Misdiagnosed

A few posts ago we talked about gifted kids who were misdiagnosed as having ADD or ADHD. Cookie magazine's March & April issue (on news stands) has an equally alarming essay about a gifted boy named Alex who was misdiagnosed as autistic.

Cookie is a new magazine, and it's pretty funny -- think Vogue, only instead of the Fendi "it" bag your accessory is a toddler. The back cover ad has children in Kenneth Cole Reaction clothing and one of the articles is about jetting with your family to Sweden. But leaving that aside, "Normal," an essay by Aliza Valdes-Rodriguez, is worth wading through the too-cute spring frocks.

Valdes-Rodriguez's son, Alex, spoke very early. He spoke in full sentences. He wouldn't walk for ages, then just decided to do so and did so. He would become obsessed with one particular game. When he kept speaking of himself in the second or third person, though, his parents became worried. Teachers suggested it might be autism. They had him tested, and the Southwestern Autism Network said that was indeed his issue. His parents were devastated.

Of course, Alex picked up on his parents' devastation, and would talk about them being sad. This was the first clue that he might have been misdiagnosed. Autistic children have an impaired abilty to understand emotions and emotional cues from other people. Valdes-Rodriguez did some more reading, and came to realize what might have happened. "Alex," she writes, "is a brown-skinned boy named Rodriguez in New Mexico, the poorest state in the union. I remembered that when I had suggested to one of the clinicians that perhaps Alex was simply a genius, he chuckled, as if this could not be possible."

But indeed it was possible. Growing up, the writer had to fight to be recognized as gifted herself. Now, the same thing was happening with her child. She got him retested by more autism experts, and they said the original diagnosis was dead wrong. She just had a very, very, very bright boy on her hands.

So why the strange third person talking? The obsessive behavior? These are signs of autism. It turns out that Alex's parents were "colluding to make this kid the way he is," according to the professor of psychology they took him to. Both neglected and misunderstood as kids, the two wouldn't let Alex do anything on his own -- smothering him in a sense. The professor pointed out that the Rodriguez family always referred to Alex as "we" -- as in "Now we're going to put on pants." Alex was just speaking this language style right back.

Once the family became aware of the problem, they changed it, and Alex's "autism" disappeared. The writer has some great thoughts about the struggles of gifted kids at the end, but you shiver to think what could have happened if she didn't keep poking at the diagnosis to see what was true and what was not.

Flying High (learning on your own)

As some of you know, I'm writing a book on young people who build their own careers doing things they love outside the traditional corporate grind. While researching this topic, I'm coming across some great stories, like this one of Jamail Larkins, an acrobatic pilot and motivational speaker, or a young woman I just found who started a company that runs surfing camps for girls. On Thursday I'm interviewing a young man who started a toy company; I just wrote a profile of a young woman who designs and sells renegade needlepoint patterns (think sushi rolls and tattoos, not the bunnies and bonnets your grandmother stitched).

All of these bright, gifted young people were highly impatient with the corporate world. Big companies insisted they take on responsibility only when some higher-up deemed them ready. It's reminding me a lot of the impatience I heard from kids as I researched Genius Denied. These kids wanted to move on to new topics when they felt ready, not when their age or the textbook decreed that OK.

I'm writing my book in part because the corporate world's career ladders are disintegrating. In the next few decades, more of us will have to strike out on our own. For reasons from layoffs to burn-out, it's the rare person who will spend her whole career at one company. Even the academic world -- where many a grown-up gifted kid lands -- is increasingly relying on adjuncts, and so putting young PhDs in a position where they have to scramble to find work that fulfills them and pays them well. More and more of us will have to learn as we go. It won't even be clear what we *should* learn.

The problem is that this is the complete opposite situation from how we learn in school. There, it's very clear what we should learn -- the curriculum from grade 9, then grade 10. Even when we get to accelerate, it's still clear what's next. This is as old-fashioned a set-up as IBM's old lifetime employment career tracks.

But it's also a tricky issue to handle. Students do need a certain background in reading, writing and arithmetic, not to mention computer science and other fields. Many a graduate school of education has posed this question and decided that students should undertake experiential learning. The net result tends to be kids who don't know arithmetic but have a fun time talking with other students about problem-solving strategies. That's not an improvement.

But at least gifted programs on the high school level could start incorporating this independent learning issue. Students could telescope the high school curriculum into 2-3 years, with the option to continue regular advanced study for half days their last two years. The rest of the time they can work on rigorous independent projects. This will require a fair amount of teacher involvement -- and flexibility. I blew off the research project I was assigned in high school. But I know why I blew it off. It had to be an academic research project. I've never been interested in academic research. If I'd been allowed to devote that time to investigative journalism for our school newspaper, I would have been a lot happier.

I'm wondering if any readers have kids in schools that push independent work, and how this is handled. Handled badly, it can be a waste of time. Handled well, it could give kids a leg up on planning their careers and teaching them how they'll have to learn for the rest of their lives.

I'm betting the homeschooling parents reading this blog already do this :)

Multi-Age but... Homogenous?

The Northern Wells Community School Board in Bluffton, Indiana (east central part of the state) has encountered a fascinating paradox. The local school had several multi-age classrooms (ie, second and third graders share a teacher). Yet the school board canceled the program because the powers that be worried that such a multi-age program was creating homogeneous classrooms. You can read about this puzzler in the News-Banner here.

It's no secret that high-achieving kids (and their families) tend to like multi-age classrooms. Teachers know there will be a wider range of abilities, and so plan for some kids to be more advanced than others. Kids in the lower grades can work ahead at the higher grade level -- or even skip to the higher grade -- with no awkwardness. Since parents could request placement in multi-age classrooms, the school board determined that just about all of the school's high-achieving kids were in the multi-age classes. That meant they weren't in the single age classes. Voila -- homogeneous grouping by default. And the Northern Wells School Board wasn't going to stand for that.

This is a frustrating story in many ways. According to the article, school principal Steve Darnell seemed to determine to shut down the program, claiming “It wasn’t the program that created the success stories, it was the positive interaction between the students, parents and teachers that created that memory for the child.” He stated that the staff wanted heterogeneous grouping by ability -- but apparently not by age -- and that gifted students were already being served through other programs. He also blamed No Child Left Behind, saying it requires schools to hold children accountable by grade, and so it was administratively difficult to do that in multi-age classrooms. He said that many other schools with multi-age programs cut them for just that reason.

Has anyone else experienced this in their school systems? Is NCLB really leading to the demise of the few multi-age programs out there, or did this school system just not like the idea that high-achieving kids got clustered in one class?

MathCounts Memories

Districts and chapters held their MathCounts competitions last weekend, which means the past week has been filled with stories like this one from the Peoria Journal-Star about the mathletes.

MathCounts is a middle school math competition that pits 7th and 8th graders against mathletes from their districts first, then around their states (to select state teams), then nationally. Since the competition covers algebra and geometry, in theory, many a mathlete winds up learning these topics a few years ahead of the game, and learns them in a way that is a game. For instance, to be quick at the competition, I learned to find averages not by adding numbers and dividing, but by taking the over/under of where I was aiming and working with these numbers (eg, if Johnny scores an 86, an 85, and a 91 on his first three math tests, what score does he need for an 89 average? You use -3, -4 and +2 to get -5, which means he needs +5, or 94.) This has been more useful than one might imagine in life.

The problem, of course, is that schools with strong MathCounts programs also tend to have strong math programs to start with. So in schools where kids are already getting a solid foundation, they learn some quick tricks, like the one I showed above. In schools were they don't, they don't do very well in the competition. I helped judge the New York City MathCounts three years ago. The Young Women's Leadership School, a local charter school, scored dead last. That made me a little sore; the school has gotten deserved good press for helping bright girls aim for college, but you think they could be a bit more rigorous about math in the meantime. My school in Indiana had no MathCounts team; my mother formed and coached one since no teacher planned to do it. We had a decent run of it; we won the chapter competition my 8th grade year and placed in the state competition. But once my family wasn't involved anymore, the school stopped being involved.

I suppose MathCounts could be most useful in situations where local college math majors come in and coach a team in a school without a great math program. I hope there are a fair number of these teams. If people know of them, let me know. I'd like to profile them here.

"He is quite intelligent, but daydreams..."

The Ask the Teacher column in a recent Boston Globe had an interesting question from a parent. Her son was "quite intelligent, but daydreams," got distracted easily in class and didn't always finish his work on time. A battery of tests had ruled out ADHD. The columnist, fortunately, suggested that the parent have her son tested for giftedness. "The behaviors you describe tend to trigger thoughts of an attention disorder," the columnist wrote, "but they're similar to those seen in gifted children."

As someone who daydreams, gets distracted easily and hates having my time wasted by assignments that don't make sense, this column struck a note for me. When doing research for Genius Denied, and since, I've heard anecdotal evidence of schools that issue their own diagnosis of ADHD, then expect the parent to shop around for an actual physician willing to confirm it. There are kids with ADHD, sure, that need to be treated. But there are also kids who don't fit into the lock-step watch-the-teacher, sit-still-until-we-call-on-you school mode. I shudder to think how many of the latter are having their personalities medicated away. I shudder more given recent headlines about the potential cardiac side effects of ADHD medication (the FDA is considering a black box warning for the drugs).

