Amazing Girls

The New York Times had a rather odd feature piece on the cover this Sunday on "Amazing Girls" and their struggles to stand out and get into top schools. Students around the country are hearing from the elite colleges this week, which is always a time when joy comes in fat envelopes and tragedy in thin. I remember the anticipation I felt about all of this exactly 10 years ago this week. I had gone to Sweet Briar, Virginia for the weekend for a conference on women in science. I came back to my dorm to find some notes indicating packages in my mailbox. A good sign. Rejection letters would have fit in the mailboxes easily. Acceptance letters had to be held for later pick-up.

For the Amazing Girls feature, Sara Rimer, a New York Times reporter who often writes about education and gender issues, followed a group of high-achieving girls at Newton North High School just outside Boston as they waited for similar letters. Newton North is one of the nation's most affluent high schools, and so the article tries to document the angst of America's upper class teenagers who have been groomed for elite colleges since birth. They are expected to take multiple AP classes, to ace their SATs, to be on student council and play varsity sports. The article describes these high-achieving girls working until 4am on physics lab reports, at the same time that the town's BoBo sensibilities (that's Bourgeois Bohemians, the title of a David Brooks book) draws yoga studios and Whole Foods stores that tell you to relax and be yourself. The girls have grown up always hearing they can do everything boys can. But now more girls than boys apply to elite colleges. That means that it's even harder for them to get in, since most elite schools strive for gender balance. So there's the pressure to do that, as well as the standard adolescent girl pressure to be attractive, thin and happy. One mother said "you just hope your child doesn't have anorexia of the soul."

Well. I am sure life is competitive for the girls of Newton North. But I can't help thinking that articles like this reinforce the idea among America's elite (the folks who read the New York Times religiously) that this is what all schooling and teen culture is like. Esther, the lead character, has a literature class in which the teacher asks what Virgil's Aeneid teaches us about destiny and individual happiness. She's read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and debated what it means to be condemned to freedom. As I've written on this blog before, I had to move three hours away from home to go to boarding school in order to receive an education that valued asking questions like this. At my local school -- in a middle class town featuring a major research university -- I spent weeks in an honors English class listening to my classmates read A Separate Peace out loud, paragraph by tortuous paragraph. We were tested over what happened on p. 86. Not about the themes of friendship, betrayal, etc. If any thing approaching a significant number of American high schools suffered from the angst of Newton North -- of too many people applying for elite colleges and taking AP classes that had them working until 4am -- we would be in a much better position for future competitiveness. And the vast majority of gifted kids -- girls and boys -- would be happier.

But most schools aren't like that. Given that only 25% of high school seniors can solve a simple algebra problem (as we talked about on the TIMSS thread a few weeks ago), the Newton North experience is as rare as getting a fat envelope from Princeton is. The problem for gifted education is then that America's most affluent parents do not see the problem first hand. And so these politically well-connected people become inclined to believe that gifted kids can fend for themselves, that there's too much homework as it is, that schools demand too much, that kids need more non-academic time, etc. For most gifted kids, nothing could be farther from the truth.

That's not to say that the amazing girls of Newton North aren't appealing characters. Teen angst always dredges up certain emotions, and reading about Esther's rejection from Williams, her top choice, stings a bit. But then she got into Smith, so the story ends on a happy note. I just wish articles like this came with a disclaimer noting that Barbie still way outsells Baby Einstein in this country. And that most high schools send, at most, a handful of people to colleges like Williams and Smith.

EdWeek conversation with Karen Isaacson and Tamara Fisher

Education Week has a fascinating transcript from an online chat with Karen Isaacson and Tamara Fisher, co-authors of Intelligent Life in the Classroom, posted on their website. The chat covers all sorts of topics, but I found a few especially noteworthy.

For instance, the authors suggest having kids advocate for themselves. "I've found that the child speaking up and asking for harder spelling words (for example) is much more powerful than me or a parent doing it," says Fisher. "And over time, the more kids who speak up to the teachers about a need for more challenging curriculum, the more likely the teacher begins to realize that it's a real need (rather than it being just the GT specialist or parent bugging them yet again... although I've found most teachers don't feel that way and are generally open to it.) I tell my kids that if they are going to self-advocate, they need to follow the 3 P's: 1) Be polite (don't say "this is boring." 2) Do it in private (not in front of the rest of the class.) And 3) Provide proof (that they've actually mastered the content.) For some kids it is a good idea to role-play the process ahead of time. Usually the kids meet with success (i.e. a receptive teacher and accommodations)."

Since we've been talking about self-reliance on this board, that strikes me as very good advice.

The authors also suggest asking absent-minded professor type kids what strategies they think will work best for getting them more organized about school work, getting places on time, etc. This at least gets them thinking, and changes the model from combative to trying to solve a problem together. They note that one GT program is called "Extended Studies" instead of that tough word "gifted" -- and that removes some of the stigma. Then they offer this list of gifted links though, ahem, Gifted Exchange is not among them. But we'll forgive that, since overall, this chat was a very enlightening overview of the issues in gifted education.

A Head for Numbers

I wrote a short profile in April's Wired magazine on Anarghya Vardhana, one of the 2006 Davidson Fellows (page 40 - with a rather fun photo. Wired likes to be edgy). The piece mentions the prize money available to gifted young people like Anarghya through the Davidson Fellowship program. She won $10,000 to help with college, and others have won $25,000 and $50,000 scholarships. All application materials for the 2007 contest must be received by the Davidson Institute by March 30th, so if you sent in a preliminary interest form, get over to Fed Ex ASAP!

Gifted programs and desegregation

Gifted programs and desegregation efforts often become intertwined. Some people think gifted programs are a way to avoid desegregation -- that they involve separating out white students from other kids. That's an erroneous idea, since gifted kids come in all colors. But sometimes the two issues become involved for other reasons. A number of cities, after being ordered to desegregate their schools, chose to create magnet schools offering gifted programs. The more strategic of these districts located their gifted programs in historically black schools that white parents might have been wary of enrolling their children in otherwise. Parents of highly gifted kids are usually willing to send their kids anywhere that might work, and when the schools offer enough other benefits besides gifted programs, these school districts have integrated their schools fairly seamlessly. For instance, my elementary school in Raleigh, NC was located in a historically black school. I rode the bus for an hour every morning. In addition to gifted programs, the school offered lots of dance, drama and music, and consequently middle-class parents of "average" kids also put their students on the bus. A good enough magnet program can actually draw kids back into the public school system. DuPont Manual in Louisville, for instance, offers dozens of AP classes, and its adjacent performing arts academy offers a best-in-nation class orchestra. The school draws kids from 32 middle schools into its 9th grade. A good number of those schools are private.

But other districts have been less successful in this regard. The Baton-Rouge, LA school system had tried putting its gifted programs in inner-city schools as part of a desegregation effort. But it was less successful in convincing middle-class, white parents to give the public schools a whirl. You can read about the course of events here. The district is now considering opening more gifted programs at neighborhood schools.

I am not sure why, exactly, the gifted-program-in-inner-city-school tactic works for some districts and not for others. A few things certainly help. For instance, when magnet schools work, it's because the whole school is good -- not just the gifted program. The school also has to be reasonably integrated -- no one likes it if the gifted program is predominantly white and the rest of the school has no white students. It looks bad. I think the change has to be managed at a time of a broader shake-up in the schools -- for instance, a merger of two districts. Then people approach their new schools with less of the baggage that they might have had before. I'm curious if any parents reading this blog have experience with a district that tried to use gifted education as a tool to help achieve desegregation compliance.

And -- a side note, if you post, you just might be the 30,000th visitor since March 29th last year! I'm thrilled that we're going to cross 30,000 views in a year. That's 2500 a month. If the average visitor stops by 4-6 times per month (roughly, I'm guessing), that means we have about 400-600 regular readers. Which is wonderful. I'll see if I can hunt down some Gifted Exchange stats for the next post.

Intel Announces Talent Search Winners

The annual Intel Science Talent Search is always a great showcase of young researchers. The awards were announced last week, and you can read about them here.

The kids are amazing. A few interesting tidbits. First, former Harvard President Larry Summers will be pleased to learn that the top 40 places were occupied by an equal number of boys and girls. The finalists were quite geographically diverse -- for instance, there were kids from North Dakota and Oklahoma.

Of course, the bulk came from high-income, highly-competitive regions like suburban New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island. These regions start with certain advantages -- such as having a concentration of universities and college-educated parents. But after years of following science research competitions such as Intel and the Davidson Fellowships, I've developed a few thoughts on how schools choose to make themselves and their students competitive in national competitions. There are a few steps almost any reasonably competent school could follow.

First, let kids get actual lab experience as part of their school curriculum. Five day a week classes with bells ringing every 50 minutes are not good for this sort of thing. Block schedules are good for concentration in general, and they're particularly crucial in the sciences.

Second, take your AP program seriously. Invest in hiring teachers or training ones you have to become AP instructors. Then make it "normal" for the brightest kids to take AP Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Calculus, preferably by the end of their junior years of high school. Hopefully the National Math and Science Initiative (see the post below) will start making such training more lucrative for good teachers.

