School time
School doesn’t start here until the day after Labor Day. Both boys are starting new schools, so we’re all a little twitchy waiting to see how everything works out. D’s noticed that he’s shorter than kids who are younger than he is, and is a bit worried that kids will tease him about it. I’m trying to tell him both that it’s perfectly normal to be a little nervous about starting a new school, and that it will be fine, and for some reason he seems to think that there’s a contradiction inherent in the idea that everyone’s scared of it but there’s nothing to worry about.
The most emailed article today on the NYTimes website is about teacher turnover, and how school districts are scrambling to fill their slots. In case you thought this was limited to poor districts, go visit Jody, who’s got some stories to tell about teacher and principal turnover. Having lived through D having 3 teachers (plus literally more short-term subs than I could count) last year, I’ve got my fingers crossed for some stability this year.
The Washington Post on Sunday had an opinion piece by Patrick Welsh, a local HS English teacher, on the battles over gifted and talented classes in Alexandria. Apparently they’ve cut down enormously on the number of kids classified as G&T, especially in the more affluent schools.* The problem is that there are lots of kids who don’t meet the new cutoffs, who are still bored/underchallenged in their regular classes, which (claims Welsh) are mostly focused on making sure that low-income minority kids are passing the SOLs. He includes a quote from Superintendent Perry that’s fairly horrifying if accurate:
"To allay parental anxieties [Welsh has to be tongue in cheek here], Superintendent Rebecca Perry
has said that the students at the top of the regular classes — i.e.,
the white kids who didn’t get into TAG — will help to ‘challenge,
mentor and coach’ the students struggling with the SOL material."
Interestingly, today’s Post has an article on how gifted and talented students are the ones being left behind under NCLB. It’s based on a research paper that actually argues that both the very advanced students and the very behind ones get less attention as a result of the NCLB requirements. The paper argues, plausibly, that schools have huge incentives to devote their resources to the students who have a shot at passing the standardized exams, but aren’t guaranteed to do so, rather than those who definitely are going to pass or those who are definitely going to fail. It’s the same argument for why campaigns focus on swing states, rather than New York or Utah.
Welsh cites the Carol Dweck work on Mindsets that I’ve written about here before to argue that the gifted and talented label is destructive both to the kids who get put in those classes and the ones who are excluded. He concludes that the goal should be to challenge "all our kids, all the time." I agree with him in theory, but think it’s easier said than done. And sometimes easier done with differentiated classrooms, rather than with one teacher trying to cover the full range of skills and learning styles. Especially with all those novice teachers who are standing in front of classrooms.
*I don’t know if it’s a real contrast, but the complaints I’m hearing in Fairfax are in the opposite direction, about the "watering down" of gifted and talented classes. Who knows?
August 28th, 2007 at 6:49 am
Most households have eddies, where things get left for a long time. Back of the fridge leftovers-of-yestermonth (out they go, they have white beards) last year’s canned cranberry sauce (gotta be still good, it’s canned, right?) And for us, worthy magazine articles set by the toilet to get read sometime. Sometimes this is fortunate: the NYT magazine article Still Left Behind, What It Will Really Take To Close The Education Gap by Paul Tough (Nov 26, 2006) is still in the stack.
Broadly, he said KIPP schools are successful in making better outcomes for the kids who go there. He mentions the KIPP critic Rothstein – Rothstein says that the kids coming in are selected simply by their parents choosing the school, so the kids are not comparable. I talked some about peer group effects in an earlier comment here http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2007/07/best-bang-for-t.html#comment-77352018 and I have read elsewhere since about followup: they have looked at kids whose parents tried to get them into charters and for whom there was not room, they went back into the regular schools and their outcomes were not as good as the (otherwise indistinguishable) kids who did get in. Seems like that puts paid to Rothstein. And Tough has a GREAT closing paragraph: “Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail – if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 per cent of the country’s poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.” Yow.
Elizabeth, you talk about the value of differentiated classrooms, and I think you have hit the nail squarely. I’m going to try and tie in peer group and parent groups too: my boys are 9 and 10, and we have in many ways lost them. Sam’s, and Henry’s, and Jimmy’s, and Aidan’s opinions on schoolwork, Wii games, hair length are far more important and persuasive than ours. Those opinions, thank God, are not terribly different from ours: our family lives in a community where most parents have similar opinions about the importance of schoolwork, etc., and Sam-Henry-Jimmy-Aidan largely reinforce for us.
