The Project

I am blogging from Washington DC, where I attended the Davidson Institute's annual Fellows award ceremony at the Library of Congress last night. I also got to participate in interviews of all the finalists in the morning. They're a fun bunch of young people -- some more intense than others as you can imagine. We learned about the ontology of science, mesmerizing music, nanotubes and Kansas education. It makes one a bit wistful for the days when creativity does not necessarily need to be shoehorned into what you can get a grant for, what you can convince your company's research department to fund, what the major New York publishers are buying and the realities of trying to make a living in incredibly competitive fields.

Indeed, the high school and college years are probably the last years when this is possible. Which brings me to my thesis for today, one that I hope the readers of Gifted Exchange will help me develop over the next few weeks.

I think it is extremely important for gifted children -- not just the profoundly gifted ones -- but perhaps kids who score in the top 5% or so on standardized tests, to have a Big Project during high school.

While there are a lot of reform efforts going on in US education, much of it remains, shall we say, pointless for people who function a reasonable distance from the mean. You spend years learning material you could learn in weeks if you tried, and you often see no point to it, aside from vague societal pronouncements that education is important, and you should stay in school (say this while patting child on the head).

Good high schools often have reasonable classes, such as the AP franchise, which has so far resisted watering down. But still, you can get mired in the day to day. Humans in general, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has postulated, are happiest when they are in the "flow." (Read one article about the new science of happiness here). They are working hard -- absolutely absorbed -- in something that is reasonably challenging, but enjoyable. They are stretched to the extent of their capacities, but not frustratingly beyond.

A big project can hit this sweet spot. For me, I am happiest when I have figured out the thesis of a longer piece and am cranking away writing it (or editing my novel -- I just finished one and am looking for test readers if anyone is interested in giving feedback...). The Davidson Fellows spoke yesterday of their hours in the lab, their hours at the piano bench, these hours which don't seem like hours when you love what you are doing. Rick Warren talks of the Purpose-Driven Life. A Big Project can give a young person a sense of purpose during what is often an alienating stage of life -- when you are old enough to think as an adult, but not old enough for society to treat you as one.

Some young people -- like some of the Davidson Fellows -- think to take on these projects on their own. But most people don't. Some high schools now have multi-year research programs that try to guide students into finding these kinds of projects, and finding the kinds of mentors who can offer effective advice and support. These don't always work well. The Indiana Academy in theory had a research program -- I started it trying to do humanities research and it really just got lost in the shuffle (and gave me the one C ever on my transcripts). But creative writing classes with an emphasis on longer works could also step into the void. As it is, these classes tend to assign short stories because they're easier to workshop, even though there is no real market for short stories in the real world.

The point is -- young people need time and guidance to create the kinds of Big Projects that can give their teen years a purpose. As a side benefit, these projects tend to look awesome on college applications and can often be entered in contests like Davidson and the Intel Science Talent Search. A cynic might say that the rise of Big Projects among high schoolers is solely a function this -- and of parents pushing their kids to do something that stands out on a college application and confers bragging rights. We should just relax in high school, this school of thought goes. There's plenty of time for work afterwards.

The parental pressure worry has merit. The best projects are student initiated. As Barbi Frank, head of the extremely successful John F. Kennedy High School research program told me the other day, she tells parents, "suggest different topics, but don’t make it your passion. Children need to be passionate about it because they’re the ones who are going to be putting all these hours into it for next 3 years."

But I don't think it matters that some kids do these projects to win awards or write better college applications. The real world is all about incentives. As readers of this blog know, I'm no fan of Alfie Kohn's punished-by-rewards philosophy. If incentives nudge a few more kids to try a big project (and indeed, about half of the Davidson Fellows said that the possibility of winning an award affected their decision to do their project) then that's great. Big Projects teach children how to set a goal, break it into small steps, and develop the self-discipline to execute on each step.

These are life skills. Our world will be better off if more children learn these skills at a young age.

Ligon Middle School Detracks

Many many moons ago, I was a sixth grade student at a place called Ligon Middle School in Raleigh, N.C. I only went to this magnet school -- located in a rather dingy part of the city -- for one year. My parents elected to move to South Bend, Indiana shortly thereafter. But I remember it as being a fairly good year academically.

Ligon was, at the time, one of the most thoroughly tracked schools around. I was a member of the "Chell team," named after my wonderful home room teacher who just retired recently after 36 years of teaching. The Chell team consisted of about 200 students who'd been identified as gifted. We all took academic classes with a set group of teachers (math, language arts, social studies, science) who only taught the Chell team students. (There were also plenty of options for electives -- a Tarheel ghost stories class, a tap dancing class, etc. -- what fun! These were usually not tracked and anyone could sign up).

So far, so good. However, within the Chell team, we were further subdivided into the apple group, the orange group (or some such) and other harmless fruit names. The apples all took academic classes only with the apples, the oranges with the oranges, etc. Though it was never explicitly stated, it turns out that these fruit groups were also organized by IQ scores/giftedness levels.

That's two levels of tracking if you're counting. Given that some schools don't even like to have one level of ability grouping, it was only a matter of time before this system got re-evaluated. It turns out that that matter of time is now. According to the Raleigh News & Observer, this year, "Ligon limits classes to the most gifted."

Rather than dividing into teams based on ability levels, only the most gifted students (in essence, the apples of the Chell team) will be in classes with other gifted students for all their core academic subjects. The more moderately gifted students (i.e., the oranges, pears, bananas and so forth of what used to be the Chell team) will attend social studies and science classes, at least, that feature mixed ability groupings.

I am of two minds about this. On one hand, there is a big difference between a moderately gifted kid whose needs can, in fact, be met in a good, challenging, grade level classroom, and a profoundly gifted kid whose needs cannot. At a normal middle school, it makes far more sense to keep the gifted program rather small, and not get into one of these politically untenable situations where 25% of students are suddenly labeled gifted.

But Ligon is already a magnet school -- the 200 or so students on the Chell team had applied from all over Wake County. The school system, total, has a pool of several thousand 6th graders. We are still talking only a small percentage being served in this gifted program. One of the things I liked best about Ligon is that we weren't just tracked for math and reading. You could do more advanced work in science, for instance, and have better discussions, because of the tracking. Creating more mixed ability classes has already had the predictable effect. According to the N&O article, "David Gaudet, a sixth-grade science teacher, said the main difference for him has been how he paces his lessons. He said he spends more time reviewing material in the mixed classes than in the classes exclusively with gifted students."

In other words, the moderately gifted students at Ligon are simply going to be bored under this new scenario. But hey, according to Scott Lyons, Ligon's principal, "This is more in keeping with Wake County's values." I guess at least they're explicit about what those values are.

The Young Poet

While there have always been precocious mathematicians, the ranks of precocious poets are a bit more thin. Gifted young people who read a lot and think a lot can often write clearly and compellingly. But an understanding of the human condition is a bit like wine. It tends to deepen and become more complex with age. As Roald Hoffmann, poet and Nobel Prize winner (in chemistry!) once told me, "Children write beautiful poetry. There is an innocence and power to observations that are not stunted by too many things. Children are also repositories of our romantic notions about innocence. They write interesting poetry." But... "They don't write great poetry."

Of course, adults seldom write great poetry either. One of the reasons we don't write it is that most of us don't read it. Few books of poems make the display tables in Barnes & Noble's. Of major general interest magazines, only the New Yorker publishes it. Consequently we don't know what good poetry sounds like (for often, it is meant to be said aloud) and even people who might write good stuff wind up cranking out greeting card fare.

So that's why I was thrilled to see an article at the Poetry Foundation's website about homeschoolers re-introducing poetry to a new generation. Poetry can be extremely kid friendly (although the tale of the 4-year-old lisping Emily Dickinson is hilarious: "Because I could not stop for deff, He kindwee stopped for me..."). When poetry drills deep into our heads as we memorize it, we wind up meditating on the words and finding deeper meaning in them -- something that often happens for me with songs. But that requires memorization, something traditional schools have all but dropped. That's too bad, because it's a fun challenge for bright kids. Bright pre-school aged kids often commit books to memory just because they like them so much. Why not continue that with poetry? Homeschooling gives you the time to commit a text to memory -- or at least the freedom to read and read the good stuff. Hopefully at least a few regular school programs do this too. Without reading the good stuff, it's unlikely there will be many great poets in the future.

I'm curious about which poetry texts readers of this blog like sharing with their children, and if your kids have been interested in memorizing poetry. Do they like to write it too? Which books are best for parents looking to introduce the genre to their little ones?

Homeschooling while holding a job?

This is not an official GE post, but more of a request for a column I'm writing for USA Today on homeschooling. I would love to talk with a parent who homeschooled a child while holding a job (working from home/self-employed is OK, as long as it was a "real" reasonable money-making enterprise). Please let me know if you'd be willing to be interviewed. Thanks!

