Smart Kids, Bad Schools

One of the things I’m trying to do here on Gifted Exchange is review more education books. With that in mind, I’ve been reading Brian Crosby’s new book, Smart Kids, Bad Schools. Crosby, a veteran English teacher, launched himself onto the education reform scene with his book The $100,000 Teacher, and now he’s back with 38 essays on ways American education can be improved.

Some are very good. For instance, Crosby founded the American Education Association, which seeks to be more like the American Medical Association than a union. The idea is to make teaching a true professional career with very high standards, get rid of tenure, demand results and then pay teachers accordingly. Indeed, Crosby would prefer to see larger class sizes for a simple reason: there aren’t enough excellent teachers to go around. Better have 40 kids with a stellar $120,000/year teacher than 2 20-kid classes with $60,000 mediocre teachers. He likes the idea of more field trips, of getting rid of middle school, of hiring MBA principals rather than simply promoting teachers looking to get out of the classroom. He notes that special education funding is grossly disproportionate to the funding other children receive, and that gifted education is massively undervalued. “Why doesn’t the issue of equity apply to bright kids?” he asks. He also points out that “People might be surprised to learn how often teachers of advanced classes give their students more work at a faster rate than their nonadvanced counterparts and call it a day. As if the amount of work and how fast you do it determines how smart you are.” When he was first assigned to teach advanced students, he notes that he was not given any special training on enriching or deepening the curriculum.

He understands that this is problem so... I wish I liked this book more, but I just didn't. Many of the 38 essays contain long anecdotes about particular injustices Crosby has suffered over the years, which may or may not be relevant to larger educational woes (memo to Crosby: everyone hates meetings – people in corporate America too! Plenty of people have bad bosses, not just teachers working under incompetent bureaucrats). The essays often suffer from a lack of focus; the one on improving gifted education manages to hook in GPA inflation, how much money the AP organization is making, awards for perfect attendance, goody bags at children’s parties and so forth.

Also, Crosby cites plenty of statistics, but has no end notes or foot notes explaining where he got them. That’s a problem because some of them are highly suspect. He claims that “one study on giftedness discovered that 15 to 20 percent of gifted kids drop out of school, mainly due to boredom.” We examined that statistic at length a few weeks ago. Also, there’s this paragraph: “Smart kids are the country’s most valuable resource. And how does the U.S. government reward such talent? By continuing to underfund and cut gifted programs, rewarding these bright young people with two cents out of every dollar spent on education.” The thought is right, but the only U.S. (federal) government funding for gifted education is the Jacob K. Javits program. It usually gets about $10 million in funding, out of the roughly $50 billion federal education budget (actually, the budget is bigger now, but that’s the number I’m guessing he’s using). This comes out to two cents of every $100, not every dollar. These silly errors undermine the book's authority.

Furthermore, for all his good ideas, he’s got some really bad ones too, like that because most homeschoolers are white, “race may play a large unspoken role in [these] parents opting out of public schools.” He also claims that “except for religious reasons and spiffy uniforms, there is no sound argument for educating children in private schools. Which environment mirrors the real world, public or private school? Do parents choose where their children will work and who they will work with?” This just totally misses the point. Public schools bear no resemblance to the real world either. In what company do employees only work with folks who have a birthday within 12 months of each other? He says that “no private school has ever won the U.S. Academic Decathlon since its inception in 1980” as evidence that private schools are no better than public schools. I have never heard of the U.S. Academic Decathlon, and I’ve been writing about education for awhile. This proves nothing.

So, the verdict? Check it out of the library or skim the table of contents in the bookstore - I'm not sure I'd buy it for your personal library.

Too Many Asian Kids

That seems like a stark headline, doesn't it? But it would have been a better title to a recent New York Times story called "Racial Imbalance Persists at Elite Public High Schools" than the one the headline writers dreamed up.

As we've been talking about in recent weeks on this blog, New York City has long had a commitment to serving gifted kids from all backgrounds. This is a city of immigrants, and tales are legion of children from all kinds of deprived backgrounds getting into the city's elite schools for the gifted and succeeding wildly. Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science, for instance, have produced many Nobel Prize winners.