Anyway, one solution is to have school districts train more teachers to recognize the symptoms of giftedness, and how those can mimic symptoms of ADHD. The Houston Independent School District is actually proposing such training. According to this article from the Houston Chronicle, all kindergarten teachers would be trained to recognize signs of advanced intellectual ability. HISD is considering this in part to increase the representation of minority children and children from low income backgrounds in the gifted program, but my guess is it will result in fewer ADHD misdiagnoses as well.

The word "gifted"

I had spoken about this blog with a reporter for a journalist trade magazine recently. The resulting article gave the blog a nice mention. One thing that did surprise me, though, was that the author put "gifted" in quotes. You rarely see quotes around "special" education, though that's a coined term as well. I guess what made it jarring is that I view quote marks as a way to sneer at something. Strunk & White's Elements of Style notes on colloquialisms, "If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better."

I don't think the reporter was inviting us to join her in a select society, though. There's simply a fair amount of trepidation about using the g-word. We all have gifts of some variety or another. You can be a gifted athlete, a gifted conversationalist, a gifted liar. Why use the word just for children with high IQs?

From what I can gather of the history of gifted education, Lewis Terman coined the term gifted child in the early 1920's. He used it to refer specifically to those with high IQs because, well, that's what he studied. He believed people with high IQs would be the movers and shakers of the future, and were thus gifted with abilities that needed to be recognized. Leta Hollingworth used the phrase "gifted children" in a book title in 1926. It caught on. Most of us use the word without dwelling on it because it makes as much sense as any other word. It's a euphemism, sure. But it sounds better than "brainy children" or "High IQ children" or other phrases I could put in quote marks because I don't like them. It's also a nice metaphor. A gift is useless unless unwrapped. Likewise, being gifted won't do a darn thing for you if you don't develop your talents and work hard.

But a lot of schools don't like using the word. We've grown accustomed to acronyms, rather than simply calling something the gifted program. Think TAG, GATE, etc. In schools with lots of ability grouping, the more advanced groups are usually called the "apples" or the "blue jays" or something else that doesn't imply a value statement. Indeed, I've often joked that schools should call their gifted programs something perjorative. The clowns. The dunces. The remedial program. If parents were still willing to put their kids in there, you'd know they really needed the intervention, not that it was a prize to brag about to the neighbors.

I wonder if any blog readers have examples of euphemisms their schools have used, or ideas for what gifted education should be called.

Public or Private

6-year-old Grady Day had an enjoyable time lobbying Arizona lawmakers about gifted education recently. According to an Arizona Republic article, "First Grader Wows Arizona Legislature", Day told lawmakers he found the standard kindergarten curriculum a bit tedious. He preferred learning about things like stem cells. His family decided to put him in a Phoenix gifted program, rather than in a regular classroom in his Mesa home, to help meet his needs.

As blog-reader Kim Moldofsky points out, what's most interesting about this link is not so much the article, but the comments from the readers, below. A poster mentioned that he was once this kid. "You're cute as long as you're a dog and pony show." Then he said "I ended up homeless with a doctorate."

Who knows if it's true or not. But this missive sparked letters on whether parents of highly gifted kids should be lobbying for gifted programs in public schools, or lobbying for vouchers for private schools created solely for gifted kids (the idea being that public school gifted programs weren't as effective as they might be). Part of the mission of public schools is to educate all children to a certain level of competency. But that means, for the most part, that districts feel they're doing you a favor by creating anything outside that. Schools try to fit their gifted programs within their regular parameters, and so many choose pull-out programs that have kids learning about Robin Hood or bugs for 90 minutes a week, and then racing right back to be part of the regular program.

Private schools are certainly not free of their problems, either. Even private schools for the gifted. When I was interviewing parents for Genius Denied, I had a few parents tell me that their private schools for the gifted were even less flexible than the public schools. There, all children were gifted, so there really weren't going to be any accommodations for a kid who's IQ 160 vs. IQ 130. But a strong parents group could create private schools that do cater to gifted kids' needs specifically. They could make sure such schools continued to be run with gifted kids' best interests in mind.

So the question arises -- lobby for vouchers for private gifted schools, or lobby for public school gifted programs?

Right now, I'd have to say the latter. The Florida courts recently struck down most of that state's voucher programs, and while other state courts might be more amenable, the national political situation isn't pro-voucher enough to make the first option feasible. Not only would parents have to overcome general education establishment resistance to gifted education, they'd also have to overcome the resistance to vouchers.

Charter schools are, of course, a reasonable option somewhere between the two. So maybe that's the best choice if you have cute, brainy 6-year-olds willing to make a good speech in favor of something.

Speaking of Math and Science Academies...

New Hampshire is thinking of opening a charter school called the New Hampshire Academy for Science and Design at Daniel Webster College in Nashua next year. That's an amazingly ambitious timeline for opening a school, but you can read about it in the Boston Globe here.

The Academy would cover grades 7-12. The first half of the article is quite encouraging, talking about the rigorous science classes students could take in aeronautics and biochemistry.

The second half is less encouraging. Apparently, New Hampshire originally allowed charter schools only if local voters and local school boards near the site approved them. Not surprisingly, some small minded folks decided such schools would break their local monopolies and got every charter school proposal defeated until about two years ago.

Then the legislature started a pilot program allowing themselves to approve charter schools, and the first opened about a year and a half ago. That's a small step forward. But these new laws set charter school funding at $3500 a student. New Hampshire's regular public schools spend about $6,000-$10,000 a year educating each kid.

I'm all for saving taxpayer dollars, but I think making charter schools start out broke unless they can raise private funds is a mistake. Such a policy tempts school officials to seek out students whose families can contribute the rest, instead of throwing open their doors to whichever scientifically curious kids want to cross the New Hampshire Academy for Science and Design's doors.

Our Scientific Edge (Another Take)

Time magazine's cover story this week builds on the math news from the Business Roundtable last week, with a title "Are We Losing Our Edge?"

The gist is that Americans still produce the most peer-reviewed articles, the most innovation, and still have one of the highest productivity growth rates in the world. But bright young people who come to the US for college and graduate school are often entertaining offers to return to their home countries afterwards. And with amazing institutions like the various Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) cranking out top engineers, many such young people aren't even coming to the US at all. And that's before we get to the subject of the declining number of science and engineering PhDs going to American citizens... and the bad state of science and math education in our primary and secondary schools...

It's a complex topic, which is why throwing our hands up in the air isn't entirely warranted. For starters, geographic boundaries mean less these days. An Indian engineer might work in India for an American company -- does that mean America is losing its edge? Not really, and not any more than an American working in America for a pharmaceutical company headquartered in London means things have gone horribly awry.

Also, people move more. I have interviewed a number of Chinese graduate students in the US. Many would like to stay; others would like the ability to move back and forth. Few go back to China for long periods of time without obtaining US citizenship. It's still a helpful passport to have, given the uncertainties of the Chinese political situation, or the possibility of social unrest in India, Russia and other countries that send top-notch students to the US. Occasionally, there's even a touch of xenophobia in these arguments about America's scientific "edge." People who don't even understand the concept of statistical significance look at US grad schools, see a lot of Asian faces, and say "we're" losing our edge. As if many of these young people won't become "us." For that reason, Charles Krauthammer has an essay in Time saying "Don't Believe the Hype. We're Still No. 1." Google was founded by a Russian, he points out, Yahoo by a Taiwanese, etc.

I agree with Krauthammer that the opportunities in the US -- to get rich, to build a company with little government interference, to fail and then move and start over again -- are still attractive to many of the best and brightest around the world. But he brushes over the very serious problem of American students not receiving a vigorous enough education.

Ideally, America would be bringing in the best and brightest from other countries and cranking out more folks from American schools capable of doing innovative work. This isn't just a matter of standards, as most of the policies put on the table seem to indicate. Sure, it would be great if all students got a more rigorous math and science education.

But it's the top 1% of US students who will really be competing in the innovation category with their peers from around the world. Some states have recognized this and created residential math and science high schools for their top performers. These schools offer more in-depth labs and accelerated classwork (often in conjunction with state universities). That's the good news.

The bad news is that fewer than 20 states have such schools. If America really wants to push the envelope in science, creating such schools in every state would be a bold first step.

"Class" Division in Hawaii

An unfortunately titled article ( "Class Division") in Sunday's Honolulu Star-Bulletin notes that the Small Learning Communities movement has arrived in Hawaii.