Third, partner with a local university or commercial research lab. Obviously, some schools have a natural advantage here; if a huge chunk of parents work at a local lab, then it will be easy to establish ties. But most metropolitan areas have at least one advanced-degree granting institution in their midst. I am continually amazed how few schools and universities take advantage of that fact. My first high school was located all of 2 miles from Notre Dame, which is a major research university. It could have been on the other side of the moon for all anyone cared to bring the two together. Bring in professors and researchers to talk about their work, and bring kids over for a field trip to check out the labs.

Then, fourth (and this is key) -- help bright, ambitious high school juniors who express interest in this sort of thing match up with research mentors for the summer between their junior and senior years. The research mentors will help the kids figure out which problems are best to investigate (ie, most likely to offer some results during the summer and be deemed "interesting" to the outside world). Few high school kids -- even winners of Intel and other competitions -- know enough about the scope of research that's been done in a field to know which little area they should investigate. Professors do. So make no mistake. This method is how most of them get the titles of their projects. Why shouldn't they? This is how grad students often come up with their thesis topics, too.

Schools can act as matchmakers between researchers who want to mentor kids (and maybe need free help in the lab) and kids who'd like to take a shot at the big research competitions. Schools with block schedules could continue sending their young researchers over to universities or commercial labs during the kids' senior years.

With Intel, Davidson, and other competitions, there are always a few kids who spent weeks knocking on researchers' doors on their own, asking to be allowed to work in the labs, doing the work only on Saturdays and afternoons because their own schools couldn't care less. We should be doubly amazed by the results these young science talents come up with. (And we should be wary of their schools' willingness to then tout these students as examples of how good the schools are!)

But most winners have help from schools or communities or parents who facilitate these big projects. There's nothing wrong with that. What is valued in a community usually gets done, and success breeds success. When I did MathCounts in middle school, one particular school had won Indiana pretty much every year for the previous decade. Not surprisingly, by the 10th win, almost all the brightest students in the school were taking tests to see who would make the team, the coach was recruiting kids in elementary school, practices were scheduled regularly and taken seriously, and the kids showed up confident that there would not be a single question on the exam that they wouldn't be familiar with. No wonder they won!

Schools can do the same thing to produce Intel winners. Too bad most don't care enough to do so.

Can you boost your kid's IQ?

The popular press likes to promote the idea of the pushy, hovering parent doing everything possible to get a child into Harvard from birth -- see all the talk of Hothouse Kids and the like over the past year. This is a misleading stereotype; most parents are focused on simply getting through the day without major crises, and have not developed a philosophy on why Baby Einstein is better than Barbie. But there is a certain subset that apparently believes, rather egotistically, that their children's later success rides on their early parenting decisions.

For instance, I recently came across a book, by neurologist David Perlmutter, called "Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten." Dr. Perlmutter says that 30 IQ points are at stake between birth and kindergarten, and he has the activities you should do with your kids to maximize their allotment. Frankly, I'm not sure why birth is the beginning point, except that it's hard to interest a fetus in flashcards. An industry of womb music has sprung up for parents looking to get a jump start on all this after putting two and two together. You see, babies remember music they hear after 20 weeks gestation, according to this article, and countless elementary school science fair projects have shown that plants grow better when exposed to classical music. So in theory, playing Mozart to a child, in utero, should make him smarter later. Except there's absolutely no evidence of this. Research is even showing that breast-feeding, long thought to increase IQ, actually doesn't.

That's not to say that parents have no effect on a child's intelligence beyond their genes. Studies on adoption have shown that while adopted children with lower IQs don't match their new families' IQ scores, they do get a major boost. This boost is enough to take children from the borderline mental retardation level to just a bit on the lower side of normal. This has a huge payoff in terms of what kinds of jobs and what kind of life the child will be able to manage later on.

But the evidence is not so clear on what well-educated parents can do to raise the IQ scores of their already well-loved, well-stimulated children. Nor is it clear that a mildly higher IQ score -- beyond a certain level -- will do much to enhance a child's success later in life. As the "Praise" post a few weeks ago discussed, there's much to be said for self-reliance. For a child to develop that, a parent has to do one of the hardest things possible in our competitive culture -- step back and let the little one succeed or fail on his own.

It's human nature to want to believe that things are within our power that aren't. But it doesn't help gifted kids to have society believe that parents just hothoused them from conception to age five. As one mom told us in Genius Denied, she saw a father out jogging with his son, shouting multiplication tables back and forth to be sure the boy learned them. "Sam just learned them," this mom says of her own kid. "I didn't have to do a thing." Gifted children are a gift, often a complicated one, for sure, but not a reward for doing the right number of flashcards. Discussions of gifted education would benefit from a wider realization of this truth.

Paying kids to take AP tests

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article about the National Math and Science Initiative, which pays kids to take and pass AP tests. You can read a press release from ExxonMobil, one of the lead sponsors, here.

NMSI builds on a Texas program that's been shelling out cash for good AP scores for almost a decade. Dallas-based Advanced Placement Strategies, Inc. began in 1996, when only 156 students passed AP tests in math and science at the original 10 Dallas schools in the program. This jumped to 877 last year. The program has now expanded to 64 schools. Students receive $100-$500 for passing the test, with students from poorer schools often getting more. Teachers get training bonuses -- $500 to $1,000 for becoming AP instructors, and lead teachers who coordinate the programs in the schools get $5,000.

Within five years, NMSI plans to have math & science AP incentive programs running in 150 school districts, and to set up teacher training programs at 50 universities.

Frankly, I think this is a great idea. For starters, what gets measured and rewarded gets done. Companies pay bonuses for precisely this reason. We can have a whole philosophical discussion about whether it's better to be externally or internally motivated (take the AP test to earn $500 or for the love of knowledge?) but this is a luxury we don't really have when it comes to math and science education (see the NAEP scores post, below). Over time we may all become members of Free Agent Nation, building our own businesses that satisfy internal desires for meaning and autonomy, but currently most people work for other people's companies -- like ExxonMobil -- and they work for pay. They tend to work more if promised more pay. So why not pay kids and teachers to do more of what this country has said we need to focus on?

Second, this national initiative isn't a tax-funded program. ExxonMobil can spend their money on whatever they'd like, and putting it toward better educational outcomes strikes me as smart for a company that needs to hire a lot of engineers. NMSI also is in talks with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to put in some money. As readers of this blog know, the Gates Foundation's efforts in education have so far been mediocre at best and damaging at worst. Paying kids to pass AP exams -- which do show specific content mastery in tough areas -- would be a much better use of Bill Gates' money than his small schools initiative, which pretty much hasn't worked. Using private money also gets around the problem of entrenched bureaucracy, and unions, which for some reason are loathe to allow schools to pay more for better teachers with skills that are in demand.

Ultimately, I see this as a stepping stone to a world where teachers with in-demand skills -- such as math and science qualifications -- earn more. People with these skills have more career options, and so few want to consider teaching, where they'll earn less than the teacher down the hall who's done nothing but sit there for 20 years, solely for reasons of seniority. I also like the idea of rewarding kids for outcomes. It takes a lot of work and study time to get a 5 on an AP Chemistry or calculus or biology test. That's time kids could be working at part-time jobs or watching TV. If the U.S. has decided that it would be better for kids to spend more time studying chemistry than watching Grey's Anatomy, then why not create incentives for them to do so?

The usual suspects, of course, have complained about all this. Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told the WSJ that the approach involves "basing education reform on a series of bribes to kids and bounties to teachers." But nothing else seems to be working, and I'm guessing Schaeffer would take a different job if he were offered twice the pay. It's silly to say people shouldn't base decisions on money when almost all of us do.

The best schools for gifted kids

From time to time, parents struggling with the question of what to do with their gifted kids ask if there is a "best school" for such children. Some of these parents have flexible jobs, or the resources to live wherever they want, so it's a wide-open question. And unfortunately, not an easy one. That's because some schools for gifted kids cater to a certain range of giftedness, and some cater to certain temperaments. A very free-spirited child might prefer a Montessori or Waldorf type approach, whereas a more regimented child might prefer a structured curriculum that's heavy on grammar, logic, the liberal arts, etc. Some children have other profound gifts that need to be taken into consideration -- such as a budding musical career -- and some have learning disabilities that require their own modifications. A school that works wonderfully for one child might be awful for another.

That said, Hoagies' Gifted Education Pages has a list of schools organized by state (and some online ones) for people looking for a place to start the search. You can find the list here. Peruse the schools' websites, then send off for more information. Interview parents and graduates of these schools. Visit the schools. While it's unlikely any child will find a perfect match, choosing the right school can make learning far more enjoyable.

If people have been through this process and have helpful advice for other parents, I'd appreciate your posting your experiences and recommendations.

12th Grade NAEP Math Scores

The regular release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress ("the nation's report card") is always a sobering experience. I don't like to be alarmist, but inevitably, it's a cause for some national self-flagellation.