Unlike many of the city's private schools, it's no mystery how one gains admission to the elite public high schools. You have to sit for the annual exam. Anyone can take the test; indeed, the city offers a program to prepare you called the Specialized High Schools Institute. If you score high enough, you are offered admission. Connections don't help you.

Net result? Stuyvesant High School does not "look like America." In fact, it looks a little bit more like Beijing, or Delhi than like any city in the US. Though the city's four major racial groups represent roughly equal proportions of those who sit for the test (28 percent of last year’s were black, 23 percent Hispanic, 30 percent Asian and 19 percent white), a full two-thirds of Stuyvesant students are of Asian descent. In other words, Stuyvesant is majority minority. But apparently its students are not the correct minority, because all sorts of city critics are up in arms these days about the failure to "diversify" Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and the city's other gifted programs.

As Daniel Golden pointed out in his thought-provoking book, The Price of Admission a few years ago, when it comes to education, Asian children are "the new Jews." Once, elite colleges conspired to reduce the proportion of Jewish young people granted admission, even though these young people often had stellar credentials and had overcome amazing odds (poverty, immigration, discrimination, etc.). A similar mindset seems to have gripped the diversity proponents criticizing New York's gifted programs. As it is now, your father can be a cook working in Chinatown after leaving mainland China penniless, and your admission to Stuyvesant will not be looked upon as a cause for celebration. Something strikes me as very wrong about that picture. Indeed, any efforts to further "diversify" the city's elite schools will result in fewer Asian children being granted admission.

New York City gets it right

I live in New York City with my family. Most likely we will move out of the city before my son, Jasper, goes to school, but this is not necessarily because of the schooling situation. If you live in Washington DC and desire a good education for your bright children, you pretty much have to enroll in a private school (as Pres. elect Obama, incidentally a school voucher opponent, will choose for his children). But New York City has long had good gifted programs, including Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, which have produced numerous finalists in the former Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

About two years ago, though, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joe Klein surveyed the gifted programs, and noted that they were not exactly fair. Not so much "not fair" in the way people normally claim they are not fair (i.e., separating out kids for special treatment, or even the racial balance, though they did note that). The programs had a patchwork of entrance requirements, were located at certain schools due to better parental lobbying, started in different years, etc.

So last year, the schools decided to standardize admissions requirements. First, the NYC schools declared that as many students as possible should be tested. They did tons of outreach to historically underserved areas. They used two tests -- a reasoning test and a school readiness test. Then they declared that only children who scored in the top 5th percentile (on a national comparison basis) would be admitted to NYC gifted programs; the flip side of this is that every child who did score about this level would be guaranteed a spot.

Well, all did not go entirely as planned. It turns out there were fewer gifted children under this definition than the schools liked, so they lowered the cut-off to the top 10% -- already pushing it, in my opinion. Even so, some schools have far smaller gifted programs than in the past -- for instance, 10 students in a class in a school in which there average class size is 20 or more. You can read about the controversy in this New York Times story on "Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs."

As you can imagine, some people are upset about this. From the article:

"At P.S. 110 on the Lower East Side, the gifted kindergarten class has 16 children, while another kindergarten class has 28, a situation Lisa B. Donlan, president of the local Community Education Council, called 'unfair to the entire school community.'

"At P.S. 52 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, one of four schools with gifted classes of eight — the minimum the city requires — the other five kindergartens have 22 or 23 children each.

“'Their intentions are all good, and I understand making it more uniform across the city,' the school’s principal, Ilene Altschul, said of the changes in gifted admissions. “I just don’t understand how a class of eight children is beneficial.'”

Indeed, some parents are pressuring schools to open up these smaller gifted classes to other kids; as one parent noted, “To get your kid into a good kindergarten in New York City is such a yearlong battle, and I know that it’s a very desirable program...It’s a shame that other kids are being denied the opportunity.”