On Acing the SAT

NPR's Morning Edition ran a fascinating snippet recently about a program at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which is a magnet high school in Baltimore. The school's "Ingenuity Project" has a good track record of students earning perfect scores on various sections of the SAT. (NPR sounded like everyone was getting 2400s or 1600s -- the old perfect score -- but the school web page is more toned down -- it says from 2001 to 2006, 12 students scored 800s on various sections, and one scored a 1600; you can listen to the NPR story here).

The most fascinating thing for me about this story was that NPR made it sound like the point of the program was to get students to ace the SAT, which isn't the case (though the project does like to publicize such scores). The program is designed to have Baltimore students achieve on the national levels in various competitions and gain acceptances to top colleges. To do that, the Ingenuity Project has students accelerate through the high school math curriculum and do calculus by their junior years. The program also leaves plenty of time for AP science courses, labs, and independent research (see here for more details). I've been coming across more and more public schools that have these research programs -- partly to have students win Davidson Fellowships, Intel nods and the like. What is rewarded gets done. We will talk about this more in the near future.

But anyway, back to the SAT question. The Ingenuity Project is a great example of a high expectations public school program. In 2005, three participants earned finalist nods in the Intel Science Talent Search. But with all the accelerated math these students are doing, you might think that more than 12 students would have achieved perfect SAT section scores. As one young man told NPR, there was nothing on the SAT they hadn't seen.

Fundamentally, a test like the SAT tests both content knowledge and your ability to call it up quickly and apply it to new problems. This is one of the reasons people dislike the SAT -- if your geometry class grades show you know the subject, why does it matter how quickly you can conjure it up? Why does it matter that you can solve a geometry problem that's next to an algebra problem? Others dismiss the test altogether, saying it can be coached.

But while coaching might raise a kid's 1800 to a 1920, coaching alone will not get anyone a perfect score. If a program like Baltimore's Ingenuity Project, which likes to publicize its perfect scores, can't get more than 12 of them in a 5 year period, that shows how difficult such a score is to achieve. It's not just a matter of having an excellent high school curriculum -- though obviously that's a big part of it.

For many years there's been a cultural debate over the place of the SAT. Once it was viewed as more of an intelligence test -- designed less to cover the high school curriculum, and more to identify people with high intelligence, regardless of what their high schools covered. Over the years this idea has fallen out of favor. Some schools are now even moving away from requiring the SAT.

But I still think this idea of fast critical thinking has a place. It may not be the most critical factor for predicting high grades in college -- it would make sense that one's academic grades in high school would be a better predictor of this. But it may predict some of one's future success in life. A Vanderbilt study done two years ago studied kids who did well on the SAT, taken in 7th or 8th grade. They were more likely than a comparison group of graduate students to earn an annual salary of more than $100,000 or achieve tenure in a top-50 institution. That's not what the SAT sells itself as predicting - so it's quite interesting if that's the case.

Homeschooling goes upscale

Once upon a time, homeschooling was viewed as something only freakishly religious or hippie parents did. In the past 15 years or so, though, it's gone mainstream. Estimates very wildly, but a 2003 National Household Education Survey found that more than a million US kids met the homeschooled definition.

There are a number of reasons for this, both on the push side (dissatisfaction with schools) and on the pull side (the internet makes finding curricular materials or even whole courses much easier; online communities offer support for what can sometimes be an isolated undertaking). In our wired world, we are less inclined to see sharp dividing lines between places where we do things -- an office for income generation, school for learning, home for leisure. I met a family in Texas not long ago in which the father was working from home and the mom was homeschooling their kids. In other words, no one ever really had to leave the place!

Homeschooling offers certain natural advantages. There's a low pupil to teacher ratio, which some people think is important. The hours can be flexible, and so can the curriculum, which is good for kids with special needs. When I was helping Jan and Bob Davidson write Genius Denied, they told me that a huge chunk of their profoundly gifted Young Scholars try homeschooling at some point.

But of course it's not for everyone. One major barrier has always been that homeschooling seems to require one parent to teach the kids, which is pretty much a full-time job. Not every family has a parent who feels qualified to do this, or wants to.

Then, yesterday, I found the most fascinating press release in my in-box. A new New York City education consultancy called QED (Quality Education by Design) is promising to offer parents an alternative to traditional homeschooling. How? They hire certified teachers/tutors in different subjects, piece together a curriculum for your children, and handle all the paperwork with the Board of Education. It's somewhat like retaining an agency to hire a governess, though with more of a focus on subject matter experts and experiential learning (one example they cite is going to the Galapagos to study Darwin). Hey, if you've got the money, why not?

Clearly, the market for this service is limited. The vast majority of American families do not have the resources to hire the equivalent of a full-time teacher, though in crazy Manhattan, it's probably a bargain compared to paying private school tuition for three kids. I'm hoping to write more about this topic for some of the publications I write for, and will update this blog once I (hopefully) get interviews set up.

But in the meantime, I wanted to throw this idea out there to Gifted Exchange readers. What do you think of the idea of outsourcing homeschooling, but retaining the customization homeschooling allows? While it's easy to dismiss the idea as yet another example of the strangeness of some parts of this country (what, the private schools now aren't good enough?) I tend to think that there's a good idea here. Over the past few decades we've seen again and again how ideas and products that catch on among the rich and/or famous trickle down to the rest of us. Once, back-up generators existed only in mansions housing extremely rare fish requiring aerated water. Now, they're becoming relatively standard in high-end, but not uber-high-end construction. If more people considered it normal to customize their children's education, I can't help thinking this would benefit education overall.

Are 20% of high school drop-outs gifted?

I spent a year as a fact-checker at USA Today before embarking on a freelance career. The experience of hunting down statistics gave me a statistic of my own: the majority of oft-cited stats are completely inaccurate. We do not know that telecommuters are 40% more productive than office-based workers. We do not know that 80% of 2-income couples have hired a cleaning service. We do not know that only 5% of Americans have a valid passport. Nor do we know that 95% of small businesses fail. Sometimes authors would make the stats sound more accurate by saying "According to the Census Bureau..." or some such, but when asked for back-up, it would always be a link to another news article or someone's website, never a primary source. And, indeed, when I called the primary source, I'd get a lot of loud sighing. In the internet age, incorrect stats get bandied about a lot.

Which leads me to the topic for today's post: the statistic that 20% of high school dropouts are gifted. This stat gets used in a variety of formats, which even at first blush makes it seem problematic. Some people twist it to say that 20% of gifted students drop out. Others say "up to 20% of high school dropouts test in the gifted range" (I think I've been guilty of this one). There are old studies that mention something around this number. The 1972 Marland Report to Congress seems to have used an 18% figure. In 1973, E. Nyquist presented a paper to the National Conference on Gifted saying 19% of New York high school dropouts were gifted. E. Robertson's 1991 article in Equity and Excellence on "Neglected Dropouts: The Gifted and Talented" said 18-25% of GT students drop out. From there things get more slippery. Some people cite one Solorzano 1983 stat saying the figure is up to 18%, but this turns out to be an article in US News & World Report, not an original study.

Of course, all of this hinges on there being a clear definition of giftedness. There isn't one. Some school districts in the past used a clear 130+ IQ definition, but this method has fallen out of favor in terms of more comprehensive assessments, achievement tests and the like. There isn't even a completely uniform definition of a dropout. Some people go back to school later in life -- or at least plan to, and hence wouldn't identify themselves as dropouts. Just on an extremely long sabbatical.

All that being said, I've spent the past few hours reading a late 2002 report from the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented about "Giftedness and High School Dropouts" that has a bit more rigor to it. The report was mainly designed to find out why gifted kids drop out. The answer is that they drop out for the same reasons other kids do. They don't like school, they're failing school, they're pregnant, they want to get a job, their parents didn't finish school, their home life doesn't particularly support learning, etc. The report found that "at risk" gifted kids -- those of lower socioeconomic status -- are more likely to drop out, as are gifted minority kids. These are unfortunate findings but not particularly surprising.

However, to establish these things, they had to find gifted dropouts. And to find them, you have to have some sense of how many of them there are. The study's authors used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study begun in 1988. This tracked 8th graders through the next few years and is the most comprehensive data set available on who stayed in school and who did not (obviously not all dropouts could be found, but many could). The authors had to use some screen for giftedness, and so they chose a relatively broad one. Students were counted as gifted if they participated in their school gifted program, or took more than 3 advanced, enriched or accelerated classes. Obviously, this is not perfect. My first high school's advanced classes would hardly have required a genius IQ to do all right in, but this at least gave the authors some screen for kids being relatively bright.

The numbers? In the first part of the study, "Among 1285 students who completed the Second Follow-Up Dropout Questionnaire, 334 were identified as gifted." That gives us a rate of giftedness among dropouts of 26%. That's even higher than the oft-cited 20%!

But, of course, it's not quite that simple. We need some context here. What is the giftedness rate among the overall population using this definition? For the second part of the study, the authors used the full cohort of 8th graders who completed all the rounds of the longitudinal survey. Of 12,625 students, 3520 met the giftedness definition, or 28%.

