Progressives for advanced education
In today’s edition of SCHOOLED, several friends on the left, including Jennifer Jennings and Constance Lindsay, offer ideas for making advanced education more palatable to a wider audience. Plus a round-up of recent posts by Jed Wallace, Tim Daly, Natalie Wexler, Dale Chu, Robin Lake, Mike McShane, Bibb Hubbard, Rick Hess, Robert Pondiscio, Chad Aldeman, Jim Cowen, and more.
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On Tuesday, I asked how we might make gifted education more palatable to the political left. (I talked about that on the Fordham podcast this week, too.) I offered three suggestions:
Call it “advanced education” instead of gifted education.
Address concerns around equity and bias by using “universal screening” to identify eligible students instead of parent or teacher recommendations.
Build initiatives in every elementary school in the country—including high-poverty ones—to serve their top 10 percent of students, at least.
I solicited ideas on what else we might do to get progressives to embrace advanced education in the early grades, just like they support expanding access to advanced courses in middle school and high school. And boy did y’all deliver!
Let’s group the suggestions into four buckets:
Rhetoric.
Nomenclature.
Program design.
Political strategy.
In terms of rhetoric, several of you had recommendations for arguments that might be persuasive to folks on the left, especially around equity and fairness.
Equity
An anonymous contributor writes:
The concern from “the left” has always been about equity. Underneath are several smaller concerns related to resource allocation (e.g., why give more to kids who already have a lot? this takes away resources and time from kids who need more help, it’s just a way to keep rich (mostly) White people happy and in the district), plus the argument that gifted ed is just segregation of schools by another name.
The strongest argument from a “left” perspective for advanced learning in public schools is that less-advantaged kids are the ones that need it most. American schools could get rid of all honors courses, AP, etc. tomorrow and it would make very little difference in the life of a rich kid. Her parents would open-enroll her to a different district, go to a private school, lobby/run for school board and change the policy, or get private tutoring. Low-income families/those who can’t play the system or move to a different district don’t have that privilege. Jonathan Plucker has made similar arguments related to excellence gaps.
Eric Calvert at Northwestern’s Center for Talent Development (CTD) expands upon this, making the case that advanced education is essential to diversifying the pipeline of students ready for elite colleges and beyond:
Advocate beyond a defensive focus of protecting what children of affluent, non-minoritized families already have to ensuring gifted education services exist in every school—including rural, Title I, and high-need urban schools. Make the argument that we will never fulfill the progressive dream of society-level equity if we don’t commit to high-potential Black, Brown, and rural low-income kids growing up (disproportionately) in the aforementioned schools having access to pathways that can legitimately lead to C-suites, Senate seats, and superintendencies in adulthood (and publicly challenging arguments from both the right and left that a return to pipelining students from lower-income families and communities into military and vocational training programs is “reform.” Yes, plumbers and electricians are essential and are often paid very well, but they rarely write laws, set institutional policies, or drive the media).
And over at Bluesky, Constance Lindsay agrees with the equity angle but wants it to be additive, not zero-sum:
Universal screening is the answer. I don’t believe in taking things away in service of “equity.”
Fairness
Fairness requires that all kids be challenged and have their needs met. That was the argument, in a nutshell, of a few others over at Bluesky. As Dan Goldhaber wrote:
Limiting opportunities is bad for kids. I don’t think anyone would argue that schools should work to engage and challenge students. Eliminating advancement opportunities is a fast path to disengagement for students who could excel.
Jennifer Jennings (once known as Eduwonkette) agrees:
The key point for me is not about identifying and cultivating the next Einstein, but ensuring that kids who are performing well above their peers are being challenged as well, per this paper.
And we don’t see the same qualms about helping other kids with special needs, argued Christianne Beebe:
An education that meets the true needs of all students should be the goal. We would never oppose that for students requiring special education services. We acknowledge many flaws in current identification of special education students, but don’t push for abolishing the entire system. Same for gifted services.