So maybe I can explain why it's beneficial. New York City gets it. Gifted education is supposed to be an intervention for children who need it. Personally, I think they should have stuck to the original 95th percentile, or even higher. But, leaving that aside, gifted education is not supposed to be the "desirable" class, an entitlement (every school gets 20 spots) or a way to keep middle class families in the city so they don't move to New Jersey. If kids need the interventions of gifted education, they should get it. If they don't, they shouldn't, even if there are empty seats. It's not about seats.

It's also not about "rewarding" kids. The New York Times falls into this trap, as usual obsessing about the racial composition of these classes, pointing out in the article that only 22% of the students identified as gifted now are black or Hispanic. Most districts would find this pretty good; if you add in Asian children, the city's gifted program is 50% minority, but given that the New York City schools have a higher proportion of minority students than this, the New York Times claims the reforms have "failed to diversify the historically coveted classes" (even though the percentage of Asian students in these classes has actually gone up).

But Bloomberg and Klein are sticking to their guns. As Klein says, "we won’t compromise standards and thereby dilute our programs." It's about time a school official understood why a school district should have a gifted program, even if not everything the NYC schools have done to reform their program has been entirely smart.

Nature: Some people are naturally good at math

The October 2 issue of Nature, the weekly journal of science, contains an interesting study about something called the "approximate number system." (The headline, in catchy Nature form, is "Individual differences in non-verbal number acuity correlate with maths achievement.") ANS is an innate counting sense, present in animals, infants, and others who've had no formal training in math. Some people have a much better ANS acuity than others. Those that have this acuity wind up doing better on standardized math tests, even controlling for IQ.

To prove this idea, scientists at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere gave 64 14-year-old children a test to gauge the innate numerical sense ANS measures. They showed them a scatter plot containing dots in 2 colors. They asked which color was more prevalent. They changed up the ratio, and found that when there were twice as many purple as yellow dots, almost everyone could tell, but when there were only 25% more purple dots than yellow, only about 60% of the children got this right -- not too much better than guessing. But, of course, some children were far more accurate on these close ratios than others. The researchers then looked at the children's scores on standard math tests going back through kindergarten, and found that those who could gauge the ratios easily had higher scores.

This wasn't just because the kids were "smarter." They had previously given all the children an IQ test, and found that, controlling for IQ, kids with higher ANS acuity still did better on math tests. They also gave the kids a rapid color reaction test to make sure they weren't just testing reaction times. Again, the kids with the best ANS scores did best on math tests.

The result? "Individual differences in achievement in school mathematics are related to individual differences in the acuity of an evolutionarily ancient, unlearned approximate number sense," the authors wrote. They said that much more research would be needed to know if ANS could be taught and, if it could, how this would affect student achievement.

I always like studies that use the scientific method to get at the obvious. We all know that some kids are just naturally more number-oriented than others. Some highly intelligent adults panic when asked to make change; others can look at a room and see instantly that there aren't enough chairs.

That said, this is all fine for student achievement tests. But if there's anything I've learned over the years through trying to write about math and mathematicians, it's that at some point, numbers have little to do with it. Indeed, I remember one day in my freshman math class in college looking at the chalkboard and realizing there wasn't a single number up there! This was somewhat disappointing to me, as I really liked numbers. But as my older brother once wrote as a math graduate student at Princeton, "Despite what the general public thinks, math isn't just about being able to multiply numbers in your head quickly, or memorizing thirty digits of pi (I know good mathematicians who struggle to calculate 15% tips in restaurants). We've got computers and calculators for that. Mathematics is about finding structures and truths in the world of patterns, and explaining why they're there."

I suspect that what happens is that kids who have both a good ANS acuity and a high IQ wind up finding early math easy and fun. So they become more interested in it, and are encouraged along. The ranks of top mathematicians are then pulled from this group of folks who have spent more time studying math and playing with it than other people. Ultimately, though, it's not the quick counting that will help them -- it's the ability to see patterns and draw inferences.

It's NaNoWriMo Time! (Nurturing the Young Writer)

Writing a novel is a huge undertaking. Not only do you need to have a good story, you need the discipline to sit down and crank out the 50,000+ words necessary to deem a manuscript "book length."

