Mensa-Wannabe Moms

The Savannah Morning News ran a humorous column called "Mommy I don't want to be a child prodigy" a few weeks ago. Columnist and new mom Anne Hart made fun of the British family that had their 2-year-old child (Georgia Brown) take the Mensa test. She passed and got in, which in theory could set off a lot of dithering among other parents. After all, we all want to believe our children are brilliant.

But personally, I've never understood the appeal of Mensa. It's so easily mocked (the Washington Post once put a note in the paper asking people to send in stories of Mensa members doing something really dumb -- the phrase "the wise man knows himself to be a fool" comes to mind). There's obviously something to be said for being around smart people socially. That's one of the reasons ability grouping is so important for kids. But with some careful career planning as an adult, you can work in an office of very smart people. With some careful social planning, your group of friends will share your intelligence. Kids can't choose their lives and choose who they spend their time with. Adults can. Which makes Mensa seem less necessary.

But I could be wrong! I'm curious if any readers of this blog have joined Mensa, thought about it, joined and quit, or what have you. Have your children ever expressed interest? Is there a place for a social organization made up of intelligent people? Or in this era of "bowling alone" is this another group that will lose clout?

Schools Move Toward Following Students' Yearly Progress

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story on something we've talked about a lot here on Gifted Exchange: using yearly NCLB testing to track individual student results, not just school quality. As it is, schools are graded based on the scores of fourth graders this year compared with fourth graders last year. But while that tells you if a whole school is stepping up its game, it tells you nothing about individual children. And last time I checked, we learn individually.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is aware of this, and she addressed the topic briefly during her speech at the opening of the Davidson Academy in Reno last summer. A number of states including North Carolina, Ohio and Florida have started participating in a pilot program that tracks individual results on achievement tests, comparing a fourth grader this year with the same kid as a fifth grader next year.

The New York Times article, "Schools Move Toward Following Students' Yearly Progress on Tests," by Winnie Hu, ran on July 6th. That means it's been moved to Times Select and, alas, is not available for free anymore. But here's the rather interesting opener: "The Cohoes city school district, outside Albany, is considering a gifted program for elementary students and adding college-level courses after discovering that its top students improved less on standardized tests in the past two years than everyone else in the district."

Yes, it seems that tracking individual test results shows what gifted education advocates have been saying for a while. Gifted kids are often being left behind. While they may continue to pass grade-level achievement tests, they are not truly learning as much as they could. That the Cohoes district is using this new knowledge to create new gifted programs is reason to celebrate indeed.

There's much to love about individual test result tracking. Schools with large concentrations of disadvantaged children like the concept because it means that they get credit if these kids improve, year over year, even if the kids don't meet a certain set cut-off. Schools that shortchange their brightest students will also be more likely to have a fire lit beneath them. So who's against it? Well, according to Hu's article, it's the usual suspects.

"It's detrimental for education," Aimee Bolender, the president of Dallas's American Federation of Teachers chapter told Hu. "It is pulling apart teams of teachers and it doesn't look at why test scores are low. From the very beginning, we viewed it as a slippery slope that did not do anything valuable to improve the educational environment in the schools." Bolender is fighting a decision by Dallas to remove 30 teachers whose students failed to show adequate progress. Bolender said many teachers call this individual growth model "voodoo math" because "you have to be a Ph.D. in statistics to even comprehend it."

And then there's Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust (which advocates for disadvantaged children). She told Hu that the individual growth model might put too much (!) attention on kids at the top. "It risks so broadening the federal government's involvement that its historical role will be dissipated," she told Hu.

So there you have it. The people who are upset about this don't like it because it means removing bad teachers from classrooms and focusing on gifted kids. From my perspective, that means there's a lot to like.

Anything but Acceleration!

It's been three years since the Templeton report on acceleration, A Nation Deceived, came out. The report established that all the available evidence supports acceleration (aka "grade skipping") as a cheap, effective educational option for gifted kids. Accelerated kids tend to thrive academically, and there are no negative social consequences that lead accelerated kids and their parents to see the acceleration as a mistake.

Too bad so few education "experts" are actually listening. The Orlando Sentinel's Family Project section ran a Q&A from a parent whose 5-year-old son needed more challenge. Should the child be accelerated? The Family Project panel members "prefer not to see a child moved ahead in school," though all agreed that the parent would have to advocate for her son so he'd get the enrichment he needed.

There's just one problem with that advice. Enrichment may or may not happen. Maybe the parent doesn't have the time or expertise to advocate. Maybe the kid's teachers don't know how to enrich the curriculum. The good thing about acceleration is that if you put the kid in a grade where he's actually challenged by the basic material, you don't have to advocate.

But the panel did not mention this. Instead, they repeated the usual odes to socialization:

"The most important part of kindergarten is peer relationships and that's why panelist Maryellen Blass says she doesn't advocate advancement. 'Enrichment can be very easily integrated into kindergarten,' she says.

