NYT: The Rise of the Gifted-Child Industry

alwaysamom · November 21, 2005, 11:22am

tsdad, I think there really are separate issues here. The challenges and discrimination which some minority students and parents experience are not always tied to gifted education and whether or not they are included. At least in our experience, this is not the case.

“I believe that the concerns with gifted children are grossly overdone especially since in many school districts it would seem that almost all the white kids are gifted.”

This comment of yours would not be the case if we are discussing ‘true’ gifted education for students who have been identified as academically gifted. I’ve yet to see a school district where ‘almost all’ white kids are in that category. Even if you’re merely speaking of parents’ perceptions of their kids, I haven’t seen that to be the case, and it’s nowhere near the case for specific identification.

In our school district, testing is done in fourth grade. It’s a three step process. Everyone participates in the first test, and at this point, some kids are automatically identified, and require no further testing. Another group which has reached a certain benchmark, take a second test, and then there is a one on one assessment done. Keep in mind that the testing is not done in a vacuum. Almost all of these kids have been informally ‘identified’ by their schools during K-3. There are sometimes some surprises in the testing but not very often, if you have good teachers.

Once the legal identification of academically gifted is made, there are options offered to those students. The options, which begin in fifth grade, are a self-contained program or a one day a week pull-out program. Both are run at other centralized schools. The education our children received was excellent and they were very fortunate to have the opportunities they did. The only objection that I had with the system which was utilized by our school district was that I believe it is too restrictive. Only the kids in the 98th percentile and above qualify. This determinant factor varies district to district. Some others close to ours use the 90th percentile and above.

Unfortunately, the system does not always continue the opportunities which these kids get in elementary and middle school, through to the high school years. Certainly not to the same extent in most cases. I’m afraid that too often people think that these gifted kids will do fine regardless of what educational opportunities they get, and thus there is a view that nothing specific be done for them. I think this is a mistake and have seen the evidence of this in many of the kids I’ve counselled through the years. Gifted kids have different needs, they learn in different ways, and they need to be challenged and taught in different ways. That isn’t to say that none of them will do just fine if left in regular classes but the majority of them will excel, usually beyond all expectation, if their needs are met by a qualified teacher. These kids have special needs, much in the same way that other types of identified children have special needs.

BurnThis · November 21, 2005, 11:35am

tsdad,

My son’s original school was lily white and affluent and the kids ran the gamut from dumb as a rock (sorry, but true) to brilliant (him – again, sorry, but true). When he moved to the private school for the gifted he was finally in an ethnically diverse student body. I actually think because some people erroneously assume that “all kids are gifted” and that white = smart that they don’t care about gifted kids and their needs. But trust me, as a parent of an exceptionally (over 165) gifted child, the gifted are as in need of a different, special education as mentally challenged children. Gifted children learn differently and get frustrated and give up when not taught to their potential. At our regular school, my daughter spent her time in first grade helping her classmates fill out their worksheets and memorizing the stuff written on posters around the classroom (how she learned the ASL alphabet). Had we not moved to a gifted school we never would have discovered her abilities in math. She’s now three years advanced in math and loving it. Not every kid who’s mother thinks is a little genius really is, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t gifted kids out there who need a specific educational approach to their special needs.

tsdad · November 21, 2005, 11:48am

Obviously in an all-white school my concerns aren’t an issue. In an integrated setting setting, GATE (gifted and talented education) programs have been used as a blind to re-establish racial segregation as have some non-federally funded magnet programs particularly those where the programs are located within a larger school.

marite · November 21, 2005, 1:56pm

tsdad:

There are misperceptions on all sides. Our high school tried to raise achievement by getting rid of honors classes and putting students whose abilities ranged from 3rd grade to college level in reading in the same heterogeneous classes. There was a clear sense that minority kids were too often put in non-honors classes where expectations were low, and so was achievement. But after a couple of years, when (largely middle class and white) parents of high achieving students campaigned to have honors restored, a group of minority parents accused them of racism and elitism.
The abolition of honors had been undertaken by a white principal with more ideological baggage than pratical experience. It’s taken a black principal to restore honors and challenge all students to high expectations. The several minority students who’ve gone to HYPMS this past year benefitted from the black principal’s stewardship.
This is to say that the story of educational expectations and resources is not a one-sided one. Middle class kids of professionals like my S have escape routes if the school is inadequate: enrichment programs outside school and in summer, college classes, knowledgeable and involved. If that vocal minority parent group had prevailed, the students hurt the most by the continuation of heterogeneous classes would probably have been minority kids themselves.

tsdad · November 21, 2005, 2:42pm

Take a look at the OCR summaries. This is the real problem for minorites in many US school districts. They’re misclassified as retarted, a designation that stays with them forever. They cannot get into GATE programs because many of these programs are designed so narrowly that they exclude minority stduents. This is the real shame not the supposed lack of gifted programs.

