Academically/Intellectually Gifted Education is problematic but necessary

Great Debates
41

I think I halfway disagree with you on this. Some kids do have the capacity to manipulate symbols and abstract concepts in a way that translates to a remarkable felicity with words and numbers. It can lead to specific needs for those kids: they pick up on symbolic manipulations in a single lesson that can take most folks two weeks to figure out, and if you don’t account for that, those kids sit through the remaining nine days of lessons as happy and engaged as your typical third grader would be with nine days of singing your ABCs. It’s not some mystical quality, it’s not manic pixie, it’s not indigo kid: it’s a specific skillset. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s inherent, inherited, environmental, or divinely ordained: it’s a skillset that needs to be accounted for.

But not all kids get identified because of this set. Some kids get identified because they’re disciplined as hell and they keep working until they figure things out. Some kids get identified because their families have the resources to surround them with an academic environment, and that’s all they know. Some kids get identified because their parents, let’s say, advocate for them.

And there are other specific needs I see in identified kids. Again, not in all of them, but in enough that it’s a significant pattern. The risk-averse child; the work-averse child; the poor-social-skills child. These needs often manifest among AIG-identified kids in a way that’s different from how they manifest among non-identified kids.

Even more difficult is kids who require both EC services and AIG services. They often slip through the cracks, because they use their high skills in one area to compensate for low skills in another. My deeply ADHD kid who could never keep his body still or his hands off other people, but who could calculate numbers in his head faster than I could? I never did get him services. My dyslexic kid whose understanding of characters was deeper and more complex than that of most of her peers? You can bet the test didn’t identify her, although I did get her a successful referral to the program.

Recognizing unique needs of AIG kids is no more remarkable, I think, than noticing how certain conditions–e.g., ADHD and dyslexia–can feed off one another, and dyslexia manifests among ADHD kids differently from how it manifests.

That said, I only halfway disagree. There definitely are parents who think that an AIG identification means that their kid is the smartest person in the time zone, and who think a failure to identify their kid indicates a massive failure of federal educational policy.

That’s interesting. I’m not sure what specifically you’re talking about here. Thinking about my own classes, I’m not even sure whether I’m always growth-mindseting it. Granted this is my first year, and it’s remote learning, I’m doing things like:

  • Teaching algebra to my fourth graders using a kit with chips and dice.
  • Teaching my ELA fifth graders about history and science using a “create a country” project (we’ve spent like 12 weeks on it but are finally, dear god, almost done).
  • Teaching fourth grade and second grade ELA students the fundamentals of English grammar, at different levels
  • Teaching a hodgepodge of lessons to fifth grade and third grade math students–I don’t have a clear curriculum here, and don’t feel great about that. But I try to link it to standards most of the time, with the occasional logic puzzle day thrown in.
  • Teaching any fourth grader who will come to my optional sessions about animal adaptations and about electromagnetism.

Is that not what the program looks like where you are?

42

I was your standard gifted kid bored shitless through 99% of class up through high school & half of undergrad. I’m not in education in any way but my niece is a kindergarten teacher who lived with us for awhile & I got/ often get an earful about the challenges of teaching the basics to the emotionally / behaviorably troubled, the ordinary, and the kids who can read at a 2nd grade level already. All in the same room at the same time together while working with a rigid curriculum centered on passing an end-of-year test and only that.

ISTM the central challenge is if we grab 100 young kids from the very same ethnic and SES background, the range of their inherent capabilities probably ranges across about (TOTAL WAG) 5x. That’s a gulf too big to bridge as a group. Throw in some ESL, some SES spread, and some ethnic/social issues and maybe it’s 7x. Before we add in the emotionally troubled kids. Now fast forward a few years so some kids have been slowly left behind educationally but promoted gradewise anyhow while others have slowly pulled ahead of the pack in knowledge / maturity / intellectual strength, if not in grade. The practical difference in their ability to gain incremental knowledge / skill today in topic X may be 10x. That’s right, a 10 to 1 ratio.

If each kid had their own fulltime teacher we could implement the goal that every child gets a year’s worth of high value schooling (to them) per year. Anything you’re trying to accomplish as a group, much less an age-centric group, is so doomed to failure by comparison to that ideal that it almost doesn’t matter what you try as a remedy (GATE, AIC, EIP, etc.) it’s a eyewash band-aid. Not because of malfeasance or any cynical doctrinal argument, but just because the problem is so vast compared to the tiny resources we deign to throw at it.

