We've seen this story play out before in San Francisco. Progressive educators attack tracking and advanced math courses on the grounds that equity demands everyone be in the same classroom. Somehow this was supposed to improve things for the mostly black and Hispanic students who were falling behind without doing any harm to the mostly white and Asian kids who had previously been in the advanced classes.

Eventually, San Francisco figured out that it didn't work. Apart from making life much harder for the advanced kids, some of whom had to take a year of math in summer school to keep up with their college-bound peers in other cities, getting rid of Middle School algebra did nothing for the students on the other end of the achievement gap. The city eventually reversed course once the failure of de-tracking became undeniable.

The same story has been playing out in Seattle which also put an end to gifted classes on grounds of equity. Back in 2020, a parent of a 5th grade student who was in the gifted cohort wrote to school administrators to ask what would happen to his son's classes. He received a response from the chief of equity:

After some back and forth, the district’s chief of equity, partnerships, and engagement, Keisha Scarlett, wrote this:

“These programs have been created based upon the ‘manufactured brilliance’ of the children of mostly white and affluent families,” she emailed. “Children who are not inherently more gifted than other children but benefit from the resources their families and our systems leverage to uphold to redlining in educational spaces. This promotes a scarcity frame and opportunity hoarding.”

It’s so skewed it can’t be fixed, she suggested.

“I also fundamentally believe that we don’t advance racial equity as a measure toward racial and education justice through a focus on increasing access and inclusion,” she wrote. “These are band-aids to camouflage institutional racism.”

The parent in this case was not white but was an immigrant from Hong Kong who came to the US as a kid. In any case, the message was clear. Gifted classes are institutional racism and promote "opportunity hoarding." Clearly the DEI lens would make the elimination of these programs mandatory and that's what Seattle planned to do. They were supposed to be phased out over the next two years.

But this month Seattle has decided to put efforts to end the gifted program on hold. Parents have complained that their kids are not getting the education they should and the city extended the deadline.

Seattle Public Schools will push back the deadline to end its highly capable cohort program for advanced students amid parent complaints that their children aren’t getting the services they need at their neighborhood schools.

In response to the concerns, the district has decided to extend the program, with a potential end date in the 2029-30 school year. The district initially planned to entirely phase out the cohort schools model — where students in the advanced learning program attend classes at separate “highly capable cohort” schools — at the end of the 2027-28 school year.

The district planned to introduce a “highly capable neighborhood school model” this school year, where all students are in the same classroom and the teacher individualizes learning plans for each student.

But many parents said that did not happen districtwide. At School Board meetings and in interviews, they expressed concern that teachers at their neighborhood schools were barred from teaching above their children’s grade level.

Nevertheless, the plan to eliminate advanced classes for equity has already done a lot of damage.

Consider what happened in one Seattle middle school, Hamilton, in the years since David Evans began teaching math there.

As recently as 2016, he says, the school had six classes of middle schoolers taking geometry, which is technically a 10th grade course. There was one class taking Algebra II, an 11th grade course. This was heady stuff — that’s as many as 150 middle schoolers in just one Seattle school who were two to four years advanced in math.

“Now we have only one section of geometry,” Evans testified at a School Board meeting last week, while Algebra II isn’t offered at all.

Top students in public schools have been leaving as they (or their parents) move their kids to private schools which still offer advanced math for advanced students.

“I see our top students waltz away every year to Lakeside, SAAS, Bush, you name it, they’re leaving because we didn’t serve their needs,” Evans told the School Board, listing Seattle private schools.

Danny Westneat reports that there was a longstanding debate in the city about why so many students were leaving the public schools. The progressive explanation whenever this came up had to do with the cost of homes in the city. But last month the city released a study which asked parents what was motivating the trend toward private schools. A majority of those surveyed cited quality of education and curriculum as the major factors. Only 3% cited the cost of housing. In short, people are leaving because the public schools aren't keeping up with the top students.

All of this was predictable and was in fact predicted by parents who warned the school system in advance that it was a bad idea to tear down the current system without coming up with a solid replacement and putting that in place first. The city didn't listen (just as it didn't when it jumped on the "defund the police" bandwagon" in 2020). 

Finally, it seems the city is coming around but only after losing a bunch of its best students and taking advanced classes away from many more. This was always a terrible idea. The fact that DEI made it seem not just positive but necessary should be cause for some much needed reflection on the value of DEI in education. It should be, but this is Seattle so don't hold your breath.