Was putting my Child of Color into this program supporting an atrociously inequitable system for my own individual child’s benefit? ‘You Have to Do What’s Best For Your Child’ That’s exactly the question I needed to answer for myself, and it required interrogating my own potential complicity as an Asian American who benefits from proximity to whiteness. So why would any parent still want to put their Child of Color in this program?! They’ve regained funding recently however, this modern-day, small-scale example shows the monstrosity of how devastating the impact of whiteness can be and the way it so brutally continues to colonize BIPOC spaces.
Thurgood Marshall Elementary is a global-majority school that actually lost over $200,000 in Title 1 funding to support low-income Black/Brown students in its general education program a few years ago because of the influx of white students into an HCC program SPS relocated there.
That is, you can tell which is an advanced classroom (white, Asian, and biracial white/Asian students) and which is general education (Black, Latinx, Indigenous) based on the racial demographics of its students. At some schools you can walk down the hallway and peer into racially identifiable classrooms. Within HCC, this second wave effort in maintaining school desegregation has resulted in integrated buildings but segregated classrooms.
However, if you look at the resulting racial demographics from any of these programs, you clearly see who they catered to - white students. Gifted education, along with programs and services like Mandarin-immersion, performing arts schools, and magnet schools were all created to entice white families to stay in the city by promising benefits to white children, thereby preventing white flight into the suburbs, while using coded language to describe it. These gifted education programs were designed with specific practices to identify students deemed extraordinarily brilliant compared to their grade-level peers. In Washington, HCC is Seattle’s version of “gifted education.” In other states, “gifted education” has been called GATE, TAG, or G/T education. At almost 40 years old, I’m still trying to internally dismantle the ways achieving has been tied to my self-worth. Nationwide, the debate about programs like HCC has been under intense criticism, especially in the last couple years, for the exact reasons Savage and the NAACP Youth Council have so clearly outlined in their writing.Īs a former student of this same national program, portions of Savage’s text like, “When I look around the classroom and see that I’m the only student of color there, it’s common for me to not try as hard because the possibility of succeeding seems slim,” reminded me of what it was like to be the only student of color in my “seminar” classes. Savage goes into great detail to break down their personal experiences from elementary through high school in HCC, interspersing their narrative with quotes from other SPS students of color. In 2019 former Garfield High School student Azure Savage, in their book, You Failed Us: Students of Color Talk Seattle Schools, called out the Seattle Public School District (SPS) for its racist practices, including preferential treatment by teachers, racially segregated classrooms, and discipline practices disproportionately applied based on race. This feels unsettling considering that a week prior an article by Seattle’s NAACP Youth Council came out demanding dismantling of the program citing it as racist, segregated, and grossly inequitable. Pulido explores Seattle Public School District’s programs for children designated as gifted.Īs of May 10, 2021, my 8-year-old daughter became eligible for the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC).
In this first of a three-part series, Jasmine M.
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