Your move: Gifted children shouldn't become pawns to categorical flexibility
Tanishq, a bright 7-year-old student in a Sacramento classroom, is eager to participate in the discussion. His hand shoots up repeatedly as he contributes one correct answer after another.
Certainly any teacher would be glad to have such an engaged student, but this teacher is especially impressed, as he’s a physics professor at the local community college. And Tanishq—quick to explain concepts like time dilation and Newton’s second law of motion—is certainly not your average second-grader.
Although most schools will not encounter a prodigy like Tanishq, most still have unusually high-achieving students that they must challenge to reach their potential. That goal, of course, takes considerable resources and expertise, and these days that’s not easy to accomplish.
The state Legislature makes provision for Gifted and Talented Education programs in California Education Code Section 52200. At last count, about 10 percent of California public school students participated. Many California school districts have a GATE program coordinator, and some have parent groups that support the programs in various ways.
But in recent years, school districts have been allowed to use the categorical funds they receive for GATE programs flexibly, and services for gifted students have in many cases been shelved or slashed significantly. The California Department of Education is no longer accepting or reviewing GATE applications, although local educational agencies with existing approved applications will continue to receive categorical funding.
With school finances and accountability mandates such as they are, is it really necessary for local districts and county offices of education to maintain special programs for gifted students? Won’t those students do just fine—even excel—with the regular standards-based curriculum?
Defining giftedness
Some of the answers hinge on what the definition of “gifted” is. In the early 20th century, psychologist and teacher Lewis Terman—the creator of the Stanford-Binet IQ test—studied “exceptional children” and catalogued the mental and physical traits that he felt signified giftedness. Terman believed giftedness was hereditary and promoted IQ testing to identify students with the potential to be society’s leaders so they could be tracked into a more rigorous and creative pedagogy—a contentious notion that many modern educators reject.
Even so, it’s still common for schools to base participation in GATE or advanced courses at least partly on IQ scores, although most now recognize outstanding curiosity and conceptual reasoning skills and a high degree of self-motivation and leadership, among other considerations, as evidence of giftedness. Parents may also request that their child be tested.
The U.S. Department of Education adapted its definition of “gifted” from the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Education Act: “Children and youth with outstanding talent [who] perform or show the potential for performing at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when compared with others of their age, experience, or environment. These children and youth exhibit high performance capability in intellectual, creative, and/or artistic areas, possess an unusual leadership capacity, or excel in specific academic fields. They require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the schools. Outstanding talents are present in children and youth from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, and in all areas of human endeavor.”
Children classified as gifted may also be sensitive and nurturing, quick-witted, perfectionists, or have a highly developed sense of right and wrong. Highly gifted students, with an IQ of 150 or more, usually comprise less than 1 percent of the student population.
Easy to miss
So today gifted children may be found in just about any classroom—a realization so profound that many districts have made it a policy to test every student to see if he or she would benefit from a gifted program. A blanket policy also helps counter charges of racism or prejudice.
“I know that many programs test only kids who are recommended. But when you test all kids, inevitably you’ll pick up some kids you never expected,” such as students with disabilities or English language learners, explains Teri Burns, a Natomas Unified School District board member who’s also a legislative advocate for the California Association for the Gifted, an organization of educators and parents who advocate for the needs of high-achievers. “It’s real easy to miss the kid who is really quiet or really loud and in your face if that doesn’t fit your image of what a gifted kid is.”
On the other hand, there are parents who feel that their children must be gifted because they get good grades and are hard workers, but when tested more extensively they still don’t score in the gifted range.
“A GATE student has a certain kind of problem-solving ability that goes beyond just being able to perform at high levels or [having] high math and reading skills. … Problem-solving—being able to see patterns—is quite acute,” says Lisa Hayes, director of GATE programs for the Natomas Unified School District. “They think out of the box.”
For example, during a class lesson about bats that migrate over long distances from cave to cave, gifted students might think of the pioneers who moved West, making a huge connection between science and social studies, notes CAG President Deborah Hazelton. “That’s significant that [they] would think of that.”
Student records, tests, portfolios of work, teacher recommendations and professional opinions may also be used to determine eligibility for GATE programs. Many schools use a nonverbal test so that students who are not fluent in English are not mistakenly overlooked.
Methods for teaching the gifted
Most advocates would prefer to have separate classrooms where gifted students can enjoy a challenging curriculum that allows them to instigate inquiry with each other.
“Those students need to be together as intellects and challenge one another and compete with one another” instead of distributing them in classrooms throughout the school, says Hazelton.