The folks at the National Novel Writing Month Campaign, or NaNoWriMo for short, can't help you with the plot or characters. But they can help you with the discipline part. Every year, they challenge writers to pen a novel in the 30 days of November. That comes out to about 2,000 words a day (if you take Sundays and Thanksgiving off).

Now, if you've ever tried to write 2,000 words a day for a long period of time, you'll understand a certain reality of this pace: the quality of many of those words will be low. Not just a little low. We're talking way down low, sweet chariot low.

But you know what? That's OK. I can say from personal experience that getting the basic draft of a book down on paper is the tough part. Revising can be done in shorter spurts; chiseling away at a sculpture feels far more doable when you have raw material to chisel. Whenever I'm trying to write fiction, I force myself to spend a certain amount of time every day just writing the words out longhand. Then, by the time I type them, everything has taken more shape in my mind and it's already a second draft.

I'm trying to secure an interview with someone from the Young Writers Program part of NaNoWriMo, which so far has not happened. When it does, I'll post an update. But in the meantime, this is the gist of my post: I think NaNoWriMo is a great way to challenge a budding young writer.

Here's why. First, many gifted young people are prone to perfectionism. They worry whether every answer is right, or if the story is as good as it could be. At times, this can be paralyzing. The whole point of NaNoWriMo is that your draft is supposed to be atrocious. How can it not be? Almost no novels are polished to perfection in 30 days. Yours won't be either. The young writer need not show the content to anyone. All she has to do is verify the word count.

And here's the second part: As we've talked about before on this blog, people in general (and I suspect gifted, creative people in particular) are happiest when they throw themselves into something difficult, and then, finally, achieve it. You lose yourself in the flow. You stretch your brain. You stop worrying so much about the silliness of school and the institutions of our daily lives.

There is still time to register your young writer at the official NaNoWriMo site, or you can just do your own NaNoWriMo at home, writing down the word count every evening. Maybe you could do it alongside your child (ever thought you had a novel in you? If the stories I hear at cocktail parties are true, everyone does!) In the next few days, you can spend some time creating a plot outline, sketching out the characters, and so forth. Or you can just dive in on Saturday. As the official NaNoWriMo motto goes, no plot, no problem. It will come to you. And if you give yourself a month, you'll be amazed at what you can do.

Beam me up, Scotty

So the Davidson Institute kindly sends me round-ups of gifted education in the news each week. This past week, one of the more bizarre headlines in the package was from a publication called Planet Blacksburg, entitled "Virginia's Gifted Not So Grand." After reading the piece by Kaylie Brannan, I was puzzled that a serious, adult news outlet would run it, constructed as it is by throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. But then I realized that Planet Blacksburg is actually a website that showcases Virginia Tech student freelancers, so perhaps it's best to use this essay as an excuse for a good Friday chuckle -- and a chance to count up the usual anti-gifted canards.

Technique #1: Bash "pushy parents," everyone's favorite target.
"'Our little Suzy is just so special...' How many eye-rolling moments have we all suffered when particularly proud parents begin boasting of their children's fine natural abilities? Most would say, probably too many."

Technique #2: Claim IQ tests are biased or ineffective.
"If we're using IQ tests, then it may be possible privileged children are scoring higher than disadvantaged ones."

Technique #3: Claim separating students by ability leads to horrible ostracizing and bullying.
"...Why should we have these programs anyway? Would not separating a child from his/her peers to be put into a 'gifted' program be a cause for ostracization or bullying? And wouldn't telling a child he or she is not gifted enough to be separated from 'the crowd' be sending a bad message from trusted adults and/or be cause for ostracization or reverse bullying from gifted students?"

Technique #4: Claim that incorrect socialization leads to lifelong problems.
"...A study published by the Society for the Study of Addiction, as well as research described on Sengifted.org (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted), found that people deemed gifted often experience alcohol or drug abuse as a way of coping with their differences from peers."