"Even very bright children need socialization skills more than anything at this age, panelists say. 'It's important to consider the whole child,' agrees panelist Joanne Nigito-Raftas. 'He is in the process of growing socially. If he's placed where he is academically, you may see effects in middle school when he's not at same place as other kids. It's very hard when a child is developmentally not ready.'"

Last time I looked at a sixth grade class, everyone was in a different place developmentally already. And likewise, unless these panelists socialize only with people born within six months of their birthdays, I'm afraid they don't have much of a case. Humans are social creatures, but we grow socially when we hang out with people we enjoy, and with whom we can interact in meaningful ways. A 5-year-old who wants to discuss the themes of the literature he's reading will not grow socially if he must spend all his time with kids who are just learning their letters. You'd think that educational experts would get that. But apparently not.

Stephanie Pace Marshall and the creation of IMSA

The Illinois Math and Science Academy, a residential high school for gifted kids in Aurora, IL is now 20 years old. It appears to be well-established. The newly appointed school president is actually the former Illinois state superintendent of schools. But none of this could have been predicted when Stephanie Pace Marshall, IMSA's first president, helped establish the school. She recently decided to step down, and this article from the Chicago Tribune talks about her legacy. IMSA has become a leading light in the field of gifted education, training hundreds of kids each year to see math and science as cool (I wish the school name included the humanities, but the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and the Humanities in Indiana does, and it's partially modeled after Marshall's creation in Illinois). The school has survived budget cuts and constant criticism about its elite nature. It was always a great idea, but great ideas need practical people in order to bring them to fruition. Marshall managed to be both visionary and builder. While about a dozen states now have residential high schools for gifted kids, hopefully Marshall will use some of her free time to push the rest to step up to the plate. I recommend reading the linked article from the Chicago Tribune to get a feel for the debate over these specialized secondary schools, and to learn more about one of the best education ideas to come along in the past 25 years.

A Class of Bright Sparks

Like the U.S., Australia has long been trying to figure out what to do with its gifted children. As in the U.S., with its egalitarian culture, Australians sometimes talk about cutting down the "tall poppies." That means that anything that makes someone stick out is viewed as bad. This recent article, A Class of Bright Sparks, from the Brisbane Times, examines the issue in light of the New South Wales system of selective secondary schools. I really recommend reading it.

The issues of achievement and intelligence are hard to separate out, and so admission into these schools is seen as an honor, and the schools are perceived as "better." But, of course, the issue is never entirely clear-cut. Students who obtain admission, but choose to go to "regular" schools do just fine, and plenty of students (some of whom have been coached like crazy) who do go to the elite schools flounder. The article notes that attending the selective schools does not necessarily raise self-esteem, which is obvious to anyone who's ever attended a rigorous, ability-grouped school. You learn the first day that while you were the brightest kid in your previous class, you aren't now!

The article brings up the usual note that educators are divided on whether ability grouping is good for students (though no one who seriously considers the needs of highly gifted kids is divided on this). As gifted expert Miraca Gross says in the article "Research shows that children are less likely to succeed if they are not accepted in their peer group... The earlier you put a gifted child - for some period of time at least - with other children of similar ability the more confident a child becomes. They have less time to dwell on the fact that others may think they are weird or strange which may make them feel confused and unlikeable and lead them not to develop skills of friendship and be socially isolated." Some people seem to believe that ability grouping hurts "socialization" but the truth is the exact opposite. A highly gifted child kept in a regular class becomes nothing but the "smart one." Only in a situation with her intellectual peers is she allowed to become other things.

Birth Order and IQ

There has been much discussion, the past few days, about a new Norwegian study showing that birth order affects IQ scores. Oldest sons tend to score higher on IQ tests than later sons, but the difference appears to be because of how children are raised, not biology. Later-born sons whose older brothers died in infancy show similar IQs to those who were first-born.

So what's to be made of this? Probably not much. The difference was 2-3 IQ points, which is pretty much meaningless. But that doesn't stop people from drawing whatever conclusions they like. I particularly laughed at the quote from the UC-Berkeley expert in the AP article I linked, above, stating that eldest children were probably smarter because they tutored their younger brothers and sisters. This idea that kids benefit from tutoring each other is often expressed in education circles, because it lets harried teachers use gifted kids as unpaid teaching assistants and claim it's good for them.

But anyway -- if I had to guess, I'd say the tiny difference is because parents have more time and energy to pay undivided attention to their first born children during the first 2 years of their lives. An acquaintance of mine recently confessed that with his first daughter, he was reading stories to her in the womb and, presumably, with even greater frequency after birth. The second daughter got no in-the-womb story sessions. Likewise, with my baby, I spend a reasonable amount of time showing him different patterns and objects, exposing him to different sounds, etc. I can't imagine doing as much of this if I had a 2-year-old shrieking around the house. But if that's the reason for the difference, the study's conclusion is heartening to me. If all that difference in time and energy only adds up to 2-3 IQ points, it would take a lot for good intentioned parents to really mess their children up.

