"With Gifted Education, Access Is Everything"
20817
With Gifted Education, Access Is Everything
Thursday, November 8, 2007; T18
Dear Extra Credit:
I take exception to your claim that you haven't found much correlation
between success in life and gifted education during childhood. If you
talk to successful gifted people, this might be true. If, however, you
talk to gifted people who have not succeeded, I believe you will see a
different picture. There are estimates that 20 percent of the dropout
population is gifted. (This, of course, is a difficult number to
determine given the differences in the definitions for gifted and for
dropout.) There are also rough estimates that 20 percent of those
incarcerated are also gifted.
And not surprisingly, the majority of these are low-income minorities
who are the least likely to have access to gifted programs in school.
One of the best articles I've seen on this issue is "Giftedness and
High School Dropouts: Personal, Family and School-Related
Factors" (2002) by Joseph S. Renzulli and Sunghee Park. The full
article is available at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1b/5a/46.pdf.
The following two findings are notable. First, gifted students dropped
out of school because, among other reasons, they didn't like school
and/or were failing. And second, 48.2 percent of the gifted dropouts
were in the lowest quartile socioeconomic level, while only 3.6
percent were in the highest quartile. These low-income, minority
gifted students most likely disappear off the radar. It would be
interesting to know how many of these gifted dropouts had access to
quality gifted programs and, if not, what difference that might have
made in their lives.
In light of the above, I was rather surprised to see you challenging
JoAnn DiGennaro [Extra Credit, Oct. 11] to provide data showing that
most gifted and talented students are falling between the cracks. Yes,
I know she wrote "most," but do we really need to show that gifted
students from middle and high socioeconomic groups are also falling
between the cracks at the same rate in order for us to take the above
issue seriously? I don't believe for a minute that you're okay with
the state of gifted education as long as it's just poor, minority
students who are failing to achieve. And this doesn't begin to address
gifted students who fail to achieve for other reasons: gifted learners
with special needs, gifted ESL students, gifted underachievers, etc.
Please take the above information into consideration in your future
writings about gifted and talented education.
Laura Carriere
President
Prince George's Association for Talented and Gifted Education
Bowie
You are one of the only people who responded to that intentionally
provocative statement with the data I requested. Thank you. I have
interviewed Joe Renzulli and respect his work greatly. A close read of
his good paper tells me why you and I, and others who have written me
on this subject, are having difficulty understanding one another. You
refer to the problem yourself: We have very different ways of defining
the word "gifted."
Having spoken to and exchanged e-mails with many gifted advocates, I
think I can say with some confidence that when most of them use that
term, they generally mean kids in the top 5 percent of the population
on IQ or achievement tests, roughly the group that qualifies for the
gifted centers in Fairfax County. Some would say even that definition
is too loose. They prefer the top 1 or 2 percent, which is close to
the population served by Montgomery County's gifted centers.
Now look at the definition of gifted in the Renzulli-Park paper:
"Those who have participated in their school district's gifted program
or have been enrolled in three or more classes in advanced, enriched,
or accelerated English, social studies, science or math." By that
definition, any student who has taken a few honors or AP or IB courses
is gifted. In many Washington area schools, that would mean 70 percent
of the students would get that label. I notice one of the studies
cited in that report said 11 percent of dropouts appeared to be
gifted, with the definition of gifted being those "capable of
completing college."
So you see my problem. I still have not seen any data that indicate
significant numbers of those top 5 percent or top 2 percent students
having much of a problem finding their way to schools and jobs in
which their gifts are appreciated. Exceptions, of course, are those
with emotional or learning disabilities, which can affect kids of all
intelligence levels and require a solution different than gifted
classes.
As I have said often, I am all for acceleration of gifted students.
Instead of putting them in special gifted classes in their current
grades, let's move them up to the grade level that matches their
achievement level. And I have written tens of thousands of words in
the past two decades expressing my outrage at low-income kids with
potential for college being overlooked and mislabeled and fed pap
instead of being challenged in our public schools.
In a follow-up e-mail, you expressed the hope that the federal
government would create a gifted education program that would define
the term "gifted" and get services to those children, particularly
training for teachers. I wish I shared your confidence that we
actually know how to teach gifted children to great effect without
accelerating them. I haven't seen any data that show that even the
best gifted classes we have today add very much if they don't involve
significant acceleration. If anyone has information on that, I would
like to see it.