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conuly
Gifted Kindergarten in NYC may be unfair. Well, what else is new?
Equity of Test Is Debated as Children Compete for Gifted Kindergarten
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Teachers at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan tell Alexis Stewart that her 4-year-old son, Chase, is bright.
“He knows about different fish, different birds, different species,” Ms. Stewart said. “He’s on it.”
Chase took the city test for the public schools’ gifted and talented kindergarten program, but missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, she said.
Ms. Stewart, a single mom working two jobs, didn’t think the process was fair. She had heard widespread reports of wealthy families preparing their children for the kindergarten gifted test with $90 workbooks, $145-an-hour tutoring and weekend “boot camps.”
The owner of one Manhattan tutoring company, Bright Kids NYC, says the parents of the 120 children her staff tutored spent an average of $1,000 on test prep for their 4-year-olds.
Ms. Stewart used a booklet the city provided and reviewed the 16 sample questions with Chase. “I was online trying to find sample tests,” she said. “But everything was $50 or more. I couldn’t afford that.”
She understands why wealthier families pay for test prep. “They want to help their kids,” she said. “If I could buy it, I would, too.”
Another Bloomingdale Head Start parent, Lawanna Gillespie, a medical aide who said her son Zion also missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, was surprised to hear that prep materials existed for a kindergarten test.
“There are books you can buy with sample questions?” she said. “I never knew that.”
Delores Mims, an education director at the Head Start, said, “Our parents are at a disadvantage.”
Bloomingdale, with headquarters at West 109th Street, is a highly regarded Head Start, and Ms. Mims says she has several 4-year-olds who she feels would do well in a gifted kindergarten program.
Founded as a preschool in 1960 even before the federal Head Start program was established, Bloomingdale became a national prototype. To this day, it’s considered a model, and educators worldwide visit it — recently from Iceland, Indonesia and the Netherlands.
An early 4-year-old graduate, Patrick Gaspard, who grew up to become a White House political adviser, thinks so highly of Bloomingdale that he took one of its founders, Susan Feingold, to meet President Obama.
This week, Bloomingdale marks its 50th year by graduating 100 4-year-olds, 98 percent of them black and Hispanic and all poor (to qualify, a family of three must earn less than $18,300).
Not one of the 100 will be attending one of the city’s gifted kindergarten programs in the fall, according to Bloomingdale officials.
In contrast, in 2007, Ms. Mims says, when she was a teacher, she knew of a half-dozen who were accepted. Back then, under a decentralized selection process, teacher assessment, classroom observation and interviews all played a role.
That approach was criticized as vulnerable to political manipulation and racial favoritism, since districts could take into account increasing diversity in making selections.
“The process was fractured and inconsistent, and programs were too often gifted in name only,” the city education chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in an e-mail message.
In 2008, Mr. Klein made the score on a citywide standardized test the sole criteria for admission. Mr. Klein is a leading testing proponent for everything from grading schools to rating teachers, and he predicted that a citywide test would be a more equitable solution.
Since then, there have been two major developments, neither looking much more equitable than the old system. Blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten programs dropped to 27 percent this year under the test-only system, from 46 percent under the old system (66 percent of city kindergartners are black or Hispanic).
And a test-prep industry for 4-year-olds has burgeoned. Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009, and there is so much demand that she says she’s opening a second site this month. She runs a two-month “boot camp” for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.
It’s already half-booked, Ms. Doruk said, “and I haven’t even publicly announced it.”
Last year, of 120 children she prepared for the city test, she says 80 percent scored at least 90. “Prepping makes a difference,” she said. “Prep brings anxiety down; children get used to an adult giving them the test and the format.
“A lot of middle- and upper-middle-class families rely on this,” she added.
After a big drop in enrollment the first year of the test, city officials said that better outreach last year helped them nearly double the number of blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten classes, although the percentage barely changed this year, increasing by 2 percent over 2008-9.
“We are every bit as committed as we have been, if not more so, in trying to find a way that there is proper representation among students,” Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor, said at a City Council meeting last month.
However, the Council said in a June report that despite the yearlong push, “six districts in central Brooklyn and the South Bronx still don’t have enough qualifying kids to open gifted kindergartens next fall.”
Mr. Sternberg said the city would soon request proposals for “a different kind of test” for 2012 “that would be harder to game in the way that so many families do, so as a result to be more likely to result in a level playing field.”