Technique #5: Lament some lost golden era of a classroom "community" and champion the idea of gifted kids teaching others.
"...[we] could reestablish the idea of everyone appreciating each other's differences and working with each other instead of singling people out. Maybe kids like Suzy could share their uniqueness with others instead of being herded into a room with a handful of other special kids."

Technique #6: Hint that gifted kids are nerdy. It helps to mention Star Trek.
(On changing the requirements for entrance to gifted programs): "It would be like inviting a group of intelligent adults to hold hands, cling together and chant, 'Beam me up, Scotty!' and then, when it was not really working, deciding to choose participants more assiduously."

That's a lot of the usual suspects for a short op-ed, but I bet Gifted Exchange readers can come up with a few our pundit missed. Have at it!

2e: Twice Exceptional Newsletter

Just a quick link to the folks at the 2e: Twice-Exceptional Newsletter blog. They provide a summary of news articles related to gifted students with disabilities, and also a link on their home page to Gifted Exchange (thanks!) Be sure to check them out.

Are Too Many People Going to College?

It's been a while since we've had a good Charles Murray discussion here on Gifted Exchange, but since we're debating the use of IQ tests in designating children as gifted, I figure now is the time. Murray, co-author of the highly controversial book The Bell Curve, has a new book out called “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality." An excerpt ran as part of a cover package in September's American. That essay was called "Are Too Many People Going to College?" (Hopefully we will get a chance to discuss the other "simple truths" at a later point).

The gist of Murray's argument is this: Large percentages of American high school graduates are now attempting to earn 4-year degrees. Some reformers want every student to attempt college. But in the process of expanding access to college, educators and administrators have watered much of it down, to the point where a BA is now merely a signal to employers that the person has some level of motivation and competence. Hence, requiring a BA for a job is an easy way to do a first cut on resumes. As employers require degrees for occupations that don't really require degrees, this increases the pressure on ever more students to go to college. The result is an expensive waste of time for most people.

For starters, big chunks of people are not going to enjoy a liberal arts education -- not because they're stupid but because it's not where their interests lie. Everyone needs a survey of the liberal arts (and certain cultural knowledge), but this should be covered in K-12. Many very good occupations -- electrician, skilled craftsman, etc. -- are better learned in trade schools, community colleges, or through on-the-job apprenticeships. While it appears that people with BAs earn more than people without them, Murray notes that this is a bell curve. A very good electrician earns more than he would if he became a mediocre white collar employee. And if he likes working with his hands or, say, accomplishing something each day, he will definitely enjoy life more than he would filing expense reports. It's only our own snobbishness that we treat, oh, say "Joe the Plumber" as less worthy because he does skilled labor rather than sending silly emails and crunching spreadsheets all day. And frankly, the spreadsheet cruncher doesn't need a BA either.

Second, even though college is watered down, a BA is still not achievable for a great number of people. Large numbers of people drop out. That wouldn't be a problem, except that when we expect everyone to go to college, not going to college marks someone as a failure from the start. That makes class divisions even worse in our society.

Here's Murray's take:

"Imagine that America had no system of postsecondary education and you were made a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. Ask yourself what you would think if one of your colleagues submitted this proposal: First, we will set up a common goal for every young person that represents educational success. We will call it a B.A. We will then make it difficult or impossible for most people to achieve this goal. For those who can, achieving the goal will take four years no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward for reaching the goal that often has little to do with the content of what has been learned. We will lure large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability or motivation to try to achieve the goal and then fail. We will then stigmatize everyone who fails to achieve it."

I think Murray's got an interesting idea here -- that our system of higher education has become pretty problematic. Plenty of people managed to get good jobs with high school diplomas in the past. Not just mindless assembly-line kinds of jobs that have long been outsourced. I mean jobs like, say, journalist. But, of course, many high schools now show a total lack of rigor. Students graduate without knowing much about economics, or our system of government, or how to express themselves clearly. So it's been left to college to fill in those gaps. In some occupations, I'm even hearing that a master's degree has become the equivalent of a bachelor's degree. Now that many people have a BA, you need a better signal. Where does this end?

