INCLUSIVENESS THAT DEFIES PARODY.

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff argues that achieving inclusion by excluding achievement will not turn out well.  "There can be no excellence without neutral standards with which to distinguish among the excellent, the good, the mediocre, and the poor. Thus, the war on standards entails an assault on excellence."  His essay is about the institutions of higher education at the top of the U.S. News league tables, with an emphasis on the colleges of law, defining excellence down.  That could be an opportunity for the regional comprehensives and mid-majors to gain by default, if they'd take it, which they're unlikely to.

The evidence of the assault on excellence is voluminous, and a mini-dissertation follows after the jump.

Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes noted years ago that universities are the home offices of mediocrity in the common schools, and boy howdy are the common schools assaulting excellence, from sea to shining sea.

Like the early 20th century's racist social engineers who imposed quotas limiting the enrollment of Jewish-American students at America’s top universities, today’s “racial justice” activists target gifted students. This time, many of the victims are Asian-American. This time, the excuse for racism is embarrassment at how Asian-American academic advancement undermines the woke narrative that America’s “systemic racism” precludes minorities from success.

Winning the legal battles in New York City and elsewhere is critical in defending an American Dream where we provide opportunities to America’s brightest students. These students deserve educational challenges that help them develop into leaders and innovators – and our country desperately needs them for us to advance as a nation. The solution is not to cry “racism” and destroy programs for advanced learners but to improve schools for all students.

In Seattle, their version of Milwaukee's Superior Ability Program is being deconstructed.  "[C]hanges are coming at the expense of the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC), an extremely popular gifted program that lets the students who score the highest on standardized tests participate in a specialized classes. There, they study material several grade levels higher than the ordinary curriculum."  Ah, the power of euphemism: nobody is superior any more, and "incapable" is probably a forbidden term.  But the old fears about standardized tests ridden with biases still have sway.  "The program has historically been dominated by white and Asian students, and this hasn't set well with some folks who want to see more diversity in advanced programs."  Problem is, the relatively few kids of other extractions will be relegated to the general prison school population, which is not going to serve them well.  "Their kids aren't identified as academically gifted by their teachers, they get bored in the general ed classroom, and then end up being tagged as disruptive when what they need is just accelerated curriculum."  It's straight out of Harrison Bergeron.  "How else could we describe dismantling an education program entirely because it helps high-achieving students?"

The same levelling down is at work in New York City.

Mayor de Blasio has been railing against the gifted and talented programs for years, but it’s always been a bit of a sticky issue for him to try to handle. The problem is that the “lack of racial diversity” he loves to complain about doesn’t break down in the normal fashion. If it was just a case where the lion’s share of the spots in the program were going to White students, he could simply play the race card and stomp on the programs. Unfortunately for them, that’s not the case. Year after year, the majority of the seats have gone to Asian students.

Nobody is disaggregating "Asian" further, which is probably a good thing, but I digress.  It's possible that New York educrats are picking their winners too young.

Dozens of Education Department bureaucrats are calling for an end to New York City’s controversial Gifted and Talented program, arguing that sorting kids by “giftedness” from a young age is inherently discriminatory and “cements segregation from the start,” the Daily News has learned.

Staffers from the DOE’s central offices, including the Early Childhood division that oversees elementary school admissions to the Gifted program, laid out their case in a Wednesday letter to top DOE brass and Mayor de Blasio.

“Four-year-olds should not be tested. They should not be sorted. They should not be tracked. Teachers should not be asked to determine which children are “gifted” and which are not,” wrote the staffers. “We refuse to support a sorting process that cements segregation from the start.”

The employees said this year’s shift from using the results from an entrance test to determine admission to the fast track classes to relying on teacher recommendations doesn’t solve the program’s underlying problems.

A few of the educational guinea pigs in Milwaukee's superior ability program were held back in kindergarten, for what that's worth. On the other hand, we hadn't heard of Harvard Prep Day Care back in the day.

They questioned whether there’s any valid way to identify kids so young as “gifted.”