I don’t mean to present a cynical screed and sign off. But I genuinely wonder how we can set the expectations of the customers to be close to the actual capabilities of the school system to deliver education to the mass of kids. Once expectations are more or less in line with resources, then we can make tweaks to optimize delivery. But it’ll still be stuck at the level of harvesting the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

This is definitely a

43

It’s not that they think their kid is the smartest in the room, it’s that they think he’s the most special. He’s different. Not paying attention in class? He’s bored. Missing questions? Overthinking it. Rude? Has trouble relating to normal kids. At the GT kick-off, it was all “GT doesn’t mean smart. Lots of kids are smart. We are trying to identify the ones that are gifted. It’s not the same: it’s a different way of thinking about things, looking at things. They need more than other kids”. I don’t doubt that kids learn in lots of different ways and that’s there’s all kinds of genius out there. I do doubt that there is a sharp line between “gifted” and “not-gifted” and all the different ways kids can be special can be lumped under one category. Kind of like how as our understanding of biology and evolution has improved and we understood clades, we realized that the categories like “dinosaur” and “reptile” didn’t really mean anything, or at least not anything that lined up with the generally understood meaning of the term.

I guess I’m arguing that “gifted” is a social construct, not a biological one, and it’s used as a highly imperfect umbrella to cover all sorts of types of intellectual patterns that have no overarching connection. But people will talk about “gifted” as somehow it means “better”, like the gifted kid who never learned calculus because he “didn’t apply himself” is still better, inherently, than the “normal” kid who put his head down and worked and learned. Because the gifted kid could have learned it easier, if he’d bothered to try. This attitude was absolutely common when I was a kid and I was shocked to find it still very present in my son’s school district GT program–which is largely dominated by parents who were GT identified in my generation. I find that attitude so incredibly toxic–it’s just setting gifted-identified kids up for burnout, and the others for failure. My mom will tell you that’s she’s “really not that smart”–despite extraordinary professional success–but that she “just works really hard”, and she says that like she’s confessing a secret.

You’ve got a great deal more experience than I do, and if you feel like there really is some connective tissue between these kids that gives them something in common that they don’t share with the gen pop, I will think very hard about it. But by the time they are 14, I struggle to see any difference between the very high performing kids who were GT identified and the very high performing ones that weren’t.

I guess I’d rather have a GT program that was like a resource room on the other end of the spectrum. Kids who are ahead on a specific skill–not kids identified as inherently gifted–could go to the GT room for more advanced learning or even independent learning. And when they are not ahead on a skill, they could stay behind. But I would like to get rid of the sense that some kids just have that Magic Stamp on their soul.

As far as my son’s experience, we stopped in 2nd grade–he’s in 3rd now, and we are homeschooling for the year. But in 1st and 2nd, it seemed like they just worked on the same logic puzzles I had done. They did a research project, but it felt fairly rote. Maybe over the next year or two it would have gotten better–I don’t know what is to be expected in a GT program for primary grades. Again, the program here feels so out of date to me.

44

There were no GT programs when I went to school. We were tracked in high school. I was in Track 1, the highest one. I know how little that means.

But as a teacher, I took several courses in GT. In one of those courses, another teacher protested, “We’re not talking about GIFTED kids. We’re talking about SMART kids. What about the kid who isn’t that smart but is truly gifted?” You and I know the answer, LHOD: that kid is SOL. When my district finally got a GT program, kids were pulled from classes. (I taught high school.) My G&T kids didn’t want to go: they didn’t want to miss what we were doing in class.

As a parent, one of my kids, on the recommendation of teachers, went to a G&T summer camp (no gifted programs in the district we lived in) and the other was reading Longfellow before she got out of kindergarten. That says NOTHING about me. She was in a bad way. Her school didn’t know what to do with her. They had her teach other kids (little value for her). Then they bumped her up a grade for reading. Great. She was still reading Melville when the other kids were reading Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. And emotionally, she was still only 7. She didn’t have the frame of reference for Melville. I have no idea why she wanted to read Moby Dick.

There’s way too much ego involved in G&T programs. IQ thresholds are not the answer. Home schooling is not only not the answer for many middle class students, and it’s impossible for impoverished kids. It seems to me if we could get egos out of the equation, it’d help. Maybe all parents of G&T kids should have to put a bumper sticker on their cars: “My kid’s smart despite me.”

Here in the US, as elsewhere (e.g., South Korea), we place more value on the outward trappings of education, the GPA’s, the test scores, the honors/AP programs, than we do on learning. If we could only address and resolve that, it’d go a long way to solving the problem. That, however, is a much bigger, more complex issue to solve.

45

My full argument is that that extra education shouldn’t happen in ordinary class hours by removing the student from their cohort. I have absolutely no objection to academically-advanced kids getting more advanced material just for themselves in their normal class time, if doing so is possible without the teaching of the rest of the class being compromised. The original example I replied to wasn’t such a situation.

