Dear Carol, Bill, Ruth, Shwaw, Juan, Bill, Ray and Johnny:

My pro-TAG "please do not cut" statement this year is short and sweet.  It consists primarily of an invitation to visit the website that Jeff and I have put together -- www.tagparents.org. My hope is that by spending time at the website, you will come to appreciate the necessity of protecting the TAG dollars from further decrease.

That said, I'd like to draw your attention to something we've included on the website -- the District's own dropout/nonattendance data for 1995 through 1999 (MMSD Research and Evaluation report, May, 2000).  Here is the relevant section:

When the District analyzed dropout data for this five year period, they identified four student profiles.  One of these groups -- Group 1 -- it could be argued, might have benefited from more appropriately challenging learning opportunities, opportunities that might have kept them engaged in school and enabled them to graduate.  Note well the demographic characteristics of Group 1.

Group 1: High Achiever, Short Tenure, Behaved

This group comprises 27% of all dropouts during this five-year period.

Characteristics of this group:
    ?    Grade 5 math scores 84.2 percentile
    ?    Male 55%
    ?    Low income 53%
    ?    Minority 42%
        ?    African American 31%
        ?    Hispanic 6%
        ?    Asian 5%

Put in words, more than one-quarter of the District's dropouts during the second half of the 1990's had exhibited high academic achievement early in their school careers.  In addition, over half of this group of early achieving dropouts were poor, more than two-fifths were minority students, and almost one-third were African American.

Point:  The only way to insure that poor and minority students of high academic ability are not "lost" is to work at finding them in the first place, and then to follow them throughout their school careers -- i.e., to have in place a broad-based system of early and ongoing identification (one that does not require parental advocacy).

Point:  The only way to insure that all students of high academic potential have equal access to adequately challenging learning opportunities is to have enough of these appropriately rigorous learning opportunities, in all of the District's schools and at all grade levels.

To the extent that you decrease the TAG budget, you are hurting all academically talented students in the District.  That goes without saying.  But these data suggest that as you cut the TAG budget and the TAG program, you may be causing particular damage to those academically talented students who come from less advantaged backgrounds.  These students are less likely to have parents who can successfully advocate for them so that they, too, can benefit from the ever shrinking pool of "next level challenge" learning opportunities available in our schools.  These students are also less likely to have parents who can provide them with opportunities for advanced learning outside of school, not to mention transfer them to private school when their learning needs are not met in the public system.

A case in point: West High School
 
Because of the curricular changes currently being discussed at West High School -- changes which threaten the historically broad range of challenging courses West has offered for its high end learners -- I'd like to draw your attention to a further breakdown of these data, from the same District report:

School  Group I dropouts (expressed as the % of total dropouts for that school)
East                    25.9
LaFollette              23.8
Memorial                23.4
West                    32.4

Put in words, between 1995 and 1999, West had a significantly higher percentage of dropouts who exhibited high academic achievement early in their school careers than any of the District's other three high schools, each of which had about the same percentage of Group I dropouts.  There is no reason to assume that the demographic characteristics of West's Group I dropouts are any different from those of the District-wide group of Group 1 dropouts -- i.e., it is likely that many of the West Group 1 dropouts were either minority students or from low income families.

This suggests that as West contemplates getting rid of ever more "high end" courses (the trend has already begun in the West math department and is threatening to occur throughout the curriculum, arguably as a result of the Small Learning Communities initiative), they may be moving in the wrong direction (assuming their goal is to maximize minority achievement, as opposed to simply minimizing minority failure).  As 10 of West's 18 math teachers put it in a recent (April 2) letter to the Isthmus:

"It seems the administration and our school board have redefined 'success' as merely producing 'fewer failures.'  Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst.  But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way.  Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity!  Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?"  (bold my own)

A recent example: Why did we parents have to put up a fight in order to get West to continue offering even a single section (roughly 25 students) of accelerated ninth grade biology next year?  If 103 students self-selected to take the required admissions test in the past two weeks (even more did last year, I understand), doesn't that suggest that another section or two are needed in order to meet the level of need and interest?   If over 100 students are interested in having greater challenge in freshman biology, why restrict that learning opportunity to the top 20-25 scorers on an admissions test?  Why not expand the availability of accelerated biology in order to accommodate all who are interested?

In closing, the two most popular myths about "TAG" students is that they are all rich, white kids and that no matter what they experience in school, "they will do just fine."  I hope that as you consider the above data and peruse the tagparents website, you will come to understand just how untrue those statements are.  Students at any point along the performance continuum disengage when they feel misunderstood, unappreciated, and poorly taken care of by their schools.  In this regard, "high end" students are no different from any others.

Sincerely,
Laurie Frost