Teach2005 · November 21, 2005, 4:00pm

I know I seem to pop up in all of these discussions, but I devoted many years of graduate school to gifted education in the form of both a master’s and a Ph.D. Gifted children are my passion and they are quite often “left behind”. These days everybody is worried about the low achieving students because of NCLB and tend to forget that the very gifted children sometimes don’t learn anything because they already knew 70% of what was going to be taught before they walked in the room.

Gifted education is growing, but there is still no national law and many states do not have a mandate for it. There is also no national funding other than through grants in the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Act. Services vary WIDELY by state and region of the country. Some states, like mine, require additional training to teach gifted children while others don’t. There is so much variation.

I do, however, take exception to the statement of white=gifted and black = ■■■■■■■■. It’s true that historically there have been problems with this, but that tide is turning. My program is very diverse and each child is considered on equal footing. In fact, there are laws in place in my state to make sure that occurs. I participated in a research grant in grad school where we specifically studied measures of non-verbal intelligence to see which ones were most effective with African American students. This took place in Mississippi so if we are making a strong effort to find minority gifted children here, then surely others are too.

dke · November 21, 2005, 4:04pm

In our public school system the gifted ones are on a completely different track, and are looked at as weirdos…“brainiacs”…and are separate from the others. Not an ideal situation.

tsdad · November 21, 2005, 4:07pm

Not hardly. It’s still a real problem. 37 school districts under review beginning in April of 2003 for in inappropriately putting Black kids in special education. Not history. Now.

I will tell you that OCR doesn’t undertake a compliance review of a school district unless it has a pretty good idea that there is a problem.

This is the real shame in American education not the supposed lack of gifted classes for a small group of white kids.

marite · November 21, 2005, 4:44pm

Would the argument be different if the small group was not white or was not considered gifted? To my knowledge, no one in my district has raised objections at the considerable resources devoted to remedial education. Considering that MA has zero funding for gifted education, gifted education is not an option for any kid, white or black. Our school district has never had a GATE program, and for a while, honors classes were not even available. In the name of helping struggling student, all 9th and 10th graders were supposed to take the same classes, teachers were told not to use materials that required a reading level above 6th grade.

I actually do not think of gifted education as primarily a matter or financial resources but of flexibility on the part of schools and teachers such as was demonstrated by some (not all) of my S’s teachers.

mstee · November 21, 2005, 4:53pm

In our school district, there is virtually no $$ spent on gifted kids, but I do know of a couple of cases where the district is spending big bucks to send kids with learning disabilities to private schools. Of course, the parents had to jump through a lot of hoops to get that outcome. . . the district doesn’t exactly advertise these expensive options for kids with disabilities.

I believe each school in our district gets around $1,000 to spend on gifted kids. So, what they do is use the money, which isn’t much, to enrich the learning of all the kids.

alwaysamom · November 21, 2005, 7:09pm

marite, I think the answer to your question is a very definite YES. Everyone I know, across two countries, who has children who have been identified as academically gifted, has experienced this same type of attitude that tsdad expressed in the last sentence of his post. If anyone was expressing that kind of attitude towards those who get the benefit of remedial special ed programs, they’d be blasted from here to kingdom come but somehow it’s acceptable to express those feelings towards children who have the type of special needs that gifted kids do.

marite · November 21, 2005, 7:22pm

Alwaysamom:

As you know, my question was rhetorical. I will never forget attending a discussion of gifted education at MIT, part of its annual enrichment weekend for k-12 students. I was amazed that families had come from all over NE and the Mid-Atlantic states, staying in hotels for the duration. At the session, parents had tears in their eyes as they recounted the struggles they’d had with school bureaucracies to get some kind of accommodation for their highly gifted kids, especially if the kids had dual exceptionalities (combining giftedness with physical handicaps or some learning disability). It was like a group therapy session where they felt they could share their experiences with others who would understand.

emeraldkity4 · November 21, 2005, 7:27pm

having kids who are both gifted but also learning disabled I gotta tell ya that for kids who are both= which are many= they aren’t getting served at all at many schools.
Their test scores aren’t high enough to qualify for gifted programs because of their learning challenges- but their challenges aren’t enough to get them any help.
Two years below or above in everything is what our district said a student needed to be to qualify for special programs.
So for students who may be very gifted in language, but in math they struggle to keep up, their overall grades may even out to be C’s- and the district and the school will say" what is your problem? They’re getting C’s- thats average!"