This movement attempts to take the warehousing aspect out of schooling by reducing schools to a few hundred students at most. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But as readers of this blog know, small learning communities (SLCs) tend to be heterogeneously grouped to maintain someone's idea of "community." And they tend to be small enough that they'll have only a few highly gifted students. Gifted students need to concentrated and taught in classes, with their peers, that challenge them to the extent of their abilities. This does not happen in heterogeneously grouped SLCs. The theory is that such SLCs will help those on the bottom end of the achievement ladder. The Hawaii schools give some evidence of reduced drop out rates. But the anecdotal evidence also indicates that gifted students aren't being challenged at all. They're being used as tutors. And, true to form, educators seem to think that's OK. Per the article:

"The highest level of learning is when a student has the ability to instruct others," said Principal Dennis Manalili of Kaimuki High School, which also is part of the grant."

Earth to Manalili. This is one of those nice-sounding educational cliches that isn't true. You know how to multiply single digits, right? Would you learn how to multiply any better if I made you spend the next hour explaining it to me? Probably not. Having kids teach each other topics only works when both are relatively unfamiliar with the subject. If one kid knows it cold, making her teach the subject to a classmate is just using her as an unpaid teaching assistant. She isn't getting anything out of it.

As for "the grant" described in the above quote... That grant would be from the federal government. Yes, the same federal government which can only shell out a few million dollars, total, for gifted education nationwide, is paying for Hawaii to leave its gifted students behind.

What's even more frustrating about all of this is that the SLC movement is being pushed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to this article, the Foundation has put $1 billion toward creating SLCs. Bill Gates was a gifted boy at one point, and certainly knows how frustrating it can be not to be able to zoom ahead as fast as your frenetic brain will allow. I hope the Foundation will realize what's happening and start creating ability-grouped SLCs, so everyone -- those who zoom ahead and those who need a little more help -- will be able to learn as fast as they can.

Reviving Sputnik (or making math matter)

Every once in a while, there's a new wave of stories about how Americans are losing our edge in math and science. These articles usually talk about what happened in the wake of Sputnik. Suddenly, the story goes, Congress found money for training young mathematicians and giving young academics grants and the like. And we did wind up beating the Soviets to the moon. Maybe, the stories say, we should do the same now.

We're in the midst of another wave of such stories at the moment. President Bush is expected to talk about our competitiveness in these fields tonight in his State of the Union address. The Business Roundtable and US Chamber of Commerce are also lobbying on the matter. One proposal floating around is to pay math teachers more than other teachers, though this is vigorously opposed by the NEA. You can read about the push in an Associated Press article here.

Paying math teachers more is one solution. I'm a little wary of various proposals to "make math fun." These are noble in intent, but occasionally make math fun by watering it down. Don't get me wrong -- I hated doing worksheets of 90 single digit multiplication problems. But I recall reading an essay in O magazine last year about a young woman who hated math growing up, and then wrote that she was thrilled to see that some young people in her neighborhood now had a math program where they talked a lot about math, worked in groups and shied from the pure quant problems. Maybe that's an improvement, but I'm not sure. Some kids do like numbers without the fuzzy stuff.

I realize math is collaborative -- but I'd like to see collaboration follow after kids learn the basics individually. Here's my idea for improving America's math competitiveness. All classrooms could have a computer program (and enough screens) where kids work through math lesson plans and problems. If you get enough right, you move forward in the computer program. If you seem unsure about a concept, you or the machine summon your teacher. The teacher helps, and the computer program has tutorials as well. You move on when you master something. There are programs that approximate this now.

But the key part is that there should be no "end" of the program to correspond with the school year. If you master arithmetic, you move on to pre-algebra concepts. Master those, you move on to algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc. One sixth grader could be stretching herself learning calculus while her classmate next to her is brushing up on her arithmetic. Both will be learning to the extent of their abilities. This is doable in a field like math (at least up through the calculus level or so) in a way it isn't in English or history. I bet you'd see a lot of kids learning a lot more than they do now. And gifted kids would be challenged. Maybe one of the tech companies pushing Congress to do something about math education could produce such a system.

Distance Learning

I attended Northwestern University's summer programs for gifted middle schoolers many (many) years ago. I just learned the university now offers similar programs online during the school year. If you're looking for another distance learning option, see the LearningLinks program webpage. You can also read a story in the Daily Northwestern about the program.

These programs are ideal for kids in small high schools that can't offer many advanced courses. You simply go to the library and log into AP Statistics instead of showing up in class for Math 9. At about $550 a course, it's not cheap, but if you've only got 2-3 kids who need such work in your school, it's cheaper than hiring a teacher.

Of course, my favorite part of Northwestern's "nerd camp" (as such programs are affectionately known among attendees) was hanging out with other kids like me. I liked the academics, but I really liked the social aspect. Being online isn't quite the same. Still it's better than nothing. A lot better.

Not-so-literate College Students

This is a "reforming education" post, not so much a gifted post, but I thought it was still an interesting topic.

The American Institutes for Research released a study last week on the skills of soon-to-be college graduates. They weren't too encouraging. I'm always suspicious of tests sprung on adults (those Jay Leno man-on-the-street interviews come to mind. Hey, sometimes we're busy with work and don't have time to follow current events!). But this study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, asked simple skill questions. Can students who are about to finish their degree programs understand a table about exercise and blood pressure, compare offers from credit card companies with different rates, and understand the arguments in a newspaper editorial? According to articles about the results, more than 50% of students at four-year colleges and 75% of students at two-year colleges could not perform these tasks.

Again, another study showing Americans are dumb. So what?

The reason we should care about this one is that the skills tested closely track skills that have long been bandied about as the point of free, compulsory public education. These students experienced such education for the full 13 years before they went on to institutions of higher learning. For the bulk of students, education should:

1. Give the student the skills necessary to hold employment to provide for his/her family and take care of his/her family and
2. Teach the student the skills necessary to participate in civic life.

If you can't understand interest rates, you'll have a hard time climbing beyond paycheck to paycheck living. If you can't read charts, the bulk of data-oriented jobs are off-limits to you. If you can't understand a table linking increased exercise with lower blood pressure, you'll have a hard time figuring out what works to safeguard your family's health. And if you can't understand arguments in an editorial, how will you understand the different arguments political candidates make, or lawyers make in trial when you serve on jury duty?

The question always raised in homeschooling cases is whether families can guarantee that they will teach their children the same skills that public education provides. If I were trying to launch a case, I'd clip this article. It seems the bar is pretty low.

Gifted Immigrant Kids

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a fascinating story about the representation of minority kids in gifted programs, though it's not fascinating for the reasons spelled out in the article (read it here).

The Birdville School District in Texas, the article notes, worries that minority students may not be represented at the right proportions in school gifted programs. Notes the article, "Birdville has identified about 8.3 percent of its students as gifted. But the district’s Hispanic students represent about 6.9 percent of gifted students while making up about 22.3 percent of the district’s 22,000 enrollment. Officials said they believe that Hispanics are underrepresented."

But then the article goes on to illustrate this point, not by profiling a gifted young Hispanic student who was passed over for the program, but by profiling a gifted young kid who immigrated with his family from Saudi Arabia -- and had no problem making the cut.

Young Khalid is in 6th grade. His father drives a taxi. His mother works at a department store. Both parents are trying to climb back up the economic ladder to the levels they occupied before immigrating (the father was a professor, the mother a tutor). But, tough circumstances or no, the family values education and has nurtured their son's gifts. The school noticed how well Khalid did in math and science. The article notes that he'd been an academic stand-out since first grade, despite his originally limited English. So he was invited to participate in the gifted program.

End of story. The article says kids like Khalid might fall through the cracks if Birdville wasn't looking, but it's not clear how. Which brings me to a different point than the one the article was making.

Those of us who've done a lot of research and interviewing in the field of gifted education soon notice that the families we're working with are as likely -- and sometimes more likely -- to be named Chang or Wzlovsky or Hussein as Smith. The biographies of Davidson Fellows show that children of immigrants, or immigrant children themselves, are far over-represented compared to their proportion of the population. Certainly, the group photos are more "diverse" than your average high school class! Immigrant families often come to America to prove themselves. They value education, nurture their children's gifts, and preach the gospel of hard work. That's a combo that's tough to beat.

Which is why I'm less worried about the proportion of minority gifted students than some educators seem to be. Sure, nets should be cast wide. Selection should be made on more than one test score. And schools shouldn't make their gifted programs so big that they become an excuse to segregate all white students from their peers. But if you look at the true top 1% of students, you'll see as diverse a group of faces as anyone could want.

Gifted Adults

The Davidson Institute reports that they get a reasonable number of queries from grown-up gifted kids who say they never knew that was what was "wrong" with them. (See this article by D. Lovecky for a round-up of the personality characteristics -- positive and negative -- many gifted adults display.) Some schools are simply uninterested in figuring out why the quiet kid in the back is bored with school, or doing anything about it. If parents don't know how or can't nurture their children's gifts, and if the child doesn't speak up or find mentors or teacher that do understand, then the kid can grow up thinking "learning isn't for me."