In other words, what this survey reveals is that students identified as gifted (by a broad definition) and other students drop out at the same rate -- and indeed, the authors did find this explicitly as well. 5% of both the 12,625 total student sample and the 3520 gifted student sample dropped out.

So what does that mean? My personal definition of giftedness is not nearly so broad as to encompass a full quarter of students. I don't think most other people believe the definition should be so broad, either. When people say "up to 20% of high school dropouts test in the gifted range" we generally use that stat to imply that the gifted are over-represented in the dropout population. We don't actually know that. I would love to see a study of students with 150+ IQs, looking at their dropout rates. The other way of getting at this -- studying all dropouts, and seeing how many have 150+ IQs -- would probably reveal the obvious. It's a very small percentage, precisely because so few people have IQs that test so high.

So if I'm reading this all correctly, to get a rate of giftedness among dropouts of 20%, you simply have to set the definition of giftedness among the total student population at 20%. If you set the definition of giftedness at 10% among the general population, you'd probably get a rate of 10% among dropouts too. This may not go all the way to 1%, or .005%, though it might. Or there might be more of a bell-curve, with top 1%-ers being less likely to drop out, but the misunderstood, lone 200+ IQ kid in the 0.001% being more likely to do so. I just don't know. But there's no reason to believe that gifted students are over-represented among dropouts.

However, it is interesting to note that being relatively bright (for instance, in the top quartile of seeming academic potential) does not protect students from dropping out. The 20% stat is usually cited to counter the belief that the gifted are all academic superstars. Many are, but some aren't, and it's important to keep in mind when looking at the numbers that many people drop out who are quite capable of not only completing high school but going on to college and even more. This is a huge waste of human potential, whatever the numbers happen to be.

Parenting Magazine: Is Your Child Gifted?

I don't remember ever subscribing to Parenting magazine, but somehow it keeps appearing in my mailbox. This month, though, I got over my grumpiness that a magazine called "Parenting" addresses only moms long enough to open to the feature well where, lo and behold, there was a feature called "Is Your Child Gifted?" I was glad I read it, because this was probably one of the most straightforward, non-hyped articles for a general audience about gifted children that I've read in awhile.

The answer to the title question? Probably not! "All kids are special, but not all are gifted," author Paula Spencer (full disclosure: an acquaintance of mine) notes. "Gifted has become one of the most tossed-about words in the parenting lexicon. Unfortunately -- sorry, but let's get this out of the way right up front -- it's also one of the most misused. The vast majority of children are not gifted. Only 2-5 percent of kids fit the bill, by various estimates. Of those, only one in 100 is considered highly gifted. Prodigies (those wunderkinds who read at 2 and go to college at 10) are rarer still -- like one to two in a million. And despite the boom in infant-stimulation techniques, educational DVDs, learning toys, and enrichment classes, those numbers haven't been increasing. You can't build giftedness; it's mostly built in."

Paula goes on to describe various myths of giftedness: that all gifted kids are nerds or geeks, that all eager learners are gifted ("all young children are naturally eager learners"), and that gifted kids are good at everything. She dispels the idea that prodigies are created by parents who push them. "Most true prodigies push their parents to keep up," she says, and she notes that gifted kids do not necessarily become superstar adults. Personality has as much to do with it as anything else.

While the article is mostly written for a general audience, she does give a list of signs of potential giftedness for moms (sorry, "parents") who read the piece and still wonder if there's something different going on with their kids. These signs are dead on accurate -- a preference for older children, for instance, a less-than-typical need for adult guidance in activities, and an interest in seeing patterns. But most endearing to me is that she even gets the nearly throwaway details right. For instance, she notes that IQ tests can be used as part of gifted identification, and that "testing between ages 4 and 9 is optimal." Since plenty of schools don't even consider identification until 3rd grade, this note to parents that earlier testing has its place will be extremely helpful to any parent who reads the article, checks off the early signs for a child, and then wonders what to do about sending an avid reader to kindergarten.

I don't think I'll become a regular Parenting reader (I learned in other articles that I was endangering my child by putting him in the shopping cart seat and cutting his fingernails with an adult nail clipper) but it's always nice to see articles about giftedness that present the issues clearly.

What I've Learned from "Where Are They Now?"

For the past several months, I've been writing a weekly column at the Scientific American website called "Where Are They Now?" This column profiles former Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners and finalists. For many years, the Westinghouse corporation brought 40 top high school scientists to Washington each year to honor them and have them meet each other. They also gave them significant scholarship money.

Since this has been going on since the 1940's, these former finalists are now in many different places in their careers. By looking at the careers of these people identified as high-potential young scientists, I've been trying to cover career issues in science, and also show how scientific progress is made.

At least that's the idea. It's been a fascinating few months of interviews. I've learned a few things that I think are relevant to the world of gifted education.

1. Top high school science has been professionalized.

One younger finalist apologized to me the other day when I asked how he'd come up with his project. Basically, he'd attended a summer science research program, and been assigned a mentor -- a research professor -- who'd come up with a good question for him to research. The professor knew there might be interesting results in that area and, not surprisingly, the young man got results.

He was somewhat sheepish that he hadn't come up with his own project topic, but the truth is, very few finalists after about 1975 came up with their own research topics, at least in chemistry, biology or physics (computer science is another story, which I'll get to below). Most have apprenticed themselves to a research professor in a big lab, and worked on a topic that the professor knows will be interesting. They're the ones who have to do the work, of course, but they didn't come up with the problem.

There's a simple reason for this. Even an extremely bright young person, who's taken AP chem, AP bio, etc., will probably not know enough about the chem or bio literature to know where are the best areas to look. Furthermore, they need lab equipment to work on the new problems in these fields, and their own high school labs won't have it. (This is not universally true -- Carol Fassbinder-Orth experimented on her own family's honeybees, and was named a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, Westinghouse's progeny).

By contrast, the older finalists I spoke with (from the 1950's) did, in general, come up with their own projects. They blew things up in their basements. They did work in their own high school labs. Their projects probably wouldn't get past a regional science fair now -- but they came up with these ideas themselves. Ronald Breslow, a National Medal of Science winner who was a finalist in 1948, told me that he has mixed feelings about the young people who now contact him, asking to work in his lab. "The plus side of the new system is that it gets a lot of kids into research," he told me. "The minus is that it removes the part we did that was most interesting: use our imaginations to dream up a project and figure out how to work it out."

But in a larger sense, science itself is changing in this way...

2. Scientific progress is often incremental

Just as the Westinghouse winners often work on small pieces of a puzzle that a professor has identified, science now works on this model of big labs cranking out incremental new ideas. Few papers are written by one person these days. There are few flashes of blinding insight like Newton with his apple (which may not have been quite so blinding as the legend says, anyway). Instead, you're sweeping a little more dust out of the corner.

One of the criticisms of the Westinghouse program is that it's identified precious few Nobel Prize winners. The Nobel is somewhat political, so that is what it is, but the truth is, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search didn't even identify that many future members of the National Academy of Sciences, which is somewhat more of a straightforward recognition of who is doing good work.

Yet everyone I've talked to has done something interesting and important. I would say that the science of breaking new ground is hard to figure out.

One thing that does work, though, is inventing a new technology. New technology, rather than new research on old technology, often enables data gathering somewhere that no one has ever gone. Some of my most interesting profile subjects (Leroy Hood, for instance, whose team invented the automated DNA sequencer) took this approach.

3. Computer science has probably been the most creative, wide-open field in the past 50 years

I've interviewed a few people who won Westinghouse awards for their computer science projects. Ray Kurzweil programmed a computer to write music. Terence Sanger (going up on the site this week, I believe) wrote a computer language to work on the SOL-20 microcomputer. These finalists almost all came up with their own projects and executed them from start to finish. I don't know much about computer programming, but it strikes me that it's been a bit more of a field where anyone can try something and see how it goes. Perhaps this is why there are so many high tech start-ups.

4. Judges can be wowed by real, serious social science research

One of the first finalists I interviewed, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, did a survey of her peers regarding their relationships with their parents. She was named a finalist. Social science is still science, but over the years this kind of got lost in the professionalizing of high school science. And if social science isn't seen as real science, then no wonder literature and music and other such things are seen as less serious. That's one of the reasons I'm glad that several Davidson Fellowships go, every year, to young writers and composers in addition to lab scientists. It reminds us that it's possible to do serious work in what too many people deem fluffy fields.

Meet the 2008 Davidson Fellows!

The Davidson Institute for Talent Development just put out a press release listing the new Davidson Fellows. The annual Davidson Fellowship program (funded by Jan and Bob Davidson, with whom I co-authored Genius Denied) gives college scholarships to young people who've done prodigious works in various fields. I'll write more around the time of the awards ceremony in late September (and maybe get a chance to profile a few of these young people), but here's a preview. According to DITD, this year's fellows have:

-- Invented a new type of solar panel;
-- Designed a computer model to aid physicians in patient diagnosis;
-- Bridged the relevance of classical music to younger generations;
-- Improved the mathematics of digital signal representations used in
cell phones and music players; and
-- Discovered a technology to more effectively treat breast cancer.

