Philippine Basic Education

Five years ago, research has shown us convincingly that Black and Hispanic children are underrepresented in advanced academic programs. It has been long argued that schools need to respond to the needs of gifted children. Unfortunately, for such programs to succeed, it is required that students be properly identified. This area has always been challenging. Studies have pointed out time and again that selections have been disproportionate on the basis of race, ethnicity and family income.  Above copied from Grissom, Jason A., and Christopher Redding. 2016. “Discretion and Disproportionality: Explaining the Underrepresentation of High-Achieving Students of Color in Gifted Programs.”  AERA Open  2(1): 1-25 Now, research has something else to say: Above copied from the Hechinger Report This new study is scheduled to be published in May 2021 in the journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, but authors of the study have provided us with a preview. The following sum...

"I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream." These were words spoken in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. At that moment, after about a hundred years after emancipation, we were all made aware that the bank of justice was way behind schedule as Black Americans were still "sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination" .  But more than fifty years after those words were spoken, the dream had remained elusive. Aspirations come early in life. Parents wish nothing but the best for their children. Yet, we continue to charter the course of so many children based on their skin color or socio-economic status. Martin Luther King's dream can never be achieved without equity in education.  Above copied from History More than a year ago, a panel in New York City took the bold step of recommending that advanced education programs, such as those designed for "gifted" or "talented" studen...

Black students matter for one good reason: All students matter. It may sound like a broken record but we must admit that a number of people are still clinging to the idea that only a few have gifts or talents. While I was a graduate student, another person in the research group shared with me this profound idea. In scientific research, someone else is always bound to discover what we are looking for. True enough, I find that researchers are often in a race. In fact, it is not uncommon to get scooped or see what you just have already accomplished, published by someone else in a journal. It is therefore incorrect to think that we are unique such that we alone can solve a pressing problem, or discover something that will benefit mankind. Yet, our educational system and research enterprises continue to embrace exceptionalism. Just recently, an article in Angewandte Chemie International Edition almost got into print. It contained the following paragraph: The above article has be...

There is no question that gifted programs are under-representing racial groups and low-income families. Yet in this obvious case of inequity, so many are quick to voice against the removal of advanced academic programs in our public schools. Very recently, the Department of Education in New York has approved a plan by an elementary school in Brooklyn to scrap its gifted program. New York Daily's post on Facebook so far have received scores of angry emojis. The most common indignant response goes along the line of equating the move to greater equity as simply serving the lowest common denominator, in other words, lowering the bar for all students. This is really frustrating as research shows gifted programs do not even produce academic benefits suggesting that people are attached to these gifted programs perhaps for pure vanity. Above copied from Sa Bui, Steven Craig and Scott Imberman , Poor Results for High Achiever s Nevertheless, we are missing an important move P.S. 9...

The previous post on this Blog " We voted for ONE Fairfax " elicited this comment in a Washington DC online forum: "The School Board has contributed to this mess. NO doubt there is too much Advanced Academic Program (AAP) --they have watered it down. Why? Because they were trying to get more minorities in the program. What happened. They got more Asian and White kids in the program who don't all belong there." Having spent a year in a committee of parents advising the school board on AAP, I have seen plenty of reasons why the county had not been able to fix inequity. Of these various reasons, however, there is one, unless addressed, would always spell failure in any effort to increase the number of underrepresented students in AAP. That reason is tradition. Former principal Brian Butler comments on a post made by newly elected school board member Ricardy Anderson, "It’s a great opportunity for Ricardy to transform a traditional system that holds on to tradi...

It has been three decades since Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins University told us in " Achievement Effects of Ability Grouping in Secondary Schools: A Best-Evidence Synthesis " that there is no educational benefit in grouping students according to what we perceive as their academic abilities. On the other hand, there is a clear drawback: Inequity in basic education. Receiving responses that are sometimes quite virulent on posts where I call for removal of advanced academic programs makes me realize that some parents actually fear public school education. Basically, parents fear that the curriculum provided to the students not deemed advanced is bad. This is the same reason why bringing equity to education is sometimes viewed as catering to the lowest common denominator. I guess I would be equally concerned if my child not deemed advanced is then asked to go through the word "the" as practice for sight reading over and over. Is this fear grounded on reality? Sadly, i...

The devil is in the details. There is the long standing argument that enrichment programs in basic education are intended for children who show great promise in academics. A new study now shows that such programs actually favor wealth over abilities. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K), Jason A. Grissom and Joshua F. Bleiberg from Vanderbilt University, and Christopher Redding from the University of Florida find that socio-economic gaps in enrollment in gifted programs persist even after considering a student's achievement levels. With equivalents scores in reading and mathematics, children from wealthy families are much more likely to receive gifted services than children from poor households do. Above copied from Money over Merit? Socioeconomic Gaps in Receipt of Gifted Services  What comes as a surprise in this new study is that the socioeconomic gaps are in fact bigger with White and Asian American children. Abo...

During the presidential debate of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris threw a knock-out punch at Joe Biden, "That little girl was me." Commentators quickly recognized that the former vice president was slammed on his trivial attitude toward school segregation. In my opinion, however, the more important statement that Harris made was this, "We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly." Harris is right. For so many decades, schools in most districts in the United States have remained segregated. In some states, it is called "gifted programs" while in other districts, like Fairfax county, it is called "advanced academic program". Brian Wright and coworkers noted in a paper published in Gifted Students of Color , "that to be indifferent to this persistent lack of equitable access and opportunity to gifted education is to engage in an active and conscious state of aloofness and inattention in order to maintain the status quo." It is...