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http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/20...-child/rJpv8G4oeawWBBvXVtZyFM/story.html
The poor neglected gifted child
By Amy Crawford
Boston Globe
MARCH 16, 2014

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GIVEN ALL THE PRESSURES our education system faces, it seems almost indecent to worry about the travails of a small minority of very smart children. Understandably, federal and state education policy has long focused on more obvious problems that education can help address—problems such as the yawning gaps between the test scores of rich and poor students and between different racial groups. Tax dollars disproportionately go to help kids with learning disabilities and other disadvantages, because society generally agrees that they are most in need of help.

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which penalizes public schools that don’t bring the lowest-performing students up to grade level. The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act regulates special education and provides schools with more than $11 billion annually. A provision of federal education law called Title I allocates some $14 billion to schools that have a higher proportion of students from low-income families, to pay for programs designed to keep them from falling behind.

The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up. What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward, an acknowledgment of being a fast learner.

Not surprisingly, programs oriented toward gifted children get barely any federal funding. The Javits Act, the only federal law aimed at gifted students, pays for research and pilot education programs and is currently funded at $5 million, down from a peak of $11 million several years ago.

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Thank you for the lovely Article and the cartoon is hilarious!

Yes in this country it is a crime to be rich and a punishment to be intelligent !

Thank you for sharing this thought provoking article.

Trying to digest this thought: "Lubinski’s unusually successful cohort was also a lucky group from the start—they participated in the study in the first place because their parents or teachers encouraged them to take the SAT at age 12. Previous research into gifted children has shown that many, or even most of them, aren’t so lucky: They aren’t identified early, and they don’t necessarily get special attention from their schools."

Familiar with children who took out-of-level academic talent search tests, specifically to help encourage teachers/schools/districts to provide appropriate curriculum and pacing... these kiddos, from a broad range of SES, at 12 years old had spent a range of 5-7 years in the public and/or private school systems... years which were largely characterized by benign neglect and no special attention from schools, whether "identified" or not. Some may even go so far as to say that children were "identified" to determine who not to teach.

There may be great danger in presuming that a child having taken the SAT at age 12 (or any other out-of-level academic talent search test at any age) is an earmark of the child having been the beneficiary of support, challenge, special attention, or appropriate curriculum placement/pacing from their school.

More from the article: "Politically, it raises the fraught question of whether our education system should be in the business of identifying and segregating elite students—an idea that has been tried and rejected before, for good reasons."More from real life: Kiddos may have long been identified and segregated, not for appropriate curriculum and pacing (as the article seems to imply) but rather "identified" and segregated to be recipients of benign neglect in the classroom. Several forum posts discuss gifted children receiving no instruction.

The article referring to students with a rare and extremely high intellectual profile as "elite" students may seem to imply wealth or high SES amongst these students, as the definition of "elite" is somewhat ambiguous as to indicating a high amount of talent, power, or wealth.

I thought this was a good article on a topic that rarely receives any coverage that looks anything close to balanced. Of course I support helping gifted children, but educational justice is also very important to me.

"talent war." Ugh.

In seeming to balance these statements as being opposed to one another by use of the fulcrum word "but"... how do you define educational justice in this context if it is other than helping gifted children by providing opportunity to meet the educational needs of students requiring the support/challenge of advanced academic placement and pacing due to their readiness and ability to learn at that level?

I support helping gifted children because educational justice is very important to me.

Ooh, I like this idea, so very much. It's just so reasonable.

Justice seems complicated because you can look at intent or outcomes or opportunities or resources or?.

If only one student learns at twice the pace, should twice as much course material be purchased for just them?

What if there are two students moving at twice the pace, one has tutors and works three hours a day at home on their education, the other only does school work at school. Should they get the same school resources?

24 students in a classroom, 18 moving at the same pace and can receive the same instruction, three moving faster and three moving slower need additional instruction to support where they are at. If the teacher has time each week for 24 hours of instruction for the classroom, should 18 of those go to the middle level, 3 to fast, and 3 to slow? Or should it be 8 hours to each group.

It's a pretty muddled sort of moral/ethical mix that can leave me feeling a bit uncertain about just where the line of "fair" exists.

I think fair starts with dropping strictly age based groupings.

Indigo, I'm specifically concerned with this:


and this:


Unintended consequences, of course. But very real phenoms in my experience--and those they hurt are those who can least afford it. Of course, this doesn't mean we should throw the gifted under the bus. But it's very complicated. My DD's school contains a GT magnet housed in a Title 1 school and yes, there are issues.