That's a sad situation. Fortunately, adults can control their lives in ways children can't. That means that adults who realize that maybe they weren't dumb, or weird, but just weren't being challenged, can create situations where they can feed their brains. Many, as the Lovecky article notes, become entrepreneurs. When you create the work rules, after all, you don't have to play by the ones you never liked in school. You can seek out creative fields and workplaces, especially ones that tolerate difference. You can create environments with intellectual peers by joining organizations such as Mensa and participating in their forums and activities. You can form book clubs and philosophical societies that draw people with intellectual interests. And you can always seek out activities like crosswords and auditing college courses or taking them online to keep your brain buzzing.

I'm curious if other people have suggestions for adults seeking to nurture their gifts.

How do you measure intelligence?

It's that time of year again, with thousands of high school students sitting for the SAT. It's a different beast than most of us took; now your score is out of 2400 points, not 1600. There are no antonyms, you can use calculators, quantitative comparisons have disappeared, and you need to write a 25 minute essay. USA Today has an article about the test, and various student angst problems with it here.

These changes, instituted last year, are just the most recent in a long line of reforms since the Scholastic Aptitude Test was introduced in 1926. The College Board says the test has "evolved to remain aligned with classroom practices." As such, the math section has started covering more advanced work, the word "Aptitude" has been removed, and the letters SAT now don't stand for anything.

I'm quite torn on this. On one hand, the SAT has always been about determining your ability to succeed in college. One's performance in the high school curriculum is usually the best predictive measure in this regard. A standardized exam that tests the high school curriculum helps colleges compare students across schools (when straight A students get "1750" at one school, and get "2100" at another, you have a pretty good indication which school is more rigorous). And I'm thrilled that schools now have to teach writing (the most neglected "R" in the past).

On the other hand, one of the original marks in the SAT's favor is that it didn't cover the high school curriculum. Before the early 1900's, few people beyond the sons of wealthy, WASPy families attended college. Before pursuing higher education, these young men attended a handful of northeastern prep schools. The SAT provided a way for young people from high schools that hadn't aligned their curricula with Harvard to prove they were just as much Harvard material. After all, if the SAT didn't test knowledge of the high school curriculum, nothing prevented a brilliant working class kid from a bad school from outscoring a privileged, but not so bright, boy from Exeter.

Or at least that's the theory. It's hard to design a pure intelligence test. As kids have started being exposed to more logic puzzles and games like mazes, their ability to solve such puzzles has risen. The old SAT covered subject matter such as geometry; my math score (but presumably not my intelligence) rose 140 points on the old test after taking a summer class in the topic.

The fine line between innate intelligence and subject matter exposure is one reason many educators are wary of using intelligence tests alone to select kids for gifted programs. The National Education Association website has an article on a math program in Connecticut that tries, explicitly, to expand the pool of kids identified as capable of doing advanced mathematical work, by moving beyond IQ tests.

"Kids are selected based on multiple criteria, including a special assessment of nonverbal math ability, which measures such things as spatial sense and reasoning, and standardized tests when available. Teacher recommendations and prior grades also factor in. Opening up the selection process (gifted programs in the past often selected students based on IQ scores alone) has allowed students with less obvious talents to benefit," the article says.

Yet at the same time that teacher recommendations and grades are being used, the NEA article warns teachers that "Sometimes actions speak louder than words. A kid who seems bored or disinterested (even acting up) may, in fact, need more challenging work." Since such students are less likely to be earning high marks and teacher praise, opening up the selection process might miss them.

Beauty and the Geek

So my husband has become oddly enthralled with this reality show called "Beauty and the Geek" (WB network) and to humor him, I watched part of it last night.

The show may take its place in the pantheon of pop culture salvos that create images of bright young people that stick in the collective mind. How many former gifted kids who are now about 30 can remember being called Doogie Howser? Yup, more than a few.

On one level, this reality show is better than most. It's redemptive -- we learn that the "geeks" are pretty cool, even if they do play Dungeons and Dragons or can fix a Rubik's cube behind their backs. We learn the unapproachable, glamorous "beauties" are nice girls who are eager for a project and are genuinely impressed with the geeks' intelligence (and that these young men tend to be nicer than the presumed studs most of them usually date).

But boy do we have to get through a maze of stereotypes to get there. The "geeks" are male. They're told they're chosen because they're highly intelligent, but really it's because they have certain trappings that people associate with the brainy. For instance, most wear thick glasses. Their clothing styles were not picked after religiously paging through Men's Vogue. The Dungeons and Dragons reference is just gratuitous (come on -- aren't gamers more likely to play Magic or one of the online games like Project Entropia now?)

One of the reasons many of us had a visceral bad reaction to the Prodigy Puzzle cover story in the NY Times magazine a few months ago is that the illustrations all featured stereotypes of gifted children. They had bad hair, bad glasses, weird clothes. But at least in the NY Times magazine pictures, geeks could be male and female. In the Beauty and the Geek universe, women cannot be both brainy and beautiful. That's trouble if that stereotype sticks in the public's mind.

The Life and Death of a Prodigy (The New Yorker)

The 1/16 New Yorker has a long, sad story from Blood Relation author Eric Konigsberg on the suicide of Brandenn Bremmer in March of last year. It's worth picking up a copy (the story was not available online when I checked).

Brandenn was 14. He liked video games, the Middle Ages and composing music. He had an IQ on the old Stanford-Binet Form LM of 178, though there's some controversy about that test and Linda Silverman, the educational psychologist who gave it to him. In 2001, an 8-year-old boy she tested who had scored "298-plus" threatened suicide and was found to have been coached on the test. An earlier test found Brandenn had an IQ of 146, but that was probably low, as he didn't like the whole testing process (small, gifted children, no less than other small children, don't necessarily hide their feelings!)

But the number doesn't matter. Nor, really, do the various fingers one can point in blame for why this young man decided life wasn't worth living. Konigsberg is careful not to throw his weight behind a particular thesis. Brandenn had a rough life, even if it didn't seem so from the outside. He was a social boy, but because his parents thought he was a prodigy who wouldn't do well in a standard gifted program (the article says Silverman told them this), he was homeschooled and took correspondence courses. Homeschooling works well for many kids. But extroverted kids who don't have brothers and sisters at home may need a lot of time with other kids if they are homeschooled. Brandenn's parents led a fairly monastic farm existence in Nebraska -- just them and the animals. In emails and conversations before his death, Brandenn said that he was lonely, bored and depressed. He was happiest at get-togethers for other gifted students. He was probably a perfectionist and quite sensitive, like many highly gifted kids. All these things together, coupled with the general angst of teen life, and the trials of being different, may have pushed him over the edge. His access to the .22-calibre rifle he'd been using to shoot skunks that got into the barn made it easier.

None of these factors would have been easy to change. The Bremmers had roots in that small Nebraska town that went back generations; moving so Brandenn could be part of a program for the highly gifted somewhere would have been difficult, even if it would have given him the peers he needed. Perhaps the family should have been more open about the definition of Brandenn's peers (as gifted prof Tracy Cross of Ball State says in the article, "I don't believe there's much difference between a person with an IQ of 160 and one with 170 or 180." Maybe that's not entirely right, but Brandenn likely would have made good friends with kids with IQs in the 150s, whatever his tested IQ was.) Maybe he shouldn't have had such easy access to a gun, but a rural child who's been shooting, without incident, since age 6, seems trustworthy. Maybe the boy should have been in treatment for depression. But teen troubles come and go quickly, and Brandenn was good at hiding any long term suffering.

Which leaves the reader wondering what can be gleaned from this horrible story. Maybe nothing. Not all deaths teach us something. Two years before I attended the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities, the school suffered through a spate of suicides and attempts. This was around the time of Kurt Cobain's death; researchers have found suicide can be "contagious." The school cracked down. We used to joke that any hint of depression could get you sent home. That was a problem because many students went to boarding school precisely because their home situation and local schools were intolerable. Going back really would make you depressed. Unfortunately, we live in a world where gifted children have trouble fitting in. They're different. And unfortunately, some people who feel different may find it's not worth staying on this planet.

But that's not unique to prodigies. A girl I knew at my first high school committed suicide as well. Perhaps the one lesson that can be taken from Brandenn's story is that gifted kids, like other kids, need to be with kindred spirits to feel like they have a stake on this earth. It's harder to find such friends for highly gifted kids. But it's worth trying.

Highly gifted in the Puget Sound area?

If you have precocious teenagers, and live near Bellevue, Washington, check out Bellevue School District's new high school program for highly gifted kids.

Bellevue School District (BSD) pledges to provide every student with a "top-of-the-line college preparatory education." There is some evidence that children who attempt difficult classes, even if they don't do stunningly well in them, are more likely to attend college.

When I spoke with Ronna Weltman, one of the new program's architects, she told me that a large chunk of Bellevue's high schoolers now take AP classes. All well and good. Except that, as Weltman points out, it's hard to bring in children of all levels into an advanced class without slowing it down. Good teachers are attuned to their classes; they know if people are on the right page or not. In the past, AP classes had also served as a de facto gifted program that allowed the brightest kids to be around kindred spirits. The push to involve all children in AP classes had diluted that aspect.

