Beginning in the spring of 2015 and ending in the fall, AIM became one of the most contentious issues in the school district, and for good reason. While it seems most people supported the end of private testing, changing the cutoff mark would prove contentious, while changing the identification scheme would prove difficult.
While the district and school board have thus far avoided the more fundamental existential questions about the program, the rhetoric from last week suggests those are not far off.
As an observer to this process, I found it interesting the extent to which these changes are in two ways now being used against the program itself – as both the superintendent and the board president complained about the expenditure of time while the superintendent also used the racial breakdown as a reason to question the program.
The superintendent, in his lengthy remarks, noted that last summer as he arrived “staff time was dominated by the effort needed to respond to an inquiry from the Office for Civil Rights about our AIM program.” Senior staff, he said, “had lost the month.”
He continued, “From what I understand, this was the second summer AIM was a central issue for the district office. In the summer of 2015, cabinet staff spent that whole summer engaged in the research and preparation of a report on the AIM program.
“What does this tell me?” he asked. “Over recent years, an issue that is not a central feature of a Board Goal, a Strategic Goal or a Local Control Accountability Plan goal has encumbered an inordinate amount of time and resources at the expense of our stated objectives – most importantly our work on the Achievement Gap. We have a number of other programs in the District, but no others garner the intense focus and attention of so many Board members, staff and parents.”
Likewise, Board President Barbara Archer pointed out this is the board’s eighth meeting in three years on AIM. She said, “I am concerned about the resources – it takes up a lot of staff time.”
She noted that when Dr. Bowes came to DJUSD, he wanted to focus on his leadership team, but instead dealt with the OCR (Office for Civil Rights) complaint. The previous summer, staff wanted to have a vacation after working hard all year, but they focused all their time on the AIM program.
“When we say why this program,” she said, it’s “because it tends to eat up a lot of resources.” She noted hundreds of hours of staff time, plus testing time. “Folks say this doesn’t cost any money, actually… I believe it’s $160,000 a year… so there is a cost. That is something we should be thinking about, we should be transparent about, when we’re looking at a structural deficit.”
While there are important points about the utilization of board and district staff time, one reason that this has caused so much time to be expended is that the district has made major changes to the program – changes that are controversial.
The superintendent claims in his meeting with 100 people, “The clear, consensus opinion is that our current model separating some AIM-identified students in self-contained classrooms does not best serve the students of this District.” The reality is that those eight meetings – of which Mr. Bowes has been part of one – has shown that there is anything but consensus in this community about what the program should be or how many students should be participating.
It seems a bit disingenuous to back major changes to the program and then complain that the program is consuming a great deal of staff time.
The second self-fulfilling prophecy is the complaint about the lack of ethnic diversity. Put simply, the program was far more ethnically diverse in its previous iteration than it is now.
The superintendent notes, “While our current AIM program serves some of our students well, it does not identify or support all students well. Recent years have shown us that the AIM program, in its current manifestation, has not contributed to this ideal of inclusion to the extent that it can.”
The superintendent continues, “Third, looking at ethnic diversity—I can report on the following results with regard to students scoring at the 98th percentile for AIM-identification: White and Asian students are well and almost exclusively represented while African American, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students are not. Even if we review the data at the 96th percentile, we would see a similar divide reflected.”
This is a serious concern – one that the Vanguard raised at the time when the changes were made. Part of the problem was that the use of the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test was never going to work. The district really should have known that the Naglieri, the key re-testing measure for at-risk kids, was not going to yield the kind of diverse results we would all like to see.
New York, for example, as captured in a New York Times article, tried to use the Naglieri but found quickly it didn’t identify more children of color for their gifted program.
In short, as we pointed out at the time of implementation, the Naglieri was the wrong measure and therefore we should not be surprised it has failed here.
On the other hand, the HOPE Scale has been shown to work, however, as the Superintendent noted, while the HOPE Scale attempts to locate gifted students from underrepresented populations, “[i]n Davis, however, the HOPE Scale pilot assessment did not, in either the first or second year it has been piloted, do any better than standardized tests in identifying giftedness in underserved populations.”
John Bowes noted that data from two years of using nationally normed testing “do very well at identifying white and Asian students. They are not identifying African American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and Native American students in sufficient numbers through either our universal testing or re-testing assessments.”
A lot of this was predictable. The district opted to switch from the TONI (Test of Nonverbal Intelligence) to the Naglieri to identify low-income and at-risk students, even though the Naglieri has not been shown to work in this regard and the TONI has been falsely portrayed as being a test only for people with speech problems or for English learners.
The TONI not only is helpful for those who are English learners, but also for all low SES (socioeconomic status) students – particularly those who did not go to preschool, those from disadvantaged backgrounds who might not have the verbal skills to succeed on the heavily-verbal OLSAT (Otis-Lennon School Ability Test).
“When you come from a low socio-economic background and you’re not necessarily going to have all of the those enrichment opportunities around language, and it’s precisely those kids who we think are at a disadvantage on the (OLSAT), there’s a lot of language that’s required to do that test,” Madhavi Sunder explained back in 2015.
If shrinking the AIM program was going to produce a less diverse program, and if diversity is one of your goals – you want to identify more black and Latino students for the program, then it seems logical that you have to cast a wider rather than a narrower net and you have to use tests or practices that are going to help identify those students.
