The "gifted" system in US schools is broken, racist, and completely fixable

[Nevernose]

26. In the 80s, it was LITERALLY an excuse to segregate

My friend Brian moved in two doors down from my dad's house. He was black, but I didn't really care because we were nine. His mom, who had moved the family from Chicago because of the good jobs in that particular region of the South, did not know that the schools were still segregated. Because it was the 1980s.

The school board redrew the boundaries of attendance zones so that, while our street had previously been divided straight through the middle of the roadt, there was now a slight bulge switching Brian to the "black school."

Totally unrelated, and maybe miraculously, just a few weeks later a federal court issued a ruling for "us" to desegregate the school district.

Did I mention this was 1984? Thirty years after Brown v Board?

So the way they "desegregated" us was to send the all-white "gifted" kids to the black school, one day a week. It was every Tuesday. Now, granted, the black school had been completely rebuilt from the ground up (in as cheap a manner as possible, like a series of interconnecting trailers, but at least it was new). Why Tuesday? Because that's the day the court observers came by and checked to make sure that the schools were desegregated. They'd point through the windows, say, "Look! White kids!" and continue on about their business.

What the court people didn't know was that the "gifted" kids (i.e. white and smart, and with parents willing to advocate if they weren't particularly bright, like the public school version of those weirdos in New York who make sure their kids go to elite preschools) had our own special bus to get to school. And a separate entrance, so as not to be exposed to "them." And a separate lunch room. And a separate section of the building, and bathrooms, and playground.

Brian and I didn't really understand what was happening at the time, but in a couple of years we figured it out. Fortunately, his mom had also signed him up for the "wrong" Little League team; he got put on the worst team possible. It was him, me and the other horribly nonathletic kids, the asthmatics, the "special" kids. I'm sure you get the idea. Brian played pitcher; they underestimated the team full of screw ups; it was all very Bad News Bears. We won big time. To this very day I look at that trophy and take hope in the underdog.

(Fifteen years after that, in a major public school district, my aunt taught gifted and talented students. They stuck her and the kids in a broom closet for four years straight because the principal didn't believe in gifted students. "They're all gifted" she said, probably because that was the popular contemporaneous saying. It never occurred to her that kids could be special ed in the other direction. And when I say broom closet, I mean it literally: the custodian came to her classroom for his brooms and mops)