Tricky....I really do think the best students from under-performing schools should be given a better opportunity.
However, transitioning our highest-end education to "not the students with the highest abilities across the county..." just seems like a mistake. Also, another opportunity to discriminate against very high-performing Asian-American students.
Social engineering vs. educating our best and brightest is not the way to compete in a globalized world.
26
"The county also changed its paradigm about whom the special schools should serve: not the students with the highest abilities across the county, but rather, those students who are outliers at their neighborhood schools, with fewer than 20 peers with similar abilities."
So, if your child goes to a school with excellent teachers, giving more 'gifted' students, he or she has less chance of getting into the program than does one at a less well taught school? How is that fair?
13
Gifted programs and magnet schools are the last bastion of segregation. It has been 60 years since public schools were integrated. Since then, there has been a constant attack on integration by the creation of charter schools, gifted education programs, and magnet schools.
Now that these programs are being scrutinized and subjected to integration, we see Republicans trying to subsidize private schools with public funds. Some call these "opportunity scholarships" which hides its true meaning. And of course it is the affluent (mostly white) parents who can afford the additional funds these "opportunity scholarships" do not cover.
Sixty years and we are back to square one.
But this should not be a surprise. Racism will always be with us. It is deeply embedded and only needs moments in history (like Trump) to surface again.
And maybe surprising to some (not to me) but you see it in some of the most Liberal and Progressive areas of this country.
6
I applaud this school system for taking on a very difficult problem. There are no easy answers for educating gifted children. I offer observations from history for context. Back in the 1950's everyone in public school in NYC knew who the "gifted" children were. Classses were numbered from 1 to 8 etc. If you were in class 4-1, you were among the "gifted" children. If you were in class 4-8, you were among the "slow learners". Placement was based on teacher observation and classroom tests. This was far from objective. Some teachers were bigoted. Not just race, but income and social statue mattered. "Slow" often meant "Poor.
I went to a high school for "gifted" children that was 98% upper middle-class Jewish (really!). As an Italian-American from a poor family, I found there were good and bad things about the experience. The Times article points out one of the best things. Being with kids from a different social class was a "different experience". Many of my friends lived on Park Avenue or the Upper West Side where I had never been. That alone, changed my life. The "bad" included teachers who were bigots (not all were) who actually counseled the Italos (there were 5 of us) not to go to college.
Programs for "gifted" kids should seek them out regardless of what they are and should not focus on math, science or any specific talent. We were supposed to be budding math and science geniuses. Yet, very few of us became scientists. But most found their "gift" there and succeeded at it.
12
I was/am a shocked/disappointed parent of a South Asian 4th grader from a relatively privileged family who was wait-listed to a grade 4/5 magnet center for enriched studies in Montgomery County, MD. I unequivocally applaud the move to now test all 2nd/3rd graders (shockingly overdue) and to reduce bias in the system by increasing the number of programs in less privileged parts of this diverse, massive county (over 20 high school
clusters). This revealed a need for a more challenging curriculum for several thousand more students in this grade cohort than the county historically plans for.
My concern falls with the students who don’t get to access an appropriately stimulating curriculum due to the perception that having a “peer group” of similarly-abled students at the home school with a slightly modified curriculum should be adequate to meet their intellectual needs. Research shows that inappropriately challenged, highly gifted kids lose the opportunity to develop grit and perseverance when the stakes are still low. This is true for students who are from disadvantaged circumstances, but equally true for all exceptionally gifted kids, particularly those with co-existing challenges like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. (AKA the 2e or twice-exceptional students) who may have poor classroom performance in the face of a subset of superb test scores.
17
The real question is, why are only some schools considered "elite"?.
19
Basic problem is the creation of a two or three tiered education system. All schools should be good, and there should be access to outstanding programs in various areas and subjects. It is expensive and difficult, particularly in large and geographically large districts. But that’s what kids need.
14
Many people obviously don't understand what gifted education theoretically is, and what it isn't.
Gifted programs are designed to allow students with extraordinary intellectual or artistic ability to learn at an accelerated pace, so that they can achieve their potential without being held back by their peers.
To do this, gifted kids typically need the time and mentorship to work independently or in smaller groups, and to access complementary experiences, such as additional readings or outside classes/training in a specific field that corresponds to their talent.
In my case, I was gifted in music and verbal skills, especially foreign language (I routinely skipped the first year of foreign-language class, and was about 5 etude books ahead of the next-best musician in the district). So my gifted program arranged for me to take Russian classes at a nearby university when I was just 11, where I thrived. I was also sent to take AP exams for languages I hadn't taken AP courses in; formed a Future Problem Solving club; and the district paid to send me to highly competitive music festivals and workshops.
Like many gifted kids, I was bored in mainstream elementary classes and wasn't a stellar classroom student; I placed into the gifted program through an IQ test. The hours I spent working on FPS, in Russian class and at music festivals were what kept me engaged and focused until high school offered more opportunities.
22
Our child was in a gifted and talented program in elementary school. They loved it and thrived there.
But looking at the extra things they did they were things any child would benefit from.
Once they got to middle school and high school there is self selection.
The gifted ones take trigonometry, calculus and physics - and the others don't.
12
ALL our children should have access to top-quality education that serves their particular needs, from preschool through university. There is no reason that America, with all our wealth, cannot provide that. We have chosen to limit access to education and opportunity; and we have created a "scarcity mentality" among parents who care about education, while neglecting the children whose parents are less informed or less motivated. If we invested the billions of dollars we spend on wars of our choosing, and tax breaks for people who don't need them, into outstanding public education at all levels, these conflicts would mostly disappear. If your local public high school provided an education and safe environment equivalent to the best private high schools, most parents would choose it. I went to such a public high school. If your state university and public colleges offered the same quality education and access to opportunities as the Ivy League, at an affordable price, many families would choose those. We used to have an education system that looked more like what I've described. It has been systematically defunded, understaffed, and under-resourced. Why? To cut taxes for the rich while still funding wars -- that also make some people very rich. This is also why we have a crumbling infrastructure, in one of the richest and most technically advanced nations the world has ever seen.
This is a problem we could solve, if we demanded that our government actually serve the people.
32
These are the best articles the NYT posts besides moving poor people into wealthy white areas for education.
It is where liberal ideals meet reality. Look at the comments: everyone is in agreement youre just pushing unqualified kids in 'gifted' schools... but at least it is diverse!
The NYT writes about minorities, LBGT and the poor daily but here we are, lowering the bar and people got mad. I remember in Dayton, Ohio when the passing score for the police test was lowered to an 'F' because not enough African Americans were on squad.
6
That's absurd.
Yes, Democrats are the only politicians caring about minorities too, and not only about white males. That's because they believe that a society can only thrive when ALL individuals thrive.
And that is only possible if the government makes sure that all children have an equal opportunity to develop their best talents and learn how to be morally responsible, happy citizens.
Republican politicians don't care about this at all, and merely focus on ONE demographic: white Christians (often even merely white males). So the GOP and the GOP alone is playing "identity politics".
Of course, when trying to find ways to extend equal opportunities to all, there will be obstacles, setbacks and mistakes - as in ANY human endeavor.
So yes, I too believe that when you first create schools for gifted children, it's not a good idea to "water down" this kind of specific pedagogical approach in order to adapt to kids with a lower IQ too ... although the fact that having gifted children in their classroom helps kids with a lower IQ get better results IS an argument that deserves to be taken into account.
What liberals believe, however, is that ALL children deserve the best possible education. That's the exact opposite of what the GOP does and believes, and that literally leads to limiting quality education to those children who come from highly educated families already. So they don't even TRY to come up with solution. And that's when it's easy to criticize those who do ... ;-)
4
Perhaps not all students are gifted, but every student would benefit from the type of exciting projects that gifted students get. School need not be boring for anyone.
15
@Charles Pack
In real life, studies show that the brains of gifted children (only 3% of the population) literally function differently and are wired differently.
That not only means that they can think faster and find solutions to problems faster, it also means that they are more creative, AND have much more intense emotions.
The kind of environment that this kind of brain needs to thrive is NOT the same as that of other kids.
In fact, studies show that a whopping two thirds of gifted children never even manage to get a high school degree and drop out of the current education system.
That is not only extremely sad and lots of talent wasted, it's also totally unfair to do this to this special kind of kids, who do are literally "special needs" kids.
Apart from that, it's obvious that ANY good education is most of the time very exciting and not boring at all. And of course any American child deserves the very best the world has to offer, when it comes to education. But that means education that takes their specific strengths and weaknesses into account, NOT one type of education for no matter what child.
A kid coming from a low-income family, for instance, needs a school that actively helps with homework, whereas a kid from a high-income family has a much bigger chance of getting crucial homework help from one or both of their parents.
Differences exist. Taking them into account is what leads to a fair and thriving society, not trying to ignore them ...
16
Bingo. That’s my experience in 40 years of teaching
3
I feel for the qualified students who have lost a spot.
15
@Jennifer As do I, but I also feel for the qualified students who have yet to have a spot.
10
Yes, I’m sure the parents who spent time and money trying to follow the rules only to have the goalposts moved in the 4th quarter will take comfort in knowing that their child’s education is being sacrificed for a worthy cause.
If we move away from neutral and transparent criteria to more subjective criteria, and set political standards rather than academic ones, we create more unfairness, not less.
15
I was in a district that had "special requirements" for minorities in the gifted program. Basically, an IQ score that was thirty points below what was needed to qualify. The result? Teachers reported that they had to water down the program because of so many unqualified kids who couldn't keep up. By the time they reached middle school or high school they had to be dismissed from the program because it was impossible to keep up with the others. So, basically, time and money wasted.
29
We have twins. We initially put them in our local "affluent suburban" public school. One tests "gifted" but, unlike the children of a number of teachers, was not placed in the gifted programs until the school administration was pushed to explain the discrepancy and was not able to do so.
The other twin has learning disabilities but otherwise tested as normal. That child was "mainstreamed;" learned nothing with the modicum of "intervention" received and was considered "stupid" by peer students. We pulled that child out of public school and the child is flourishing at a specialized private school.
You can have all the gifted programs in the world, but it takes active and aggressive parental involvement to insure your child has a shot at them. And if your child is not perceived as "gifted," or worse yet has learning disabilities or is simply developing within a normal range but not as quickly as others; without active and aggressive parental involvement that child will in all likelihood be kicked to the educational curb and tracked into mediocrity.
These programs need to radically change. Every child has different needs and develops differently. With technology today, every child should be getting the best education for that child without regard to the phony labels the system creates to perpetuate these IQ caste systems. Also, continuous and aggressive parental involvement is essential. WIthout it, even the brightest children may not get a proper education.
13
@D. Smith
I would refer you to an earlier comment. "Haven't met a parent yet who does not have a gifted child".
It is the accommodation of parents such as yourself that makes a teaching career less attractive.
Thank heaven that most parents do feel that a school or school system should not revolve around their child or the parents demands.
You did the right thing. Take your child and move on.
Now you are someone else's headache.
2
@John Christoff
Presumably you are neither a teacher nor a parent. Your immediate assumption that being an advocate for a child in a bureaucratic system which is often focused on mechanistically pushing kids though requires making outlandish demands on teachers or administrators is incorrect.
Most teachers actively welcome parental involvement and commuications and recognize that errors occasionally occur in evaluating and placing students. Your assumption that such communications need to be heavy handed, are not supported by legitimate objective information, or are some narcissistic exercise by a parent is simply insulting. I am surprised tne NYT moderators let your comment through.
5
“Some experts say diversifying selective academic programs is not enough to address inequality in education. In fact, they argue that such programs should not exist at all. They point to research showing that low-performing students learn more when they attend classes alongside higher-performing peers, while the test scores of high performers do not suffer.”