Adding on to this, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, long time head of Northwestern’s CTD, wrote that:
At the most basic level, elementary educators need to operate under the belief that every school, no matter how poor, has students who are capable of doing advanced work, and not just some small percentage. The work at CTD/Northwestern with schools has found that implementing advanced learning options is more palatable to elementary educators if the underlying rationale is educational need/readiness and talent development rather than giftedness per se. With many states embracing [a multi-tiered system of supports] MTSS, integrating talent development into the MTSS would eliminate the delegation of gifted programming to an “add on” and help infiltrate advanced services into general education.
Then there was a suggestion about nomenclature. “Advanced education” is surely better than “gifted,” but “talent development” is better still, argued Paula (who after all did name her center the Center for Talent Development!):
When I was president of NAGC I gave a speech arguing that the field should move away from “gifted” and embrace “talent development” instead. The reaction to that was strong and mixed. Scholars loved it and, truthfully, others before me have advocated the same idea if not using the same words (Don Treffinger, Carolyn Callahan). Parents, however, went nuts, worried about children losing that label and that programs would be “watered down” if we let more kids into them.
Of course, we can’t help but wonk it up here at SCHOOLED, and several folks weighed in about the program design that would make advanced education more equitable (in addition to universal screening, local norms, etc).
Jennifer Jennings, for example, suggested constantly re-evaluating students to make sure that we didn’t miss late bloomers who might now be ready for acceleration, rather than “one and done.” She also thinks it’s important to identify students who are ready for advanced education in specific subjects, rather than across the board. (These were also recommendations of the National Working Group on Advanced Education.)
Finally, there’s political strategy. Eric Calvert had lots of ideas for this one. Here are three of them:
Ally more tightly and visibly with other movements that advocate for other groups of students who are similarly widely underserved and marginalized in many schools (and that are currently under threat), including advocates for students with disabilities, English Learners, and LGBTQ youth….
Include in our advocacy agenda things beyond academic programs that we now know are important to cognitive and talent development where there are vast inequities. For example, where were gifted education advocacy organizations when the Trump administration cancelled already awarded funds to renovate public school buildings in Milwaukee known to be sources of lead exposure to young children when we know every sip from the drinking fountain puts healthy brain development at risk? Why aren’t our advocacy organizations speaking out about what’s happening to SNAP and WIC and women’s health care when we know most brain development happens before kids even enter school and research shows participation in these programs improves both health AND cognitive outcomes? Why aren’t our organizations speaking out for immigrant students and children of immigrants now living in terror when this is the population from which our most innovative scientists, technologists, and artists have historically come if we care about gifts and talents and exceptional achievements?….
And, with respect to current political events, speak out against both the Mamdani and Cuomo plans for gifted education in New York City. The former guts gifted programs. But the latter essentially doubles down on a model that is nowhere close to alignment with current NAGC best-practice standards, likely guarantees continued high levels of disproportionality, and seems to deny the malleability of talent. Offer a more inclusive alternative that incorporates things like front-loaded interventions aimed at relative strengths, talent-development summer enrichment and afterschool programming, universal screening, use of local norms by school, and automatic enrollment into the next highest level of programming, development of dual enrollment partnerships, and more.
Todd Truitt thinks bluish-purplish Virginia shows what’s possible:
Please don’t forget about Virginia. As I wrote earlier this year, Virginia is likely the leading state in the nation to use state-level actions to encourage districts to offer accelerated math opportunities to middle school students, which increases enrollment in advanced math in high school. Not only do we have a new autoenrollment law, but we also have a middle school advanced coursework factor in our new accountability system. We’ve seen both parties getting in on the action here, too. It’s good policy and good politics.
That’s a lot to chew on. Thanks, everyone, for taking the assignment so seriously. Now let’s get busy building advanced education initiatives in every elementary school in the country.