The Sorry State of Education Research

One of the biggest movements in education these days is to choose research-backed programs and reforms. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Education involves a ton of variables, which confound many attempts to figure out "what works."

For instance, the Gates Foundation's small schools initiative works great when you take a lousy, huge, failing high school and substitute smaller ones with high quality principals who have a lot of flexibility. Some early experiments in this concept featured schools with these qualities. But was the success because the schools were small or because of the principals and the flexibility? Other small schools experiments didn't turn out so well, particularly for gifted kids (because schools were split, and many educators didn't like the idea of ability grouping these small schools, gifted kids couldn't be concentrated, so the brightest kids became incredibly bored). Yet, across the country, school districts have seized on the small school concept... sometimes because of the availability of Gates money.

Likewise, every teachers union will tell you that "smaller class sizes" are the key to better school outcomes, and that this is proven by research. But this perceived truth is based on fewer studies than anyone will admit. And some countries with larger average class sizes than in the US do much better on international comparisons in math and science. So it's not clear that class sizes, by themselves, are the magic variable either.

So what is? And for the purposes of this blog, what works in gifted education? There's some research on ability grouping that shows better outcomes for both rapid learners and those who need a little more help. But this is certainly an area that could use more research. If large, rigorous studies showed that ability grouping helped both gifted kids and others learn better, more educators might change their views of such arrangements. Maybe. Then again, plenty of studies have shown that acceleration works (see "A Nation Deceived") but the prejudice against grade skipping remains alive and kicking.

The Davidson Institute has published a list of 12 Cost Effective Educational Options for gifted kids. More research backing up these 12 options with data would certainly be nice to see. I wonder if there are any other burning questions people would like to see answered? I hear, on occasion, from researchers looking into different educational topics, so I'd love to know if there are particular statistics that would make lobbying for gifted education programs easier. It's funny how putting a number to a problem or a solution changes the conversation.

Should Gifted Education be Mandatory?

Colorado's governor signed a law recently that tightened the requirements on school district gifted programs. As an educator explains in this linked article from the Greeley Tribune, the law turns a lot of "mays" into "wills."

It raises the question: Should gifted education be mandatory? And if so, on what level should that mandate be sent down?

Over the years, a number of gifted education advocates have pushed for a national mandate similar to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law requires that disabled children be given a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment. It mandates individual education plans, and courts have sometimes interpreted the law as requiring vast services from districts, even if it means other priorities can't be funded (there are stories of art or music services being trimmed for everyone because one child needs profound intervention... though of course, these are not the only options -- trimming overhead or raising school taxes are always on the table too, even if people don't like to admit it). Since gifted kids have special needs, too, some gifted advocates want IDEA interpreted to include gifted, or else they want a similar national law to be passed for gifted kids.

Others have focused on the state level, and indeed some states do mandate gifted education. States vary in their enforcement, though. Sometimes, a requirement that all gifted kids receive IEPs winds up meaning that everyone's IEP says the same thing: 90 minutes of pull-out a week. Or districts may hire one or two gifted teachers who do "whole class enrichment" -- ie, word puzzles and games with whole, non-ability-grouped classes. None of this does much to challenge gifted kids to the extent of their abilities.

Colorado is attempting to address these issues. The new law allows the state to use its gifted dollars to push for more rigorous gifted programs. In theory this is a good idea. There's no point in spending money if it's not spent right.

But I'd like to hear from parents who read this blog about whether a move to make gifted education mandatory in your state or district has had any practical effect. Sometimes laws can change people's minds by showing that something is a priority. But sometimes, when things aren't a priority, culturally, people follow the letter of the law and not the spirit. In too many schools, gifted kids aren't a priority, whether gifted education is mandated or not.

Thinking About Careers

I'm doing a number of radio interviews in the coming weeks in correlation with my book on the rise in self-employment among young people, Grindhopping. We're talking about the graduation theme of "You Don't Have to Hate Your First Job" (based on a USA Today column I wrote with the same name).

While it's fun to spin the topic this way, career choice is a source of considerable angst for most young people, and for gifted young people -- who have so many options -- in particular. My advice to graduates is to, first, realize that all that education is leading somewhere, so they should spend as much time thinking about what they want to do after school as they do studying for any given exam. And second, ask yourself some key questions, namely 1) what do I love to do so much I'd do it for free and 2) how can I get someone to pay me to do that.

There's no reason this process has to start in college. In fact, I think there's a good case to be made for asking gifted teens to really start thinking about the real world as soon as possible, even though they won't really be living in it, fully, for a long time (See the "Trashing Teens" post, below).

