Can you change your IQ?

I keep reading articles about new research (published in Nature last month) finding that IQ is malleable. The sample size of the study (33 British students) was quite small, which means that outlier findings need to be taken with a grain of salt. One student's IQ rose from 107 to 128, and another's fell from 114 to 96. The trumpeted finding is that 9% of students showed a change of 15 points or more, but of course 9% of 33 is 3 kids. The most interesting finding is that MRI scans showed actual brain changes in the kids with the big IQ changes, which suggest that it might not be total measurement error. The idea is that one can possibly change IQ, on the margins, through certain brain exercises.

Some people will no doubt trumpet this as evidence that giftedness is some sort of made up concept, just capturing a snapshot in time among kids whose parents have trained them more than others. But one certainly doesn't have to draw this conclusion. I am comfortable believing these two things at once:

1. I am not nearly as athletically gifted as many other people and never will be and
2. If I practiced hard in any given sport, I could become better at it over time in a way my body might actually physically reflect.

These two beliefs also do not lead me to believe that we should get rid of varsity basketball teams, or camps for children who've shown promise in basketball or that athletic ability is some sort of social construct. So I'm not sure why the idea that IQ might change by one standard deviation in a small number of children would lead anyone to believe that there aren't children who learn differently and need more challenge than others of the same age.

Children and Rituals

The holidays are approaching, and they are always a time for traditions. This will be our first Thanksgiving and Christmas in our new house, and our first with three kids, and our first with any sort of space. As we start to put down roots, we can start to choose which rituals and traditions we will do, and hence our kids will someday think of as "normal." If you think about it, this is a heady amount of power.

Families raising gifted kids have the additional element of the constant "whys." When it comes to rituals and traditions, these are often good questions -- from both the mundane to the profound. Why do we have hamburgers and hot dogs on Sunday nights? (Because it's easy and your father grew up having that for Sunday dinner. That's why). Why do we give gifts? Why do some kids celebrate different holidays? (and this at an age where you didn't think you'd be explaining such things). Why were the pilgrims so thankful for food? Did they not have food? Why? What happens when you don't have food?

I think this year will feature some sort of write-up of what we're thankful for, some Christmas cookie baking, a decorated tree with lots of kid-made ornaments, an Advent calendar, and such. I'd like to take the boys shopping for another child through one of the non-profits around here, but I'm not sure how that will go. I'd love to hear from people about what rituals and traditions they've introduced or kept up in their families, what their kids think and ask about them, and how you've figured ways to celebrate the meaning of the season with small kids.

Fluctuating IQ in Teens

A new study in Nature this past month indicated that the teenage brain is fairly plastic; that IQ can change a reasonable amount during those years of rapid physical change (You can read one write-up of the study here).

As usually happens, some of the commentary on this study has raised the question of whether giftedness exists, or if it just captures a moment in time. But I think this misses the point -- while IQ may not be absolutely constant, a child whose IQ measures at, say, 150, is unlikely to then measure at 100. And just because IQ can change doesn't mean that giftedness shouldn't be accommodated. Gifted education is an intervention for children who need it. If one doesn't view it as a reward, then there's no reason children couldn't move in and out of needing services over time. It's something to consider.

Glaring Asynchronous Development

One of the challenges with gifted children is asynchronous development. This means that physical, emotional and intellectual development are not proceeding at the same pace. Sometimes this can be downright jarring. You can be having a real, fluent conversation with a 5-year-old about something, but she then proceeds to scream or cry because she's tired or hungry. A 3-year-old might be reading words on a box of his own diapers. You get the drift. What are some particularly glaring examples of asynchronous development that you've seen? How has this affected your parenting?

Life With Gifted Children (New Series Idea)

One of the goals of Gifted Exchange is to cover parenting topics, as well as educational policy. To that end, I'd like to start a regular series called "Life With Gifted Children" to provide an outlet for parents to share stories about the unique challenges of raising gifted young people. I'd like to focus on parenting advice that could possibly help other people, but I also want to provide a place for people to talk about their kids (albeit anonymously if you'd like!) knowing many of the people reading it are also raising gifted kids. In other words, they won't think you're just bragging when you mention that your 8-year-old is way into Shakespeare.