Welsh’s quote of Perry is of course not meliorative: what parent wants his kid to be cannon fodder to get someone else’s kid through the exams, at cost to his own competence? And the peer group effect I’ve mentioned above suggests to me that there is as great a likelihood that the kid who is doing okay-to-good will get sucked into the preoccupations of his lower-performing peers. You have solved your problem as we have solved ours: get the kids into a school where the behaviors we value are reinforced by the other kids. Differentiated classrooms and probably more effectively differentiated schools will save some kids. Most of the schools which get ‘miracle’ press seem to be places where they have worked very hard on establishing a culture of accomplishment.
August 28th, 2007 at 11:53 am
I actually think that several pieces of information you cite form a pattern that fits together. People are grumbling about “watered” down gifted classes because there’s a perception that savvy parents (I use this to mean any combination of education/income/assets that allows people to navigate the school system) work to get their “bright” children into “gifted” programs. For example, there’s private testing, tutoring, and re-testing, all of which are used frequently to get children into these programs. If the active parenting brings in kids who are at the edges of cut-offs, those who easily meet them will feel that the curriculum is watered down to meet the needs of those kids. I’ll have to read the study you cite, but, I’d need to see the definition of “very advanced” to see if it applies to those students in Alexandria who are now being excluded from the gifted programs.
Perry’s comment is circling in the gifted community, because that’s the perception parents fear most: that their children be used for the benefit of others. I think many educators who are dealing with so much desperation from the lower end of their populations have a hard time taking seriously the concerns of affluent parents, whose kids are going to do fine (though the affluent parents are playing a different game, getting into Harvard, rather than getting a fine and adequate education.
But, she’s addressing, badly, two aspects of the self-contained classroom debate. The first is the role that students play in educating each other. I’ve always thought that’s an important point of school, and that students can really benefit from “helping” each other (though not in the form that Perry suggests). Second, do the “above average” kids actually constitute a special need that is best addressed by a self-contained classroom? In answering this question, people like Perry want to know whether they have this special need because of their innate abilities, or whether their need for a different classroom is merely an affect of their environment. If it’s just environment, providing them with a special classroom ends up exacerbating the existing social differences among the population (hence the comment about “white kids”). If gifted classrooms aren’t necessitated by the innate needs of a subgroup of children, they are merely a means for parents to segregate their kids. That’s a battle school administrators are constantly fighting.
I think the fact is that if we really used the extremes of the distribution in testing properly (and didn’t allow re-testing that screws up the statistics), far fewer affluent children would qualify for the “pull-out” classrooms.
One idea that’s being considered in my neck of the woods is a “self-selected” advanced learning classroom, in which students would have to meet standards to remain, combined with a tightened criterion for very advanced students.
bj
August 28th, 2007 at 11:55 am
PS: good luck to D & N in their new environments. My daughter is going to first grade the day after labor day (in the same school we picked after much agonizing last year). She’s excited about starting first grade (asks us when she’ll start first grade), and explained to me that last year she was excited, too, but also anxious, because it was new. This year, she says, she can be excited without being anxious.
bj
August 28th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
There was a nice article in Time recently about gifted education, and how it’s still failing the needs of the profoundly gifted.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653653,00.html
August 28th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
I wonder if the reason gifted progams are failing the truly gifted is due to the fact that not everyone belongs in these classes. Every parent may believe that his/her child is gifted, but how are we defining gifted? Many of my teacher friends tell me that in a classroom of 20, they may have one or two gifted children. So are parents pushing schools to place children into gifted programs that really do not belong there? And if this is so their child has better college options, is it improving their abilities and grades on the college level? Should there be remedial classes for those struggling? I doubt parents want their kids in those classes due to the stigma. In my experience it is beneficial to have a variety of student levels in one classroom. There are a few colleges near where I live that offer gifted summer programs for children. Some people say that anyone can get in if you have the money to pay. As a teacher of art, it can be easy to spot a gifted student. I think a student has to have artistic ability (drawing, painting, sculpture, etc. skills), but also the ability to develop it further. Basically, you either have it or you do not.