But Bellevue's superintendent recognized this, and wished to do something for children who finished the gifted "PRISM" programs at the elementary and middle school levels. So Bellevue is rolling out a highly gifted program at Interlake High School for ninth graders next year. Students who test at the highly gifted level will take their core academic classes with other students like them. These classes will follow the International Baccalaureate program. Students will complete the high school curriculum in 11th grade. For 12th grade, they can take seminars, participate in internships (or go to college). All during high school, they'll take the fun stuff (PE, electives, music, etc.) with other students at Interlake.

The University of Washington already has an Early Entrance college program where students can skip several years of high school and start classes at UW as soon as they are ready. But as even gifted education pioneer Julian Stanley took to pointing out toward the end of his life, early college isn't for everyone. The new Bellevue program will give highly gifted students another option.

Weltman wants to make sure parents know that you don't have to live in the Bellevue School District to attend. Anyone who can reasonably make the commute to Interlake is welcome to apply.

Twice Exceptional

Dani D'Spirit is a second grader who reads at the eighth grade level, loves watching CNN and learning about archaeology and history. Last year she took a few EPGY courses online from Stanford. In short, she's your average gifted 8-year-old. Except that Dani suffered a stroke slightly before birth and has never been able to walk or talk. She communicates by pecking on a computer. The Wilmington News-Journal covered her amazing story in late December.

I can't imagine the frustration of trying to communicate your ideas with the world through such awkward circumstances. But gifted kids with disabilities wind up dealing with a lot of frustrations. At least Dani's disabilities are so obvious that they can be recognized and accommodated. I'm always amazed by the stories of gifted, severely dyslexic children who don't learn to read, but are so bright they can hide it and come across as mediocre students. I suspect one of the reasons it's been reported that 18-20% of high school drop-outs test in the gifted range is that many have some sort of disability. The disability masks the giftedness. The kid gets both bored and frustrated. Bored, frustrated kids decide school isn't for them. Dani wound up "dropping out" of first grade because she didn't like it (her parents homeschooled her for the year and used EPGY). Hopefully her teachers and schools will be able to teach to her gifts and accommodate her disabilities better in the future.

The Problem of Achievement (part 349...)

I've been getting emails from various blog readers about this topic, namely, the problem with pushing for gifted education on the basis that "these children will be our future Nobel Prize winning scientists, literary novelists, composers, etc."

It's not a bad argument in the sense that movers and shapers of our society do generally come from people in the top 1-3% of intelligence.

The problem is that many programs that recognize gifted students for their early achievements don't wind up choosing the ones who actually will shape the culture.

I was reminded of this by a story in today's USA Today on the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the paper's All-USA High School Academic Team.

Since the late 1980's, USA Today has been choosing a handful of high school stars to profile every year. I have my own beefs with the selection process (community service, geographic diversity, an athletic side and some sleek marketing will get you on the list faster than pure smarts will). But regardless, these are the folks USA Today says are the best of the best. Now it's looking at the best of the best from twenty years ago.

The paper takes great care to say all these men and women, now in their late thirties, are successful. And by most definitions they are. They're doctors, scientists, writers, moms, moms who are doctors, scientists and writers, etc.

You also haven't heard of almost any of them. The paper surveyed the winners from 1987-1996. One, David Liu, is a Harvard chemistry prof who was recently named to the Popular Science "Brilliant 10" for his research. Another, Brooke Ellison, has continued to garner headlines for her disability advocacy (paralyzed in the seventh grade, Ellison went on to graduate from Harvard. Christopher Reeve directed a cable TV movie about her life, and Ellison and her mom wrote a book about living with disabilities).

Many of the others no doubt have the potential to do great things. But by age 38, we're getting out of the "potential" age and into the years where truly influential people start showing results. The All-USA team is presented as the best of the crop. The twenty years after high school are enough time to start a billion dollar company, or get elected to Congress, write a best-selling novel, compose a symphony that every orchestra in the country is itching to play.

If these All Stars had done that, USA Today would have written about it. And they didn't.

But unlike the Prodigy Puzzle article from the NY Times magazine a few weeks ago, I don't think that means we should throw up our hands and say, well, let's forget programs for gifted kids since we don't know who will do great things with their lives. I view the issues as entirely separate.

As a society, we don't devote a huge chunk of our educational resources to meeting the needs of special education students because we expect them to win Nobel Prizes. We simply view it as inhumane not to develop potential, however much is there. We think society is better off if people find learning to be an enjoyable thing, however much they are able to learn.

Gifted students deserve no less. No matter what they do with their lives.

A Nation Deceived, One Year Later

In late 2004, the Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa released the report "A Nation Deceived" showing how educational research supported accelerating gifted students. Written by experts Nicholas Colangelo, Susan Assouline and Miraca Gross, the report was designed to convince mainstream educators that skipping grades wouldn't cause children to became wounded psychopaths, wouldn't require anyone to stop worshipping that golden calf of "socialization" and would help kids learn better, to boot. (These are my words ... this is a serious academic report...).

A year later, the authors released a follow-up survey, which you can find in PowerPoint form here.

Let's just say the authors are a little tough on themselves. Of the 2500 respondents who were interested in the topic, 50% said the report had no noticeable impact. More said the report was not changing policies and procedures regarding acceleration in a positive direction than said it was. And while a majority said the report had a positive impact on educators in the field of gifted education, only 1% said it had a strong positive impact on educators outside the field.

The problem with this, of course, is that it does little good to have the gifted coordinator who travels between three schools conducting pull-out programs think acceleration is swell. You need the teacher of a gifted third grader to think it's a good solution, and the teacher of the fifth grade class where she'll be moving to, to accept it as well.

Advocates for gifted education are up against a tough wall here. A surveyed parent commented that she presented the findings to her son's district only to hear "Well, I'm sure there is just as much evidence against acceleration if we looked."

So what's to be done? Research alone can't change minds when educators have stuck in their heads the tale of "one child" who skipped a grade years ago and was miserable.

Families who've accelerated a child and had a good experience need to share their stories too. We need to trumpet these tales in the popular media. We need to talk about them at teachers colleges and conventions and portray grade skipping as a cheap way to meet kids' needs while lessening the headaches on teachers (dealing with vast differences in skill levels is tougher than dealing with a little difference in age). These stories will also help parents who wonder what to do for their kids, but fret that acceleration will harm them.

If anyone has some good stories of acceleration, please share!

Update on the Bomkamp Story

Two months ago, I wrote about 5-year-old Alison Bomkamp's saga with the Kenton County Schools in Kentucky. Since Alison had already mastered the kindergarten curriculum, her parents placed her in first grade. But since Kentucky only reimburses districts for half-day kindergarten for 5-year-olds, the school district sent the Bomkamps a bill for $3,000 to cover the difference.

This blog pointed out how ridiculous this was (young Alison is actually saving Kentucky taxpayers money -- she'll take 12 years, not 13 to go through school. If she skips more grades along the way, that's an even bigger savings).

Fortunately, Alison's mom, Shauna, reports that saner heads have prevailed. State Sen. Jack Westwood and State Rep. Jon Draud have introduced bills clarifying that school districts will be reimbursed the full-day school fee for 5-year-olds who place out of half-day kindergarten. The school district has stopped sending their bills to the Bomkamps. And Alison is doing great in first grade. She's in the most advanced math group, has been awarded for excellent behavior and has made lots of friends. "She is truly with her peers," Shauna says -- even if she doesn't turn that magical first grade age of six until March.

The Kentucky Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer have both run stories on this battle.

Gifted Girls and Legos

This story about an all-girls team of 6th graders winning a Lego robot-building contest just made me smile. Read the report from Pocatello, Idaho here.

Legos make great holiday gifts for kids because you can approach them at any level, and they require you to dream up ideas and then build them. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of toys on the hot-lists these days that encourage that sort of creativity. I experienced the joy of shopping in a crowded Toys R Us the other day for my niece and nephews and was struck by how many toys involved licensed cartoon or movie characters. Don't get me wrong, I love Dora the Explorer. But now instead of a kitchen set where you have to dream up the story line, you get a Dora kitchen set, with Dora's world already attached. I'm curious how people reading this blog go about choosing toys for their kids that don't take the imagination part out of play.

Obsessing with Outcomes

Last week's Christian Science Monitor has a fascinating story about an academically rigorous kindergarten program in North Carolina called "Einsteins at Five."

For the most part, the piece is balanced. Still, the author is a bit obsessed with waxing nostalgic for a time when kindergarten was about graham crackers and eating paste. That's disingenuous. All of us know kids who read The Chronicles of Narnia, or the Little House on the Prairie books in kindergarten and were horribly frustrated with the naps and counting lessons their teachers pushed.

But it's this paragraph that got me thinking:

"...while it's clear that young children have a large capacity for learning - research shows they learn faster at 5 than any other age - it's less certain whether all this early erudition has an impact in later years. The French have universal preschool starting at age 3, but Swedish children don't begin academic work until 6, sometimes 7. Studies show that both populations end up doing just as well."

