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Inclusion Doesn't Inhibit the Best Students
(By Julie Zhu -- Montgomery Blair High School)
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Leslie Sinn
Hamilton
This is an apt summary of the strains and stumbles that surround this issue. I suspect many Loudoun County educators will take issue with your view of their system, but you put your finger precisely on the problem that gifted programs have throughout the country.
Public school systems rarely have the expertise or the money to reproduce the kind of program you had as a child, and the number of students like you and your daughter who are ready for it is so small that it is hard to justify to taxpayers.
The only solution, besides the acceleration that Loudoun and other districts do allow, is to support families such as yours that grab opportunities outside the system -- clubs for super-gifted children, tutors, college courses.
As for AP, you need to do more research. I know of no counselors anywhere who try to get students to take six or more AP courses a year. If you have evidence of that, send it on. If inclusion hurts the best AP students, why do we have far more top AP test scores than we did before inclusion became the standard in Northern Virginia? Inclusion can lead to less learning for the fastest students, except in cases, such as with AP and IB, in which the course must follow an external high standard, which the teacher can't dumb down without being caught.
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