EXCLUSIVE: The VSB Says They're Revisioning the MACC Program. Alumni and Parent Critics Say They're Destroying It.
From Arnold C, Wikimedia Commons.
UPDATED 1:07 PM SUNDAY, JAN 30 2022: ADDED CONTEXT RE AP COURSES AND IB PROGRAMS.
The Vancouver School Board says it's planning a "revisioning" of the Multi-Age Cluster Classes (MACC) program under the theme of equity, but alumni and parent advocates say they're tearing the program apart.
The school board's plans to move the multi-year program to a six-week topic-focused module-based system renamed "Gifted Enrichment Centres", or GECs, has upset many across the District. The VSB has made continual efforts to make District 39 more equitable and inclusive and says that revising MACC is part of that process.
District officials say their revisioning is guided by research and the 2016 curriculum, but the Vancouver school community is standing firmly and publicly at odds with their proposal and says they aren't being heard and consultation is failing. A petition to "save MACC" now stands at 400 signatures on Change.org.
The VSB describes MACC as academic enrichment and social-emotional support for grade 4-7 students through a conceptually advanced curriculum. MACC students, who enter after applying and successfully undergoing a psychoeducational assessment, leave their catchment schools to attend the program.
MACC allows for students to attend the program for anywhere between two to four years, starting in Grades 4 to 6 until moving to secondary school at the end of Grade 7.
The four MACC classes across the district have a combined total of 80 spaces, 20 per class. A VSB information page says 73 students applied and met the enrolment criteria for the program in the 2021-2022 school year. There is no waitlist.
The VSB's changes would alter the program's model so that students would attend subject-focused six-week modules, expanding MACC's capacity to 720 available spaces per year. Students would be allowed to attend multiple modules and revisit the program. Four and eight week programs are also a possibility.
Among the other changes include a redistributed location placement making all programs within 1.4km of all district addresses, and a move towards teacher and student-self identification of gifted learners.
“MACC gave me a place where I could fit in socially, where it was okay to be weird or nerdy. It gave me a space to share my ideas with no shame,” Aija Tso, a MACC alumnus and current 10th Grade student at Templeton, told Trustees in a January 24 special board meeting.
Tso was joined by Fraser Hannay, a current Grade 12 student from Churchill, who shared similar sentiments. "I hugely benefited from my time in MACC. The autonomy the program provides really allowed me to rise above and beyond in a way that I was never able to do in the mainstream."
Both Tso and Hannay, along with other students, were critical of the District's plans to replace MACC's multi-year design with a six-week model, and said it undermined the core purposes of the program.
MACC's current model was introduced in 1988, but the VSB says that now nearly three and a half-decade old design needs to be redesigned to reflect the educational developments of the present. They cite a host of peer-reviewed research and the 2016 curriculum in their plans to overhaul the program, anchored to five equity principles: equity of location, access, development, service, and admission.
"The current MACC model was introduced more than 30 years ago, and although it was forward-thinking at the time, recent international peer-reviewed research shows learners with a gifted designation thrive in a regular classroom setting where learning is tailored to meet the needs of everyone in class,” says a VSB webpage.
"As the needs of learners are ever-changing, the District places a strong emphasis on program offerings that are dynamic and responsive to this growth and development."
The VSB retained Spur Communications in their MACC consultation campaign and had the firm produce an eight-page pre-consultation report, outlining the District's consultation process in the program's overhaul.
In December, the VSB held two pre-engagement workshops with stakeholders, as well as with current MACC students and teachers to address the proposed changes to the program. The District said it is committed to seeking input from and working with the community, and is specifically interested in input regarding "what subjects should be taught, how they should be taught, as well as how long each subject should be taught."
When the District asked participants what they liked about MACC, many shared that they specifically valued the longevity of the program.
"Participants appreciate the long-term nature of MACC" the Spur report read. "Many participants spoke to the strength of the long-term structure of MACC and expressed a desire to maintain this approach."
But notwithstanding participants' wishes, maintaining that approach isn't part of the VSB's plans. The District says their research findings suggest a shorter program is supported.
"Research identifies a duration of six weeks as an ideal length for enrichment programming," Liz Hayes-Brown, District Principal, Learning Support said in a video posted to YouTube on January 21.
When it was first reported the VSB planned to alter the program back in July 2021, experts told The Globe and Mail that they agree with the board's approach in making enriched and gifted programs more inclusive and racially and socio-economically equitable, but expressed skepticism over the soundness of the pedagogy around the six-week model and educational outcomes.
Dr. Joan Pinkus (Ph.D.), a veteran Vancouver psychologist with a private practice specializing in assessing gifted children, told The Nest she finds the proposed changes "very concerning,” and also questioned the depth of research into the six-week model.
"I doubt that there is any research that shows that six weeks is better than a year of being offered challenge and enriched programs if the outcomes are meant to be educational,” she said.
