Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education NAGC's "bold step"

I'm not sure what's going on. I think they're backpedalling!

More from Paula O-K. http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=8996

From that link:

"For example, for the last 12 years, I have been running a program called Project Excite whose goal is to prepare talented under-represented minority students to qualify for honors classes in math and science when they enter high school. We identify children with potential by virtue of the fact that they are the highest scoring students in their schools on tests such the Naglieri and the ITBS in the third grade. However, none of these students would have been identified for a traditional gifted program that used high scores on ability or achievement tests for selection. At this point in their lives, the students have potential, but that is not demonstrated in high test scores or high achievement. Through involvement in enrichment and accelerated gifted programs over the course of a few years, most qualify for advanced course placement in grade nine (into honors classes) and most have completed one or two years of high school math by grade 9."

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Note that the program is only for "minority" children (I bet that does not include Asians) who are only being compared to other children in their schools. A similar effort is NOT made to prepare white children with the same test scores for advanced coursework in high school. Why?

Gifted programs, and educational programs in general, should serve students based on their abilities and interests, not race. The big political problem plaguing gifted programs is that whites and Asians score well above blacks and Hispanics on IQ and achievement tests on average, so the former two groups will be heavily "over-represented" if students are chosen based on race-neutral , academic criteria. The NAGC leadership does not have the guts and the intellectual honesty to state this openly.

Sorry to drag up this old thread, but I was just re-reading this article and thought that it was very relevant to this conversation: http://www.georgeparkyncentre.org/documents/high-achievers-pdf.pdf

I think that what we are talking about is two different groups of kids as Ms. Cathcart mentions in this article. A focus on talent development serves the kids who function within the box that is the current school system much better than it does the square pegs, IMHO. I know that not all gifted kids are square pegs. My oldest functions fairly well within school with some significant frustrations regarding the level of work of the other students, but I suspect that she'd be functioning much less well were she not nearly two year younger than most of her grade mates. None the less, she can do it.

I am particularly sensitive to focus on functioning highly within the box, though, b/c my 2e kid doesn't do well with that regardless of the amount of acceleration. She's devising new formulas during math rather than focusing on learning the ones that exist, for example. She just can't bring herself to engage and she is, thus, shut out using a talent development approach.