Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Does your district not offer periodic pullout?

I'm trying to get an idea of how common periodic pullout is in America. In other words, an educated estimate on how many states don't offer pullout. Our kids are young adults now but our town, comparatively monied, has a gifted class and also offers 3 twenty-min pullouts a week. Thank you for answering. This teacher I was interviewing said that our town used to imitate the trends in Calif. but now looks to Australian trends in education. Interesting. --San

No pull out in our district in NJ. Only in class differentiation until 6th grade where there is an honors math class.

We don't have pullouts here either. Our district offers a gifted program from 3rd to 6th grade (6th is still elementary), but some years we don't have it because of budget cuts. In middle school and onwards we have an honors class, and a brand-new "theory" class for 8th & 9th grade math, which is one level above honors.

No daily gifted class until 6th grade, and then only in math. 1-hour a week pullout starts in 4th grade in both math and language arts. (The LA pullout continues in 6th, but doesn't become a daily class like math does.)

Too little too late!

And there's a GT class in middle school, but to take it, kids have to sacrifice one of their electives. (It is a pretty crummy class from what every one of my GT babysitters has told me. ) Obviously, many GT kids do not take it so they can take drama or band (or whatever) instead. There is no other grouping or honors or anything in middle school. Nada! All levels of ability are in all classes.

We have no pull-outs either.

We live in a school district rated "excellent" by the State of Ohio Department of Education. Our school offers a "gifted" program from 2nd-5th grade. The first graders are given the CoGATs in January and the ITBS in March. The school uses these results to determine the gifted class for the next 4 years. Once a child tests into the class in first grade they remain in the class regardless of future test scores. My daughter tested in the 99% across the board for math (both locally and nationally)on the ITBS, received a perfect score on the nonverbal section of the CoGAT, and scored in the 96% overall on the CoGAT.

Despite the fact that my daughter is considered gifted by the State of Ohio Department of Education, the school does not include the nonverbal score when determining the "gifted" class and my daughter was not one of the 24 children selected.

The state of Ohio requires every school system to test and identify the gifted kids, however, the state of Ohio does not require the school system to provide any additional services to their gifted students.

In my opinion, this is a classic example of why the United States is lagging other nations in math and science.

We are now homeschooling.

Our district has inclusion gifted services (I think enrichment for the whole class, like music or art) for K and 1 for 1 hour every other week. At the end of 1st all kids are tested. Those found gifted may be offered a place in magnet school. All gifted kids who don't go to the magnet school (and those suspected of being gifted - I think they test high but not quite high enough) are placed in "gifted cluster" classes. A gifted cluster class has up to 8 gifted and suspected gifted kids, and the rest of the class is average-performing and above. Those classes get gifted inclusion services 1 hour once a week. Nobody gets pulled out. I don't know if it's a good system or not. My ds goes to the magnet school, and I think it's been good for him overall.

I always fail to understand how this can even begin to be considered GT services. We used to call this "art class" or music class."

*sigh*

Our district does testing in K and 2nd grades (CoGat and ITBS). Then, there is a pullout of about 1 1/2 hours a week (assuming the GT teacher is not busy administering state tests, helping the special ed teacher, performing hall duty, or a multitude of other tasks). There is a theme and the kids do arts and crafts and watch movies and read some books. Last year in 1st it was Ancient China and they made a Great Wall, a Chinese Dragon, ate rice for Chinese New year, stuff like that. Pud loved going but it didn't do much for him academically. I think the time increases a little each year after 2nd until they go 3 hours a week in 6th grade. I think it is a miserable way to address GTness. The problem with pullouts is that kids are gifted all the time and these programs really just entertain the kids and help keep them from going out of their minds with boredom in the regular classroom. Our 1st grade teacher actually resented the GT pullout and sometimes "forgot" to send the kids.

I don't know what our middle school has. High school has AP classes and an agreement with the local community college for joint courses.