It’s The Atlantic’s turn to dig into America’s Lost Decade and why Republican states are now out-educating Democratic ones. Journalist Idrees Kahloon does a nice job running through the theories for why test scores declined in the 2010s before calling on blue states to learn from the Southern Surge. And note to self: Some magazines will be happy to print swear words, even those coming from their sources!
Let’s not forget, though, that before the Lost Decade, we made two decades of remarkable progress for our students. And not just in terms of test scores, but high school graduation and college completion rates, too. So demonstrates yours truly in the Education Gadfly.
Jed Wallace is back from vacation and madder than ever at Democrats Against Education Reform. Note especially the sobering tidbits about Rahm Emanuel’s avoidance of the words “charter school” and the lackluster science of reading law in California.
Freddie’s back, too, this time making a compelling case that phonics alone won’t help all kids be great readers. Duh. But it can help the worst readers, which ain’t nothing. He calls phonics “helpful, but not transformational.” That’s true about every effective intervention in education, though we reformers don’t like to admit that.
Tim Daly (whose Substack should be called Tim Monthly, ba-dum ching) offers many thoughtful suggestions for getting past the culture war around the word “equity.” But he’s wrong about why the Trump administration is targeting Chicago’s Black Student Success Plan. It’s not the word equity. It’s the word Black. The Trump folks sincerely believe that any initiative that’s explicitly race-based is out of bounds legally and constitutionally, not to mention (from their point of view) politically.
School choice opponents like to complain about “privatization,” but the real threat today is “deprivatization,” worries Dale Chu, foreshadowing what might happen when the new federal education tax credit falls into a Democratic administration’s hands.
Book release (and book review) season continues. Today’s entry is from Natalie Wexler, reviewing Diane Ravitch’s new memoir, which gives her a chance to discuss (guess what!) the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum.
Robin Lake enjoyed her time at the PIE Network summit in Atlanta last week, but was surprised and dismayed that ed reform advocates aren’t paying as much attention to AI as she thinks we should.
Mike McShane, who really does seem to come from a “family of teachers,” writes up a new Annenberg working paper about the teacher pipeline, which is “not a pretty picture.” He thinks this is an opportunity for schools of choice, which can “rethink teaching,” and also for disruptors in the educator preparation space.
The teaching profession is on Chad Aldeman’s mind, too, as he writes up two other studies, both about teacher pay. “It’s possible that teachers are overpaid compared to market values,” he concludes, “but they’re underpaid compared to the demands of their job.”
My friends at AEI Education just can’t stop writing about Ryan Walters’s bonkers (and currently defunct) idea to give an ideological purity test to out-of-state teachers. Now it’s Robert Pondiscio’s turn. I’ll forgive him, though, because that’s really just a hook for a thoughtful essay about public school teachers’ role in a democracy.
Speaking of AEI, Rick Hess interviews Bibb Hubbard about Learning Heroes’ valiant attempt to get parents to understand that their children’s decent grades don’t mean they’re actually on track for success.
Versatile, nonstop Rick also expresses his frustration with today’s politics, and the terrible lessons they are sending to kids and teenagers.
“Virginia closes the ‘honesty gap’ to open more doors for students” —Jim Cowen, Forbes
“Many young adults barely literate, yet earned a high school diploma” —The 74
“The stricter the cellphone policy, the happier the teacher, research finds” —EdSurge
I think Jennifer Jennings and Todd Truitt are on the right track thinking about specific courses, rather than an overall "gifted" designation. The nice thing about advanced courses is that the prerequisite content is teachable—something we can control.
There is no way to use "talent development" to offset the massive advantage that socioeconomic privilege confers in reaching the highest levels of testable academic ability. It's a nice idea, but far less powerful than we'd like, because school-based factors can never match non-school factors.
If you identify the top 1% or 5% or whatever, that group is going to be overwhelmingly composed of students who are both bright AND socioeconomically privileged.
I don't see a way to identify bright, low-SES students without explicitly factoring SES into the equation. But of course that will alienate much of the constituency for gifted ed.