Mr. Klein added, “Our highest priority is to ensure that we continue to have a rigorous citywide test that identifies only those qualities of giftedness in children.”
But other testing experts — including Tonya Moon, a University of Virginia professor and principal investigator for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, and Robert Tobias, a New York University professor who directed assessment for city schools from 1988 to 2001 — say there is no magic test that can’t be gamed. They say tests need to be supplemented with teacher evaluations, classroom observation and interviews.
“No test gives a full picture,” Dr. Moon said. “There’s need for multiple measures.”
While applauding Mr. Klein for creating a citywide standard, Mr. Tobias said the test should be just one part of the evaluation: “Tests are fallible. I don’t know a test in existence that’s not subject to test prep. You will always have results biased toward kids with better opportunity.”
The Klein administration early on tried a form for teachers to evaluate children, but abandoned it as too cumbersome to administer.
Even Ms. Doruk, whose livelihood is test prep, thinks the city is making a mistake relying only on tests. She says she’s seen many bright 4-year-olds turn to jelly on test day. “The city needs to look at the child as more than a test,” she said.
Kellyah Hayes-Bernardez, 8, who was at Bloomingdale Head Start in 2007, when teacher evaluations still played a major role, was selected for the gifted program. Her mother, Eva, a kitchen worker, says Kellyah, now in third grade, has thrived at Public School 145’s gifted program. “It pushes her to her fullest potential,” Kellyah’s mother said. “One day she came home talking about, who’s that artist, Monet?”
Marilyn Barnwell, who has worked 30 years at Bloomingdale, says: “The old system included us. We knew the children; we were in their environment every day. We saw potential and curiosity of learning. Now we’re just scorekeepers for the test.”
Ms. Stewart, who arrives from her supermarket job at 5:45 p.m. to pick up Chase, believes that test prep is a new form of discrimination, “not by race, by social class.”
“Discouraged? Of course. It’s awful, but I don’t give up,” she said. Then she walked Chase to the home of his grandparents, who watch him while she works her night job as an usher at the Broadway show “Memphis.”
Harlem Helps Raise Coffee In Ethiopia
From a 542-square-foot office above a bustling intersection in Harlem, the Rev. Nicholas S. Richards is building what he hopes will be a 7,000-mile bridge to the eastern highlands of Ethiopia.
It is a bridge more than 200 years in the making.
In that modest two-room office off East 125th Street, the Abyssinian Fund, the only nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia formed by an African-American church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, finally has a home.
Mr. Richards, 26, an assistant minister at Abyssinian under the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, is the president of the recently formed Aby Fund, as he calls it, an international aid and development arm of the church. It will soon be joining forces with a co-op of 700 coffee farmers in the ancient Ethiopian city of Harrar, with a mission to improve the quality of the farmers’ lives by helping them improve the quality of their coffee beans.
The Abyssinian Fund will pay for specialized training and equipment to help the co-op’s farmers produce a higher-quality product so they can be more competitive on the international coffee market. Once their income has increased, part of what they make will then be set aside in a fund to support local development projects, like much-needed roads, schools or clinics.
Mr. Richards, members of the fund’s board of directors and congregants of the church said the mission was as much about social aid and economic development as it was about the church’s desire to reach back and reconnect with its spiritual and ancestral homeland.
Well woven into the fabric of Harlem, the Abyssinian Baptist Church has a connection to Ethiopia that goes back to the church’s founding in 1808 by free blacks and Ethiopian merchant seamen who refused to worship where blacks and whites were segregated. (Abyssinia is a historical name for Ethiopia.)
Just a year and a half ago, the Abyssinian Fund was a dream that had sprouted from a simple seed planted after Mr. Butts led a group of congregants to Ethiopia in 2007 to celebrate the church’s 200th anniversary.
The fund was inspired by the group’s reaction to the struggle and resilience of the impoverished Ethiopians they had encountered.
“Ethiopia touches your heart,” said Dori Brunson, a donor and congregant who made the journey. “The villages were so simple, so lacking in the amenities that we are so used to, and at one point I just had to walk away, and I stood there and cried.
“Even though we were born here in America, we are part of that African soil. And because of what Africa has given the world and what they stand for, we must give back.”
So far the organization has raised about $130,000, only slightly more than a third of its year-end goal. Mr. Richards has not yet hired any salaried employees or opened a field office in Harrar. Not a single training session has been held or piece of equipment shipped.