This was driven home to me this weekend, when I had the good fortune to make my Lincoln Center choral debut on the stage of Avery Fisher Hall. I was singing as a ringer with a few high school choruses who were performing Beethoven's Ninth. During rehearsal on Saturday, I was singing next to a young lady from a Long Island high school who asked me how old I was. I told her. "Wow," she says. "You're 28?" "Is that old?" I asked, defensive. "No, she said. It's just crazy. I'm singing next to a 28 year old!" That's when it struck me that this girl had probably never engaged in collaborative projects with adults. At school, she's working with other 16 year olds. If she goes to church, she's in a youth group and Sunday School with other people her age. My guess is she doesn't have a job during the school year, so she doesn't have exposure through the workplace to non-parent and teacher adults (who are authority figures, and have their own ways of interacting with teens). What a strange universe. The real world features peer relationships across age groups.

One of the reasons the Cristo Rey school model (see the When School Works post) works so well is that it brings teens into adult workplaces, gives them responsibilities, and lets them see that there is something beyond lockers and homeroom. I don't think many schools will adopt that model soon, but parents can use summer vacation to get kids thinking about these same things. One option is to have the kids start a business. The other is to have them work at a corporation or at a university. Volunteer projects that involve people of all ages can also expose them to different ideas about what people "do" with their lives. The point is to get the kids thinking about what they would like to do once their formal education is mostly completed. Because eventually they will have to answer this question. If you just start thinking about the question when your college's career counseling center holds a job fair, you will wind up at one of those companies that sponsors booths at such things. While those may be fine jobs, I don't think many people grew up dreaming about working for Avis or Georgia Pacific. It's hard to land a dream job if you don't think about what that dream job might be.

Profoundly Bright and Profoundly Bored

ABC's Nightline featured the Davidson Academy of Reno, NV on Monday night. For those of you who didn't get a chance to see the show live, there's a written version available here.

I've been following the progress of this school since I attended the ribbon cutting last August. Setting up a school is never easy, and the teachers and administrators at the Davidson Academy had to do some quick thinking and reshuffling in order to make sure the kids were getting the education they deserved and the challenges they were able to handle. But as the Nightline story pointed out, they did it. That's the difference between a school that caters to profoundly gifted young people and one that simply does not. Often, kids are told to simply wait for the others to catch up, or that this is the solution that's been decreed for this year, so just deal with it. But as one parent who was homeschooling her gifted kid once told me, what works now is guaranteed not to work in six months.

That's a tricky proposition to create a school around. Schools by their nature are institutions that resist change. So the Davidson Academy's flexibility on this count is encouraging news, even if it has made the first year more of a challenge than many schools deal with.

Trashing Teens

A recent issue of Psychology Today has a fascinating interview with psychologist Robert Epstein about "the problem with teens." It's not what you think, and it has far-reaching implications for gifted education.

Over the past 100 years, modern societies have succeeded in extending adolescence for years (one survey found Americans don't consider people to be "grown up" until age 26!). As a result, teens are not allowed the responsiblities and freedoms of the adult world until years after they are physically mature enough to be adults. Many of these restrictions are codified into law. Teens have few property rights, for instance, and can't participate in the responsibilities of citizenship. They can't usually set up businesses or borrow money without an adult's supervision. They also can't determine what they'll spend their time doing -- most are warehoused with their age peers into schools for 7 hours a day where they learn what someone else has deemed important (and that someone is often wrong). As a result, a whole teen culture has sprung up which celebrates angst and stupidity, and encourages teens to spend time and money on trivial things. This is true even though in a study Epstein did, which measured 14 areas of adult competence (such as interpersonal skills, and handling responsibility), teens did as well as adults.

I think Epstein is onto something (though I'm not sure he's correct about teens being able to make good marriage choices -- perhaps if all the other restrictions are changed first! Then again, many adults don't make good choices in this area either.) He's speaking about average teens; the situation is much more pronounced for gifted teenagers.

Part of being gifted is the fact that your brain is older than your body. You develop the ability to think abstractly, to analyze and draw new conclusions before your peers. Many gifted children prefer the company of older kids and adults because they speak the same language. When your thoughts are grown up, but you have no responsibilities, no rights, and no say over your life, no wonder it's easy for intelligent teens to become depressed or to act out.

One solution -- for gifted teens, at least -- is to compress basic education into fewer years, so they can start higher education earlier. I've also recommended encouraging kids (all kids, not just gifted ones) to start their own businesses. Figuring out market niches, advertising, profits and all that encourages synthesis across many areas, and gives kids a stake in the adult world. So do opportunities to interact with adults through church or community groups, particularly if these groups undertake real projects like concerts or volunteer work. None of these make adolescence easy, but if Epstein is right, they could certainly make it easier.

Choosing Secondary Schools

One of the most common questions I get from readers of this blog is "which school is best for my gifted child?" It's a question that's hard to answer, even if money and location don't matter (and they do tend to matter for most of us). Different children have different learning styles. A Montessori education might delight a free-spirited child, but frustrate one who needs more structure.

