Choosing Secondary Schools

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

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

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

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

How to Fix No Child Left Behind

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

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

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

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

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

Research Partnership on Gifted Education

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

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

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

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

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

Big News!

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

When School Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Not Going to Harvard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glamour's Top Ten College Women of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prufrock Press

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

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

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

Voucher Remedy Litigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teen Finishes University of Michigan in One Year

We read a lot these days about perpetual college students -- and college drop-out rates -- so I thought it was refreshing to see an article this morning about a young woman who enrolled at the University of Michigan in the fall and will be graduating this summer. You can read the article here.

Nicole Matisse attended high school outside Detroit, and finished up the curriculum there by her junior year. So then she took enough classes at Oakland Community College to transfer into Michigan as a junior. Rather than coast through her college experience, she then decided to double up on credits and finish up this spring. As a result, she'll be graduating with a bachelor's degree at age 19, and starting law school this fall.

Since Matisse did this all this curriculum compacting at ages 17-19, news accounts of her story feature a notable lack of teeth-gnashing about the topic. Often, children who finish college at age 19 -- because they start at age 14 or 15 -- encounter a lot of skeptical folks who wax nostalgic about their own high school and college experiences.

But there is no particular reason high school or college "should" take 4 years apiece. Indeed, there are many advantages in getting done sooner. Matisse can start her law career with more time and energy for that ladder, or she can get another degree and still be the same age as most of her peers when she starts her first job. With the scandal in student loans filling the airwaves, it should be noted that people who finish college in less time often wind up with fewer loans than people who take longer.

Unfortunately, though, I worry about how the very efficient Matisse will find law school. The first year tends to be tough, but by October or November of year two, most major law firms have hired their summer associates for the following summer. As one law firm recruiter once told me, they then give offers to just about any summer associate who doesn't drool on herself. So Matisse will find that only 1.2 years of her three-year law school program actually matter. Business school is even worse. Most firms hire their summer interns by November of the first year of B-school, then hire them permanently after the summer. That means only 2 months of the whole 2-year program matter. But perhaps this gifted young woman will find a way to introduce the concept of curriculum compacting to graduate school as well.

Mind Games

Nell Casey has a story in Cookie magazine's May/June issue on "the cult of the wunderkind." She says that after a 1994 Carnegie Corporation report claiming that the 0-3 years were critical for neurological development, an explosion of educational toys, games and videos aimed at that age group hit the scene. Every major magazine did a story on ways of increasing children's intelligence and even though marketing studies find that Gen X moms don't like it when products are aggressivey marketed as educational, they buy them anyway.

Baby Einstein is, of course, the epitome of this trend. Sold for $25 million in 2001 to Disney, the brand is now showing up everywhere, to the tune of $250 million in sales per year. Toys R Us, Buy Buy Baby, you name it. The educational nature of the books has subsequently been watered down to pointlessness. I flipped through a Baby Einstein picture book at a store today, and saw no reason it couldn't have been any other picture book of animals, colors, etc. But somehow it's got the halo effect of being for parents who want smart children. (Funny quote from the Casey story: "One health professional interviewed ... posits that 'the reason babies seemed so riveted on Baby Einstein videos was that they were actually slipping into what could be described as a low-level seizure state.'")

As I've said in past posts, I don't like the narrative of pushy parents forcing all these educational toys on their children from birth in the hopes of getting their tots into Harvard later in life. Very few parents fall into this category. The average child watches more hours of TV per day than any of us care to think about, very little of it even claiming to be educational. If well-meaning parents want to buy children books with colors and animals and shapes and so forth that claim to boost intelligence, well, hey, at least they're buying them books. While some children have been "hothoused," in most schools extreme intelligence is not exactly perceived as a good thing. One wonders how those pushing this narrative would feel if nature suddenly bestowed upon them children with IQs of 160+.