The 2005 12th grade math scores are no exception. While tests given to 4th and 8th graders suffer from a certain reality that pretty much everyone attends these grades, by 12th grade, many people who have no interest in learning have removed themselves from school. Those remaining should skew toward the reasonably advanced. Indeed, the majority of high school graduates intend to go on to additional education.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to be learning the basic math skills that further education should require. Check out the sample 12th grade NAEP math questions here. The first is a very simple multiple choice geometry question; 73% of students got it right. The second is a simple algebra question that requires you to cough up an answer; only 23% of students got it right. Many students take algebra before geometry, so it seems odd at first glance that the geometry question was easier for people than the algebra one. But I think there's an unfortunate dynamic going on here that doesn't indicate good things for the rigor of most kids' curriculum.

The first geometry answer could likely be deduced through some real world observations (answer A isn't right since the second angle looks bigger than the first angle... and if you've ever doodled shapes inside a protractor in class, you might know a straight line totals 180 degrees). Children see streets in real life, too, so there's less of an eyes-glazed-over response to the question. Plus, it's multiple choice. You might give it a shot. The second question, though, with its f(x) and f(g(x)) language, doesn't feature a lot of real world reference points. Answering it requires a confidence gleaned from having taken and understood algebra. It is a pure content question, measuring content mastery. And unfortunately, three-quarters of high school seniors seem to lack that.

It goes without saying that children who can't do algebra will have an awfully hard time succeeding in college-level math. And a great number of jobs -- particularly fast-growing, high-paying ones -- will require some college-level math. U.S. schools do not seem to be preparing the majority of high school seniors for these career paths. But hey, at least the kids' grades are good. A report on high school transcripts, released about the same time as the NAEP scores, shows that students now average a 2.98 GPA in high school, higher than in previous years. Too bad their NAEP scores don't show a similar rise.

Thoughts on child prodigies

The Gainesville Sun ran an interesting piece recently with quotes from some experts on child prodigies. You can read the piece here.

Leave aside the bizarre opening (if the child's novel is a best-seller, it doesn't do much good to withhold the father's name from the article...). I thought the quotes from Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, provided some real food for thought. For instance, she said that (with the exception of the child author in the lead anecdote), prodigies are often good at things that have already been mastered. Many of the child prodigies touted on TV have shown amazing memorization skills or technical skills -- they can cite facts about all the U.S. presidents, for instance, or have memorized dictionaries full of quotations, can play the violin beautifully, or can do arithmetic with amazing speed. But adult successes in many of these fields require a different set of skills. Mathematicians need to dream up new proofs. Composers need their own vision of the music they plan to create. Knowing facts about presidents and quotes doesn't get you anywhere in particular. Perhaps, she suggests, this is why the narrative of the prodigy who flames out is so compelling for many people.

This is no doubt why making the transition from childhood to adult success is so difficult. One of these days I hope to write a book about how gifted children have successfully made that transition! It also provides a rubric for thinking about questions we've looked at on this blog in the past (for instance, why there are so few literary prodigies, compared with math ones. The equivalent of a math prodigy in the literary field is someone who can read and comprehend incredibly quickly. Writing a novel is an entirely different concept).

Talent Searches: What should schools do with the results?

On Monday, I spoke about my new book, Grindhopping, at the Kellogg School of Management. This is located at Northwestern University just outside Chicago. It's a place I have many fond memories of. For 3 summers in grades 7-9, I spent 3 weeks taking classes there through Northwestern's Center for Talent Development. If it hadn't been snowing like crazy, and if I hadn't had an 8:30pm plane to catch out of O'Hare (which was subsequently delayed... like every flight I've ever taken out of O'Hare...) I would have loved to spend more time walking down memory lane there.

I took classes through CTD because I'd participated in something called the "Midwest Academic Talent Search." Through this program, middle school students take an out-of-level test (I took the SAT) to provide more data on their level of advancement. On grade-level tests, gifted students tend to score in the 99th percentile, but on out-of-level tests, their scores spread out over the whole bell curve. I'm happy to report that I did quite well, even winning a partial scholarship to the summer program my 8th grade year. I received the award at a ceremony at Northwestern University. I also was recognized at a ceremony called "Achievers All" that the South Bend Community School Corporation held at the end of the year.

This experience is pretty typical for students who do well in talent searches. A survey by CTD found that after receiving MATS results, 66% of school coordinators recognize participants by handing out certificates at a special ceremony. However, in most schools, they don't do anything else. Only about 20% held meetings with parents and/or students to help them interpret the scores, and only 16% provided some sort of letter or materials they'd developed about the topic. A grand total of 2.8% communicated with parents about subsequent educational services that might be available. A full 22% of school coordinators said they did no special follow-up. I am traveling in Canada right now and don't have my HTML cheat sheet, but here's a link to the study results:

http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/mats/howdoschoolsusetalent.html

Since Dr. Julian Stanley did the first talent search at Johns Hopkins years ago, talent searches have done an excellent job of finding highly gifted kids. They have also done a great job of providing summer classes at top universities for these gifted kids. But the classes are expensive. Ideally, when a child does incredibly well on an out-of-level test, it should trigger action in their regular school. It should be time to figure out that, hey, if the kid is achieving the same scores as a high school senior, maybe she should be taking the same classes as high school seniors. But this almost never happens. Instead, schools treat it as a fun reason to hold an award ceremony.

Across the Midwest, schools should be receiving MATS scores around now (the SAT date was 1/27 and the ACT was 2/10). And unfortunately, most schools will fill out a certificate and file the scores somewhere to never be seen again.

Cogito.org

I just wanted to share a new website with readers of Gifted Exchange: Cogito.org. This project from Johns Hopkins University features interviews with high-achieving young scientistis and mathematicians (in the beginning of their careers), lists of distance learning programs, contest deadlines (the Davidson Fellows one is coming up!), etc. The idea is to create a community for young people aged 8-18 who are interested in science and math, and introduce them to the careers and resources that are available. It's pretty well done, so please check it out!

Praise: The Powers and Perils

Po Bronson is one of my favorite kid/parenting issues writers (I mentioned his essay for Time on Barbie v. Baby Einstein on this blog a few months ago). He had a cover story last week in New York magazine on the The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids.

The feature is based on some research done a few years ago by Carol Dweck, a psychologist who's now at Stanford. Dweck discovered that, despite all the self-esteem literature out there, praise can actually discourage your kid from trying tough things -- that is, if you do it wrong. In one classic example of her studies, kids were given an easy test, one on which the researchers knew they'd do well. The kids were then told their scores and given a single line of praise. It was either "You must be smart at this" or "You must have worked really hard."

Then the kids were given a choice of which test to take next. One of the tests, kids were told, was hard, but they'd learn a lot from the puzzles. The other was easy, like the last one. Of the kids praised for their effort, 90% chose the harder test. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, the majority chose the easier one. A single line of praise made that much of a difference.

For a third test, the kids didn't get a choice -- it was hard for everyone. The kids praised for their effort struggled but threw themselves into trying. Some volunteered that it was their favorite test. Those praised for their intelligence, though, hated it - they felt massive distress as they found themselves failing. On a fourth test, as easy as the first, the group praised for effort improved their scores by about 30% despite their previous failing performance. The group praised for their intelligence took the failure to heart, and scored 20% lower than their first round attempts.

Dweck hypothesized that the one difference between these two groups of kids was a sense of control. Effort is something kids can control. Simply "being smart" is not. Those praised for being smart don't want to risk not appearing smart. They are absolutely petrified of trying something and failing. Those praised for effort want to put in more effort, so they do. The two approaches ensure drastically different results.

I've read this study before, but reading the Po Bronson article got me thinking about it again in relation to gifted kids. Few gifted kids are truly challenged in school. That's a problem not because gifted kids are somehow more deserving of "special" work, but because they learn that things should always come easy to them. They are constantly labeled "smart" for minimum effort. After a while, your self-image becomes wrapped up in being "smart." You don't want to risk not appearing smart, which means you never stick with something that's difficult, or that you don't stand out at immediately.

That's a problem because any change in life requires mastering new skills. I know gifted kids who've dropped out of college because suddenly the work wasn't easy anymore. They invented stories about "oh, they just don't understand me here" but I wonder if perhaps these kids were praised a little too much for intelligence, and too little for effort growing up. I suspect that many gifted kids suffer a tough transition to the real world for the same reason. When building a career, there is often no "right" answer -- there are simply choices you must make with imperfect information. It's not immediately obvious if you've made smart decisions or not. So people flee back to graduate school where they can see that they're making progress, and where tests and papers provide immediate evidence of their status as intelligent people. Or they hop from job to job, not because the hopping is getting them somewhere they want to be, but because they want the immediate rush of being the smart new hire. Taking risks to create something new within institutions, or on their own, and possibly failing in front of everyone, is just out of the question.

As Bronson points out, not praising a kid as "smart" takes a lot of discipline on the part of a parent. Calling our kids smart is an easy way to show unconditional love, and praising a state of existence allows some of that praise to rub off on the people responsible for the kid's existence (meaning us). No one controls effort but the kid himself.

