America's Real Dream Team

Thomas Friedman has a great column in this weekend's New York Times, "America's Real Dream Team," also covering the Intel Science Talent Search.

He lists the names of the finalists to make an obvious point: Most of these young people are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Their projects are incredible, showing imagination, technology and drive -- the three factors that will produce the jobs and economic growth of tomorrow. America's immigrants have always done well on these fronts. A great reason to keep the doors open, and something I remember when I run through Battery Park (from where you can see the Statue of Liberty) here in New York.

He also interviewed Amanda Alonzo (the star teacher who helped mentor two finalists this year, including the 2nd place winner). She told him that San Jose real estate agents are now advertising what she's done in Asian newspapers so potential immigrants know exactly where to buy a house! These agents are on to something: We should be competing for the best and brightest in the world, and their children. As a teacher at Thomas Jefferson told me at the Intel STS public day, when he's traveled to other countries such as Russia, "They are putting a lot of effort into their best and brightest." Some teachers, such as Alonzo (who told me she took her 1-month-old infant along with her to the International Science and Engineering Fair last spring-- phew!) do this, but it needs to be a much more coordinated effort. As the Time magazine cover story this week on "The Workforce: Where Will the New Jobs Come From?" points out, ultimately only innovation creates jobs and growth. If we want jobs and growth, we need more innovators. The Intel STS suggests where we can find them.

2009 Davidson Fellow Erika DeBenedictis Wins Intel STS

Erika DeBenedictis, a 2009 Davidson Fellow, won the Intel Science Talent Search last night for her project developing a software navigation system to help improve spacecraft travel through the solar system. Her research looked at gravity and how the planets move to help create "easy transit routes," (per the Intel press release) which will "ultimately help spacecraft move faster and with less fuel." You can read about her Intel project here, and about her Davidson Fellowship here.

(I also interviewed her for a Wall Street Journal article last fall on why it wasn't a bad thing for kids to be very busy).

She's a very impressive young lady and I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more from her in coming years. In the meantime, now that she's won another $100,000 in scholarships from Intel, I'm not sure there is a college that's expensive enough to cover all her winnings!

Observations from the Intel Science Talent Search

I went down to DC yesterday to interview folks at the Intel Science Talent Search finals for a City Journal article (slated for the autumn issue). As I go to more of these events (Siemens, Davidson, ISEF and Intel STS) I am continually struck by how certain schools show up again and again: the Texas Academy of Math and Science, Thomas Jefferson (in VA), Ward Melville in New York, Montgomery Blair (in Maryland) and a few others.

One of those this year was Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California, which had 2 finalists (and 6 semi-finalists). Unlike some of the others, Lynbrook is a regular public high school and doesn't have a long institutional history of sending kids to the Intel (or Westinghouse) finals. It only started happening a few years ago.

Why? Because of a young teacher named Amanda Alonzo, that's why. You can read this profile of her in the San Jose Mercury News.


Basically, she got excited about scientific research and invested the time in starting a program and mentoring her students. Over the past few years it has paid off. Several of her students are now going to get loads of scholarship money, and possibly have more college choices than if they had not been Intel finalists or semi-finalists.

It's a fascinating thought experiment. Clearly, the latent talent was there at Lynbrook. But a motivated, talented teacher helped develop it. If Mrs. Alonzo was teaching somewhere else, would there now be a major research program at another school? Would her students have done what they did? It is hard to know. The two I interviewed at Intel yesterday were obviously incredibly bright and hard-working and came up with their own ideas, so it is quite possible they'd still be there. But probably several of Mrs. Alonzo's students who didn't make it to the top reaches, but learned a lot about science in the process, will pursue careers in the field. The question is whether Mrs. Alonzo can be replicated.

Building a Better Teacher

The cover story of the New York Times magazine this past week, Building a Better Teacher, dealt with the increasingly popular topic of improving America's teaching corps. Author Elizabeth Green makes the point that with 3.7 million teaching jobs in the US, you can't simply hope to attract a better caliber of teacher in the future. Your best bet for improving student outcomes is raising the skill-level of the vast majority of teachers who are neither great nor awful.

Teaching and managing a classroom are, it turns out, skills like any other. Some people are naturally better at them than others, but most people can become better than they currently are with focused, deliberate practice. It's a fascinating piece, and worth checking out.

Common Core Standards

Today, the National Governors Association released a draft of its core standards for grades K-12. Almost all the states (well, 48 of them) have signed on to this idea of creating standards that define what students should know at any given grade level.

I've been reading through the standards (available here) and I think there is a lot to like about them.

For starters, the math standards were specifically benchmarked against countries that routinely eat America for lunch in international comparisons (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea). And so they are far from the lowest common denominator standards that some folks had fretted about. Kindergartners need to know how to count by tens, to understand what adding and subtracting are as concepts, and to think about geometric concepts such as 2- and 3-dimensions. By 6th grade, students are learning to think algebraically about problems (if I can walk half a mile in 10 minutes, how can I use that information to figure out how many miles I can walk per hour?) By 7th grade, students are learning about probability concepts--if I guess on 10 true-false questions, what are the chances I get 7 right?--and in 8th grade, they're thinking about the slopes of lines and concepts in solid geometry that in general many kids these days get around to in 10th grade.

Some critics in the news articles about these standards have said so what, what's the point in learning concepts earlier? That doesn't mean you'll really know them. But I disagree with this -- the earlier things are introduced, the more time you have to think about them. And waiting to introduce concepts until later has had the effect of watering down standards, to the point where 4th graders are still working on addition because you have to fill time with something.

The National Governors Association also released the language arts standards, and at least on the writing front, I'm cautiously optimistic about them. Many of the student writing samples in the appendix are pretty good (one 4th grade short story blew me away, though the authors of the standards pointed out that it may have been edited -- then again, so is all professional writing!).

I think it is encouraging that the common standards will be aimed high, and I also think it's encouraging that we will have common standards, in part because I hope this will pay off for gifted kids. If we define as a nation exactly what an 8th grader should know, then it raises an obvious question. If a 10-year-old knows what an 8th grader should know, why can't that 10-year-old be in 8th grade? This question exists now, but because there are so many varying standards on 8th grade knowledge, there is always wiggle room. Common standards help take that away -- which I think is a good thing.

Idaho encourages gifted kids to graduate early

Acceleration is good for gifted kids -- allowing them to move through school at a rapid pace without dredging up some of political issues that dog other accommodations. Now the state of Idaho is realizing that acceleration can be a money-saver for governments, too.

According to the Associated Press, a new Idaho plan would pay kids to graduate early. (Direct URL: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hMyjdWG670FdForgcXMTVOa4MY1QD9E7AU780 -- I have been having trouble with Blogger on getting the whole URL in these links lately).

Kids who finish high school up to three years early would be eligible for a scholarship of $1600 for each year they don't do. That sounds like it would be a new expense for the state of Idaho, but of course it isn't. Every year that a kid spends in the Idaho public schools costs the state $4593. Not only will the kids have the opportunity to move on to more challenging work, the state will save about $3000 a year. The one problem, of course, is that tuition at a place like the University of Idaho runs more than $1600 a year, but at least this is a start.

Primary Sources

Today, the Gates Foundation, partnering with Scholastic, released the results of a survey of 40,000 American teachers. You can read the press release (and find links to the main report) here.

There were several interesting results. For instance, more teachers thought that supportive leadership, time to collaborate, and quality curriculum were important for retention than thought that higher salaries were essential. About half of elementary school teachers said they'd be willing to have parent-teacher conferences in kids' homes. Teachers endorsed the idea of clear standards, common across the states. And perhaps most interestingly, only 10% of teachers said that tenure was a good measure of teacher performance. Some 42% said it wasn't a good measure at all. This suggests a potential difference in belief between rank-and-file teachers, and teacher union leadership (since years of service and graduate degrees tend to be the most commonly allowed standards for differences in pay).

In recent years, the Gates Foundation has moved on from its initial Small Schools programs (which turned out not to work that well) to focusing on teacher quality. This report is a first step in figuring out what teachers think, in order to enlist their support in future reforms.

St. Louis -- and what's wrong with gifted education

Yes, this is the second post of the day, but I wanted to get this one up before the weekend (and the early school dismissal on account of snow).