That said, I've come across two lists of "good" schools for gifted kids recently that can serve as good starting points. The first is the broad Newsweek list of the 1200 best high schools in the US. (Follow the links from this page for the list and related articles). Dallas's School for the Talented and Gifted came out in the top spot, with Dallas's School of Science and Engineering coming in at number two. So if location is truly negotiable, Dallas might be worth checking out. It's also worth noting that Newsweek purposefully excluded selective schools like the Illinois Math and Science Academy and Bronx Science from consideration for reasons that aren't entirely clear; the magazine published a list of these excluded schools (link from the same main page). These are all good options.

The second list comes from the Malone Family Foundation, a non-profit that makes grants to support gifted education. The Foundation adds three independent secondary schools to its list of "good schools" each year, and bequeaths a large enough chunk of change to these schools to endow scholarships for gifted kids. Since the schools have to undergo a certain vetting to get on the list, most of these are pretty good options for secondary school kids as well.

If anyone reading this is going through the school selection process right now, I'd love to hear how you're making your decision.

How to Fix No Child Left Behind

Time magazine has a cover story this coming week on the problems and promise of NCLB five years in. First the good news. A number of high-poverty, low-performing schools are indeed doing better on reading and math tests. When it becomes public knowledge that only 10% of kids at a school score at grade level on these tests, most people find that fairly embarassing -- and they do something about it.

The bad news is that sometimes the things they do are not exactly going to help America's competitiveness in the global economy. As Time points out, states can choose their own standards test, and some, such as Mississippi, have chosen to make the tests so easy that they're meaningless. A surprising number of schools simply cheat. Others adopt drill and kill approaches and get rid of all curriculum that doesn't appear on the tests (science, history, art, music, etc.)

And then, of interest to readers of this blog, there's the perception of neglect of kids who will definitely pass the standards tests. The opening anecdote of the Time article describes a school focusing on a batch of kids with borderline scores. Maybe they'll pass, maybe they won't, so the school throws time and resources at pushing them over the bar. But what about the kids who are already over the bar? I haven't been able to find a lot of stories of schools actually getting rid of gifted education because of NCLB, but certainly many people feel it's no longer a priority. The same criticism of NCLB, incidentally, can be made on the other end of the spectrum. A child who is reading four grades below his age level can improve to one grade below, but still may not pass the test. In the NCLB world, this improvement is meaningless.

One of the best proposed reforms is to put the focus on individual student growth. As Sec. of Education Margaret Spellings points out, the data bases necessary to achieve that would be complex. But the idea is that schools would need to show adequate yearly progress for individual students. A gifted child who wasn't learning would suddenly be a problem for the school (well, provided the test was hard enough-- a national set of standards might improve the picture).

It's anyone's guess how much NCLB will be reformed. I don't think it's a big priority in Congress right now, and given the small percentage of education funding the federal government provides, states may rebel over too much meddling. In general, acountability is a good thing, so I'm hoping NCLB can be done right. I'm not too optimistic it will be, though.

Research Partnership on Gifted Education

The Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa, and the Davidson Institute for Talent Development just announced that they would be working together to research highly gifted children. Some of the proposed projects actually look at the questions we've been talking about on this blog, namely, the problem of measuring potential.

As Nicholas Colangelo of the University of Iowa points out in the press release, there is very little research in this area. Decades ago, Louis Terman started a longitudinal study of children who'd scored very high on IQ tests. Like many researchers in this field, Terman assumed he was tracking the future movers and shakers of this country. Certainly, most of his subjects did very well in life. But his study missed some of the highest achievers from that age group (i.e., people you would have heard of, Nobel Prize winners, etc.). Similarly, the Glamour Top Ten College Women contest has missed almost every high-achieving woman you would have heard of who's lived in the United States over the past five decades. You can look at high-achievers and try to trace back to things that made them great. But it is very, very difficult to look at a group of kids and figure out who has the most potential to advance the culture, science, the economy, or what have you.

I liken this to magazine diet stories (stay with me here). You can read dozens of success stories in any given publication. But last year, Redbook tried an interesting experiment of following three women as they attempted to lose weight over a 12 month period. The women had access to nutritionists, trainers, etc. Only one of the three lost more than a few pounds. Why did she succeed where the others failed? Similar columns in Shape and other magazines have encountered this exact same problem. You can screen hundreds of applicants, but it is very difficult to measure motivation, gumption, discipline, drive -- whatever you want to call it. Some people simply will not let themselves fail, be it at becoming healthier or doing scientific research. It's hard to move the needle in any field. People who do tend to have that certain moxie.

Hopefully this research will, long-term, help supply the answers. Colangelo states that he thinks the Davidson Fellows in particular will show up more on the radar screen in future years than Terman's kids, because their awards are based on actual accomplishments, not just a test score. I think there's something to that. Hopefully this blog will be able to report on lots of research updates over the next few years.

By the way, thanks for all your kind wishes on the baby! We're all doing great.

Big News!

I'm happy to announce that my husband and I welcomed little Jasper Vanderkam Conway into the world at 2:15am on Wednesday morning. He was 7lbs 8oz, is very alert, and loves taking in the world around him. I'm attaching a photo of the little guy to this post. We are home from the hospital and enjoying getting to know each other. And sleeping on occasion!

