In the past several months, I’ve posted comments decrying California’s Frameworks for Mathematics in its denial of giftedness and its abandonment of programs to meet the needs of gifted students. (See Does America have its Priorities in Order?)
The statement in the draft of the Frameworks read as follows:
An important goal of the Framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics “talent” and “giftedness” with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway. There is no cutoff determining when one child is “gifted” and another is not.
My post on this site on March 24, titled, California Education Retreats from its Denial of Gifted Education celebrated the fact that public outrage over this policy had persuaded California to allow special programs for the gifted as well as tracking (acceleration). The original policy had been underpinned by an egalitarian ideology, aimed at reducing gaps between high and low achievers by limiting opportunities for high achievers. To justify this policy, data was presented from an experiment conducted in the San Francisco United School District purporting to show that this policy reduced the gap in achievement between minority and white students. However, subsequent analysis, described in some detail in an article in Education Next (see: San Francisco’s Detracking Experiment) calls into question not only the SFUSD report, but also the fact that such policies might actually increase the gap in achievement between whites and minorities. Some of the concluding remarks in that article are presented below.
San Francisco Unified School District embarked on a detracking initiative in 2015, followed by an extensive public relations campaign to portray the policy as having successfully narrowed achievement gaps. The campaign omitted assessment data indicating that the Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps have widened, not narrowed, the exact opposite of the district’s intention and of the story the district was selling to the public. Only SFUSD possesses the data needed to conduct a formal evaluation that would credibly identify the causal factors producing such dismal results.
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If SFUSD would now approach tracking with an open mind, officials need not look far to discover equitable possibilities. Across the bay, David Card, a scholar at University of California, Berkeley, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research applying innovative econometrics to thorny public policy problems. Card’s recent studies, conducted with colleague Laura Giuliano, investigate tracking. In 2014, Card and Giuliano published a paper evaluating an urban district’s tracking program based on prior achievement. In particular, disadvantaged students and students of color benefitted from an accelerated curriculum, with no negative spillover effects for students pursuing the regular course of study. Card and Giuliano concluded, “Our findings suggest that a comprehensive tracking program that establishes a separate classroom in every school for the top‐performing students could significantly boost the performance of the most talented students in even the poorest neighborhoods, at little or no cost to other students or the District’s budget.”
Card and Giuliano’s current project studies two large urban districts in Florida, predominantly Black and Hispanic, that provide mathematically talented students with the opportunity to accelerate through middle school math courses. When these students enter high school, they will have already completed Algebra I and Geometry. They begin high school two years ahead of students in San Francisco, opening up greater opportunities to take Advanced Placement (AP) courses in later years.