Out in St. Louis, the city school system is looking to open a second gifted elementary school, according to this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

On one hand, this is great. I'm always glad to see schools trying to meet gifted kids' needs. On the other hand, the tone of this article points to two big problems with gifted education as it currently exists.

First, the article notes that there are hundreds of students on the waiting list for the gifted program. This means that gifted education isn't being treated as an intervention for kids who need it. It is a special program for those lucky enough to get in.

Second, the school system is explicitly using the existence of a gifted program as a way to keep middle-class families in the city schools. Again, this makes gifted education about special treatment--a situation that is ripe for resentment. All children deserve a good education; some children just need to move at a different pace than others.

As we've talked about many times on this blog, gifted education should be about matching students with an education appropriate to their needs. It should not be considered "better" than what other kids get. While I'm glad St. Louis is taking gifted education seriously, this seems to be the underlying assumption, at least according to the people quoted in this article.

The Early Literacy Crisis

Earlier this week, I had my first "real" parent-teacher conference at Jasper's (2y9m) pre-school. We had a parent-teacher conference last year, too, but that was mostly just to report that he liked to sing the clean-up song and seemed to have mastered the concept of drinking out of a cup. This year, though, I found myself sitting down with a list of which letters Jasper could recognize, and nodding in a way to convey that I understood that this was important.

I don't think it really is at age 2, but it turns out that letter recognition is a big deal these days, in part because it is a proxy for other things. It is a way to try to quantify young children's pre-literacy skills. Such skills include the knowledge that in the English-language world we read left to right, how you hold a book, that we read words not pictures, that letters correspond to sounds, that letters strung together make words, which stand for concepts.

As Richard Whitmire points out in his new book Why Boys Fail, the early grades have become much more reading intensive over the past few decades. Some children thrive in this language-rich world, but others (more often boys than girls) do not.

One way to make children comfortable with language is to expose them to lots of it. My son's pricey pre-school is teeming with books, as is our house (to the point of absurdity, as my toddler fell asleep last night on top of a copy of What Do You Do With A Tail Like This? which I thought had been misplaced). But many environments are not. The Pearson Foundation came out with a study last fall noting that 61 percent of low-income families do not have any age-appropriate books in their houses. Parenting magazine picked up on this and ran a story this past month called The Early Literacy Crisis, calling for more pre-school and highlighting early educational interventions.

I think in general such interventions are a good idea. The important thing is to get them to where very young kids are, and this is slightly more problematic. If the kids are in daycare centers, that's one thing, but if they're in family care, or in home-based daycare centers and other informal arrangements, this is going to be more difficult. People try with educational television (since, alas, television occupies a lot of children's time, even if reading does not). When people talk about public pre-schools, they're often talking about schools for 4-year-olds. The scary thing is that this may just possibly be too late. While letter recognition at age 2 doesn't mean a whole lot, when kids' brains haven't been surrounded by a lot of language early on in life, they may not develop in a way that will make reading intuitive later. And that has all sorts of consequences. In one of the most awful and cynical sentences I have ever read, Parenting reported that "States like California and Indiana have even factored in the number of third-graders who are not reading at grade level when planning future jail construction."

Fleeting Youth, Science and Hiring College Grads

Is there an age for optimal creativity?

That's a question many people have debated over the years. Many great mathematicians and scientists did their most innovative work quite young (see this story, "Fleeting Youth, Fading Creativity in Science" by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal for more on this.) It can help to be able to see a field afresh, without the weight of previous interpretation narrowing your focus. This isn't necessarily true in all fields -- writing a great novel may require knowing lots about the human condition, which tends not to happen until you've experienced the human condition -- but it is in many branches of science.

That can be a problem, because funding tends to come later in a scientist's career. Grant-making bodies like the NIH like to see a track record, which a younger scientist might not have. But Lehrer highlights work that is being done to change that, so that's encouraging.

Of course, one easy way to get funded is to work for a tech company that really hopes you will make a breakthrough. So I was fascinated to see, yesterday, a press release from Intel about a new $3.5 billion job initiative. Intel, and several other companies, are committing to increase hiring of American college grads into various science and tech positions. I imagine that many top math and science grads already have their pick of positions, but certainly giving a broad swath of young people access to capital and equipment probably won't hurt the cause of innovation.

The New Child-Testing Craze

Gifted Exchange garners a mention in NurtureShock authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's new piece in The Daily Beast: The New Child-Testing Craze.

We are grateful for the shout-out, but I worry that their writings on this topic aren't being read as carefully as one might hope.

Bronson and Merryman repeat their point from NurtureShock that a child with a tested IQ of 130 at age 4 may not necessarily test in the gifted range later, then go on to say that unfortunately other tests aren't any more reliable (such as those designed to see if kids can get along with others, follow teacher instructions, etc.).

Thus, they write, admission to gifted programs can be random, "save for an occasional bona fide prodigy who blows the top off these tests."

The problem is that this is an exception that is worth thinking about. While there may not be a big difference between a child with a 125 IQ, and a 130 IQ, and IQ can change over time, there are ways to deal with this. First, you can test multiple times. Kids can go in and out of gifted programs. And most fundamentally, gifted education should be viewed as an accommodation for kids who need it, not some sort of reward. That's one reason that acceleration (grade skipping) is often a pretty good option. It's not a special program where you get to go to science museums on Friday. It's what everyone else is getting... just a few years ahead.

But while there may not be a big difference between 125 and 130, there is a difference between 100 and 160, which Bronson and Merryman readily point out. Unfortunately, I think that point often gets lost in the recent craze (see the New York magazine article recently) to claim that giftedness is a myth.

Planning for Early College

Many of us, these days, work in jobs where we are judged on results. We aren't compensated based on how many hours we spend in a seat, but on achieving certain objectives. I get paid the same amount whether a USA Today column takes me 10 hours or 5 hours, and there's also a certain standard. If it isn't good enough, it won't be published, no matter how many hours I devote to it.

But while growing numbers of us have such flexible, results-oriented jobs, education remains largely a matter of keeping your posterior in a chair. In general, a school year is 180 days with about 6 or so hours of instruction per day. You do that for 13 years (K-12) and then you are done. Yes, you have to pass classes, but there is often no particular standard aside from what one individual teacher decrees. If he isn't particularly knowledgeable about the subject, or not good at teaching it, chances are his pupils won't learn much, but that doesn't matter. In many cases, you pass the class and you get a credit.

Of course, this leads to cases of people having high school diplomas that don't indicate much of anything. So over the past 20 years, a number of states and districts experimented with high school exit exams. Starting in 10th grade or so, you'd have a certain number of opportunities to pass a test of basic high school level skills. There would sometimes be exceptions (you could submit a portfolio of work instead) but the idea was that all high school graduates would have at least a minimum level of competence.

But then what? It raises the question: if the majority of students could pass a high school exit exam in 10th grade (and generally that was the level such tests aimed for), what were the last two years of high school for? Students intending to go on to selective colleges would take college prep classes, but what about everyone else?

It's a good question, and so I'm glad to see that, according to an article in the New York Times, a "New Plan Would Let High Schoolers Graduate Early." In eight states, certain schools would allow kids who passed the high school exit exam in 10th grade to actually...exit high school. They would enroll in community college classes for the next two years instead.

I think there is a lot to like about this idea. First, it gets more kids starting college. Many students get lost somewhere in between high school graduation and college, or in their first year or so of college, because they're also adjusting to adulthood at the same time. But if you're still technically a kid and going to college, then you can get at least 2 years under your belt before you're off on your own. Two years is enough for an associate's degree--not a bad thing to have in the job market.

And second, it reinforces the idea that you are in high school to learn certain skills, and not to twiddle your thumbs until you're 18. If you learn those skills, then it's time to move on to something else. Gifted kids are going to be the biggest beneficiaries of this separation of learning goals from seat time. Because frankly, if you can master the high school material in 10th grade and move on, why not an option to master it in 8th grade and move on? Or 6th grade? Since every state promises children a free and appropriate education up to grade 12, I think it would be a logical step forward to say that the state would promise a free and appropriate education up to the equivalent age. Gifted kids could then enroll in community colleges in their teens and hopefully get the kind of challenge that middle and high schools often fail to provide.