Of course their test scores don’t suffer. Many high performing students could take these exams at the beginning of the academic year and ace them. When some students consistently score in the 98% percentile, standardized tests will show that student making little progress to increase their score. Almost all tests in school simply don’t represent or test the student’s abilities on the upper range.
16
I fear that policies like this, along with the Ivies admissions policies, will drive Asian Americans, a reliable Democratic Bloc, into the arms of the Republicans. Just as soon as the Republicans recover from their Trumpian folly and return to their Reaganite ideals.
The opening up to the entire population was good. Throwing out the cognitive test in favor of class room performance with the result that kids below grade level are in magnet schools makes a mockery of the idea of a gifted program in favor of social engineering. The fact that school demographics now closely matches population demographics is evidence to me that this was the actual goal. Perhaps the primary goal. If I were the parent of an excluded actual gifted kid (not by Lake Wobegon standards but a nationally accepted cognitive assessment) I'd be considering private schools and supporting voucher programs too. Nothing will motivate people to switch political parties faster than making them feel like their kids are being treated unfairly.
82
One can only look at Louisville KY. The only school system left with mandatory busing. It is achieving diversity but the students aren't learning a thing. Public schools are a mess.
11
Notice this new change doesn't hurt whites but an astonishing 8 percentage point drop among Asian Americans. Why? Because Asian Americans have the lowest political power in American politics and are basically used by the Democrats.
It's time for all Asian Americans to wake up to the fact that identity politics is anathema to them as a small but high achieving visible minority.
13
Uh, no, it's because the Asian Americans in Montgomery County are wealthy and connected. This system (rightly or wrongly) is designed to curb the influence of wealth and connection in gaming the selection system, and modify it for better demographic representation.
6
@Jonathan In the previous system, parents applied for the programs. The numbers:
Applicants/All students
White 24%/33%
AA 16.5%/20.8%
Hispanic 7.6%/26.8%
Asian 39.5%/14.6%
Now that 100% of the kids are tested. And high performing kids in under-performing schools are prioritized. I think it's great.
2
It’s because they lowered the standards for Whites to keep Asians out. Read the Harvard admissions lawsuit.
3
I agree with a lot of the content of this article around the need to diversify gifted ed. I do have an issue with the idea that gifted ed isn’t necessary, as justified by the quote, “They point to research showing that low-performing students learn more when they attend classes alongside higher-performing peers, while the test scores of high performers do not suffer.” Test scores are only one element of learning, which is a complex process. How about student interest and engagement, social concerns about fitting in with peers, and being able to pursue complex concepts in the classroom? Just because test scores don’t drop when gifted kids are with their peers doesn’t mean that gifted ed isn’t needed. Many gifted students find school boring because they constantly have to wait for their peers, or they can’t pursue a topic at the level of complexity they’re capable of pursuing.
12
I have yet to meet a parent who doesn't have a gifted child.
81
I actually met a lot of them, during the years that I've been teaching kids coming from low-income families.
The social environment in which both the parents and children tend to grow up, in those communities, is one created by the conception of "intelligence" that dominates our entire culture for more than a century now.
People have been told that school results of children are a reliable reflection of their innate intelligence and personal character, so if they don't like school or have bad results, especially parents of low-income families tend to conclude that their child must have bad genes, and that just like they themselves have no "talent" for studying etc.
In real life, however, it has been shown that children from families with highly educated parents get a totally different pedagogical environment at home, with parents constantly assuming that their kid will do well in school BECAUSE they did well, and who pay attention to what their kid learned in school that day, cultivate curiosity and a passion for learning, and teach crucial homework skills.
By doing so, they are providing exactly what a child needs in our current school system (based on elite schools in the 19th century...) to love studying and to thrive. So THOSE are the parents who spontaneously believe that they may have gifted children.
Parents of low-income families, on the contrary, can't believe this idea, and as a consequence are neither able nor willing to do at home what schools don't teach...
9
Gifted And Talented Education, GATE, originally was intended to include children who had talent in any one (or more) of multiple areas. Could be dance, art, etc. Measuring ability in most of those areas was very subjective and expensive. Many districts and states restricted admissions to GATE programs to IQ, which was easy to test.
When Black students were qualifying for GATE programs in very low percentages, educators and others objected to questions on the tests. Questions focused on skiing in St. Moritz were considered unfair to students who had never even heard of skiing. Schools started relying more on tests such as the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test. All students in third grade could be given these tests at a relatively low cost. The tests are based on shapes and patterns, very little language is required for the test. Unfortunately, the non-langauge-based tests generally gave the same results as the more language heavy tests they replaced. Some districts are just eliminating GATE programs, because programs based on tests such as the Naglieri skew so heavily towards white and Asian students.
Really smart kids should be given the chance learn faster and at more depth. Taking the top 10 percent of each school is not going to give you the brightest kids in your district. Standard, cheap IQ tests are not biased against any race or group of kids.
16
A true gifted program is based on one thing and one thing only: intellect. Not class performance, not wealth (high or low), not race, certainly not an absurd politically correct agenda. To be sure, the “intellect” measurement must occur in neutral ground - no pay to play private psychologists, they should be administered by the school, first written and then with a school psychologist for the top performers. Nobody below the 98th percentile of IQs should be allowed in. Parents need not worry about their child studying hard enough for a test because no amount of studying can materially impact a properly administered set of tests. Loosening these rules in any way is unfair to the inherently brilliant minds the program is meant for and is in turn a major disservice to society. Anybody who has ever met a TRULY gifted child knows how far beyond they are from your typical “A student”. Try funding the public schools properly and you won’t need to bastardize special needs programs to give everybody a fighting chance.
And, for the record, not of this prescription is a flight of fancy. It is precisely how a myriad of Canadian school boards do it.
27
Sadly, in my board and across the province, gifted programs no longer exist. In theory, classroom teachers are supposed to meet the needs of gifted students through differentiated instruction. In reality it never happens.
We have thrown gifted students under the proverbial bus. This is regrettable because these are precisely the type of minds that will help solve the challenges of the future.
The current obsession in Ontario education consists of indoctrinating students in the current sj ideologies of identity politics and making sure we look good on EQAO ( province wide standardized testing) scores.
We are not a beacon on a hill. Trust me.
8
I'm a G&T consultant. One of the most common misconceptions of cognitive giftedness is that usually the gifted do not produce at the level of their comprehension. There are numerous explanations for their gaps in productivity. One of them is asynchronous development: The fourth grader who reads at the college level--1500 lexile--but has poor executive functioning and cannot complete assignments on his or her own.
Super-intensity is another eccentricity many G&T students grapple with, and it often manifests itself as abject perfectionism. Last spring I had to calm a third grader down in between tests because she could not answer one question on the CogAT. She was hysterical. She scored in the 99th percentile.
The problem with this article and their ilk is that we know 'magnet' schools and gifted programs can make or break many children's futures because of our incredible disparities in wealth and the competition it creates. Were we to pay living wages to everyone rather than a select few, our society might recognize the values of being merely a good, participating citizen rather than earning much more than everyone else.
15
As long as we equate giftedness with a cultivated, supported, well-trained student, the gifted education system will never be truly equitable.
My oldest child is the ultimate learner. A voracious reader, dedicated and organized studier and lover of new challenges. She was scooped up by the districts G&T program at the start of 1st grade. She now is 2 years accelerated in math and gets nominated for every elite program offered by the school.
My youngest has ADHD. Barely pays attention. Turns in half-completed, crumpled assignments. Talks too much. Hates to read. Hates to apply himself. Was noticed by a sympathetic teacher in 2nd grade and nominated for the G&T program, despite all of the protestations of the other teachers who said he was not a good student and not G&T material. One teacher said flat out that he didn't, "deserve" the gifted designation.
Not surprisingly, my youngest child scored much higher on the measures of inherent intelligence, but all of the academic "spoils" go to the first kid who is excellent at playing the game of school. The reality is, the messy, bored, anti-social, tuned out kid is often the truly gifted kid. But none of the other parents want that sort of kid in the elite program, nor do the teachers...
63
@M This is exactly like my kids, except the 2nd is a girl. It REALLY sucks to be a girl with ADD. Her test scores look like an EKG. It all depends on the day... But she's hilarious and clever and, like many kids with ADD, very creative. She'll find her place! It just won't be anywhere near her "perfect" sister!
5
Let parents decide whether or not to put their kids in “gifted” classrooms, and then schools assign the number of seats/classes/school buildings needed to cover them. Give parents the expectations for reading level, homework, parental involvement, etc., i, as well as recommended minimum standardized test scores as compared to the “regular” classrooms. If more families want a more challenging educational environment, why deny it to them? They can transfer out of the program if they find it difficult to keep up. Make the offer open to everyone, with a stipulation that kids could be removed for disruptive behavior problems.
This is not my idea, but my experience. When my oldest son went through school, the schools decided which students would go to the gifted school, then which could take the honors and pre-AP courses in junior high. There was a lot of drama and stress. Kids got labeled early and lived down to it.
When my youngest went through school, they had eliminated the magnet school gifted program, but assigned one class per grade at every school (not overtly labeled) that supplemented the curriculum with more challenging material and extra assignments. Many more kids got the chance to work through difficult material and to think deeply and creatively. Beginning in 6th grade, all the kids got to decide whether to pursue regular or pre-AP tracks for each subject. No stress. No labeling as “talented” ... or “not.”
3
In the 1960s I did some of the earliest research on busing black children from Boston public schools to the white suburbs. The stresses (travel time, hostility, overt racism, increased academic competition) on the black kids were substantial, but even worse was the fact that the Boston schools had not remotely prepared their students to compete at the same grade levels as their peers in the suburbs.
Integration is a worthy goal, but it makes no sense to dumb down the entrance criteria for specialized or "elite" schools in order to meet some politically-defined and arbitrary racial quota. Doing this will lead to failure for many or even most of the students so admitted, and will force many teachers to teach down to the lowest common denominators. Specialized schools will also need to set up tutorials and remedial classes for the "challenged" students, which will require more funds and personnel.
All of the above steps may result in a few more minority students making it into and through the specialized schools; however, many of these students will then be stigmatized as the product of affirmative action rather than having been selected on merit.
Unfortunately, many parents whose qualified kids are shut out of the specialized schools are likely to move to the suburbs or send their kids to private school.
The (very expensive) answer is not to water down the selection criteria for the specialized schools, but to improve all schools. Now that would be leadership.
19
Every child is talented and gifted.
Funds should be distributed equally and taxes raised commensurately to ensure the finest education for every American child.
Anything less, is class war fare- and we of the lower orders are thouroighly tired of being trickled down upon-
Sincerely,
The illegitimate daughter of a teenage mother, born in the summer of 1968- trickled down upon since 1980.
2
"Gifted" programs, nationwide, are fairly broad in how they are defined. In a lot of schools, the "gifted" kids aren't necessarily more intelligent, but they are better students. They listen to the teachers, engage with them, don't require the rest of the class slow down so they can have the lesson explained one more time, and they are not disruptive. These are elementary things, but with newer social justice and equity initiatives, they get lost when people, like this reporter, only look at kids based on the color of their skin. If kids can be good students, regardless of race, they should be grouped together with good teachers. But I worry that this type of program that begins race-based decisions is simply gerrymandering.
8
Growing up, my teachers and parents recognized that I needed to be challenged but I failed to pass the “gifted” exam. I had to find my own outlets.
Years later I was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. I’m glad I didn’t let that test define my abilities - and I applaud efforts to be more inclusive so that children (especially from disadvantaged backgrounds) who want to be challenged have access to these kinds of programs.
5
Not passing the test doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. Passing it says nothing about your drive or ambition or work ethic.
Congratulations on things working out for you but that doesn’t mean this particular system is illegitimate or that there aren’t truly gifted children who benefit from its integrity.