When School Works

From time to time, I like to share news about educational innovations with readers of this blog. One of the more interesting ones I've come across lately is the Cristo Rey network of schools.

Started in Chicago a few years ago, this network of college prep Catholic schools has a mission to serve the urban poor. Indeed, in most Cristo Rey schools, 80% of kids qualify for free or reduced lunch. The majority are black or Hispanic. Students receive a rigorous education and are expected to pursue college afterwards. Across the network of a dozen Cristo Rey schools, more than 90% of graduates go on to 2- or 4-year colleges.

There's nothing too crazy about this; Catholic schools have long provided a quality education to inner city kids. But over the past few years a number of urban Catholic schools have closed. For various reasons, archdioceses have run low on funds, and with fewer nuns and priests willing to teach for cheap, Catholic schools have had to pay salaries to lay people that are closer to public school salaries. That means they have to find donors or raise tuition. Raising tuition is seldom an option when a big proportion of your student body lives close to the poverty line, and even middle class families worried about college costs may be loathe to absorb big cost increases. But fundraising is expensive and time-consuming too.

So how do you develop an urban Catholic education model that's sustainable? Enter Fr. John Foley, a Jesuit priest. A few years ago he wanted to start a high school in Chicago, and he asked a management consultant friend to brainstorm funding ideas. The one they hit upon? Have the kids "work off" their tuition by apprenticing with area businesses. Basically, for about $25,000 a year paid to the Cristo Rey school, a company gets a full time equivalent worker in return. This comes in the form of a four student team. Each student works one day a week for the company doing something clerical or entry-level (and 2 days a week one day a month). Students spend the first 3 weeks of their freshmen year in a career bootcamp learning to shake hands, answer the phone, use computers, etc. Then the school matches them with a job that tempts their interests.

Since one of the big problems with high school is how unconnected it feels to the real world, this model has been a big hit. Kids at the Chicago Cristo Rey school would show up at downtown skyscrapers and find desks waiting for them. How cool is that? They'd bring their parents to see the buildings on weekends. Many had never been to the Loop before. Businesses that employ Cristo Rey kids like having these young people around, and Cristo Rey schools have to do very little fundraising.

Not that they're not attracting funds. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given several million dollars to the Cristo Rey network to help open seven new schools this fall, including in Newark, NJ. The Foundation is interested in learning if the model can be replicated broadly. I'm not sure how much of the schools' success is related to their Catholic nature, and how much is related to their rigor and career focus, but anything that helps bright kids from tough backgrounds see a world beyond their neighborhoods is worth praising.

On Not Going to Harvard

I read a fascinating essay in the New York Times' parenting section last week on being Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard. The author, Michael Winerip, is a Harvard alum who does admissions interviews for that illustrious institution. He lives on Long Island, where the number of wealthy families hoping to give their kids any advantage in life is high. Out of 40 interviews he's done, he says, only one student has actually been accepted by his alma mater. So as he meets these highly accomplished young people, and talks to them, the thought that keeps going through his head is "Another amazing kid who won't get into Harvard."

The kids certainly do sound amazing. They've scored 5s on innumerable AP tests. They've done original research for science experiments (Winerip's school science experiments, he notes, involved plants in shoeboxes). They've traveled amazing places, often for charitable reasons. They are polished. They have Googled him. They write nice thank you notes.

Winerip writes, wistfully, that the stats that were good enough to get him into Harvard in the 1970's would be scoffed at now. Maybe. But I can't help think there's more to it than that. I can Google as well; I've learned in a quick search that the author is a man from a blue collar Massachusetts background who's won a Pulitzer for his writing in the Times, is a published novelist, etc. Perhaps the admissions committee saw in him a spark of ambition that Harvard could truly help, by giving this local boy an entrance into the elite world that he then wound up writing about for the next 30 years. The upper middle class (OK, let's not mince words, upper class) kids Winerip interviews now have a million routes to success available to them. Perhaps schools like Harvard don't like to perceive themselves as just another feather in a kid's cap.

But I don't know. I do know that even as recently as 10 years ago, Harvard was still open to not-terribly-polished kids -- like myself. Maybe it helps to be from Indiana, not Long Island. The admissions committee called a high school teacher of mine (in whose class I earned a "C") to figure out what had happened. The teacher said he wasn't sure, but I'd done much better in another class I'd taken with him later on. That apparently satisfied the committee enough to accept me (I didn't wind up going, but that's a different story).

Maybe everything has changed in 10 years, but I doubt it. The New York Times magazine did a cover story in 1996 about four near-perfect seniors at one elite high school who applied to Harvard that year. Only one got in. Winerip refers to recent "tragic" stories that recount the same odds. These tragic stores have been going on for awhile. I think he's even written some. Maybe in a sea of perfect applicants, it helps to be the kid who signs your own check for the application fee, who wrote your essays during your smoke breaks in the Fazoli's Italian Restaurant parking lot, whose transcript contains a few consonents, etc.