Richard Whitmire on Why Boys Fail

Richard Whitmire, an education writer who did a Q&A with us last year on various educational issues, and who co-write an op-ed with me for Ed Week on skipping grades, has a new book out called Why Boys Fail. He argues that while reading and verbal skills have become increasingly important, and emphasized, in the early grades, boys haven't caught up. As a result, they start out behind, and in many cases stay lost. He argues that the current collegiate practice of accepting young men with fewer qualifications than young women is needed at least for a few years until the gender ratio becomes closer to 45-55 (it's currently 43-57 men to women). He also warns, in a world in which young women still seem to prefer to marry men with equal or more education than they have, of a marriage gap as women can't find suitable husbands.

It's interesting stuff, if a bit controversial. Yes, women now comprise 50% of US non-farm payroll employment, but looking around the centers of power in this world -- the big corporations, the government, big law firms, banks, even non-profits -- it's kind of hard to argue that men are underrepresented at the top. But it is always dangerous to think that what is true now will be true in the future, and we will be better off if men and women all learn the skills necessary to succeed in this new economy. You can read a Q&A with him on the topic here in USA Today.

Gifted brains...more efficient?

An old but interesting link crossed my desk recently--a CNN look ("Scientists Dissect Mystery of Genius") at the MIND Institute, where researchers do brain mapping and study what that tells us about intelligence. It seems that the brains of people with high IQs appear less active, but it is because they are processing information more efficiently.

I guess this should not be surprising. One of the basic definitions of intelligence is the ability to piece together bits of information to solve problems, particularly new problems in new situations. Being good at this means being able to retrieve and relate information more quickly -- like a librarian who knows his way around the stacks.

Of course it raises the question -- if high IQ brains are more efficient, can training make any brain more efficient? If IQ is fungible within a certain range, then it would seem that one could push toward the top of a range through repeated use. This could explain why certain problem solving games could lead to slightly higher scores on IQ tests.

Do homeschoolers and telecommuters get a snow day?

I've been working pretty much as usual as the snow piles up outside; the commute to my home office is not changed by the weather. Many people are having this experience today -- a number of federal government workers, for instance, are working from home on contingency plans, though the fact that they can do this raises the question: why don't more workplaces have people work from home more often? Work that requires a lot of collaboration can still benefit from seeing people in the flesh, but a number of workplace studies have found that telecommuting, say, twice a week, has no effect on collegiality.

Back when I was in school, snow days were always a source of great joy -- you got them truly "off." After all, the buses couldn't take kids to school, and school is where schooling happened. But I'd venture to guess that a great many school children have home computers these days, and could get a lesson plan emailed to them from a teacher. Since if the schools are closed, a parent or other adult has to be home anyway, there would be adult guidance to help kids work through their lessons. In other words, they'd be doing a version of homeschooling for a day.

Of course, this then raised the question for me -- do homeschoolers take snow days? Not having to travel to school is one of the perks of learning at home, but still doing regular lessons would certainly change the connotation of those first weather announcements of an impending storm! I'm curious what the homeschooling parents reading this blog do.

The Junior Meritocracy, or the "Myth" of the Gifted Child

It's become a very popular piece to write: Some schools test kids before kindergarten for placement in gifted programs. IQ tests are problematic! 4-year-olds are hard to test! Therefore, giftedness is a myth!

The latest publication to jump on this bandwagon (which others, including Malcolm Gladwell and Po Bronson have also joined or hinted at) is New York magazine, whose cover story this week is called The Junior Meritocracy.

Jennifer Senior's article makes the usual points. First, IQ is not inherently stable. It can move by 10 points or so over time, and is likely to regress toward the mean. This means that a strict cut-off (aka 130 points) can be problematic. Also, tests can sometimes be coached, and very young children are hard to test. They'd rather play, they need to go potty, they want their mothers, and so forth.

I had a few thoughts. First, this is a very New York specific piece. Most districts do not, in fact, test kids for giftedness at age 4. Third grade is a far more usual time, because in education lore, the schools will have straightened out in any advantages or disadvantages that kids came in with by then. This seems strange to me (kids spend more time at home than at school), but that is the thinking.

Second, New York is strange in that there are very few chances to get in "the system" once your kid has started school. Private high schools want you to have gone to private elementary schools, and Hunter's schools go K-12. Most districts do not have nearly enough choices in schooling for any of this to matter.

But anyway, some more important observations: So IQ can move. That may matter if we're talking about dropping from 135 to 125, but the chances that a kid who has been tested multiple times at 150+ will drop down to, say, 110, are quite low. As one quoted expert, Samuel J. Meisels, put it in the piece, "Giftedness is a real thing, no question." That completely contradicts the cover line ("The Myth of the Gifted Child") and suggests that the problem is not that too few kids are being labeled gifted, it's that too many are, with a dividing line too close to the mean. Tell the parent of a 3-year-old who taught herself to read just because she finds books so fascinating that kids are all the same, intellectually, and may even out over time, and she'll probably laugh in your face.

If IQ moves, then test multiple times. Test for entrance to gifted programs every year or two -- and have kids test out too. I agree that there's no point in having only one extremely high stakes test. But that doesn't mean giftedness is a myth. If a kid has a growth spurt at age 15, he's more likely to make the basketball team in high school than if he has a growth spurt at age 18, or just stays pretty short. That may not be entirely fair, since playing a sport can teach great lessons for life and maybe help with college admissions. But we don't go apoplectic as a society about how unfair this is or, more ridiculously, try to claim that tall people don't exist.

My last point: why are these articles always illustrated with child models wearing nerdy looking glasses? When the New York Times magazine ran a cover story several years ago about the rise of the "gifted child industry" they did the same thing.

The Atlantic: What Makes a Great Teacher

It sounds like a no-brainer: You've got a 23-year veteran teacher, a very nice woman who persists in teaching in a lower-income school rather than moving elsewhere. She spends her own money on new equipment for the classroom. She decorates the place and keeps it neat and tidy. She clearly loves children. If you had to find an "effective teacher" she'd be it, right?

Well, maybe not, according to a fascinating (and well worth reading) article in The Atlantic by Amanda Ripley called "What Makes a Great Teacher?" This article is based on more than a decade of research from Teach for America, which has tracked teachers and looked at who raises test scores and who does not. While test scores are not the be-all and end-all of educational results (as parents of gifted kids know well), they do show something, particularly when tests cover basic knowledge and skills and students repeatedly do not show mastery of such things.

We are learning--as perhaps we've always known but maybe not really appreciated--just how much teacher quality matters. The article starts with an anecdote of a young Mr. Taylor, a teacher who manages to boost almost all of his lower-income charges up to grade level and better, regardless of where they enter his classroom. Research has shown that if a lower-income kid can have three years of teachers like Mr. Taylor, he will perform as well as kids in well-to-do suburban districts. On the other hand, if you have three years of teachers who aren't effective, you may never catch up.

So you definitely want effective teachers. The problem (as Malcolm Gladwell compared with NFL quarterbacks in a New Yorker article a while back), is that it's hard to know ahead of time what matters in a teacher. We've isolated some things, like a teacher's own scores on standardized tests, and subject matter expertise in the case of math, but there is still a lot of ground to cover beyond those data points. In the absence of knowing what matters, we look to things that seem like they should matter, such as years of experience or (perhaps the one that is the most insidious) how nice and caring the teacher seems. Clearly someone who bothers to put up friendly decorations is a good teacher, right?

But it turns out that there are other factors that are far more important. A key one, the Teach for America data shows, is "grit." This is a short way of saying a person's tendency to stick with a difficult problem until she solves it. A classroom of kids with plenty of woeful tales is full of problems. How are you going to make them learn?

The "you" in that sentence is there on purpose. Teach for America also found that effective teachers tend to believe that they personally are in charge of the situation and can come up with a solution, regardless of what other people do. Mr. Taylor, for instance, notes that "On back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to see six or seven parents.” But when Ripley asks him how that affects his teaching, he tells her, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things.” He calls all his students' parents the first week of class. Other, less effective teachers she interviewed tended to keep complaining about the lack of parental involvement, or budget cuts, or too much standardized testing or organizational politics (or the monster under the bed), and use that as an excuse.