Yet Mr. Richards said there was a sense among supporters and congregants that they had crossed a threshold, having succeeded in formalizing the fund’s status in less than a year to a recognized charity with a nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia and an office in New York.
“To see our plan being transformed from just some pages to actual brick and mortar is amazing,” said Mr. Richards, sitting in the sparsely furnished, seventh-floor office, where Ethiopian art hung on the mustard-colored walls and leftover bottles of water and wine from an opening reception a few days earlier were scattered on uncluttered desktops.
The organization will operate as an independent but affiliated body of the church, much like the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which has helped create housing and prompt commercial development in Harlem, including a supermarket, schools and homeless shelters.
Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, and the green beans the farmers grow there are prized on the multibillion-dollar international coffee market.
Coffee is the second most-traded commodity in the world, after oil, yet these farmers earn an average of $1 a day, less than $400 a year, according to aid organizations.
There has been no shortage of aid money pumped into Ethiopia from international organizations and other nations, including the United States, which, according to the State Department, gave $4.7 billion in assistance from 1999 to 2009. But Mr. Richards said the Abyssinian Fund would not function as a traditional charity, as the farmers would share the responsibility for the project’s success.
“We are going to try to the best of our ability to provide the highest level of training and the most necessary equipment that the farmers need,” he said. “But it will be the farmers’ responsibility to reinvest. Reinvestment is going to be critical.”
Instead of providing financial aid or food to the farmers, the Abyssinian Fund will hire coffee experts who are specialists in the processing and quality standards of companies like Starbucks that are the chief buyers of Ethiopia’s beans. Substandard processing has vexed the farmers’ efforts to command higher prices.
The trainers will also teach planting and harvesting techniques that help farmers grow and select only the choicest coffee beans, and the fund will provide equipment like scissors, shears and mechanized pickers to ensure that the beans are properly harvested. Many of these farmers still harvest their crops with their bare hands, Mr. Richards said.
Mr. Richards said the goal was for the farmers to double their income in five years. Helping to improve the livelihoods of the 700 farmers in the co-op, he said, could result in better conditions for as many as 3,000 people.
The fund has had to tread delicately in Ethiopia, where the government has been skeptical of the motives of some foreign aid groups.
Ethiopia is one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world, and has come under the scrutiny by human rights groups, the American government and the World Bank for what has been described as a leaky aid system, with accusations of governmental manipulation of food aid to reward political allies.
Reta Alemu Nega, a minister counselor with the Ethiopian Consulate in Manhattan, said the criticisms were the work of political enemies of the state. Nongovernmental organizations operating in Ethiopia “are not always what they present themselves to be,” he said.
But Mr. Nega said the Ethiopian government supported the work of the Abyssinian Fund. “We know the Abyssinian Church,” he said. “We know who they are.”
Mr. Richards said he had to assure the Ethiopian government that the fund would not operate in a political capacity or meddle in local politics. If so, he said he was told, the organization would be kicked out of the country.
“There’s very little concern for us about corruption because we have a direct relationship to the farming community that we are working with,” Mr. Richards said. “We know the farmers. I’ve visited the farmers. I’ve talked to them, and I’ve talked to their leaders. We don’t provide any cash. And that’s a huge way that we mitigate our exposure to corruption, because there is no cash that is being provided.”
So far, most of the money raised has come from Harlem, with donations ranging from $25 a week to one for $10,000. Other money has come from an art sale and gala featuring work by Ethiopian artists.
“Most of the people doing development work in Africa are not of African descent,” Mr. Richards said. “To have a group of African-Americans concerned about a particular nation in Africa, and doing something about it, is tremendous. This is black folk helping black folk, and it is tremendous to me.”
Equity of Test Is Debated as Children Compete for Gifted Kindergarten
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Teachers at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan tell Alexis Stewart that her 4-year-old son, Chase, is bright.
“He knows about different fish, different birds, different species,” Ms. Stewart said. “He’s on it.”
Chase took the city test for the public schools’ gifted and talented kindergarten program, but missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, she said.
Ms. Stewart, a single mom working two jobs, didn’t think the process was fair. She had heard widespread reports of wealthy families preparing their children for the kindergarten gifted test with $90 workbooks, $145-an-hour tutoring and weekend “boot camps.”