If it hasn�t changed since I looked into the public school offerings a few years ago, our elementary district offers minimal pull-out enrichment beginning in 4th. I guess the grouping aspect and temporary boredom relief makes it better than nothing, but my preference would be accelerated academic instruction which is against district policy.

Honors classes start in middle school and continue through high school, but they are not very challenging based on comments from parents whose children had attended one of the two private K-8th schools. The regular (non-weighted) high school classes sound remedial based on course descriptions. Unfortunately, AP or IB courses haven�t yet found their way into our district.

Our district does a weekly 1 1/2 hour pull-out for kids in 2nd through 6th grade who test out as GT. It is enrichment oriented - they do things like go on field trips, see concerts, build stuff, create poems, etc. It's definitely the highlight of DS6's week. Any kid, GT or not, would benefit from this pullout given the lack of enrichment stuff in the curriculum now. Lots of parents are resentful that their kids don't get to participate and I don't blame them - their tax dollars are paying for other kids to go on field trips! IMHO, I think the district uses the pullout to placate parents of GT kids so they don't have to differentiate the curriculum on a daily basis.

Our state mandates identification but not programing. I would be suprised if very many local districts are in compliance with this.

Our district did away with pull-out programs in favor of 'in class enrichment' and there are very rare instances of subject accelerations and grade skips. Our elementary public school didn't have a gifted coordinator. For kids who act out, the pressure to accept a special ed diagnosis in order to get services that might include a subject acceleration is quite high. Kids who 'behave themselves' just mark time. Individual teachers may be wonderful or terrible or somewhere in between. Individual teachers may work with parents or not.

In Middle school about 25% of the kids get to be on the 'honors Math' track, and take Algebra 1 in 8th grade. I know of a boy who is one of two boys who recieves gifted services in science. He gets tests that are 'fill in the blank' while the rest of the class gets the same test with multiple choice answers. Once every 6 days, the teacher and the two boys stay together during lunch/recess and do science experiments.

In the High School, the subjects are divided into 'Core' 'Advanced' and 'Honors.' The Honors classes lead to AP classes later. Multiple sections are offered in each of the Honors classes, so I'll guess that 15-20% of the kids take any of the Honors classes. I would guess that only a relative few take more than 3 Honors classes at once, as sports are very important in our district, and very time consuming.

((shrugs))
Grinity

Hi Everyone,

All your answers give us a bird's eye view of the reality of gifted education across the miles. From what a lot of us are writing, many exceptional children receive the company of true peers 1.5 to 2 hrs a week, which leaves 28 or 28.5 hours a week with age peers who consider many of them freaks, do not converse about common interests, and in many cases, are suffering ridicule for being on a different wave length.
Thank you. This helps.
--San

How pullouts work in our district:
GS9 goes for just under an hour/day, at the end of the school day. He's in a class of 5-6 other 4th graders where they get additional instruction in whatever the gifted teacher decides to do. The first semester is Language Arts, the second semester is Math, not all the kids in one are in the other. I think there are 4, 2 girls & 2 boys, that are identified as gifted in both areas. There isn't much of a chance to converse about common interests in the pullout, they didn't even have any class discussions when reading and doing a study guide on a book earlier this year.
The kids are spread out among three 4th grade classrooms, this year none of the other gifted kids are in GS9's home classroom. Apparently there is some kind of break at the time GS9 goes to his gifted pullout, and the older kids tease the gifted kids as they pass in the hallway. Knowing kids, they probably also tease the ones heading off for remedial help at the same time.

Well, she did say "many," not all.

Maybe "some" would have been a better word choice...

I do think her point that HG+ kids need true peers is a valid one. "Freaks" may be too strong a word, but I know that I didn't feel like I found real friends who "got" me until grad school, even though anyone looking in from the outside would have never believed this. I, too, was a leader and a kid very involved with my age peers. But I never felt like I really was one of them.

Just another take...