I thought that public education meant the best education for ALL children, not for just the so called "gifted." I would like to remind the over- anxious parents of these genius kids that Albert Einstein never attended a gifted program and did rather well without one. Some children physically grow up fast and others have growth spurts later on. The same is true for intellect, curiosity and a passion for learning. Please stop this push, shove and trample my kid ahead into the Ivies philosophy that some parents have. We are a democracy and we can and should provide the best opportunities for all of our children.
14
This is a sad state of affairs. I think all children are gifted. To presume a small few deserve special education is a ridiculous and polarizing thought. It showcases the dismal state of public education. This is a reflection of both, the calibre of teachers capable of disseminating science and math especially at the elementary school levels where very few teachers have a background in STEM, and the fact that parents are far removed from their childs education. Every elementary school needs to employ specialized math and science teachers for every class starting kindergarten. There are plenty of parents who could help the teachers out with either teaching a particular topic or with good material, I have noticed, teachers are resentful of such overtures and very defensive. A lot of material they use is mostly recycled and terrible information from outdated teacher websites. Universities and government agencies do a good job getting good teaching material out. Teachers do a good job sending links which they almost never use. This I believe is the prime reason kids are not 'gifted'. Get them teachers like the amazing people on Jeopardy and watch the kids all do fantastic stuff with knowledge. Don't segregate the population for no reason. Make all schools evolve.
"With a more diverse student body, not every child performed above grade level, Ms. Petrola said."
So I guess it's not really a program for gifted kids anymore.
15
Every school should be a magnet school. Too often it is used to segregate students.
The whole reason for having academically advanced classes for children has been upset by parental ambitions and political intentions.
First, only trained, professional educators should be involved in curricula decisions for specific students. Edit out parents and interest groups.
Second, the level of teaching for the mainstream classrooms should be challenging for ALL students.
The only reason for advancing certain students in gifted classes is because their NEEDS ARE NOT BEING MET in the mainstream classes.
Few students belong in this category: you will know them when you see them getting frustrated, angry, troublesome, or bored.
In addition, with the use of biennial achievement tests (e.g. the Iowa tests), conscientious students should also qualify for advanced classes.
IQ tests have been gamed, misapplied, and misunderstood. The definition of genius is producing something ingenius; no test can identify it. IQ tests reflect the ideas of the test makers, who are overwhelmingly academically advantaged, male, and Anglo.
Give the process of education back to the educators. The schools have been off the rails for generations, because of the dumbing down and de-professionalization of our system of education.
Yes, I'm an educator, as well as a parent. And yes, I've raised kids who have been in advanced classes, and I've raised a minority "dreamer" who was ignored, but whom I helped qualify for the gifted program he needed.
3
I graduated from HS in Howard County (right next to Montgomery) in '09 and grew up going to public schools there. It was difficult for me. I got bullied. I'd hide a book under my desk and read in class. There were a lot of calls home. Teachers told me I wouldn't be successful. It all seemed pointless, I was depressed, and at times I wanted to drop out. In a worse school system I think I might have.
I ended up taking 11 APs in my last 2 years of high school and got the highest possible score on all but one AP test. Life has only gotten better since.
For me, the "gifted" classes really did change the trajectory of my life. But what made them a godsend was mostly just that the teachers and students actually wanted to be there and learn difficult material.
Montgomery County's aims are admirable. But weighting class performance highly in admission to "gifted" programs will overlook kids like me who belong there but can't demonstrate "gifted" performance normally. Many "normal" classrooms are in fact pathological.
The just thing to do is make "gifted" education available to any child who wants it and who will not disrupt other children's learning in a "gifted" environment. "gifted" education doesn't have to cost more, and these programs don't have to be exclusive. Anything short of this is simply denying a better education to kids who want it.
17
@Max
I totally agree. Why are gifted slots so limited. If you have kids who qualify, why not teach them at that level?
8
I think it positive that educators are trying to expand the definition of who is "gifted." But from my experience and reading, there is a very small group of student who percolate to the top far beyond their peers at an early age (in abstract reasoning, and, for example, for doing such things as double digit addition and carrying in one's head at age 5 and reading and writing in pre-K) and they greatly benefit from school work that challenges and engages them. Sort of the other end of the spectrum from those with special needs who also need a more specialized curriculum and instruction. The vast majority - maybe 85% -90% of students - will thrive in regular schools that have a variety of enrichment levels for the variety of levels of learning of the kids who attend.
10
I am glad they are moving towards testing that does not rely merely may be heavily dependent on language, social status, parental education,and wealth. But I agree that if the identified kids cannot catch up within a certain period - which the schools can determine - perhaps they need to be placed back in regular schooling.
I grew up mostly poor, with a mother who did not speak English. She valued education and supported us in the best way she could (e.g making sure we had a place/ time to study, a life with as little turmoil as possible) but she was simply overworked and did not have the time/ schedule to make help us with our homework, make sure we were completing it, etc. much less buy books or classes to prepare us for any tests. During my schooling, my mother never went to a single parent-teacher conference.
Nevertheless, I was identified by my teachers and enrolled in gifted programs starting from 1st grade after taking an intelligence test. Within those gifted programs, I was still above the math/ reading levels of my peers so my teachers would find individualized materials for me. Based on system-wide standardized academic testing when I was 12, I ended up in a university summer program and then eventually ended up starting university full-time in my teens.
I support the new testing schools are trying out because they will help identify disadvantaged kids like me but the kids do still need to perform above grade level eventually.
6
One complicating factor that is not addressed by the article is that one of the original intents of the magnet programs was in fact to diversify/desegregate the County, raise the profile of under-resourced schools, and draw more parent and private resources to those schools. The PTA budget for middle schools in the wealthier portions of MoCo is easily $90,000 per year. By contrast, the PTA budget for one of the Humanities middle school is $11,000-$12,000. Much of that budget is funded by donations from magnet parents from wealthier parts of the County. 2/3s of the school is non-magnet, and over half of the school is on a free or reduced meal program. In other words, by bringing magnet students into an under resourced school, these programs also bring more resources. It is not just money - research shows that wealthier families have more time to volunteer too. It simply is easier to volunteer if you can afford childcare in order to attend PTA events, or if you can afford to have one stay at home parent who volunteers regularly. That volunteer time is free labor for the schools. It is a complicated issue and there is no easy solution.
6
Opening selection for G&T magnet programs to all students is an important place to start. It's true that in many school districts students are tested only if their parent or teacher enrolls them for the testing. Ultimately a lot of smart kids get missed due to factors such as bias (discussed in the article) and parents who aren't as savvy to the ends and outs of school programs.
I did not attend a magnet school but was lucky enough to be selected for my school's G&T pullout program in middle school (a teacher recommended I test for it). I flourished in this program with its focus on curiosity and creativity and no grading system. I disliked most other subjects in school and don't think I would have done well in accelerated versions of my regular classes. It wasn't until college that I was able to rediscover that love of learning that I had in the G&T classes. I wish that all children had access to these kinds of programs that make learning an end in itself and not just a means to proving yourself worthy of a letter grade.
3
Hi! I'm a senior in high school in MCPS. I'm white and I've been in the accelerated programs since fourth grade. I can attest to their effectiveness- and the fact that they're overwhelmingly white and Asian.
My high school is roughly 25% white, black, Latino, and Asian. I know this is quite rare and I've learned so much from my fellow students who share their varied backgrounds and experiences in class. But it's impossible not to notice that the majority of honors, AP, and accelerated classes are in no way representative of the school at large.
Reading this article, I had to ask myself- would younger Adelaide have been accepted into the fourth-grade program in 2018? It's impossible to know for sure but I imagine that I would have different friends, studied different subjects, and may be applying to different colleges if I was rejected. But here's the kicker: my parents have the time, experience, and resources to have helped me anyways.
Reading this article (as well as the recent piece in Education Weekly about algebra tracking) reminded me that advanced programs can serve multiple purposes. Yes, they exist to provide a space for students to learn at a faster pace and to dive deeper into subject material. But I do believe in giving help first to those who need it most. In this case, that may be communities who have been long denied the opportunities others have. It's too late to go back and edit the policies of the past but if change can be made, it must be.
25
Fair enough, but if we’re going to help those who need it most then let’s get rid of the notion that these programs are necessarily for high achieving students. For better or worse they are for whatever students politicians have decided to focus on that day.
@Sarah No, they are for high achieving kids in under-performing schools.
l systems as they function could get rid of teachers who are not teaching in an engaging, rigorous, differentiated way, then there really would not be a need for all of these "gifted" programs.
Because schools cannot fire teachers for not begin great (and they should be), then this is a school districts only recourse to address their needs. They create all of these programs with different tests and points of entry so that they can present them as "options" for their students.
The "Excellence Gap" is a perfect way for defining this problem. It is not that students are not achieving (for the most part) but rather they are moving through dull and slow-paced classes. It requires a lot of skill on the part of a teacher to execute what is described above, but certainly there are people who do it.
I support unions. But we need to have a system within the union that allows administrators to identify teachers who are just not that good at teaching. Currently that is not enough to remove a teacher from a district. Can you imagine trying to implement a whole new standard at a business but not being able to weed out people who are incapable of falling in line with the new standard of doing business? That is what is happening in education.
We need to place the focus squarely and relentlessly on teacher quality and demand that it is present in every classroom for every child.
4
Your typical elementary classroom is going to have at least 10 percent or greater students with special needs — autism, emotional disturbance, learning disabilities, ADD, physical disabilities, severe peanut allergy (and a parent who demands lots of cleaning and that teacher use an EpiPen), maybe a kid who needs help using the restroom, maybe one or more disabilities. All are mainstreamed. Some have aides to help but others might not. Some of these kids may actually physically attack the teacher. The principal is breathing down their necks to get test scores up for the low performers. When exactly are they supposed to find time to differentiate instruction? It would be like coming up with individualized lesson plans for a dozen kids. It would take a super woman to do that well. Gifted ed. probably should be a separate program entirely for kids who are actually gifted.
9
Education scarcities are artificial. Each child has many different kinds of potential simultaneously. So educational institutions are selective by limiting every child's potential in some ways.
In the meantime, each child is responding to her environment, so that it does not make sense to regard her talents as entirely her own, like her property or capital. It is mostly because of standardization of environments that we think that some skills define being "intelligent."
In the end, parents of gifted students are the most important part of their children's environment anyway. So it should not be surprising that high-performing students still get high test scores when they attend classes alongside lower performing students.
5
The local school district just transitioned back to self contained gifted classrooms for kids with the highest scores on a test in two subjects. Kids at the next lowest level will be bused to the school for enrichment one day a week and their regular teachers will receive instruction in how to support enrichment. The next lowest level of kids were placed in clustered classrooms with teachers who had special training. Gifted ed. teachers call this the gold standard. Prior to that, they sent gifted ed. teachers out to the elementaries to work with regular classroom teachers. The guiding belief was that “all kids are gifted.” That actually is not the case. A truly gifted kid is as different from a kid with average intelligence as the average kid is from one who has an intellectual disability. Gifted kids are entitled to learn something new every day and to make significant educational progress each year, even if it means they are ahead of other kids in the class. I have my doubts that this school is going to truly serve truly gifted kids.
10
"The district now gives less weight to the Cognitive Abilities Test" says it all -- ignore the needs of the gifted and discriminate against Asians for the crime of doing well in school.
The right thing to do of course would have been to give an IQ test to all children, and then put the brightest children in classes appropriate to their needs. Every study finds that intellectually gifted children thrive in such an environment. And it is an excellent way to rescue gifted black and Hispanic children from underperforming schools as well, since it requires no special knowledge or action on the parents' part.
But instead of a fair approach, they chose to discriminate against gifted children who are of the wrong race.