The owner of one Manhattan tutoring company, Bright Kids NYC, says the parents of the 120 children her staff tutored spent an average of $1,000 on test prep for their 4-year-olds.
Ms. Stewart used a booklet the city provided and reviewed the 16 sample questions with Chase. “I was online trying to find sample tests,” she said. “But everything was $50 or more. I couldn’t afford that.”
She understands why wealthier families pay for test prep. “They want to help their kids,” she said. “If I could buy it, I would, too.”
Another Bloomingdale Head Start parent, Lawanna Gillespie, a medical aide who said her son Zion also missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, was surprised to hear that prep materials existed for a kindergarten test.
“There are books you can buy with sample questions?” she said. “I never knew that.”
Delores Mims, an education director at the Head Start, said, “Our parents are at a disadvantage.”
Bloomingdale, with headquarters at West 109th Street, is a highly regarded Head Start, and Ms. Mims says she has several 4-year-olds who she feels would do well in a gifted kindergarten program.
Founded as a preschool in 1960 even before the federal Head Start program was established, Bloomingdale became a national prototype. To this day, it’s considered a model, and educators worldwide visit it — recently from Iceland, Indonesia and the Netherlands.
An early 4-year-old graduate, Patrick Gaspard, who grew up to become a White House political adviser, thinks so highly of Bloomingdale that he took one of its founders, Susan Feingold, to meet President Obama.
This week, Bloomingdale marks its 50th year by graduating 100 4-year-olds, 98 percent of them black and Hispanic and all poor (to qualify, a family of three must earn less than $18,300).
Not one of the 100 will be attending one of the city’s gifted kindergarten programs in the fall, according to Bloomingdale officials.
In contrast, in 2007, Ms. Mims says, when she was a teacher, she knew of a half-dozen who were accepted. Back then, under a decentralized selection process, teacher assessment, classroom observation and interviews all played a role.
That approach was criticized as vulnerable to political manipulation and racial favoritism, since districts could take into account increasing diversity in making selections.
“The process was fractured and inconsistent, and programs were too often gifted in name only,” the city education chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in an e-mail message.
In 2008, Mr. Klein made the score on a citywide standardized test the sole criteria for admission. Mr. Klein is a leading testing proponent for everything from grading schools to rating teachers, and he predicted that a citywide test would be a more equitable solution.
Since then, there have been two major developments, neither looking much more equitable than the old system. Blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten programs dropped to 27 percent this year under the test-only system, from 46 percent under the old system (66 percent of city kindergartners are black or Hispanic).
And a test-prep industry for 4-year-olds has burgeoned. Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009, and there is so much demand that she says she’s opening a second site this month. She runs a two-month “boot camp” for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.
It’s already half-booked, Ms. Doruk said, “and I haven’t even publicly announced it.”
Last year, of 120 children she prepared for the city test, she says 80 percent scored at least 90. “Prepping makes a difference,” she said. “Prep brings anxiety down; children get used to an adult giving them the test and the format.
“A lot of middle- and upper-middle-class families rely on this,” she added.
After a big drop in enrollment the first year of the test, city officials said that better outreach last year helped them nearly double the number of blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten classes, although the percentage barely changed this year, increasing by 2 percent over 2008-9.
“We are every bit as committed as we have been, if not more so, in trying to find a way that there is proper representation among students,” Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor, said at a City Council meeting last month.
However, the Council said in a June report that despite the yearlong push, “six districts in central Brooklyn and the South Bronx still don’t have enough qualifying kids to open gifted kindergartens next fall.”
Mr. Sternberg said the city would soon request proposals for “a different kind of test” for 2012 “that would be harder to game in the way that so many families do, so as a result to be more likely to result in a level playing field.”
Mr. Klein added, “Our highest priority is to ensure that we continue to have a rigorous citywide test that identifies only those qualities of giftedness in children.”
But other testing experts — including Tonya Moon, a University of Virginia professor and principal investigator for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, and Robert Tobias, a New York University professor who directed assessment for city schools from 1988 to 2001 — say there is no magic test that can’t be gamed. They say tests need to be supplemented with teacher evaluations, classroom observation and interviews.
“No test gives a full picture,” Dr. Moon said. “There’s need for multiple measures.”
While applauding Mr. Klein for creating a citywide standard, Mr. Tobias said the test should be just one part of the evaluation: “Tests are fallible. I don’t know a test in existence that’s not subject to test prep. You will always have results biased toward kids with better opportunity.”
