This Tuesday, June 14. 2022, marks the end of the 2021/2022 San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) school year.

This week we address the SDUSD “Standards Based Grading Policy” that essentially guarantees fake graduation rates, horrible educational outcomes and ensures an extremely powerful school to prison pipeline.  And all, of course, with ZERO Honesty, Transparency or Accountability.,

Serendipity struck this week via an article from the Hechinger Report that points out inconsistences and disparities in approach from classrooom to classroom regarding REAL Gifted Education.  Many of those same disparities are manifested in the “adult centric” new SDUSD Standards Based Grading Policy.

Although we have featured the complete article today, we strongly urge our readers to click on the title (in red) to read the full article for themselves.

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PROOF POINTS: How do you find a gifted child?

Teacher ratings differ when you cross the hallway, study finds

by JILL BARSHAY – May 31, 2022

At one elementary school in rural Appalachia, most of the children are white and poor; 90 percent qualify for free or reduced priced lunch. Guess how many of the 800 students are gifted? The answer: three. At least, that’s the determination of a widely-used national intelligence test, on which few students living in poverty score highly.

School administrators wanted to boost the number of gifted students and invited a team of researchers to come up with another way to find them. The researchers asked 16 teachers to rate their students to indicate which ones were far above average in their classrooms, if not the nation, and could benefit from advanced instruction. 

When the research team tallied up the teacher ratings for all 282 students in this 2021 experiment, they were startled. Different methods of creaming off the top 10 percent produced entirely different groups of students who would be identified as gifted with almost no overlap. The top 10 percent in each classroom yielded one group of gifted students. The top 10 percent school-wide yielded another. Only six kids were in both groups. 

“It was inconsistent from classroom to classroom,” said Karen Rambo-Hernandez, an associate professor of education at Texas A&M University, who presented her unpublished findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 2022. “Teachers may be making different judgment calls.” 

Related: Gifted programs provide little to no academic boost, new study says

Despite the training that teachers received on assessing students by answering a list of 37 questions, some teachers were inclined to rate their students more generously than others. The definition of who is gifted appeared to change as you walked across the hallway. 

This experiment is important because many school systems around the country rely on these sorts of teacher checklists, often called  “scales” or “instruments” in the field of education, to identify who is gifted. New momentum is building to lean even more on these teacher ratings as school systems wrestle with how to address the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in gifted education. Only 10 percent of the nation’s gifted students were Black, far less than their 15 percent share of the school population in the federal government’s most recent data. The gap is even larger for Hispanic students, who made up only 18 percent of gifted students but over 25 percent of the school population.  

In April 2022, New York City permanently eliminated a gifted test for four-year-olds that resulted in a terribly lopsided allocation of only 16 percent of the gifted and talented seats to Black and Hispanic children, who make up 63 percent of the city’s kindergarten population. The city is replacing the test with teacher evaluations of students, which will involve judgments of traits, such as perseverance and curiosity. 

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

The advantage of teacher ratings is that they can assess important aspects of giftedness that tests cannot measure.  A newer HOPE scale of teacher ratings was expressly designed to improve racial equity in the selection of gifted students, and includes questions on social behaviors, such as whether a student shows compassion for others. 

The teacher rating scale used in the Appalachian experiment was developed by education psychologist Joseph Renzulli. He theorized that a combination of creativity, motivation and ability indicate a high potential for inventiveness and productivity that can be nurtured even if a student doesn’t score high on an intelligence test.

Among the evaluation questions used at the Appalachian school were how often a student demonstrates “imaginative thinking ability,” “the ability to concentrate intently on a topic for a long period of time,” “curiosity about scientific processes,” and “is eager to solve challenging math problems.” A sense of humor is an important indicator of intelligence on Renzulli scales too. 

All of these questions involve subjective judgment calls. To some, five minutes is a long period of concentration. For others, it’s a half hour. Some teachers might see exceptional curiosity when a child asks questions. Others might see questions as normal child behavior.

In the Appalachian school, math and science were emphasized in the questions about each student because the school wants to create a gifted program in computational thinking and computer coding for students. Teachers’ math ratings were more consistent from classroom to classroom, but science marks were much higher in some classrooms than others. Across all 16 classes, teachers tended to think that girls were more creative than boys. 

Rambo-Hernandez, the Texas A&M professor who conducted this experiment, fears that teacher ratings of giftedness may ultimately benefit children from wealthier families with more educated parents who tend to be more verbal. Their imagination, curiosity and tenacity may be more visible to a teacher. Quiet students could be overlooked. 