19
@Josh Hill: better idea -- put the real money and effort into REGULAR CLASSES.
Very few kids are Mozart or Einstein.
Separating elite kids out this way is the problem.
Everyone I know has all their kids in "Gift & Talented" and it seems to mean little more than "upper middle class". Now it will mean "affirmative action".
Both are false.
Invest in average kids, and work to make school as good -- creative and innovative -- as possible FOR EVERYONE.
1
Schools should have multiple pathways for students and offer honors programs etc for the high achieving students. Entirely pulling out high achieving students into "gifted" schools does not make sense at all and limits opportunities across the boards.
A very small percentage of us are 'truly gifted' and may truly need an alternative setting. No offense to Montgomery County but I doubt such a high percentage of your children really fall into this category.
11
In K-12 we did not have gifted programs. I was lucky enough to have supportive parents and to attend superior schools for a fair part of my elementary and junior high school time. I hated the boring Kindergarten because I already read at the 3rd grade level. In 7th grade I went to my math teacher and told him I was bored out of my skull and could I move ahead. He sent me to the principal and the Principal told me that if the teacher was willing to have me work individually and my parents agreed, then go for it. In seventh and eighth grade I did the 7th, 8th, Algebra, Geometry and Algebra II texts and entered Trigonometry as a freshman in high school.
I graduated from high school in less than 2.5 years because I had taken all of the challenging classes that were available. I usually was in class reading something of my own choosing and participated in discussions and corrected teachers politely when there were incorrect items.
The most useful learning experiences I had were often in classes like Ag Mechanics and individual studies projects, but as the oddball both in the rural high school and the city and suburban elementary and middle schools, I had never fit in. This was not a problem from my perspective because I knew I was different already. But I really enjoyed helping other students learn and I learned how to teach in a supportive manner.
The MOST important things for education are support and drive. Whether a star student or a challenged one.
4
@Organic Vegetable Farmer - you didn't fit in in your high school, but what if you had a high school filled with students like you? I went to the elite math/science magnet school in Montgomery County, and the coursework you describe was routine for an entering freshman, not extraordinary. Can you imagine if, instead of being bored all the time, you were being challenged constantly by your teachers and your peers? Would your perception of the value of high school change?
I very much agree with the diversification efforts, but the experience I had as a magnet student so many years ago was a blessing.
1
As a foreign born mother (with a PhD) of 2 children now attending good public schools in the US, I can attest to the fact that the idea of gifted is entrenched deeply in the school concept of students.
In my country of origin, tests are naturally hard, and so only a few students get everything close to right. No one is bored.
In the US, teachers are constrained to teach for standartized tests, and so classroom tests are easy, homework is easy, everything is easy and you stride along with your leveled group until adulthood, when you suffer the consequences of knowing or not how to write and add.
Cognitive tests are bogus - more and more we know that intelligence is epi-genetic, and that children respond to expectations and to early learning experiences. I find it almost abusive to label some children gifted and others not (unless they are going to college).
I teach my children that the important thing is to practice, they have extra-homework, and my 4 year old already knows how to read simple sentences and how to add with her fingers. My 7 year old increased her reading level after I exposed her to chapter books she was actually interested on.
I worry about all the parents that buy this fictitous distinction between gifted/not-gifted and don't invest on their children. This is an idea that is more American than universal.
13
I think it's time to re-examine the entire "gifted" idea. My impression is that schools for the gifted, for example the Thomas Jefferson school in N. Va., cost an inordinate amount of money compared to "normal" high schools. Do the graduates of Thomas Jefferson, or any "gifted" institution do measurably better in any real sense than the top 5% or 10% of any good high school? My sense, based on limited personal experience, is that children are preped and pushed into these gifted schools largely by parents with high expectations. The children get a great education which leads to a good college education, and then they perform just about like all of us. That is, there is no "gifted" magic, success takes hard work and focus whether you graduated from Thomas Jefferson or were in the top 5% or 10% of a good high school. All the money spent on special facilities for the "gifted" might be better spent on AP and other courses in ordinary high schools and the children that are legitimately gifted will do just as well.
9
My own experience is that programs for "gifted and talented" have only a very minor impact on future academic and career achievements. Our own two sons never were selected for these programs for our school district (CCISD in Houston) but both went to Ivy League schools, got MBAs from Stanford and are doing well in their careers. In the meantime, many of their peers in school who were selected for the gifted programs have severely under-achieved.
9
I have lived for 27 years of my professional life in the wealthiest part of Montgomery County, MD, where a friend of Afro-Carribean descent lived and enrolled her children in elementary public school. When her son was in the third grade, she and her Afro-Caribbean husband were surprised that their always academically talented son was not chosen to sit for the exam to enter the county's gifted and talented program. When the mom inquired about this decision, the school allowed her son to sit for the exam (the speed with which the school agreed with the mom to reverse its original decision indicates to me that the original decision was not an innocent oversight). The irony is that he was the only 3rd grader from his school that year who scored high enough to enter the gifted and talented program and his elementary school was able to use his high score to promote the qualities of the elementary school to other families.
Racial discrimination hurts every member of the community, including privileged African-American children, and schools whose biases can squelch talent. The family of this 3rd grader eventually enrolled him and his siblings in private school. I never asked my friend whether it was because of what I viewed as a racially-motivated experience with the Montgomery County, MD Public Schools that she took her children out of public school, but it had to have been a factor. Montgomery County, pls vote Democratic in November for an inclusive future.
8
@B PC
This sounds so much like my experience in a different state. We were thwarted at every turn by our local school district when we attempted to get our children tested for GT programs and enrolled in classes that would ensure they could take AP classes later on. One child was already GT identified at our previous district in the same state. The new school refused to accept those results and deployed every delaying tactic so testing would not be done. When they finally tested they seemed shocked but had to accept him into the program. Kid 2 we waged a three year battle for testing but were told she was just “average” despite evidence to the contrary. By the time they tested her (and accepted her into program) we were tired and had decided to move them to private school. Both graduated with honors from Ivy League schools and I tell them doing well is the best revenge. Testing is not as fair and unbiased and easy to access as some commenters seem to think. I’ve heard of abuses in our district- one neighbor said her kid was tested several times during a year until they got the required score.
4
25 years ago my son was accepted by test score to a new middle school program called GEM: Gifted Education in Mathematics. It demanded a high level of achievement in an accelerated curriculum and those kids thrived! It was not intended to be aspirational. These students mixed with all ability levels in Language Arts, social studies, science and art and some, but not all, were successful in those studies too. Maybe we need to work harder to recognize and nurture a narrower definition of gifted.
3
I believe kids should be able self-select into challenge courses - with the ability to move back to a regular class after 4 weeks if they find the work too hard.
We switched high schools after one of my kids was not accepted into the AP (advanced placement) courses he wanted at our home high school. He was judged not to meet the criteria. We moved to an IB (international baccalaureate) school which allowed students to self-select in. He graduated from Stanford in 4 years with a masters and an undergraduate degree and a 3.9 GPA. He wasn't a pre-med student, but he took the more challenging pre-med bio/chem courses to challenge himself and aced them all.
Evidence suggests he would have done fine in the AP courses. If we had let the teacher who evaluated his fitness dictate his high school options - he would have had a very different future.
Teacher judgement is fallible. Effort (grit) goes a long way for a motivated student. Let kids try - and decide for themselves whether they can keep up with requirements.
Don't put up false gates. If demand for advanced courses exceed supply -expand the supply without backing down on requirements until students find their own level based on capabilities and effort.
29
Children can be gifted in different ways. We should be looking for ways for each student to reach her potential.
Bring back art, music, dance in the schools. Languages, literature, poetry, but also graphic novels, comics. Technology, science, math, but also shop, cooking, sewing.
With more variety in the curriculum I am sure we would find many more gifted and talented students.
15
Fortunately, I attended Nottingham Convent of the Sacred Heart in Buffalo (a sister school to NYC's 91st Street). The entire curriculum, and the school itself, was challenging, interesting and fun. But even there, we had gifted classes, particularly in literature, in which I participated. I loved it all. A great school will support each of its students and find a way for all to succeed.
4
It's pretty sad that we have reduced our children to their demographic selves. If Americans stopped caring so much about status, elitism and being woke, and starting actually caring about the children they are supposed to be teaching, wouldn't they then be creating enough gifted classes and schools for all gifted children, and insuring no school has sub par educational programs?
I can't believe race and a student's ability to get into Harvard are the biggest issues facing education these days. Focus instead on lack of funding for repair and renovation of school buildings, for replacement of teaching material and equipment, and higher wages for teachers, on hiring excellence, innovative learning programs, and insuring every child has the opportunity for an excellent education.
17
There's lots of white gifted poor children and you never see scholarships for them - I suppose you can't say white as it would be seen as racism but it's ok to say scholarships for black gifted children. Shouldn't be based on ethnicity as being 'poor' doesn't have an ethnicity or colour.
27
Cue to the white and Asian parents deserting the public schools because they feel the level of instruction isn't good enough, leaving the public schools with the same problems as before.
20
So it continues - the dumbing down of our schools, jobs and country in the name of affirmative action. Children who belong in gifted programs don’t need an “enrichment course” to qualify.
Merit matters, not the color of your skn. This is racism. Liberals/leftists/socialists refuse this concept and here we are.
61
@Olivia
As a liberal, I'm ashamed to admit that you're right.
I'm a Sanders supporter who believes in just about every liberal cause from abortion rights to saving the whales. But dumbing down our schools and destroying opportunities have nothing to do with the kind of liberalism I grew up with, or support.
That kind of liberalism seeks to extend equal opportunity to all children, not to pretend that a student who isn't even at grade level is "gifted."
Somehow, we've lost the ideal of fairness that made City College the "Harvard of the working class" in the days when it was selective and free, as opposed to the worthless institution it became under open admissions.
The irony is that the rich can always send their kids to private school, where they will receive an appropriate education.
It's the gifted children of modest means who suffer from this.
15
Merit does matter. That's why it's so important to look for kids who are gifted even if they don't speak English at home, go to good schools, or have parents who know how to work the system. The kids who are outliers in poor schools despite the odds aren't getting into these programs because of racism, they're finally being recognized despite racism.
@Josh Hill I am happy to hear there are others who share this view. Thank you.
Gifted programs should be for gifted children, not social engineering.
89
Exactly. Gifted children, not privileged children. The kids in this article are gifted. There's a lot of kids taking up spots in gifted programs who come from nice families who work the system and speak fluent standard English, but aren't gifted. Working to maintain the status quo is a shameful example of social engineering, that this program is working to change.
2
Gifted at what though? It may be true that all students are gifted at something but then these programs become meaninglessly broad and hopelessly unfair. If we want to put standards on entry then we should make the program relevant to those standards and vice versa. It used to be test performance and accelerated curriculum. Those go together. Now it’s enrichment, and on what basis can you decide who is eligible for enrichment or not? This is how the program becomes arbitrary, gets diluted and ultimately becomes useless.
I support automatically considering all students for entry. That is a good change. Introducing more intangibles and having students that can’t perform at level is not.
It's too bad any gifted child should be left out of a selective school or program for gifted student. Why not test children every year and then make sure to hire enough teachers and have enough seats to include all gifted children in these classes? For low income gifted children, it's their only way out of sub par school programming.
14
@Una Rose: how about making REGULAR classes for AVERAGE kids equally interesting, challenging and creative? and not just for the "elite smart kids"?
1
My son was offered a seat in a Montgomery County highly gifted program. I attended a meeting for parents to learn about the program, and found I was the only parent asking questions about the curriculum. I didn't like what I heard, so we declined the spot and our son has been fine in "regular" school, with teachers who accommodate his learning needs creatively. All the other parents' questions were about logistics, like bus schedules; they seemed to think a school labeled gifted would automatically be better. My conclusion is that a lot of parents see a gifted designation as a status symbol and don't see beyond that.