And also Learning by Teaching doesn’t just mean helping the least academically-capable, it also applies to teaching average-to-good students. And yes, all students should practice it, including (especially including) the less-academically-advanced of the cohort.

The other thing is, I’m not just advocating this out of the blue. This type of methodology is already successfully applied, in Finland and other places.

46

Ah, yes. I had a kid once who wore a shirt that said something like, “I’d clean my room, but I’m too smart for that” and his school work reflected that attitude. And every time I saw that shirt I’d think, somebody, probably a parent, thought it was a good idea to buy him that shirt. There are some traits that show up among gifted students that are both negative and parent-created.

This is tricky to answer. There’s definitely no single way kids make it into our program. As I said earlier, there are the kids with an almost intuitive understanding of symbolic manipulation; there are the kids who study their butts off; there are kids who are raised in a thoroughly academic environment; there are kids who just love a challenge and will grab hold and not let go; there are kids whose parents agitate until they’re included. These are probably the major groups I see (I’m not aware of a scientific study on the subject). The groups can be pretty different, and there are even some gender differences in tendencies (I see a lot fewer girls who think that hard work is a weakness than I see boys with that attitude).

To the extent that there’s anything categorically different about gifted kids, I might say that a very small subset–the profoundly gifted–can sometimes reason about things in a way that’s significantly beyond their years, and sometimes beyond the adults surrounding them. I’m not talking about the kid who knows her multiplication facts when she’s five or who’s reading Dante’s Inferno when he’s eight. I’m talking about the kid who at five is discovering novel properties in numbers.

These kids are far, far rarer than parents tend to think. I’m not convinced I’ve personally worked with a kid in this group, although I have one or two that might. And I’ve seen parents–including on this board–far too willing to believe their child is in this group.

Yeah, this attitude exists and is incredibly harmful. It ties into the idea that gifted kids often have, that work is a sign of stupidity. It’s one of my professional obligations to disabuse them of this notion, and it’s part of why I think a gifted program, appropriately run, is so important: without providing students with appropriately-difficult work, some kids will be able to skate through school with this attitude intact.

47

Where I object here is that you put this basically as “fine but unnecessary.” It’s something you have no objection to, which is great, but only if it doesn’t compromise anything else.

But in US classrooms at least, individualizing education can be really difficult. 20 kids in a class is a nice small size; but designing a curriculum in which a single adult can meet the needs of a third grader reading Hunger Games and a third grader struggling with Elephant and Piggie and ten kids reading Magic Treehouse and eight kids otherwise on the spectrum means that someone’s education is going to be compromised. The default, in my experience, is that it’s the kids at the extremes.

Moving kids from their regular cohort during class hours can be incredibly helpful, in my experience. When I was a classroom teacher, sometimes half my class would leave the room for AIG (I know–overidentification is a big issue in my community, that’s another piece of the discussion). As a result, I’d have 45 minutes, once or twice a week, when I could really focus in on the needs of the kids who were still there. Differentiated instruction through different instructors is a fabulous educational technique.

Again, this is a great pedagogical technique. But it’s not great for all kids in all circumstances. And it’s not something that gifted kids need to be doing every day.

I think you’re oversimplifying things in Finland. Finland does have programs for gifted education, and it makes allowances for parents to choose children’s schools and to enroll them at a younger age. It recognizes giftedness in more than academic arenas, which is really important, and it’s traditionally placed greater emphasis (as has the US) on helping students with disabilities.

48

Absolutely–but I am not sure that those kids having something in common with each other that they don’t have in common with others. I do know what you mean. But does the math prodigy have something in common with the verbal prodigy that makes it so they benefit from being with each other?

I feel like the gifted spiel I heard at my son’s school (which seemed unchanged from the rhetoric of 20 years ago) was: “Gifted kids are all different. Some are good at math; some at reading; some at dance or music or art”. And I agree with that. But I don’t know why or how a single pull-out program is seen as a way to address those very different talents. It seemed to be “gifted kids just got that thang, and we know it when we see it”. Which leads to this situation where, um, parents of agency, end up getting their kid classified as gifted, and the school hires an extra teacher and diverts extra resources just for them.

I don’t have a problem, at all, with meeting kids where they are and helping them grow. I have a great problem with identifying a subset of kids as “gifted” and opening up a range of services just to them. The GT teacher should be a resource for all students (and teachers) and there should be enough of them that they can be. The culture of the school should be that the GT teacher is part of the whole school, not a sage on a mountain top that only the anointed can visit. It was my impression that this was getting better, that “growth mindset” had replaced “gifted”. This is why I was so shocked to find this was NOT the case in my son’s district. I am very open to believing this is not the case everywhere.