Various topics come to mind:

* How do you stay calm after the 20th question related to the same arcane topic?
* What to do when your children don't like to sleep (and don't seem to need it)
* Discipline -- what is age appropriate behavior when a kid often acts older than her age?
* How to find books that are challenging but age appropriate
* How to prepare a child for an acceleration
* How to speak positively about your child without alienating friends/family/neighbors
* Teaching respectful behavior when a child is bored in school

And so forth. Please email me at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com if you'd like to share what you've learned along the way, or any particular challenges you'd like input from others about.

A Davidson Fellows Media Round-Up

I missed the Davidson Fellows award ceremony last week due to Ruth's arrival that afternoon. So, in lieu of writing about the winners of this award (scholarships of $10,000-$50,000 for important original works in fields from math to the humanities), I thought I'd share some of the news clips from other places about the fellows.

Arjun Aggrawal, 17, of Lexington, SC, won a $25,000 scholarship for building a robot that tells jokes and gives hugs. He built the robot in his garage and spent about $2800 on the project, which sounds like a pretty good return on investment! You can read more about Gnut III here.

Lucy Wang, 17, who lives in my neck of the woods (PA), won $25,000 for a project that used the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (from the CDC) to try to predict adolescent depression. Her statistical model accurately predicted which young people would have symptoms of depression more than 80% of the time. You can read more about her here.

Caleb Kumar, 15, of Blaine, MN, won a $25,000 scholarship for his work developing an algorithm that automates the diagnosis of bladder cancer. You can read more about him here.

It's always fun to see high-achieving students in the news, and every year the Davidson Fellows remind me just how much young people are capable of... when they are challenged and given opportunities to develop their talents.

Say hello to Ruth!

I had to miss this year's Davidson Fellows awards in DC because I was otherwise occupied here in Philadelphia, giving birth. Please say hello to little Ruth, who arrived on October 5 at 3pm, weighing 7lbs 12 oz. She joins big brothers Jasper and Sam, and will no doubt provide lots of fodder for future Gifted Exchange posts.

The Case Against Delaying Kindergarten

In New York City, where I used to live, the cut-off to start kindergarten is to turn 5 in late December. I find it interesting to ponder whether my life would have been different if I grew up there; my birthday is December 5, and so I could have been a grade ahead of where I actually was in school. Here in Lower Merion, PA, where we recently moved, the cut-off is September 1. Thus my son, Sam (9/24) and soon-to-be-born baby daughter (around 10/5 or so) will always be among the oldest in their classes.

I really wish they'd be the youngest instead. It's become common for parents to "redshirt" their 5-year-olds, delaying kindergarten for another year, particularly for boys. Schools let parents get away with this, but for some reason, going the other direction (starting kindergarten early) is fraught with the same angst that grade-skipping in general evokes in some people. Sure, some kids aren't ready. But others are. If a kid can read and write, which many gifted 4-year-olds can, what purpose is served by keeping them in preschool another year?

So I was fascinated to see an op-ed in the New York Times this past week from Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt called "Delay Kindergarten At Your Child's Peril." The gist of the piece is that any advantage that children get by being delayed a year disappears rapidly, and that school, in general, is good for children. It helps their brains grow and develop. Some data has found that disadvantaged and advantaged children make similar gains during the school year, but disadvantaged children slide during the summer break, when they're not exposed to lessons. Enough summers can make a pretty big gap. It's not a huge stretch to believe the same would be true for starting kindergarten. The earlier disadvantaged children can get into full-time school, the better.

Gifted children likewise would benefit from more flexibility in when kids start kindergarten. While, again, I think the angst about grade-skipping is overblown, it can be harder to pull off to go from, say, 1st to 3rd grade in the same school. But when you start kindergarten early, it doesn't have to be a big deal.

I'm curious if anyone has successfully challenged a school district's cut-off date and been able to enroll a child in kindergarten early.

15 Minutes Outside

I've been paging through Rebecca P. Cohen's new book, 15 Minutes Outside: 365 ways to get out of the house and connect with your kids. There is plenty of research finding that getting outdoors can boost one's mood, and kids who spend time outdoors are highly likely to get more physical activity than those who don't. So those are two big reasons to get out there.