And here are their names:

2008 Davidson Fellow Laureates
$50,000 Scholarships
-- Mr. Akhil Mathew, 16, Madison, N.J.
-- Mr. Sikandar Porter-Gill, 17, Gaithersburg, Md.
-- Miss Christine Shrock, 17, Setauket, N.Y.
-- Mr. Philip Streich, 17, Platteville, Wis.
-- Mr. Conrad Tao, 14, New York, N.Y.


2008 Davidson Fellows
$25,000 Scholarships
-- Mr. Michael Cherkassky, 16, Minneapolis, Minn.
-- Miss August Siena Thomas, 17, Montague, Mass.
-- Miss Hilda Huang, 12, Palo Alto, Calif.
-- Miss Jasmine Miller, 17, Nashville, Tenn.
-- Miss Saraswathi Shukla, 17, Princeton, N.J.
-- Mr. Vijay Venkatesh, 17, Laguna Niguel, Calif.
-- Mr. William Yuan, 12, Portland, Ore.
-- Mr. Charles Zhang, 17, Rochester, Mich.


$10,000 Scholarships
-- Mr. Nathan Georgette, 17, Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
-- Miss Molly Hensley-Clancy, 16, Minneapolis, Minn.
-- Mr. Kyle Hutzler, 16, Huntingtown, Md.
-- Mr. Michael Leap, 17, Okemos, Mich.
-- Miss Divya Nag, 17, El Dorado Hills, Calif.
-- Miss Avanthi Raghavan, 17, Orlando, Fla.
-- Miss Sarah Waliany, 16, Arcadia, Calif.

Hopefully they're all celebrating in style in these last few days before the next school year starts up again.

Are Boys and Girls' Math Scores Now the Same?

A slew of articles this past week, based on a recent study in Science, claim that boys and girls' math test scores are now the same. According to this article in the New York Times, the average math scores for boys and girls on the tests taken for No Child Left Behind are identical. This article from the LA Times notes that boys and girls score in the top 5% at just about the same rates. Many of these articles gleefully note that former Harvard President Larry Summers was wrong about his statements a few years ago that women are underrepresented among math and science faculty because they are underrepresented in the top levels of abstract reasoning ability. Many articles also mention the stupid talking Barbie who, many years ago now, said "Math class is tough." Girls are just as tough as boys! the articles say. The idea that girls aren't good at math "doesn't add up."

But as Heather MacDonald points out on the City Journal website, this isn't exactly what the Science study said. Average student scores for boys and girls were the same, and top 5% scores were similar, but among the top 1% (and the very bottom), there was a lot of variability. For white 11th graders, for instance, boys outnumbered girls 2-1 at the 99th percentile. What does one make of this? It should be noted that these are also No Child Left Behind tests -- scoring at the 99th percentile on one of them isn't exactly tough for a highly gifted kid. And it's highly gifted kids who grow up to be the mathematicians of the future. Perhaps a truly tough test (for instance, the math SAT given to 7th graders) would show a different spread.

MacDonald brings up some good points, but what I find most fascinating is one that she just touches on -- among Asian students scoring in the top 1%, if I'm reading her correctly, there are slightly more girls than boys. So while she claims that the skew toward boys scoring better among white students shows that Summers was not wrong (boys are more likely to be extremely gifted or extremely mentally disabled), the Asian scores may show something else. But what exactly?

Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between the "there are no differences, just cultural bias" camp and the "boys occupy both extremes" camp. One hesitates to stereotype, but my observational experience of gifted Asian children is that families value science and math achievement in girls and boys equally. There may be later assumptions about occupations and childcare and the like, but these don't show up among 11th graders. And hence they don't really show up among 11th grade scores. That may be a more complicated point than can come across in these articles, but if it's true, it's one worth looking at.

No Child Left Offline

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article about how different towns are retooling themselves to compete for talent and jobs in an economy where many people can live anywhere.

One of the most interesting programs was Kentucky's efforts to bring broadband internet connections to all rural parts of the state. Certainly this is allowing people to work from home while living in low-cost rural regions, and is also helping people start small businesses. A component of it is to distribute laptops to children -- see this article on No Child Left Offline.

While I know some readers of this blog aren't as big fans of distance learning as I am, I think there is potential for a program like No Child Left Offline to do good things for gifted education. When enough students have fast internet access, it is possible to tailor a curriculum to meet their needs using courses from elsewhere, access to mentors, etc. Not all small, rural districts have enough highly gifted students to create special classes or schools. But any district can come up with a computer. We'll see how this all shakes out.

Summer School and Gifted Kids

When I was a kid, I remember that "summer school" was for kids who were in danger of being held back. But, of course, there's more to it than that. Some districts offer summer enrichment programs (in, for instance, Mandarin). When I lived in South Bend, a highlight of each year was participating in the "Firefly" musical production run by the school corporation, which pulled the best singers and dancers from the entire district. This was, technically, a summer school course.

Unlike the federal government, many states require themselves to balance their budgets. That means that as the economy turns south, tax revenues dry up, and something has to go. Alas, this tends not to be the person assigned to make sure all highway signs reflect the new gubernatorial administration as soon as it changes over, or the person assigned to print out all emails for the Luddite assistant undersecretary for agriculture public relations. Legislatures instead tend to cut the enrichment programs. The New York Times has an article about this here. If any readers have seen enrichment programs hit the chopping block in their district, please let me know.

On Working Hard

A few weeks ago, one reader asked me to post more stories about the Indiana Academy, to try to demystify the concept a little bit. Since news is a little slow on the gifted education front during the summer, I'll post something about it now.

The Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and the Humanities is a residential school for gifted high school juniors and seniors. It is located on the campus of Ball State University and enrolls approximately 300 students. It's one of about a dozen similar public schools around the country (though it's one of only a very few that also emphasize the humanities. Most specialize in math and science, because these are seen as "hard" subjects that you can be gifted in. I am continually amazed how few people think the humanities are actually difficult -- done right they are!)

Anyway, my husband and I were talking recently about whether we would ever consider such an option for our son, Jasper. My husband actually lived at home for part of college, so the idea of having a child leave even earlier, at 15 or 16, seems foreign. Plus, he reminded me, my "normal" high school in South Bend produced a number of successful people in the grade above me, and mine. He's met one woman who got her chemistry PhD at Stanford, one who is getting a PhD at Harvard, has heard of a guy in my class who is now a doctor, etc. All of which is true.

But the occasional bright student does not change the culture of a school. The most fundamental difference for me between South Bend Clay High School, and the Indiana Academy, is that the Indiana Academy had way higher expectations. It taught me to work hard for something -- to throw myself into it -- when success was not guaranteed. This intellectual risk-taking is almost completely absent from the American educational experience for bright children today, and that is a shame.

I've been thinking about that lately, because I am deeply involved right now in an almost fantastically hard task. I have recently taken on a book project (another collaboration) that must be written in its entirety in about 5 weeks. So I'm cranking out about 2,000 publishable words per day, in addition to my other writing projects.

But here's the thing -- it has never occurred to me that it might be "too much." And, indeed, the darn thing is pretty much done a week early. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to throw myself into something and make it happen for a simple reason: that's what I did at the Indiana Academy.

My first semester junior year, I floundered around a bit. I didn't know how to work -- how to set goals and execute against them. But I figured it out. My senior year, I felt that to get into a good college as a not terribly well "hooked" kid from Indiana, I really needed to stand out. So I decided to get straight A's while taking our AP chemistry and AP biology classes simultaneously, plus multi-variable calculus and various humanities class, writing long features for our school newspaper, applying to 7 colleges that all had their own application forms, etc. I really didn't sleep much. I was in the lab a lot, and drawing on every bit of math ability I had to figure out my chemistry equations and the like. But it all wound up working out. I got 5s on all my AP tests, got my A's, got into every college I applied to, won several writing contests. And as these things started happening, my view of myself started to change, too. I had the ability to figure out a situation and make things happen. This does remarkable things for your confidence.

At Clay I never had to work. Really. It's not just that I was the top student in my class, because I often was at the Indiana Academy, too. It's just that what was required to be the top student was more. In theory, all of us could have failed a test (and, indeed, on some of our AP chemistry tests, the top score in the class would be in the 70's; the class median was a B, and to get an A you had to be more than a standard deviation above the mean). That would never have happened at Clay. The tests and mastery level required was set so that someone was inevitably getting a 100. If that someone was inevitably you, then you didn't have to work hard. Simple as that.

We do no favors to bright kids by making things easy for them. The Indiana Academy didn't make things easy -- and that was its biggest gift to me. I'll write more on this subject later, because there are many things that happened at the Indiana Academy to make a good academic environment, but that was the big one.