But what I found most interesting was his observation that "I see these kids -- and watch my own applying to college -- and as evolved as they are, I wouldn't change places with them for anything. They're under such pressure." As some readers of this blog know, I am expecting a baby any day (in fact, today is my due date; the kid is taking his sweet time). My kid is likely to grow up someplace where the ambition to go to Harvard is not uncommon. I will probably choose schools for him where kids can take 10 AP classes and will likely score 5s on all of them. Perhaps it will even be a school where, as Winerip recounts, a statistician is on hand to help run the numbers on kids' science experiments (OK, maybe not -- I hope I'd make the kid learn statistics on his own and run the numbers!). My husband and I are not unfamiliar with the ways of marketing; we could probably help the kid figure out some great story of why he should be admitted to all the top schools.

But the trade-off when everything is there for the easy taking is that you sometimes lack the spark that pushed one incredibly literary kid in Quincy, Massachusetts to apply to Harvard in the 1970's. One of the sweetest things in life is to want something so badly that little else matters, to throw yourself into working for it, and then finally to achieve it. Even better: to know you achieved it on your own. In that sense, I can see why Winerip wouldn't want to change places with the kids he's interviewing. It's hard to recreate that joy.

Glamour's Top Ten College Women of the Year

The June 2007 issue of Glamour lists both the 2007 winners of the magazine's annual Top Ten College Women of the Year, and looks at winners from the past 50 years. The contest began as the "Top 10 Best-Dressed College Girls in America" in 1957 and mercifully evolved into an academic and leadership competition by the 1970's.

Regular readers of this blog know I'm a little wary of lists like this that purport to show who will be the movers and shakers of the next few decades. The young women Glamour chose are obviously very accomplished -- there are budding researchers, activists, musicians, etc. -- but potential is a tough thing to measure. So magazine and newspaper lists like these (USA Today also puts out a All USA Academic team list each year) give special weight to good stories.

On this year's Glamour list, there is, for example, a young woman with chronic asthma who lobbies to ban smoking indoors. She says her goal is to be the director-general of the World Health Organization. That's an interesting goal, since the WHO is part of the UN, and it's generally understood that people from the most powerful or controversial member countries (ie, the US) won't be heading up some of the major UN agencies like the WHO. These positions tend to be allocated politically to "uncontroversial" countries such as Norway, South Korea, Sweden, etc. Even Margaret Chan, the current DG, who's from China, was quite controversial. I'm not saying it will never happen, but if this young woman becomes the future DG, she won't be chosen for it on the same merits that she was chosen for the Glamour list (ie, being bright, optimistic, and having a good story).

Herein lies the problem of these lists. The same skills that get you noticed in the college application game, and the college award game, are not the same skills that get you noticed in the career game. Credentials matter less. Who you know matters a lot more. So does luck and timing. Our anti-smoking crusader could have the perfect credentials to be DG, but if South Korea is "owed" a major UN agency position, and then the person sticks around until our anti-smoking crusader is perceived as too old, she will not land the job. She can, of course, make a difference in the world of public health. But to do so, she will probably have to do something more entrepreneurial, like scale up her anti-smoking activities overseas. Will she do that when there aren't any major awards to win for doing so?

Indeed, the people you've heard of on these lists have often wound up doing entrepreneurial things. For instance, Martha Stewart was on the Glamour list in 1961 -- though she was actually the 11th girl chosen. One of the top 10 did something bad and was booted from the list. Stewart took her place. It is highly unlikely that the first has accomplished nearly as much as Stewart. People who take the time and effort to nominate themselves for these lists and complete the paper work and figure out what it takes to catch the judges' eyes care a lot about credentials and how other people perceive them. Entrepreneurial types do not. Credentialists often try to work their way up institutions, which can be incredibly frustrating and political. It often doesn't work, which is why you've not heard of most of the Top 10 College Women over the years. They become things like "assistant dean at Arizona State University" (as a winner from 1968 did).

Because of this bias toward credentialism, it's amazing when you think about some of the incredible women Glamour's Top 10 College Women list has missed. Since the list has been around for 50 years, pretty much any woman in any major leadership position you can think of (who's under 70 years old) wasn't on the list. Granted, it wasn't fully academic/leadership oriented until the 1970's, but that means any woman in a leadership role who's under age 57 was also missed. I find it fascinating that the assistant dean of Arizona State University made the list, but the female presidents of Harvard (incoming) and Princeton (current) did not. Perhaps our Arizona dean has better credentials, or is even smarter than the other two. I don't know. But she wasn't in the right place at the right time. Oprah Winfrey did not make the list. My guess is that she was too busy actually building her career as a television journalist when she was in college to care about such things.

I'm happy that these lists exist, because I think it's great to give attention to bright, ambitious young people, particularly in magazines that often spend a lot of time talking about how to tone your thighs or spend $300 on a blouse. But no one has yet come up with a great methodology for measuring potential, which is something to keep in mind while reading these lists.