August 28th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
interesting article, elizabeth. i take huge exception to the assertion that grade skipping is the panacea treatment for gifted kids – i was pushed ahead with absolutely disastrous results, socially. of course, they did talk about it being optimally 3 grades or more. that may make a difference ~ the kids would so obviously be so much younger than the other kids that they may end up being more protected and nurtured by the older kids rather than, um, tortured.
and of course, it goes without saying that not every family has the resources to pick up and move to reno. sheesh. let’s be real here. that’s a nice option, but there are plenty of elite boarding schools for the children of parents who have resources. what about the gifted kids who don’t? who are in crappy public schools because they live in an area that is socio-economically depressed — not upper middle-class suburbs. they get left to twist in the wind.
sorry, i’m a little bitter about this whole subject.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
I just read the Time article and it really ticked me off since the education system has been well aware of the retiring boomer issue for a long time. They are aware of teacher union contracts and retirement policies. With such great retirement packages, do they think boomers are going to keep up the daily classroom stress for an extra few years? Add in oversized classrooms and a need for new schools and it is too much to deal with. In my attempt at considering teaching high school art I went back to grad school and attended educational mass hiring events. The hiring sites I attended were in a large city and with enough people like an open call for a movie. Disorganized, nasty board of ed organizers, long waits with no idea if your subject area was hiring and multiple applicant interview (you were literally competing face to face). Each school should be able interview rather than go through the beaurocratic board of ed. Some schools have been able to hire and keep positions off the radar, but this is rare.
This last minute hiring of bachelor degree only candidates to teach high need subjects is outrageous. If a school is struggling they need the most experienced and succesful teachers, not professional business people looking for a career change. You need people with education in subject area curricula, classroom management, child psych, etc. – all the things teachers learn in college. And they are wondering why turnover is so high. Many of the professional career changers do not stay to teach as a career and I though I read somewhere that they leave after a year and then after five. The bonus and housing incentives are not working if turnover is so high. Most new teachers get placed into high need schools and then leave once they get their tenure or experience. I think people need to start asking teachers why they do not want to stay in those schools rather than just discuss the turnover rate. Could it be due to pay, safety, commute, administration’s style of management? In my large metro area it is the same school districts struggling to hire, while others are fending off too many applicants. I would bet the next solution will be what business are doing, recruit from immigrants other countries.
Lastly, the science and math issues in the U.S. have been looming since Reagan. Are we just seeing the results of the lack of progress in this area? Possibly. What has the government been doing to improve this issue besides NCLB? Does NCLB address the lack of certified teachers in math and science?
August 28th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Sorry that was a little less than quality posting; I am just hopping mad.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Trishka, the founders of the Davidson Academy do have another program for kids who can’t move to Reno:
“Through another project of theirs, the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, each year the Davidsons assist 1,200 highly gifted students around the U.S. who need help persuading their schools to let them skip a grade or who want to meet other kids like them.”
(Full disclosure: My mother used to work with Jan Davidson.)
I was not pushed ahead, and it worked out OK, but I do think that skipping might have been better for me in the long run. I agree that it’s not a panacea, though – every kid is different.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Christine:
I’m hopping mad about the teacher hiring in schools, too. I think we’re moving towards non-career teachers, who teach for a few years and then burn out (because they have no support). Some may move on to other things anyway (it’s not an easy job, even with support), and it’s not ever going to pay the way that people pay to keep others in high-stress occupations.
The system of teacher hiring is dysfunctional, but no one (the unions/school boards/taxpayers/administrators) is doing anything to fix it, and everyone is waiting for the other guy to blink first.
bj
August 28th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Re: the Davidson Institute?
To answer Christine’s question, they really do seem to target a tail of the distribution (3 standard deviations above the mean), and IQ on currently normed tests of 145 (compared to the average of 100). This translates into a frequency of 1/1000. That means 50 kids in a population of 50,000, which in turn means not very many kids in an average sized school system. Gifted programs in most cities tend to pull out about 5% of the kids (2500 kids).