But ultimately children have to learn to deal with life themselves, without hovering parents or teachers giving constant reassurance. Equipping gifted children with this skill is probably the greatest gift parents can give them.

Curriculum Compacting: Why not start school in January?

Sally Reis has an article in February's School Administrator magazine called No Child Left Bored. Her piece talks about the various options available for gifted kids. It's more or less a laundry list, though it's a good refresher for people stumped about what to try next.

Buried in the section on curriculum compacting, though, I found an interesting tidbit. According to Reis, "In a national study, we found that with only a few hours of training classroom teachers learned to eliminate between 40 and 50 percent of the previously mastered regular curriculum for both high-ability and gifted students. Interestingly, no differences were found between students whose work was compacted and students who did all the work in reading, math computation, social studies and spelling. In fact, in some content areas, scores were actually higher when this elimination of previously mastered content took place."

I searched for the study I believe she is referring to, and found a summary here. As the study title asks, puckishly, "Why not let high ability students start school in January?"

Aside from the obvious answer (parents have to work; where do you stash the kids for an extra 4 months a year?) it's a reasonable question when you look at the results. Reis and her fellow researchers found that after a bit of training, 95% of teachers were able to identify 1-2 high-achieving students in their classes, and most of these teachers were also able to identify what material these students had and hadn't mastered. Quickly trained teachers were also able to brainstorm ways for the students to show mastery. They identified about 40-50% of the regular classroom material that could be eliminated for gifted kids. Even when a full 50% of the classroom work was eliminated, these students did no worse on standardized tests (and out of level tests) given to them later.

In other words, high ability students are probably wasting about half the "teaching time" in their regular classrooms. That doesn't even include the time everyone wastes doing things like waiting for other students to be on task. While this is probably no surprise to any bright kid who's been bored in class, it is interesting to see it documented.

Unfortunately, in the Reis study, while teachers trained for only a few hours were able to successfully compact the curriculum, they were not able to come up with high quality replacement material to fill the time. While reading in the back of the room, going to the library or even just daydreaming may be better than doing mindless worksheets, it hits home that gifted kids are often in school just to mark time. And if that's the case, why not start in January? To truly blossom, gifted kids need teachers trained to meet their special needs. And unfortunately, that's harder to pull off in a few hours of staff development.

All Gifted Education is Local

Returning to School Administrator magazine... Jane Clarenbach, director of public education for NAGC, has an essay in the February issue on the gifted various services different districts deliver. You can read the article here. While the piece is more a survey of what different options exist, the opening lines suggest an interesting question. In the U.S., education is largely a local matter, and so gifted education is a local matter, too. Is this smart or good for gifted kids?

Clarenbach says NAGC often receives calls from parents wondering where they should move in order to make sure their children receive an appropriate, challenging education. It's a tough question. A district that offers a magnet school for gifted children might look like a good choice, but if that school is inflexible about grade skipping (believe it or not, that happens) then it might not be a good choice for a profoundly gifted child.

In general, I believe educational decisions are best made closest to the people they affect. So gifted education should be a state or local issue. However, given that the federal government does muck around in various educational decisions already, I don't like the idea of gifted education getting the short end of the stick. I wish the federal Education Department would identify gifted education as a major national priority, offer better resources and circulate more "best practices" ideas for districts to implement. Federal bureaucrats can use their positions to promote concepts, even in the absence of national mandates. Because, unfortunately, one of the side effects of gifted education being local is that well-to-do parents, who can move, have better access to it than families who have to stay put. While local control of education is a concept worth defending, that result is not.

Gifted Education in Africa

I spent last week in South Africa, mostly in the Sabi Sabi Game Reserve near Krueger and the Mozambique border. I was also able to pay a short visit to the nearby J.J. Matsone Primary School. I'm going to attempt to load a photo of the 4- and 5-year-old class singing songs in English and Tsongan (the local area's language).

The school building was newly constructed, but signs of South Africa's general poverty remained. Only about half the children had shoes. The village had electricity and water, but many of the town's buildings still resembled the awful slum homes you see in the townships outside Johannesburg and Capetown.

As I wrote last year when visiting Vietnam, when education is such a limited and coveted resource in a place, it becomes an interesting question of how you find and nurture the talent of particularly talented children. How do you reach children who live in circumstances that put them mostly outside the modern economy? Many nations wrestle with this. India and China have world class universities in the cities, but children in villages still must often pay for the few years of schooling they can afford.

South Africa has come upon one interesting solution: Get on Oprah Winfrey's radar screen. The talk show host has long had an interest in gifted children (I recall reading that she skipped grades herself). She's particularly interested in gifted children who overcome tough circumstances like she herself faced growing up poor in segregated Mississippi. Yesterday's program was on amazing kids from around the world, and featured young scientists, memory champions and so forth. These past few years, Winfrey has put that interest into practice with the newly opened Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. You can read about the school here.

The school will eventually be home to 450 gifted South African girls. They will be challenged and taught by the best teachers, and hopefully taught to be leaders (something Africa, with its chronic human resources problem, desperately needs).

I think this is a great idea, one I hope is replicated in other African and developing world countries. All developing country education needs to be improved, but nurturing the talents of the brightest gives you more bang for your buck. These girls will someday improve the systems in South Africa or, even if they immigrate to Europe or the U.S., will send money and expertise home.

Starting schools is expensive. But I suppose there are lower cost ways to accomplish the same objective. I'm picturing an international program that perhaps a technology or research company could fund that would seek out particularly bright children from poor circumstances. The company would make sure the children receive additional training -- perhaps via online stations in the libraries that the Gates Foundation is putting up around the developing world -- that would allow them to be accepted at the best western universities. Of course, the company couldn't force these kids to come work for them afterwards, but many probably would!

It is a shame to squander talent in the U.S., but even more talent is squandered around the world because children happen to be born in poor countries. Finding and nurturing talented children should be a part of any smart aid program.

Georgia Tries Acceleration

I've been hearing some sad stories about gifted education programs in Georgia lately from parents. So I'm pleased to read in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the easiest, cheapest form of gifted education -- acceleration -- is increasingly on the table. You can read the story here.

While few school districts downright forbid acceleration, they often use it only when parents insist, or when a kid moves to the district and there's no clear record of what he/she was doing before. Even in these cases, the parents often face alarmist stories about "one child" who was accelerated years ago and was consequently screwed up for the rest of his/her life. That's too bad because, as the recent report A Nation Deceived showed, acceleration is not only good for kids academically, it's fine for them socially, too. If "one child" was harmed by it at some point in the mythical past, there are 10 kids who are being harmed more by leaving them in the grades that their birthdates sentence them to.

According to the AJC article, a Georgia panel last year recommended that districts consider acceleration in their guidelines, and noted the "unequivocal" benefits. Ohio, the article also notes, recently required its 600 school systems to create policies saying how kids can go about skipping grades (for instance, the Iowa Acceleration Scale gives parents and teachers an idea of what grade a child is ready for). Since acceleration is cheap, effective, and doesn't share the political baggage of so much of gifted education (that it's a "special" program, or a reward, and therefore should be bestowed upon all motivated children regardless of actual intelligence), this is good news all around.

Every Child a Cheetah? (the "Full Fabric" Myth)

The most recent issue of The School Administrator is chock full of articles on gifted education. I will be out of the country next week, but we'll look at one of the articles today, and more when I come back.

Weaving the Gifted into the Full Fabric, one of the magazine's essays, is quite a piece of work. The author, Eric Smith, has been the superintendent of four school systems, and is currently the senior VP for college readiness programs at the College Board. He makes several of the "right" statements about gifted education -- i.e., that we don't challenge our brightest kids enough, that identifying giftedness in third grade is too late -- but fundamentally, this essay uses those caveats to then argue that any notion of separate education for gifted children is fundamentally flawed. Instead of viewing children as cheetahs, beavers and turtles (as, no doubt, some well-meaning teacher in one of Smith's school systems called various reading or math groups), he says we should view all children as cheetahs. We should have high expectations for all, inviting all children to partake of the same advanced curriculum that would be limited to gifted kids, and support those who need help. He cites a few examples from his own tenure that certainly are impressive (lower income children exposed to an accelerated preschool program in Charlotte maintained their academic gains several years later; the number of Anne Arundel, MD students taking AP classes soared).

One has to be an optimist to run a large school system. But as many a parent has pointed out on this forum, in the real world, almost all classes are taught to the lowest common denominator. When students who are not prepared for college level work take AP classes, the AP classes must be taught to keep these "turtles" on board. That means the cheetahs must learn more on their own. They wind up spending time tutoring the other kids, waiting for questions to be answered, etc. The whole pace is slower. In the course of researching Genius Denied I looked at one school that made a point of offering an accelerated curriculum to all students. I have no problem with that. I encourage it! People do perform better when there are high expectations. But when I interviewed the mother of a highly gifted girl in that accelerated program, the mother sighed and said it was unfortunate, but her daughter just wasn't being challenged. It was a great school, the teachers and administrators meant well and were achieving great results among the students. But that does not change the reality that some students are simply more intelligent than others.