36
I concur. I had a similar situation: kids in a school for gifted learners but the curriculum wasn’t nearly as rigorous as I had hoped particularly as they got older. And to me it seemed parents wanted their kids in the school for the ability to brag that their kids were in a school for the gifted.
4
@Tamar R. Odd assumption to make ... I am from MoCo as well. Many parents I knew had already educated themselves on the curriculum and had talked to parents and students who had been in the program in prior years. The ones who were asking logistical questions may already have done their homework about curriculum. If you had, you would have learned that there are significant differences between what the local schools offer and the magnets. And had you surveyed parents with gifted kids whose child went to local school, as our Center class did, you would have found much discontent with the local offerings at even the highest performing schools. That is not to say that your decision was wrong - and the new pilot program to offer more enrichment at non-magnet schools (which this article doesn’t mention) is very promising. But I don’t know why you would be so quick to make assumptions about parents you do not know.
3
Maybe they already did their homework
1
Ms Petrola states, "Anybody from any diverse background can be gifted." Where does Ms Petrola live? I had no idea that Lake Woebegone was located in Montgomery County MD now. All the students are not just "above average", now they're all "gifted"! Who knew?
Having seen what has happened to the Advance Program. When it was started, it was truly a "gifted" program. Over the years, the requirements for admission got lower, then it became available only in certain schools in a "cluster" and was one for math in Grades 3-5. In 2014, it was totally changed, and for all practical purposes, no longer exists on the elementary school level. Thank goodness this happened after my two grandsons were out of elementary school.
Now, the MST magnet middle school they attended is under attack - admission criteria is being lowered for "under-represented minorities". The outstanding magnet HS is also under attack but so far has survived. Whether my younger grandson will get through the next 3 years before it is decimated, remains to be seen.
A truly gifted child is not just disciplined and hard-working. In fact, some are neither, often due to boredom. My eldest grandson is a freshman in the engineering school of an Ivy and is over the moon over his classes - he says they are the most interesting and challenging classes he's ever taken. H can't wait to do his homework as it is exciting and challenging.
It should be this way K-12 for all gifted students.
15
@India - It seems pretty clear that she's saying race and background don't mean someone CAN'T be gifted, not that ALL kids are gifted.
I attended Stuyvesant, and before that, I was hand-picked by my teacher to attend a specialized junior high school.
My parents knew little about Stuyvesant or what it took to get in (more common a number of years ago). I decided to take the exam with no preparation.
Going to my junior high school was based solely on my 6th-grade teacher's discretion; mostly related to in-class achievement. The JHS taught advanced math and pushed us to read more advanced books; both needed for the high school exam I later passed.
So, I've seen both approaches. And in my experience both approaches work--but only at grade-appropriate levels.
At younger grades, high achieving students at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum could benefit from going to special programs. These programs could pull from all schools relatively evenly, and they could prepare their students for more rigorous gifted programs later on, based on entrance exams, thus leveling out the field for high-school.
But giftedness is different from in-school achievement and the two don't always coincide. Often, gifted students are bored, bullied, or even disruptive when younger. Likewise, hard workers and good listeners can do well in a regular school setting but may struggle to do mental gymnastics that their high-intelligence peers find doable.
Gifted students, when together, tend to excel, in my experience and would benefit from being together in a very challenging high school in preparation for college.
40
@Frank Scully As a fellow Stuy grad, I agree. Basing giftedness on grades and academic achievement is an insult to the incredible capacity of the human mind. Unfortunately, many people conflate the two and protest when the scope is expanded for admissions to high prestige programs. Being good test takers, doesn't make a child "gifted."
5
35 years ago my children attended school in a Texas district that had a Gifted and Talented program that identified children through testing upon recommendation by a teacher or counselor. The chosen few were then pulled out of regular classes for "enriched" activities several times a month. As a school volunteer, I was invited to attend the training session for teachers who taught those sessions. All the educational and instructional theory presented in that training could just as easily been used to adapt the curricula for every child in the district but it wasn't because a subset of parents from wealthy Anglo neighborhoods demanded the district have an elite program. Teachers attempting to nominate low-income and minority kids reported their nominations were ignored. What a shame things have changed so little in 35 years.
25
This article demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the purposes of identifying (diagnosing) the gifted and attempting to meet their needs (see http://sengifted.org/). The public schools are going in the wrong direction and appropriating a needed resource for their own purposes. It is shameful
13
As someone who was able to take advantage of these programs, they can be a mixed bag of enrichment. However, I think the whole notion of grade level needs to be abolished. That would go a long way toward addressing inequities and get rid boredom for high achieving students. Design progressive curricula and occasionally evaluate progress to bring up proficiency. Allow kids to master things and move on at their own pace.
13
If you try the paper folding question on the quiz by folding a piece of paper, you'll see that the given answer showing four spots is incorrect. The answer with only two spots is correct.
"6 of 8
See how the paper is folded and changed. Select the picture that shows how the paper looks when it is opened."
This raises the question of whether that incorrect answer came from the Times, or was provided by the test generator, and whether it appears on an actual test.
I'd find it very interesting if the Mr. Goldstein and the other quiz authors would address the issue of incorrect answers on standardized tests..
4
@David Beierl Ummmm, sorry, 4 holes bud.
8
So high expectations on the so-called gifted and lower expectations on the rest of the children. A glass ceiling of sorts.
And the rest- what do they get?
In addition to race, culture and gender, there are many other factors why kids do not perform at higher levels. If one really wants the best for kids, then all kids need lifting up and therefore, money spent should be distributed to help all children.
All kids have potential. Some children have additional important factors, unseen and unseen, that hold them back from those potentials.
To name factors would take pages, but experts in social science know, such as, parents working multiple jobs, parental mental illness, dysfunction in the home- contributing to neglect of the child emotionally and academically. Performance, attention and interest in school, as a result, is brought to lower intellectually capable levels.
We need to nurture all our children, not just a few.
7
In my experience as a teacher, everyone wins when teachers present enriched curricula to "regular" students. Restricting the most interesting and challenging material to those deemed "special" enough to deserve it, is a form of discrimination in itself.
65
@Kristin
I have a 15 year-old friend with an IQ of 177 who speaks with the sophistication of an unusually intelligent graduate student. We discuss Hegel at an age when the average kid is reading Gossip Girl. How the hell can you teach regular students at his level? They'd be lost by the third word.
5
I find this whole process nauseating. As a child, my local public schools were subpar, so my parents sent me to a highly regarded private school. Every year I was there, my grades got worse - primarily because I was unhappy, burnt out and had no time to figure out who I was. I dropped out of college, left the country and spent time having fun and becoming creative. This led to a Masters degree at Harvard and me becoming a successful, self-employed person. I believe in myself, I believe in my kids and I think all of this hand-wringing over excellence, "giftedness" etc is so short sighted and unwarranted. Better to focus on bringing adequate education to the masses than worry about how some kid in Bethesda with two parents for Doctors can get into an Ivy...
130
Gifted programs with non-gifted students is ridiculous, no matter the reason. It's another retelling of Vonnegut's classic short story "Harrison Bergeron." Shackle the gifted, so that they are not so gifted. Let's get our kids some lead weights and siren-earphones.
Another issue: modern K-12 school environments are less suited for boys, proven by empirical research. If we link gifted programs to "class performance" (as stated in the article) rather than cognitive ability, then are we punishing boys?
Gifted programs should be abilities-based. Anything less obviates the meaning of "gifted." If we want to address structural shortcomings amongst diverse student bodies, then I submit it has to happen earlier, and elsewhere in the curriculum. Not here.
102
@Gideon Strazewski
As a parent of boys in Bethesda, MD/MCPS, I share your concern that boys get disadvantaged in this process. However, I also unequivocally applaud the move to now test all 2nd/3rd graders (shockingly overdue) and to reduce bias in the system by increasing the number of programs in less privileged parts of this diverse, massive county. This move revealed a need for a more challenging curriculum for several thousand new students than the county historically plans for. I agree that the a strong curriculum and quality teaching across the board are key to an equitable and successful system. Kudos MCPS!
Most of all, I agree with your point that GT education should really be focused on meeting the needs of students who cannot thrive or come close to meeting their potential in a rigorous, though typical classroom environment. We must not forget that these outcomes look different in more disadvantaged populations, therefore, straight comparison cannot be an effective measure.
I’ve heard of parents who invest in test prep for these 2nd/3rd grade exams. While this felt feels egregious at odds with my notion of “meritocracy,” it’s the corollary to the opportunities of more resource-advantaged ivy-caliber educated families. Just the availability of books and discourse in the home milieu can confer many benefits. This effort is another, more bottom-up way to try and reduce the steep grade of the playing field.
1
As a teacher at an advanced studies academy, the benefits of grouping our most "gifted" students is very clear in the levels of instruction and academics that our students can engage in. We produce numerous perfect ACT scores and National Merit Scholars from our population. These children and their parents compete mercilessly to rise to the top of the academic ladder.
However, what I notice is lost amongst our children (as well as their parents) is the understanding that a real education and the ultimate purpose of public schools in our society is much larger than the ability to score well on a test. The purpose of public education is to develop citizens who are critical thinkers, inquirers and are reflective in their learning. Instead, we only teach the value of education as how well kids can take a test, which tends to disproportionately benefit children with family means to pay a psych to administer a gifted test.
Education is freedom. It is the freedom to determine your own future, the meaning of your life and the world around you. By placing our kids in these pressure cooker environments, we are teaching them that education enslaves. I very much believe that if we balanced our content education with the character education afforded by mixing the haves and have nots in more traditional neighborhood schools, the real purpose of education could reemerge.
In the meantime though, I certainly know which type of school I'd only want to teach at... and I'm already here.
29
One factor not brought into this the discussion is the social networks and "play dates" outside of school. I bet the segregation there still persists because people choose their friends. Elite summer camps, weekend trips to exotic locals or experiences, internships at mom's startup for her kids friends etc will do more to advance inequality than anything else going forward. Money always wins and kids from poorer backgrounds will be excluded from these gains because the freedom to associate will undo the integration in the classroom. I've seen this in my own life.
8
All I know, is that in WI, it really doesn't matter if your child is flagged as gifted or not. There is no "program" for your child to be a part of anyway -- at least not in the school district that we are part of. Really the legislative focus and energy seems on how more taxpayer money can be given to private schools where many republicans in the state (who have school-age children) send their children, esp. private religious schools (see: Dale Kooyenga (R) - Brookfield) rather than providing appropriate educational opportunities to all kids within the public school system, including identifying GT and funding appropriate learning opps.
17
My daughter was tested for gifted in kindergarten after recommendations from her teacher and the speech teacher who interviewed her for only an hour. She was given an IQ test all subsets of which she ceilinged out. At a later date she was estimated by her tester to be in the 160's. These kids are definitely 'different' and learn differently.
She attended a gifted elementary school for three years but we ultimately homeschooled so I could offer her a more individual program on a college level in high school. That worked better for us than a gifted magnet program. Both her grandparents attended gifted magnet programs in Manhattan (Hunter and Stuyvesant). There is a great difference between gifted students no matter what group is involved and private schools aren't necessarily set up for that.
After being referred to by another student as 'retarded' because of the differences I had to do something to make sure that she never felt bad for being exceptionally gifted.
69
@LAB
Sounds like you made the right choice. (we did about the same) It's a tough call to make, since 2E kids, or what would amount to the underachieving gifted in some circumstances, are quite different from the high achievers or good students that are common in GT programs. We found it came down to the inability of programs to teach individualized instruction rather than still try to group them all together but just give them higher workloads. But individualized instruction is going to cost more money, and as we know, our society isn't valuing teachers or education right now as a priority. It's quite distressing.
