Seattle Schools Study

I was shocked today to read a supposedly scholarly report on Seattle's "APP" program. Although the senior author, Carolyn Callahan, is well known to people I respect, the report is unscientific and full of ad hominem attacks .
APP is important to me because our kids graduated from this program. APP serves the needs of kids at the extreme end of academic ability. Kids like these often fail ihn life due to boredom in school.

APP is thirty years old and was built on a simple idea proposed by Hal and Nancy Robinson of the UW. Their idea .. reward kids for progress by giving them new challenges continually. This continuous progress model could be used for all kids but in Seattle the idea was to use it to deal with kids at the highest test levels, kids who typically perform two or more grades above the norm.

Instead of an evaluation, Dr. Callahan has collected pages of gossip and innuendo. Instead of statics, she bases her recommendations on anecdotes and often unsupported and ad hoc comments:

some quotes:

She sees racism based on:

"A small number of principals view the program as “promoting institutional racism.” Others view the program as responsible for “taking away our top kids” and leaving their buildings with poorer reputations than would be the case if the students remained in their neighborhood schools."

She described elitism because:

"some of the claims are patronizing of and condescending toward other groups (e.g., “the gifted students can take care of and look out for the kids in the special education program”)."

Instead of an examination of test scores or curricular content, she says:

" While the work at Lowell may be more challenging than students’ previous schools, the students did not agree that it was challenging enough. In a group of elementary students, only one student indicated that the curriculum was challenging more than 50% of the time and that they were learning something new more than 50% of the time. One second grade student remarked that the instructional pace at Lowell was rushed, and that teachers moved through topics quicker than she wished, and thus their learning lacked sufficient depth and breadth. The high school students described different classes and different teachers as providing varying levels of challenge. For example, one high school science class was described as “a joke.”

Even specific examples seem ... unconvincing:

"Classroom projects appear to be enriching but do not reach the level of rigor appropriate for this type of setting. For example, a second grade student
described a Mystery Book Bag Project where the students were asked to put objects into a brown shopping bag that showed facts about a book they read."
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I could go on and on the critical points are these

1. Criticisms are based on anecdotal comments. sometimes by "some" students or an anonymous group of dissident parents. In some places these charges border on slander. In one place the authors charge some parents with working the system by hiring people to produce favorable test scores.

2. The program is criticized by comparison with an unstated current consensus on how gifted children "should be taught." No specifics are offered.

3. NO STATISTICS ARE OFFERED. In one place the authors incorrectly recommend the use of a "standard error of the mean" to describe a range of test results. The correct term here would be standard deviation.

4. In a program in existence since 1978, no attempt was made to determine if the program's students are successful. No graduated students were interviewed and no data are offered on such easily obtained vlaues as college admissions, higher degrees, etc.

5. On many specific points, the authors have their facts wrong E.g. they seem unaware that APP is not a high school program or that several Seattle Schools have competitive music programs
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I am bewildered. The main author is supposedly very competent. Did her assistants write this Did she read it? Is this what passes for scholarship in education?Worse, is the SPS going to harm a very succesful program?