49

I have to recognize that I’m pretty insulated: I know what’s happening at my school, and to a lesser extent my district, and even a lesser extent my state. Some of what we’re doing, we’re doing well, I think. We identify kids as gifted in math, or in ELA, or in “other” (which generally means visual skills, due to our test). We have separate classes for math and ELA, with curriculums that somewhat match classroom skills, although we could be better at that. The “other” category, at least at my school, gets services along with the rest of their grade level: normally this means a 1/weekly push-in class taught by the AIG teacher. It’s a chance for all kids to know the teacher, and also a chance for the AIG teacher to notice kids who might benefit from one of the other classes but who don’t do well on tests (this is especially important for identifying students of color in our district).

But that points to what we’re doing poorly: we’re vastly underidentifying students of color in our district.

50

That sounds a lot better than the once-a-week two-hour pull out for all GT identified kids my son’s district was doing. It might have gotten better at the higher grades, but in K-2 it was very unfocused and felt elitist. And our school had more GT support than most in the district, by way of extra funds for a deseg magnet.

Anyway, I am super excited about this hybrid school for next year. I know that it’s not a good match for a lot of families, but for my son and his academic needs, it’s exactly right.

51

If educational resources are some kind of zero-sum game, yes, it does become a nice-to-have. Priorities should be basic education for everyone first. If that need isn’t being met for some, especially for the learning-challenged, then there should not be advanced education for others.

Look, I’m not an absolutist about this - your 45-90 minutes of AIG a week definitely isn’t going to keep me awake at night. I don’t view that as any different than some kids taking music or art lessons that the rest of the class doesn’t. As long as the kids are involved with their classmates during the rest of their class time, it’s fine. It’s when the classes start getting streamed for the majority of their time that I balk.

Sure, agreed about “All circumstances” and “not every day”. I’m in no way saying it should be anything but an arrow in the quiver. Not the only basis for education. I do think all kids would benefit from a little of it, though (barring actual mental issues)

I am, a bit. But only a little bit. I have not been considering upper secondary schools at all, because they are a uniquely Finnish thing somewhere between school and uni. And it’s only really there that the specialization occurs.

As for early enrollment, all that does is place the kid in a different cohort than their own age mates. That’s why I usually try to use “cohort” and not “age grade”. And I’m cool with early enrollment.

I have never made the argument that Finland doesn’t recognize giftedness, they absolutely do. They’ve just made the decision not to do anything radical or stream-ish about it in basic schooling.

52

At university I met so many students with the same story: “I was always top of the class, everything came easily to me, and I thought I was some kind of genius - until I went to university and for the first time in my life I was middle of the pack.” There was definitely an attitude that the sign of a real genius was never having to put any effort in. IMHO these people would have benefited a lot from having peers at school who challenged them and were at the same level, rather than always being the one everyone else turned to for help.

53

I hear you, but there’s a really thin needle to thread between “you will benefit from more challenging work” and “you are better than normal people. Everything should come very easily to you”. It’s hard to send the first message without sending the second, and even if they are provided with more challenging “enrichment” material in K-8 or K-12, they will still have the same shock when the “required” work gets difficult; it will still threaten their sense of self.

This is why I really favor a focus on skills over ability to master something. It’s what can you do? What do you need to be able to do? What would you like to be able to do? and then work on that. Don’t worry about comparing how fast you can pick up skills. Meet kids where they are and move them forward at a steady, sustainable pace.

54

I don’t see a good way to Discourse-quote the tidbits I want to in a way that makes sense, but this is a direct response to @DemonTree’s & @MandaJO’s thoughtful posts immediately above.

@DemonTree’s story fits so many. Including myself. And the reason it fits is because the earlier schools utterly failed in what @MandaJO suggested: “Meet kids where they are and move them forward at a steady, sustainable pace.” I was never once met where I was. I was always standing around wondering whether by the very end of this school year anyone will have said anything I didn’t know / understand at the start of last year. The way to avoid “they will still have the same shock when the ‘required’ work gets difficult” is to have had the required work be difficult, by their personal standards, all along.

The only reason "you are better than normal people. Everything should come very easily to you” is an issue is because “everything” is defined as “everything a typical person of your age is taught”.

IMO the right way is: “we will load you smarty pants kids, and the ordinary kids, and the slow kids, and the disabled / disturbed kids, right up to your/their personal sustainable daily learning capacity. And we’ll keep that strain up for all 12 years. You’ll all end up in very different places academically. But you’ll all be maximized.” Then college will pick up where we left off, likewise streamed into strata of capability, just with the bottom couple of non-college-attending strata peeled off.