5
@LAB
It's unfortunate, that accommodations are not made for exceptionally gifted children.
Using a 16 SD scale, less than 1 in 10,000 children have an IQ above 160. Probably enough to fill 1 or 2 small K-12 schools in NJ.
I have known about 2 kids in that category, neither public schools nor gifted school suit them. They require special handling and peers
3
@LAB
Exactly. Your daughter was not gifted, but *extremely* gifted and even standard gifted classes aren't appropriate for such kids. She is lucky that you were able to homeschool her at an appropriate pace. Kids with IQ's above 160 need a program that is suited specifically to their needs.
Profoundly gifted kids with IQ's above 180 are even more remarkable. These are the kids who know ancient Greek and calculus at age 6 -- the Mozarts, the Gausses, the Von Neumanns. They can easily do college level work when they're of elementary school age.
People should try imaging being an adult in kindergarten class to get an idea of what school is like for these kids -- and then realize that for some of them, it is even worse than that.
3
“ 'For those of us who live with and raise and deal with these highly gifted students, we also want these classrooms to be offering what they need,' she said. If challenging instruction is not available, she added, she and other parents might enroll their children in private school."
This is blatant elitism. If these parents can afford to send their children to private schools, they should do that instead of displacing students who can't afford exclusive schooling.
Furthermore, "gifted" programs are nothing more than a status symbol for the well-to-do. Frankly, it wouldn't hurt their kids to remain in regular classrooms where they can be an asset to the students who need extra help.
How about teaching your children to share their "gifts" instead of isolating them in a pediatric think tank?
15
@magpie
Kids whose IQs are beyond two standard deviations of the mean should frankly be treated as special needs.
Google terms like "asynchronous development" and "emotional needs of gifted children" to understand how intelligence comes with a special set of challenges that are best addressed rather than ignored.
It's not a gifted kid's job to be a teacher's aide in a mainstream classroom. It's a gifted kid's job to learn, to struggle, to grow just like any other kid.
180
You obviously don’t realize the importance of students being challenged in school. Gifted education is necessary when the regular curriculum is not what the student needs.
43
@magpie
Two thirds of gifted children never even get a highschool diploma, and the reason is that they stop studying because they're too bored (which comes with a lot of anxiety, depression, rapidly dropping self-esteem etc.).
So they really need a high level of challenges (including emotional intelligence trainings) in school. And why would the wealthiest country on earth refuse to offer them the best of what American education has to offer ... ?
The solution isn't to start sacrificing what one kid needs so that another can advance a bit more. The solution is to finally install equal access to high-quality education for ALL American kids, and a type of education adapted to what each of them needs in order to advance in school and develop their talents.
An example: homework.
It is well-known that kids with parents who are interested in what they do at school and explain how to do their homework and then teach them how to make summaries and how to learn by heart etc., do MUCH better in school, independently of their IQ, than kids who don't have this kind of learning environment at home.
THAT is elitism, and totally unfair for kids who don't have parents able to do this.
Those kids need a school system that actively teaches them what the luckier ones receive at home, if not, they'll quickly start lagging behind, through no fault of their own.
As to "sharing gifts": what would that mean, concretely ... ?
11
In California, Gifted & Talented Education (GATE) is mainly for blond-hair, blue-eyed kids. It is very discriminatory. The kids don't learn social skills, and their parents run the school.
3
@Bob
Considering the domination of Asians in both higher education where Affirmative Action is banned and in Silicon Valley I find your assertion highly suspect.
2
There’s an implication made in this article that psychologists are providing statements that may be untrue for a hefty fee. This is a scurrilous attack presented without evidence and without regard for the harm it could do to the reputation of the field of psychology and the people it serves. The author should adjust the language to indicate that statements from psychologists have historically been unattainable to less privileged families due to the time and expense involved in psychological testing. The current phrasing is highly problematic.
17
The issue of affirmative action -- whether at Harvard, the NYC middle schools, or in the program described in the article -- will ultimately split Asian-American voters from the Democratic party. It's one thing to ask Asian-Americans to support the Democratic agenda in theory, but it's another thing entirely to ask this to happen at our childrens' expense.
60
@Derek
I'm not Asian, but it isn't Asian-Americans who suffer, it is the world, when we allow petty differences, like perceived ethnicity, to prevent us from developing our brightest and most motivated children.
We need people, whatever their race, to solve the world's toughest scientific problems.
I tire of hearing "this and that needs to be changed because it isn't working out for this ethnicity". There is a place for all of us
8
That in the wealthiest country on earth children from one demographic have to fear to be left out once more children from another demographic get access to high-quality education is totally absurd, amoral and unacceptable.
Look at the Scandinavian countries for instance, where ALL children, without any exception, get access to the best possible education out there.
Why on earth would we impose a cruel and by definition always unfair SELECTION system on our own kids, all while still having the best universities in the world ... ?
It's time to strongly increase teacher salaries, invest much more in teacher trainings that allow them to use top of the world pedagogical tools even for the "dumbest" American kid out there, and to make them accessible independently of the income of its parents.
THAT is how you build an "elite" society in the 21th global economy.
Not by systematically rejecting most of our own kids and limiting education to what are merely FINANCIAL elites, as the GOP is constantly doing - all while cultivating people's understandable and often fully justified hatred of most of those "elites", because frankly, if you never had any serious moral character training or training in science and the arts, but are simply able to accumulate tons of wealth by rigging the system at the expense of the entire middle class, as many belonging to our financial elites today do, WHY would you deserve the epithet "elite" in the first place ... ?
104
Denmark has no gifted school public programs. By age 16 depending on test scores and aptitude, one is assessed to go on to specific interests of higher education. Constantly comparing the diverse cultural make
Of a country @5 million to one of 325 million and ignoring unique makeup of our very heterogeneous population to their mostly homogeneous population is exhausting.
And then there is the tax question. Are you about to pay 60% of your income for what they do n Denmark? How much taxes do you pay?
“But overall, the problem is the number of seats is just too little.”
That quote is the whole problem in a nutshell. What happens to the kids who would have gotten in before but now do not? Will they simply be bored or ignored? If we acknowledge the originally corrupt nature of the majority (but not all) of the gifted programs, why are they being tweaked to exclude some other group instead of the whole system being re-imagined? This is the same as what's happening in NYC with the specialized high schools: it's musical chairs with some very, very small amount of real social justice. Fine, keep going, but do not congratulate yourself. All kids deserve to learn up to their own level. All kids deserve to go to a good school that's safe and gives them appropriate challenges, pushes them, but not to despair or sleepless all-nighters doing homework. We have to move into a post-industrial model to prep kids for a new world of intellectual work, or tell them frankly that they're destined to clean other people's houses, serve them at convenience stores, or take random shifts at Walmart with no hope of unionization, and might as well start working at 14. Kids deserve honesty. Shifting deck chairs is like lying to the rest of the kids, unless the "general education" classes are real and not a dumping ground.
8
I’m still waiting for the NBA to distribute its rosters according to the racial makeup of the country. Hey, what difference does it make, those are just million dollar jobs so probably nobody really wants them.
36
Isolated gifted education makes for moral morons answerable only to their own whims, with some super inflated sense of entitlement, sort of like a 21st century version of the Divine Right of kings.
5
@lefty442
Sounds like somebody didn't get selected for the gifted program
19
@James
And isn't that precisely his point? When will we, as a democracy, both fully intellectually believe, and simultaneously feel, that all people deserve the same opportunities for life, liberty, and happiness?
Perpetuation of class divisions via double-track classrooms are separate and unequal education, and they annihilate democracy.
The heartbreaking messages little black children perceived when comparing black and white dolls convinced the Supreme Court in Brown V. Board that separate was unequal, and was causing deep psychological harm.
I would love to see another study proving similar harm by labeling certain children gifted, and leaving everyone else to assume, by default, they must be dumb. And yes, James, I too, wasn't selected for TAG. It still hurts after 50 years. But it has convinced me often we are just a democracy in name only, as I see injustices increasing in my lifetime.
@DreamsAmelia We already have special education for children who have special educational needs to match their peers at grade level or to partake fully in the school day, so the division and labelling you are so concerned about is already occurring. Should we eliminate special education, and all IEPs, just to make absolute sure no one takes it wrong and could feel “dumb,” and have concern that it is anti-democratic that these children are on a different, and often more resource-consuming, pathway? After all, is this not, according to your reasoning, unequal? To be clear, I fully disagree. Schools are there, by law, to give a free and appropriate education to all children, not to give a exactly equal education to everyone. Some children will have greater, or different, needs than others. This includes children with special learning and healthcare needs, and also, includes truly gifted children, who typically also have special needs of their own. They are also promised a free an appropriate education, and they do deserve that opportunity, not to be sitting staring bored or drafted into being teaching assistants. Research also shows these children often have special needs as well, such as higher than average levels of anxiety, social functioning issues, emotional dysfunction, etc compared with their similar aged peers. The answer is not to throw some kids under the bus because “their test scores don’t suffer”(even though they may) so that other people’s feelings aren’t hurt.
1
"They point to research showing that low-performing students learn more when they attend classes alongside higher-performing peers, while the test scores of high performers do not suffer."
Because that's all that matters.
Gifted kids are at higher risk for anxiety and depression, in part because of their asynchronous development compared to their peers. Gifted kids stand out whether they want to or not, which often makes them targets for bullying.
Of course the gifted kids are still going to score highly on standardized tests that are designed to test sufficient educational achievement, not to see just what that gifted kid could do with teaching tailored to gifted kids.
56
What happens when teachers present gifted curricula to general class students? Do they work, learn and perform higher than traditional classroom curricula? What are the risks and harms in moving in this direction?
It saddens me as a graduate of public school education in K-12 who would read the entire textbook during the first week of classes in September and then spend the rest of the school year bored to literal tears, ignored and left to my own devices, but expected to be obedient and silent, that instead of broadening gifted student curricula, we instead are restricting it and causing children needless impediments to learning, achievement and lifelong enrichment.
We all lose in this scenario.
56
@aek: I was actually in gifted, advanced placement, honors classes in junior high and high school (admittedly, when dinosaurs roamed the earth).
Even THERE....I read all the textbooks the first week, and all the supplemental materials, and the entire recommended book list for the year....and got in trouble for "skipping ahead of the class".
We had a program called SRA, that gave you reading materials and tests based on grade level achievement. By 8th grade, I read entirely the entire system, which put me at least at sophomore college reading level. I was punished for doing this.
One of my teachers told me "she could tell I was stupid, because only stupid people wear thick bifocal glasses -- because they are not smart enough to focus their eyes". She made me sit in the front row, to see the blackboard even though I was FARSIGHTED.
BTW: I was a straight A student in English, History, Science, Social Studies and Art.
1
By credulously quoting certain parents, this article allows some factual errors and mistaken assumptions to be presented as fact.
First of all, no one was "de-selected" from magnet middle school admissions. Magnet admissions for elementary school are completely decoupled from middle school magnet admissions. About 1,000 kids participate in the elementary school magnets. There are 225 middle school seats. No matter the selection process, MOST kids who participate in the elementary magnets will not be part of the middle school magnets.
The article also confuses things by interviewing a teacher from a newly-established local gifted center. Yes, the criteria for admission to a local center will be lower than the previous system, in which kids from 4-6 schools vied for the same 27 seats. But that's GOOD, because it is creating more spots.
34
Actually, a number of kids who otherwise qualified for middle school magnet programs by test scores were deselected because it was determined — subjectively, not objectively — that they had a sufficiently large “peer cohort” at their home middle school to fulfill their enrichment needs.
Which is ludicrous, because home middle schools do not track students by ability. Everyone who is at grade level takes “honors” English — classes that are not enriched or accelerated in any way.
