Last night I went to a party. There were teachers and former teachers there. One person was a substitute working currently in a public middle school in an economically struggling area.
All of these people were white, middle class and educated.
The topic of conversation turned to the subject of how the public schools in the urban district where we live (and where their children all go to school) is getting ready to make elite public schools where the children have to test to get in.
I couldn't help myself, I had to say, "This is too elitist for me."
Their argument was that gifted children who really try hard in school deserve someplace to go, someplace better.
I have no real complaint with that statement but I do have a major problem with the public school thinking that it can decide which children deserve the best in education and which children do not.
Ever since I was a child there has been a public school weed-out process for the "children who didn't matter".
When I was in school the weed out into better/worst classes and expectations was around who was on the college track (because their parents cared enough to make sure everyone knew that their child was going to college). Parents who were not savvy enough to realize this was the game probably never even knew that their child was in one of the "classes that didn't matter as much".
Nowadays the way I understand it there are elite "gifted" classes where the children are not subject to the same teaching methods. The "gifted" children (who must test as gifted in one area) are given over to a teacher not subject to the same guidelines as others. The classes are smaller and more hands-on. According to this website http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=656 minorities and children of less economic means are barely represented in these sort of classes.
Why is it all these "gifted" children are mostly white, from two parents families? Why are they mostly from the middle class?
Why are minorities not represented in the "gifted" classes in a much stronger way? Certainly one doesn't need to be white with 2 married parents in order to be gifted. To think so is to continue to perpetuate racism and isn't it about time that as a society we stopped perpetuating both racism and classism?
So now that school district has the go-ahead to make an entire school building into "kids who matter" while other buildings and their teachers are (based on the standardized test scores) going to have to defend their existence.
Does any of this bode well for children with special needs or learning differences? No, I don't think so.
Are many impoverished children who deal with who-knows-what sort of challenges each day are going to be getting into these "gifted and talented and oh-so-special and deserving of more attention children?" I doubt it.
It's not set up to work that way.
I have a real problem with elite public schools and any of this weed-out type action.
Taxpayer money needs to be used to educate equally. Public funding demands that doors be open to all children, not only children that some God-playing school staff determine to be worthy.
Do private schools track some children into worthy or not categories? No, of course not. They already know that every child walking in the door is cared about and that parents are willing to pay extra to make sure their child has the teacher's attention.
Do Catholic schools lump children into worthy or not worthy categories with privileges for some but not for all? No, I have never seen this in my Catholic school experience.
If a child is a ghetto child then the teacher needs to have some idea of what that sub-culture is about in order to meet that child where they are. White middle class teachers need to be educated about the population they are teaching.
Last night so much of the conversation was blaming the parents for not caring, or not teaching the child how they should behave in school.
This sort of talk raises my warning flags.
What control do children actually have over the environment they came from? They do not. Teachers need to understand the children and what they will respond to, not the other way around. And certainly public school staff do not need to be deciding which children matter and which do not.