This is the same issue that the Prodigy Puzzle in the New York Times hammered at for 10,000 words a few weeks ago. Yes, it's true that adult outcomes (however they are measured -- I have no idea how he's comparing the Swedish and French) are not necessarily dependent on what kind of enrichment bright children receive. We can't guarantee that a kid in a gifted program, or a kid allowed to skip 2 grades, will win a Nobel Prize while the unenriched child will not. There is a lot of luck (and other things) involved in achieving fame, or breaking new ground later in life.

But so what? You can't tell, looking at a group of babies, which will be professional athletes based on how fast they all crawl at 8 months. But that doesn't mean anyone should grip the ankles of the quick ones to keep them from scooting ahead.

Bright kindergartners want to learn as much as possible. They teach themselves to read better because they want to read better things than the tedious counting books on the kindergarten shelves. Keeping them in kindergarten programs that aren't academic, because of someone's notion of what the unhurried childhood should be, is like gripping a baby's ankles. I'm glad brainy five-year-olds are getting the chance to use their heads. Whether they become Einsteins later in life or not.

Small schools… small gains for gifted kids?

Bill Gates, by all accounts, was a very gifted young man. So it’s unclear why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is choosing to fund school projects that eliminate the classes bright children need most.

The Gates Foundation gave $11 million to the New Schools Project to develop 75 small high schools of no more than 400 students. Since this isn’t a capital building grant, these high schools tend to result from dividing existing schools into 3-4 schools.

By design, these split schools don’t have one school of faster learners, one of medium-speed learners, etc. Each school of 400 is supposed to encompass the whole range of learning speeds. Since that means there usually aren’t enough students to create full honors programs, many classes wind up containing all ability levels. You can read about some North Carolina schools’ experiences with this model here.

As the article starts out, “The days of the brightest high school students taking their own classes could be ending in the interest of helping slower students succeed.”

The consequences of mixed-ability grouping for quick learners are clear. As the article notes:

“If you want easy credit from an honors class, it's good,” said Lauren Hopton, 17, a senior at Southeast Raleigh High School. “But if you want a challenge, it’s not.”

Gifted children learn best in classes tailored to their speed of learning. It’s naïve to think even a very skilled teacher won’t slow down the class pace when children who are not capable of learning as quickly are added to the mix. In fact, skilled teachers may be more likely to slow down, as they are most aware of every member of the class’s progress.

Consequently, gifted children wind up with extra time on their hands as they wait for their classmates to catch up. Some enterprising teachers try to accommodate their gifted kids’ extra time by using them as teacher’s assistants.

This is exactly what’s happened in these new small schools. From the article: “Another benefit, Southeast Raleigh High Principal Beulah Wright said, is that the usual honors students are put in leadership positions as they help their classmates learn the harder material. ‘You learn more when you're teaching it yourself,’ Wright said.”

This is just not true. If both students are relatively unfamiliar with the material, the quicker kid may learn a bit more by teaching it to the slower one. But there’s only so many times a gifted kid needs to see the difference between “its” and “it’s” before she knows it. Explaining it three more times to other students won’t help her. It will bore her.

The saddest thing about these mixed-ability classes, though, is that for all the talk of raising the floor, de-tracking doesn’t help slower learners either. A major review of 23 ability grouping studies by James Kulik of the University of Michigan found that grouping students by ability in subject matter classes helps slower learners learn more. In Success for All reading program groupings, for instance, low-achieving fourth graders gained as much as two-thirds of an academic year over control groups in mixed ability classes.

If the Gates Foundation wants to fund small schools, how about funding schools that are grouped by ability? That will help slower and quicker learners a lot more.

Math vs. Verbal prodigies

The Siemens Westinghouse competition just announced its 2005-2006 math, science and technology winners, and the projects are stunning as always. You can read about them here.

One of the winners is a young man named Michael Viscardi, a mathematically gifted student who is also homeschooled. The press release says:

“Michael Viscardi’s project, entitled On the Solution of the Dirichlet Problem with Rational Boundary Data, develops exciting new approaches to a mathematical problem first formulated in the 19th century by the French mathematician, Lejeune Dirichlet. His research, in an area of mathematics called complex analysis, shows solutions to the Dirichlet problem which are, in many important cases, what mathematicians call ‘rational functions.’ Elegant, simple and useful, ‘rational functions’ are particularly amenable to computer implementation. …

"‘Mr. Viscardi dazzled us with his creative use of the mathematical language,’ said judge, Dr. Steven Krantz, Professor of Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. ‘His research is profound, substantial and complete, with potentially important practical applications ….’”

The phrase “creative use of the mathematical language” stuck with me.

You see, while mathematical prodigies making creative use of the language are rare, language prodigies are even more rare. Plenty of gifted kids learn to read young. But almost no new, widely available literature is created by people under age 20. I was struck by Davidson Fellow Laureate Heidi Kaloustian’s comment in The Prodigy Puzzle (NY Times magazine) on whether she hoped to publish her work:

“I wouldn’t dream of trying” she said. “I have so much more to learn.”

I can think of a few practical reasons for this dearth.

New research in science and math often happens within the academic world. Sure, universities have their politics, but a proof is a proof, a result is a result. A real world implication is great, but not absolutely required.

Literature, on the other hand, is a commercial business. Books are published not just because they are good, but because acquiring editors could see a market and thought the author had a good “platform.”

Second, more people view themselves as qualified to produce literature than new mathematical or scientific findings. Few people would send in an article to a peer-reviewed science journal without being a working scientist in the field. But scores of folks are typing away on what they believe to be the next great American novel, even if they’ve never published a thing in their lives. This volume means the publishing industry has set up a more intimidating process of agents as gatekeepers. A gifted child is unlikely to have the connections to get an agent to read a manuscript, and a manuscript sent unsolicited to a publisher will not be read.

But there’s a matter of skill, too. Literature deals with the scope of human experience, and even a very imaginative gifted child will have trouble writing about the disappointments and wisdom that come with age. Stories by children often feature the most dramatic of life events – deaths, usually. It is the one thing they know to be momentous enough to justify a story. But this lends a melodramatic tone to student writing. Audiences prefer true tension to deaths.

I also think young children with writing talent aren’t nurtured the way mathematicians are. Sure, few gifted kids are nurtured. But on the margins, we recognize math to be a “tough” field, and so a child with talent there is more likely to be recognized as precocious and sent to higher levels. What are higher levels of writing? Because we believe math and science are “tougher,” winners of those contests get more press. We believe that anyone can write. So young writers are simply encouraged to be creative.

To make a living as a writer, though, that creativity needs to be honed and trained. Given how infrequently it is, and the commercial savvy a young writer would need to navigate the publishing world, it’s no wonder you read of so few literature prodigies.

Prodigy Puzzle, redux.

The NY Times magazine printed a number of letters on the Prodigy Puzzle (the cover story on "The Rise of The Gifted Child Industry") in their Dec. 4 issue. See the letters here.

Gender and Giftedness

Charles Murray wades into the waters Harvard president Larry Summers stirred last spring with a fascinating piece on the American Enterprise Institute’s website called Where are the Female Einsteins?

His thesis: For evolutionary reasons, men’s brains developed neurological pathways that elevate their abstract spatial reasoning capacities, relative to women. Consequently, men are more represented on the extreme ends of the spectrum in abstract fields. Math is abstract, hence there are more eminent male mathematicians. Musical composition is more abstract, hence there are more imminent male composers. Literature, on the other hand, is less abstract, and so even in times much more patriarchal than our own, women writers have been decently represented among important authors of the day.

He also hints at social reasons for the lack of women at the top of many fields, of course. As he says, “To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be. My point is not that women must choose between a career and children, but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.”

I like much of Murray’s writing. It’s usually thought-provoking. But this is rather a dreary explanation. For starters, writing fiction is quite abstract. You have to imagine a world that doesn’t exist; why this involves such different abilities than imagining a sonata that doesn’t exist isn’t clear. And second, Murray is basically saying that extremely accomplished men must, by definition, be lousy fathers.

But there’s another way of looking at gifted girls’ choices that doesn’t even go into the abstraction or motherhood bit.

Gifted girls are finally pretty much free these days, encouraged even, to go into mathematical and scientific fields if they so desire. And they are. But the funny thing is, they’re going into “biophysics” over physics, biostatistics over statistics, etc.

Gifted girls are more likely to be talented in many areas than “spiky” in one. They also tend to rank “helping people” and being around other people as high on their priority lists. As these girls become women, they seek careers that use all their gifts. Since the cultural image we have of an abstract mathematician is a man sitting by himself in a turret dreaming up stuff that is of no use to humanity, it’s no wonder that highly gifted girls prefer to choose other jobs. Biophysics sounds like it’s the human side of physics, and may involve more than just mathematical talent.

This is a personal interest of mine… I scored an 800 on the SAT math section in 8th grade, and thought maybe I should be a mathematician. But it later occurred to me that while I liked math, I always felt if I chose that as a career I’d be missing out on something. I preferred writing – especially since it allowed me to dabble in many interests (writing about science, medicine, engineering and math is thrilling to me). That has little to do with my spatial reasoning abilities or any plans for future children. I just like the varied life.

