Fact Check: When it Comes to MACC Disinformation, the Third Time Isn't the Charm. (It’s Still False).
In a third attempt to prove the proposed six-week duration for MACC is reccomended, the District has produced a new set or research, a set even more detached from the truth than previous.
Following a month of continuous investigation, The Griffins' Nest has repeatedly found that the Vancouver School Board is deceiving the public regarding the research behind its proposal to effectively cancel a gifted program. Following inquires from The Nest, the District quietly produced a new set of research amounting to the most demonstrably false claims to date in the saga.
For weeks, the VSB has maintained that its highly controversial plan to replace the Multi-Age Cluster Classes program with "Gifted Enrichment Centres" (GECs) is well supported by research, including their proposal to reduce MACC's length from its current multi-year format to six weeks.
The planned GEC model's six-week duration has been a key focus of MACC advocate’s dissent, saying that it offers neither the social-emotional support nor academic enrichment that the special needs program's gifted, neurodiverse grade 4 to 7 students need.
Neurodiversity is a term coined in the 1990s that refers to differences in brain functions, and encompasses neurodevelopmental differences such as ADHD, ASD, and other learning challenges, according to Understood.
In late January, the VSB produced two videos describing their rationale behind the GEC proposal, presented by District Principal - Learning Services Liz Hayes-Brown. Ninety seconds into the second video, Hayes-Brown states "research identifies a duration of six-weeks as an ideal length for enrichment programming", along with a graphic with the word "recommended" brightly appearing above the text “six-weeks.”
Screenshot of the second January MACC Rationale Video, where the VSB prominetly makes their six-week recomendation claim.
That claim was not true when the video was published on Youtube on January 21. It was not true after The Nest examined the listed studies and found no such recommendation. Upon asking the VSB to provide evidence, on January 28, they sent an unlisted 2012 Egyptian study conducted in Saudi Arabia that also did not support their claim. It was not true when The Nest asked the VSB why they were misleading the public regarding their research, to which the District doubled down on the already debunked Egyptian study and provided out-of-context quotations on February 11. Nor was it true when they quietly created a new set of research and buried it on their updated MACC webpage exactly 46 minutes before telling The Nest the Learning Services department had conducted "comprehensive research in gifted education.”
In an investigation of January MACC consultation participants' outrage over the insufficiency and inadequacy of their involvement in the VSB's proposal, The Nest contacted on routine the VSB Communications Department in February to comment on the situation and answer important questions. These could not be answered by turning to the MACC-specific frequently asked questions page on the VSB's site.
The Nest inquired into the District's reliance on the Egyptian study, including regarding why it was being used in the first place. In previous reports, The Nest noted that the study-in-question examined 42 Saudi students in an experimental pullout program that *happened* to be six weeks long, and did not discuss the choice and impact of the duration other than to say it was insufficient for the development of practical learning abilities.
Practical learning abilities, combined with analytical and creative abilities, formed the three aspects of giftedness that were the researchers' focus. Upon completion of the program, researchers found significant growth in program students' creative and analytical abilities, but insignificant growth in practical abilities. In the study's discussion and conclusion, researchers stressed that growth in creative and analytical abilities isn't worth much in an educational program if students cannot apply their knowledge, and said educational programs' success is increasingly measured through growth in application abilities.
Chief among the issues of quoting this study is that it does not support the efficacy of the six-week model, contrary to what communications staff told The Nest on January 28. The Nest noted that misquotation in its January 29 report the following day.
After following up with the District days later, communications staff said The Nest had incorrectly reported their misquotation, and that the Egyptian study did support their six-week proposition. That was an incorrect assertion the first time they said it and was for the second time in their February 11 statement.
"Again, this information can be found in the FAQ section of the MACC website,” wrote VSB communications staff, seeming to suggest that the inquires made on February 8 could be answered by checking the practice response list as opposed to emailed questions. However, that webpage had been updated between February 8 and 11 and did not feature any FAQ answer specifically about the six-week model and the research supporting it.
Upon visiting the FAQ page, one will find the second listed question is "How are you translating a year-long education program into six weeks without losing the depth and insights of the previously designed MACC?"
