Kumar Singam knew his selection to an advisory committee that’s currently considering controversial changes to Montgomery County Public Schools’ (MCPS) gifted-talented program would not exactly be a cake walk.
That much became clear when program director Marty Creel Blackberried the president of the Asian-American Parents Advocacy Council (AAPAC) and offered to help him pick a “better” candidate.
When Singam, a medical researcher who lives in Bethesda, showed up for the committee’s Feb. 12 meeting, Creel and MCPS chief of staff Brian Edwards literally refused to seat him at the table.
Instead, Singam was taken to a conference room around the corner from MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast’s office while the advisory committee meeting started without him.
Singam says he was initially told he could not be on the committee because his precocious nine-year-old daughter was no longer enrolled in MCPS, but he protested that other members didn’t have children in the system, either.
Then Creel and Edwards told him that the entire committee had to vote to seat him as a procedural matter, which he refuted by pulling up the minutes of previous meetings on his laptop and demonstrating that other members had been welcomed without a vote.
Singam told me that Edwards finally said that MCPS would “consider” allowing him on the advisory committee, but only if he agreed not to pursue certain hot-button issues, including his insistence that all GT selection data be made public.
Edwards denied the accusations, insisting that Singam tried to bully his way onto the panel. “We decide who’s on the committee,” Edwards said. Of course, that means MCPS only hears what it wants to hear.
And MCPS obviously doesn’t want to hear from Singam, who did a statistical analysis of the GT program when the school system “accidentally” published the data during the 2004-05 school year.
Maybe that’s because the former Fulbright scholar and physics professor discovered that the impossibly high GT numbers in some schools (for example, Bethesda’s Westbrook Elementary identified 87 percent of its students as gifted, kind of like Lake Woebegon on steroids) were the result of gaming a process known as “global screening.”
Multiple screening is an arcane process by which multiple criteria, including test scores and more subjective teacher and parental recommendations, are used to identify highly gifted second graders.
Although the total number of “gifted” students has remained fairly steady (Edwards says it’s about 40 percent of all MCPS students), Singam maintains that teacher nominations are now six times higher than they were in 2004.
So kids who are well-liked by their second grade teachers, or who have pushy parents are even more likely to make the not-too-difficult cut.
When The Washington Post reported in December that the MCPS Board of Education had already decided to eliminate the GT “label” in favor of what it calls a “services-based model” that will supposedly do exactly the same screening – “except for the final identification and labeling of students” – all hell broke loose, even as board members admitted that the school system’s pilot program at Burning Tree and Georgian Forest schools is doing exactly that.
Singam believes that it’s already a done deal, and the advisory committee he didn’t get on is “merely voting on the semantics of a predetermined policy barreling down the road to GT elimination.”
I asked Edwards how MCPS can teach gifted children at an appropriate level without first identifying them and yes, labeling them as such? “In a no-label world, teachers would meet with parents and staff and make sure the child is getting accelerated instruction,” he responded. They would apparently just all agree not to call it GT, so as not to offend anybody who is offended by accomplishment.
But there’s a huge hidden cost when a society’s otherwise commendable egalitarian impulses are allowed to stifle the sometimes mystifyingly unequal bestowal of talents. The paradox is that whenever true excellence is welcomed and nurtured, the resulting meritocracy benefits everybody.
But when the process of acknowledging humanity’s natural elite is hijacked for political purposes – and MCPS unfortunately appears to be well down this dreary, well-rutted road – the last stop is inevitably mediocrity.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor. She can be reached at: [email protected]