Of course, the question for modern children, accustomed to video games and such, is what you do once you get outside. One can always hit the playground, and we do this fairly frequently. But this is often not terribly relaxed, partly because of the Intense Other Parent Factor (at a playground just outside Washington DC earlier today, I kept having parents apologize for their 2 and 3-year-olds taking our ball, as if children that age have much concept of other people's stuff anyway. Sometimes I want to hang a sign saying "Chill out! I'm not going to judge you!") Cohen's book lists hundreds of activities for kids to do outside during all types of weather. The idea is that once you get them started on something, they'll probably come up with something else, and eventually move to the unstructured free play that is the holy grail of child development.

Among my favorite ideas:

* Do homework outside. If you have to do a boring worksheet, it's still better while lying on a blanket on the grass.
* Find wonder in a small pail. Have kids collect whatever they like (blades of grass, acorns, etc). in a pail and then look at them under a magnifying glass.
* Give your kid a place to dig. Digging is just plain fun. So why not give kids a patch of dirt in the backyard where they can go to town?
* Play leaf tic-tac-toe with autumn leaves of the same color as Xs or Os. Or just use different species of trees at any point in the year.
* Track an animal. A lost human skill, if you think about it.
* Get the kids to weed and rake!

Of course, by the time you get to 365, some ideas seem not so fabulous. It also bothers me that Cohen buys, hook-line-and-sinker, into the idea that picky eaters will eat their vegetables if they plant them themselves. It's fine to keep a garden if you're into it, and kids often like plucking tomatoes and peppers and the like. But my own experience with this is the exact opposite of her claim that "One of the best things is to get your kids involved in growing and harvesting the vegetables. They are more willing to try new foods if they can proudly boast, 'I grew that!'" Maybe if you don't have a truly picky eater. But despite this as an overarching theme of essays in numerous parenting and women's magazines, I'm not convinced it's the case. My 2-year-old eats lots of things and eats the tomatoes we grow. My 4-year-old loves picking tomatoes, but will not eat them, or our acorn squash, no matter how many bushels he picks. Picky eating is not really about your parenting (or you wouldn't have kids in the same family behaving so differently). It's about some kids being more sensitive to tastes than others.

But I digress. In general, coming up with ideas of stuff to do with kids is tough. It's always easier to turn on the TV, but watching television for hours isn't terribly fulfilling, and probably won't create the kind of memories that splashing in mud puddles will. So it's good to read a book reminding us that the latter is an option.

(Cross-posted at My168hours.com)

Content vs. Skills

E. D. Hirsch Jr. waded into the story of declining SAT scores this week with an op-ed in the New York Times on "How to Stop the Drop in Verbal Scores." Hirsch claims that the drop stems from a move away from content-rich elementary school reading curricula and toward an emphasis on reading and writing skills, divorced from anything larger.

This is the whole anti-worksheet sentiment that rears its head fairly frequently in education circles. I can, of course, sympathize. Especially since I write content! There are amazing writing and vocabulary lessons to be gained from reading interesting books. Reading books also allows you to absorb a lot of core knowledge about history, civics, science, etc.

However, just like the widespread progressive educator idea that children will simply discover the rules of mathematics by looking at different problems and talking them over, I know from personal experience that this doesn't always happen. I read everything under the sun as a kid. What actually allowed me to make a living as a writer, and make writing feel easy, was learning rules of grammar and why they exist. I'd look at incorrect sentences and correct ones and see why certain things worked better. I memorized these rules. And while I break them all the time (I just started this sentence with an "and"!) I know I am choosing to do so and generally do so for effect.

The reality is that as people learn, they need both content and skills. This doesn't have to be a battle over every individual class. I was thinking of this while pondering Princeton's relatively recent writing requirement. The problem was that even young people who were capable of getting into Princeton arrived unable to construct an academic paper. So the freshmen writing seminars would give them the skills necessary to do this. The problem that such a program always struggles with is that the professors who teach these courses want to teach specific content areas -- their areas of expertise. So is the emphasis on the subject matter or the writing skills?

Ideally, people should get both. The Hirsch argument is that many disadvantaged children never get the core knowledge that their more advantaged peers show up with. Skills are useless apart from that. But content without skills isn't that helpful either -- as anyone who's struggled to write a paper that actually expresses what she means to say knows.

SAT scores fall to new lows

Every year, more than 1.5 million high school students take the SAT -- the test used by most selective colleges to assist in enrollment decisions. According to headlines this week, the scores for the class of 2011 were the lowest ever recorded.

