"Labels Aren't What Kids Need"
Mike
Labels Aren't What Kids Need
By Patrick Welsh
Sunday, August 26, 2007; B01
It's that anxious time again, the start of a new school year. But when
Alexandria elementary schools resume classes after Labor Day, a lot of
parents will be even more anxious than usual. Like Nancy Williams, the
mother of a fifth-grader at George Mason Elementary, who has been
fighting the good fight to get her son the best education she can.
"It's an ongoing comedy trying to get the school to challenge him,"
she says. "The school keeps saying, 'Don't worry. Your child's needs
will be met.' Then his teacher says she can't give him challenging
work because 'We were told not to assign above-grade-level work to
anyone who isn't labeled TAG.' "
That's TAG as in Talented and Gifted. And who is and who isn't -- or
at least who's designated such and who isn't -- has been one of the
most contentious issues in Alexandria since the school system raised
the bar for the TAG program two years ago. The new rules have cut out
about two-thirds of the students who once qualified: At George Mason,
the size of the fourth-grade program went from 17 to six last year.
Which means that a substantial number of students will now be
relegated to the "regular" curriculum, where the emphasis is on
ensuring that lower-income children who lag far behind in basic skills
will pass the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exams. In
Alexandria, the first group is mostly white, the second mostly black
and Hispanic. Some white parents at George Mason are now demanding a
special class, between regular and gifted, for the "nearly gifted" --
as they call the children who missed the TAG cut.
Nancy Williams does not want a special class, but she does believe
that the education her fourth-grader, who didn't make TAG, is getting
at George Mason can't compare to what his older brother received there
four years ago, when he got into TAG under the old rules.
"It's become too restrictive," agreed Priscilla Zanone Goodwin, whose
three children are in the TAG program. "You have bright kids who don't
make the cut wondering what's wrong with them, why they aren't getting
to leave the room and do the same work as their friends in TAG."
The debate over designating students "gifted and talented" has been
bedeviling school districts in the Washington area and throughout the
country for years. Middle-class parents have come to see the label not
just as a guarantee that their children will be challenged, but also
as a status symbol, and they complain when their kids aren't included
in the programs.
But of all the labels that we so-called educators give students, none
seems more absurd -- and few more destructive. When we apply this tag
to a tiny group of children in third, fourth or fifth grade, we are in
effect saying that the rest are ungifted and untalented. We're
denigrating hard work and perseverance, telling children that no
matter how much effort they put forth, they just can't measure up to
their special peers.
Just as bad, we're telling those on whom we deign to bestow the
coveted label that they have it made; we're giving them an overblown
sense of their intellectual abilities and setting them up to fall
short when they face real challenges later. What schools need to do is
not to single out a small group as special, but push all kids to work
to their fullest potential.
The TAG philosophy heightens the racial and class tensions that have
long been at the heart of the Alexandria school system. This is a city
where 52 percent of the school children are eligible for free or
reduced-price lunch. White students, most from fairly affluent
families, make up 24 percent of the school district.
It's easy to write off the white parents now seeking a special class
for their kids as snobs who want to create an exclusive club within
the public schools for their darlings. But the parents at George Mason
and elsewhere have reason to be concerned. For a fairly bright child,
the SOL exams aren't much more than a minimum-competency test. To
allay parental anxieties, Superintendent Rebecca Perry has said that
the students at the top of the regular classes -- i.e., the white kids
who didn't get into TAG -- will help to "challenge, mentor and coach"
the students struggling with the SOL material.
George Mason parent David Rainey charitably calls Perry's statement
"an interesting perspective." But "the unanswered question remains,"
he says. "What else could these students be doing instead of reviewing
material they already understand as they challenge, coach and mentor
their classmates?"
Alexandria's school administrators are caught in a political and moral
trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who
provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children
can progress academically without being held back by lower-income
kids. At the same time, the school system cannot create exclusive
schools-within-schools for upper-income students.