The Klein administration early on tried a form for teachers to evaluate children, but abandoned it as too cumbersome to administer.
Even Ms. Doruk, whose livelihood is test prep, thinks the city is making a mistake relying only on tests. She says she’s seen many bright 4-year-olds turn to jelly on test day. “The city needs to look at the child as more than a test,” she said.
Kellyah Hayes-Bernardez, 8, who was at Bloomingdale Head Start in 2007, when teacher evaluations still played a major role, was selected for the gifted program. Her mother, Eva, a kitchen worker, says Kellyah, now in third grade, has thrived at Public School 145’s gifted program. “It pushes her to her fullest potential,” Kellyah’s mother said. “One day she came home talking about, who’s that artist, Monet?”
Marilyn Barnwell, who has worked 30 years at Bloomingdale, says: “The old system included us. We knew the children; we were in their environment every day. We saw potential and curiosity of learning. Now we’re just scorekeepers for the test.”
Ms. Stewart, who arrives from her supermarket job at 5:45 p.m. to pick up Chase, believes that test prep is a new form of discrimination, “not by race, by social class.”
“Discouraged? Of course. It’s awful, but I don’t give up,” she said. Then she walked Chase to the home of his grandparents, who watch him while she works her night job as an usher at the Broadway show “Memphis.”
Harlem Helps Raise Coffee In Ethiopia
From a 542-square-foot office above a bustling intersection in Harlem, the Rev. Nicholas S. Richards is building what he hopes will be a 7,000-mile bridge to the eastern highlands of Ethiopia.
It is a bridge more than 200 years in the making.
In that modest two-room office off East 125th Street, the Abyssinian Fund, the only nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia formed by an African-American church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, finally has a home.
Mr. Richards, 26, an assistant minister at Abyssinian under the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, is the president of the recently formed Aby Fund, as he calls it, an international aid and development arm of the church. It will soon be joining forces with a co-op of 700 coffee farmers in the ancient Ethiopian city of Harrar, with a mission to improve the quality of the farmers’ lives by helping them improve the quality of their coffee beans.
The Abyssinian Fund will pay for specialized training and equipment to help the co-op’s farmers produce a higher-quality product so they can be more competitive on the international coffee market. Once their income has increased, part of what they make will then be set aside in a fund to support local development projects, like much-needed roads, schools or clinics.
Mr. Richards, members of the fund’s board of directors and congregants of the church said the mission was as much about social aid and economic development as it was about the church’s desire to reach back and reconnect with its spiritual and ancestral homeland.
Well woven into the fabric of Harlem, the Abyssinian Baptist Church has a connection to Ethiopia that goes back to the church’s founding in 1808 by free blacks and Ethiopian merchant seamen who refused to worship where blacks and whites were segregated. (Abyssinia is a historical name for Ethiopia.)
Just a year and a half ago, the Abyssinian Fund was a dream that had sprouted from a simple seed planted after Mr. Butts led a group of congregants to Ethiopia in 2007 to celebrate the church’s 200th anniversary.
The fund was inspired by the group’s reaction to the struggle and resilience of the impoverished Ethiopians they had encountered.
“Ethiopia touches your heart,” said Dori Brunson, a donor and congregant who made the journey. “The villages were so simple, so lacking in the amenities that we are so used to, and at one point I just had to walk away, and I stood there and cried.
“Even though we were born here in America, we are part of that African soil. And because of what Africa has given the world and what they stand for, we must give back.”
So far the organization has raised about $130,000, only slightly more than a third of its year-end goal. Mr. Richards has not yet hired any salaried employees or opened a field office in Harrar. Not a single training session has been held or piece of equipment shipped.
Yet Mr. Richards said there was a sense among supporters and congregants that they had crossed a threshold, having succeeded in formalizing the fund’s status in less than a year to a recognized charity with a nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia and an office in New York.
“To see our plan being transformed from just some pages to actual brick and mortar is amazing,” said Mr. Richards, sitting in the sparsely furnished, seventh-floor office, where Ethiopian art hung on the mustard-colored walls and leftover bottles of water and wine from an opening reception a few days earlier were scattered on uncluttered desktops.
The organization will operate as an independent but affiliated body of the church, much like the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which has helped create housing and prompt commercial development in Harlem, including a supermarket, schools and homeless shelters.
Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, and the green beans the farmers grow there are prized on the multibillion-dollar international coffee market.
Coffee is the second most-traded commodity in the world, after oil, yet these farmers earn an average of $1 a day, less than $400 a year, according to aid organizations.
There has been no shortage of aid money pumped into Ethiopia from international organizations and other nations, including the United States, which, according to the State Department, gave $4.7 billion in assistance from 1999 to 2009. But Mr. Richards said the Abyssinian Fund would not function as a traditional charity, as the farmers would share the responsibility for the project’s success.
“We are going to try to the best of our ability to provide the highest level of training and the most necessary equipment that the farmers need,” he said. “But it will be the farmers’ responsibility to reinvest. Reinvestment is going to be critical.”
Instead of providing financial aid or food to the farmers, the Abyssinian Fund will hire coffee experts who are specialists in the processing and quality standards of companies like Starbucks that are the chief buyers of Ethiopia’s beans. Substandard processing has vexed the farmers’ efforts to command higher prices.
The trainers will also teach planting and harvesting techniques that help farmers grow and select only the choicest coffee beans, and the fund will provide equipment like scissors, shears and mechanized pickers to ensure that the beans are properly harvested. Many of these farmers still harvest their crops with their bare hands, Mr. Richards said.
Mr. Richards said the goal was for the farmers to double their income in five years. Helping to improve the livelihoods of the 700 farmers in the co-op, he said, could result in better conditions for as many as 3,000 people.
The fund has had to tread delicately in Ethiopia, where the government has been skeptical of the motives of some foreign aid groups.
Ethiopia is one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world, and has come under the scrutiny by human rights groups, the American government and the World Bank for what has been described as a leaky aid system, with accusations of governmental manipulation of food aid to reward political allies.
Reta Alemu Nega, a minister counselor with the Ethiopian Consulate in Manhattan, said the criticisms were the work of political enemies of the state. Nongovernmental organizations operating in Ethiopia “are not always what they present themselves to be,” he said.
But Mr. Nega said the Ethiopian government supported the work of the Abyssinian Fund. “We know the Abyssinian Church,” he said. “We know who they are.”
Mr. Richards said he had to assure the Ethiopian government that the fund would not operate in a political capacity or meddle in local politics. If so, he said he was told, the organization would be kicked out of the country.
“There’s very little concern for us about corruption because we have a direct relationship to the farming community that we are working with,” Mr. Richards said. “We know the farmers. I’ve visited the farmers. I’ve talked to them, and I’ve talked to their leaders. We don’t provide any cash. And that’s a huge way that we mitigate our exposure to corruption, because there is no cash that is being provided.”
So far, most of the money raised has come from Harlem, with donations ranging from $25 a week to one for $10,000. Other money has come from an art sale and gala featuring work by Ethiopian artists.
“Most of the people doing development work in Africa are not of African descent,” Mr. Richards said. “To have a group of African-Americans concerned about a particular nation in Africa, and doing something about it, is tremendous. This is black folk helping black folk, and it is tremendous to me.”
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Date: 2010-07-29 05:17 am (UTC)But what we want is to figure out which kids have innate potential, and then help them to realize that. At least, I think that's what we want.
It's a tricky question. Because take a child who is a little less smart but has a very supportive environment (we're going to ignore downsides to having parents who are pushing you when you're four for the moment). That child may well be able to handle harder classes than a child who goes home and has to do chores and doesn't have much time for homework and can't get any help with it. That's not fair, but since we're not about to balance out all of the inequalities, I think our goal should instead be to maximize each child's potential.
As such, I think the real problem is there seems to be a need for more gifted classes than there are. Those kids who aren't making it apparently would have made it in previous years. They're just being pushed out because more kids with less innate ability are reaching higher. ~That's not a bad thing.~ What's bad is that they're pushing out other kids (and that it is also increasing socioeconomic disadvantages). But it seems the ideal solution is to make more gifted programs and make a minimum standard that a child must meet to get in. If we end up with a nation of more kids who are gifted by older standards and we simply end up with better educated children... well, I could live with that.
I don't want to tell parents to stop being involved with their kids' educations (although I would prefer a less grades/tests oriented approach personally and a less stressful one too). I'd just like to see there be less need for parents to push things to these extremes just to get their kids a good education. Good educations for all the kids who can benefit from them, that's what I want.