The field is in a pickle. Intelligence tests disadvantage children in poverty. Efforts to shift the test score for giftedness school by school, giving poorer schools lower cutoffs, haven’t moved the needle as much as many had hoped and don’t improve racial balance in more integrated schools. Even lotteries for children above a certain threshold will end up advantaging demographic groups that do better on the test. Now this experiment shows that teacher ratings of gifted indicators aren’t a clear solution either. 

Related: What research tells us about gifted education

Joni Lakin, an associate professor of educational research at the University of Alabama who has developed tests to identify gifted children, praised the study. “I think we’re too fixated on identification,” Lakin Said. “I’ve lost my faith in fixing gifted’s equity problem by fixing how we identify students.”

Lakin and Rambo-Hernandez both want the field of gifted education to focus more on improving the services offered to gifted children first. They point out that most schools have one sort of gifted program that doesn’t necessarily help many children who are in them. 

“Children are diverse in their characteristics,” said Lakin. “Some are creative. Some are rigid but have stick-to-itiveness. If you put them in the same services, they’re not going to be served well.” 

The Appalachian research team is going back to the drawing board on how to select which students will get the extra instruction in computational thinking next year. They are considering using other assessments that the school is already giving children. It’s a work in progress.

This story about gifted identification was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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DISTRICT DEEDS ANALYSIS:

This week in Sunday Reads was perfect example of Serendipity…

We were initially going to write a post this week regarding Gifted Education and how the SDUSD has systematically destroyed the once renowned Gifted and Talented Education program based on totally ignorant comments by senior SDUSD Leadership like Trustee Richard Barrera who said in a recent San Diego Union Tribune article:

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Barrera added that he wants to completely eliminate the use of a test for San Diego Unified’s GATE identification, although the school board has no current plans to do so.

“It’s a silly structure that’s been in place for way too long. It was never a good idea,” Barrera said. “I’ve certainly been concerned about this for a number of years, and we do need to make a change.”

Barrera suggested that teacher and parent recommendations could replace the test. But some experts including Peters said recommendations can contribute to disparities, too.

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But after reading the today’s featured article from The Hechinger Report about Gifted Education as part of that effort, we discovered a wider application for some of the findings presented there regarding “teacher recommendation” for Gifted Education:

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School administrators wanted to boost the number of gifted students and invited a team of researchers to come up with another way to find them. The researchers asked 16 teachers to rate their students to indicate which ones were far above average in their classrooms, if not the nation, and could benefit from advanced instruction. 

When the research team tallied up the teacher ratings for all 282 students in this 2021 experiment, they were startled. Different methods of creaming off the top 10 percent produced entirely different groups of students who would be identified as gifted with almost no overlap. The top 10 percent in each classroom yielded one group of gifted students. The top 10 percent school-wide yielded another. Only six kids were in both groups. 

“It was inconsistent from classroom to classroom,” said Karen Rambo-Hernandez, an associate professor of education at Texas A&M University, who presented her unpublished findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 2022. “Teachers may be making different judgment calls.” 

Despite the training that teachers received on assessing students by answering a list of 37 questions, some teachers were inclined to rate their students more generously than others. The definition of who is gifted appeared to change as you walked across the hallway. 

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One sentence in that section stood out:

“The definition of who is gifted appeared to change as you walked across the hallway. “

Suddenly we came to the realization that, in the new SDUSD Standards Based Grading Policy, the EXACT same thing WOULD happen.  To paraphrase:

“The definition of who passes a class appeared to change as you walked across the hallway.“

According to the SDUSD Grading Policy on the district website:

“As a district, we have listened to our stakeholders, researched equitable grading practices, and revised our grading policy to best meet the needs of ALL students…”

EDITOR NOTE:  Archived in case the SDUSD decides to delete the original”  ARCHIVED SDUSD Grading Policy on the district website

Total SDUSD Propaganda.

To burst that SDUSD Propaganda bubble, we reached out to SDUSD Stakeholders including Teachers, Parents and Staff and found out we were very close to the truth.

Here are quotes we received from our school site Stakeholder contacts (Parents/Teachers/Principals/Staff) regarding Teachers and the new SDUSD Grading standards:

• “In the trenches it is every man for themselves.”

• “Grading has become totally subjective, not objective.  This is not about helping Students, it is about helping Adults.”

• “Some teachers don’t use the assigned textbooks for the class, some have grading scales that take only a 40% to pass the class, it is all over the place.”

