Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Very depressing article

I just read a depressing article in the 2009 -2010 Education and Enrichment Guide from Bay Area Parent (BAP). For those of you not in the Bay area, BAP is a ubiquitous free parenting magazine. It's a major information source for day care and school listings.

The issue in question contains an article called Learning to Read, Reading to Learn (page 24). It starts off by talking about 2-4 year olds who learn to read. They talked to a couple of teachers from Spring Hill School in Santa Cruz, CA, which supposedly understands and nurtures gifted kids. One teacher talked about "magic readers" who enter kindergarten with "this phenomenal capabilty of reading." At first I thought, "Great!"

Then I kept reading:

"But here's the thing: as remarkable as their precociousness is, it typically fades as the years pass and their peers catch up with them --- usually by grade 4. "

Then it gets very special:

"And what starts out as a distinct advantage is usually relegated to a personal milestone. The child who learns to walk at 9 months isn't going to grow up to be a better walker or hiker or runner in the field than the child who didn't walk until he was 13 months. Such is the case with the early reader. 'By the time they're in fourth grade, the other kids have caught up to them and often even superceded them.' says Trish Melehan, who for many years taught kindergarten and fourth grade at Spring Hill."

This is depressing on so many levels: it has an ignorant quote from an apparent expert <ahem> with "many years" experience at a school described as being for "the advanced and gifted." The quote is in a ubiquitous free magazine. And BAP doesn't have an online forum for commenting on its articles.

You can see the article at http://www.flashedition.com/publication/?m=2676&l=1. You'll have to enter an email address, but a bogus one will work if you don't want to get on their mailing list!

FWIW, I'm about to send a mail (and a copy of A Nation Deceived) to the publisher of BAP. Her name is Gilda Fracchia and her email address is gilda.fracchia@parenthood.com. Maybe if a few people write to her, they'll publish another, more accurate article.

The email address of a person called "Local Editor" is jill.wolfson@parenthood.com and the article's author is sara.solovitch@parenthood.com.

Argh,

Val

I have mixed feelings about the article. It clearly didn't present gifted children accurately. On the other hand, the initial quote was from someone who teaches at a school for the gifted and advanced. So I took the quote to mean "among the gifted, an early reader isn't necessarily more gifted than a gifted child that doesn't read early". Among that population, you can't pick the early readers from not by 4th grade. And as the parent of a HG+ child that didn't really read before kindergarten, but shocked us by the end of the year, I could say that is true. I've met families in the GT community with children my son's age that read at 2 or 3 who DS9 has caught up with or surpassed.

However, the non-GT community is going to read this wrong and think EVERY child will catch up and be on a level playing field at 4th grade, which is obviously NOT true. I think the GT school's comments are completely out of context. Generally the message is good - kids (GT or ND) don't necessarily need to read early to be successful. I don't think they needed to target GT kids to get this message across! Definitely worth a note to the author. Thanks for posting this!

I think it would have been less bad if she'd been saying that, but the quote about early reading as a milestone makes me think that she was talking about all kids.

Either way, your note about people believing that the statement applies universally is spot-on.

How come no one ever says this stuff about gifted athletes?

Val

... I interviewed this school for Wolf. Let's just say that his needs mattered MUCH less to them than our income. They also did not seem to believe what I said he could do. I very much got the "Oh she's a pushy mom" feeling from them. I did not have a very positive reaction to the experience, so I *personally* wouldn't put much faith in anything that comes from that school.

The story is not about gifted kids. It's just saying that whether a child learns to read early or not does not have long-term consequences in their education. I agree with that.

I feel like early reading is such a tricky topic because there are so many different issues mixed up in it and everyone seems to read with their own slant. I've yet to see any article address all the issues in an honest, reasonable way, differentiating between taught and self-taught early reading, and between ND, MG, and HG kids, and acknowledging that generalities do not apply to every individual child. When I see articles like this one, it does trouble me because I know that people are going to come away with a wide variety of different ideas--some accurate and some totally, bizarrely wrong.

I think the contradictions are what disturb me the most. It seems the overall theme is that early reading doesn't matter; that parents who say their kids are early readers are often wrong or lying, or, worse, pushy; that other skills, like emotional development and pencil-holding are more important for academic success; and that you can encourage your child to be an early reader by __________. Um...wait, I thought it didn't matter?

Ouch. It's such a bummer when you think you've found a great school, only to be let down like that.

So sorry.

I think what bothers me the most is watching a silly idea like "the other kids all catch up by [insert grade]" get perpetuated right in front of my eyes like that. How obvious can the reality of the situation be? I mean, a kid enters kindergarten reading at a third grade level and hasn't apparently improved by third grade and no one thinks it odd that she hasn't learned anything in three years? No one thinks that maybe, just maybe, forcing her to put her finger on the letter B and sound out words like c-a-t mightn't be a problem?

Val

It seems to me that there's another way to interpret the data that the kids who read early are surpassed in 3rd or 4th grade. Were these kids given sufficient academic challenge early on? Did they learn "how to learn" like the other kids did? In my opinion, if not, then they're at a disadvantage starting in 3rd or 4th grade when the curriculum becomes more challenging and they don't know how to deal with that.

"And what starts out as a distinct advantage is usually relegated to a personal milestone. The child who learns to walk at 9 months isn't going to grow up to be a better walker or hiker or runner in the field than the child who didn't walk until he was 13 months. Such is the case with the early reader. 'By the time they're in fourth grade, the other kids have caught up to them and often even superceded them.' says Trish Melehan, who for many years taught kindergarten and fourth grade at Spring Hill."

I read this to mean that by fourth grade there was no advantage to the kids who learned to read at 2 over those who learned to read at 6. Obviously, some kids will be reading better than others, but it's not necessarily the ones that learned to read early who will be ahead.

Inserting my own personal bias against teaching babies to read and toddlers phonics ... but it is big business to prep kids for kindergarten. Not surprising that schools are not impressed by parent claims and take a wait and see attitude.

I agree with some of the other posters that the problem here seems to be the failure to differentiate between gifted and normally developing kids. I've read somewhere (wish I could remember where) that the gap between gifted and normally developing kids only widens over time, and I've definitely seen this with my son. He read easy readers at 2 with no formal instruction and is now reading 5th and 6th grade material fluently with comprehension at age 4. As a result of his early reading and advanced comprehension, he entered kindergarten with an expansive knowledge base that also gives him a huge advantage in things like science and social studies. His teacher has commented that he makes great contributions to class discussions and that his classmates learn from him. Unless you took all books away from him for a few years, I honestly don't see how his classmates could catch up at this point, given his huge head start. For example, I doubt any of the other kids in his kindergarten class (who are all older than him) have read Greek myths, while he's already committed dozens of Greek heroes and stories to memory and refers to them in unrelated contexts. By the time his classmates get around to the same stories years from now, DS4 will presumably have long since moved on to other things.

Maybe normally developing kids who read early don't comprehend or retain the information they're reading the way gifted kids do? Or maybe they can read, but don't have the same passion for the knowledge imparted by reading that many gifted kids show? Otherwise, I don't see how there can't be some lasting advantage.