Letter: Don’t racially engineer CCS

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Editor,

At trial this week, Asian-American plaintiffs described Harvard’s so-called “holistic” admissions process as a pretense to permit Harvard its preferred racial composition by consistently rating Asians lower than any other race on subjective qualifiers like personality, likability, courage, and kindness. Consequently, the same test scores and GPA that afforded an Asian applicant a mere 25 percent Harvard admission chance provided a virtual admission guarantee – 95 percent – for a black applicant.

Mimicking Harvard’s racial bean counting philosophy, at a March 12 meeting Carmel Clay Schools’ curriculum director, utilizing pie charts dividing students by race, proclaimed that there are too many Asians, and whites, in CCS’ purportedly overpopulated Gifted/Talented (“GT”) classes. This untenable outcome justified CCS’ planned replacement of the existing GT program with a race-oriented TSCG program (which disturbingly describes children as “subjects” in an “experiment”) that requires removing gifted children from their special classrooms and spreading them among classes with average and lower average achieving peers. TSCG prohibits grouping gifted with high achieving peers.

TSCG’s first goal as stated on the Purdue College of Education Gifted Education Resource Institute is “to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups … identified as gifted.” TSCG’s manual emphasizes that underidentification of “certain” minority groups is not acceptable; however, it is easily dealt with as “no limits” are placed on how many children can be identified as gifted, and if the desired demographic result does not materialize, school personnel are directed to “intervene.”

Predictably, the subjective approach that Harvard used to punish Asians would similarly be used at CCS to penalize Asians, and whites, to achieve CCS’ stated racial composition goals, by recognizing proportionally fewer Asians and whites, relative to other groups, of gifted ability, and/or CCS will otherwise dilute existing achievement standards to achieve race goals. Perhaps, like Harvard, if CCS implements TSCG, CCS will also ultimately suffer a DOJ investigation or class action in resistance.

It shouldn’t come to that. CCS should support our children’s development based upon the common-sense measure of where the child is developmentally at the time of evaluation, without regard to race and should ultimately reject TSCG.

Scott Dillon, Carmel


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