“Those of us who are early childhood educators know children well, and challenge the idea of ‘giftedness’ as an identifiable attribute,” the staffers wrote in the Wednesday letter.

I'm sure any teacher can pick out the quick studies, or the precocious readers, or what have you. Note, though, that the New York solution is not to defer the identification of students into the fourth grade, rather, it is to get rid of any sort of advanced fourth grade, in the name of equity, or something.

Education Department spokeswoman Danielle Filson said “this letter calls for the end of the Gifted & Talented admissions process, but as we announced in December, that process will no longer be used moving forward. We’re providing families with a temporary alternative this year and will be partnering with communities to chart a new, more inclusive and enriching path forward.”

That is, if you define "inclusive and enriching" as etiolated.

Parents want their kids in these programs so badly because the majority of our schools are mediocrities, if not catastrophes. In 2019, 47.4 percent of city students in grades three to eight scored at the proficient level on the English-language assessment; in math, the figure was 45.6 percent.

Put another way: The majority of the city’s students aren’t proficient in English and math. That’s pathetic and an embarrassment. And it’s much harder to fix a failed general-education system than simply remove G&T programs that expose how dysfunctional the rest of the system has become.

I’ve already heard from many parents planning their departure from New York over this question. They believe that scrapping the test can’t but prefigure the end of the programs as a whole. They don’t trust the mayor or his schools chancellor.

It gets weirder, though.  In California, setting middle-schoolers up with the opportunity to study calculus as high-school seniors is inequitable, and counterproductive.

The [state department of public education] is worried that too many students are sorted into different math tracks based on their natural abilities, which leads some to take calculus by their senior year of high school while others don't make it past basic algebra. The department's solution is to prohibit any sorting until high school, keeping gifted kids in the same classrooms as their less mathematically inclined peers until at least grade nine.

"The inequity of mathematics tracking in California can be undone through a coordinated approach in grades 6–12," reads a January 2021 draft of the framework. "In summary, middle-school students are best served in heterogeneous classes."

In fact, the framework concludes that calculus is overvalued, even for gifted students.

"The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided," says the framework.

As evidence for this claim, the framework cites the fact that many students who take calculus end up having to retake it in college anyway. Of course, de-prioritizing instruction in high school calculus would not really solve this problem—and in fact would likely make it worse—but the department does not seem overly worried. The framework's overriding perspective is that teaching the tough stuff is college's problem: The K-12 system should concern itself with making every kid fall in love with math.

Broadly speaking, this entails making math as easy and un-math-like as possible. Math is really about language and culture and social justice, and no one is naturally better at it than anyone else, according to the framework.

Guilty as charged on the "repeated calculus in college." At least I knew what I didn't know, and was able to overcome that the sedond time through. It is rich, though, having the same people who are responsible for college matriculants showing up reading at a middle-school level, or figuring like a hand calculator with a bad battery, and there are enough of those that state legislators have noticed, fretting over colleges having to schedule calculus classes for high school graduates who didn't test out of it.

Robby Soave might even be missing the point of the inclusive exercise.  "If California adopts this framework, which is currently under public review, the state will end up sabotaging its brightest students. The government should let kids opt out of math if it's not for them. Don't let the false idea that there's no such thing as a gifted student herald the end of advanced math entirely."  Sabotaging bright students is the whole point.

That's not to say that changing the mathematics sequence is a bad idea.

U.S. high schools teach math differently than other countries.

Classes here often focus on formulas and procedures rather than teaching students to think creatively about solving complex problems involving all sorts of mathematics, experts said. That makes it harder for students to compete globally, be it on an international exam or in colleges and careers that value sophisticated thinking and data science.

There are a number of ways to approach the challenge in addition to the ideas laid out in that article.  Consider, for instance, that algebra is different from geometry is different from calculus, and that geometry might go well paired with philosophy or symbolic logic, with all sorts of promise for cross-fertilization with coding and computer programming, and calculus is part algorithmic and part a first step into analysis.  But inevitably, you have to do the dull stuff, whether it's getting familiar with integrals or solving endgames or working on those mark-roundings or hitting that blocking sled.