Effective teachers set big goals, and then execute against them, planning extensively for the next day, week, year. They are also constantly trying to improve. The Teach for America person in charge of quality decided to visit the most effective teachers' classrooms to see what they were doing. But whenever he called, he noticed he'd get a similar response, Ripley writes. “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’"

All of these things are going to be hard to screen for in hiring teachers. There is also currently no good way to get rid of teachers who aren't performing very well, and frankly, I'm not sure many principals and parents have the heart to in some cases. The warm, caring 23-year teaching veteran who used her own money to outfit the classroom (in Ripley's article) turned out to be a horrible teacher, in the sense that, at the start of the year, 66 percent of her students scored at or above grade level. At the end of the year, only 44 percent scored at grade level. When schools start counseling such teachers to leave, you will know that there has been a major shift in educational philosophy toward performance, and away from the fuzzy stuff. We are a long way from there.

But at least this data gives us a place to start, and the Race for the Top money is going to start bringing more of this data into the public eye. For the cause of education reform, this is a good thing.

UK Pulls the Plug on National GT Program

Back during his time in power, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had an ambition: to get more middle class families to stay in the UK's state schools. One way to do that, he decided, was to increase programming for gifted students. The result, a national academy for gifted students, was launched in 2002. This program provided summer classes, trained teachers, and otherwise tried to bring the needs of gifted learners into the forefront of education.

Now it appears, according to this article in the Telegraph, that the program's 20 million-pound budget will be redirected mostly to achieving more "social mobility," whatever that means. Any national funding for gifted kids will be directed mostly at those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Now, I understand that budgets are tight everywhere, and there is nothing wrong with helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds. But it is absolutely ludicrous that this is set in contrast with gifted funding, with the idea being that any gifted funding is taking away money from students who deserve it more. 20 million pounds is a small drop in the UK's education budget. The country could probably find that kind of money by reminding everyone to turn off the lights a bit more frequently, or using cheaper toilet paper.

Instead, this is purely a philosophical stand made by educrats who are obsessed with "equity" to the exclusion of all else, and really hate the idea that some kids are brighter than others. If you can't remove that reality, then you try to at least ignore the bright kids and trust they'll do all right. It's a short-sighted philosophy, but it's incredibly widespread for reasons I don't understand. What is it about going into education that makes people dislike gifted kids?

Two Intel student prize-winners to be recognized in the State of the Union Address

President Obama will recognize two young scientists as part of his State of the Union address, according to this release from Intel. Li Boynton of Houston, TX and Gabriela Farfan of Madison, WI, who have both participated in Intel's science fairs and contests, will sit with First Lady Michelle Obama during the speech.

For the past few decades, presidents have been highlighting Americans with various triumphs or woes during this annual speech; the exercise is meant to call attention to certain issues. So I'm certainly glad that a big issue he'll be calling attention to is gifted young people doing great things! We should be doing more to treat such young people as rock stars. I look forward to seeing it.

An Alternative to AP

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story called "In Suburban Schools, an Alternative to AP." The article chronicled the growing interest in dual-enrollment programs, in which high school students take classes that follow college syllabi (and often earn college credits).

The New York Times billed these courses as two things: a cure for senioritis, and an alternative to the "high-pressure" pace of the AP, and its high-stakes end-of-year tests.

I think the first is definitely true. Once the college admissions process is over for the most selective schools by the second semester, people definitely start to slow down. Rather than take easy classes, dual enrollment lets students try out what they'll be doing during the next four years. Dual-enrollment classes potentially expand the curriculum that is available, and by giving kids a taste of college level work may sharpen their study skills.

But I am not sure that these courses are quite equivalent to the AP. For starters, while the AP classes are designed to get you credit (or passed out of courses) at even the most selective universities, many dual-enrollment programs use local community colleges' courses. That doesn't mean they're not good, but Harvard may not recognize these credits. And second, the end-of-the-year high stakes exam is the main reason I like the Advanced Placement courses. They are completely standardized across the country. A 5 in Boise means the same as a 5 in Tampa and New York City. You won't get a high score just because you are the smartest kid in your school. These are hard tests, there is an absolute standard, and if you don't know the material, you will not do well. If you do, though, you know that score means something.

Much in education is incredibly fuzzy. We have no idea if an A in calculus one place means the same as an A elsewhere. We don't even know that the same material is covered. Many gifted kids earn As for no better reason than that the teacher in a regular school has to aim the material to the middle of the class, which makes the material too easy for someone on the high end of the bell curve. A national, difficult, standardized test removes these temptations.

The homeschooling single parent

There's been a bit of a dust-up over at Business Week over their recent cover story, The Permanent Temporary Workforce. The story was written with the intent of casting the rise in the free agent workforce in as negative a light as possible. For some people it is a bad thing -- you're doing the same job as an independent contractor, and so not getting any benefits. But for many of us who consider ourselves more entrepreneurial, it's great not to call any one company boss, and certainly worth the trade-offs (like buying our own health insurance, something I did for a few years).

Anyway, the dust-up is that Business Week later had to run a letter from the lead character in the story, a single mom named Tammy DePew Smith, disagreeing with the whole premise, namely that "You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal." Smith works with LiveOps, a Santa Clara provider of call-center workers. She works from home, basically when she wants to, earning about $15/hour -- not great, but not exactly poverty, either.

So what does this have to do with education? Well, it turns out that Smith is also homeschooling her 7-year-old son. I know a lot of Gifted Exchange readers are homeschooling, and often this involves one parent stepping out of the workforce for a while to function as their children's full-time teacher. But the economy is changing. More of us are working wherever, whenever. While working from home is not a good way to save money on childcare when you have little children (trust me on this one), if an older child can be started on a lesson, the parent can then go do something else. In Smith's case, what she does is go answer customer service phone calls for half an hour or so until he's done. This allows her, as a single parent, to support her children, and homeschool one of them too.

Indeed, Business Week could have written a whole story about that! It could have read, "isn't it great that the economy is now so flexible that a single mom can not only support her kids, she can homeschool, too?" But I guess this was not the company line. Michael Bloomberg, whose Bloomberg company now owns Business Week, has often told graduating classes in his stump commencement speech that "it never hurts to be the first one into the office each morning -- and the last to leave." Well, it hurts if you don't get to homeschool, and you've decided that's what's best for your kids.

I always like to hear stories from homeschooling parents about how you're making it work, particularly if you are combining it with paid work or other commitments.

Ranking the States in Math

Ed Week recently published a "Math Progress" index related to the Quality Counts 2010 report. The index ranks the various states according to 12 metrics. I believe some of these metrics are important-- for instance, the percentage of middle schoolers attending schools where taking algebra in 8th grade is the norm. Others are less important--for instance, the percentage of lower-income students taught math by teachers who have been teaching it for more than 10 years. What with tenure and the like, it is quite possible to teach math badly for 20 years or more, especially in the large urban districts where many lower income students reside, and other studies have shown that after the first few years on the job, teachers don't make vast quality gains. So I'm not sure I would have included this one.

Nonetheless, what I find most interesting about these rankings is how varied the states are. Some are generally good on most of the metrics (Massachusetts and Maryland). Some are generally bad (Mississippi, for instance). But even the top scorers like Massachusetts don't do well on some important metrics, like 8th grade algebra, whereas lower ranking states like California do quite well on this one. Because of this, it is hard to point to one state doing "best practices" that others can emulate. In other words, large scale math reform is not going to involve just pointing to one state and saying "do what they do." It will have to involve picking and choosing from across the country.

The Intel Semi-Finalists

Intel and the Society for Science released their list of the semi-finalists in this year's Intel Science Talent Search. You can read the list of 300 students here.

While the list of students who have done amazing independent scientific research projects is long, the list of schools they attend is much, much shorter. Scroll down, and you'll see the Texas Academy of Math and Science, the North Carolina School of Science and Math, the Illinois Math and Science Academy, and a few other stand-outs listed again and again.

What's happened is that a few schools have institutional research programs that give kids the time and the mentoring to actually conduct interesting, meaningful experiments. While it is certainly possible to find your own mentor at a university near your home, or even come up with your own experiments you can do at your kitchen table, a research program makes it that much easier for kids with scientific aptitude to test and stretch themselves.

I would love to see more schools putting serious research programs in place as an option for kids who want a project in high school. Hopefully the cash a semi-finalist designation earns will, over time, convince more schools to give it a try.

Our Little Genius

Over the past few years here at Gifted Exchange, we've written a few times about "child prodigy" shows, when TV hosts like Ellen or Oprah bring on kids who do what are billed as amazing things. These often involve memorizing a high volume of information, like which US president did what, or lists of famous quotes.

