Philippine Basic Education

It was my first time to witness a school board meeting in Fairfax county. Fairfax County School Board At-Large Member Karen Keys‐Gamarra last night requested the Board to consider a work session to discuss "inequities of opportunity and access for historically underrepresented populations to Advanced Academic Programs". This is certainly a good first step. What struck me the most however was what I heard before the meeting from a current student. The student talked about his experience of being enrolled in the gifted program in grade school during which he might have appeared a year ahead of his peers in math. Now, that he is in high school, he is now five years ahead in math. He is wondering whether his peers would not have fallen so far behind if they were likewise afforded the same opportunities and access that were given to him. Poverty profoundly affects basic education in so many ways. One way poverty insidiously undermines education is by limiting opportunities. Ofte

Paul L. Morgan, George Farkas, Marianne M. Hillemeier, and Steve Maczuga write in Replicated Evidence of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Disability Identification in U.S. Schools , "Findings of minority underidentification are consistent with reports that schools are more likely to (a) medicalize the struggles of White children while criminalizing those of minority children and (b) identify White children as gifted among those who are similarly high achieving." Sadly, the county I live in is an example of such schools. Here are the facts. (1) White and Asian children are much more likely to be identified as talented than Black and Hispanic children: Above copied from Civil Rights Data Collection The Gifted and Talented program of Fairfax county already suffers from over-identification. More than 23 percent of students are deemed gifted or talented. Statistically, this means some of these students enrolled in talented programs are not even one standard deviation

Vikas Mehrotra reminds us of the story of the "cobra effect" in a Freakonomics radio podcast . The story is an anecdote from the time India was a colony of Britain. The British wanted to address the large number of venomous snakes in India, but in the process of incentivizing the killing of cobras, the population of these venomous snakes actually increased. The reward for killing a cobra led to breeding of cobras for the sole purpose of collecting a reward later. When the British found that the program was being abused, the reward system stopped, and the breeders were forced to release their snakes into the wild. Such is an example of a perverse effect as predicted by the law of unintended consequences. Our intentions are more than often noble, but we must keep ourselves vigilant with the actions we choose to take. The previous post on this blog talks about the disparity based on socio-economic status of advanced academic programs between schools in Fairfax county in Virgin

The Institute for Educational Achievement has just released an advanced reading copy of a report entitled " AMERICA AGREES: PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARDS GIFTED EDUCATION ". The report is a "compilation of results from a national opinion poll assessing the general public’s understanding of and attitudes towards gifted education". One major finding of the poll is that the American public has a good grasp of what "gifted" means, and how this greatly differs from a "high achieving" student. This distinction is reflected in the following items the poll includes: Gifted students are rare, and gifted students need special programs. In the poll, gifted students are considered different from high-achieving students. High-achieving students are often characterized as students with "Guts, Resilience, Initiative and Tenacity (GRIT)". In addition, a supermajority of Americans agree that giftedness is not associated with family income. In Fairfax county,

Last night, I happened to browse through my son's study guide in his seventh grade class on Investigations in Environmental Science. The topic was eutrophication and the guide was asking my son to describe in his own words water pollution. The guide specifically stated not to use the word "trash". "Trash" does seem a general word and perhaps, it is time for my son to use specific terms. Not using "trash" may also help my son appreciate the fact that water pollutants responsible for eutrophication are often invisible to the naked eye. Water pollutants in the form of floating objects are of course easy to spot, but invisible ones, like nutrients from fertilizers, may easily be the factor that turns a living lake into a dead one. Years ago, in the town where my mother was born, I helped the local administration initiate a wastewater management project. The project faced strong opposition and perhaps, part of the reason was most people in the town had neve

This semester, with great help from my teaching colleagues, General Chemistry is now taught at Georgetown with an overarching narrative, a story that binds and embraces all the topics covered. Chemistry is all about atoms - this is how we explain matter and all of its properties. Thus, even with a myriad of research publications showing up every year from chemists, some of which may end up gathering dust in libraries or go unbrowsed on the internet, these papers can still serve as foundations for future work for these not only contain descriptive observations and stand-alone guesses, but have gone through the test of either fitting in an established theory, or refining or even changing an existing one based on evidence. Myths have a much smaller chance of survival in the field of chemistry now since both the past and future are considered, and fads are then easily identified for these are simply not sustainable. A chemist cannot really cling on an idea just because it sounds appealing

Lack of equity is a problem different from lack of excellence. The National Association of Gifted Children in its position statement on excellence gaps declares, "Closing excellence gaps is both a social-­equity issue and a workforce development issue that carries national competitiveness and security implications." There is nothing inherently wrong in this statement. However, it detracts us from the central issue of equity. The workforce development issue is in fact less clear since it is really difficult to gauge whether the United States is lacking in talent or not. Excellence shortage is a matter of opinion. Lack of equity, on the other hand, is based on evidence. The graph below provided by an article published in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning shows vividly the excellence gap. Above copied from Call to Action: Data, Diversity, and STEM Education These are the percentages of students by race and year that have received a GPA of 3.0 or better at the U