The answer did not refer to the researched-based recommendation that had been touted in promotional texts, videos, and by Spur Communications and VSB staff in the January consultations held over Zoom. However, that wasn't the only FAQ item on the topic of the six-week model posted on the 11th.
Captures from the Internet Archive, a web-based library of digital files, from January 5 give some indication of the history of the FAQ webpage. Before it was updated on February 11, the page had 12 FAQs listed. Following the update, it had 21, with the additions being mostly defensive in tone.
Buried second to last on the FAQ page, number 20, is the question, "what evidence supports the recommended six-week service model.” The answer is the same text that was in the District statement, but minus one key detail; this time around, officials had a new document, hyperlinked to the phrase "the research can be found here.”
Upon opening the PDF document, six new studies, all new to The Nest, were found. Staff did not make The Nest specifically aware of this document, for reasons that are not known.
An analysis of the document's metadata through Adobe Acrobat and Metadata2Go revealed that the PDF was created by District Principal, Learning Support, Liz Hayes-Brown using Microsoft Word at 4:48 PM on February 11, just 46 minutes before staff reiterated Learning Services had conducted "comprehensive research" and directed The Nest to an updated FAQ page at 5:34 PM.
The Nest had pressed the District on the fact they had not provided any evidence to support their six-week claim in emails days earlier.
Matching timestamps for the document's creation and modification indicates it was copy-pasted from source document previously prepared by Hayes-Brown or another VSB employee before it was likely posted to the school board's website minutes later and communications staff defended the Learning Services department's research within the hour.
After the document's origins were examined, its contents were too, and all six studies were evaluated against the District's claim that they are evidence to support the efficacy of a "six-week service model for gifted programming".
Without qualification to assess the integrity of scholarly pedology, The Nest examined the study's support of the VSB assertion through answering three questions about the literature, culminating to determine the basic informational value of it becoming evidence that recommends the six-week model.
Specifically, the questions The Nest was trying to answer were whether each document focusses on elementary age students, focuses on gifted students, and whether it focusses on the duration of gifted programs and commented on a duration's merits.
Each document needed to pass all three questions to be considered in support of the District's claim.
None passed, and in fact, most had nothing to do with a MACC-type special needs program education, to begin with.
The literature review's preamble says documents were selected based on whether they were "recent and current, from a reputable authorship, contain both qualitative and quantitative components with a high degree of ethics, and the internal citations in each article had to reference other research that met the criteria above."
By the numbers, four of the six documents focus is on either summer programs or extracurricular activities. Three documents do not even mention the word "gifted" or an analogous term. Despite the District's statement that they selected research based on whether it was "recent and current,” the youngest study from 2015, and two are from 2004, making a third of the research 18 years old with the average across all six items being 12 years old.
Three of the documents focus on high school students, a completely different age category than the gifted elementary population MACC serves. All six focus exclusively on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), culminating to a literature review that ignores at least half of the provincial curriculum.
All six items were seemingly unrelated to the current MACC and the GEC proposal, with the exception being the fact that something *broadly* educational took place in six weeks. It is exceedingly clear that none of the research compiled by the VSB has any relation whatsoever to MACC; with each study covered here.
1. “Young Scholars Gifted Program - Summer Research Opportunities for gifted and talented students”
This 2012 document refers to a six-week summer program operated by Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The researchers set out to introduce elements of post-secondary STEM to high school students of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. The program is essentially a summer camp, geared toward STEM education, having nothing to do with gifted education in the context of the MACC or the GEC proposal, and does not comment on the six-week duration. It just happened to be over the span of six weeks.
The researchers — none of whom have a background in education, special or otherwise — never meant for their article to be quoted in the way the District is using it, especially after they explicitly wrote "this is not a research paper."
2. “Teaching by Design: An Early Introduction to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Concepts”
This 2004 paper examined a six-week, robotics-oriented, pilot program with a group of gifted fifth-grade students in South Texas. The program focussed on developing students' creative and critical thinking abilities in STEM problem-solving situations. It had no clear relation to gifted education, and although 16 "gifted & talented" students were selected by their principal for participation, the degree to which those students' learning complexities were relevant to the paper was not indicated or discussed beyond a single mention. Further, the paper had no conclusion or finding, simply stating the goal of the project was to explore young students' STEM education through robotics, and "it [was] the hope of this project that the children and their subsequent teachers will seek out other hands-on experiences to develop a deeper understanding of STEM areas."