But Casey does have a point about the extreme neuroses everyone seems to feel entitled to inflict on parents. She felt if she gave her infant a single bottle, she would have harmed his intelligence for life. When she did, she chose a formula brand loaded with DHA and ARA, the "smart" fatty acids (the research is unclear on whether these actually boost IQ). Even if all the neuroses raised IQ a point or two, though, this can disappear in statistical noise. Gifted children are gifts. Relaxing and enjoying them is probably the most gracious way to accept such a present.

Politics and the gifted kid

Though it's only early 2007, the 2008 political cycle is in full swing in this country, which is no doubt causing some interesting discussions in some families of gifted kids. First, gifted kids tend to be more aware of "adult" subjects like politics and current events (and find it very frustrating that their peers are more into TV shows and toys). Second, gifted kids tend to have a profound desire for justice, and sensitivity to injustices. While I think neither the conservative nor the liberal side of the American political spectrum has a lock on just causes, my experience is that a number of gifted kids learn toward the left.

I certainly did for a long time. For starters, I've always liked to be contrarian, and many of my fellow Hoosiers were unthinkingly conservative. I didn't realize that it was just as possible to be unthinkingly liberal, since the "smart" people I knew with advanced degrees and the like overwhelmingly leaned left (a fact that demographic/political surveys back up). Eventually, I studied economics and decided that big government didn't protect the little guy. My interest in justice took on a decidedly free market slant and, before I knew it, I was voting that way, and was engaging in dorm room arguments on the opposite side that were every bit as obnoxious as they were before.

My experiences around gifted kids these days, though, lead me to believe that most more naturally align themselves with the liberal side of the political spectrum. Liberals talk in a narrative of injustices (poverty, environmental devastation) that can then be remedied with government solutions. Conservative interest groups are only just now starting to adopt this narrative (the hassled small business owner, the home owner subject to eminent domain, the urban child locked in failing schools) with free market or limited government solutions. Plenty of gifted children feel like outsiders, and the Democratic party often comes across as more sympathetic to outsiders. Plus, it's easy to believe government should "do more" when you don't personally have to deal with much red tape, and you don't pay much in the way of taxes. All of these mean that an election conducted in a self-contained gifted class might not come out the same way as one conducted in the nation at large.

I'm curious if other people have found this to be the case. Given that gifted kids often like to argue, too, I'm sure homes with split political affiliations turn into battlegrounds every few years!

Surviving Nerdhood

A recent interview with Sylvia Rimm (author of See Jane Win) in Education News covers a variety of fascinating topics related to gifted education, and can be found here. For this blog, I thought I'd write about the last question, which broaches the topic I find most fascinating: Nerdhood.

Yes, nerdhood. According to Rimm, surving "nerdhood" as an adolescent can do great things for you later in life. It "builds independence and selectivity about friendships," she says. "As former governor of New Jersey Christine Whitman pointed out, her separateness in adolescence gave her the strength to be strong in politics when at the end of the day, you may indeed feel very alone. There are many successful adults who viewed themselves as nerds in adolescence. ... Parents and teachers can reassure these kids that having a few good friends is more important than the popularity that is so admired in middle and high schools. "

As a recovering nerd myself, I find this reassuring indeed. It is true that being well-liked by people who were born within 6 months of you and live within 3 miles of you has little bearing on the kinds of skills you'll need to make your way in the wider world. And some realizations you gain from social isolation can be a big positive. Making a living as a writer, for instance, involves a lot of rejection. I don't take it personally. Likewise, I threw myself a book launch party for Grindhopping last week, and I was amazed by the number of acquaintances who bothered to stop by. Since my self-perception doesn't depend on the number of people who show up at my parties, I could simply enjoy the serendipity of who showed up, and not worry about who didn't. You avoid a lot of mental angst that way.

I recall Mavis Leno (wife of Jay) saying in a magazine interview once that she could be happy her whole life simply knowing she'd never have to live through middle school again. If middle school was rough for beautiful, brilliant Mavis, that says a lot about the institution. But even so, while having a rough time in adolescence is certainly not something parents should hope for with their children (the Columbine anniversary lurks around the corner... and who knows what demons inspired yesterday's shooting at Virginia Tech) viewing it as a character building experience is better than viewing it as a trauma. And parents can help by pointing out that in the long run, it's better to be smart and ambitious than to be adored by people who will never do a blessed thing in their lives.