Given the large class sizes and student bodies at all of the home middle schools, any benefit of a “peer cohort” is diluted to the point of meaninglessness. And the MCPS administrators responsible for the new magnet admissions process have clearly stated they have no intention of offering tracking throughout the middle school curriculum to group the “peer cohort” together.
Even well-regarded MCPS middle schools are essentially three-year holding tanks. Smart, extremely smart, and gifted students have no ability to step up to the challenge of advanced classes until high school.
The magnet elementary and middle school programs are head and shoulders above the home elementary and middle school programs. MCPS is so focused on closing the achievement gap that it is willing to deny students who can do the work the ability to take more challenging classes.
- MCPS parent of three children who have variously attended magnet ES, MS, and HS programs as well as home ES and MS.
4
My little boy is in a gifted second-grade classroom. He has effectively been in a segregated gifted classroom since Kindergarten. I find the lack of diversity utterly appalling and completely unnecessary. However, I'm guilty (as the article suggests) of protecting privilege even though he is mixed-race by having him privately tested early and filling out all necessary and appropriate paperwork when he was little more than a toddler.
The problem is that now, because of massive and competent early instruction and an absurd amount of enrichment activities both in and outside of school, he reads comfortably at a fifth-grade level and can functionally do algebra. I don't know how a second-grade teacher could possibly effectively teach him and someone just learning to read using the same lesson in the same class. There is no assignment that works when kids are as much as six grade levels apart.
It's time to abandon the myth of differentiated instruction. It doesn't work. As far as I'm concerned, the best path is to dump the IQ requirement for gifted education and exchange it for a skill-based assessment... And secondly, open up the vast majority of activities to all kids. Have separate science and art teachers and math and English teachers far earlier. If a good with otherwise good abilities has an important deficit.. address it (individually if necessary).. Otherwise, where you can mix kids, mix them. There is no reason you need to be gifted to build a rocket!
66
@Jasonmiami You seem to believe that everyone is equally intelligent, which is not the case. We live in diverse world, and people differ in terms of abilities and aptitudes. A one-size-fits-all approach to education fails to engage huge swaths of the student population.
And while it may not take a gifted individual to build a rocket, it takes one to make a rocket that will work.
17
@Jasonmiami
That's contrary to all the research.
Skills are taught at such a low level in school that there is no way to distinguish the kids with high IQ's.
Kids with high IQ's languish in a typical school, and flourish in an appropriately rich and accelerated environment.
3
@Jasonmiami
This is what happens in my children’s public school district and I think it works well. The kids are together in most classes such as choir, gym, etc. At the beginning and end of the year the kids are tested then can go to a grade, two three or four above in math and to different levels of an English class. I would not want my kids to be separated out from their peers and this has worked well for us.
1
"With a more diverse student body, not every child performed above grade level, Ms. Petrola said."
So, we have "Gifted & Talented" programs for kids who are not able to perform above grade level. Should we start awarding the Heisman Trophy to the most average college football player? Olympic gold medals to athletes who finished in the middle of the pack? "Employee of the month" to the employee who did the most mediocre job?
I just don't get it. Why have G&T programs at all, then?
164
@Reader - Because “gifted and talented”’refers to more than just grades. Intellectual curiosity, mental agility, logic, artistic ability, and quickness to learn are all part of being gifted. But without attending a good school and - more importantly - having involved, supportive parents - even gifted children may lag below grade level.
9
@Reader
Well, it depends on whom is truly considered gifted.
Take one kid whose parents signed them up for every enrichment program under the sun, is read to regularly, has had access to high quality preschool and has highly educated, resourceful parents.
Take another kid whose parents work 2 jobs, who spends daytimes at home in front of the TV with grandma due to the high cost of preschool and whose parents are stressed trying to make ends meet.
It almost doesn’t matter at all what sort of intrinsic intelligence either child is born with. The first kid will arrive in kindergarten looking like some sort of wunderkind while the second kid will be figuring out how to spend the day in a structured environment with peers. Who will get tagged for G&T? Whose fate was determined almost before they were born? Unless the playing field can be equaled from the very start for all kids, G&T is just an excuse for segregated education.
32
@Reader
Agreed, let's get rid of Gifted and Talented, and let's make all the schools Centers for Enriched Education.
"Gifted and Talented" is a label to stroke the egos of parents, and to create an elite group of entitled kids.
As long as our society has a large differential between what winners get and what losers get, and is therefore highly competitive, people will naturally seek rules that help their children win at the expense of other children. People who have done well will be opposed to generational mobility because it will give their own offspring increased competition, and losing that competition often has nasty results.
If we are going to be a true meritocracy, we must foster generational mobility so that those with merit can escape the relative low incomes of their parents. Many people who have done well used to support a meritocratic ideal with behind-the-scenes boosts for their own children. Now that behind-the-scenes boosts are being exposed and eliminated, their support for meritocracy is being tested and found wanting.
This problem is fixable only when those who are less successful are not doomed to an insecure, hardscrabble existence, as is now the case.
7
Cambridge faces many of these challenges, as do larger districts. What is left unclear -- by both the reporter and the Montgomery district -- is what is meant by gifted. In Montgomery about 6% (715/12,000) are "gifted" -- is that too high or too low?
The decision to look at outliers is a good one. If 20% of a class has advanced learners, a teacher is more likely to gear lessons for that group than if just one student does.
2
My daughter attends a gifted and talented magnet school in Colorado. If you want your child to attend one of these schools, your best chance is to get them into kindergarten, which means assessing them when they are still in preschool. My daughter was 4 when she took her IQ test. I’m not sure how meaningful that assessment was, even though she did well. It seemed to me that the parents and their commitment were being screened more than the children. There are lots of type A parents at the school. Part of the application process requires parents to write at length about their child’s history and abilities, providing multiple examples. I believe that writing in Spanish is acceptable. A letter of recommendation from a teacher is also required.
Its unfortunate that not all gifted children have parents that value education, but I’m not sure the demanding environment would right for a child without support at home. I don’t think that that has to do with race or socio economic status, necessarily (although I’m not blind to the correlation). I would definitely be in favor of the district reaching out more to lower income families, but I wouldn’t be in favor of altering the application process. The school has already made in-house, free IQ assessment available to families.
I would also be in favor of expanding the program so that older students have a better chance of transferring in.
6
I wish we could stop worrying about gifted or not. Can we just help kids figure out what their natural talents are and encourage those to develop? More and more research shows that a lot of what looks like excellence and high-level performance is the result of 10,000 hours of hard work and development of talent. Acting as though one is anointed or not is a mistake.
22
@Pandora
The 10,000 hour rule was debunked shortly after Gladwell published it - although its stickiness in modern pop culture is impressive.
Raw, native smarts can't be duplicated by hard work - period.
Sometimes life is unfair - but so is the distribution of intelligence.
17
@Pandora
I pole vaulted for 10,000 hours, but I didn't get any taller.
2
“The process identified a lot more of the underachieving gifted,”
This has been the biggest benefit of Montgomery County's GT reforms. I'm an MCPS parent, with a recent graduate and an incoming freshman. When my kids were younger, I became acquainted with pushy parents who tried to game things by whatever means necessary to get their kids into the GT program, mostly for their own egos. Although too late for us, it's great that the system is much more broadly-based and accessible.
Having said that, I would like to see GT abolished, since I've always thought it sets up a class system. The students most definitely know who is GT and who isn't, and there is no more corrosive message to send to a child than "we have these really great teachers and really great program that we could be educating you with, but we're not going to."
44
Expand the gifted program so children for whom it was designed are not excluded. Wasting a gifted child's time in a regular class is not a good use of educational funds. It is not their job to help the other kids or sit there while the teacher explains the lesson for the second or third time. Nor is it right to slow the program down to accommodate the kids who are there for diversity's sake.
Parents move into a good school district because they expect their kids to be academically challenged. This will cause them to leave for private school which will leave the gifted program with less than gifted students who won't have any role models. I spent 3 years in a gifted program followed by a high school with streamed classes. There was a big difference in expectation of the quality of work which was required of us. Gifted children should not be short-changed in favor of being politically correct. Expand the program but also make sure to keep its level of excellence up to its past levels.
67
@S.L. They ARE being challenged in their local schools, where there is a critical mass of highly educated kids with access to paid tutoring. The smart kids in poorer schools are the ones left behind. This gives the poor access to the appropriate curriculum. They will need to catch up. And their ability to catch up with be the real determination of their "giftedness." Smart kids will catch on quickly. The ones who don't will leave the program.
1
I love the idea of finding kids who are outliers within their schools -- it makes so much more sense than just choosing the kids who know the most. Gifted isn't about what you already know -- it's about potential. I imagine the kids who come to the program "below grade level" catch up quickly.
My "gifted" classes, such as they were, were mostly filled with polite kids who spoke English well and did their homework. They were above average in their grades and test scores, but they weren't gifted.
42
@Anna L I agree. It sounds like kids that are outliers need something different than what is offered at their schools. Kids that are smart but not outliers are likely in good schools already being challenged at an appropriate level. They don't need the magnet schools.
3
@Anna L
So how does any of this serve the genuinely gifted?
They seem to be the whipping boys for all of this nonsense -- whether it's separating white and Asian kids from underprepared and poorly behaved kids, or putting kids who aren't even working at great level in gifted classes.
Gifted classes should be for kids with IQ's above 130. Extremely gifted schools should be for kids with IQ's above 160. And profoundly gifted kids, with IQ's above 180, can handle college before puberty, and are so rare and precious that they should receive individual attention.
Anything else is harmful to these kids, and to our future.
3
"Some experts say diversifying selective academic programs is not enough to address inequality in education. In fact, they argue that such programs should not exist at all. They point to research showing that low-performing students learn more when they attend classes alongside higher-performing peers, while the test scores of high performers do not suffer."
Right. The scores of the higher-performing peers do not suffer. Is that the only criterion? What about the high performers being bored out of their minds from the lack of challenging material?
120
@no-name-given
I agree so much with that. I have been in gifted classes then switched to regular classes due to school change. In retrospect, it was wrong of me but school was so easy that my friends and I often skipped and still made a 3.8 gpa.
10
This is correct. Although it is true that average learners do better in a classroom with high performers, it is also a fact that gifted children are best challenged when they learn with other high achievers. Hence the conundrum that school districts have a hard time acknowledging.
4
@no-name-given
It isn't even true. Academic performance maxes out at an IQ of 120. Above that, it starts to decline because the students are bored out of their mind. By the time you get to the extremely and profoundly gifted categories, many students fail out of school simply because the work is so far beneath their ability that they can't stand it. Those are kids for whom even genuine standard gifted classes are marginal.
The situation is nothing less than obscene.
2
"With a more diverse student body, not every child performed above grade level, Ms. Petrola said. She said she and other teachers used ability grouping to teach at different levels. For example, for a unit in which students read an author’s autobiography and fiction side by side, to look for consistent themes, some groups were assigned authors who wrote at a more challenging reading level."
So they're pulling kids into the "gifted" program who aren't even performing above grade level, and then they're implementing tracking within the "gifted" program so some students are learning at an accelerated rate while other students are playing catch-up? And then there's a totally different tracking system at the regular school so that the students who didn't get into the "gifted" program can learn more challenging material?
That makes no sense.
194
@Kathryn McDonald
Gifted isn't about what you know, it's about how you learn. When I was in school, I was just as bored in the "honors" classes, which were mostly filled with polite kids who spoke English well and came from good families who made them do their homework, thus ensuring that they got good grades that qualified them for the honors track, as I was in any other class. Meanwhile, there were kids who didn't speak English well, whose parents didn't know how to navigate the system, who were undoubtedly smarter than many kids in "honors", even though they weren't at grade level for English.
61
@Kathryn McDonald You got it more than correct. It is the "dumbing down" to accommodate the new average which, in effect, negates the entire premise of the "gifted" education.
