The horror of being "average"

I wanted to write a longer piece about education, schools, and privilege, something that would piggyback off a brief post  I wrote last week about being labeled as a "smart kid," but as a single person with no children of my own, I don't really have a dog in this fight.  Then I read this. And I read it again, just to make sure.

Tashi’s teacher told me to get her tested again with an outside consultant, so I called my sister-in-law Lisa, who has three gifted daughters. Lisa said, “You tested her through the school system. Are you that stupid?” She told me no one gets in that way. She said, “The smartest way to get Tashi into gifted is to pay an outside consultant $300.”

Call me naive, but if you have to pay $300 for a consultant to tutor your child into the gifted program, doesn't that make the idea of "gifted and talented" kind of meaningless?  Not to mention the injustice of a system that bestows the label of "gifted" to only those who can afford it.

It's been over two decades since I've been in school. My grade school didn't have a "gifted and talented" program. The only way you could get into an "accelerated" class was to move up to the next grade, and they didn't do that too often. I only knew one kid who skipped a full grade, and I and three other kids were moved from a third grade math class to a fourth/fifth grade one, but overall we were taught that you weren't any better than the kid in the next seat. My high school loved tracking, so much that instead of the standard three ability levels we had six. I was in what I guess could be called "second honors" or "upper average." (We called ourselves the dumb smart kids.) There were major problems with the tracking system. It was largely dependent on recommendations from your grade school teachers, and in an already competitive school, it was a huge part of a student's identity. It was also pretty subjective. I didn't fit their gifted template: my parents weren't professionals, I had an ethnic last name, and I lived in "bad" zip code. I transferred to another school my sophomore year, one with a traditional "one, two, three" system, and was a "one." As far as I can tell, I didn't gain any IQ points from one semester to the next, but someone thought I was a "one," so that's what I was.

Not that return to tracking is the answer (though some people think it is ), but it's frustrating to read stories about parents doing everything they can just to make sure their child is not, god forbid, average, particularly when the system that grants kids "gifted" status is a classist one.