The beauty of a separate education program for highly gifted kids is that it fails better. We do not have schools where everyone is as energetic and interested in problem solving as Smith. Teachers mean well, but it is hard to teach to anything but the lowest common denominator. Only the best teachers can do it and, alas, just as some kids are more intelligent than others, some teachers are better than others, too. When highly gifted kids are in separate classes, the lowest common denominator is at least closer to where they are. High expectations for all, and gifted education, are not mutually exclusive concepts. Smith does a disservice to school administrators who value his opinions by implying that they are.

Scaling up "Gifted"

The state of Florida does better than most when it comes to providing funding for gifted education. But anytime something is perceived as an educational reward bestowed upon a favored group, politics come into play, and that's precisely what's happening in Florida right now. The state Department of Education is in the midst of changing the way it defines "gifted" in order to be more inclusive. You can read about one county's experience with the change here.

For starters, the state wants to expand the number of children screened for giftedness to all of them. Not a bad idea. Currently, many districts only screen for giftedness among children whose parents or teachers request it. But some parents may not know much about gifted education, or how to navigate the school system. Few teachers have training in gifted education, and so may assume that "gifted" means "doing well in class." Not always the case.

But administering IQ tests is time consuming. Doing the full deal requires at least 2 hours one-on-one with a psychologist. So Florida districts may have to use quicker, slightly rougher versions of IQ tests for mass screening. But then the 130 cut-off seems even more arbitrary. So why not add in achievement test scores? That's what the state is proposing, in addition to lowering the IQ bar to 120. School officials say this may double or triple the number of children identified as gifted, and thus make the programs more inclusive.

I'm all in favor of inclusiveness if it means screening more children. But the move toward labeling more children as gifted -- which school districts across the country are trying -- strikes me as problematic for gifted education in general. In recent posts we've talked about the problems of positioning gifted education as some sort of reward. Attempts to pack more children into the definition buy into this thinking. If a district defines "gifted" as "good student," and as a seal of approval that the kid is going places in life, then why not choose everyone who has good grades and reasonable test scores?

Proponents of gifted education are on our most solid footing when we define gifted education as an educational intervention for students who need it. If 10% or more of a class suddenly needs an intervention, maybe it could just be taken care of by more differentiation in reading groups, math groups, and the like. I'd like to see true educational interventions (grade skipping, distance learning, early enrollment at college, magnet schools for the highly gifted, including boarding schools) focused on a smaller percentage of students. That means raising the cut-off IQ bar, not lowering it. If any districts are going that direction, please let me know. I'd love to hear about them.

Advanced Placement (AP) vs. Actual College

I was just in Louisville the past few days, meeting with various school and community leaders to write a piece on the recent desegregation case that's come before the Supreme Court. It's a long, complicated story with a long, complicated history, but race is, of course, not the only issue a large and varied school population faces. So I thought I'd share one issue here. The Jefferson County Public Schools include a number of magnet programs. More or less, the gifted and talented program for high school students is located at DuPont Manual High School, which is just across the street from the University of Louisville.

It's a great set-up; if students run out of, say, math classes, they can cross enroll at the university. Principal Beverly Keepers told me that in years past, as many as 100-plus students would cross-enroll. That number, however, has fallen in recent years. She identified two reasons. First, cross-enrollment is no longer "free" (i.e. underwritten by people's education taxes). State universities across the country have had to raise tuition in recent years and the University of Louisville wasn't thrilled to be filling its introductory classes with non-tuition paying students (though the professors, Keepers said, loved working with such eager pupils). Second, the Advanced Placement program at "Manual" (as residents and students call it) has greatly expanded. Students can take everything from AP Statistics to AP Studio Art. Some 80% of students receive scores of 3 or higher on their AP exams (out of 5); 23% of Manual AP scores are 5s.

AP classes are held at the high school. They're also portable in a way that specific classes at a specific university sometimes aren't. While some universities would gladly recognize freshman biology at the University of Louisville as being functionally equivalent to their own introductory biology classes, others don't. Keepers noted that her own daughter was not able to claim credit for one such science class when she went to college; the school wound up giving her "elective" credit for such a course. Many Manual students intend to go to college outside Kentucky. So they opt for AP courses that they can take with their friends, with portable scores, rather than head over to the University of Louisville.

I have a feeling this is happening at other rigorous high schools across the country, and I have mixed feelings about this. The quality of university classes is uneven, but so are AP classes. A poorly taught AP class with a lot of smart kids can easily produce a lot of "3" scores, but the kids will really flounder if they try to take upper level classes at a university next. Some schools also don't do the AP labs "full out." They tell the kids what should happen and why, but lack the equipment to do the necessary experiments. And the AP labs do involve quite a bit of hand-holding. I took AP Chemistry at the Indiana Academy, which was a very rigorous course. I scored a 5 on the exam, which implies that I knew what I was doing. But I was quite confused about lab procedures and such when I took Organic Chemistry at Princeton. Students who enroll in university courses will get the full university deal, sink or swim.

In addition, AP was originally supposed to be an option for kids who were ready for college level work, but who didn't have ready access to a college. Manual's block scheduling allows for college-length classes, and they have a college nearby. But AP still wins out. I am guessing there's a bit of the college application mania going on here. AP scores are readily comparable and, like perfect SAT scores, make you stand out on a scale that everyone else applying to selective colleges will also be judged on. Local university classes may not indicate the same thing.

So now Manual students tend to enroll at the University of Louisville only if they've blown through AP Calculus BC before their senior years. Then they enroll in the university's multivariable calculus class.

Across the country, AP classes are becoming a national curriculum for the most ambitious college-bound students. A rigorous national curriculum may be a worthy goal to pursue in its own right, but I'm not sure that, on the whole, students who are prepared for college work aren't better off just enrolling in college when they're ready.

Vying for NYC's Gifted Programs

As mentioned in previous posts, New York City is trying some new methods this winter for figuring out which children belong in the city's gifted programs. Unlike many big cities, New York has a long tradition of offering gifted education; indeed, the city's public magnet schools for the gifted are among the best accommodations in the country for such special learners (think Stuyvesant High School, profiled in Genius Denied). The city also starts gifted education in kindergarten, while some districts insist (wrongly) that it's impossible to tell the difference until 3rd grade.

This year, the city is promoting a test for 4- and 5-year-olds to choose students for spots in the limited number of kindergarten and first grade gifted programs. The school system has been aggressively promoting the test in neighborhoods where parents may not be as savvy about these things. So far so good.

But this is New York, one of the most competitive cities in the country. And given the general weakness of the public school system, this test has suddenly become quite high stakes. You can read a Daily News story about the issue by following this link:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/487308p-410292c.html

I sympathize with Anna Commitante, head of NYC's gifted program. She notes in the article that "It's unfortunate that it's turned into the belief that this is the only way to get a quality public education... Gifted doesn't mean the classes are better or the kids are better. ... These children learn differently and need modifications to their education program."

She's absolutely right. One of the problems with gifted education in this country is that so much of the rest of education is so mediocre. In many schools parents perceive, rightly, that the gifted classes are the only ones where academic expectations are kept high. But all children deserve to be challenged to the extent of their abilities. Unfortunately, many gifted programs feed into the nonsense by not covering academic material. Why should only gifted kids get to study myths or insects or the culture of Japan, or various other classic pull-out curricula? This special, more "fun" work invites resentment and the idea that gifted education is a reward. Many schools feed into the hysteria by choosing ridiculously high percentages of kids for their gifted programs and by creating quite arbitrary cut-offs that invite gaming the system.

Gifted education should never be a reward. It should be an educational intervention for kids who need it. This is one of the advantages of grade skipping as an accommodation. Clearly, it isn't a reward -- it matches the child to the curriculum that best challenges him. Maybe instead of having thousands of nervous 4-year-olds vying for spots in special classes, NYC should try having those who have already mastered kindergarten material start 1st grade, or 2nd grade, or, heck, 6th grade. My guess is that you'd see a lot fewer parents convinced that it's "gifted" or the private schools.

North Carolina trains more gifted teachers

Teacher training is a thorny subject. On one hand, I believe that the current system of licensing teachers is horribly inefficient. Many prospective teachers major in education, rather than in the subjects they will teach, and too many districts have elaborate licensure systems in place that discourage mid-career professionals from considering teaching.

That said, studies have found that gifted education teachers who've done a significant amount of coursework in that area have better outcomes than those who haven't. So it makes sense that if a district is going to go to the trouble of creating a gifted program, it should make sure that the program's teachers know how to reach these special learners.

