Seattle Public Schools will discontinue its gifted and talented program to create a more “inclusive, equitable, and culturally sensitive” program for students, according to a report from the New York Post.
Going forward, the school system’s High Capable Cohort will continue to be phased out with a new “woke” model available to all students by the 2024-2025 school year.
The school district’s website boasts that the new program will help students “furthest from educational justice” and will “address historical inequality,” (via SeattleSchools.org):
To address historical inequity, SPS has changed how we identify Advanced Learners and Highly Capable students.
The program is not going away, it’s getting better. It will be more inclusive, equitable, and culturally sensitive. In particular, students who have been historically excluded will now have the same opportunities for services as every other student and get the support and enrichment they need to grow.
The Post reported that the current program allows students who placed in the top 2 percent on standardized test exams to be placed in the Highly Capable Cohort. From there, the students would be sorted into one of three elementary schools, five middle schools and three high schools.
Seattle public schools shuts down gifted and talented program for ‘inclusive’ alternative https://t.co/fA5jWJWs4V pic.twitter.com/hZOCVhWKuF
— New York Post (@nypost) April 3, 2024
However, in 2020, the school board voted to end the program due to its lack of diversity (via NYP):
But in 2020, the Seattle school board voted to terminate the program, after a 2018 survey found that the students in the Highly Capable Cohort were 13% multiracial, 11.8% Asian, 3.7% Hispanic and just 1.6% black.
Nearly 70% of the students were white.
“Numbers would suggest that within our city … predominantly white children are more gifted than other cultures and races, and we know that is absolutely not true,” Kari Hanson, the district’s director of student support services, told Parent Map at the time.
Under the new program, dubbed the Highly Capable Neighborhood School Model, teachers will be required to come up with individualized learning programs for all 20 to 30 of their students — a task for which, they argue, they do not have the time or resources as the district faces a $104 million budget deficit, according to the Seattle Times.
This is not the only way Seattle Public Schools is pushing its woke agenda. Last year, Townhall covered how parental rights organization Parents Defending Education found that the school district’s School Based Health Centers offer middle and high school students access to certain types of gender mutilation care, including referrals for irreversible surgeries.