Those “0.1%” kids might have special needs (though they might be satisfied in a variety of ways — highly educated parents can often handle the access the kids need themselves). That’s the Davidson institutes focus, and although I certainly wouldn’t put the needs of those kids at the top of my priority list, the Davidson’s can do whatever they want with their own money. But, I find the rhetoric of the Genius Denied (Davidson) & the studies funded by the group underwhelming. They’re an advocacy group for the education of students identified by standardized IQ testing, but they’re heavy on the advocacy, and underwhelming on the analysis and science.
I find the Robinson Institute, at the University of Washington, which serves the same population a bit better. But, in general, even the university based organizations (also at Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere) haven’t overwhelmed me with the quality of their science on educating the “gifted”.
bj
August 28th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I haven’t read the whole Time magazine article on gifted education, but it did seem to overplay skipping. For balance, I suggest a book called “Re-Forming Gifted Education: How Parents and Teachers Can Match the Program to the Child” by Karen Rogers. The book offers a variety of recipes for gifted children, and provides profiles of children for the reader to try to put together the best program for. Options include skipping, ability grouping, single-subject acceleration, summer programs, correspondence courses, separate schools, school within a school, pull-out groups, and peer-tutoring.
I skipped 8th grade and initially faced a lot of hostility in my new class, but eventually cowed the bullies and found my peers in my new class. My dad signed me up for a correspondence Russian course through the University of Washington and arranged for me to have a free period at school to do my homework. Having nearly run out of academic coursework, I skipped 12th grade and went to college at the University of Southern California as a just-turned 16 year old. USC had a special early entrance program (the kids lived in a single dorm as freshmen, I believe) combined with a core honors program (fulfilling basic requirements) where classes usually of 35-40 would be taught by real professors. It was a very effective and enjoyable program with a fearsome paper load. Given local resources, it would have been hard to create a better high school or college experience. However, I think things could have been a lot better K-7, where I was spaced out a lot of the time.
August 29th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I wasn’t going to touch the whole giftedness thing. But didn’t the magazines and the NYTimes just publish a series of articles about research showing that people who identified themselves as hard workers, disciplined and dedicated to their craft, achieved more as adults than those who were told they had high IQs? Maybe that’s an argument in favor of the Davidson curriculum — push geniuses out to the boundaries of their abilities, so they too can see their achievements as the result of hard labor. But in practice, at least as implied in this article, the Davidson curriculum seems to be reinforcing the (discredited?) message that being highly gifted means having the innate smarts to achieve “adulthood” as a tween.
Just because one is preternaturally verbal doesn’t mean one is a mini-adult. Adulthood, I hope, involves more than the ability to engage in advanced reasoning with a complex vocabulary. Are highly gifted children’s brains developing at a more rapid level? Do they not lack the same impulse-control regulators that all teenage brains are still developing?
I would like us to have a more nuanced vocabulary about intellectual prodigies. This article just irritates me.
Also, weren’t there studies last year finding that the highest achieving athletes, even Michael Jordan, were defined more by their hard work and effort than by their innate abilities? Again, this may support the most advanced curriculum we can find for gifted children — to achieve great things as adults, they need to know the pleasures and struggles of hard work. There needs to be the intellectual equivalent of the 300 free-throw practice every night for those kids.
Although: I don’t believe JK Rowling’s IQ has ever been published, but I’d be shocked if she’s been hiding her childhood identification as a prodigy from the world.
To put it another way, could we have identified Alex Rodriguez and Michael Jordan and Bill Gates at the age of 8? 12? 15? Did they stand out that much from their peers? And when did they do so? And how did we know? I’m intrigued by Christine’s ability to identify the highly gifted in her classes. Christine, do you know how they’ve done, as a group, as they progress? Do you have ideas about what helps or holds back these kids?
We are constrained by limited funds. Especially these days. So it’s legitimate to ask, who needs our education dollars the most? We don’t just give more money to the developmentally delayed because we want to achieve some sort of grey-suited, achievement-dampening standardized mean. We give them more money because we assume, rightly or wrongly, that one of the gifts of high intelligence is the ability to seek out one’s requirements on one’s own.
August 29th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Jody’s absolutely right about limited funds. And it’s an interesting question.
