — Open It Up

So Seattle Public Schools is getting rid of its gifted and talented programs, kind of phasing them out over the next couple of years, because black and Hispanic students are underrepresented in them.

And I think this is an important thing to be concerned about, but I think shutting down a program because you have underrepresentation is precisely the wrong idea, because we have to think about where that underrepresentation comes from.

One source of underrepresentation can come from barriers and bias in the process.

For example, one thing Seattle did a couple years ago to eliminate barriers is they stopped doing the testing on Saturdays where you had to kind of like make sure your kid got signed up and get them there on a Saturday.

And of course, guess who can do that in higher numbers?

Instead of taking that approach, they just started testing everybody every year during the normal school day.

And guess what?

That made a difference.

So of course, there are some barriers to access and some kind of built in biases that we can address.

But the second source of underrepresentation is the inequality in society itself.

And programs like this are precisely the kind of thing that can address societal inequality.

But if we look at a program and say, oh, well, because of societal inequality, we have underrepresentation in this program.

Let's just get rid of this program.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

This is going to make things worse because A lot of the families that have the resources to get their kids these kinds of opportunities are going to continue to get them at their own expense if Seattle Public Schools stops offering these gifted and talented programs, the highly capable cohorts.

And guess who is not going to get those services anymore?

Well, it's largely the black and Hispanic students that supposedly are underrepresented.

but we're not doing them any favors by shutting down this program.

Some is not as good as an equal representative number to match the demographics of the district, but zero is not better than some.

Nobody's going to be kicked out, but phasing out these programs so that nobody benefits from them is not the right way to pursue equity.

I see over and over again, I don't know if this is a West Coast thing or what, but the idea of just shutting down anything, where there is underrepresentation or any kind of disproportionality.

We are never going to get an equal society by doing that because we have to create opportunity where it does not exist.

And some of those opportunities, we're not going to be able to fix this problem at the point of those opportunities.

I think this is just precisely the wrong way to think about underrepresentation.

I think we need these programs.

We have to accept that there is going to be a certain amount of underrepresentation in them.

And of course, we do everything we can to address that.

But shutting them down is not the right idea.

Let me know what you think.