Labels Aren't What Kids Need

Alexandria's school administrators are caught in a political and moral trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children can progress academically without being held back by lower-income kids. At the same time, the school system cannot create exclusive schools-within-schools for upper-income students.

Then there's the question that's usually too delicate to address: Can low-income minority students get the attention they need when they're in classes with middle-class whites? Research shows that KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools are the most successful in the country at closing the gap between low-income black students and middle-class white students. But the philosophy of these schools is geared to the needs of poor children. The schools operate on the belief that to close the learning gap, children from poor homes need an education that's not just equal, but superior, to that of middle-class whites. KIPP students, virtually all of whom are minority and poor, spend 60 percent more time in school than most other children in public schools.

Over the past 30 years, I've seen Alexandria swing back and forth between the concerns of the white and the black communities. Until the mid-1980s, the emphasis was on keeping white families in the system by running schools with large TAG programs, as well as honors and advanced-placement (AP) courses, that were virtually all white. In the late '80s and early '90s, Superintendent Paul Masem began to whittle away at that system. Every year during his seven-year tenure, the school system declared "minority achievement" to be its main goal; this angered white parents, many of whom left the system.

In 1995, Virginia instituted the SOLs, which are now complicating the racial dynamics even further and causing new concerns among white parents. Even the TAG students are being slowed down by the emphasis on the tests. When Priscilla Goodwin complained that her third-grader was bored, the principal of George Mason told her that the mandate from the central office was to get all students to pass the SOL exams. "Principals are running scared," Goodwin says. "Their reputations and promotions depend on the SOLs; they think that as long as bright kids pass these simple tests, they're doing fine. They're giving kids worksheets on facts that most children already know because they go at the pace of the slowest kid in the room. TAG or regular classes, kids aren't being challenged."

This is a problem not only in Alexandria, but in school systems throughout Northern Virginia and elsewhere in the state. Says University of Virginia education professor Carol Tomlinson: "Many bright kids encounter year after year of waiting for other kids to finish work so they can move ahead. Parents get weary of advocating for challenges in 'general' classroom settings and understandably come to believe that the only folks in the building who have their kids on the radar are the folks in the gifted program."

What most parents don't realize is that the gifted label can harm not only those who don't receive it, but also those who do. Labeling can create what Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a "fixed" mindset of intelligence -- the belief that your intelligence is set in stone -- as opposed to a "growth" mindset, which views intelligence as a muscle, something that can be developed throughout your life. In 1998, Dweck conducted an experiment in which she gave two evenly matched groups of elementary school kids the same nonverbal IQ test. When one group of children did well, they were told that they must have worked very hard to get their results. The students in the other group, meanwhile, were told that they must be very smart to have done so well.

Dweck found that as time went on, the kids who were told that they were smart "fell apart when they hit a challenge. They lost confidence in their abilities. Their motivation dwindled and their performance on the next IQ test dropped." By contrast, the children in the group praised for working hard tended to seek out challenges and persist at difficult tasks and ultimately learned more.

I've seen Dweck's theory proved time and again in my AP English classes. When an Asian student who has spoken English for only four or five years gets an A on a test and an American kid labeled gifted gets a D, the American will often do one of two things: denigrate the Asian's grade because it was achieved through hard work, or bring in his mother to argue that the test was unfair and that I should change his grade because I "know how smart he is."

In truth, many bright students feel uncomfortable as they go through the gifted-and-talented program. "I was always uneasy about being pulled out of class for TAG, set apart from other kids and shuttled through to college," says Sarah Shaffer, a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Shep Walker, a T.C. graduate about to enter the College of William and Mary, says the problem is that "gifted-and-talented programs get filled with white kids who have pushy parents, leaving a lot of black and Hispanic kids out in the cold and creating de facto segregation in the classes."

In its defense, Alexandria's school administration was probably trying to fix that situation. But the solution isn't to mark fewer students as gifted and talented. It's to challenge all our kids, all the time.

may6dog@aol.com

Patrick Welsh teaches English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.