• “It is a plantation mentality…’WE know what’s best for black and brown Students'”

Based on these comments we pulled the SDUSD 2020-22 Grading Policy Implementation document from the Morse High school website:

Through a tip from our contacts we found that the San Diego Education Association (SDEA) Teachers Union had a problem with “Late Assignments” and “Reassessment/Revision Opportunities” affected by the policy and filed a grievance with the SDUSD.

We then discovered that, despite ANY SDUSD, County, California State, or Federal “Standards Based Grading” edicts, those two items strike at the CORE of how grades are actually determined at the individual classroom level.

Here is the official Grievance Settlement Agreement document from the “Our Rights – MOU’s and Other Agreements” page on the SDEA Website:

EDITOR NOTE:  Here is the internet archive link in case the page gets deleted:  SDEA Our Rights – Archived  

Remember our paraphrased quote from the featured article?

“The definition of who passes a class appeared to change as you walked across the hallway.“

With the SDEA Grievance Settlement for “Late Assignments”:

“Educators maintain discretion over the grade issued for work not submitted within the grace period(s) established by the educator.”

District Deeds Translation:  Classroom Teachers (Educators) can INDIVIDUALLY set up grace periods (if they want to…or not) and can assign any grade they see fit (maintain discretion) based on their own personal perception ( not fact).

Totally lacking any requirement of Honesty, Transparency, Accountability, Consistency  and/or EQUITY from one classrom to another in the same SCHOOL, let alone from OTHER SCHOOL SITES!

And with the SDEA Grievance Settlement for “Reassessment/Revision Opportunities”:

“The educator shall determine the circumstances, form, and frequency in which reassessment and/or revision opportunities will be made available to students.”  

District Deeds Translation:  Classroom Teachers (Educators) can INDIVIDUALLY determine what (if any) when (if ever) and how (if allowed) the Students in their classroom will recieve the benefit of reassessment and/or revision of assignments and/or grades.

Again, totally lacking any requirement of Honesty, Transparency, Accountability, Consistency and/or EQUITY from one classroom to another in the same SCHOOL, let alone from OTHER SCHOOL SITES!

This means…

“The definition of who passes a class in SDUSD ABSOLUTELY CHANGES as you walk across the hallway.“

This means the assertion from the SDUSD Grading Policy on the district website…

“As a district, we have listened to our stakeholders, researched equitable grading practices, and revised our grading policy to best meet the needs of ALL students…”

…is a HUGE Lie!

With disparate grading and assessment/reassessment practices from classroom to classroom, grade to grade and school to school it is the definition of inconsistency and inequity and does NOT “meet the needs of ALL students“!

Like our Stakeholder told us:

This is not about helping Students, it is about helping Adults.

Think about the “progress” that the SDUSD made while the Stakeholders were severely impacted and distracted by the Covid Pandemic.

With this dystopian, inconsistent and inequitable SDUSD grading policy created specifically to AVOID Honesty, Transparency and Accountability :

• If a student is lucky (or unfortunate) enough to go to a good (or bad) school and pick the right (or wrong) Teachers, they could either get a 4.0 gradepoint average and be admitted to college OR flunk out of high school with exactly the same amount of effort!

• When certain schools, mostly south of the 8 Freeway, begin generating poor educational performance from poor and minority Students, what will stop corrupt SDUSD Senior Leadership and Principals (under the gun for performance) to “suggest” that Teachers “make available” EASIER “circumstances, form, and frequency of assessments” to give them a passing grade?

Theoretically, in this SDUSD Educational dystopia, if a Student is affable and knows how to manipulate a teacher, they could graduate from high school  while:

• Not knowing how to read, write or perform basic math calculations above a 9th grade level.
• Turning in less than 20% of classwork
• NEVER turning any classwork in on time
• Not taking any independent tests of educational proficiency (no SAT, opt out of all standardized tests).
• Never fully read a book.

This is what represents the NEW Slogan for the SDUSD…

Based on these facts, we feel compelled to take the “opportunity” to give the SDUSD an academic and citizenship grade, under the same reassessment/revision rights as the SDEA, to the corrupt, incompetent SDUSD Senior Leadership.

For “Academics” we give them a big,fat…

“F”

For “Citizenship” we give them a big, fat…

“U”

Final grades for the corrupt, self serving SDUSD Leadership that has refused to provide any semblance of Honesty, Transparency or Accountabilty for the last 9 years:

F. U. !!!

“Great minds think alike though fools seldom differ. -Unknown