The myth of the gifted child

Good article in this week’s New York Magazine by Jennifer Senior, about the myth of the gifted child – with only about 25% of children who were tested at age four as “gifted” repeating at 17.

It also reveals the unfairness of the administration's current admissions policies, based on strict cut-offs on high stakes tests, because the results are so highly biased in terms of race and class.

As one expert says, “Sometimes,” he says, “you look at a big city’s decisions to do this and wonder if it’s about nurturing giftedness or if it’s about keeping middle-class families in the city limits.”

The city's desperate attack on the NAACP following their lawsuit to block the closings of 19 schools

Yesterday, the UFT, the NAACP, the Manhattan and Brooklyn Borough Presidents, city councilmembers, state legislators, and two Community Education Council presidents all joined to together in a lawsuit to block the DOE's plan to close 19 schools.

The lawsuit states that the DOE failed to comply with the public process outlined in the new governance law, and that its Educational Impact Statements were woefully inadequate, points we have made repeatedly on the blog and in our official comments to the DOE. (Here is the memo of law; here is the notice of petition and affidavits from the two CEC Presidents.)

The best coverage of the lawsuit was from NY1, whose education reporter, Lindsey Christ, continues to excel. See below.



Unbelievably, the NY Times did not run any story about the lawsuit, though it carried the news on its blog (Teachers' Union and NAACP Sue to Stop School Closings). The lack of judgment on the part of the Times editors never ceases to amaze.

Meanwhile the NY Post has a twofer, in their effort to undermine the credibility of the NAACP for joining the suit; a predictably misleading oped from Dennis Walcott and a predictably nasty editorial: The NAACP in the schoolhouse door. The Post's own news coverage on the lawsuit runs only eight lines: NAACP, UFT in school suit.

Methinks the city and its toadies on the Post doth protest too much.

Really, who are NYers going to trust about the effects of these destructive policies on the city's neediest kids, the NAACP or Rupert Murdoch?

The Faces of Ed Deform

Check out the latest edition of the Indypendent devoted to the Bloomberg's administration's proposal to close 19 schools -- the best coverage of this issue anywhere.

Especially valuable is the centerspread -- showing how the destructive policies being imposed on urban schools here as well as nationwide are coming primarily from a small cabal of billionaires -- Gates, Broad and Walton.

The money of these men now controls the output of most of the inside-the-beltway think tanks, and they have successfully planted their agents inside the US Department of Education.

These moguls are pushing for mass closings of urban schools, the radical expansion of charter schools, for teacher merit pay tied to standardized test scores, and other ideologically- driven notions that have no backing in either research or experience.