Call for Entries for Davidson Fellowship Program

Hello everyone-- I've been away on vacation, and in the middle of another massive project, but thought I'd pass along this announcement. I helped Jan and Bob Davidson write Genius Denied several years ago. The Davidson Institute for Talent Development, which they started, awards multiple $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000 scholarships each year for young people who do extraordinary projects. See below for their recent call for submissions for the 2009 program. I would love to see an "Outside the Box" winner this year, so hopefully someone will read this and come up with a wonderful project that no one knows how to categorize!

Davidson Institute Seeks Extraordinary Achievers to Receive $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000 Davidson Fellow Scholarships

The Davidson Institute for Talent Development is offering high achieving young people across the country the opportunity to be named as 2009 Davidson Fellows, an honor accompanied by a $50,000, $25,000 or $10,000 scholarship in recognition of a significant piece of work in Science, Technology, Mathematics, Music, Literature, Philosophy or Outside the Box.

To be eligible, applicants must be under the age of 18 as of Oct. 1, 2009, and a U.S. citizen or permanent U.S. resident residing in the United States. There is no minimum age for eligibility. The deadline to apply is March 4, 2009. Applicants must submit an original piece of work recognized by experts in the field as significant and it must have the potential to make a positive contribution to society. The scholarship must be used at an accredited institute of learning. For more information on the Davidson Fellows scholarship, or to download an application, please visit www.DavidsonFellows.org

"Time to Learn" -- an extended school calendar?

The other day, as I was dropping Jasper off at day care, a mom brought her 5-year-old in to greet Jasper's teacher. Apparently, this little boy had started at the day care when he was a baby, and was now back for the older kids' summer program. Kindergarten operates on a 9 month schedule but, of course, most people's jobs do not. So the family had to make arrangements.

Across the country, most students are now out of school for the summer. It's a fascinating anachronism, and one I've been thinking about a lot lately as I've been reading Christopher Gabrieli and Warren Goldstein's new book Time to Learn: How a New School Schedule is Making Smarter Kids, Happier Parents, and Safer Neighborhoods. Very few American children need to be on the farm for the summer season, which was the original reason for a long summer break. Some 70-plus percent of American women participate in the workforce in some capacity -- not too far off the participation rate for men. That means that in the majority of American families, the only way someone can take the summer off to be with the kids is if mom or dad is a teacher.

Those high labor force participation rates also lead to a school year problem. As Gabrieli and Goldstein point out, most school calendars not only end after 180 days, a "day" is considered 6 hours. "As working parents we have raged against the inefficiency and foolishness of dismissing school at 2:30 in the afternoon," they write. If both parents work full time (or in single parent families) you either have to hire a sitter for the afternoon or rely on "self care." This is when kids get into trouble. As they note, "half of all high school students are sexually active, but we pay less attention to the fact that many teen pregnancies get started between 3 and 6pm." Parents who do want to be home to meet the school bus wind up limiting themselves in their career options.

That might all be fine if a 6-hour school day were best for the kids. But Gabrieli and Goldstein argue that it is not. A longer day has many benefits. "In science, longer classes allow students to carry out experiments from beginning to end in a single session," they write. In NCLB-driven schools that focus on the basics, extra time can create room for music, drama, art, PE. A study hall period can let kids do their homework at school and spend their evenings with their families. A pilot group of schools in Massachusetts that tried extended school days wound up seeing their test scores rise faster than the state average. So the authors encourage all school districts to give the idea a look.

I think it is worth looking at too, though I have some reservations. First, a lot of the school day is already wasted getting kids to be on task, dealing with discipline issues, moving between classes, etc. A year or two ago on this blog, we joked about starting school in January for gifted kids, because they could cover in a half year what it takes the typical class a year to cover. If a 6-hour school day is inefficient, I doubt an 8-hour day will be more efficient. Furthermore, if a school isn't meeting a child's needs in 6 hours, the school won't do it in 8 either. That's a philosophical choice, not a matter of time.

But, as someone who writes about working moms a lot, I do agree that it's ridiculous to send children home to watch television for 3 hours before the standard work day is done. I'm curious what Gifted Exchange readers think about the topic. Should school get out at 5pm?

Did NCLB hurt gifted students, part 2

For those of you who have waded through the whole Fordham report (see previous post) I'd like to start a discussion on the teacher survey. This is the second part of the Fordham report, and is based on questions asked of 900 elementary, middle and high school teachers.

Surveys are always somewhat problematic for a few reasons. First, people who respond may be different than those who don't respond. For instance, they may be more thoughtful about the questions being asked, have more of an interest in them, or just not be as busy. Second, people often answer questions in ways that show they agree with positive sounding statements (and then answer just as affirmatively to opposing statements that are also framed in a positive manner).

That said, the results of this teacher survey are fascinating. Among them:

1. Teachers are skeptical of the gifted label. A full 50% either strongly or somewhat agreed that "too often students are labeled as advanced only because their parents are overzealous and know how to work the system." Over 60% of high school teachers agreed with this statement.

2. Schools are not that concerned with the needs of high achievers. 78% of teachers agreed that getting underachieving students to proficiency is so important that the needs of advanced students have taken a back seat. About a third said that academically advanced students were a low priority, and 40% of high school teachers said that honors and accelerated classes were often watered down.

3. Teachers are quite concerned with the needs of academically advanced students, even if they don't believe their schools are. 73% agreed that "too often the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school -- we're not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive." The focus group statements on this were particularly interesting. See page 52-- teachers talk about "cheating" their students and levels of frustration "when they have to sit by while we're babysitting." Noted one teacher. "It does seem that the resources, when we do get them for the higher achievers, are always geared toward things like day trips to places...The problem is that when we do get funds for the gifted students, it's always 'Take them to the science museum.'"

4. Teachers think students do better with homogeneous grouping and recognize that in-class differentiation is tough. By a margin of 72-14, teachers believed advanced students were more likely to reach their academic potential in homogeneous classes, rather than mixed ability classes. While this fell to 46-36 for struggling students, this still tilts in favor of ability grouping for slower students as well. A full 76% of teachers said they favored the idea of homogeneous grouping for meeting students' needs. Key problems in mixed classes: 77% agreed that when they assign group projects, advanced students do most of the work. (I should note that 57% disagreed that teachers had advanced students tutor others when they ran out of things to do...)

5. Teachers recognize that they have not had much professional development on the topic of high achievers. Only 30% said they had some training, and only 5% said a lot. This is a problem because most teachers said that there wasn't a lot of special gifted programming in their schools, meaning that any teacher may be required to teach a high ability student.

6. Yet for all this, teachers are pretty negative on grade skipping, something that would remove the need for as much in-class differentiation and specialized training. While 85% liked the idea of subject matter acceleration, 63% opposed grade skipping. This is reflected in school policies. 46% said that their schools do not allow grade skipping, and 27% say they are not sure, which means that it must be extremely rare in these teachers' schools.

I find it intriguing that the majority of teachers would favor subject matter acceleration and the majority would oppose whole grade acceleration. I wonder if there is the fear of kids being picked on in gym class (though few schools have gym class anymore)? Or a way of recognizing the reality that kids need more challenge while clinging to the "community" ideal of school? (That frankly has no basis in reality -- my friends weren't all born within 6 months of my birthday).

Regardless of the oddity, this may suggest a strategy for parents looking to advocate for gifted kids: if you want a high probability of success, pick 3 subjects you want your kid advanced in, and go for broke on those. If you play your cards right, you might say that this is introducing your kid to more peers, and hence is increasing their socialization... Grade skipping will be a harder sell.

Did NCLB hurt gifted students?

This week, the Fordham Institute released a new report on "High Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind." I'm trying to get an interview with the authors, but then it occurred to me that the good thing about a blog is that I can write about the same topic multiple times! So I'll give my first thoughts on the report now, and hopefully start a discussion. Then, when I get the authors on the phone, I'll have better questions to ask.

For the Fordham report, authors Tom Loveless, Steve Farkas, and Ann Duffett looked at how students in the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile scored on the NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or "the nation's report card"). They particularly focused on scores since 2002, which is roughly when the current national focus on accountability began. They also surveyed teachers about their time and priorities.

This is the major finding: Congress passed NCLB with the goal of narrowing the achievement gap. That has, in fact, happened over the past 5-6 years. Here is why it has happened: lower-achieving students have made fairly large gains on the NAEP. High-achieving students have made small gains. Consequently, the achievement gap has been closing.

The bigger question, of course, is whether this is something to be celebrating, and whether Congress set the right goal.

In education, there is always a fundamental tension between excellence and equity. As Americans, we really like both concepts. We want all students to achieve more in the future than they do now, and we also want some students not to lag too far behind others. But these are conflicting goals. If all student scores were rising on the NAEP at a fast clip, the achievement gap would stay the same. In fact, if all student scores rose by 10%, this would expand the achievement gap (a student scoring 200 would go to 220, a 300 to 330, expanding the gap from 100 to 110). This means that, fundamentally, we have to choose which of the goals of excellence and equity is most important.