I'm not sure how it's become a broadly held notion that intelligence in children is defined by the ability to memorize things and do quick recall, but I guess this is what makes for good television. All of these kids are, of course, bright, but children in general like to memorize things like the names of all the Thomas the Tank Engine characters or the names of dinosaurs. It helps them make sense of the world and given that they don't have to stuff their brains with other questions (like "did I remember to pay the mortgage?"), many can do it quite well. If you've got parents who want to promote the kid, then you've got a TV segment, though it may not be showing quite what everyone thinks it does.

It was particularly eerie in one of the Oprah episodes I watched, in which a young girl who could recite famous quotes was asked about her favorite quote from Oprah. She gave the quote, then said at the end "Oprah Winfrey." Since she was speaking to Oprah, this made very little sense to give the name of the speaker. But this is how she had memorized everything (quote, then name of person who said the quote), so she stayed true to form, rather than changing to take account of the current situation (which is probably a better measure of intelligence).

Anyway, this television tendency will now get a new breath of life with the new Fox show, premiering next week, called "Our Little Genius." In it, children pulled from gifted programs will answer increasingly difficult trivia questions to win money. Their parents have the option to have them stop at any given point if they decide that's enough winnings. The show's creator, Mark Burnett, told the New York Times that “I love that we’re shining a light on these academic geniuses... So much light is shined on gymnasts, football players, singers and actors. It’s not often that you get a light shined on academics.”

This is definitely true. However, I wish we would recognize that this is a certain kind of academics. For game shows to work, there has to be a right answer. So you get questions like "Who was the Roman god of war?" for which you can study and cough up the right answer. You don't get more interesting questions like "why might a culture have a god of war?" or "how might it change a culture to move from a pantheon of gods to one god?" which actually test a person's ability to draw on different bits of information and reach a new conclusion. If you had a show in which a 7-year-old discussed those questions, I'd definitely watch it. But since there's no right answer, it would be hard to dole out $500,000 in front of a studio audience. And the ratings would probably stink.

Teach for America and civic engagement

For the past 20 years, Teach for America has sent new grads from top colleges into troubled schools to teach for 2 years. The idea is that these young, energetic teachers will inspire their charges, and that, in turn, having the experience of teaching will turn these young grads into better citizens.

It's an intriguing idea, but there's now some new evidence that the latter is not necessarily true. According to a new study from Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam (written about here), rates of voting, charitable giving and civic engagement are lower among Teach for America grads (who completed their two years) than among those who were selected to the program but declined the offer.

While there's some controversy about these findings (founder Wendy Kopp disputes them) it does raise the question of why this would be the case. I think the answer has to do with how much we, as a society, like neat narratives. We like stories that make sense. What could make more sense than people having a life-changing experience doing something like the Peace Corps, or Freedom Summer (when college students helped register black Mississippi residents to vote back in the Civil Rights era), AmeriCorps or now Teach for America? Thess life-changing experiences, according to the story line, would then inspire people to a life of service.

But real life seldom fits into neat narratives. As McAdam points out, the Freedom Summer folks (who did stick around in progressive activism) were undertaking something pretty risky and counter-cultural. When 13% of Harvard's graduating class applies for Teach for America, though, it's hard to think of it as a counter-cultural thing that would truly inspire you to do difficult and potentially unpopular things for the rest of your life.

It's also possible that serving in an inner-city school for two years can make people feel like they're "done" -- they've done their work for humanity, and now they don't need to volunteer or give money. Or perhaps people get so burned out doing this difficult work that they no longer care about public policy (why vote for politicians who will just grandstand about education anyway?)

These are tough questions, and I don't know the answer. In general, I think it's not a bad thing to have young, smart people try teaching. One of the few metrics that actually matter in teacher quality is the teachers' own scores on standardized tests. Clearly, the Ivy League grads who fill Teach for America's ranks do well on that metric. So maybe this study was going after the wrong thing. After all, if more than 60% of Teach for America grads are still involved in education, then it's certainly a success on that front.

What are we thankful for?

Gifted Exchange will be taking a holiday break starting next week, and be back in 2010. This past year has been a big one for us. We passed our 4-year anniversary, and have now tallied more than 400 posts! Through the "Facets of Gifted Education" series earlier this year, we got to meet a wide variety of people involved in gifted education, from teachers to publishers to kids.

We've covered a variety of woes in the gifted education world, but as part of the holiday season's focus on joy and gratitude, I'd love to hear from people about things that are going right. If you know a school, a program, an accommodation, etc., that's worked really well, I'd love to hear about it. I want to thank everyone for reading this blog, and hope you have a fantastic holiday season and New Year!

Intentions and results in school reform

Everyone is into school reform these days, and everyone has good intentions. Schools and teachers talk about how they're trying different things; every educational symposium features sessions about their innovations, with sympathetic audiences crediting the speakers for trying to "do something."

And it turns out, according to a very big new study, written about here in Education Week, that all this freelance innovation may not be as effective as following very specific scripts.

Thirteen years ago, researchers from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education set out to study three packaged school reform curricula: Success for All, America's Choice and Accelerated Schools. Success for All features scripted lessons which tell teachers exactly how to teach a concept. Accelerated Schools allows teachers to devise lessons, with guidance toward outcomes. America's Choice is somewhere in the middle. After studying the achievement of thousands of students at hundreds of schools, the researchers found that Success for All outranked the others. While the Accelerated School teachers felt they had far more autonomy in their classroom, this autonomy translated into not being very effective, or at least doing no better than the control schools. The Success for All scripts, on the other hand, raised achievement levels of the average participating student from the 40th to the 50th percentile over 2.5 years.

This is a fascinating result and, if you are a teacher, a wee bit tough to swallow. We think of teaching as a profession, benefiting from a personal, charismatic touch. It's somewhat akin to how we think of medicine. And there's a parallel to the dust-up going on among doctors with the whole evidence-based medicine announcements coming down from various task forces. In this morning's USA Today, for instance (right next to one of my op-eds!) there is a column from Dr. Marc Siegel at NYU complaining about the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which recently recommended against annual mammograms for women over age 40. Dr. Siegel writes that "Today I use my own checklist based on 20 years in practice." This involves sending women who are over age 40 for mammograms. He is sure that this is the right thing to do (and hence is writing an op-ed complaining about being told not to do it) but the reality is, based on the evidence, it isn't. That's exactly what the task force was "tasked" with figuring out. But he's a professional! He knows what's right based on 20 years in practice! Hence the title, "Task-force thinking doesn't deliver my kind of medicine."

The same thing, apparently, happens in teaching. When you teach for 20 years, you know how to teach, right? Certainly you know better than a scripted curriculum package... except that for the average teacher, that's not what this study seems to be saying. And just as doctors often object to standardization programs (for surgery, procedures, etc.) that try to turn them into robots, I don't think teachers like them either. But it raises the question in both areas: if the results are better (and there's no doubt that doctors following strict procedural guidelines make fewer errors), is it worth the cost? Nobody likes unhappy teachers or doctors. But we like results too.

National Journal: Education Tracking Continues to Stir Debate

As long-time readers of Gifted Exchange know, "ability grouping" or, as I like to call it, "readiness grouping" is a very important part of meeting the needs of gifted students. The narrative of a gifted child being bored in a heterogeneous classroom -- and being asked to serve as an unpaid teaching assistant because of it -- is so common it's a cliche. It's incredibly difficult to teach a classroom full of kids with wildly differing abilities in a way that challenges all of them. Excellent teachers can do it, sometimes. Unfortunately, excellent teachers aren't quite as bountiful as we'd all like.

Nonetheless, ability grouping or, as opponents like to call it, "tracking," remains controversial among people who aren't trying to raise bored gifted kids stuck in heterogeneous classrooms, and so people continue to study the practice. National Journal recently highlighted a new study from Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution claiming that schools with more ability grouping showed better results than those with less ability grouping.

Some folks agreed with him, and some didn't, but I was particularly interested in a quote by Kevin Welner, a professor of education at the University of Colorado. Per the article, "The research on tracking is as clear as anything in the field of education," Welner said. "It is a destructive practice that has the undeniable effect of lowering expectations and opportunities for students who have already fallen behind." In Welner's estimation, National Journal reports, the body of research documenting the harmful effects of tracking speaks for itself, the debate is over and it's time to move forward.

