- Darius Brown’s educational biography, featured last week in the Dallas Morning News, should be encouraging for reformers. It’s the story of a bright young Texan from modest circumstances who, through his own talents and the prodigious advocacy of his single mother, took part in his district’s gifted program and won a Gates Millennium Scholars award and matriculate to Texas A&M. Unfortunately, his story isn’t representative—even though they account for 6.5 percent of the state’s students, black boys like Darius make up less than 3 percent of those enrolled in Texas’s gifted programs. One of the main reasons for the discrepancy is that too many states and districts still rely on referrals from teachers and parents for screening into such programs, rather than spending extra and instituting universal screening. As Jay Mathews argues in the Washington Post, settling for this narrower pool leads to gifted classrooms that are significantly whiter and more affluent. Above-average intelligence is a category of special learning need; the only thing setting it apart from, say, a physical disability or a lack of English fluency is that it doesn’t always make itself known. That’s why we need to do everything we can to identify and serve gifted kids, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- The old saying goes, “If you love something, set it free.” Louisiana educators seem to have taken that adage to heart, making their carefully crafted and Common Core-aligned Guidebooks 2.0 curriculum available to teachers nationwide at no cost. At least, we think they love it; after all, the state spent a nice chunk of change partnering with the website Learnzillion to develop hundreds of web-based lessons for teachers of grades 3–12. Then again, an official with the state’s department of education voiced this giddy endorsement of the design process: “To be honest, I don’t think other states should create their own curriculum if they don’t have to. It takes a lot of time.” (Well, yeah.) Louisiana is following in the footsteps of New York—which has already released its homebrew EngageNY curriculum to superb reviews—and Learnzillion has won praise as a resource for reformers looking to intervene directly in classrooms. Let’s hope that sound partnerships and precedents augur good tidings for a state that could use them.
- We think of California as the land of sun and waves and far-off geological cataclysm. But if the Big One seems only a distant possibility, the state has already been hit with an educational earthquake in the speedy proliferation of charter schools: Writing in Education Next, Richard Whitmire demonstrates convincingly that charters have devoured much of the district’s market share over the past decade, laying claim to roughly one-fifth of the total student population in Los Angeles. Now the aftershocks are starting to be felt. With the recent revelation of a Broad Foundation plan to vastly expand the city’s charter sector, a full-scale counterrevolution is being led by the schools’ foes. Most notably, the powerful United Teachers Los Angeles has conducted some canny organizing in an effort to unionize the city’s biggest charter network, and perhaps even repeal the state’s charter law entirely. Let’s see if choice advocates have been bracing themselves for another shakeup.
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