As societies with any sort of inflation have discovered, it's hard to reverse these expectations. Individuals who choose not to go to college face a hard battle in a tough job market. And even if they don't -- Alaska "First Dude" Todd Palin, for instance, made about $100,000 a year in his blue collar work without a college degree -- these people often face contempt from those who did go to college.

Two things could reverse the degree inflation. The first -- an actual, rigorous, high school education system and a top-notch professional training and apprenticeship system -- will be a long and unsure road. The second, unfortunately, might be the declining student loan market. If it becomes harder to get loans for a 4-year degree, fewer people may attempt it. If Murray is right, if this pushes smart people to do jobs they are more suited for, this may actually be a net benefit for many people and society in general -- a tiny silver lining of the credit crunch.

What do you think? Are too many people going to college? Has college become what high school used to be?

Does Giftedness Wax and Wane?

Education Week has a fascinating article up on their website titled "Gifted Label Said to Miss Dynamic Nature of Talent." It requires a free registration to read, but I hope a few Gifted Exchange readers will take the time to do so, because I'd really like to hear your take on this one.

The article is basically a preview of a new book being released by the American Psychological Association called "The Development of Giftedness and Talent Across the Life Span." In this book, various researchers comment on giftedness at different stages, with an emphasis on the idea that talent can wax and wane.

“The essence of this book, and the reason I found it so exciting, is that it is moving away from this idea of talent as something that some people have and some people don’t. It’s showing talent as something developable,” Carol S. Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of the book's forward told EdWeek. Dweck is, of course, the researcher who's made a name for herself by showing that praising for effort, rather than ability, inspires children to try hard things and risk failing. Children praised for being "smart" don't want to challenge that assumption, and hence don't want to try things that make them seem not smart.

The book will talk about giftedness in various areas (spatial understanding, music, art) and the problems with the way school gifted programs tend to address the issue. "If schools were to view giftedness as more of a developmental process than an immutable attribute, they would likely need to test children more often. And children might move in and out of “gifted” programs more frequently, based on their individual needs," the article notes. "Instead, many schools test children once for academic advancement, and students tend to retain that classification for the rest of their school careers."

It's all well and good -- we all know that talent, not nurtured, can certainly fade. And hard work is probably the deciding factor between which, of two talented children, will wind up succeeding as adults. Furthermore, the whole pull-out enrichment concept is -- as we've talked about many times on this blog -- absolutely ridiculous. There is no reason you need to be gifted to spend 90 minutes a week learning about bugs, or Robin Hood, or the culture of Japan, or whatever. All kids could benefit from these programs. What gifted kids really need is advanced, accelerated academic work. It at least sounds like the contributing researchers are pushing that idea.

But... I'm worried about this book. I'm worried because of this explanation of the thesis near the top of the article: "Academic talents can wax and wane, the latest thinking goes, meaning that a child who clearly outpaces his or her peers academically at age 8 can end up solidly in the middle of the pack by the end of high school. Instead of being innate and immutable, giftedness can be nurtured and even taught."

If acceleration were widespread and uncontroversial, if students were grouped by ability and schools were committed to meeting gifted kids' needs, this statement, that academic talents can wax and wane would be fine. True enough. I used to be sharper on, say, math than I am now. We all know some kids who were identified as gifted who wind up having trouble later for a variety of reasons.

But the problem is, we don't live in that world where intellectual talent in children is seen as a precious resource and is nurtured appropriately. We live in a world where school systems seek out any reason to not allow acceleration, seek out any reason to mainstream gifted kids, do heterogeneous classroom groupings and the like. The last thing we need is a group of gifted advocates trying to make headlines by claiming that yes, kids really do all even out by third grade (the argument that's used to avoid serving younger gifted kids) or that giftedness can be taught, and hence we don't need gifted programs. See, all kids can be gifted! Gifted kids are probably just hot-housed by their parents and once professional teachers get involved nurturing other kids' gifts (and neglecting the gifted, who will fend for themselves) it will all get straightened out.