I have the perspective of a business person who cannot find good workers. The kids who are anointed as “gifted” early on, who go to name-brand colleges and are the focus of so much parental effort and angst — these kids often IMHO have a tough transition to the “real” world, because they have not gotten the message that 90% of life is effort, not talent. I don’t think the current educational approach is necessarily helping them long-term.
OK fine, so that’s one perspective. I think the work world is important, but I also believe our educational system has a responsibility to turn out good *citizens*. An educated populace is incredibly important to a democracy. Here I don’t have as much data. Do we think that NCLB will help produce an overall better citizenry?
August 29th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
well, i think that is the issue with gifted education, to tailor it to the abilities of the kid so that they DO have to work.
college was a nasty wake-up call for me, when i found out i had to actually do homework in order to ace tests!
btw, i also enrolled as a 16yo, but there was no special dorm or program or anything for me. i was just thrown in with the other students, all substantially older. thankfully, though, they did tend to look out for me a bit as a child prodigy, and not pin unrealistic expectations on me, as far as maturity goes.
but it is not an experience i would recommend to anyone. i am fiercely adamant that our son is not going to get short-changed in his education, no matter what we have to do to accomplish it. and if that means private school rather than fight the battles at the public school level, so be it.
August 29th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I agree with trishka – to me the point of identifying gifted children is so that they have harder work to do, and realise that you do have to make an effort sometimes.
I find this whole debate really interesting, because when I think about the public policy aspects – what is the biggest bang for buck in terms of society – it probably is focusing your dollars at the lower end of the socio economic and capability spectrum. But my children aren’t there, and as a parent, I want the best possible education for them, so I don’t particularly like a public policy that takes the money away from that kind of child.
Budgets can be increased, but they are always rationed in the end. So every school administrator has to work out the balance between equity and investment in the future, and it’s not an easy balance.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Jody, to answer your question, I do have some progress information due to the school keeping into contact with alumni. Students that I have had who are really gifted do go on to succeed in the field. The ones that struggle have other issues, such as money, family support, etc. Which makes me tend to agree with someone above that there is more to adulthood and succeeding in life than simply talent. I had an extremely intelligent and talented student join the military because they could not afford to pursue a career in art. Also, at least in art and graphics, there is so much competition for so few spots many kids look for other directions. I am guessing that very specialized fields where only the really talented are sought is the same way. Athletics seem to be that way as well.
What holds these kids back most of the time is outside the classroom issues like I mentioned above, but it can be something else. I remember a student that was able to draw anything in a photographic way. It actually was detrimental to the class since everyone decided her work was the best and effort nose-dived. I had to fight strong against this mentality because other than drawing she had no capacity for creativity. It seemed she just wanted to notate, rather than create. I started to assign projects that made them think outside of the box and this kid struggled when anything abstract was presented. Drawing ability is a great tool and there are certainly jobs out there, but I saw that she would be limited. Ideas to me start in imagination and creativity. I have had other kids that have great imagination, but no skills to translate. These type of students work best in a team environment and that is something I also try to bring into the classroom.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:25 am
“Which means that a substantial number of students will now be relegated to the “regular” curriculum, where the emphasis is on ensuring that lower-income children who lag far behind in basic skills will pass the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exams.”
This is part of the article written by Patrick Welsh & posted in the Washington Post about gifted children. He also makes regular comments about the white children not being challenged while everyone is try to help their black & Hispanic counter parts keep up.
I am a lower income single mother (& white) who has done everything she can to ensure her children get a great education. My lower income children are in gifted programs & have always been in gifted programs. My son is 16 & there have been cuts in the programs at his school as well. However, he & several other students still in the program are lower income & minority.
I would hate to think where these children would be today if they had a racist & classist teacher like MR Welsh. If that is the best VA has to offer, no wonder laws like NCLB had to be written.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I agree that Welsh is way too flippant about assuming that only poor and minority kids are struggling with the SOLs. But it doesn’t do anyone any favor to ignore the fact that poor and minority kids are disproportionately at risk, and are often not identified as gifted and talented even when they should be. I’m NOT a fan of No Child Left Behind, as readers of this blog know. But the one thing that I think has been good about it is that it’s forced school systems to honestly confront what a lousy job they’re doing, in most cases, of serving disadvantaged kids.
Dave, I wrote about the Tough article when it came out:
http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2006/11/what_it_takes.html