Since Welner is so against ability grouping, I assumed that his classes at the University of Colorado must be open to all comers of all abilities. But it turns out that the University of Colorado at Boulder's School of Education is very proud of how "ability grouped" it is, in the sense of being very selective to get in. As this profile page notes, GRE scores for doctoral candidates in the School of Education ranked 6th out of 190 schools around the country. I think one needs to take with a grain of salt the idea that young people should be subjected to completely heterogeneous classes when it comes from people who have put themselves in professional environments where everyone has done well on standardized tests.

What to tell kids about Santa

No, not the big question. I'm guessing that many readers of this blog had their 5-year-olds come to them with good arguments about the top land-speed of reindeer, their dense bones which would preclude flight, the exact number of houses in North America--let alone in the rest of the world where, curiously, many cultures have a different conception of a night-time gift giver. Or, if your kid has a strong inclination toward fairness, she noted that while some of her friends got huge gifts from Santa, her stocking inclined mostly toward gum and toothbrushes (I don't think my parents wanted Santa taking credit for the good stuff!).

Since my family was firmly in the gum-and-toothbrushes category, any Santa belief ended quite early. In second grade, my class was supposed to write letters to Santa, which would then be answered. I wrote a letter saying this was a stupid exercise since he didn't exist. The letter I got back said I sounded like a smart little girl. I'm not sure if that was a good thing.

Anyway, the question is what to tell kids to say to other kids about Santa. While gifted kids can figure things out quickly, they're not always that good at social niceties, or see the point of white lies. It's wrong to lie to people, right? So if you've got a little Santa truther, how do talk him through this social navigation, particularly if all his friends at school or church are still at the age where it's fun to believe? (There's a broader take on the Santa issue, from the child development perspective, talked about in this article here). I'd love to hear how you all handled this issue.

Motivated Kids (and the Joys of Non-Fiction)

It should come as no surprise that one of the key ingredients of a good education is motivated kids. One of the issues that has bedeviled the study of charter and private schools is that often, the kids and families who elect to attend (or even apply for) these schools are just more motivated and oriented toward learning than those who don't. That means that a school billed as more challenging academically, which requires people to apply, will do better than a "regular" school, even if the former takes all comers or, for that matter, isn't any better. Motivation matters. If you knew you had to give a speech in French in four days to a big audience, you'd be a lot more motivated to practice than you probably were in your college French classes!

Some children start school more motivated than others. They come from families that really value learning (a positive focus) or come down hard for bad grades (a more negative focus, but probably effective, too). The question for raising the caliber of American schools, then, is whether you can create motivated kids in situations where families aren't sending the message that school matters.

I think you can. There have been a million articles written on successful-against-the-odds schools (I've probably written several dozen myself, as you can see from the links that follow). The common theme (aside from good principals and teachers, and often high standards) is that the schools have found some "hook" to motivate the kids. The Cristo Rey schools bring children into professional work settings 1-2 days per week where they see what skills might be needed to land high-paying jobs. The police academy magnets in LA interest kids in learning in the context of forensics, intense physical education and so forth. The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship has kids learning math and writing so they can produce business plans (and make real money -- a real world motivation!)

What all this boils down to is creating conditions where students want to learn something because they are personally interested in the answer. I was reminded of this at the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented conference, which I attended this past week. Much of the conference was aimed at teachers getting their professional development credits. I attended a session called "The Joys of Non-Fiction," led by Dr. Keith Polette, a professor of English Education at the University of Texas at El Paso. He started with a story of a kid in English class asking the reasonable question "Why did Poe put questions at the end of his story?" Almost every English class features short selections followed by questions, which Polette claimed was dull and not very effective.

So he tried another approach with us, showing us a black and white photo of a Victorian woman with no caption. Who did we think she was? People threw out silly answers. Then he gave us another clue. She did something no woman had done before. What did we think she did? (People threw out more silly answers, which he then made fun of. Humor always helps in teaching...) We pondered who she was, what she had done and why she had done it. And of course, by the time we had spent 5 minutes guessing who she was, we were all quite curious. When he finally gave us a short biography of a woman who turned out to be Bertha von Suttner, the first female winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, most people were genuinely interested in reading it, and in learning about this journalist who published Lay Down Your Arms in 1889. I am pretty sure most people would not have been interested in reading that chunk of text under other circumstances.

In other words, motivation can be created. The question for education reform is how to spread best practices to create motivation more broadly--for as many hours as possible that students are in school.

A different way of doing assessment

I just got back from the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented's annual conference (where Jan Davidson was the keynote speaker). I'll write more in coming days about various issues that came out of the conference. But one fascinating one, at least for me, was the assessment that the Davidson Academy at the University of Nevada-Reno has developed for choosing its students.

The Davidson Academy is the nation's first public school for profoundly gifted kids. To be eligible, students must have IQ scores above a certain level. However, scores only tell you so much. And so, the folks who run the Davidson Academy have developed a way of gauging how a student actually learns. Here is the Assessment Schedule (taken from a hand-out at Academy Director Colleen Harsin's talk-- the words in parentheses are from the hand-out):

1. Read a short story and respond to four critical thinking questions (done independently on laptops)

2. Academic discussion and direct instruction (About an hour using a PowerPoint presentation to guide the students through the literary elements of the story -- PowerPoint also includes information about how to write a literary analysis essay)

3. Write rough drafts of essays (Given detailed guidelines about how to approach the essay and what is expected)

4. Science questions (Both objective, multiple choice questions and reflective short answer and essay questions)

5. Lunch

6. Math assessment (Not multiple choice-- while students are doing this, the English teachers are writing feedback on the students' rough drafts)

7. Peer editing with each other's rough drafts (Allows students to get different ideas and perspectives from each other, helps students focus on the expectations we have of their writing -- handout that guides the editing process)

8. Work on final drafts of essays (using advice from the teachers and their peers)

9. Outside break

10. Read and respond to a short story (a quick check with a second story to help us look at critical thinking, reading comprehension, and independent writing).

What I like about this assessment is that, for starters, most tests are a complete waste of a day. They are designed to test what you know, and so they are inherently retrospective. But this assessment teaches kids something they, at age 10-12 (or so) have probably not encountered much before--namely, writing analytical essays. And second, the process is not so much about getting the right answer, or writing the perfect essay the first time (which I have never done in my life! I spent 5 hours revising a 900 word essay this week!) but about whether you can learn to incorporate feedback and write a better essay after evaluating your own and others' work.

In much of school, you learn something, cough up what you remember, get a grade and move on. There is little emphasis on revisiting what you've done and learning from any mistakes or seeing what can be done better. But this is precisely how one actually develops talent in a discipline. The nature of intelligence is being able to fit together disparate pieces of information and draw inferences and solve problems. Basic tests don't often measure this well, but I think this assessment does.

Time: The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

This past week, Time magazine's cover story addressed the phenomenon of "overparenting" (or helicopter parenting, or pushy parents, or whatever you want to call it). Writer Nancy Gibbs chronicles the backlash against a perceived tendency toward too much hovering and protectiveness, and treating even grown children as if they were babies.

I had a few thoughts on the piece. First, Gibbs does a good job of bringing up some nuances to all this that don't normally get addressed. One is that Americans in general have a real problem with statistics. We worry more about potential predators lurking on the half mile route between home and school than, say, an aunt's somewhat creepy boyfriend, even though statistically, the latter is far more likely to be a problem. Crime rates in places like New York City are at 1960s levels, and yet few parents let their kids wander alone around city neighborhoods, which 1960s parents were far more comfortable with. She also acknowledges that if you have a choice between an overinvolved or an underinvolved parent, you are probably better off with the first.

But then she doesn't really follow through on this thought. The reality is that some small number of children do have overbearing, hovering helicopter parents -- some small percentage of generally well-to-do children (whose parents read Time magazine). Unfortunately, though, far greater numbers of children don't have the advantage of parents who can do a lot for them. Various studies have put the percentage of children who aren't involved in any extra-curricular activities at 40-50%. A stunning number of children spend their non-school hours in something researchers charmingly refer to as "self-care." This generally involves watching a lot of TV because mom or dad aren't home, and that's the safest thing around to do. While some children get headaches and symptoms of anxiety because their academic work is too strenuous, the vast majority aren't being challenged nearly to the extent of their abilities.

