Schools have often struggled to meet the special educational needs of a wide range of students – those with learning disabilities, those learning English, those with behavioral problems and those whose homes suffer from poverty. But they have largely neglected one large group of students with special needs: the academically gifted.
Many school districts across the country have scaled back programs for early adopters. The practice of ending or rolling back such programs began about 15 years ago. But it became more intense in 2021, when the Black Lives Matter movement made schools think about the surprising fact that they are much less likely to identify Black and Latino students as gifted than white and Asian students.
Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parents’ competition for fame and profit. Unlike other categories of special education, the gifted label was desired by parents. Classes and sometimes entire schools for gifted students tend to have a richer curriculum and additional resources. They have become classrooms for high achievers rather than students who are best described as gifted.
These programs were originally intended to meet the needs of students with strong, often irregular, learning patterns. They tend to be seen as not needing special attention because they tend to do well. Since standardized testing requires schools to aim for student achievement, the focus is on those who have not met that mark. Those who went beyond were considered righteous.
But they just aren’t right. Gifted children, more than others, tend to excel in some ways and struggle in others, a phenomenon known as atypical development. A third grader’s reading skills may be at an 11th grade level and his social skills are like those of a kindergartener. They often find it difficult to communicate with other children. They are also in danger of being closed because the lessons are slow.
I don’t know if I was gifted as a child, but I was bored out of my mind in elementary school. It was as if everything was so repetitive that paying attention in class was pointless. I started doing something just to keep myself busy.
My third grade teacher tried a few tricks, including sending me to make up things just to get out of the classroom. Nothing works. So they transferred me to the fourth grade even though the school policy forbade it.
That was a disaster. I was isolated from my friends and worried about being grilled by adults and children asking why I was in a higher grade. It didn’t work in education either. I enjoyed the challenge of participating, but when that happened, school became boring again. The problem was not a third grade thing; it was a learning curve.
When I first became involved in education in the late 1970s, it was a pleasant surprise to see this need addressed – although it was not easy to hear a 10-year-old child describe himself as a “gifted child” at school. board meeting. “MGM” was the name given to the programs, later renamed “GATE,” for Gifted and Talented Education.
It was never quite clear what gifted education was, however. In some districts, they were the most sought-after schools awarded to high-achieving students. Sometimes it enriched some students. The teachers were supposed to receive special training, as any special teacher would, but it seemed that they had failed. In the schools my children attended, the gifted program basically meant extra homework.
When giftedness becomes a matter of prestige rather than a particular learning style and necessity, all bets are off. Perhaps the problem was calling it “gifted” instead of “asynchronous development”; No one is going to fight to get their child into an asynchronous development program unless they need it.
There is no doubt that racism played a role in identifying children as gifted even though the label was based on supposedly objective criteria. But the solution to that problem is to eliminate bias, not the programs themselves.
To its credit, the Los Angeles Unified School District has maintained gifted education, with programs that cater to different academic and creative abilities. One is for gifted students, who may do well in college elsewhere while still sophomores in high school. But equal enrollment for students of color led the district to relax its admissions requirements before changing the curriculum recently. The criteria should be very simple: whether the student needs and can progress very quickly with the learning material.
California does not require schools to offer gifted programs and stopped funding them in 2013, so schools have little incentive to maintain them. The answer is certainly not to remove the programs completely. It doesn’t seem to help to open them with all the children; that led others to slow down, defeating their purpose.
Differentiated instruction – where a teacher combines lessons to meet the different needs of students – sounds good but is difficult to implement in a large classroom.
My oldest child was lucky enough to be in a small program at his public school, which was open to all until the spots were filled, which solved the big problem of segregation. It involved several exercises and many individual projects. Students choose their own books to read and report on. Their projects can be written reports or, if their skills lie elsewhere, films, plays, songs or board games – as long as they show that they have learned the lesson at hand. Empower students to work at their own pace, avoid boredom and showcase their talents.
But that program was run by two extremely talented teachers who were able to bring out the best in each student. It’s much easier to measure a test than to evaluate a project, and I don’t know how repeatable the program can be. In any case, it’s gone.
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