There are a few ways to spin this. A positive one is that the number of people taking the test has been increasing, and this larger pool of young people has far more diverse backgrounds in the past. The proportion of test-takers who are minorities has risen, as has the proportion who speak English as a second language, and the proportion who qualified to have the test fee waived. American young people seem to be absorbing the message that going to college matters, and in order to have the option of going to college, you often need to take either the SAT or ACT. This is roughly the same statistical phenomenon which would have shown falling wages when women entered the workforce in droves. You could focus on the falling wages, or you could say hey, look at all these people without a work history who are getting a foothold in the economy and are diversifying the job market.

However, there's a limit to this positive spin. Because it would be even better if scores were rising and the test-takers were becoming more diverse. To some degree, falling test scores mean what they show. Among the American young people who consider themselves college material, most are not in fact prepared for college. The College Board says students need to score a 1550 out of 2400 to have a 65% chance of getting at least a B-minus average during their first year of college. Only 43% of test-takers met that threshold.

The question of why they don't meet it is obviously the one that has been bedeviling the public for years. America spends quite a bit of money per pupil -- more than many countries that do better -- and doesn't seem to be getting the right return on investment. There's a profound anti-intellectual culture many places, where "high school" conjures up images of football and prom rather than college readiness. Fingers can be pointed many places. Parents don't care. Kids watch too much TV. School is too short. We need more excellent teachers. Bright students need to be challenged; failing kids need to be put back on track.

But regardless of the blame, the issue is a fairly tragic one, because we are increasingly living in a bifurcated economy. There is both a talent shortage and widespread unemployment. Wages for medium- and low-skilled workers are stalling (with household incomes now stuck at 1996 levels) and yet companies that require very specific specialized skills (say, Google) are throwing money and perks at their hires. The best solution to the jobs crisis would be to have more young people falling into the latter category. Judging by the new SAT results, it just doesn't seem to be happening.

Montgomery County, Acceleration and "Rigor"

For whatever reason, a number of people really do not like acceleration. The idea of a child who is, by age, supposed to be in one grade, going to a classroom associated with a different grade either on a permanent basis or just for a class or two, is just something to be avoided if at all possible.

At least that's the message I'm taking from a fascinating story in Bethesda magazine called "No more math acceleration?" According to the article, the principal of Wyngate Elementary School sent home a note informing parents that because the district's new math standards were so rigorous, "the previous practice of grade skipping acceleration in mathematics will not be necessary for most students. Almost all of our students will be working at the challenging grade level standards this year and not in the next grade level up."

The article goes on to mention the dreaded "gaps" problem -- the idea that acceleration somehow leads to holes in one's knowledge, as if all education isn't choosing some things to study and some things not to study. In this case, it's a haunting problem: "Parents and teachers have long complained that accelerating math students by skipping grade levels has led to gaps in basic skills and mastery of concepts that haunt them when they reach higher level math."

Perhaps there will be exceptions; as the article says, "Don’t worry – this doesn’t mean that children who are truly gifted in math won’t be challenged. The curriculum includes enrichment and accelerated material that goes beyond the new requirements. That means that “students who consistently demonstrate proficiency of a mathematics concept will be able to enrich their understanding of a grade-level topic or accelerate to a higher-level topic,” [the principal] wrote."

Just not in a different grade level class. Because that would be a disaster.

The whole thing is kind of funny, in one respect. I'm not sure why people are so allergic to the idea of skipping a grade in a subject or overall. The whole concept of grades is pretty arbitrary anyway. My oldest son, Jasper, just started a new preschool where they do mixed-age classes. Kids who are ages 3-5 can be in one class together, and I suspect that 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds are much farther apart on development spectrums than, say, a high-achieving fourth grader and a sixth grader.

As it is, rigorous content standards are a great idea. Covering fewer topics in depth to mastery is also a good idea. But there's no real reason to take acceleration off the table, even if one does have very rigorous standards. Sometimes kids really are ready to move on.

Too Young for College and Graduate School?

Over at the Huffington Post, Kelsey Caetano-Anolles has a fascinating essay about being a young college student -- and would-be graduate student. She enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at the age of 14 after working with a legislator to get the minimum college age repealed. Having graduated with a degree in psychology, she's now trying to apply to the graduate program. But according to her, when she applied, she was told she was too young, and she really should take some time off to go backpacking through Europe.

