By Karen Hamilton

A recent Enterprise opinion piece criticizing the district’s adoption of a lottery process to fill seats in its self-contained elementary gifted classes makes a large issue out of a small or nonexistent problem. Under the lottery process, the 15-student wait list is about the same length as it was under the rank-ordered placement process — the only change is that now a few students on the wait list have higher test scores than a few students in the program. That is neither a tragedy nor an injustice.

Throughout California, the vast majority of districts serve the vast majority of their gifted students without placing them in self-contained classes, and some of the best districts have altogether dispensed with sorting and labeling students as gifted and not gifted. In Davis, about 40 “gifted” third-graders each year opt out of the self-contained program entirely, and they go on to enjoy tremendous academic success in high school and college.

Before addressing any perceived unfairness of the placement lottery, one should consider where the test scores come from in the first place. The district tests all third-graders (approximately 650) with the OLSAT each fall, but only about 45 students pass that test by scoring in the 96th percentile or above.

In this year’s crop of third-grade gifted students, a typical yield, one-quarter (47) qualified in the first round through the universally administered OLSAT, half (96) later qualified through the TONI (Test of Nonverbal Intelligence) administered in one-on-one sessions with the district’s GATE (now “AIM”) administrator, and approximately one-quarter (47) qualified through private testing obtained and paid for by parents.

Most of those students who qualified through the TONI (71 out of 96) scored, curiously, at the very rare 99th percentile. The district’s data showing this can be seen on the PAGE website, davislearningtogether.org.

Why do some students, but not others, receive the opportunity for one-on-one TONI testing? The risk factors listed in the Master Plan that can justify TONI-testing are expansive and include the following: parental unemployment or low income; participation in reduced-price lunch programs; lack of preschool experience; poor attendance due to conflict with home responsibilities, transiency or lack of study time; unsettled family life; learning disabilities; allergies; asthma; health problems; prescribed medication; primary student or parent language other than English; lack of proficiency or fluency in English; limited home/school communication; family cultural values unlike those of the dominant culture; parent from a different culture; child abuse; emotional adjustment problems; parental divorce or separation; chronic illness or death in the family; extended absence of a parent; remarriage; frequent residential moves.

One must ask: How many kids in this district don’t qualify under one or more of these categories? Although the Master Plan states that parents, teachers and administrators can claim the existence of risk factors, that provision is not widely known or used and in practice it is the AIM administrator who determines, without oversight, which students receive follow-up TONI testing under these vague and discretionary factors.

Other grounds for follow-up testing include an OLSAT score within the standard measure of error (5 percent), and a discrepancy between STAR and OLSAT test results. The district has not released data showing how many students are TONI-tested annually.

The Master Plan says the purpose of second-round testing is to bring in students from backgrounds typically under-represented in gifted programs. However, nearly 60 percent of this year’s TONI-qualified pool are classified as Asian or white — which are not racial backgrounds typically under-represented in gifted programs. Risk factors such as low family income or parents being from a different culture might justify TONI testing, even though such factors also could correlate with having a parent in graduate school or a parent from outside the United States now on the university faculty.

Parental educational attainment is the single most important factor eliminating the risk of educational obstacles for children, yet there is nothing in the Master Plan mandating that positive and negative factors be balanced, to assess whether a student’s circumstances taken as a whole merit special dispensation through the “search and serve” testing process.

What is clear from the Master Plan is that the AIM administrator, with little or no oversight, determines which factors come into play, if any, and personally executes the search and serve process that doubles the eligibility pool for the gifted program.

Those who oppose the use of a lottery say it is absurd to think that a student who reads 10 grades above level, or a child doing calculus in the fourth grade, could be excluded from the gifted program by the luck of the draw. Certainly there are a few highly unusual children in Davis having extraordinary educational needs due to their intellectual precociousness. But the gifted program in Davis is not structured to serve those children.

My daughter has been in self-contained gifted elementary classes over the past two years, and I have not seen students in those classes receiving instruction in college-level math or language arts. What the program does provide is instruction a grade or two ahead in math and English, which could be provided just as well through flexible ability grouping within and between regular classes. It also provides project-based learning, social grouping of high-achieving students, experienced and effective teachers, a lower number of classmates facing extreme educational challenges, and an abundance of enrichment opportunities such as field trips and participation in programs like Future Problem Solvers and the Stock Market Game.

These amenities, which one might expect to find in an expensive private school, would benefit most Davis elementary students just as much as they benefit the students designated by the district as “gifted,” and we can ask whether access to such resources might be distributed more equitably among students in the district.

Whether or not a placement lottery is used, whether the program is called GATE or AIM, whether the Master Plan review process is active or dormant, the district cannot continue to close its eyes to the lack of transparency and even-handedness in its process for identifying gifted students.

Even more importantly, the district must continue to investigate alternative models and ask whether its present gifted program, which centers on rigidly tracking large numbers of students starting in fourth grade and continuing into high school, is the best way to fairly and effectively serve the academic, social and emotional needs of the student body as a whole.

If more information is needed to address these issues, the district should start gathering it through conferring with educators in other districts, checking in with researchers and academic experts, and obtaining an independent, full and unbiased evaluation of the program and its administration and impacts.

— Karen Hamilton is a Davis resident and a member of PAGE (Proposing Alternatives in Gifted Education).

Comments

comments