I find overparenting as funny as the next person -- I like nothing better than making fun of parents who put hygienic gloves on their babies' hands so they never touch the dirty world. But there's also a problem with having this mocking and disapproval become the cultural narrative, especially in the context of gifted children.

Here's why. Few schools are really set up to handle the needs of highly gifted kids. This means that parents who have such kids are going to have to advocate for their children. They will have to get involved in the classroom, see what the children are learning, and step in to suggest various accommodations. Gifted kids also often need lots of outside-school stimulation as well. Many have amazing talents for music or art or things like that, and to develop their talents, these kids need lessons, coaches, etc. Often they need to travel to different towns, or go to special camps or what have you in order to interact with other students of similar abilities.

So -- if you're not into gifted education, which a great number of schools and educators, alas, are not -- what do you call a parent who is constantly advocating for her child, signing her up for violin and piano lessons at age 6 and setting up a math league so she can participate? A pushy parent, that's what. But I'd argue that that parent is simply doing what her gifted child needs. That's not pushy parenting, that's good parenting of a pushy kid.

Obama launches "Educate to Innovate" STEM campaign

Today, the White House launched its new science, technology, engineering and math initiative, "Educate to Innovate." Backed by $260 million in cash and in-kind support from companies including Intel and organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the initiative is supposed to complement the "Race to the Top" federal education spending. It has three main goals:

1. Increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering and technology
2. Improving the quality of math and science teaching so American students are no longer outperformed by those in other nations
3. Expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.

The President and other partners in the Educate to Innovate campaign intend to use a variety of approaches to attack these issues. Time Warner will be sponsoring STEM after-school activities. Discovery Communications will work on science-related television programming. Sony, Microsoft, et al will sponsor game design competitions to produce STEM-related video games. A National Lab Day will push the idea of kids actually doing science as opposed to merely reading about it in textbooks. The White House will use its bully pulpit by hosting winners of science competitions.

Of course, I think it's great that this issue is getting attention, and it would be great if American students could top international comparisons in math and science. I just want to bring up a few issues that I'm not sure are going to be addressed by all this:

1. Much of the talk is about "motivating" and "inspiring" young people to learn math and science. But I'm not sure the problem is a lack of inspiration. As discussed in this Scientific American piece (which quotes me), some 85 percent of American kids said in a Lemelson-MIT survey they are interested in science and math, and 80 percent said their schools had prepared them for a career in science. This is absolutely delusional. Barely half of kids are even prepared for college! You can think math and science are as cool as you want, but until you learn the tools, you won't actually be able to do anything truly cool at all. Sometimes the tools are boring. I absolutely love writing, but learning the rules of grammar still wasn't exactly fun. So what?

2. Many parts of the initiative are aimed at improving math and science education among under-served, or under-represented groups. For instance, Intel sent me a press release about the initiative that said "Intel will develop new models for student research programs in rural, inner-city, low-income and high-minority classrooms across the US that encourage hands-on science and math learning." This is great; much math and science education in America's less-privileged schools is truly awful. Per the president's priorities, I would also love to see more minority (and women) scientists and mathematicians.

However, this focus on under-served kids seems based on the widespread assumption that America's rich white kids are doing just fine. This isn't true. See this column I wrote for USA Today about how our top 10% would fare, internationally. The answer isn't pretty. America's place in the middle-of-the-pack, internationally, is not necessarily because of an "underclass" problem. Closing the gap between black and white students, and between poor and better-0ff students would improve things, but not nearly as much as people think it would. Any effort at making America top-of-the-world needs to face the harsh reality that even America's well-to-do suburban schools with their helicopter parents and loads of homework are, in fact, not cranking out armies of graduates ready to compete on the international stage. We live in an increasingly competitive world. The sooner we truly recognize that, the better.

State of the States...and really changing things

So I finally made my way through the epic National Association for Gifted Children's bi-annual State of the States Report. (I'm having trouble copying links on Blogger, if I didn't type that link exactly right, here it is: http://www.nagc.org/uploadedFiles/Information_and_Resources/State_of_the_States_2008-2009/2008-2009%20State%20of%20the%20States%20Report%20%28full%29.pdf)

We will discuss specific aspects more in coming weeks, but overall, the report makes a convincing case that gifted education is not particularly a national priority. The vast majority of states say that most aspects of gifted education are decided by local education agencies (LEAs). This includes policies toward acceleration and early kindergarten entrance, dual enrollment, etc. While 32 states mandate gifted education for kids who need it, only 6 of those states fully fund those mandates. While most states say that gifted education for young kids is done in regular classrooms, only 5 states require that regular classroom teachers receive any training in meeting the needs of gifted kids.

I'm sure this is not really a surprise to many parents of gifted kids. You probably spend a lot of time working with individual teachers and principals to get appropriate accommodations. Then your child moves up to a different school and you have to start all over again. Or maybe your district has good policies, but then you move to a new city and, again, you have to start from scratch. Sometimes there's even wide variance in policies within schools, and parents of gifted kids whisper among themselves about how to get the right teacher -- the one who understands how to meet their kids' needs (maybe she actually took an elective in this while getting certified!)

But anyway, while I'm very glad that NAGC has compiled all these statistics in one place, the larger question is, so what?

So we know that gifted education is not a national priority. We also know this is shortsighted and stupid in an era in which most of us have to compete on a global stage and our ability to attract top talent from other countries is diminishing. When an economy is based on brains, not brawn, then gifted students need "a responsive and challenging educational system to help them achieve their highest potential," as NAGC puts it (actually, I'd say all kids need that, but that's a different point).

But again, so what? Advocates have been crying in the wilderness for years that doing great things like the next equivalent of putting a man on the moon requires nurturing top students. But the powers that be do not seem to care. In general, the federal powers that be are more obsessed with the accountability movement. State powers that be are gnashing their teeth over their current budget crises. So it's no surprise that most decisions about gifted education are left to local education agencies.

But there is an upside to this: it is a lot easier to change things at the local level than at the state or national level. Perhaps someday we'll have national education officials who are really into gifted education, but since education secretaries (and deputies and policy makers) tend to come from the ranks of state and local education bureaucrats, gifted advocates need to pack the pipeline. And that means holding as many of these spots as possible. Local education authorities have vast discretion in making gifted education work. If gifted education is a decision maker's pet cause, it will get attention.

Who are these decision makers? Broadly, the people with the most power to change things through personal discretion include professors at teachers' colleges (who can work gifted education into the curriculum), principals and district administrators, and local school board members.

The first three are not necessarily going to be easy professions for gifted advocates to enter, as you generally need classroom experience and certain degrees to become a principal, professor or administrator. Many gifted education advocates are parents with different professions (though we can certainly try to lobby these people! And long term, we can encourage like minded people to go into the education profession).

But running for school board is a different matter. I'd love to hear from people who've done a lot of advocacy on the local level, but it seems that if there were strong advocates for gifted education on a local school board, gifted education would become a bigger priority on the local level -- which is where most decisions are made on these things anyway. I'd love to see advocates run for school board anywhere they can -- and hopefully start changing some of the statistics in the State of the States report.

Ten9Eight

Last night I attended the premiere of Mary Mazzio's latest film, Ten9Eight. This documentary about the teen finalists in the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship's annual business plan competition is showing in select AMC theaters today around the country (Gifted Exchange has covered NFTE in the past, under its previous name, the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship).

There are very few positive films out there about bright teenagers doing good things with their lives, and fewer still that feature hip hop dance, slam poetry, Popsycakes and (very briefly) the Washington Redskin cheerleaders. So if you live in NYC, LA, Boston, Washington DC, Kansas City, Miami, Atlanta or Chicago, go check it out!

Myths of Gifted Education

Gifted Child Quarterly recently ran a package tackling various "myths" of gifted education. This page has a list of the short articles, with links to PDFs of each of them. They're all written by big name researchers in the field and are worth checking out.

I particularly enjoyed reading James Borland's take on the problems of specifying what percentage of the population is gifted, mostly because he weaves in the movie Spinal Tap when discussing IQ. Obviously, any scale of measuring something as varied as human intelligence is going to have some arbitrariness to it, much like the amp in Spinal Tap that is extremely cool because it goes to 11, rather than 10.

