Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more. You can subscribe on the Fordham Institute website and the newsletter’s Substack.
We launched this newsletter about advanced learning back in July with a post about “hope and progress.” Gifted education, I wrote, “is a clear and substantial good, and it can be much better than it is in most places and has been for decades.” I then chronicled a couple recent developments that made me think more people were beginning to believe that, too. Parents in San Francisco had just organized en masse to help rescue merit-based admissions at a prestigious high school in the city. And I was full of optimism having just completed a meeting for the National Working Group on Advanced Education, a collection of twenty academics, practitioners, and advocates—truly diverse in terms of ideology, race, gender, and geography—doing great, promising work in this realm.
So as the year comes to a close, in the midst of another holiday season, it feels right to reflect on the last six months and see what progress we’ve made. Was that hope, in other words, justified? And should it be maintained in 2023?
Yes and yes. Despite some significant bad news—like high-achieving middle schoolers suffering devastating math losses because of the pandemic and heightened opposition to selective high schools—advanced education is headed in the right direction in many places.
Regular readers know that each edition includes a list of links to notable writing that was published during the previous two weeks. These biweekly collections come from around the country and a wide range of sources (even if New York City’s print-media dominance leads to some overrepresentation), and they do a good job of showing the state of advanced education. Here are ten items, in chronological order, that illustrate the progress that happened over the last six months and why there’s hope for more in the new year.
1. “To expand NYC’s ‘gifted’ programs, one nonprofit turns to after school,” Chalkbeat New York, Christina Veiga, July 14, 2022.
“New York City’s gifted programs have been the subject of fierce debate,” writes Veiga. “Not every school hosts one, which raises access challenges for many students”—especially Black and Hispanic students, who are starkly unrepresented in the city’s programming. New York is improving this, but it’s a work in progress. In the meantime, offerings like this afterschool program at a Bronx public school, called the Excellence Project, are helping give these students the opportunities they’ve long lacked.
2. “Back to school at Tempe Elementary: Gifted learning program opening at Arredondo,” Wrangler News, Wrangler News Staff, July 31, 2022
For almost fifty years, elementary schools in Tempe, Arizona, have “provided award-winning programs for ongoing discovery, enrichment and accelerated-learning opportunities for gifted students,” write authors. But that didn’t stop them from adding ASPIRE Academy at Arredondo, a new self-contained fourth-grade classroom for the 2022–23 school year. Plus, “Tempe Elementary will expand talent-development opportunities in all schools to increase identification of students who qualify for gifted services, including underrepresented populations.”
3. “Philadelphia reintroduces test score requirement for magnet admissions,” Chalkbeat, Dale Mezzacappa, August 17, 2022.
Philadelphia scrapped the exam component of its holistic admissions process for its selective high schools in 2020 because the exam wasn’t administered due to pandemic-related restrictions. This policy was reversed earlier this year for the class that’ll be ninth-graders in 2023. This is a good thing, especially during a time when standardized tests are under siege. Research suggests that eliminating these assessments doesn’t foster greater equity, and that alternatives have big issues of their own. Admissions essays, for example, can be even more correlated with socioeconomic status than test scores, and rising grade inflation is ruining GPA as a meaningful signal of academic success.
4. “Gifted education and equity are not at odds,” Wall Street Journal, Ellen Winner, August 29, 2022
A Professor Emerita of Psychology at Boston College writes in a letter in the Wall Street Journal: “[I]f we don’t offer advanced learning opportunities, we won’t see advanced learning. Equity doesn’t mean treating all students the same. It means individualizing education to meet the level of challenge appropriate for each child. Providing advanced classes is the way to do this... Ideally, we should be expanding the number of seats in advanced classes at the elementary level.” Indeed.
5. “The First A.P. African American Studies Class Is Coming This Fall,” New York Times, Anemona Hartocollis, August 31, 2022
It was reported this summer that the College Board would be launching a pilot AP African American Studies course—something that’s been in the works for more than a decade. It’s currently at sixty schools across the U.S., with the plan to expand that to hundreds next school year. After that, any high schools can offer it, and the first AP exams for the course will be administered in spring 2025. As Dr. Nikki Taylor, Chair of the Howard University History Department, has said, such a course “sharpens all knowledge about our nation.”
6. “Mayor and chancellor, please keep merit-based admissions,” New York Daily News, Yiatin Chu, September 10, 2022
In September, a New York City public-school parent asks Mayor Eric Adams and schools chancellor David Banks to reverse some of the changes former Mayor Bill de Blasio made to the city’s admissions process for selective middle and high schools. Those changes sought to demolish the network of eight “exam” high schools and fiddle with the performance-based elements of admission to all the city’s “screened” schools. The parent points to the large number of families who were unhappy with these shifts, which she rightly calls “divisive and harmful,” especially to Asian-American children. A few weeks later...
7. “NYC changes controversial high school admissions process,” New York Post, Cayla Bamberger, September 29, 2022
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and schools chancellor David Banks introduce a number of policies that are a big step in the right direction for high-achieving middle- and high-schoolers. Among other things, they place a greater emphasis on good grades, after de Blasio turned the process into a “crapshoot” where “top grades barely matter[ed].” The corrections from Adams and Banks put a greater emphasis on merit in the endlessly contentious rationing of a much-valued but far too scarce good—challenging, high-quality schooling for those who want and are prepared to take advantage of it—and take steps to ease the scarcity.