I hope I am wrong about this, and that the book calls for a massive upgrade in how our country nurtures its brightest kids. But trust me, that won't be the headline.

Gifted Programs and Standardized Tests

Once upon a time there was a fairly clear method of selecting students for gifted programs. The child in question took an IQ test, and if the score was over 130, in you go. This method -- and IQ testing in general -- has fallen out of favor over the years. Now many programs use a variety of measures from grade level tests to school work to portfolios and teacher recommendations for admission. Some people consider this more "fair" than relying on one test. But, as a story out of Duxbury, Massachusetts, shows, this is not always the case.

The Boston Globe ran a story recently that "Duxbury's new program for 'gifted' children puts parents in uproar." Apparently, 14 3rd-5th graders were selected for the program, which was developed quietly. The children were chosen based on their matching "a chart of behavior traits associated with gifted children." Several families who had been agitating for more challenge for their children, who scored high on tests, discovered that their children were not included in the Gang of 14. This led to much finger-pointing and the like. Indeed, "At a forum on the program, held the first week of school, 150 parents peppered school officials with questions and accusations," the article notes. That's a lot more parents than kids in the program, suggesting that many more people think they have gifted kids than the school system decided had them. "Some even think that the kids selected for the program were chosen because their parents had 'connections' at the school," the reporter writes.

Of course, there's a certain element that's humorous about all this. If 14 children had been selected for a program called "remedial learning" or even something totally neutral, no one would be up in arms. It's just the reality of the gifted label. If someone is going to be labeled as "smart" then other people want their kids in too. But when you go down a road of choosing kids for programs based on behavioral charts and other extremely subjective measures, you do wind up in a gray area.

The beauty of IQ tests is that everyone takes the same test, and everyone is judged on the same scale. I've been writing profiles, for the past several months, of former finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for Scientific American. In the past, Westinghouse gave applicants a test which functioned almost like an IQ screen in order to choose their finalists (now, the Intel search is almost entirely based on project results). The profile running this week is of a woman named Sister Julia Mary Deiters (born Rosemary Deiters; she later became a member of the Sisters of Charity) who grew up in Ohio in the 1930s and 1940s. No one from her school had been a Westinghouse finalist before, and she certainly didn't have much science background. Her parents hadn't gone past 8th grade. But on a standardized test, she stood out with the best-trained kids in the country.

When we lose sight of that fundamental fairness, we miss quite a bit. Perhaps IQ tests shouldn't be the only measure of giftedness. But I tend to think they can play a fairly large role.

"A Nerdy Boy in Mathematics"

The New York Times today has a fascinating write-up of a study of female participants in the International Math Olympiad and other high-level contests. The article, "Math skills suffer in U.S., study finds" makes the point that almost all the U.S. female participants in these contests are either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants from countries where mathematics ability is more broadly prized.

As one top young mathematician noted, in U.S. schools, there is an image of being "a nerdy boy in mathematics." This is, for the most part, an undesirable image. No one wants to be a nerd, and no one wants to date a nerd. And so, given that math ability is undesirable, only those who care very little about the social order of things are willing to showcase their abilities in the field. The fact that US young women are achieving less in these fields is less about innate ability, and more about a lack of cultivation of young talent. After all, other countries have managed to find far greater numbers of promising young female mathematicians to send to international contests. Not as many young women as young men, certainly, but not in the lopsided proportions you see in the U.S.

I find this fascinating because, as we've written about here before on Gifted Exchange, young men tend to outscore young women at top levels on math tests here in the U.S. But this difference is less pronounced (or absent) among Asian American young people. It suggests that there is some cultural element to the difference. We are all assumed to be relatively familiar with baseball. We aren't all assumed to be relatively familiar with math. Maybe if we were, it would be seen as less of a subject for "nerdy" boys.

Where should gifted students' test scores be counted?

It's no secret that gifted kids tend to score very high on grade level standardized tests. It's also no secret in this era of No Child Left Behind that schools like to include gifted students' scores in their averages!