Pinkus also shared that she views the VSB's MACC proposal as "a political decision based on current social mores with a claim that it is research-based.”
In the January 21 video, the District categorized programming length as an "equity of access" issue and cites three documents — two scholarly articles and one study — under that umbrella.
The Nest read through all three items but was unable to find any such recommended or ideal length for gifted or enriched programming, or for that matter any reference to the length of time those programs should span. All three papers generally pertain to the identification of gifted learners, their personalities, and how that intersects with methods of instruction and ethics, but do not mention a recommended programming length.
After asking the VSB where within their listed literature the six-week recommendation lay, communications staff sent a study, one that was not listed, conducted in 2012 by Egyptian researchers examining gifted education in Saudi Arabia.
In an email, the District told The Nest that study's findings support the efficacy of the 6-week model, especially regarding the development of practical learning abilities, but after The Nest read through the paper, it actually supports precisely the opposite.
VSB Communications said, "District staff are mindful of [the Egyptian study's] findings and recommendations and are incorporating the key learnings of [it] into the new GEC model, specifically the findings around practical application of new learning."
Participants in the Egyptian study were selected based on two criteria, one of which was an abilities test (not the same as the psychoeducational assessment required for MACC students), designed for a Saudi school system. The study did not comment on the gender of participants, a relevant observation only because Saudi Arabia maintains gender-based segregation in schools, and only allowed female teachers to instruct boys as recently as 2019.
The study examined 42 students in an experimental 6-week program designed to measure three psychoeducational domains: analytical, creative, and practical abilities. The study found that upon completion, program students advanced their creative and analytical skills, but the enrichment had "no significant effect on practical abilities".
The study said "practical intelligence represents the ability to use knowledge gained from experience to successfully modify the environment (Sternberg et al., 2011), which means developing skills needed to foster this intelligence requires time and real-life challenges (Sternberg, 2010; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2007). The structure and length of the enrichment program in this study did not successfully support this process."
Researchers also wrote that in the design of enrichment programs, which parents and experts say are different from MACC, which is a gifted program, it is not sufficient for students' educational or social-emotional development to promote social, personal, analytical, and creative abilities without considering a robust way to practically apply those abilities in a real-life scenario.
The study concluded with finding “developing students’ abilities to manage their analytical, creative, and practical skills effectively takes a relatively long time. Therefore, to accommodate this process, enrichment programs should not be envisioned as a one-off program.”
The VSB said the Egyptian study supports the switch to a shorter duration, particularly in regards to the development of practical abilities within a six-week timespan. The study specifically and repeatedly emphasizes the exact opposite of that.
As of publication, the VSB has yet to produce any evidence substantiating their statement that the proposed six-week duration for gifted learners is "recommended" or identified as ideal by research. Currently, that is an unverified claim and has failed fact-checking tests. All provided research is either irrelevant to the claim or directly contradictory to it. It is misinformation.
VSB Communications mentioned that "it should also be noted that this 6-week recommendation is a very small piece of the larger conversation around best practices for the inclusion of all learners." But the six-week "recommendation", which based on The Nest's review, does not exist, appears to be the single most contentious issue shared by alumni, parents, and experts.
“I have read about your new program idea and have taken the online survey, and frankly I’m not able to see how your seminar could be comparable to MACC,” Tso told trustees at the board meeting. “MACC is not paralleled in any way to the short-term seminars you call ‘a revisioning.’"
"I can confidently say that going back to grade four, if I was offered to participate in one of these six-week enrichment pull-up programs, I wouldn’t have done it. That sounds stressful, socially isolating, and those sorts of short-term solutions do not lead to long-term skill-building in kids,” Hannay said.
Sophia Chung, a Grade 6 student currently attending the French immersion MACC program, said in the meeting that she had attended a pre-consultation in December, but expressed disappointment in the session after she alleged the agenda was changed at the last minute, and that she was "not able to advocate for the program."
"Instead," Chung said, "we were asked about what we wanted to see in the new enrichment centre. I felt very disrespected and defeated as I wasn’t able to voice my opinions and when I asked questions they were never answered."
Another delegation, featuring current MACC parents Jessica Wang and Dr. Christiane Hoppmann (Ph.D.), said the VSB's revisioning of the program is more accurately described as a cancellation.
"MACC has changed our children's lives," Wang said. "MACC is not an enrichment centred- program. It is for Grade 4-7 students who are neurodiverse and highly able learners."
"Why not keep MACC for special needs gifted learners, and pilot the new enrichment centres for all learners?" Wang asked the board.
Wang also took issue with the school board's portrayal of equity in MACC's revisioning. "No one would say that a program for students with autism or dyslexia is not equitable because it isn't open to everyone. Cancelling MACC sets up a bigger inequity for these students."
