In the Garden

Credit: Sahar Khatri

Recently my sister, an education researcher, posted a link to an article called “The ‘Gifted’ System in US Schools is Broken, Racist, and Completely Fixable,” expressing as she did the hope that tracking in US schools could just die forever. (Why would you want to get rid of academic tracking if it is fixable? Well, I actually don’t think it is, but, as this article demonstrates, districts don’t even want to pay for universal screening for GT programs, which is the only way to even BEGIN to disrupt their current status as intra-school mechanisms of racial and economic segregation. A more accurate title of this article might be “The ‘Gifted’ System in US Schools is Broken, Racist, and Completely Fixable, Except We Won’t Ever Fix It Because It’s Actually Doing the Work of Our Racism For Us So Maybe On Reflection the Term ‘Broken’ Was Inaccurate.” )

One of my best friends posted a query in response: “Talk to me about the value of an integrated classroom for highly gifted students. My friend’s kindergartner reads novels and asks about the astrophysics of the Big Bang.”

Indeed. Even if you completely reject academic tracking on principle, what should you do if one of your children gets one of those freaky brains in the biological lottery? Will they be intellectually and socially stifled if they don’t get to learn with their freaky peers? (And of course, the broader and much more common question: What if I believe in public education on principle, but when I have a child of my own I don’t want to send them to my local public school because I don’t think it offers a quality education? Only applicable to the richies, of course.)

I have this kind of ecological, scaleable vision of education. With the caveat that no single environment is right for every student, I think that just, sound educational principles apply both at the level of the general population and the individual. I think tracking systems produce diseased educational ecologies, and that these ecologies are unhealthy for all kids, including the gifted ones. And I think parents who oppose racial and economic integration in the schools of their individual kids are invested in and support systems of race and class-based oppression, no matter what principles they may pay lip service to.

First of all, a kindergartner who reads novels is going to be a weirdo wherever they are (in the best possible way). I don’t think being in a GT program would necessarily make them feel less isolated, and in fact if they’re head and shoulders above the certified Smart Kids, they might even stick out more than in a class with wildly various types of brains.

And that’s the other thing: IQ testing screens for one kind of brain. It does a super good job at what it was designed to do: figuring out where you fall on the overall human spectrum of ability in filling in the blanks in analogies and manipulating patterns of dots in your head. The extent to which those abilities correlate to, let alone cause, novel-reading and grasp of theoretical physics: ???. (And who decided that analogies and dots stuff were the signposts of intelligence? Well it was the eugenicists, who wanted an empirical measure of how intellect corresponded with race and class. Look, disinterested they were not.)

Genius is real. It comes in many forms. In my nine years of teaching, I’ve seen that. And yes, I think my little baby geniuses are well-served in an integrated classroom.

The other day I took three kids out to the garden. One boy who is very tempted by the coolness of the streets, but whose family farms in DR, who feels an affinity for the garden. One girl with such a severe reading disorder that she can only decode at about the 2.7 grade level, and who has some expressive language issues too, but who I consider a kind of moral genius: she has this force of compassion, and willingness to question authority, that is a fairly rare type of brilliance. In-born, can be cultivated but not really taught. World-class. And a third girl who is the IQ kind of genius: blows away every standardized test we give her. In a racially and economically mixed school (mine is v. segregated) she still might have been left out of GT, because she is poor and Afro-Latin and, as Laur’s article shows, GT selection bias does a decent job of screening those kids out. She spent last year in an ICT class (which stands for Integrated Co-teaching, half general ed. students and half kids with disabilities, taught by two teachers.) Because there were always two teachers in her room, it was easy for one of us to occasionally pull her aside, put her in front of a computer, and say, “Please research and describe how Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring changed US discourse on environmental conservation. Oh, this is how you use the Google search bar.” “Find an article about the Bronx, identify its use of connotative language, and analyze how this language reveals the author’s perspective  on our borough.” Toward the end of the year: “Do any research project you want about an environmental issue.” “Can I research ecologically friendly manufacturing techniques, and write up a proposal  for a factory along with blueprints?” “Yes, that.” She also did an intense amount of group work, and when she finished essays early I asked her to help her classmates copy-edit theirs. (I never did explain to her what copy-editing meant. While I expected her to help them fix their capital letters, it was only after I learned about the “See Revision History” on Google Drive that I discovered she was writing friendly notes to classmates in which she steered them toward better evidence and clearer analysis, notes which they promptly followed through on and erased. Let’s face it. Dots are the least of her gifts.)

We ran around in the garden filling up watering cans from our rain catchment system and dumping them on our raspberries, beets, and new clover. We sat down for a rest under our solar panels, and spent a while talking about renewable energy. Marlene naturally had some engineering questions I could not answer (I say “That’s a good research question!” with a tone of approval as if someone caught a fish, about ten times a day). We idly plucked apart some shriveled up marigolds, discovered their seeds, and John wondered whether they would grow if we planted them, and if so whether they would be best served by him creating a small lagoon of rainwater in their flower bed. (Only one way to find out!) “It’s possible to give them too much water,” Marlene informed him. “Seeds can drown.” John allowed his waters to recede. Genesis looked up at the solar panels. “How come here is always on?” I didn’t understand the question. She reworded it a few times, and explained her thinking: “At my grandma’s in DR the power is on and then off from 9-7. How come here the power is always on?” Marlene backed her up, and quickly began discussing the merits of back-up power generators, while I sat, stunned.  I’m smart enough, that is (clever is as clever does) smart enough to do my job. I will never be the one who asks, How come here is always on.

Of course, all groups are heterogenous. We are a mixed bunch, by nature, variation being one of those great reliefs of a biological imperative. All kids need and deserve a little bit of time with kids who are really smart, and maybe smarter, in the same ways that they are, but I think a few special projects at the extension center (or a few classes at college) ought to do it. I think it’s also good to be with kids who are smarter than us in ways that we are not. (As one of my general ed. students said on her first day in an ICT class years ago, “I’m glad I’m here because the kids from the special ed class are better at socializing than I am, and they can teach me.” She said this in front of the whole class. Certifiable literary genius, that one. She could write a horror story that would haunt you for years, and her essays would run rings around you.)

Great teachers bring out the richness of their students’ offerings, and make rich learning environments, regardless of students’ classifications. My 12th grade AP English teacher brought me competently through the AP exam, but I had to unlearn everything she taught me about writing when I got to college, whereas my 12th grade African American Lit teacher built a challenging and supportive learning community amongst her students (some “honors,” some not, many still close friends), and I used some of those class notes at Swat for two years straight (Their Eyes Were Watching God changed my major/life, and what would I have done without my Daughters of the Dust family tree.) The fact that great teachers are mostly shuffled off into GT, AP, Honors classes? Well, that’s what our unequal system is designed to do. But it’s their loss.