Then there's the question that's usually too delicate to address: Can
low-income minority students get the attention they need when they're
in classes with middle-class whites? Research shows that KIPP
(Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools are the most successful
in the country at closing the gap between low-income black students
and middle-class white students. But the philosophy of these schools
is geared to the needs of poor children. The schools operate on the
belief that to close the learning gap, children from poor homes need
an education that's not just equal, but superior, to that of middle-
class whites. KIPP students, virtually all of whom are minority and
poor, spend 60 percent more time in school than most other children in
public schools.
Over the past 30 years, I've seen Alexandria swing back and forth
between the concerns of the white and the black communities. Until the
mid-1980s, the emphasis was on keeping white families in the system by
running schools with large TAG programs, as well as honors and
advanced-placement (AP) courses, that were virtually all white. In the
late '80s and early '90s, Superintendent Paul Masem began to whittle
away at that system. Every year during his seven-year tenure, the
school system declared "minority achievement" to be its main goal;
this angered white parents, many of whom left the system.
In 1995, Virginia instituted the SOLs, which are now complicating the
racial dynamics even further and causing new concerns among white
parents. Even the TAG students are being slowed down by the emphasis
on the tests. When Priscilla Goodwin complained that her third-grader
was bored, the principal of George Mason told her that the mandate
from the central office was to get all students to pass the SOL exams.
"Principals are running scared," Goodwin says. "Their reputations and
promotions depend on the SOLs; they think that as long as bright kids
pass these simple tests, they're doing fine. They're giving kids
worksheets on facts that most children already know because they go at
the pace of the slowest kid in the room. TAG or regular classes, kids
aren't being challenged."
This is a problem not only in Alexandria, but in school systems
throughout Northern Virginia and elsewhere in the state. Says
University of Virginia education professor Carol Tomlinson: "Many
bright kids encounter year after year of waiting for other kids to
finish work so they can move ahead. Parents get weary of advocating
for challenges in 'general' classroom settings and understandably come
to believe that the only folks in the building who have their kids on
the radar are the folks in the gifted program."
What most parents don't realize is that the gifted label can harm not
only those who don't receive it, but also those who do. Labeling can
create what Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck calls
a "fixed" mindset of intelligence -- the belief that your intelligence
is set in stone -- as opposed to a "growth" mindset, which views
intelligence as a muscle, something that can be developed throughout
your life. In 1998, Dweck conducted an experiment in which she gave
two evenly matched groups of elementary school kids the same nonverbal
IQ test. When one group of children did well, they were told that they
must have worked very hard to get their results. The students in the
other group, meanwhile, were told that they must be very smart to have
done so well.
Dweck found that as time went on, the kids who were told that they
were smart "fell apart when they hit a challenge. They lost confidence
in their abilities. Their motivation dwindled and their performance on
the next IQ test dropped." By contrast, the children in the group
praised for working hard tended to seek out challenges and persist at
difficult tasks and ultimately learned more.
I've seen Dweck's theory proved time and again in my AP English
classes. When an Asian student who has spoken English for only four or
five years gets an A on a test and an American kid labeled gifted gets
a D, the American will often do one of two things: denigrate the
Asian's grade because it was achieved through hard work, or bring in
his mother to argue that the test was unfair and that I should change
his grade because I "know how smart he is."
In truth, many bright students feel uncomfortable as they go through
the gifted-and-talented program. "I was always uneasy about being
pulled out of class for TAG, set apart from other kids and shuttled
through to college," says Sarah Shaffer, a sophomore at Oberlin
College in Ohio.
Shep Walker, a T.C. graduate about to enter the College of William and
Mary, says the problem is that "gifted-and-talented programs get
filled with white kids who have pushy parents, leaving a lot of black
and Hispanic kids out in the cold and creating de facto segregation in
the classes."
In its defense, Alexandria's school administration was probably trying
to fix that situation. But the solution isn't to mark fewer students
as gifted and talented. It's to challenge all our kids, all the time.