16
@Kathryn McDonald
This is liberal Lake Wobegon where all the kids are above average and 100% of the young people are gifted.
3
I've been wondering a lot about selection for gifted program, and the influence of parental income & education. My son was flagged as potentially gifted when he wrote a standardized test in grade 3. What followed was 4 in-person meetings during business hours at the school:
1. To determine whether we wanted him to be tested for gifted. (Yes).
2. After the test showed he was successfully within the top 2 percent, whether we wanted to apply for a placement in gifted program. (Yes).
3. Another meeting, which seemed to be a repeat of #2, but with additional officials from the school board.
4. A tour of the school.
My son was one of 3 kids in his class of 24 that scored at/above the 98th percentile. This has left me wondering:
- It's unlikely that his class randomly had such a high concentration of naturally smart students. His teacher mentioned that she had taught at a low income school before, and had never had a child identified as gifted. So there must be something in the test that selects for students whose parents have higher education and/or income.
- Even if a child from a poor neighborhood was initially flagged as gifted, I have to think that the requirement to attend multiple meetings during business hours would have caused parents with inflexible work arrangements to drop out of the process.
I'm happy my kid got in. The school seems great. But I definitely wonder about equity.
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@Meg
"...selects for students whose parents have higher education " - you do know how genetics and inheritance works?
About 35% of IQ is explained by your parents.
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@Meg
As a test prep professional, I can tell you that these standardized tests are written in a way that favors people from certain socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. They are, unfortunately, not always a great tool to identify potential. They are a great tool for identifying ability when placed in the right environment. So I imagine the 3 students in your son's class were all bright children who were in a nurturing environment. Much like you said, they were able to win the game of this standardized test by having the right parents and the right environment.
Your second point is really striking. I think you are absolutely correct - shift workers would have a hard time making those meetings, effectively forcing their children to drop out of gifted programs before they even begin.
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I am very familiar with the Canadian gifted programs. What you describe is accurate and has merit. What I think you might be missing is how utterly corrupt and fraudulent many of the American programs are.
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Always there is tension among (at least) 3 factors: providing instruction that meets individual students' abilities, having kids in tracks that - sooner or later - may not be appropriate but hard to move out of, and funding. We don't really know how to manage any of these elements, but the described program sounds like a good effort, an improvement over the past.
My own frustration with tracking came when our daughter's school selected students for the gifted program solely on the basis of aptitude in mathematics and logic. Our highly verbal kid - avidly reading the Harry Potter series just after turning 5 - failed to pass the test. The school's rationale was that they wanted to reduce the impact for kids from non-English speaking families. I appreciate that desire, but still feel the selection process should have been more inclusive somehow.
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"They worry their children will be excluded from selective programs, or that the level of instruction at the magnet schools will fall as students are accepted from lower-performing elementary schools."
In other words, the new kids don't measure up. I think most people can smell the classism in this statement.
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I would love to see where the majority of gifted children end up as adults. Statistics? Anyone?
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@Coles Lee
From the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) on this very subject:
"The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires."
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@Coles Lee
The statistics will astound you.
The median income for a person in their early 30s with an IQ of 85 is $21,414.
For an average IQ of 100, $34,592.
For a gifted IQ of 135, $78,245.
For a gifted IQ of 153 is $106,000.
And the chart doesn't even get into the extremely and profoundly gifted ranges.
https://pumpkinperson.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/dollarbar.png
@Coles Lee I suspect it varies a lot. I know a little about the research on prodigies having gone to an accelerated academic program. Some go on to become internationally well-known figures responsible for the paradigm shifts in their fields while others aren't as publicly known but become well-respected figures in their fields/ communities. There's also a percentage who end up like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. There are also people who have been in gifted programs like Lady Gaga or skipped grades like Cameron Crowe/ Ronan Farrow. I don't follow the careers of my classmates closely but I know some have been Rhodes/ Fulbright scholars; some are Chairs of university academic departments or researchers; others are in leadership positions in their companies or have started companies and retired early. I don't feel anyone is a "failure" merely because they did not become a "famous" person.
Some kids struggle with social/ emotional intelligence but most are fine. I can't tell you the number of times as a young person I was told "I can't believe how normal you are." I had classmates who were college athletes or joined the Greek system. Some kids suffer from learning disabilities (e.g. dyslexia) or ADHD while being highly intelligent: these are often the kids with poor grades but do fine on non-academic intelligence tests.
Am I missing something? If there are more students qualified for gifted programs than had previously been thought, why are they excluding gifted whites and Asians rather than enlarging the number of classes for ALL gifted students? This sounds like a zero-sum game is being created where none should exist.
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@Oriflamme
Agreed. It appears that "rethinking " gifted education merely means playing musical chairs, instead of creating more seats for more people.
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@Oriflamme
but that costs money.
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@Oriflamme I was wondering the same thing. I’m an educator, and if a child has been identified as gifted, they should be access to a differentiated curriculum. By law, we do the same thing for kids with IEPs and 504s, so we should be doing it for kids with GT designation.
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Diversity is not the goal - representation is the goal.
But because more than half of a child's learning happens outside of school, economically disadvantaged children often can't achieve their innate potential because they lack the resources of their peers.
To achieve representation, we need to close that learning gap as early as possible. Teachers know when they have quick learners in class - regardless of test scores - and some teachers are better able/more excited about meeting that innate talent, interest and drive. Schools should consider giftedness a special need, and cluster gifted students in mainstream classrooms with capable teachers, and provide extra support for activities to help ALL students achieve to the best of their abilities.
THEN we can begin to achieve representation.
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@common sense advocate: unfortunately, research AND experience have shown that teachers are generally NOT good assessors of giftedness ( https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context.... Often a general classroom teacher is not able to distinguish between a behaviourally problematic or underperforming student with gifted potential and a well-behaved student who always completes his or her homework (for example).
Add to that, in North America, most teachers lack sufficient training in teaching gifted children, school systems lack specialist subject teachers , teachers struggle with too little in-class time, decreasing prep time, large classes, multiple groups of special needs students within each class, a lack of funding for educational assistants, communication difficulties with parents of linguisitically or culturally diverse students, and so on..
Historically, there have been many difficulties with the successful integration of gifted students within a general classroom.
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@common sense advocate "Representation" has no bearing on the goal of establishing a gifted education program. The goal of gifted education is to provide a curriculum that engages and challenges the students that are above the scope of the general ed program.
You seem to believe that the learning gap is something that can be closed - it's not. The learning gap exists because mean intelligence levels vary between populations.
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@common sense advocate
Notice that after six decades and $100 Billion spent, the Head Start program has produced ZERO beneficial effect on student proficiency.
Representation is the wrong goal - it simply pushes kids into something they are not suited for. The goal should simply be for each individual child to do as well as their genes and situation allow, WITHOUT hindering other students in the process.
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The issue here is to find a way to reduce the number of white children while increasing the number of minority’s children that will survive a legal challenge. Unfortunately education resources are finite and this is a zero sum situation. Somebody has lose and perhaps the average white child already has so many advantages that reducing their numbers is the only way to even the playing field.
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@Christian
But the article actually says "The white share of the accepted population increased, too, by 3 percentage points. But the Asian share of the population admitted to the special schools dropped 8 points."
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Any child, no matter their socioeconomic background can be gifted if they have an IQ 2 standard deviations above the mean.- 130. Testing should be done using a wide battery of tests that account for language and other factors that might disfavor children with challenging backgrounds. Labeling a kid with an average IQ gifted is like calling a cow a pig.
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@ROK
Please re-read the article to take in the explanation about why the term "gifted" is no longer used and why the criteria for the program have been expanded. You might even expand your own narrow, extremely outdated viewpoint.
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The new definition is meaningless.
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Wait. They are putting children in gifted programs that do not perform at grade level?
How is that gifted?
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@Jennifer
It's not about how much you know, it's about potential -- how you learn. Put a gifted kid in a classroom where the teaching is far below grade level, because that's where the other 29 kids are, and you're going to end up with a gifted kid who achieves below grade level. Move that kid to a class with other kids like them, and they'll catch up fast.
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@Jennifer How dare you question these educators. They went college and received degrees in education. Can’t you see their brilliance? Of course you don’t really have to be “gifted” to be in the “gifted” scholars class. You just need to be in the right racial group, that way you can be classified as “gifted.”
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@Jennifer Sigh. There's accumulated knowledge and then there's capacity to learn. The first depends not only on capacity to learn but also on having previously been in a reasonable learning environment and thus capitalizing on one's capacity. One can have the intellect and capacity to learn faster than another person and still be behind on account of poor learning conditions earlier in life.
Gifted here equates to capacity to learn or innate intelligence NOT a knowledge base that one previously acquired or was unable to acquire.
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There is a difference between "gifted" students and students who outperform because they are good at playing school. Truly "gifted" students need to be challenged in a non-typical environment in order to reach their potential. Society needs these kids to succeed, because they are the ones most likely to make out-sized contributions to society. The hardworkers will succeed wherever they go to school. The "gifted" may not. I think Montgomery County is going in the wrong direction here.
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@Citizen The whole point is that this process finds the naturally gifted kids, not the kids whose parents send them to prep classes. Those prep-class hard working kids will do fine in their home schools.
I will never be a portrait painter or a neurosurgeon or a professional athlete. I don't have the ability. I am not "elite". This has nothing to do with my race or my socioeconomic status. It is simply a fact of life. Elite programs should be for the elite, otherwise they are meaningless.
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I lived in a neighborhood in which the local public school went “all-gifted.” The rationale was that so many students placed into the gifted category that it was more efficient to run every class that way.
The parents protested.
It wasn’t the enhanced education they wanted; it was the label.
And the opportunity to exclude.
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@Hillary Warren We're all winners! We all get trophies! We are all gifted!
Everyone gets to participate in the Olympics. We just need to make the marathon 2.6 miles instead of 26. The 100m dash will be downhill, and scooters are allowed. The use of a trebuchet will be allowed in the long jump. A companion service dolphin will be permitted to tow in the swimming events. An autonymous water robot will be allowed to proxy for you in synchronized swimming if you aren't good at holding your breath. If you don't like horses, you can participate in equestrian events using a motocross bike. In pole vaulting, a platform and extension ladder will be provided.
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You said it all.
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@Vladek That's a silly and disingenuous comment. @Hillary Warren is correct -- the parents bristling at these attempts to put actualy gifted children into gifted programs (instead of filling gifted programs with children whose parents can afford to make them expert test takers or with the children of the people who just knew to show up and apply) don't care about education or potential. They only care about bragging rights, whether or not they are deserved.
My son was in a gifted program, in a Northern Virginia elementary school, back in the 80's. One day he came home and told me that his teacher had said that he was the dumbest kid in the smart class. I wonder if that was HIS fault, or HER fault, or the SCHOOL SYSTEM'S fault? His IQ is 137.
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@ChesBay
"[H]is teacher had said that he was the dumbest kid in the smart class. I wonder if that was HIS fault, or HER fault, or the SCHOOL SYSTEM'S fault? His IQ is 137."
Instead of wondering whom to fault for your son's being in the gifted program, why not just say that what his teacher said was obscene.
What teacher calls a child "dumb"?
Oh. Your son's teacher.
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[email protected]
At one time we were in a Northern Virginia elementary school in the 80's. My daughter did not do well on the admission criteria for the "gifted" program. It bothered her because she was an excellent and probably one we might call and over achiever. On her own she went to the principal to appeal her case and the principal advise her to take her request to the school board. Again, on her own she set the appoint and we did take her but she went in alone and after pleading her case she was eventually accepted in the program.
I think a major problem here is the social aspect too. When your left behind and thought "not good enough" or "special." She knew that there are somethings you just need to fight for and she did.