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

Kurt Vonnegut, the author of eccentric, classic novels from The Sirens of Titan to Slaughterhouse Five, died yesterday at age 84. There are obituaries floating around the web, but here's one from USA Today.

Vonnegut was still on the lecture circuit until recently. I heard him speak in the fall of 1996, and even in 2005, he appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As Stewart told the audience, "As an adolescent, [Vonnegut] made my life bearable."

I agree. I first discovered Vonnegut's novels during a 10th grade independent study literature class. His prose was clean, stark, appealing ("So it goes.") His oddball characters and absurd time shifts have won over many a gifted, disaffected teen stuck in the absurd construction of high school. His novels invited you to engage in the Big Questions. Your high school classmates -- too stuck on who said what to whom at whose locker -- did not offer such engagement. And so Vonnegut provided an escape.

A number of other novelists have provided a similar service over the years. I was never so big on Catcher in the Rye (it's so obviously about teen angst that it becomes a bit too much) but The World According to Garp embraced the absurdist element to perfection. I'd love to hear about other people's Make-My-Life-Bearable novels from adolescence. What books are transformative for the gifted teen?

Amazing Kids

Just a real quick post, a request from Jacob Komar, a Gifted Exchange reader who's been involved with Davidson Institute programs for years. When he was 9, he founded a non-profit called Computers for Communities that refurbishes used PCs and distributes them to people who might not otherwise have access to such technology. Now that he's 14, Computers for Communities has distributed over 1,000 computers. He's also taught a number of prison inmates how to do the refurbishing, thus giving them a skill that might be useful upon their release.

Anyway, Jacob has been selected as a Brick Award winner from the organization dosomething.org. The website is asking visitors to vote on which project should receive an additional $15,000 in operational funds. There are a lot of deserving projects, but obviously Jacob would appreciate a boost in his category! If you have a Yahoo account, you can vote at this site, and if you don't have an account, you can create one fairly painlessly.

Voting, Jacob tells me, ends on Monday. I'll post how it all turns out.

Cluster Grouping in Arizona

Arizona has become an interesting laboratory for different school options over the past few years (a lot of the school choice legislation and litigation is coming out of this rapidly growing state) and consequently, gifted education is experiencing some changes as well. An article in the Arizona Republic recently noted that Paradise Valley gifted first graders will now be kept together in clusters. This means that the students identified as gifted will be put in one class with a teacher trained in meeting their needs. They will not be the only students in the class, however. The balance of these first grade classes will be filled with "normal" kids (whatever that means!)

It's an interesting compromise position. On one hand, it's a good thing, as some schools like to spread their gifted children around to different classes and just do pull-out on occasion. Administrators may believe that these kids will provide examples to other students, that these kids are "easier" to teach, and therefore every teacher deserves one. It's awful for the gifted kids themselves, because they quickly get labeled as the smartest kid in the room, or sometimes the teacher's pet. The teacher can rarely create lesson plans specifically for the one kid. So the gifted kids wind up tutoring the other students and becoming unpaid teaching assistants. They also miss out on the social benefits and the academic challenge of being with other kids like themselves. So clustering all the gifted kids in a grade in one class is a massive improvement from the default scheme.

On the other hand, if you're going to cluster and train the teacher (or hire one with a gifted endorsement specifically for this purpose), why not just create a self-contained class? There may not be enough students at one elementary school to justify this, but that's what magnet schools and school buses are for. Even very good teachers have trouble differentiating the curriculum across a wide variety of needs, and group lessons tend to be taught to the lower middle of the bell curve. The cluster system still extracts a high price in terms of efficiency and achievement in order to maintain a quasi-egalitarian set-up. It's better than nothing, but we'll have to see how it works for Paradise Valley, long term.

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.