The Fordham report gives data on what we have, apparently chosen. I want to stress that it does show something important: NCLB has not, per se, hurt the highest achieving children on an objective test measurement standard. Scores are relatively flat. The NAEP (like an out-of-level test -- e.g. giving the SAT to 7th graders) allows for a full spectrum of scores to show up. So this is not the case of a consistent 99th percentile grade-level score masking a decline in achievement that a blunt test can't pick up.

But the authors did also survey teachers, and found something that is also salient. Some 60% of teachers said low achievers were a "top priority" at their schools, and 23% said high achievers were (teachers could give more than one answer). Asked about who was likely to receive more one-on-one attention, 81% of teachers said struggling students were, with only 5% saying advanced students were.

We don't really have data of how teachers felt in the past. But it is clear that in this era of accountability, NCLB and other policies have designated our national priority: raising the test scores of low-achieving students. Everything else is secondary.

It is, of course, a worthy goal to raise low scores. On the other hand, a teacher's one-on-one attention is a zero-sum game. If it's going to low achievers, it's not going to high achievers. So basically, as a nation, we have made a choice to let high achievers coast. This shows up in the NAEP scores.

I -- and many readers of this blog, I'm sure -- am not terribly comfortable with this national choice. I've long advocated taking the basic concept of accountability and applying it to individual students, rather than schools. That way, no one can hide behind averages on a grade-level test that make it more critical for a kid on the border of proficient to become proficient than for a high-achieving student to excel. From my first read of the Fordham report, I think we can start making a case in public policy spheres that we should change NCLB's mission from closing the achievement gap to raising the achievement of all students (really meaning "no child"). It does us little good to make sure everyone is capable of reading a ballot and balancing a checkbook if we can't also produce engineers and doctors and programmers and the like. Equality is not a useful end goal in itself. Excellence is.

But I would really like to hear from some readers about this. Anecdotally, is NCLB hurting high achievers at your school? Leaving them to languish? Is it causing a new set of priorities? Or just reinforcing beliefs people already had?

Achievers All

The school year is drawing to a close, and around the country, middle schools are hauling out the podiums and the fruit punch, and holding ceremonies at which they celebrate their high achievers.

Chief among these are students who have participated in talent searches -- usually when a university gives out-of-level tests (SAT, ACT) to young teens to see how they do. (For one such article, see this piece from the LA Times). The theory behind talent searches is that while highly gifted kids max out at the 99th percentile on grade level tests, out-of-level tests can show the kids who are truly capable of more advanced work.

But, as usually happens with things in gifted education, something has gone a bit awry along the way. A talent search is supposed to be a diagnostic -- showing what a child is capable of, so that schools can arrange for more challenging work if necessary. But, instead, it's become more of an excuse for an awards ceremony to "celebrate" an achievement, as if it's a real achievement to score highly on a diagnostic test. If you study a unit in biology very hard, and then do well on a test, that may be an achievement worth celebrating. But celebrating a high score on a talent search diagnostic is like taking a kid out for ice cream because she did well on an IQ test. It misses the point.

But you can see why schools generally like talent searches and like to hold award ceremonies for the students who participate. Who wouldn't want a headline that a handful of your district's middle schoolers scored as high as college-bound high school seniors on the SAT?

Don't get me wrong -- kids like the attention too. But the problem with these ceremonies is that for the vast majority of students who score highly on out-of-level tests, the ceremonies are the end of the line. These kids are never given anything more challenging to do in school. The well-to-do ones can take summer classes at universities. But most pick up their certificates, enjoy the applause, collect copies of the newspaper story from their neighbors, and go right back into 8th grade pre-algebra.

That's too bad, because while celebrating high test scores is one thing, actually nurturing a bright young mind so the young person can achieve real things in the future is far better.

I am curious what the readers of this blog have encountered in terms of awards ceremonies for high scorers on out-of-level talent search tests. Did your districts do anything with the results?

The Life Raft Strategy

I had the great privilege of attending the annual Prep for Prep "Lilac Ball" last night at the Waldorf-Astoria here in New York. This ball doubles as the graduation for students in the Prep for Prep program, a 30-year-old campaign to prepare the brightest minority students in New York City for admission to independent prep schools (day or boarding). Prep for Prep continues to monitor their students' progress while they attend Andover, Choate, Dalton, etc., with the hope that these students will attend elite colleges.

It seems to be working. Among the roughly 150 high school seniors walking across the stage last night, a dozen are going to Yale, eight (I counted) are going to Harvard, and many others to Princeton, Columbia, Duke, MIT, Stanford, etc. I got a little teary when Learah Lockhart, the daughter of a single mom, talked about how she had been working until 2AM as a 7th grader getting ready to go to Choate. She didn't want to leave her mother to go to boarding school, but her mother insisted. Her mom always kept her school papers with good grades in a box by her bed. As Learah said, in April, she got something that was definitely box-worthy. At this point, she read us the letter offering her admission to Harvard.

(Of course, knowing how hard this young lady worked to get to where she is in life, it kind of ticked me off to know -- according to Daniel Golden's book The Price of Admission -- that Albert Gore III got into Harvard despite being suspended in 8th grade for smoking marijuana, being cited during high school for driving 100mph, and not getting particularly good grades or test scores. While a student at Harvard, he was ticketed for driving under the influence, and was also later charged with marijuana possession. But I digress).

Children are chosen for admission to the Prep for Prep program based, initially, on having test scores above the 90th percentile. From my discussions with people in the program, this seems to be a pretty hard fast line. Then once they make this initial cut, they give these children (drum roll please)... an IQ test! Yes, people are chosen for Prep for Prep based on their scores on the WISC. The selected children are then put through their paces being brought up to speed academically so they will enter their prep schools on par with the more privileged children who usually attend such schools.

As far as I know, the Prep for Prep program is not particularly controversial. It's funded with private money (and often the independent schools themselves give scholarships and financial aid to the young people who gain admission). You would need to have a pretty big chip on your shoulder to begrudge giving brilliant kids from modest circumstances the opportunity to attempt the kind of rigorous education that will give them a shot at being admitted to elite colleges (I might quibble with the fact that Prep for Prep does not seem to be open to white children, many of whom also come from modest circumstances, but a fair number of the graduates were Asian children, so at least it does seem to be open to all minority children).

Yet when we refuse to create self-contained gifted classes or schools in inner cities, this is exactly what we do. I think of Jonathan Kozol's complaints about New York City's selective public schools (which some Prep for Prep kids wind up attending). "The better schools function, effectively, as siphons which draw off not only the most high-achieving and the best-connected students but their parents too," he wrote in Savage Inequalities. "This, in turn, leads to a rather cruel, if easily predictable, scenario: Once these students win admission....there is no incentive for their parents to be vocal on the issues that concern the students who have been excluded...The political effectiveness of those who have been left behind is thus depleted...public schools in a democracy should not be allowed to fill this role."

There are plenty of people who think that schools for the gifted wind up being politically unacceptable life rafts. They concentrate limited resources on the brightest children, rather than the lowest achieving, or some other metric.

This is, of course, exactly what Prep for Prep does. The program amounts to a private gifted education program. The idea is to get the brightest kids out of bad schools, and put them in good schools where they will be challenged.

I -- like most people -- have no problem with that using private money. In an ideal world, sure, all schools would be great. But we don't live in that world. So I don't believe in holding bright children hostage until they and their parents revolt. If Goldman Sachs and BlackRock are willing to cough up money to buy tables at an event to support that, all the better.

But I do find it interesting that such a program has to be private to be politically palatable. Wouldn't it be great if any highly gifted kid across the country whose needs could not be met locally could attend an elite boarding school without worrying about the cost? Wouldn't it be great if we identified all the brightest kids (perhaps partially using the WISC!) and then monitored their progress and made sure their needs were being met? Alas, this does not seem to be a public education priority. A private life raft is better than no life raft. But I'd like a few more public life rafts around the country as well.

Core Competency Moms

This post is not specifically about gifted education, but about parenting. I had mentioned on this blog a few months ago that I was looking into the rise of middle-class household chore outsourcing (just as corporations are focusing on their core competencies -- ie, what they do best -- families are starting to as well. For moms this tends to be nurturing kids and the paid work they do). I've even spoken with some readers about the topic. Now, I've been posting a series of essays over at The Huffington Post on "Core Competency Moms." Here are some links; I'd be thrilled if you checked them out and left a message or two.

On Not Doing Dishes: The Rise of the Core Competency Mom

Life, Uncluttered

On Wasting Time: Are You Reading This at Work?

A Happy Mom's Secret: Don't Do Your Own Laundry

Figuring out the Flynn Effect

When I was in Atlanta a few weeks ago, blogging for Scientific American about the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, I interviewed a student named Julian Lyles Bass-Krueger who'd done a fascinating project on how Tetris (the computer game where you turn shapes to fit into variably-sized holes) makes you "smarter."