There are no gifted programs of any kind in my school district, though they do have some AP classes at the high school. A high percentage of kids attend private school (small Christian based or medium sized Catholic school)and quite a few of us homeschool- more than you'd expect in a town this small.

It is sad when a district has a policy against accelerated classroom instruction. We all know from the experts that waiting until high school or jr. high is too late as many children become turned off, frustrated with boredom and rejection, underachieving with homework, and sadly, angry. Listening to Mozart, looking at Picasso, or discussing the theory of relativity 1-2 hrs. a week is a poor band-aid.

Where we live in NH there is no program until 3rd grade and even then it is not a real pullout program since there is no funding.

Once a child is in Middle school or High School they can opt for Level 4 and AP classes.

Our public school talks about differentiation but my DS6 is currently in K in the morning and 1st in the afternoons and we have not seen any hint of differentiation yet.

While researching, I came across a quote by Hans Eberstark, the mental calculator and linguist: "We are an odd lot, often at odds with the society we were born into. We are out of context. Few, if any...were socially adapted conformists. Some were slandered and ridiculed." Dr. Deborah Ruf, in her book, notes that the chances of social alienation increase as one goes up the IQ ladder. Her studies found that the moderately gifted blended in easier. Those with IQ above 150 had a tougher time. I do think that the child's personality will play into how well he/she deals with this. When we mature, as adults, we are able to overlook rejection better and let things roll off.

Apparently there's no gifted program this year for the elementary schools. :\ It's really wacky, because some years it's approved and other years the budget just isn't good enough. The IG (stands for Intellectually Gifted) isn't the best gifted education program, either, but that's another story.

Couple of comments -
Our county has gt from k on, to varying degrees. The current program my ds is in focuses on problem solving strategies, they do a lot of puzzles and play games which rely on visual-spatial or language skills so they do emphasize fun. (3rd gr.)
They have a project where they have to plan an adventure: get a budget, work with a couple of team-mates to work up a list of items to purchase before hand, saving enough money to have some on hand during the exploration/adventure phase and they have short writing assignments describing their progress.
Apparently the next and final big project for the year is to design an amusement park and draw it to scale, again in teams. The teacher put this part at the end of the year so they would have time to phase in some of the math concepts.
In short, I have been pretty pleased so far with the ideas for curriculum, although I haven't seen much of the final work.

As for not fitting in, when I was first trying to figure out why my ds was sad about 1st grade, I thought of all the times folks had suggested he has some kind of condition such as add, asperger's, etc.
What I read about these things didn't seem to fit but they ended up leading me to think in terms of giftedness and have the school start looking into that. Still, there might be some problems which need further assessment in his case, but the turn around since he has been able to get into the short pull out program has been very gratifying.

I agree. If a gifted kid is struggling socially with age mates, there is a temptation to blame it on the GT when it really could be something else - not just that they are too intellectually different. I know several PG kids who genuinely enjoy and are comfortable playing with same age peers (DS included). That said, when a teacher makes a child stand out by doing things like teaching other kids or otherwise not being sensitive to the differences in ability it can be a pretty bad social fit.

Yes, in ds' case I think it has been very helpful!
I think that he really felt like he was being excluded. Now it's like a de-facto 'you are included'. Also, we've been able to speak more openly about his unique characteristics and how and why that will sometimes make things easier and sometimes make things harder for him.
I'm sure feeling better about oneself can only increase a child's confidence and ability to get along with others so I do hope that this good feeling begins to extend past the kids in the gt group.

One other factor we found to be counterproductive was the lack of discipline at our son's school. Kids were not well supervised and the victim who fought back in defense was suspended as well. If ethics aren't taught in relation to peers, it makes school extra stressful for kids who are different. For example, the kids were brought back from recess and left in a classroom without an adult. This enable a boy to shove him to the floor while a girl cut his hair. (4th gr.) The playground didn't have enough aides, also. So, even though he entered the school system with good social skills and was friendly, he soon found that an environment of similar values was not fostered and was virtually a free-for-all.