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Seattle axes program for gifted students chooses to dumb down entire classrooms all for 'equity' by: Pat Droney 2024-04-05 Source: Law Enforcement Today Opinion SEATTLE, WA - The dumbing down of America continues in Seattle, Washington, where a gifted students program, the Highly Capable Cohort, is being mothballed because city progressives complain the program is “too white,” according to KTTH-770’s Jason Rantz. Rantz wrote that the program, which separates academically gifted students from others via different classrooms or schools, was put on the chopping block in 2020 when city school board members caught a terminal case of white guilt and terminated the HCC, despite objections of parents. As Rantz notes, instead of elevating all students to the level of more gifted students, they would instead drag down high achievers. Rantz explains: “These self-proclaimed saviors boast on social media about tackling inequities, oblivious to the harm they inflict,” Rantz wrote. “Indeed, the program to replace the HCC and implement it in every classroom ensures that gifted students will be unchallenged, struggling students will escape the attention they deserve, and teachers will be overwhelmed. In other words, everyone will be equitably armed.” In 2020, critics of the HCC program argued that it didn’t reflect the diversity of the community, prompted in no small part by the Black Lives Matter activism of that year after George Floyd’s overdose death. In 2015, the Seattle Public Schools hired an “equity specialist” whose charge was to address (in other words, find) so-called racial inequities. Three years later, the HCC served 13% multiracial students, 11.8% Asian, 3.7% Hispanic, and 1.6% black. In 2021, those numbers had increased to 20% multiracial, 16% Asian, 8.2% Hispanic, and 3.4% black. In other words, most cohorts virtually doubled their participation, while Asian participation saw a 25% increase. However, that wasn’t good enough for critics who complained the program was “racist” and had to go. That decision met with protests from parents across the spectrum, including black, Asian, and Hispanic, who argued against shutting down the HCC, arguing that the school system should work harder to identify minority students who are eligible for the program rather than mothballing the program altogether. In one case, a father slammed the Seattle School Board, accusing them of doing a “disservice…to the minorities that are already in the HCC program.” He argued that the HCC “does more for Black children, particularly Black boys than it does for their peers.” That mattered little to the radicals on the Seattle School Board, with then-director Chandra Hampson accusing black parents who supported the program of being “tokenized” by white Seattle parents. Talk about racist; there you have it…the old “Uncle Tom” argument. In the 2024-25 school year, a “whole classroom” model will replace the HCC. Rantz argues that it is “unworkable.” He explained that students of all learning abilities would be included in the classroom, with each teacher responsible for between 20-30 students of differing learning abilities, with no additional resources and limited new training. Rantz argues it will make it impossible for teachers to create individualized programs for students with such disparate needs. “It’s not likely that a teacher can help a student who can barely read while simultaneously challenging a classmate who is reading two advanced books a week,” Rantz wrote. According to a recent Seattle Times feature, it examined a “typical” day in the whole classroom model, which Rantz called “hardly impressive.” On a recent day in a first-grade classroom, seven advanced learners sat on the floor reading silently on their iPads. Several others wrote independently at their desks. A special education student wrote with a paraprofessional at their side. The rest of the class sat in a front corner of the classroom while the teacher read a book out loud. In other words, Rantz said, advanced learners were sent back to the scourge of COVID-19 learning, “relegated to impersonal iPads,” while other students are writing, alone at their desks, somehow avoiding the distraction of the teacher loudly reading a book out loud.” The move to dumb down the gifted kids to the level of their less advanced peers is “another lazy move,” Rantz argues. Instead of trying to lift the underachievers up, they dumb everyone else down. Is it any wonder that test scores are in the basement? Instead of working to find any so-called impediments to “diversity,” the Seattle school board is taking the easy way out. “Progressives,” Rantz wrote, “keep trying to have it both ways” where student performance is concerned. “Systemic racism,” they complain, fails minority students by “giving them substandard education as compared to white students.” Except for Asians, whom progressives fail to mention because, as Rantz writes, “it doesn’t adhere to their ideological dogma.” Progressives argue that participation in the HCC should match the demographics of the school districts. If there are 15% black students in the Seattle Public Schools, HCC should likewise have 15% black students in the gifted program, academics be damned. The Seattle Public Schools should investigate why black students do not achieve at the same level as white students or Asian students. Is it because they do not statistically come from two-parent families? Who knows? But the school system isn’t even trying to find out. And in failing to do so, they are failing their minority students. Rantz said that moves such as eliminating the HCC program do “measurable damage” to students, and that is precisely why many parents are pulling their children out of the Seattle Public Schools. He argues that parents with the financial means are pulling their children out of the public schools “and enrolling them in private education so they’ll get the academic challenges to meet their needs.” Pulling students out of the school system also has the unintended consequences of impacting funding to the Seattle Public Schools, which is already facing a $105 million budget deficit. Rantz argues that it creates more inequity when parents with means can pull their kids out of school for a better opportunity. By mothballing a program that lifted kids up and was working for the lowest common denominator, the progressives on the Seattle school board are failing not only their high-achieving students but the very students whose “equity” they are trying to achieve.