I don't know Kelsey or her academic credentials, but I find this line of reasoning from UIUC fascinating. "Grown-ups" have a tendency to romanticize what young people should be doing: spending time finding themselves, traveling, etc. We like to wax eloquent about having plenty of time to advance in our careers later. Why hurry now? (the whole "Hurried Child" book was called that for a reason -- it appeals to a certain mindset). Of course, there are good arguments for "hurrying" too. Whole books have been written about the time crunch experienced by people trying to pursue graduate degrees and the early pre-tenure years of academia while having and raising small children. One way to space these windows out is to finish with school earlier. One way to finish school earlier? Start earlier.

Age is not a classification like race for which the law recognizes almost no reasons for discrimination. We don't let children work in most paying jobs before age 13 and have limits on hours and types of work up until age 18. Most people support some age restrictions on driving, drinking, etc. Nonetheless, age is a pretty blunt instrument for determining what people are capable of. We got rid of most mandatory retirement age policies, and these days, senior citizens are showing that people can contribute massively to organizations after age 65, 70, or what have you. And so, likewise, we need to be careful about claiming that people should or shouldn't do something else with their time because they happen to be 17. I hope Kelsey finds a graduate program that is interested in treating people as individuals -- and recognizing that human psychology allows for many different ways of finding happiness as a young person.

The Joy of Information (plus Davidson Fellows announcement)

Plenty of folks are going back to school this week and next and the week after Labor Day. In my home, both my boys are starting new preschools this fall. My almost 2-year-old will be going two days a week. This will be quite an adventure for all of us.

It's also, if you think about it, an amazing privilege. We have so much access to education and information here in the United States. Right here on my computer I can read all kinds of books in the public domain. For a few bucks, I can download most others to my Kindle and start reading them in a minute. I can watch Khan Academy videos or listen to amazing classical works on Pandora. Kids can go to free public schools, and even if they're not wonderful, they exist, up to the high school level, for every kid in the country. That's more than many nations can say.

Can you imagine not having any of this? Can you imagine that, if you wanted to know Abraham Lincoln's birthday (to take one absolutely random example), you wouldn't just be able to figure it out? You'd have to ask around, and people might or might not know. Imagine having to walk a whole day to the next town to make a phone call to someone who might know the answer to a town engineering problem. It's funny that we make such a big deal about back to school sales, and what the kids will be wearing, and seldom stop to think about how amazing it is that we can tap in, so quickly, to much of human knowledge. It's something to be grateful for, even as we try to change our schools to best serve our kids.

On another note: The Davidson Institute has just announced this year's Davidson Fellows! These $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000 awards go to young people who've done groundbreaking work in math, science, literature, the arts, and other categories. For profiles of this year's winners, read the announcement here.

A Historical Perspective on Skipping Grades

Close to 9 years ago, I wrote a column for USA Today called "Some Can Sail Over High School." The piece dealt with the phenomenon of early college enrollment, and suggested that it was a good idea for gifted kids. That was actually the column that led to my working with Jan and Bob Davidson on Genius Denied!

So I was fascinated to learn recently that my grandfather didn't go to high school, but did go to college. The story is a little less tidy than in these modern days of early college programs. He'd left school after 8th grade to work -- a far more common phenomenon in years past than now (and something I remember when someone extols the virtues of small scale farming. Sure it's fun to grow your own tomatoes, but small scale farming consumed a massive amount of human capital and potential before our economy became more specialized). But his minister saw that he was extremely bright, and tutored him. As a result, he was able to go to college and later to seminary to become a minister.

I wonder how many other stories there are like that? I was recently reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book is full of tales of people who are incredibly successful in business, despite not having more than (say) a 6th grade education. Plenty of smart people used to be forced to leave school for economic reasons, and had to learn on their own.

Now, one wonders, has the pendulum swung the other way? We force children to stay in school in lockstep for a certain number of years -- whether they're getting anything out of it or not. Skipping grades is a good way to zoom along to a point in school where one is actually challenged. It's fascinating to see that that is what happened with my grandfather -- even if the circumstances aren't so rosy.