How so? He had half of a group of subjects play Tetris for 15 minutes (the other half did not play the game). Then he gave both groups a spatial reasoning assessment, of the sort you might see on an IQ test. The result? People who had played Tetris for 15 minutes scored about 55% higher on the spatial reasoning test.

While intelligence tests are usually based on multiple areas (not just spatial reasoning) this is obviously a huge difference. Bass-Krueger posited that this might be one factor in the Flynn Effect, the phenomenon that IQ scores seem to have been rising a few points per decade for much of the 20th century. After all, games like Tetris didn't exist 70 years ago. If many modern children are exposed to such games, their scores would naturally be higher.

It's an interesting theory, and there's probably some truth to it. The Flynn Effect is one of those concepts that's very difficult to tease out, and is often misunderstood. I have heard people reference it as a critique of the concept of intelligence. After all, if IQ scores are rising, then maybe IQ tests are easily gamed. People who've had the opportunity to do brain teasers as kids will naturally score better. Based on this idea, the use of IQ as a way to identify kids for gifted education also seems flawed. After all, who's to say if a child is gifted and needs educational intervention, or has just played a lot of Tetris?

But I think there's a larger factor in play that's probably more important. While it's a popular email forward to give an example of an 8th grade test from pioneer days (thus showing how dumb we modern folks are by contrast), one has to remember that when intelligence testing first took off in the earlier part of the 20th century, childhood mortality rates were still fairly bleak in industrial countries, including ours.

In 1936, according to historical records from the US government, infant mortality nationwide was 57.1 deaths (among children under age 1) for every 1000 live births. For non-white children, the rate in many states was twice as high (for instance, among non-white babies in Delaware in 1936, there were 110 deaths before age 1 for every 1000 live births). These days the number is 6.78 deaths per 1000 live births. Among black babies, the rate is twice as high: 13.6/1000. But even this unfortunately high number is many times lower than for children of all races 70 years ago.

Two things that we know affect brain development are pre-natal and infant health and nutrition -- factors that are highly correlated with infant mortality. Just as most of us are taller than our grandparents, it makes sense that our brains were better nourished when we were babies. And as it turns out, most of the Flynn Effect gains are concentrated on the lower part of the intelligence spectrum. That suggests that intelligence scores have gone up not because striving parents are teaching their kids brain games to get them into the top track in school, but because pregnant women and infants are not generally malnourished in developed countries anymore. They also receive better medical care (such as antibiotics that fight the infections that might otherwise lead to long term learning problems).

There is some evidence that the Flynn Effect has mostly stopped of late in richer countries, which would also be consistent with this hypothesis (there's less room for improvement these days).

But that brings us back to the Tetris question. If 15 minutes of Tetris can improve spatial reasoning scores by 55%, doesn't this put IQ scores under at least some suspicion? Yes...and no. All tests are blunt instruments. The fact that children's IQ scores tend to rise by 5-6 points the second time they take a test indicates that there is a learned familiarity boost. But this is pretty much a ceiling on the effect. Just as coaching can boost an SAT score 100 points, but not 600 points, playing brain games might boost an IQ score from 110 to 115, but not from 110 to 150.

In a previous post, I suggested that IQ tests be used as an initial screen for gifted education, but not the sole screen. Gifted education is not a reward for kids who work hard in school. Nor should it necessarily be based on a stark 130-and-over line in the sand. It should be an educational intervention for kids whose needs cannot be met in a normal classroom. My suspicion is that this is a subset of the 130+ crew and -- in good schools that allow grade skipping -- probably a smaller subset.

The Flynn Effect is a fascinating phenomenon. It may be a result of a more stimulating environment, but it's probably also the result of some more basic public health and welfare improvements. I don't believe, though, that it fundamentally changes the need to recognize the unique learning styles of extraordinarily bright children.

A Modest Proposal for Gifted Education

As school days dwindle, education stories are becoming fewer and far between. We'll go on our summer schedule here soon at Gifted Exchange, posting a bit less frequently. I thank you all for visiting me through our third school year.

In the meantime, I want to start a discussion on a new gifted program in Pittsburgh. You can read an article about it here. The reason I'm highlighting this particular one is that it gets at a lot of the current issues in gifted education (amazingly, in about 1200 words).

1) How do you identify gifted students? Pennsylvania is instituting some changes. From the article:

"'This is about a more flexible, open process,' said Jim Buckheit, executive director of the state board. 'It opens it up to students who may not test well on the IQ test.'

Current state rules say students must have an IQ score of at least 130 and do well on other measures -- grades, teacher observation, other standardized tests -- to be identified as gifted. The new standards, which after a review process could kick in for the new school year, say districts can use an IQ test or other measures."

Across the country, many districts and states are chucking the 130-and-up standard. Many educators (and others, I might add) are highly suspicious of IQ tests. But it's interesting that few educators are recommending that you use an IQ test as an initial screen, and then cut it down from that based on the idea that IQ tests might identify too many kids, because they can be gamed (at least one study found that people who play Tetris right before a spatial reasoning test do 50% better on it).

Rather, educators are proposing ditching or downplaying the IQ test standard because they want to open gifted education to kids who would not score above 130 on such a test. I suspect people want to do that because it gets at a second issue raised by the article:

2) Gifted education as a reward (as opposed to an intervention).

Here is the opening paragraph of the Pittsburgh article:

"David Badamo composes a sports fight song, goes on a scavenger hunt and uses books about sports to learn literary techniques at the Senator John Heinz History Center.

Badamo, 11, visited the center with 200 other gifted students from 20 school districts in the area."

This just has me shaking my head. You do not have to be gifted to go on a scavenger hunt. I'm guessing that all kids would enjoy a lesson about literary techniques using sports books, just as most kids would enjoy a field trip to the John Heinz History Center. If the basic way of serving gifted kids is bringing them on field trips that other kids don't get to do, who can blame people for wanting to expand the definition to encompass any kid who does well in school? It's like giving a kid an ice cream cone. We naturally want to give the treat to anyone who works hard.

But that is not the same as being gifted. Gifted kids can be lazy, can get bad grades, can act out in class and so forth. Gifted education should be an intervention for kids whose needs cannot be met in a normal classroom, not a reward for the "best" students.

3) Inadequate ability grouping.

Of course, the reason the Pittsburgh students were brought to the history center is that they needed to do something on their special "gifted day." From the article:

"Pittsburgh Public Schools is the only district in the area that sends its 2,800 gifted students to a special school one day a week. J. Kaye Cupples, executive director of student support services, said the district is thinking of ending its gifted center at Greenway School because of concerns the program might not meet students' needs the rest of the school week."

Very true. What is the point of bringing a kid to a special school for one day a week, and then leaving them in their regular classrooms the rest of the time? Unfortunately, the district's solution is not to open up the gifted school for five days a week. Instead...

"The district will experiment this fall with five schools -- Colfax, Dilworth, Fort Pitt, Grandview and Northview Heights -- where gifted children will be taught with other students.

Many districts "cluster" gifted students in a classroom with regular students.

'Research shows that they need to be with intellectual peers a good part of the day to share ideas and to push each other to excel,' said Cathy Ekis, the elementary gifted coordinator at Penn Hills.

The youngsters might also be pulled out of their regular classrooms and be taught by special teachers elsewhere in their school."

In other words, we're going from one day a week of busing to a central location to maybe a daily pull-out, with a few gifted kids clustered in an age-level classroom.

This is not necessarily going to be an improvement, but looks more palatable to people who don't like gifted education. It also maintains an allegiance to the "kids should be with their grade level" mentality.

Which leads me to my modest proposal for setting up a system of gifted education. After spending years reading through the literature, and various articles like this, I have a few ideas on best practices in gifted education:

1. Don't chuck IQ tests or out-of-level tests. Yes, these may miss kids who don't do well on tests, so it's worth having some alternative screen (like a portfolio). But the point should not be to expand the definition of gifted. This is an educational intervention for kids whose needs cannot be met in a regular classroom. If a kid who is working just slightly above grade level is getting bored in a regular classroom, it's because you've got a lousy teacher. Deal with that problem.

2. Gifted education should not look like a reward. In smaller districts, it should look like one thing: acceleration. You take a lot of politics and mystique out of the gifted label if kids who get it don't suddenly get to go on fun field trips. Instead, they go (for example) three grade levels up for math, do an independent study in English, sit in on a community college history course, and take an online science course in the library.

3. If you're going to do ability grouping, really do it. Larger districts may have enough highly gifted students that it becomes more economical to create self-contained gifted classes or schools. That's a fine idea -- but don't just bus the kids there once a week. Don't just do two afternoons a week of pull-out. Self-contain them the whole time. And combine these programs across grades. Gifted fourth graders have no more in common with each other than they do with gifted third or fifth graders. Let the kids work at their own pace while interacting with their intellectual peers. All told, that might be even more fun than composing a fight song and going to a history museum.