Nothing was concluded or discussed related to the six-week duration beyond its initial mention.
3. “Urban Elementary STEM Initiative”
This 2015 study examined teachers in an elementary-level STEM summer school program run in partnership with 22 schools in the Baltimore Public School District in the United States. The study focussed on answering two questions related to teachers' professional development and curriculum implementation. Student outcomes were not the focus of the study, nor was the program's duration. The only comment the study did make in its discussion regarding the duration, was to say that after discussing the results with participating teachers, they found "a shortened summer school session was not adequate for some teachers to fully develop teaching practices around an integrated STEM approach." The word gifted could also not be found within the text, as the study was not related to gifted education nor was the summer program a gifted one.
4. “Improving Equity through a Science Enrichment Program”
This 2011 paper devised a six-week after-school science program for Grade 9 students to answer the question "What impact will enrichment activities have on participating female students’ achievement and attitudes toward science?” A total of 17 student students participated in "enrichment activities [such as] after school tutoring, inquiry-based activities, role models and mentoring,” and found that the program "had a positive impact on [participants’] achievement and attitudes toward science. The paper's irrelevance, as it focused on an after science-oriented, after school program for neurotypical high school students, as opposed to an all subject, gifted, elementary-age program, is what disqualifies it.
5. “Promoting Academic Achievement and Identity Development Among Diverse High School Students”
"This paper describes how a university outreach program promotes academic achievement and identity development among culturally diverse tenth-grade students. The primary goal of the outreach program is to advance students' engagement and competency in mathematics and science learning," researchers wrote in the opening sentences of their paper's abstract. Conducted in 2004, the University of San Diego ran "an intense, highly structured six-week summer residential program," that ultimately found that pre-test and post-test scores indicated growth in participants' abilities.
There was no indication that the students involved were gifted nor that the summer outreach program was intended for gifted students. It was operated by a private actor outside the primary and secondary school system as an extracurricular activity, with no clear relation to MACC.
6. “Growth Mindset of Gifted Seventh Grade Students in Science”
This 2014 study was the only one to focus on gifted learners and gifted programming. But, like its predecessors, it did feature a STEM program that occurred in a six-week timeframe. Its purpose was to investigate three questions, "first, what do gifted students believe about the malleability of intelligence compared to regular students? Second, do gifted students who participate in a mindset intervention during science class increase in growth mindset compared to a control group? Third, what was the effect of the teacher on the mindset intervention for both gifted and regular students?” Notably, its purpose was not to examine the duration of gifted programming, and none of the guiding questions address the six weeks nor do they make any comment as to that coincidental duration's merits.
The VSB has quoted six papers, half of which focus on high school students, do not mention the subject of their reference purpose, a third of which are almost two decades old, more accurately described as summer camps than gifted programs, and all of which focus on purely STEM education and leave the rest of BC's curriculum unaccounted for in their quest to prove that a six-week duration is supported by sound evidence for an elementary age, dedicated, full-service gifted program like MACC. It isn't.
On February 22, the MACC-specific "peer-reviewed research" webpage, separate from the FAQ, was updated to move the new research compilation to a prominent location in its preamble. The change is especially visible in comparison to February 16 Internet Archive version.
February 23 screenshot from a MACC webpage displayng the new hyperlinked research in the preamble.
The District has maintained their position that "a six-week span for pull-out gifted programming is the most well-supported and frequently implemented time frame in educational research."
The fact that these documents all mention something educational occurred in six weeks cannot be construed to mean research endorses the idea of a special needs gifted education program also being six weeks. These documents appear to have been indiscriminately compiled together on the basis that they contain some form of education, in or outside of a school and regardless of whether they pertained to special needs students, that occurred in a prescribed period in which the VSB seeks to prove the efficacy of.
The VSB's claim that a six-week model is supported by research is entirely false based on the research they have offered on three separate occasions across several months. The District has been given the benefit of the doubt in erroneously misrepresenting research in the past, however, patterns of deceitful behaviour attempting to mislead both journalists and the public make clear that the VSB is no longer negligent in their casual relationship with the truth on the matter.