Services, Not Labels

Many districts, faced with budget shortfalls, are trimming their gifted programs. So I was encouraged to see an article from Wisconsin's State Journal highlighting a new program in the Madison School District. A group of parents had filed a complaint with the state that the district was not upholding various education laws requiring identification and services for gifted students. As the article puts it, "The district also has historically blanched at grouping students by ability."

It's too soon to see what the effect will be. The idea is that there will be a lot more grouping by ability, with gifted education treated somewhat more like special education. Children with the most profound needs that can't be met in a traditional classroom will get services outside the classroom, and grade acceleration will be an option. All sounds good.

But what I liked most was this line: "Sue Schaar, the district’s new talented-and-gifted program coordinator, said the new program differs from past practice by focusing on services, rather than labeling students."

This is what gifted education, ideally, comes down to. Over the years I've started to think that much of the resistance to the idea of gifted education in general stems from this word "gifted" or the phrase "gifted and talented" -- which implies that some kids are somehow better than others, even if this is not the intention. We're prone to many euphemisms in education (like "special education") and the word "gifted" is yet another in a long list. But the word just doesn't matter. You can call it something neutral, or even negative if necessary. The point is that children will have their educational needs met, and will be challenged to the extent of their abilities, ideally in an environment with their intellectual peers. Services, not labels. The only reason for the label is to get the services. If there would be some way to downplay the label, that would be great.

Khan Academy, and Learning by Mastery

I'm in the early stages of trying to write something about the Khan Academy. This online library of video tutorials on different subjects exists to break down much math, science, economics and other knowledge into discrete units. You go through at your own pace, and when you master a particular topic, move on.

So who is the target audience? This is where this all gets fascinating. It could be someone who discovers she needs algebra skills on the job... or someone in rural Morocco sitting at a library computer... or students in a US classroom whose teacher likes the Khan approach. Wired recently ran a story on school classrooms where advanced kids could move ahead at their own level, with the teacher checking where they were getting stuck, and answering questions.

There is much to like about individually-paced instruction, particularly the idea of moving on to new material as soon as you've mastered other concepts. So I'm curious if any Gifted Exchange readers have experience with Khan Academy tutorials, or if your children attend schools that use them.

Another State, Another Governor's School In Trouble

A few years ago, I wrote here about efforts to keep New Jersey's Governor's School afloat. Many states created such programs over the years, which sent high-achieving high school students to camps for the summer to study different topics (science, math, art, music). While there is no shortage of private summer programs that do the same, the point of these programs was to give all students who qualified access to intensive work. Kids also tended to enjoy being around their academic peers, and these programs figure prominently in many alums' memories.

But, like much in state budgets these days, they are on the cutting block. In North Carolina, another state with a long-running Governor's School, the state budget chopped the entire $850,000 appropriation. The program was to run this summer but probably not next. Alums raised $130,000 to keep it going, a downpayment on the $1.3 million needed to send 800 kids for free, but whether that money will come through is anyone's guess.

I hope it will, though I'm also not sure about the direction these programs are heading, relying on wealthy alums or state business groups to keep them afloat. Those of you who know my politics (which I try not to talk about too much on this blog) know that I'm generally a free market kind of girl, not too enamored with government spending in general. But, as we are debating the federal budget these days, the giant elephant in the room is that governments of various levels are going to spend money on something. So the question is what we spend money on, and what that says about our priorities.

Because the $850,000 the state was going to appropriate for Governor's School (with 800 students paying about $500 apiece to go to make up the shortfall) compares to the $11.5 billion North Carolina spends annually on Medicaid -- a figure which rises about 8% per year. If North Carolina somehow managed to save one one-hundredth of one percent (0.01%) on this program, that would be a savings of... $1.15 million. Enough to fund Governor's School close to completely.

So what's a better use of public resources? A rounding error in health care spending or sending 800 kids to an academic enrichment camp for the summer that could possibly change their lives? I have my opinions -- unfortunately, they don't seem to be shared by the folks who make funding decisions.

Tests and Cheating

We all like great stories. The seeming turnaround of the Atlanta public schools was one of them. Kids appeared to be doing better on standardized tests. Now it's come to light that principals and teachers were changing answers, with analyses of incorrect-to-correct erasures indicating astronomical odds against anything other than cheating going on. Even some Teach for America teachers have been questioned in all this.