But with school budgets stretched to their limits, it’s often impossible for districts to provide separate specialized programs. Instead, educators have developed a number of other ways to meet the needs of gifted or high-achieving students, such as accelerating the child to a higher grade, independent study, pull-out or cluster groups, and differentiated instruction.
Each method has its pros and cons, and researchers disagree about which is best. But try to do something, urges Burns, the Natomas board member.
“The thing we always hear is that these kids are really smart, they’ll do fine. We’ve got to help the struggling kids,” she says. “Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. If gifted kids are left to their own devices, a lot of them drop out. A lot of them just disengage and don’t pay attention to school—they just do the minimum and get out.”
Differentiated instruction—the practice of adapting a lesson to the specific needs of each student—has become the option preferred by CAG and many other educators because it is an effective practice for any classroom. Adding complexity and depth to the curriculum using online instruction to help enrich the lessons is certainly another approach.
Specialized techniques like differentiation require training, though; few new teachers have experience with gifted students, so it falls to districts to prioritize professional development that will benefit gifted children.
Consultants can come into the district to do the training, and organizations like CAG have workshops and summer institutes that can help teachers learn how to meet students at many different levels. Hazelton says she’s even had teachers pay for the training themselves, it’s so important to them.
“I think they may feel it’s a moral imperative for them to offer lessons and educational opportunities to their students. They want more ideas, they want to be more adept at actually creating lessons and content that will serve their students,” Hazelton says.
Moved to drop out
One surprising statistic concerning gifted kids is how many of them drop out of formal education—at least from high school. While the exact percentage is hard to pin down, estimates range from 15 to 25 percent.
“Regardless of the actual rate of gifted students who drop out of school, they are the loss of a national resource that cannot be ignored,” said University of Connecticut researchers in one 2002 study.
What are some of the reasons gifted students give up on school? Burns, the Natomas Unified board member, has a theory.
“If I’m bored in school and I have really good skills at organizing, business, communications with adults and others, I might just set up myself some entrepreneurial enterprise that makes me a lot of money in the privacy of my own home,” she offers, warning that “sometimes those aren’t always as legal as you would like.”
It’s a horrible waste of valuable resources when gifted students aren’t developed to their potential, agrees Hazelton.
“Even more frustrating is that this disregard of high-ability students has occurred amidst a flurry of activity by government commissions, panels and task forces to study the nation’s decline in the innovation and science, technology, engineering and math,” she wrote in a recent op-ed piece. “Despite the reams of recommendations that have gone unheeded and the urgent pleas from [President Obama] to ‘out-educate and out-innovate the world,’ the facts show we are failing to cultivate our talent.”
A report by the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy at Indiana University in Bloomington lamented that the current emphasis on minimum competency under No Child Left Behind may have a negative effect on American economic competitiveness.
“We encourage educators, parents, and policymakers to focus more attention on the excellence gap,” the researchers wrote in “Mind the (Other) Gap! The Growing Excellence Gap in K-12 Education.”
“This attention need not come at the cost of addressing minimum competency gaps—the shrinking of which remains a necessary and noble goal. Yet continuing to pretend that a nearly complete disregard of high achievement is permissible, especially among underperforming subgroups, is a formula for a mediocre K-12 education system and long-term economic decline,” they warn.
The TALENT Act
Federal funding for gifted programs comes under the Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, which passed in 1988 as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Whereas Javits consists of grants for pilot programs to research what works in teaching gifted students, Congress is now trending toward another approach as outlined in a bill known as the TALENT Act (To Aid Gifted and High-Ability Learners by Empowering the Nation’s Teachers). The House and Senate have their own versions, but both would replace the Javits Act and would require LEAs to report on the progress of their gifted students.
“I think the TALENT Act is a very, very important thing because it will put meeting the needs of gifted students in the mainstream of education,” says Martha Flournoy, the California Association for the Gifted’s legislative chair. “Even though it’s always been implied, unless you put ‘gifted students’ in [ESEA], people don’t pay attention to it.”
The TALENT Act would:
- Require states and districts to report on the progress of their gifted students.
- Ensure gifted students are included in plans for federal Title II professional development funds.
- Require that teachers of underserved gifted students in rural and Title I schools be trained to deliver a gifted pedagogy.
- Emphasize research and dissemination of best practices.
There’s no funding yet, but Flournoy thinks getting those requirements included in the ESEA reauthorization now is important.
“In this time when we really can’t expect anything more, what we can do is change language and policy that will in fact support gifted kids down the road,” she says.
