Parents in Seattle have been pushing for years for the school district to adopt universal screening to identify students for the highly capable program. Now, Seattle Public Schools said it plans to administer a 30-minute test to more than 4,400 second-graders later this month.
It’s something that’s already been adopted by other school districts, including Tacoma and Northshore.
The ultimate aim is to make the student population of the highly capable program more racially representative of the district as a whole. White students have long been overrepresented in Seattle’s highly capable cohort. Last fall, district officials proposed a long-term plan to largely eliminate separate classes for students in the cohort, but a school board committee blocked a policy change that would have enabled that to happen. District leaders have said they aim to propose it again. They’re ending other honors classes in middle school this fall.
Many parents with students in the highly capable cohort have urged the district to change its identification processes so that students whose families lack knowledge of how to navigate the testing process can get into the program.
Ji-Young Um is a parent who served on the school district's Advanced Learning Task Force. She said the task force recommended that all students be screened unless their parents opt them out, so she described this as a positive step.
“I’m very happy to see it happen, even though I do recognize that it’s not a magic wand,” Um said. “I don’t necessarily believe that just doing the universal screening is going to suddenly make HC completely racially equitable, accessible, all of these things.”
In fact, in spite of the Tacoma school district’s efforts to remove barriers and adopt universal screening, its highly capable program is still disproportionately white. In the 2018-19 school year, 63 percent of students in the highly capable program were white compared with 38 percent for the student population overall.
Seattle’s Advanced Learning Task Force worked for more than a year on ways to make the district’s highly capable program more diverse. Some of its recommendations included creating committees of teachers and other school staff to have more say in identifying underrepresented students for advanced learning services.
And the task force recommended that the district and schools use what's known as “local norms.” That’s where students' test scores are compared with other students from similar backgrounds and the students who score the highest could then qualify for highly capable services.
In recent years, Seattle Public Schools has been screening all second-graders in some schools, ones that qualify for federal funding known as Title 1, because they have higher levels of poverty and schools with a high percentage of students of color. But parents have said that meant the district was overlooking some students in other schools whose parents may not know how to navigate the testing process.
Deenie Berry, Seattle Public Schools supervisor of highly capable services and the advanced learning program, said the district will use what’s called the Naglieri Nonverbal Assessment, which is a measure of “reasoning and general problem-solving abilities” that focuses on pictures, puzzles and patterns. It will be administered by pencil and paper.
“The Advanced Learning department has chosen this tool because it is reported to have less cultural bias,” Berry said in the statement. “Our goal in universal screening is to increase access for students who are furthest from educational justice.”
The cost of universal screening materials and scoring services this year will be $66,000, she said. Last year, the cost for universal screening in Title 1 schools was about $45,000.
She said the test will be given to all second-graders, even students who have already tested into the highly capable cohort, but the test results will not jeopardize their status in the program.
Families of students who score highly on the screening assessment and who also perform well on reading and math assessments will then be sent a letter encouraging them to refer their child for the highly capable testing process in the fall, in which students take a cognitive abilities test on a Saturday.
Berry said that the district will communicate with families about the second-grade screening process in the next few weeks.