Critics of NCLB and testing in general are claiming that this is the inevitable result of high-stakes situations. Hedge fund managers rewarded or fired based on performance may resort to insider trading. Athletes use performance enhancing drugs. I think these explanations go a little too easy on the culpable individuals involved, but I'm not particularly naive about human nature either. In situations where it is easy to cheat and cheating is rewarded, people cheat. By some estimates, about half of sole proprietor income (e.g. the guy who paints your deck) goes unreported in the US (and hence untaxed). Teachers judged on student test performance are subject to the same temptations.

I think there's plenty to criticize about NCLB -- not least of which is taking a focus away from high achievers who will always pass grade level tests, and concentrating teachers' time and attention mostly on children who are right around the edge of passing. Those children deserve attention, sure, but so do kids who are too far below grade level to catch up in the time any one teacher has them, and so do kids who will score in the 99th percentile.

On the other hand, in the absence of any accountability measures, you can wind up with kids graduating from high school who do not know how to read. Children are not necessarily served well by no testing either.

So how does one keep accountability while reforming some of the worst aspects of its unintended consequences? Long-time readers of this blog know I like a "value-added" assessment approach. Create tests that don't ceiling out at grade level (so you can get an accurate picture of gifted kids' needs as well). Then assess again throughout the year and judge teachers and schools on kids' improvement. In a digital era, this shouldn't be too difficult, and could in fact make testing fun. Frequent feedback can help teachers make spot changes (and is also more fair, given how much some students move around). Such assessments would reveal that a teacher who brought a fifth grader up from a 2nd grade level to a 4th grade level was in fact doing an awesome job -- and hopefully wouldn't put pressure on her to change a few more answers to get that kid up to 5th grade level. Such assessments would also show if a school's gifted students were merely treading water. Yes, they keep "passing" grade level tests. But that doesn't mean anything good is going on.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

I spent the last few days reading through economist Bryan Caplan's new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. The title is a bit of a stretch but the argument is a fascinating one when viewed through the lens of the whole parenting advice industrial-complex.

Caplan's main argument is that within the norms for First World, middle-class homes, nurture doesn't make a whole lot of difference to children's long-term outcomes. Parents can have an effect in the short run, but mounting evidence from identical vs. fraternal twin studies, and adoption studies, shows that over time, these effects become less and less pronounced. Parents have their biggest effect in the moment of conception. After that, there are very few effects that last. The only ones that really seem to are religious identification and political affiliation, but even there it's a shallow affinity. Devout Presbyterians who go to church twice a week might raise a child who identifies as Presbyterian, but he's not much more likely to attend services regularly than other people. The biggest effect may just be whether the child remembers the home as being happy or not.

As for what this means for one's fertility, Caplan suggests that people overestimate how much effort modern parenting requires. If you are a normal, productive adult, odds are your children will be too, and if you raise them within American middle-class norms, any odd outliers are probably not to your credit or blame. The flash cards don't matter. The activities don't matter. The focus on strict TV limits doesn't matter. Discipline matters more for making your life more pleasant in the moment than for anything it will do down the road. So he suggests that people relax and try to enjoy their time with their children, possibly more children than they were otherwise planning to have. After all, bigger families are good for nurturing social ties -- one of the key components of human happiness -- and if items are cheaper than you thought, economists will tell you to stock up.

I'm not sure on the "stocking up" advice, but I do think it's fascinating to ask the question of whether nature or nurture matters more. There's an old joke that parenting advice books are all written for first time parents because once you have the second one, you realize how little of it you actually control. You feed kids the same things and interact with them the same way at dinner, and yet one will lustily eat lox, capers, tomatoes and anything else you put in front of him, and the other screams when a strawberry touches his vanilla yogurt, thereby tainting it. Some children love to sleep and others decide that sleep is for the weak and flabby. Most disconcertingly, I recall reading not long ago an essay in O magazine from the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters. There is really no evidence that she raised her son in anything but a normal fashion, the same as plenty of his peers. And yet look what he did.

As Caplan notes, no one likes to believe that nurture matters as little as it does -- though you could view it as a relief as much as anything else. But I'm curious what Gifted Exchange readers think. There are always anecdotes that point one way or another, but in a world of 7 billion people, it is possible to find anecdotes of anything...