Tongue-in-cheek here, I also have a modest proposal for articles about gifted education. Attention writers: please stop including the "we're just normal kids" line. Everyone does it. Sigh. Here's the Pittsburgh one:

"Most people think we're different because they think we're brainiacs," said Badamo, a fifth-grader at Ross Elementary School in the North Hills School District. "I don't think we're different at all. We do a lot more advanced work. We still like to do sports and the things other kids like to do."

Is there a 'War on Boys?'

The American Association of University Women (which captured tons of headlines in 1992 for its report on "How Schools Shortchange Girls") released a report yesterday called "Where the Girls Are." This report seeks to compare boys' and girls' school performance and to refute the idea that boys are getting the short end of the stick in today's schools.

"It is a testament to the success of the efforts by AAUW and others that the gender equity debate has taken a new twist in which boys are cast as the disadvantaged gender," the report notes, singling out Christina Hoff Sommers' book, The War Against Boys. "Girls' gains have not come at the expense of boys."

The evidence in the report is fairly straightforward. Both boys and girls have been holding steady or improving slightly on standardized tests over the past few years. Girls tend to do slightly better on NAEP reading sections, boys do better on the SAT. The between-gender differences in performance, though, are nothing compared to the differences between racial groups and between income groups (which might be a more fruitful area for concern). Young women (and, interestingly, older women) are going to college in record numbers, but young men are more likely to go than in the past as well. So while the percentage of college students who are men has fallen in recent years, the proportion of men who are going to college has gone up. This suggests that women aren't "taking men's places" in colleges -- they're simply flooding into college, while the proportion of men going to college has been more of a slowly rising tide. Among "traditional" college students (those under 24) from high-income families, men still slightly outnumber women. It's just that while older women are more willing to go back to school for a few years, many older men can't or won't leave the workforce to do so.

The AAUW of course has its politics. They sniff that there's no way there could be a war on boys because men still out-earn women, even controlling for years in the workforce, field of study and the like. Which is true. But girls were doing OK on tests compared with boys in 1992, too, and the AAUW still managed to put out a report then counting the number of times teachers called on kids who were raising their hands, the number of times boys blurted out answers and teachers acknowledged them, etc. If one used different stats, one could surely come up with a report that schools shortchanged boys. For instance, boys are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and to be disciplined for causing problems in the classroom. The majority of elementary school teachers are women, and just as grown women often feel awkward in offices in which all the managers are male, boys can feel excluded in female-dominated environments that lack male role models.

That said, I don't think there's much to be gained from hunting for a war on one gender or another. No discovery of a war is going to help a kid read or do math. Our schools have lots of problems. Not least is that bright kids sit, bored to tears, in their classrooms because they're not allowed to move ahead. Kids breeze through tests and homework, not learning the joy of having to actually labor hard to understand something. That happens to girls and boys. We should see more studies on that.

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

Last week, I went (with Scientific American) to Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair in Atlanta. I did a lot of live-blogging from the site, and I encourage you to visit the Scientific American website to read some of my postings.

My job there was to point out some of the more cool projects. Here at Gifted Exchange, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the whole science fair concept, and how bright children often encounter science these days.

On some level, the ISEF was a lot like a normal science fair. Everyone hung out in a giant hall in front of their tri-fold poster boards, which contained a lot of grainy photos of (often) a gloved hand pouring some liquid into a container. On the other hand, there were less props than you normally see at a science fair. Few plants. No vinegar volcanoes. With people traveling, and with strict rules, it's just easier not to put a pea plant on a table to indicate that you put certain compounds on said pea plant.

The students were often undertaking interesting experiments. They measured wave patterns in a tsunami simulation. They gave people spatial reasoning tests after they played Tetris (a concept I will write more about later). I was glad to see that a fair number of high school students are really interested in science. It makes you hopeful about the future.

On the other hand, was a certain humorous innocence to some of the projects. For instance, my editor, Ivan, blogged about an experiment in which a young lady photo-shopped pictures of her mother and her science teacher's husband to change various features, and then asked people who they would vote for for president. The results indicated that appearance did affect how people would vote but, on the other hand, what else were people going to choose on? They had no information about these candidates' platforms, history, etc. A much better experiment would create platforms and histories and rotate them through the photo-shopped candidates, all the while asking who people preferred. If you could see that even people who supported gun control were quite willing to vote for a gun-rights candidate with a stunning nose, you might reach the conclusion that people were more interested in nose appearance than they probably should be. But, of course, this is high school. I was reminded of my own science fair project once which looked at "Probability and Pascal's Triangle." I "discovered" that, when you toss x number of pennies a certain number of times, the number of times you get each quantity of heads does work out to look like Pascal's triangle. In other news, I hear that mixing vinegar and baking soda makes a volcano.

For all their re-discovery of the known, though, the good thing about science fairs is that they change science from a subject in which you memorize definitions for a test to a subject in which you think up questions and try to answer them. I suspected many of the students at ISEF did not actually think up their own questions. They worked with professors who suggested the problem; they had parents in the particular field they were looking at. But they did think through the investigations. Science fairs also give students hands-on experience with science. Some young people did experiments at home, others learned to use lab equipment -- a fun experience which no doubt keeps many people interested in research.

I also realized that certain schools make a point of teaching kids about lab research, and encouraging students to do independent research projects. The existence of science fairs like Intel's (and the Intel Science Talent Search, and the Davidson Fellowships) do dangle a carrot out there for schools and kids to leap after. What may be more amazing is -- given the scholarship money out there, and the prestige that comes to a school from having multiple winners, or even one -- is why more schools don't encourage this. All you have to do is free time up in the schedule, or schedule a research class, and hook people up with a local university. My own excellent high school -- the Indiana Academy -- required everyone to take a "research" class, but I recall no one actually winning anything major as a result.

But as college admissions becomes more competitive, I'm sure more schools will figure this out. It's all a little packaged, perhaps, but it does encourage kids to work hard, and spend their time on independent science projects. I'm curious about readers' experiences with science fair projects, and what your children have learned from making a tri-fold poster board display.

New Scientific American Column: "Where Are They Now?"

A quick personal note that might interest some readers: I just started writing a new column for Scientific American called "Where Are They Now?" This series looks at former Westinghouse/Intel Science Talent Search finalists and winners, and what they're doing with their lives. We're starting with a couple this week, and the series will run weekly for awhile. The first one is on Roald Hoffmann, the 1981 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. I'll be live-blogging later this week from the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in Atlanta.

Precocity and potential are fascinating topics. It should surprise no one that some finalists (like Hoffmann) have made amazing discoveries that have garnered lots of attention. Others are more quietly advancing science, and others are not in the sciences at all, but are doing other things with their lives. This series will also investigate issues of building a scientific career, and how that's changed over time. So please come check it out!

Brain Games

Hello- apologies for the long time since the last post. I was on vacation in Peru, which was a wonderful experience. Lima is bustling and busy, with the gorgeous Pacific ocean right there (leading to amazing ceviche!). Cusco, up in the highlands, shows off its snow-capped mountains. Out in the Andean countryside, there are llamas and alpacas, and women carrying babies in woven blankets on their backs. I could never get Jasper (who turns one this week, by the way) to stay in a sling, so I was impressed. The country is both poor in parts and rich in parts. It is thoroughly modern in places (like downtown Lima) but in small villages, the people don't even speak Spanish. They speak the native languages their ancestors spoke before the Spanish conquered the Incas, and pretty much live life as they always have too.

Anyway, one of the great things about travel is it forces your brain to work. You figure out Spanish words on signs, you figure out how to communicate when you don't share a language, and new experiences forge new connections in your brain. In other words, your brain gets a bit of exercise!

This concept has actually been in the news a lot lately. As our society ages, people are increasingly concerned about diseases such as Alzheimer's and the general deterioration of the brain as we age. A few studies have suggested that we can do a few things to preserve brain function. The most important is probably physical exercise. Living a creative life that forces you to think is another.

But there's not much obvious money to be made on those (well, there's a whole industry of commercial gyms, but most people don't go there for their brains!) So enterprising folks turn to another potential brain booster: brain games.

I've just spent the past half hour test driving an online brain game site called Happy Neuron. The company charges about $10 a month for access to 1500 hours of brain games that range from deciphering quotes when each letter is replaced by a certain symbol, to pairing letter-clusters together from a grid to make words. No sooner had I played this for a while (getting absolutely stumped that "me" and "li" could combine to make "lime")than I stopped by the Scientific American website, and saw an ad for another such site called Lumosity. This site also charges $10 a month, and like Happy Neuron, is backed by a team of psychologists and brain researchers.

I am sure there is a free site with similar games out there, and I'd love to hear about it. But anyway, the experience got me thinking. We don't spend much time as adults pondering whether we're challenged in given situations. We don't set aside seven hours a day or so to try to learn. Children have to go to school, and so we worry about whether they're reaching their potential, and whether their classes are meeting their needs. But we don't give much thought to whether adults are reaching their potential. I'm curious what readers of this blog do to keep their adult minds in the kind of tip-top shape that we expect of younger people.