The prospect of mandating reports of gifted students’ progress also excites Natomas Unified board member Burns.
“Right now if you come into fourth grade and you’re reading at the eighth-grade level, you’re testing ‘advanced.’ Good for you. If you then come into fifth grade and you test out reading at the eighth-grade level, you’re still testing ‘advanced.’ You come into sixth grade, you are still reading at the eighth-grade level, you test out ‘advanced.’ So nowhere are you coming up on the system as having made no progress for three years—none whatsoever. So we need to identify a system where we look at those kids and ensure that they’re making progress.”
Funding sources
To cash-strapped districts, it can be awfully tempting to exercise the flexibility the state has allowed for categorical programs, shifting the funding they’d received for GATE, for example, to general purposes. Spending the money to test students, using it to give more hours to a classroom aide or purchase some books may seem like a more pressing need.
But that’s a false economy, says Burns.
“Think about it as also costing money to deal with kids who are dropping out because they’re bored, or causing trouble in a classroom because they’re bored, who are disengaging entirely and reducing your scores—you kind of have to weigh those things against one another,” she says.
Consider using nontraditional funds, such as Title I, she suggests, because gifted kids come from all economic backgrounds. Title II can be used for staff development to train teachers dealing with gifted students. “The strategies that you use in gifted education can be used across the curriculum,” Burns says.
Title V, which covers innovative programs to meet the needs of all students, as well as parent education, may also apply. And districts can always use their general funds.
The California Association for the Gifted would like to see the state and LEAs focus on three areas:
- Including gifted students in the state accountability system to ensure that these students are also making learning gains
- Training all teachers on the characteristics of gifted learners and differentiation strategies
- Requiring districts to identify gifted learners and maintain services for them, particularly for disadvantaged gifted students
“I get that this is an incredible crisis that we have never seen before—don’t get me wrong,” says Flournoy, CAG’s legislative advocate. “But we need to meet the needs of all of our students. And I do believe that the gifted students really get lost in the shuffle.”
What local boards can do
Hazelton and other gifted education advocates urge board members to take their responsibilities toward gifted students seriously: Make sure gifted students are being identified, and train their teachers to recognize the characteristics of gifted students and to differentiate their instruction so high achievers are properly challenged.
While all students should advance in their learning, says Burns, “to not advance your best and brightest is a mistake in an economy that needs to be world class. All boats need to rise, not just those at the bottom.”
Kristi Garrett (
kgarrett@csba.org
) is a staff writer for California Schools.
Resources for out-of-the-box thinkers
Nurturing children’s special talents is a gift that society gives itself. Here are a few resources to help school districts and county offices of education help their gifted students:
Organizations
National Association for Gifted Children
www.nagc.org
This research and advocacy organization offers tools and information for parents, administrators, teachers and students. The site includes a glossary of frequently used terms relating to gifted education and a calendar of conventions and seminars.
California Association for the Gifted
www.cagifted.org
This statewide advocacy group is one of the largest in the nation providing information, training opportunities and events for gifted educators and parents. CAG is conducting a pilot project to develop an informal method of identifying gifted students, and it sponsors a recognition program for outstanding gifted programs.
Council for Exceptional Children, the Association for the Gifted
www.cectag.org
This membership organization site features journal articles, research and reports about gifted education, and promotes the welfare and education of high-potential children.
California Department of Education Gifted & Talented Education
www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt
This state website offers detailed information about the GATE program, related fiscal issues and standards for gifted education. The site also has links to a host of useful resources.
Study
‘Mind the (Other) Gap! The Growing Excellence Gap in K-12 Education’
www.iub.edu/~ceep/Gap/excellence/ExcellenceGapBrief.pdf
This 2010 report from Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation & Education Policy provides some preliminary data about the “excellence gap” affecting high-achieving students. The center hopes to start a national discussion on the importance of promoting excellence in K-12 education.
Policies
Subscribers to CSBA’s policy services may reference CSBA Sample Board Policy 6172 and Administrative Regulation 6172 when formulating policies on gifted education.
www.csba.org/Services/Services/PolicyServices.aspx
Legislation
Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program
www2.ed.gov/programs/javits/index.html
Although the U.S. Department of Education says no new competition for Javits grants is expected until at least 2012, the site provides information about the law and other resources of interest to parents and teachers of gifted students.
To Aid Gifted and High-Ability Learners by Empowering the Nation's Teachers Act (The TALENT Act)
www.thomas.gov
Read about and follow the progress of House Resolution 1674 and Senate bill 857 from the Library of Congress website.