My D1 has an Iq of 160- this is taking into account that she was below grade level in some areas- as much as 3 or 4 years below( re: her testing). However- because through sheer effort she was never going to be two years below grade level- she didnt’ qualify for extra help. COnversely- even though she was reading , writing and comprehending 10 years above her age, because she was below grade level in computation, she was never going to qualify for gifted programs.
We managed to find a private school path for her- with a lot of finaid- that made an appropriate education possible. But most families don’t know that those resources are out there- or they are limited in their area.

Our experience has been- that unless your child is a typical learner & unless you are willing and able to be hyper involved with the school and the district- your child is going to fall through the cracks.

It is a shame that in many districts parents seem pitted against each other- it takes focus away from the responsibility of the district to provide an appropriate education- and toward other groups who are perceived as getting more than their share of the pie.
Parents need to work together- to get a decent education for all kids- not just at their school or in their childs classroom. We all benefit when standards and accountablity are raised.

dmd77 · November 21, 2005, 8:31pm

I spent my first year teaching general science in a school where one year of general science was required for graduation but kids on the “college track” took intro science and then bio/chem/physics. So general sci was where you ended up after you flunked out of intro sci. So by definition, most of the 32 kids in the classroom had failed science the year before. (They changed the policy the next year. Partly because of my comments, partly because the new principal actually had a brain.)

Of those 32 kids, about 1/3rd were learning-disabled in one way or another, most of them without previous recognition of this fact–I spent a lot of time on paperwork to get the process started, mostly for 10th and 11th graders! (They’d been passed along for years.) A few of these kids were genuinely low-ability, kids with IQs of less than 75.

Another third didn’t speak English well and were in the class because it was considered appropriate for ESL students.

The other third were what is traditionally thought of as “unmotivated” students. They were unmotivated, yes, but stupid they were not. Several of them were supporting their families. A few were alcoholics or on drugs. A few more were gang-activity transfers, students who’d been transferred into a different district to remove them from gang activity, either as leaders or victims.

It was a hell of a year. Most days I went home and cried.

But strangely, when I cut the kids a little slack and emphasized learning over due dates, they started to learn. By the end of the year, most wrote coherent essays on their final exams (yes, I gave an essay test!) and the vast majority passed.

While I support gifted education for the top 1 or 2 percent–who are as different from the middle as the bottom 1 or 2 percent–I no longer believe that educational testing can actually classify all students accurately. Consequently, I believe that all students should be able to choose their level of academic challenge–don’t screen them out of AP!

Teach2005 · November 22, 2005, 10:19am

Emeraldkity, you are right about the neglecting of students who are both gifted and learning disabled. The second year I was full time in grad school I participated in a grant that studied just that issue. We surveyed all of the districts in the state to see how many kids overlapped. We found that the largest overlaps were in speech/language disorders and learning disabilities. We ended up doing training for school districts to try to help them find these kids. Unfortunately, though, you’re right. These kids often fall through the cracks because each of the exceptionalities mask the other. I have only taught one child in gifted that also had a special education ruling.

Tsdad, it is still a problem, but it is also one that educators are fully aware of and trying to combat. In my gifted program I have white students, black students, asian students, hispanic students, and kids who barely knew English two years ago. Every teacher in the state of Alabama has to go through Lee vs. Macon training that ensures they know the risks of overresentation in both special ed and gifted. I went through ten hours of training on this issue before I could get my license swapped over from Mississippi. Also, in Mississippi I taugh in a school that had a total of nine white children in the whole school. None of these white children were in gifted, yet we somehow still had a thriving gifted program as well as students in special ed. I know it can still be a problem but it’s hardly an argument to not give some children what the need. If gifted kids don’t get an extra push, they can often go down the wrong road or get bored with school and drop out!

NYT: The Rise of the Gifted-Child Industry

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