Prufrock Press

EdNews.org recently published an interview with Joel McIntosh, publisher of Prufrock Press. Started in 1988, Prufrock is one of the biggest houses devoted to books and journals on gifted children. If you've ordered teaching materials for gifted kids or books on parenting them (such as James Delisle's books), you've heard of this house. You can access the article here.

He has a few interesting points. First, countering the general trend of putting down "pushy parents," McIntosh says that parents need to advocate for gifted children more than ever before. I don't quite share his view on No Child Left Behind being so awful (in general, accountability is a good thing), though I agree that what gets measured gets attention, and so gifted children tend to be ignored in schools that are worried about falling close to the line on showing adequate yearly progress. In such an environment, parents who want their kids to receive a challenging education have to step up to the plate to help make that happen.

The other interesting tidbit is where the name "Prufrock" comes from. Apparently, it takes its name from a T.S. Elliot poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Although I'd heard some of the lines from this poem before ("Do I dare to eat a peach?") I don't think I'd sat down and read the whole thing. It was an enjoyable experience, and I recommend it! In the poem, Mr. Prufrock frets about no one understanding him. "Do I dare disturb the universe?" he asks. This poem appealed to McIntosh, because he thought this experience of thinking no one understands you, that the universe is absurd ("I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me") is pretty common for gifted kids. It is. That's why Kurt Vonnegut is always such a favorite writer among adolescents who actually think. And so McIntosh's publishing house became Prufrock Press.

Voucher Remedy Litigation

Last week, I interviewed Clint Bolick, the former head of the Alliance for School Choice, for another piece I'm writing on vouchers and the like. However, I thought some of his insights might be interesting for people who care about gifted education as well.

The Alliance for School Choice has generally been focused on defending voucher programs against lawsuits that claim they violate the First Amendment's establishment clause (or roughly, the idea of separating church and state). As Bolick has pointed out, the words "separation of church and state" aren't in the Constitution. There are also all sorts of other precedents for using state money for non-religious ends via religious means. Veterans can use their education stipends at religious colleges, some Head Start programs are held in churches. etc.

This past summer, though, the Alliance for School Choice decided to take a more pro-active approach, which Bolick calls "voucher remedy litigation." Rather than wait for a district, city, or state to pass a voucher law, he sued the Newark, NJ public schools for failing to provide an equitable and thorough education to its students. As part of the remedy, he asked the NJ courts to force the district to impose a voucher solution.

This is obviously an entirely different can of worms, though there's some precedent. Courts have often imposed busing or funding schemes on districts deemed to be inequitable or segregated. And as Bolick points out, there's plenty of precedent in consumer law. If you buy a car that turns out to be a complete lemon, and you sue the dealership, if the court imposes a remedy, it's unlikely to be a massive payment to the dealership. More likely, you'll be given your money back to go buy a different car.

It's seductive reasoning. On the other hand, if I'm not happy with the way the U.S. military or the NYPD are defending my safety here and abroad, I don't think many judges would take kindly to a suit asking for my tax dollars back so I can hire a private security guard. Some problems we recognize must be argued out in elections and through the legislative process.

Bolick has an answer for this too. When it comes to school choice in NJ, he says, the democratic process has broken down. Newark mayor Cory Booker is a member of the Alliance for School Choice's Board of Directors. Something is clearly not working when the mayor of a city is on the board of an organization suing the city to get a solution that, in theory the mayor should be able to do something about. Bolick notes that he believes the New Jersey legislature would vote to create urban voucher programs if they were given a chance to do so. But a few legislators in the education committee have vowed that such a bill will never get to the house floor. So that's why he's taken to the courts.

He plans to take this "voucher remedy litigation" show on the road to other states whose Constitutions guarantee an education, where there are state standards, and where there are failing urban districts. It will be a hotly contested area in the future I have no doubt.

So what does this have to do with gifted education? One of the biggest arguments I've heard people make against vouchers is also one that's been made against separate schools for gifted students. Namely, that taking certain kids out of failing or mediocre schools amounts to "creaming." In the case of vouchers, the people who care about their children's education the most will avail themselves of the chance to send them to private schools. Then these parents will no longer care about the public schools. Similarly, I have heard opponents of gifted education argue that parents of gifted kids care a lot about education. If you remove these parents from the general public schools, they will no longer advocate for better teachers, more funding, more attention, etc.

Frankly, I think both arguments miss the point. Children are individuals, not members of some collective whose theoretical good should be advanced at their concrete expense. A childhood can't be repeated. As the Davidsons and I write in Genius Denied, "squandering a bright mind in the name of a future utopia is hardly justice." People who are concerned about the public schools have every right to advocate for whatever they want. But they have no right to hold other people hostage as allies. I'm not sure I agree with Bolick's litigation strategy. But the idea that certain children should be kept in miserable situations in order to change those situations deserves to be fought on both the voucher front, and in gifted education.