Parental chit-chat, and the PG kid

Kim Moldofsky, mom of two gifted children, sent me a link to an essay she has in Chicago Parent this week on Giving Up on Public Education.

Moldofsky highlights a side benefit she's found by sending her children to a school for the gifted: she now has fellow "refugee" parents to chit-chat with. Why is this important? Turns out, just as some gifted kids feel isolated in their regular schools, their parents can, too.

Talking about your kid, and how proud you are of her, comes with the territory of being a parent. But there's a quid pro quo. One dad waiting to pick his kid up from Girl Scouts can talk about his daughter's great grade in English, then the mom next to him can say what a great goal her daughter scored in soccer over the weekend. No one wants to hear that the next mom's daughter is taking college literature classes and has just translated a series of Italian sonnets into English.

It puts parents of gifted kids in a bind. You want to praise your kid, but our culture doesn't like praising people's intellectual gifts, particularly when they achieve things without difficulty at times.

At a school for the gifted, on the other hand, parents may nod and laugh when you say, throwing up your hands, that you had to enforce lights out last night when your daughter insisted on reading one more chapter in her math book. They won't think you're bragging -- they'll think you're parenting.

No wonder Moldofsky quotes another mom saying "This conversation feels like a hug!"

More Standardized Testing Troubles

Under No Child Left Behind, states are supposed to test their students every year, and show "adequate yearly progress." NCLB is federal, but in a nod to the states, the federal department of education said states could use their own tests. Since 100% of students are supposed to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014, it doesn't take a genius to see the temptation states face.

Why not make a really easy test? One that doesn't require much heavy lifting to get 100% of students proficient in the next decade?

This appears to be exactly what most states are doing.

This article from the NY Times notes that 87% of Tennessee's 8th graders were "proficient" on Tennessee's math tests. Alas, only 21% of Tennessee's 8th graders were "proficient" on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, the results of which were released last month.

Other states show similar gaps. In Mississippi, 89% of 4th graders were proficient in reading on the state tests; only 18% were proficient on national tests.

Of course, it's difficult to say what the right level of difficulty should be on a test (though having looked at NAEP questions, I'm not inclined to say that's a particularly difficult test either, which means Tennessee and Mississippi are probably merely asking students to count and identify letters).

That said, states do their citizens no favors by lowering the bar. South Carolina isn't -- that state's test produces similar (lowish) results to the NAEP. Making progress is difficult. But if SC achieves anywhere near 100% proficiency on that test by 2014, you will know something exciting has happened there. We'll be seeing every business in the country trying to relocate to Charleston twenty years from now.

Why be Well-Rounded?

The Rhodes Trust recently announced the 32 American winners of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. This award pays for American students to pursue post-graduate studies at Oxford University in the UK.

Biographies of the winners are listed here (follow link to press release). All these young people seem highly accomplished, or at least have a lot of potential. But one thing that struck me, reading the bios, is that the Rhodes Trust is very into the idea of well-rounded students. Think a physicist who plans to try out for the US Olympic ski team, a mathematician who plays volleyball… On one hand, this is good – it shows that brainy people can be brawny, or have wide interests.

On the other… there’s a lot of marketing that goes into marking oneself as Rhodes material, and I’m sure many of these winners have been coached to show some other, resume-worthy activity that the Rhodes committee can seize on. The pursuit of well-roundedness can become pretty zealous at times. What’s wrong with choosing the kid who’s published the most exciting mathematical papers during his undergraduate career, even if he doesn’t play squash or tutor underprivileged youth?

The truth is, we live in an anti-intellectual culture, and even the Rhodes scholarship, given to the brainy, is influenced by this. In an anti-intellectual culture, few groups are willing to choose winners based on intellectual or academic merits alone. Look at lists of USA Today’s top college students, for instance. The winners always have a lot of community service, side interests, and are chosen for geographic and ethnic diversity in a way the lists of the top high school basketball players never are. (The Rhodes Trust also guarantees geographic diversity by choosing candidates from different regions).

People can certainly choose recipients of scholarships as they wish. But there’s a problem with the pursuit of well-roundedness. I think of it as the Miss America problem. To be crowned Miss America, you have to compete in multiple areas. You are supposed to look decent, have a performing arts talent, have the ability to speak in front of groups, and have a significant community service interest.

Not surprisingly, it is very rare to find anyone who excels in all these areas and hasn’t gone professional (as a model, as a singer or dancer, etc.). So you get mediocre talent performances, forced answers to the questions on the TV program, and candidates who aren’t all that attractive, to boot. No wonder TV ratings dropped, vs., say, Miss USA, which is solely a looks-based contest. In other words, their candidates aren't well-rounded.

Something for the Rhodes people to keep in mind.

"The Prodigy Puzzle" puzzles me...

Sunday's New York Times magazine featured a cover story on The Prodigy Puzzle or "Can Genius Really Be Cultivated? The Rise of the Gifted-Child Industry." (Requires registration).

The piece was thought-provoking and, while quite long, eventually made a point we've discussed here. Intellectual potential, and even early prodigious works, do not guarantee that a child will grow up to advance human knowledge or shape the culture. You need more than IQ. You need discipline, creativity, endurance. And luck.

But calling what's going on in gifted education these days an "industry" is pushing it. A handful of groups give scholarships, and attempt to make rock stars for a few days out of kids whose works place them at the national or international vanguard of achievement. These children then return to schools where principals will throw pep rallies because the football team won a few games against local competition. I wish gifted education advocates had enough clout in the culture to create an "industry."

Increasing College Enrollment -- good or bad?

This is a follow-up to my post last week about Mary Catherine Swanson's Ed Week article on saving the middle quartiles of students. Her AVID program, I noted, had helped many bright but underachieving students go to college. Interestingly enough, the major education news this week is about kids going to college, then not graduating (see the AP story, "Focus On Getting Students Into College Shifts to Getting Them Out").

A recent study found that only 54% of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 (my cohort) had a degree 6 years later. This is a problem because higher education has a huge degree effect in terms of boosted job opportunities and income. Quitting a 4-year college after 2 years is not the same as getting a two-year associates degree. Indeed, if you borrow money to attend the 4-year school, you might wind up worse off.

Former Princeton president William Bowen has announced he'll be studying this reality, which is why the subject made headlines. He points out that at comparably prestigious state schools such as the University of Minnesota and Penn State, graduation rates vary widely. At Penn State, about 80% of students graduate in 6 years; at U-Minn it's about half.

Clearly, colleges have some effect on the matter. They can make signing up for necessary classes easier. They can encourage advisors to be more pro-active about pushing students to fulfill requirements. They can boost financial aid so students don't drop out for monetary reasons.

But they shouldn't dumb down their classes and make it easier to earn a degree. Already there's been a disturbing trend toward grade inflation and remedial classes at universities. More of the same will just dilute the value of a 4-year degree. Education experts often say that a college graduate earns $1 million more over her life than a non-graduate, but the premium is falling as more people pour into college. Unfortunately, if this continues, people will spend many years and much money chasing degrees they might not get and that could be devalued anyway.

So what's to be done? First, education leaders need to stop pushing 4-year degrees as a universal solution when most students lack the foundation. A full 66.7% of 2004 high school graduates enrolled in college that year, but one 2002 study found only 34% of high school students were "prepared" for college. So no wonder only 54% graduate. 34% is just about 54% of 66.7%...

More students should certainly be challenged to build that foundation. I've often complained about a 10th grade English class I took where all that was expected of students was the ability to read from a book outloud and answer trivia questions. This was a class for college-bound students. No wonder reality often hurts when it hits in college classes requiring in-depth analysis of literature, papers advancing new theses, etc.

But higher standards is a long-term solution. In the interim, two-year colleges need to promote themselves better. They are not about "settling" -- these degrees vastly boost job prospects and income levels. Local businesses should apprentice high school students and ease them through 1-2 years of post graduation training and into work. Schools should push vocational education more. Some very skilled trades require college degrees, but others don't. As anyone who's called a plumber knows, they make a lot more money than your average college drop-out.

Making "Pull-Out" Fair

I was interested to read a short note about Wake County (NC)'s efforts to tell parents about their magnet schools (a short item from a local TV news station).

I attended two magnet schools in this county, which includes Raleigh, from 1st to 6th grade (Washington Elementary and Ligon Middle). The more I've learned about how different educational systems work -- including having attended worse ones myself later on-- the smarter this system's moves seem.

First, Wake County put many of their magnet programs in schools located in not-so-nice areas of the city. Both my elementary school and middle school were across from housing projects. This was an easy way to desegregate schools -- put the good programs in schools that would have been segregated and boom! Middle class parents are willing to bus their children for an hour each way.

