Someone has to stand up for the gifted students

I oppose bullying in schools, and that includes the smart kids. A draft report from the Toronto District School Board Enhancing Equity Task Force appears to target a wretched demographic, the kids labelled “gifted.”

I will speak up for them. Someone has to. It’s not as if gifted children are going to put their hands up and defend programs aimed at matching their talents and ambitions. You can get beat up for that.

Who among us at some point has not cowered in a classroom, aware of being stamped as singular in some way? I keep thinking of that 2006 American TV series, Malcolm in the Middle, with young Malcolm horrified to discover he is a genius who will be placed in the special Krelboyne class for the hopelessly intelligent. “Malcolm is different,” the teacher announces. “Very, very different.”

Malcolm screams quietly. Being book-smart is a social wasteland but somewhere a light beckons, that adulthood might be a kind of catch-and-release program for kids who don’t like gym.

The task force, an amorphous group with an unrivalled talent for educational jargon, has written its report with the apparent aim of annoying parents, admittedly not a difficult thing to do in these Trumpy competitive conflict-ridden times.

It wants all students to be the same, and be made to be the same, calling for an end to specialized schools for the arts, as well as halting high school streaming into Academic or Applied classes. It’s a big hammer for a tiny target in a board with 245,000 students, nearly 600 schools and 37,000 employees.

Teachers won’t like this. Neither will teenagers. How awkward to unite them on this subject.

As the Star’s Noor Javed has reported, TDSB director John Malloy has already said no to the draft plan. Toronto will retain schools like the Claude Watson School for the Arts and “other specialty programs that are run within schools such as gifted programs, STEM, International Baccalaureate, or TOPS.”

In fact, he was so opposed that he has asked for the recommendation to be deleted. How had it ever reached this point?

Here’s how the task force made its peculiar case. “Specialized schools and programs, along with optional attendance, while benefitting certain populations, have inadvertently resulted in greater competition and disparities between schools.

“In many cases, these schools and programs have served to limit enriched learning opportunities for students, especially those from the most marginalized communities, who experience barriers to accessing optional attendance (attending school outside one’s neighbourhood).”

The report is badly written, by the way. A document on education shouldn’t require translation into plain English. What does “engaging with students as knowledge-keepers to enact change” mean?

The task force is describing situations like the one in Parkdale, where, as the Globe and Mail has reported, a school expanded its gifted program and began to attract students from families who weren’t living in poverty. It then lost its extra low-income funding, meaning, for example, that school trips were no longer subsidized.

Parents weren’t happy. While some might possibly have been pleased to have their child get a better shot at attending a local gifted program, others complained that their child would miss out on day trips. Travel is good except when it isn’t.

The report says gifted programs should be in every school/ cluster or not exist at all. This would work if schools could afford it. But in a country, province and city that screams bloody murder at the idea of increasing taxes — ending income sprinkling, paying highway tolls, raising property taxes — the money isn’t there.

The thinking behind the recommendation was that all Toronto students are identical in interests and abilities. But they’re not. Well, they should be, the task force says. How is this to happen?

Amid calls for such things as parents and students joining hiring panels for school principals — employment law does not appear to interest the task force — one thing goes unmentioned. That is the ideal of a good public education for hardworking students, with teachers in charge of demanding classes that value intelligence and create successful citizens.

Teaching, reading, classrooms, insights, kindnesses, marks, homework, the safety of the class routine, all these things seem not to be valued. This troubles me greatly.

The report defines success narrowly, as if there is only one academic or social path, one way of being, as if the whole world will one day inherit a job in their dad’s law firm, as if everyone should have equal access to unfairness.

It has almost nothing to say about actual teaching and learning, and that is its greatest flaw.