carli – that is good to hear about DMUSD expanding their GATE program. That’s the opposite trend of San Diego schools. They still have a GATE program – but funds are being cut and Seminar classes are increasing in size next year.
I’ve compared notes with coworkers about the GATE programs in PUSD, SDUSD, and DMUSD. The are a couple of differences. I know the most about SDUSD because I live in San Diego and my kids go to public school in San Diego.
Poway and San Diego districts do Gate testing in the 2nd grade. In fact my younger son is being tested tomorrow. From what I’ve heard from CV coworkers the testing isn’t till 5th grade in that district.
San Diego has GATE – which is for kids in the top 2%. And it has Seminar – which is for kids in the top 0.3% or something like that.
Seminar classes are homogeneous and smaller class size. GATE classes tend to follow the cluster model – at least 1/3 of the students in the class are identified GATE – and in theory – the teacher offers differentiation so that the GATE kids can work ahead of grade level, or delve deeper into a subject. Some of the elementary school were offering homogeneous classes for GATE, but the district has moved away from that. Doyle was doing this until recently.
There can be pretty different approaches to seminar programs. Some emphasize the Socratic method, others may do tiered lessons. (Spreckels Elem. is big on Socratic method, Hawthorne is more about using tiered lessons to allow differentiation.) So the seminar programs should be looked at to see which school is a good fit – if your child tests in.
SDUSD also allows a retest in 5th grade for kids who either didn’t test GATE, or tested GATE and want to be tested for Seminar. To qualify for the retest the first test has to have had a score of 85% or better. (98% is the minimum for GATE) and they have to have scored Advanced on 5 CSTs.
