Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy A sad realization last week....

You must have been the one who mentioned that. I remembered reading once about somebody who's child was gifted and being taughted in a special Ed school. The part I remember reading was that the special Ed teachers were a good fit for the gifted child in that case because they were more flexible and already experienced in differentiation.

I doubt the most employers have the the patience of ABQMom and other special ed teachers (nor the inclination) to spend the time needed to help these students learn their jobs, even if the apprenticeship were subsidized. Plus, special ed teachers also teach them valuable general life skills (like riding the bus and making sure to be there on time, grocery shopping, etc.) help students be as independent and self-sufficient as possible upon adulthood.

I disagree. Gifted kids, especially, need smart teachers with subject expertise, since (for example) teachers who don't know algebra cannot teach it. A study http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/physical-education-teachers-are-not-smart/ has found that special ed teachers have lower SAT scores than other elementary school teachers . Only gym teachers have lower average scores.

The kind of students we are describing are a tiny percentage of the population of special education students. Where I teach, most student who receive special education services are in general education classrooms for most of the school day. Many of them continue on to college or post-secondary vocational training.

US Schools are required to work with high school special education students and/or their parents in order to create a plan to transition to life after graduation. This takes the individual strengths, challenges and interests of the student into account. There are any number of things that might go into these plans, and any number of community partners that might be involved.

I guess this is one thing that bothers me about spending on special education. The non-mainstreamed students may only be a relative handful of students, but the spending on them starts at "high" and goes to "astronomical."

Many people here have said that they don't want to take things away from special ed. students, especially given how they were treated before the 1970s. I see that point, but I also see that overspending on special education takes funding away from everyone else. Why is that okay? (I don't think it is; I think that people are just used to the idea.)

Do I think these students should be denied an appropriate education? Of course not. They have a right to an education. Do I think that programs targeting them should get as much funding as they do? No, I don't. Gifted and talented students have a right to an appropriate education too.

I can see your point of view, but schools, districts, or states that do not adequately provide for the needs of these students can find themselves under a federal consent decree. Hawaii ended up quadrupling its special education budget as a result of one of those, so you could describe the cost-cutting measures of the state as being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Yes, exactly.

I guess this is one of these situations that started out doing something good and then got out of control at some point.

I continue to be shocked at the perception that parents of kids with special needs at the other end of the spectrum have a walk in the park and that an appropriate education for these kids is a given.

My kid with Down syndrome would have been parked in a class with a completely inappropriate education in the district we moved from. Our only alternative was to put him in private school for the past 5 years and fund a 1:1 aide, including her health insurance some of those years, at obviously an extreme financial sacrifice. The speech therapy he received from the public school was far less than adequate, so we paid that out of pocket. While I am currently filling out the DYS application that will provide free advocacy for his big sister, there was no such thing for him. We paid for advocacy and educational consultants ourselves.

Now he is an excellent public school district--but again, the idea that he will automatically be given what he needs is just unfathomable. This kid has tons of potential, but because of a significant speech delay and other issues, he will also need tons of advocacy to make sure that expectations are high. And the money invested in his education by taxpayers now will provide a great return on investment when he is able to work and live independently.

FWIW, a friend who is a surgeon told me that the best scrub tech she knows has Down sydrome--do you seriously think that without an appropriate education and job training in public schools that that individual would have had that opportunity?

Thanks MON, aculady and ABQmom for speaking up on this issue.

This is two posts in one: about special education and gifted education, and why theory applied to one should apply to the other.

About half of special education students in the United States qualify under the eligibility category of Specific Learning Disability (which is not nearly as specific as it sounds). Theoretically, this would include dyslexia, but schools rarely use that term. For one thing, it's a medical diagnosis, and there's probably not one person in the school district that is qualified to make that diagnosis.

For another thing, it's not a particularly useful label for educational programming. Schools are more interested in ways to help children with disabilities learn than the exact medical nature of the glitch in their information processing, for the most part. Some of us are very interested in exact glitches!
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I have been a co-teacher in the past. In fact, once we had three teachers in one classroom: general education, English language instruction (70% of our students spoke another language at home) and special education. I'll be co-teaching again next year for the first time in about eight years. I'm really looking forward to it!

When I first became a teacher, the mother of a student in my first homeroom told me that her daughter was gifted on the first day of school. I thought I knew what to do for her, but I was wrong. In any case, I quickly became overwhelmed trying to deal with the all the needs, issues, and behaviors going on in my classroom.

Ten years later, I've had very little in the way of professional development for gifted students. I've done quite a bit of reading on my own time. I have had quite a bit of training and experience in the array of supports and services for disabled children and struggling learners.

And that's the part that I want to apply to gifted children. You choose from an array of supports and services to meet the needs of the individual child--not the category. Just as differentiated instruction in the classroom with everybody else is the best option for some disabled children, while others need a separate class or even school, gifted children need different kinds of options, too.

Multiply that by the tiny percentage of children that are gifted, the tendency of most of them to read quietly after they've finished their work, the lack of laws and enforcement that require schools to provide services for gifted students, the lack of professional development for teachers on this set of issues*, the reluctance of parents to advocate collectively for gifted education**, and it's little wonder that administrators rarely make it a priority.

*In my state, gifted teacher training is a portion of one college course on differentiated instruction.

**I bet there's a whole doctoral dissertation waiting to be written on that subject. I have noticed that teachers who are parents of gifted children are the first to shoot down any suggestion that would not have been useful for their child.

Deacongirl-

I do completely understand what you are saying and where you are coming from. I have seen too many friends' kids with disabilities, autism spectrum issues and other problems that the school did not handle appropriately and the kids did not receive appropriate education.

For me, though, the problem comes down to legal standing. In CA, I have absolutely NO legal standing on appropriate education for my child. I throw around FAPE, sure, and administrators that aren't so knowledgeable rack their brains and give in to what my son needs because they don't know any better. The ones that do know better just laugh us off.

Or worse, these admins play what I call "the meeting dance." "We'll meet with you after the teacher gets to know him. Oh, after the first quarter. Did we say 1st quarter? We meant Thanksgiving. Haha- we can't meet between Thanksgiving and Christmas! After the holidays things will settle down. Yes, we know it's February, but really- we start test prep next week so there won't be any differentiation anyway." And suddenly... it's April and there has been no actual education.

On top of no legal standing, we also have no funding for gifted education that is mandated to be spent on gifted ed. Which means that teachers that actually do care and are educated, have zero resources in most districts. It's very hard to convince a brand new teacher who has an interest but no money, to throw her own cash at a higher level curriculum. So we end up purchasing it for the school as a "gift."

For the most part, we are left to the whims and kindness of a school system that really doesn't care.

I take that back, they care three weeks out of the year when he is forced to produce test scores that get the school funding and cover their mistakes with the bottom 20%.

What you're sensing is not anger, it's complete frustration at a system that is broken for most of the kids! I say this as a classroom teacher and a school administrator myself. Even from within the system, you can barely make small changes, let alone sweeping changes. It took me two years and two school board votes to get a math placement test instituted in 6th grade. A placement test!!! That didn't even count the time to get the leveling of courses approved... that was just the test.