Hoppmann, a professor of health psychology at UBC, said that many gifted learners also have significant social and emotional vulnerabilities, such as anxiety and exclusion from their peers. "MACC gives them a home, to, in a safe environment, be who they are, supported in their own needs so that they can build the self-confidence and autonomy at a very crucial developer stage so that they can be launched into the regular high school stream."
Hoppmann said that her daughter also attended a pre-consultation session, and although it was framed as reshaping the future of MACC, at the event, her daughter was told the current MACC program would end and that consultation moderators were instead interested in hearing what subjects would interest future revisioned-program students.
"My daughter tried to explain that the MACC isn't about content topics, that the MACC is about providing an environment and relationships so that kids can learn" Hoppmann stated.
She shared that her daughter also told moderators that "she is always different, and she cannot shut that off outside of the six weeks she would be getting" in a revisioned MACC.
Owen Menning, MACC alum and Grade 12 student currently attending Hamber, told The Nest he appreciates the VSB wanting to expand MACC's capacity, but questioned why they simply don't invest in more facilities.
"If they want more students, just add more classes," Menning asserted. "I loved my years in the MACC, and I think that a 6-week period, even if you can revisit, isn't enough. There's something about the bond you create with the teacher and your specific group of classmates that's unmatched.”
Decisions regarding enriched or gifted education programs may ring bells of the VSB's June 2021 move to cut honours classes, leading some to criticize the District for removing opportunity. But to that, however, the VSB offers a proactive response, found in the second FAQ answer posted on their MACC-specific webpage:
"The shift in today’s education focuses on concepts instead of content, on how to learn rather than what is learned, and, on developing critical thinking skills in place of memorization. There is a fundamental shift to make education more inclusive as part of the redesigned curriculum, as such, honours classes were phased out because the same learning opportunities are embedded in the revised curriculum."
The District's answer goes on to say that "students of the academic aptitude" are still afforded many opportunities to explore their interests, pointing to mini schools, the international baccalaureate program, and advanced placement courses, and assures families that teachers can provide "differentiated and enriched instruction to support all levels of learners, including those highly able."
Many have pointed out that advanced placement course and international baccalaureate programs are only available at select schools, and therefore not as easily available as officials suggest.
The District also suggested families enrol their children in higher grade levels to quench intellectual thirsts. And while the school board's proactive response offers an answer to academic concerns, it remains silent on the other half of MACC's dual purpose: social-emotional support.
Jody Polukoshko, Vice President with the Vancouver Elementary Schools Teachers' Association (VESTA), told The Nest that teachers are able and committed to serving MACC-eligible students and families with differentiated levels of instruction, but additional support would be helpful to all parties.
Polukoshko said VESTA "has a policy that gifted and enrichment education services be expanded to include all students including at the primary level, that gifted education be supported and equitably available across the district, and that support for classroom teachers be increased to develop and adapt practice for students with advanced learning needs."
The elementary teachers union also has a long-standing position that supports for educational programming for diverse learners and should be increased, as well as access to them. "In our view, the funding provided for specialized programs for exceptional learners, students with disabilities, and students who need additional learning or emotional support is insufficient across the province. For too long, districts have been topping up the shortfalls in provincial funding and this is both unacceptable and unnecessary. We wonder why funding decisions always have to be either/or instead of the full provision of a wide array of learning opportunities that embrace students' diverse needs," Polukoshko explained.
"As an intermediate teacher, I believe that all students with diverse abilities and needs contribute to the creation of a vibrant classroom where difference is welcomed and encouraged, and where learning opportunities provide choices for students,” she said.
The District has set up what appears to be an extensive stakeholder engagement operation — complete with several custom informational widgets, YouTube videos, an active Instagram engagement-promotion campaign, and a separate, dedicated site for alumni and public feedback. That being said, stakeholders have consistently said they feel ignored and unheard in what appears to be a predetermined decision.
It is difficult to estimate the cost of these initiatives, but financial records show the VSB has paid over $300,000 to Spur Communications for previous public engagement operations since September 2019, totalling roughly $150,000 per school year. Spur’s website advertises that they were retained for the school board's Building for Modern Learning facilities engagement program, conducted from late 2019 through 2020 and compiled into a report delivered in January 2021.
On one side of the debate, District officials say they are motivated to revise MACC with the aim of equity and inclusion. But on the other side, parents, students, and experts say the District is creating an inequitable environment, risking neurodiverse kids' chances of scholastic success by taking a sledgehammer to a program essential to their academic and social-emotional well-being.
"teachers' vision for the development and protection of students with diverse needs includes both specific programming as well as ongoing support for regular classroom teachers in this area," Polukoshko explained.
"Public education is a social justice matter — and creating inclusive schools where students see their needs and strengths reflected is an essential step towards a just society."