8. “Record high for Mississippi Advanced Placement participation, achievement,” The Daily Leader, Daily Leader Staff, October 4, 2022
“The Mississippi Department of Education implemented an AP Initiative in 2015–16 to increase statewide participation in AP courses,” write the authors. The result: “During the 2021-22 school year, the number of Mississippi students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams reached a record high.” And: “Overall AP achievement in Mississippi increased by 19.1 percent between 2020–21 and 2021–22. Hispanic and African-American students achieved the greatest AP gains...” Plus: “Starting this school year, the State Board of Education requires all high schools to offer and ensure students enroll in advanced courses.” Huzzah.
9. “From 1966 to now, Peoria’s gifted program a continuing success in education,” Journal Star, Leslie Renken, October 11, 2022
The Washington Grade School gifted program in Peoria, Illinois, was created in 1966. “It was the beginning of a successful program that has grown over the years,” writes Renken. “A total of 277 students from across the district and beyond attend the program, said Reservoir School Principal Susan Martin. It is so successful parents living in other school districts send their children to the school.” The piece also covers the fiftieth reunion of the program’s class of 1972. Friendships are still strong, and “Twenty-eight of the sixty-eight students who graduated...traveled from all over the United States to attend.”
10. “Michigan to start notifying parents of AP eligibility,” News-Herald, Matthew Fahr, November 24, 2022
“The Michigan Department of Education has partnered with the College Board to use the Advanced Placement potential tool to identify students who are likely to score a 3 or higher on an AP exam,” writes Fahr. Parents will receive a letter telling them their teenager qualifies. “The letters to parents are a way to let them know students in their sophomore year can take these rigorous classes and may expand the number of students typically underrepresented in AP classes,” said State Superintendent Michael Rice. “Getting into AP classes is another way economically disadvantaged students can improve chances of an academic scholarship.” As a Michigander myself, this makes me proud. Keep it up.
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QUOTE OF NOTE
“Whatever you do, if you go away for university, I encourage you, plead with you, to make sure you come back to the Territory. We need the best and brightest to return home.” —Australia’s Northern Territory Education Minister Eva Lawler
“The Northern Territory’s top 20 year 12 students awarded at ceremony at Parliament House,” ABC News (Australia), Roxanne Fitzgerald, December 19, 2022
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THREE STUDIES TO STUDY
“Developmental characteristics of a 0- to 3-year-old gifted child based on video analysis,” by Ahmet Bildiren, Tahsin Firat, and Sevinç Z. Kavruk, Gifted Child International, OnlineFirst, December 13, 2022
“The purpose of the present case study was to conduct a detailed analysis of the developmental characteristics of a gifted child. WISC-R intelligence test was administered to a 7-year-old participant. The test result was 140 IQ. The early developmental characteristics of the participant were evaluated using parent-recorded videos over a 3-year period, from birth to 3 years of age. First, all video recordings were transcribed by the research team, then the accuracy and completeness of the transcriptions were verified. The results showed that the participant displayed early gifted developmental characteristics in fine motor skills, cognitive, language, social, and personal developmental domains.”
“Applying Automated Originality Scoring to the Verbal Form of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking,” by Selcuk Acar, Kelly Berthiaume, Katalin Grajzel, Denis Dumas, Charles “Tedd” Flemister, and Peter Organisciak, Gifted Child Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 1
“In this study, we applied different text-mining methods to the originality scoring of the Unusual Uses Test (UUT) and Just Suppose Test (JST) from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)–Verbal. Responses from 102 and 123 participants who completed Form A and Form B, respectively, were scored using three different text-mining methods... Results indicated that text-mining systems are applicable to both UUT and JST items across both forms and students’ performance on those items can predict total originality and creativity scores across all six tasks in the TTCT-Verbal. Comparatively, the text-mining methods worked better for UUT than JST. Of the three text-mining models we tested, the Global Vectors for Word Representation (GLoVe) model produced the most reliable and valid scores. These findings indicate that creativity assessment can be done quickly and at a lower cost using text-mining approaches.”
“A multi-case study of accelerated trajectories of science talent development: Matthew effects re-examined,” by David Yun Dai and Xian Li, Gifted Child International, OnlineFirst, December 13, 2022
“Matthew effect (“the rich get richer”) has been a research topic for decades. It refers to a cumulative advantage, social or individual, in talent development as well as performance or productivity, typically unfolding longitudinally. The present study builds on a previous qualitative study as an attempt to fully understand developmental underpinnings of an accelerated science career, with a focus on developmental changes as potential explanations for the observed Matthew effects. In contrast to traditional theoretical explanations that resort to either social or individual advantages, the present study, in light of Evolving Complexity Theory (ECT), uncovered developmental changes as potentially responsible for a distinct accelerated career trajectory and the apparently unfolding Matthew effects...”
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WRITING WORTH READING
“The Northern Territory’s top 20 year 12 students awarded at ceremony at Parliament House,” ABC News (Australia), Roxanne Fitzgerald, December 19, 2022
“Nearly 1 million students miss out on advanced classes. Equal Opportunity Schools is working to change that, and make classes more accessible.” WCNC Charlotte, Charlotte Today, December 16, 2022
“Is high school class rank still important?” U.S. News, Sarah Wood, December 14, 2022
“Annual conference to bring educators together to help gifted children,” Kentucky Teacher, Caleb Bates, December 13, 2022
“NYC parents scramble for kindergarten Gifted & Talented entry,” New York Post, Susan Edelman and Mary Kay Linge, December 10, 2022
“11 signs your child could be gifted,” Reader’s Digest, Fiona Tapp, December 15, 2022
“Clark County School District will pay AP student test fees,” Associated Press, December 9, 2022
