Montgomery County is overhauling the way it recommends students for its advanced “gifted and talented” program, saying the current method fails to place recommended minority students in the courses.
But parents of gifted students say they are worried that the change will weaken the program and hurt the county’s highest-performing students.
The process, Student Instructional Program Planning and Implementation (SIPPI), is being tested
in 31 elementary schools — and is scheduled
to be rolled out to the rest in the winter and spring of next school year. It emphasizes data-driven student tracking and allows students who are not officially identified as “gifted” to enter above-level reading or math courses. In its test year, more than double the number of tested students were recommended for above-level reading courses than in 2009, and nearly 25 percent more students were recommended for above-level math courses.
The enhanced tracking system found that in the current school year, 75 percent of black and Hispanic students recommended for above-level reading were enrolled in advanced courses, along with 73.1 percent of black students found fit for above-level math. Overall, 81.3 percent of students recommended for advanced reading and 87.6 percent recommended for advanced math were enrolled.
Spokesman Dana Tofig declined to explain why minority students were not placed in the correct classes. “This is an issue that practically every school system deals with and the causes are varied and complex,” he said in an e-mail.
Fred Stichnoth, president of the Gifted & Talented Association of Montgomery County, said he supported the better tracking system but noted that parents of gifted children and the school system have different ideas about what “advanced” means.
“If everybody takes them, what do you mean calling them advanced?” Stichnoth said. “I think students who may have been performing a little below the benchmarks will be mixed in with kids who perform significantly above it with the goal that all kids will be pushed toward those benchmarks.”
In turn, the highest-performing students will be “negatively impacted relative to what their potential is. … I think their potential is being wasted.”
Michelle Gluck is chairwoman of the gifted child subcommittee for the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations. “I’m a little concerned that if [SIPPI] is oversold, if there’s pressure put on the schools to identify students of the ‘we-may-have-missed-them-in-the-past’ description, some kids will be identified for acceleration that shouldn’t be,” Gluck said.
“It’ll look good for the school if its number of accelerated students goes up.”