Second, both my elementary school and the middle school I attended for 6th grade had lots of "electives" for everyone. They also had gifted & talented programs. Instead of doing "pull-outs" though, for gifted kids, everyone went to fun electives for a few hours. Gifted kids could choose certain ones that were designed to fill that requirement, but anyone could take things like art, music, dance, sports, science & tech electives, etc. One of the things that bugs me so much about pull-out programs is that the classes tend to be outside core academic subjects (let's look at the story of Robin Hood!) and cover fun stuff that all kids would like to learn about. Consequently, they give gifted ed a bad name. Why can't all kids learn about Robin Hood, after all? And they don't give gifted kids what they really need, which is advanced academic work that challenges them to the extent of their abilities.

The way Washington and Ligon handled this, though, takes away the problem of giving gifted kids fun stuff and not other kids. Washington did not track so much for core academic subjects (outside math) but Ligon did. Sixth graders were split into four teams, based on academic performance, and then these four teams were subdivided even more, with the "apples" on the "Chell" team having all academic classes together, for instance. You took electives, though, with people throughout the school (tap, choir, writing and reading mystery stories). So the "pull-outs" were non-tracked, and academics were. Talk about a smarter way of doing things.

The Forgotten Middle

Does making the case for challenging all students require making enemies of gifted ones?

That seems to be the opinion of Mary Catherine Swanson, creator of the Advancement Via Individual Determination system, which helps underachieving students prepare for college. She touts excellent results for this challenge-and-support method; 95% of students in her program go to college, vs. about a third for similar students not in the program. Her website is avidonline.org. She also has a commentary in the 11/2 issue of Education Week (www.edweek.org, requires subscription) called "It's Time to Focus on the Forgotten Middle."

Her calls for school reform are common sense: our economy needs a lot more skilled workers in the future. Our schools, though, do not adequately prepare the middle quartiles of students for college. To do that, schools need to invest in individual instruction and challenge all students to the extent of their abilities. Here, here!

But then we get this salvo:

"Today, our school policies focus on the top and bottom quartiles to the exclusion of the huge middle. Federal programs are aimed at either gifted and talented students or special-needs and at-risk kids. The two ends of the spectrum understandably have demanding and costly needs, but they have gotten most of the attention and money."

Say what? The 2002 federal education budget allotted only $11 million for gifted programs, and these funds are almost entirely for research and demonstration projects, not classroom instruction. Programs for gifted students are either funded at the state or local level. But they're not exactly getting "most of the attention and money." America spends 143 times more on special education than gifted education. The fifty states, Washington D.C. and the federal government spent roughly $50 billion on special education in 1999-2000.

But for a progressive educator, saying the hard truth -- that special education eats up the funds that might otherwise have been available to provide individual support and challenge to children in the middle quartiles -- is very difficult. So reform efforts rope in gifted education as an equal offender -- as though the tiny fraction of a penny of the educational dollar spent on high achievers is as powerful as the 21 cents on the dollar spent for special ed.

Swanson is right that both ends of the spectrum have demanding needs. She's wrong in thinking this country does much about the top.

What to tell kids about gifted testing?

An interesting question came up from a mom the other day. If you think your child is gifted, having him/her tested is usually one of the first steps toward figuring out an appropriate educational plan. But few gifted children are satisfied to sit through a test, then be told "yes, you're bright." How bright? What did the numbers say? What sections did I do best on? Did I get any questions wrong? Do other kids have scores like that? Curious kids want to know. They can go to the library or Google and read up on IQ like anyone else -- probably faster than anyone else.

So this is a question for parents who've been through that. What did you tell your child about the tests they took for ID'ing them as gifted? How did you answer their questions?

Ambition

Time magazine has a cover story this week on Ambition, why some people succeed and others don’t, and whether ambition can be taught. There’s a sidebar on how parents and schools can help kids learn ambition (sorry if this only allows subscribers to view. Some of Time content is premium).

I’m of the opinion that schools can do a lot more to teach ambition. Namely, they shouldn’t make work so easy for gifted kids. A lot of gifted kids coast through school, then arrive at adulthood and realize that the rules change. Grade 6 doesn’t necessarily follow Grade 5. Some people take risks and seek out opportunities that ignite rocket boosters under their careers. Others get stuck in the truth that there’s no crystal-clear path to, say, tenure, or getting big breaks in an artistic career, or starting your own business, or leaping out of middle management and into the top ranks. These people wind up back in graduate school in perpetuity to recapture the certainty they miss, or they switch careers or generally flounder. Gifted kids need to learn to stretch themselves. They need to learn to find questions that aren’t posed at the end of chapters, and then seek out the answers when there’s no certain right one. They need to try stuff so tough they risk failing. You can’t do that if your self-esteem is based solely on a “gifted” label -- with gifted kids being defined as those who never fail in their endeavors. Labels are worth nothing.

Time gropes toward that point but then, alas, the magazine misses the mark completely. Check out this stunner:

“Some experts say our education system, with its strong emphasis on testing and rigid separation of students into different levels of ability, also bears blame for the disappearance of drive in some kids. "These programs shut down the motivation of all kids who aren't considered gifted and talented. [They] destroy their confidence," says Jeff Howard, a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, a Boston-area organization that works with teachers and parents in school districts around the country to help improve children's academic performance.”

Oh dear. It’s because of ability grouping that children flounder? Hardly. It’s the absence of *enough* meaningful ability grouping -- with all children challenged to the extent of their abilities -- that causes the top students to flounder after school to start with!

Talent Development

As many readers of this blog know, Jan & Bob Davidson (with whom I co-wrote Genius Denied) are helping to open a new public school at the University of Reno called The Davidson Academy.

It has been getting a fair amount of press for being the first public school for profoundly gifted kids in this country. The school opens next year.

I would not be shocked to find families moving to Nevada to enroll their children. There are just not that many schools that aim to develop the talents of children with IQs of 160+. I've been thinking about this in the context of general talent development -- there are not that many schools or programs aimed at developing any kid's profound talents. If your kid is a profoundly talented musician, for instance, you'll probably need to live near a big city or a university with a great orchestra. Often, you hear of people moving to NYC for Juilliard.

Then these parents become known as "pushy." I've always thought this is unfair. Pushiness is necessary for some fields, because it's not an option to wait until the child is older or pursues such talents as an adult. I was recently reading about the English long bow, used in the middle ages against England's rival, France. British boys were trained since childhood on how to stretch the long bow, so their chest muscles grew in a way that enabled mastery. French children didn't develop those muscles, so even when the French got their hands on these weapons, they couldn't use them to full effect.

Likewise, almost no professional orchestral musicians picked up an instrument for the first time as an adult, or even late in their teens. Our brains develop in ways where pathways are forged early. If you do not learn the skills associated with many talents when you are young enough for them to become second nature, you will never develop the talent as you might.

Yet our culture is full of stories of pushy parents who forced a child to labor at a certain skill or talent when he really wanted to (fill in the blank) instead. We don't tell stories of the kid who would have been a great musician, but never became a professional musician, because his parents didn't want to push.

What Percent Gifted?

USA Today has a a feature piece on its website about Dana Kelly, one of the paper's 2005 All-USA Teacher Team members.

Kelly teaches gifted education in what sounds like a very fun program at Southwest Elementary in Lakeland, Florida. This post is not about that program's merits, though.

What stuck out for me in the piece is that 8% of the school's population participates in the gifted program. This is twice the level at other schools, Kelly explains, but she also chooses high-achievers who don't meet the "gifted" qualifications the district sets out.

It's a noble thought. There's just one catch. When the percentage of students participating in a school or district's gifted program starts creeping up, and the program consists of lots of fun extra-curriculars in addition to (or, alas, often in place of) advanced academic work, it starts becoming a prize.

Then, you have to justify keeping that prize from other kids. Why not the top 10%? Why not the top 20%? At some well-to-do districts, I've seen percentages as high as 25% in the gifted programs -- which at that level becomes more of a way of mollifying parents than meeting kids' needs.

But it's not like 4%, as this district chose, is inherently good, either. The old 130 IQ standard set the level at roughly 1% of the population. Children with IQs north of 130 are often too intellectually advanced to fit in around the margins of a grade level class (something children only one standard deviation above the norm can do with a good teacher). Of course, a child with a 130 IQ, and a child with a 160 IQ have very different needs.

So what is the right level for the gifted program? I can't necessarily answer that (though I usually do say top 1-2%). I can point out other ways of dealing with the problem.

One is to make sure the gifted program is no more "fun" than the classes other kids experience. Gifted kids need advanced academic work in all fields, not the pull-outs that have them learning about the pyramids and pretending to be Sherlock Holmes and what have you. There is no reason other kids can't do the activities in most pull-outs.

Second, schools can't start treating gifted education as a prize doled out to high achievers. Getting an A on a test is great-- but if you had to work hard to get that A, you might be in the right class already. Gifted kids get A's without trying in grade level classes. Or they get lousy grades because they're so bored they won't dignify the work by doing it. Schools need to treat gifted education as an intervention for students who need it. High achievement alone doesn't indicate that.

To ward off the prize mentality, schools could even call the program something other than gifted education. Maybe the "double homework" class ... :)