Yet few universities offer such courses to teachers. Fortunately, two universities in North Carolina have recently started programs specifically to train gifted education teachers (in ways that work around these established teachers' schedules). I am traveling in California on book tour for Grindhopping right now, so I don't have my HTML cheat sheet, but you can read about a program at Duke by following this link:

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2007/01/gifted.html

And you can read about a program in High Point, NC by following this link:

http://www.highpoint.edu/news_events/article.cfm?ArticleID=678&viewall=false

The Duke program in particular is exciting because it's run by the Talent Identification Program (TIP) that so many gifted kids have participated in. Every summer, TIP brings 1000 gifted middle schoolers to campus to take advanced coursework. Now Durham Public Schools teachers will be able to observe and work with the teachers of these courses. Students at programs like TIP often talk about how the three week summer camps enable them to endure the whole school year. Now, hopefully, some Durham students will benefit from that energy all year round.

Aztecs vs. Greeks (Murray part 3)

Today, Charles Murray turns his attention to the intellectually gifted, which he defines rather broadly as those with IQs over about 120. It turns out these articles are available online, so you can read today's installment here.

Basically, in this installment, Murray calls for the gifted to be given a challenging, classical education. He further states that we need to encourage gifted kids not to become just smart but wise. "The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them."

I totally agree with this, just as I agree that gifted kids need to learn grammar and logic. There's no point telling kids just to be creative and express themselves without giving them the tools to do so in a coherent fashion. As an art, music and history junkie myself, I also think it would be great to make sure children have a classical education, which Murray calls for (full of ethics, study of the Greeks rather than the Aztecs, which is how this essay gets its title, and so on).

Unfortunately, for all his lauding of a classical education, Murray fails to tie the knot demonstrating why studying the Greeks makes anyone good and wise. He repeats William Buckley's joke that it would be better to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard, but it must be pointed out that the vast majority of Harvard faculty have studied the Greeks and art and ethics, while the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book have not. If the Harvard faculty have not become wise (defined, here, I suspect, as envisioning a society with rules similar to ones Murray and Buckley would design) than we have a logical problem. Unfortunately, this essay doesn't address that. I guess Murray simply had to crank out a part 3 of a 3-part series.

But if anyone reads Aztecs vs. Greeks and decides to push for education that holds gifted kids' feet to the fire, intellectually, than I'll be happy. There is great satisfaction that comes from trying something difficult and achieving it. This is one of the reasons Jan and Bob Davidson give their fellowship awards every year; the projects kids undertake go far beyond what is ever assigned in school. The results are rarely easy to come across, and the projects rarely easy to produce -- at least if you're going to win. Likewise, it wasn't until I got to the Indiana Academy that I discovered how hard I was capable of working. I decided I wanted to take AP Biology and Chemistry simultaneously during the fall of my senior year, and I wanted to get As in both. That required not only doing well, but according to our grading system, doing a full standard deviation better than my very intellectually gifted classmates on each test. I struggled -- writing up lab reports at 2am -- but I did it. It's a lesson of perseverance and being in control of one's life I've since taken to book writing and other long, difficult projects. It's a lesson I worry too few gifted kids learn. No one should expect life to be easy, at least not if you're going to enjoy it.

Murray part 2: Is College for Everyone?

Today, Charles Murray continues his discussion of intelligence and education in the Wall Street Journal with an op-ed on college enrollment. The returns on a college education have increased, many employers demand a bachelor's degree as a credential that shows perseverence and capability and, consequently, many more high school graduates are enrolling. In the early 1970's, only about 10% of Americans over age 25 had a college degree. Now, at least 40% of people in their late teens attempt some college. We have not had a corresponding increase in overall intelligence in the population, which means that two things are happening. Drop-out rates are high, and college instruction has been dumbed down (or at least many colleges are having to focus on remedial education for high percentages of their students). That in turn creates degree inflation where employers start looking for master's degrees to signal intelligence, and so forth.

Murray believes that, on the basis of IQ, at most 15-25% of the population is capable of college level work, as most people think of it. So he calls for other options for young people to signal that they are skilled workers that don't involve a four year liberal arts education. He calls for an expansion of two year and vocational schools. Clearly he is not riding the New York City subways, as every ad on the wall is already for such schools that teach office technologies, opthalmic dispensing, welding, and the like. I think Murray is more conveying that people in his social class assume everyone who is going to make something of themselves should go to a four-year college. That pressures a lot of young people who want to make decent wages to go to four year programs (and then spend longer than four years, or drop out before finishing) when they'd be better served by other options. So Murray calls for dropping the snob factor. Over time, he believes, the market will do this. After all, a lot of plumbers make more and have nicer houses than the white collar workers whose pipes they work on.

Are any Gifted Exchange readers reading this series? I'm curious what you think about Murray's take on college. Is the idea of making college near-universal foolhardy? Is it better to make "some education after high school" the goal? There are policy debates going on right now in Congress about subsidizing the interest on student loans as a way to increase access to higher education. But do we suffer from a lack of access?

Intelligence in the Classroom - Charles Murray

The Wall Street Journal is running a 3-part series on the op-ed page from Charles Murray, scholar of intelligence and general gadfly. Since giftedness is so caught up in questions of IQ, we'll be talking about the subject for the next few days here at Gifted Exchange as well. (Unfortunately, Wall Street Journal content is generally only available to paid subscribers online, but I'll do my best to summarize).

In today's installment, "Intelligence in the Classroom," Murray takes on the very American notion that education is salvation. You name the social problem, and "better education" is listed as the way to solve it. The point of the No Child Left Behind act is that, with the right expectations, proper discipline and excellent teaching, any child can learn to function at the kind of level that will enable him or her to succeed in the modern economy. We bemoan that 36% of fourth graders score "below average" on the reading part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, "the nation's report card") and put various standards and accountability practices in place to hope this rises.

But one question goes unasked, Murray says. What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? After all, mathematical models tell us that about 36% of fourth graders should have an IQ under 95. We do not live in Lake Wobegon. We can't all have above average IQs. So "if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught."

Further weighing on the situation, Murray writes, is the reality that a person's general intelligence (which he calls "g" and which may or may not be measurable by current IQ tests accurately) is largely unchangeable at least after you get to kindergarten. It is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, he writes. These things are set in the womb and in a baby's first few years of life. "No change in the educational system will change that hard fact."

Americans naturally don't like to hear things like this. Murray mocks the story of "a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist." That, he writes, is an underachievement story. A gifted child was not being challenged. When challenged, you "might be able to get a spectacular result," he writes of another gifted child example. Neither is a case of someone in the 49th percentile of intelligence. And 49% of us are going to have to be under that bar.

Murray does say that "This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved." And here I think he massages over a point to get to his raw thesis on intelligence.

The lack of discipline and structure and high expectations at many American schools is so profound that many children who are in the top half of the intelligence distribution are performing as though they were in the bottom half. We have many stories of underachievement going on. Claiming this is just part of the problem of low IQ is like saying that men and women are not equally capable of doing math. At the very, very top end of the intelligence spectrum, maybe there is some difference in brain wiring. But most of us are not there. Most of us aren't even close to the point where the different wiring comes into play. The vast majority of men and women are equally capable of grasping mathematical concepts, and the lower number of women in math programs in college and even graduate schools is likely more related to societal expectations than anything else. Likewise, some children just may not be able to ever read well enough to follow the logic of, say, Kierkegaard's writings. But when schools don't even expect poor children, minority children, or what have you, to be able to read at all by the end of 3rd grade, or 12th graders to be able to read a newspaper, then we have an underachievement problem.

Murray also does not address a few studies we've discussed on this blog last year about adopted children. While adopted children with low IQs who are raised in higher IQ families do not wind up with IQs approaching those of their more intellectually gifted family members, they do wind up reasonably higher. Especially when we are talking about IQs on the lower end of normal, an increase to a normal range can translate into a huge benefit in achievable lifestyle. This suggests that there is at least something one can do to raise intelligence, albeit not by as much as we'd all like. And of course, it suggests social policies that few people would support. While Head Start may be popular for, in theory, giving disadvantaged children a chance to catch up before school, in reality, the time to intervene is immediately after birth. The image of the state rushing in to take babes from their mothers' arms since "we can do better" is a bit too fascist for anyone to tolerate.

Uncomfortable as Murray's statements may be, though, I'm glad he's bringing them up. Innate intelligence is not often talked about in schools. Even gifted education advocates shy from talking about it. The "alternate" methods of identifying gifted students we've discussed on this blog often try to catch and label kids who are trying hard, regardless of IQ or "g" or whatever you want to call it. But sometimes it is best to stare uncomfortable things in the face. It is best to see what they are, so we can then react based on the facts.

Challenging Gifted Kids in the UK

Over the holiday season, the issue of gifted education has been garnering headlines in the UK, due to a report on how the country is neglecting the brightest 10% of its children (particularly those from working class families). You can read a Guardian article about the report here. The report blames an extreme egalitarian and "anti-elite" mindset in the schools -- a mindset that finds the idea of gifted education distasteful (sound familiar?).