Barbara Archer last week argued, “The reason we are so stuck on this issue is that we have focused so much on identification and not enough on delivery of the program.”
While that is true, the problem at this point is that they still have not figured out the identification side of the equation.
Karen Hamilton raised the point, “The self-contained program is now functioning as an elitist perk.”
Part of the problem is that the district has intentionally decreased the size of the program from four strands to 1.5 strands. It has clearly been miscast as an elitist program when the name suggests it should be viewed simply as an Alternative Instructional Model.
From my standpoint, most of this was predictable – and, indeed, predicted two years ago – and the current complaints are really about self-inflicted wounds.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
If the district wants a more diverse program, they will have to rescind the 2015 directive and adopt a wider selection process. The answers are right there in front of them. It all comes down to Alan Fernandes, unless they want to have another year of reduced diversity due to their own actions before a new board majority addresses this issue yet again.
David, so parent education level isn’t an issue in this discussion? Because you didn’t mention it, and that’s really where the most dramatic differences are to be found, demographically, both in 2015 and 2017.
When I looked at the achievement gap data, it goes back probably to 2007, racial disparity held even when controlling for parental education.
That said, I’d be interested in seeing the data on parental education in AIM, but I haven’t seen it yet. What I have seen is that Black and Hispanics are together 25% or so of the district but less than 5 percent of the AIM program. That’s my biggest concern – that the AIM identification is failing to identify black and Hispanic gifted students.
I think an additional question or an alternate question should be whether we are really identifying Asian and White gifted students? Or are we just identifying high-achieving students from families with highly educated parents and who aced a test on a specific day in third grade? Is that the definition of gifted that we are happy with?
Instead of expanding AIM to try to increase ethnic diversity for these students and make other children come their way and join a program that may not well suit them, the AIM students could join or remain in their neighborhood schools and satisfy their high-achieving nature another way. If parents want ethnic diversity for their students, they will find it in their neighborhood school or Cesar Chavez or Montessori or on the soccer field, or girl/boy scout troop, or maybe even playing in their neighborhoods, but apparently not AIM. This may not be an important issue to some families who are only focused on finding an intellectually challenging class with an accelerated curriculum for their student.
Interesting tidbit – Trustee Sunder, in her comments, referred to the Palo Alto School District as a comparable district in terms of parent education level, etc. We might do well to actually look at Palo Alto and see how they run the program.
According to their website, https://www.pausd.org/programs/gifted-talented-education, not only does Palo Alto not use self-contained GATE classrooms, they apparently have suspended the identification process due to lack of state funding.
(copied from website):
“Due to the elimination of funding for the GATE by the State, PAUSD has suspended the identification of GATE students. The District remains committed to serving the individual needs of high achieving and gifted students regardless of GATE identification.
Palo Alto Unified school District’s Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) provides educational opportunities that recognize the performance capabilities of gifted students as well as addresses the unique needs and differences associated with having these abilities. The goals of Gifted and Talented Education can be defined as follows:
To provide students with opportunities for learning that maximize each students’ abilities.
To assist and encourage students to acquire skills and understanding at advanced academic and creative levels.
To aid students in expanding their abilities to communicate and apply their ideas effectively.
To engender an enthusiasm for learning.
Program Model
In elementary and middle school, all students receive differentiated instruction within the mainstream classroom. Teachers enrich and extend the core curriculum for gifted students by differentiating instruction, content, and process. Through differentiated assignments developed to meet their academic and intellectual needs, GATE students are able to explore and expand to their maximum potentials. These differentiated opportunities are available to all students, not just those who are formally identified. Advanced math courses are available in 7th grade and continue through 12th grade. In high school, gifted students are able to take advanced, honors, and advanced placement courses in a wide variety of subjects.
Identifying Gifted and Talented Students (Identification Process Suspended)
The District’s identification procedures are equitable, comprehensive and ongoing. Formal identification for GATE begins in the spring of 3rd grade. Nominations may come from teachers, parents or others who know the student. Once students are nominated, a combination of multi-measures must be used to identify students as gifted and talented:
Standardized test scores
Checklists of Indicators of Giftedness
Multiple Intelligences Checklist
Teacher judgment, including class work and grades
A non-reading test of cognitive processing skills (the Ravens Progressive Matrices),
Individual Test scores
Out of district data
The GATE standards and the Ed. Code require us to use information from many sources before identifying a student for GATE. These standards do not allow us to identify based on only one of the above measures. Parents are notified by letter if their child qualified as a GATE student. Parents can request that their child not be identified.
GATE Resources for Parents and Students
A list of resources for gifted children used by Palo Alto parents and teachers includes:
Organizations for the Gifted
Summer Programs
Enrichment Programs
Contests for Kids”
So why do we in Davis insist on a self-contained program when other reputable school districts (Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Irvine, and many more) are thriving with an inclusive GATE program?
Trustee Sunder, in her comments at the Board Meeting, referenced Palo Alto as an example of a community similar to ours in terms of parent education level, etc. That made me wonder how Palo Alto runs their GATE program. A quick check of their website https://www.pausd.org/programs/gifted-talented-education yielded some interesting information that left me questioning the need for a self-contained AIM model.
(copied from Palo Alto Unified School District website)