This is a problem for two reasons. First, it creates an incentive against specialized magnet programs, since these pull gifted kids out of their home schools. These kids' high test scores (which they might have achieved at any school) are now counted to the magnet school, rather than the home school. It also creates an incentive against acceleration. If a 9-year-old scores at the 99th percentile on 4th and 5th grade tests, but at the 75th on 6th grade tests, 6th grade is probably the right place for her. But the school would much prefer to have a 99 than a 75 included in its average.

So I was intrigued to see a plan announced by the East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana to "re-route" gifted kids' test scores. According to this article from the Associated Press, this plan will "help schools' performance by counting test scores from gifted students who live nearby but attend magnet programs and schools elsewhere."

Needless to say, various watchdog groups have cried foul. Per the article, the State Department of Education spokeswoman Rene Greer said, "The department is extremely concerned and plans to investigate" ways to address it.

A group called the Council for a Better Louisiana published a commentary saying that re-routing "should be called deception," and Stephanie Desselle, a senior vice president with the group, told the AP that "School accountability is not about fooling around with scores to make things look better than they are...The heart of the accountability system is to tell us how each school is doing."

But...while it may be a bit deceptive, it does remove the incentives principles currently have to oppose magnet programs for gifted students. I've become more and more convinced that we'd do better off with a uniform national test like the NAEP that is not so targeted to one grade level. Then you should compare scores of all 10-year-olds in your school, rather than all 4th graders. It's a subtle difference, but it removes the other disincentive -- that schools have toward acceleration. Even if you use grade level tests, they should be re-branded as "age-level" tests. A 9-year-old who's in 6th grade can sit for the 9-year-old test. It will be a waste of a day for him, but better than waste a whole year in 4th grade, which is what some educators currently like to see happen.

I'm curious to know what readers think about re-routing scores, or doing them by age rather than grade, or using a national test that allows for higher out-of-level scores. Do any of your districts allow re-routing?

Patrons

I've spent the past week or so interviewing people somehow connected to the Intel Science Talent Search, the Davidson Fellowships and other competitions. What's fascinating to me is how these high-profile, big money contests, and the rising competitiveness of college admissions, are spawning high school research programs. These programs give students the time, support, and skills necessary to do graduate level science research. (For one example see the Baltimore Ingenuity Project here). Students then enter their results in these contests.

Obviously, recognition is a big part of the lure. Even before students won tens of thousands of dollars in these competitions, lots of people entered (the old Westinghouse Science Talent Search prizes were quite a bit smaller than the current levels). But money is part of it. What gets rewarded gets done.

Is that bribing? Maybe. But I prefer to think of it as more of a retroactive patronage type concept.

You can't go visit museums without hearing about the old patron systems in Renaissance Italy. The Medicis had their favorite artists, as did the popes. They gave these artists commissions, supported them financially, and hence inspired some of the greatest works in western art. In the purest form of patronage, patrons give support to creative types not in recognition of some particular work (as the Intel competition does), but because you expect there will be future great work (though the two are always intertwined; people are judged on their portfolios).

I've become involved with this on a very small scale of late. My choir, the Young New Yorkers' Chorus, sponsors an annual Competition for Young Composers. We solicit applications from all over the country. People submit previously composed choral works. We then choose three composers we think can do a great job and commission new works from them. We premiere these works in New York each spring, and give cash prizes (for the entry form, see here).

We've realized that it doesn't take much money to create great works of art. We also realize that we can fill an important niche. Student composers write works for classes. "Grown up" composers are more established in their careers and often have contracts with music publishers and big choruses or orchestras. But younger artists are trying to take risks, and often have less of an established market. They are trying to get on the map. They need patronage for that space between academics and the commercial market.

As a plus for us, when these composers hit it big (and they will) we will be known as the chorus that premiered their early works.

I've been trying to think about how good patronage programs would work in other fields. The MacArthur grants are obviously a good example -- $500,000 to do whatever you'd like. There are prizes for young economists doing good work early in their careers. Certain gallery owners nurture young artists. But it's probably an aspect of talent development that could use more cash, attention, and creativity.

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?