Fortunately, the UK is looking to do something about the problem. Another article from the Guardian, which you can read here, reports that schools minister Lord Adonis (don't you just love that name?) wants 800,000 gifted pupils to receive vouchers to pay for summer or online classes. This credit system could be used to supplement the education bright pupils receive at their local schools. Lord Adonis (I'm sorry, I can't type that without picturing a romance novel cover...) has been spearheading a registry of Britain's gifted students for better tracking, and apparently has been infuriated by the attitude he's encountering from some schools. About 30% of schools have not registered with this gifted database, and 20% claim they have no gifted pupils. That's highly unlikely, but may be the schools' way of telling Lord Adonis to buzz off.

While not a pure voucher program (the government recently rejected a flat voucher payment to parents of gifted kids) the system would give kids credits that could be used at a variety of programs that would compete for the business through the government system. Some of the suggested programs are university summer school classes (think programs like TIP or CTD in the U.S.) or online programs (think programs like Stanford's EPGY courses in the U.S.). While well-to-do parents of gifted kids can afford such programs, parents of gifted kids from lower socioeconomic levels often can't pay for challenging extra curricular programs, and so the kids are stuck with the schools they get. That, in turn, wastes potential.

Given all the focus in the U.S. on raising the achievement of kids who are lingering behind grade level, it's nice to see that the UK is also taking the issue of challenging the brightest children seriously. If this program passes in the UK, maybe American educators will be similarly inspired.

No Child Left Behind Turns Five

President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law five years ago today. One of the few truly bipartisan laws to pass Congress over the past few years, NCLB aimed to raise the achievement levels of poor and minority children while improving school accountability, giving parents choices and throwing federal weight behind proven education methods. USA Today has a thorough round-up of how the law has affected schools, teachers and kids here.

The centerpiece of the law is annual testing of all children. Parents of gifted kids have complained that the focus on testing (and keeping gifted kids' test scores in a certain grade to boost averages) has reduced support for gifted education, and has taken time away from the more accelerated material gifted kids are ready for. Standardized grade level tests -- which most gifted kids can ace without trying -- also tell nothing about whether individual gifted children are learning to the extent of their abilities.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has started talking a good game about making sure No Child Left Behind doesn't also mean No Child Let Ahead. When she spoke at the opening of the Davidson Academy in Reno this summer, she said the law should do more to encourage high achievers (of course, like all politicians, Spellings knows her audience). In an online "Ask the White House" session, she told one "Lora" from Boone, N.C. that "We are also in the process of looking at whether measuring individual student growth can be included in NCLB. This way of measuring how much each student learns in a year can help us show progress for kids who are above grade level. While we certainly have a lot of work to do in this area, you are right that we need to make sure our gifted students are also receiving a quality education." (you can read the whole chat transcript here.)

Whether anything will happen, though, remains to be seen. I am curious what effects people have seen from NCLB in their own schools with regards to gifted education over the past five years. I suspect that schools that value gifted children and gifted education have continued to find a way to challenge them within the guidelines of NCLB, while schools that have long been itching for a way to abolish or trim gifted education have used the law as a club to do that.

It's popular in some quarters to reflexively bash NCLB, but I don't think that's too smart. A number of districts have improved test scores for low income students over the past few years, a result that is worth celebrating to the high heavens. The USA Today article highlights one Philadelphia elementary school that has seen the proportion of kids scoring at grade level on state reading tests rise from 2 in 10 in 2003 to 7 in 10 in 2005. If those results are being repeated elsewhere, then society will be reaping major benefits 10-15 years from now in higher incomes, reduced crime, etc. Some principals and superintendents are also using NCLB as an excuse to clean house of non-performing teachers and to revamp underwhelming curricula. That's another result worth celebrating.

But it does seem that there should be a way to focus on raising the ceiling and the floor. Testing individual progress -- on a sensitive enough scale (i.e., out-of-level testing for gifted kids) and holding schools accountable for the results would seem like one way. Breaking out results for children identified as gifted could give parents a better idea of which schools nurture such talents. NCLB was also supposed to spur competition between schools, which in theory could have led to special gifted programs at some magnet schools in big cities. Unfortunately, many districts have made it tough for kids to transfer, which reduces the effectiveness of this element of NCLB.

I'm curious about Gifted Exchange readers' verdicts on NCLB at five. Please post and discuss. (I also want to thank readers for linking to this site so often -- when I Googled "Margarent Spellings" and "gifted education" to research this piece, Gifted Exchange came up first!)

A Perfect Mess

One of the most popular New Year's Resolutions is to "get organized." Indeed, January is the official "Get Organized Month." We promise ourselves that this year will be the one where we clean out the garage, the attic, our desks, and hence, our lives.

Now an interesting new book, A Perfect Mess, takes that pursuit of neatness-above-all to task. You can listen to an NPR interview with Dave Freedman, one of the authors, here.

The authors advance the theory that messiness has a correlation to creative giftedness. They did a survey that found that higher paid people, who have more responsibility, often do have more clutter in their desks and offices. The clutter reflects the desire to keep many slightly unrelated things together, since these seemingly unrelated things often can be linked together to come up with creative solutions (CEOs who are usually photographed in their spic-and-span offices, often have 2-3 administrative assistants who organize the clutter in the "public" office where the chief entertains visitors. In other words, they cheat to create an impression!). Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is a saying for a reason, and creative people don't like to really have things out-of-mind (they push them to the back, and to the bottom of the pile, to be retrieved later). Indeed, they usually know where most important papers are, even if the piles look bad to others.

Anyway, as I write this on my desk that's overflowing with papers -- an index card listing chunks of a novel I just wrote that needed particular revisions, stamps, business cards, page proofs of another article I just wrote on New Year's resolutions, news clippings on the Brown v. Board of Education school in Topeka, KS that might just be turned into a charter school, my running log, the press kit for Grindhopping -- I find this quite comforting. Which is precisely why this book will do well. Reviews have made this point. It's a very comforting thesis ("Actually, Mr. Boss, my mess is a sign of my genius!") The authors also belabor the point for 200 pages when they could have made it in 20.

But... I do believe that messiness can be one of the side effects of giftedness. Walk through a hall of academic offices, and you'll see people happily buried in piles of papers and manuscripts. Perhaps these people know that while a cluttered desk may be the sign of a cluttered mind, by that logic, an empty desk suggests something even worse.

Vacation Homework

Gifted Exchange readers with middle or high school children may be personally involved in one of the latest educational controversies: the idea of homework, especially over weekends and vacations. As schools close for the holidays today, many kids will come home with assignments to be completed before they return in January. Is that a good thing or bad thing?

Two books that hit shelves this year from respected education writers (Alfie Kohn's "The Homework Myth" and Sara Bennett's and Nancy Kalish's "The Case Against Homework") claim the latter. These books have gotten a lot of attention. Bennett and Kalish were on the Today Show, for instance. On national television, they told parents that the amount of time kids devote to homework has "skyrocketed," to the point where kids are losing out on quality time with family, educational play opportunities, etc.

I've long been suspicious of this claim, so I'm glad to see that Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews has likewise poked some holes in this argument. In late November, his column, The Weak Case Against Homework, notes that the studies both sets of authors cite hardly show an oppressive load. In the past two decades or so, the time 6-8 year olds spend on homework has increased from 8 minutes a day to 22 minutes a day. As Matthews points out, that's less than the time it takes to watch one episode of SpongeBob Squarepants. For 15-17 year olds, the ones supposedly crushed by homework these days, the daily homework burn rate has increased from 33 minutes in 1981 to 50 minutes in 2003.

Maybe 22 minutes or 50 minutes is too much if such work takes time away from other edifying pursuits. But 15-17 year olds, by some estimates, spend about 2.5 hours each weekday on TV and other non-studying related screen time (ie, cruising MySpace and IM-ing friends). Matthews notes in amazement that Kalish and Bennett try to nuance this figure by claiming it's so cozy to cuddle up and watch Lost together as a family.

Matthews (and I) agree with the anti-homework crusaders that much of the homework kids get assigned is dumb. Worksheets may drill and kill. Far better to assign reading and ask kids to bring in comments to class for discussion. It amazes me how many teachers do not ask kids to read a chapter in a textbook, or a primary document, before the subject is first broached in class. Won't kids get more out of a lecture if they're not encountering the material for the first time? Extended research may also be best done at home, when kids can synthesize and delve into issues before being whipped over to the next subject by a bell 50 minutes later.

But... and here's the big "but." Spending two hours a day watching TV is pretty dumb, too. Why not devote more energy to calls for better homework and more academically rigorous schools instead of penning an ode to watching Lost together as a family? Bennett and Kalish got the idea to write their book because their own children were suffering under a high load of homework in a very upscale school. The average child, on the other hand, hardly suffers from this excess of expectations. I'm still reeling from a figure I cited on this blog last week (that only 18 of 100 high school freshmen graduate from a 2-year college within 7 years or a 4-year college within 10). Spending a few hours over Christmas vacation reading or studying hardly seems like a worse way to spend the time than playing video games.

Ages 6 and Up?

I spent my weekend doing some Christmas shopping. There are a few children on my list. Some of them are extremely gifted. This raises the question that I'm sure many parents on this blog have encountered. What on earth do the age guidelines on toys mean when it comes to developmentally advanced kids?

The Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates these little "Ages 9 through 12" messages found on toy boxes. If you want to read their reasoning on the different categories, you can find the PDF file here. The CPSC chooses the guidelines based on many different criteria. Some, such as motor control and choking hazards, apply to most kids. Others, such as complexity, role-playing, strategizing and other things, can lead to the same problems if you follow the guidelines as you get by putting a highly gifted 8-year-old in a regular 3rd grade classroom. Once, I was considering a toy labeled for 3-5 year olds that said it would help a kid learn her letters in a fun way. The 4-year-old in question, though, was already reading whole books and writing stories. If I'd chosen the alphabet game, she probably would have just made a castle out of the box (not that she wouldn't anyway... 5-7 year olds can really get into creative role-playing, and so do gifted 4-year-olds).

I'm curious how people get around this. How do you choose toys for bright toddlers that don't have small parts, but still involve a reasonable level of complexity? How do you choose toys for gifted preschoolers that don't involve high levels of motor control, but also won't bore the kid? Are there any particular toys you'd recommend for shoppers facing these dilemmas? We still have a few shopping days left...

Middle School Honors Classes Come to Grosse Pointe

Thanks to a Gifted Exchange reader for sending in this item. According to The Grosse Pointe News, the Grosse Pointe, Michigan school board recently approved a proposal to add honors science and social studies classes in middle schools. The board chose to do this in order to make the curriculum more rigorous. While many middle schools in Michigan and elsewhere have honors math or English classes, for some reason other subjects tend to not be viewed as needing such rigor. There's no real reason for this, but so it goes. Grosse Pointe decided to change this and do ability grouping (or "readiness grouping") for most subjects. For this they should be commended.

I also don't see why it's particularly controversial. Is math so different from science in a way that makes ability grouping OK for one and not the other? But true to form, some educators decided that they needed to protest. The Grosse Pointe News is subscription-only, but I thought I'd share a few choice quotes from recent articles.

For instance, Roger Hunwick, a social studies teacher, says that "separating diverse learners" is against teaching philosophy. Dissident board member Alice Kosinski says that "Tracking and segregating students is contradictory to our strategic plan." Strategic plan for what -- mediocrity?

And then there's the kicker from dissident board member Angela Kennedy. She notes, "I am concerned about the trend of high school academics demanding college level achievement. I cannot support the transformation of middle school into high school. I'm worried that we are raising a generation of uber children who can read early but never enjoy literature, who are challenged but not engaged (and) who burn out before graduate school."

Uber children? Graduate school? New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mentioned a fascinating new study in a Wall Street Journal column the other day that found that only 18 of 100 high school freshmen will graduate from a 2-year-college within 7 years of starting high school, or a 4-year-college within 10 years. Kennedy's worries that rigorous classes will make children burn out before graduate school are a bit misplaced. Very few children even make it to the point where graduate school is an option under our current educational set-up.

On the other hand, some evidence does suggest that children who try accelerated classes, even if they don't do so well, are more likely to go to college than those who don't. So cheers to Grosse Pointe for taking the risk of adding honors classes for middle schoolers, despite the opposition.

Specialization

As a belated birthday present to myself, I went to a matinee performance of the Nutcracker today. New York City Ballet has been performing this Christmas masterpiece for over 50 years now, ever since George Balanchine stamped his vision on Tschaikovsky's music.

Starring several children, the Nutcracker is always a crowd pleaser. But it was watching the young adult principal dancers of the NYC Ballet company that really got me thinking. In fields like ballet, becoming a top-tier professional takes decades of practice. With dance, especially, you have to commit to training your body into the correct form and technique quite young -- often, younger than a child could rationally make a decision about wanting to be a professional dancer on her own (well, all of us probably did want to be professional ballerinas at some point -- but before a child could rationally size up the situation and decide it was feasible). Unless the child's parents make a decision that they will commit the child to that kind of intense training, the child will not become a principal ballet dancer years hence.

Other fields don't have quite the same unforgiving age elements as dance, but certainly it is easier to learn to play an instrument and read music when our brains are new enough to learn other languages easily. Early problem solving training also makes new mathematical leaps second nature. All of these issues raise the question for parents: When are you being a pushy parent when you allow or encourage a child to spend hours a day training in a subject, and when are you trying not to cut off a child's future career choice?

It's a tough question. Certainly if a child hates an activity, or is even indifferent, making big commitments of time, money or energy toward a future career is silly. Making a living as a musician or a dancer is almost impossible. If the child doesn't love it, he'll never survive. So following the child's interests is key. Asking for an evaluation from a trusted adult who's had a career in the field is important. Maybe 2 or 3 adults. Prodigies I've interviewed also recommend allowing "breaks" from time to time. If the child gets truly frustrated with her instrument or her arabesques (not just tempted by what's on TV), don't force it. If you force it, the kid will quit for good. Children who love what they're doing will eventually come back to their avocation, maybe with a different teacher or a different approach.

Beyond that, I guess it just has to be a gut decision -- and one with no guarantees. You can study ballet intensely for decades and still never wind up in the NYC Ballet program. But if you don't study intensely for decades, you definitely won't.

Gifted Adults (and Grindhopping)

This post will be both about a serious topic... and a shameless plug for my new book, which I just learned is now available at Amazon.com (not just for pre-order; they're actually shipping! You can order in time for Christmas, in case anyone on your list likes career books). It's called Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues, and is published by McGraw-Hill. The thesis is that if you're a young, ambitious person with out-of-the-box career aspirations, you don't have to pay your dues in the corporate grind to get anywhere. You can hop out of it, and build a micro-business or freelancing venture doing what you love, without much capital or experience. Indeed, thanks to technology, there's never been an easier time to do just that.

So what does this have to do with gifted education? Well, it turns out that Grindhoppers, as I call them, are often grown-up gifted children (gifted adults, in the official terminology.) Like gifted children, gifted adults tend to have certain characteristics that make them different from average. There's a list of some of the characteristics posted here.

Many of these characteristics make climbing up a typical corporate hierarchy difficult. For instance, gifted adults tend to be perfectionist, both toward themselves and others. There's little "go along to get along." They can also be very aware of slights and moral issues, all of which are part and parcel of group dynamics. They often feel out-of-sync with others, so they don't like to identify with groups. They question authority and rules. They have many interests and learn things rapidly -- far faster than a career track ("we promote people to senior account manager only after 3 years") says they can.

Of course, while all these characteristics make climbing a hierarchy unpleasant, they make gifted adults into great entrepreneurs. As anyone who's run a business knows, when you're in charge, and when it's your idea on the line, you have to learn to do everything. You have to learn to do it yesterday. And you have to be better than everyone else at what you do, which makes perfectionism a good thing. You can also run your business based on whatever morality you think is right. For instance, one of my Grindhoppers' new start-up ventures, GreenPrint, was profiled yesterday in Walter Mossberg's column in the Wall Street Journal. GreenPrint stops your printer from printing wasted pages, e.g., ones with just a line of text, like the copyright statement at the bottom of a webpage. This particular Grindhopper really values the environment, and so can run a company that exists both to make money and to save trees.

I certainly did not ask my subjects' IQs, nor did I ask if they'd been in gifted classes growing up. But I could certainly sense the same impatience that I'm sure many readers of this blog see in their children.

Anything but IQ

New York City's public schools, according to a news release from Florida State University, recently decided to switch from using IQ tests to identify gifted students, to using something called the Gifted Rating Scale. The GRS was developed by FSU prof Steven Pfeiffer, who was the head of Duke's TIP program for awhile, and has written about gifted educaion. You can read about it here.

According to the article, about 400 school districts use the rating scale (so I'd love to know if any of your children's districts are among them). The scale measures children in six areas: intellectual ability, academic ability, creativity, artistic talent, leadership and motivation. Teachers evaluate the children on these scales.

Since Pfeiffer has spent so much time around gifted kids, I'm sure his GRS is meant to make the concept of giftedness and gifted education more palatable to school systems, not to undermine gifted education.

However, I have to admit I'm wary of it. Given how few teachers have extensive training in gifted education, basing the criteria on teacher observations seems prone to problems. Also, a highly motivated child, or a child who motivates others (and hence, is gifted in the leadership category) will certainly be a successful child -- but that's not what giftedness has traditionally meant. The traditional thinking is that gifted children need more advanced work than even a good grade-level class can provide in order to stretch their brains. Motivated children who are good leaders may not. Also, the "academic" scale seems designed to mollify people who complain about students who get straight A's and yet are not labeled gifted. But giftedness and good grades are not the same thing. That's one of the reasons that just using teacher evaluations is a problem.

Of course, I have not seen the scale in practice. I'd love to be proven wrong if anyone has seen it used to great effect. Either way, I do have a question. What's so horrible about IQ anyway? IQ tests may try to put a precise number on something that's hard to measure precisely, but we don't know exactly how many calories the human body needs per day, either. Yet we know that a starving person should be fed. Quibbling about definitions of giftedness, and how to measure it and identify it, can keep us from meeting kids' needs if we're not careful.