Maybe the answer is for the ordinary public schools to identify the middle 20 or 30% they can do a good job with and divert all the others into more specialized end-to-end schools focused totally on that mission. Easy to say; hard to fund.

55

But it’s not the same 20%. My son is way ahead in math, moderately ahead in reading, and probably at level as a writer. His fine motor skills are terrible, and according to ITBS, he’s below expected in listening.

And a lot of parents really prioritize different things. When I was at a comprehensive high school, we had a lot of students who could have “handled” the sorts of academics my current magnet school does, but 1) they didn’t really want to work that hard; they wanted to put their time into other things and/or 2) they wanted a “typical” high school experience, with band and football games and class musical. And those are not bad choices.

56

We handle this with older kids by putting them in different classes for different topics. But something similar is possible with younger kids. My (first) elementary school had us in different groups for reading, math, etc. While there was some whole-class instruction on these topics, we spent good chunks of the day rotating between small group instruction (i.e. one-on-six) and “go work on this thing on your own” or “go play with these kids in this area” (in kindergarten). My kindergarten and 2nd grade teachers handled this well. The 1st grade teacher was . . . fully challenged by her position. So YMMV.

And as I mentioned earlier, some kids went to other classrooms for some of their groups. E.g. I entered kindergarten at the Dick and Jane stage, but we had complete non-readers and kids reading stuff kids typically didn’t get to for a year or three.

57

@MandaJo: Well said. Thank you. My screed was pretty one dimensional. And unexpectedly cathartic; not what I expected when I started typing. Whew. Shake it off.

Agree about the not the same 20%. I was real high in math & reading, OK+ in writing, still don’t have fine motor skills today, and still suck at most listening; the pace of spoken information flow is 30% of what I’d prefer. And back then I too prized the idea of a more or less normal path through HS; going to some specialized private school for uber-academics would probably have triggered me rebelling, not excelling. It’s only from the other end of the telescope, when as a 30-something I learned about what elite education from a young age is really like and can really achieve, that I felt utterly cheated by what I’d been given.


Having said all that, I’ll give a shout out to @MrDibble’s superb point.

Vast mounds of human potential are wasted by giving lousy (in many cases craptacularly lousy) education to the poor, the disadvantaged, and the disabled/disturbed. A different mound of human potential is wasted by under-serving the gifted kids like your son, and me, and you. ISTM the first goal of government-run schooling is to stop wasting the former mound. Or at least to greatly reduce that waste. Once we get that under control we can fine tune the remaining leakages across the board.


Please understand none of what I say is meant as a dig at the many fine teachers and administrators who are pouring their hearts and lives into trying to bail this ocean with the teaspoon they've been given. Nor to those who did the same 50-ish years ago for me.
58

My fellow students weren’t treated any differently to the average, but nevertheless they got the same message. Because they were always at the top of their classes, they were never challenged, and everything did come easily to them. Like @LSLGuy said, the only way to avoid a shock is to give them work at an appropriate level for them from the start.

I agree. So maybe sending them to different schools isn’t the answer, but different classes for different subjects might be. What is not good is having one teacher trying to teach a huge range of skill levels in one class. That just compromises everyone’s education.

59

But what if that’s not what you want? Down the hall from me, right now, we have a bunch of 15 year olds learning calculus. Most of them are not GT identified. Most were good, but not great at math (the ones that were great at math took calculus as Freshman). What they are is dedicated and willing to take 2 and 3 math classes a year, plus do a ton of homework. There are kids all over the district that could “handle” our rigor–but they don’t want to.

Heck, my son is very advanced at math. But March before Kinder, he couldn’t reliably count to 20. Then he got interested in it–and he took off. Even now, I don’t know that he’s got a special talent for math, or at least that his talent there is so much more dramatic than his talent for verbal stuff. But he likes it more, and so works harder and puts more time into mastering it. On the other hand, he can’t kick a soccer ball because he never really wanted to, and while he’d let me put him in soccer, he never once wanted to go outside and practice.

I just feel like focusing too much on innate talent and not enough on interest/engagement misses a lot of students with great potential, and gives a sense of entitlement to some of the others (I’m smart but I don’t apply myself LOL).

60

I get you now. But it’s almost impossible to separate the two in my view. If you’re interested in something and enjoy doing it then you’ll work harder at it, and be better. And you’re a lot more likely to enjoy doing something you’re good at than something where you suck. Who knows which came first, or if the two just built on each other? I do know that praising kids for their talent is a big no-no and you are supposed to praise effort instead, which makes sense.