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.