Many an advocate of gifted education has gotten caught in this argumentative trap. The problem is then when people -- acknowledging this issue -- get sucked into another logical fallacy, such as that just because something is difficult to measure it must not exist or must not exist in differing quantities. Even if we had absolutely no good way to measure intelligence, or creativity, or things like that, that wouldn't mean that some people wouldn't be better at coming up with new solutions, or solving problems, than others. The fact that relying on IQ tests as a measure of giftedness has historically excluded some bright people from programs doesn't mean that no one's gifts should be nurtured. The answer is to individualize education -- to challenge everyone to the extent of their abilities. That involves turning teachers into coaches, developing everyone's talents as best we can.

The Left-Brain Child

Today, Gifted Exchange welcomes Katharine Beals, author of the new book Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World. Beals, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, argues that "bright, quirky, socially awkward children" are at a distinct disadvantage in today's schools, which emphasize group learning and class participation. While certainly not all gifted children fit that description, the stereotypical "nerd" does -- and Beals argues that such children need help from parents and schools to best make their way in the world. Her book also contains a section on parenting mildly autistic children; if you've got a twice exceptional child, that is well worth checking out.

Gifted Exchange: Describe what you mean by “left-brain children.”

Beals: I’m using the term “left-brain” not in a neurological sense, but in the everyday sense that has permeated our language via popular psychology. So by “left-brained,” I mean those who think abstractly and logically, analyze and systematize, process things linearly (or one at a time), attune themselves to verbal rather than nonverbal communication, and prefer to work independently.

GE: What do you make of books like Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, which claim that what you label a “left-brain” style has previously been dominant, and the new economy will be based on a “right-brain” style? Do you think left-brainers are actually in the minority? Have they always been?

Beals: I agree with Pink that the “left-brain” style no longer dominates in terms of what most Americans consider important. As I argue in my book, this is especially true in our K-12 classrooms. But I believe left-brain thinking has always been essential to our economy, especially when it comes to scientific and technological advancement, and I find it rather alarming that Pink thinks we can comfortably outsource all of this to India.

I’m no expert on nature vs. nurture, but I suspect that the left-brain disposition is largely innate, and thus independent of societal trends. Whether or not left-brainers are in a minority really depends on where you draw the line. How social you are, and how linear a thinker you are, is really a matter of degree. Also, you might be fairly social but extremely analytical, or vice versa—in which case some, but not all right-brain trends will be problematic for you.

GE: Is there any relationship between giftedness and being “left-brained?”

Beals: I think there’s quite a strong relationship, particularly when it comes to academics. Strong analytical skills lead to aptitude for math, science, foreign language, and expository writing. The problem, though, is that fewer and fewer educators appreciate this connection. Today’s schools increasingly de-emphasize analytical skills in favor of social and organizational skills and visual creativity. The unfortunate result is that many bright left-brainers are no longer recognized as gifted.

GE: How can parents and schools teach left-brain children to cope with social situations?

Beals: Many unsocial children need more structure than the typical peer group environments offered by schools, which are often unstructured and unsupervised. Much more ideal is a social skills group run by a trained specialist—e.g., a developmental psychologist or speech/language therapist. Some schools offer this, but typically parents must look outside the schools to private clinics.

In my book, I also recommend several textbooks that focus on conversation rules in particular. Though these books were written for students learning English as a foreign language, and American culture as a foreign culture, much of what they say is also helpful to left-brain Americans.

GE: Has the increased use of text-based and virtual communication (email, texting, online games, etc.) opened up new ways to interact for socially awkward kids?

Beals: Yes, it has, and this is a very promising development. Many unsocial left-brainers are much more comfortable with text-based than with in-person communication. With text, all the social cues are right there, written out in front of you, and there’s more time to figure what to say and how to say it. Online games like Second Life, where you customize a two-dimensional “avatar” to stand in for yourself, have been a godsend to many shy or socially awkward kids--a non-threatening way to make friends and practice social skills.

GE: What makes math “reform” (making it more social and right-brain friendly) appealing to educators? Can a good teacher do it (or the other ideas, like Writing Across the Curriculum or Project-Based Learning that you criticize) right? Or is it inherently problematic?

Beals: Reform math appeals to educators partly because education schools have been pushing it for years, partly because it aligns with state math tests, and partly because it involves a lot less drill than you find in traditional math programs. But because it diverges so drastically from the structured, linear, explicit teaching environments that left-brainers depend on, and because the actual math is so much less challenging than it used to be, it’s hard to imagine how it can be successfully adapted to left-brain learners. An excellent alternative to Reform Math is Singapore Math: rigorous math without the intensive drill that turned off many students to math a generation ago.

Writing Across the Curriculum and Project-Based Learning are different. What makes these practices problematic is when the assignments are open-ended or large in scale—both of which can overwhelm left-brain learners. The way around this is for teachers or parents to break assignments down into smaller pieces and make the instructions more explicit, spelling them out step by step. Also, teachers need to be more flexible about the projects’ “creativity” requirements, recognizing analytical in addition to visual creativity.

There’s one element of Writing Across the Curriculum from which left-brainers should be exempt, however, and that is the requirement that they explain their answers to math problems verbally. Many left-brainers do arithmetic automatically in their heads in ways that can’t be explained in words.

GE: The main message seems to be that all kids are different. Is individualized education the answer?

Beals: To some extent it is. The easiest way to make school more hospitable to left-brainers, especially in the short run, is to let these kids work on their own, at their own rates—especially since left-brain students typically thrive when working independently. This also allows their more social classmates to continue working in groups. However, an argument can be made that certain subjects, especially math and science, need to be more left-brained and rigorous for everyone—indeed, that the future of our country depends on it.

Sesame Street and the Commercialization of Childhood

Like just about everyone else under age 45, I grew up watching Sesame Street. It's a testament to how big an influence those Muppets and their human friends have had on society that pretty much every essayist is tackling the topic of Sesame Street's 40th birthday this week (I kind of enjoyed Nancy Gibbs' take in Time, but I welcome links to others!)

Life has changed for many young children since 1969. There are the demographic changes, of course--more have moms who are in the workforce, and more are living with just their moms these days. Sesame Street features a single working mom like Gina in part to be relevant and respectful of children's lives.

But what's more fascinating to me is the changes in early childhood education and, alas, early childhood marketing, over the past four decades. Given that I can remember watching Sesame Street, it strikes me that it used to be aimed at slightly older children. But these days, many 4- and 5-year-olds are in school during times when children's educational programming tends to air. Even many 2- and 3-year-olds are in preschool or daycare. And so while Elmo, the quintessential toddler, was a side character back in the dark ages of the early 1980s when I was watching, these days he's pretty much the star of the show.

As a star, he of course has licensed products based on his likeness everywhere (the Wall Street Journal had an interesting story this morning about the star treatment that toys are getting in Hollywood these days). We have an Elmo doll at our house that Jasper likes to sleep with. Jasper and Sam's diapers both feature Sesame Street characters like Elmo. Yep, even Sam's diapers, sized as they are for children weighing 8-15lbs. The various Tickle-Me-Elmo products have become hot sellers inspiring shopping crazes every Christmas. As toys go, they're pretty wholesome, and Sesame Street is certainly more wholesome than most things on television. You have to admire the earnestness as it's expanded around the globe; a character in the South African version is HIV positive, and versions that air in the Middle East stress the importance of girls learning to read too.

But there's a problem with babies and toddlers watching Sesame Street, not least of which is that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for kids under age 2. The problem was perhaps best articulated by Susan Gregory Thomas, author of Buy Buy Baby, in this interview with Salon:

"It's complicated for an infant or toddler to process television. When they are put in front of the television, the only thing they seem to be getting out of it in a verifiable way is character recognition. That's why you see babies and toddlers so thrilled when they're at the supermarket and they recognize Elmo. ... The problem is that the great social values that Elmo and the characters on Sesame Street teach are lost on children under the age of 3. They get solely a flat, one-dimensional character recognition. And the only other times that children are going to encounter the character are when a company is trying to sell the kid something. You don't see Elmo running around your park. You see Elmo when he's in diapers, when he's on juice boxes, when he's on Band-Aids and when he's on toothbrushes."

So Sesame Street has, alas, become part of the craze of marketing toward very young children. While I love the show and think it does a lot of good, I'm wishing it a happy birthday with a caveat. I know the Children's Television Workshop can't truly control how parents let their children interact with television. But if pediatricians say that kids under age 2 aren't supposed to be watching television at all, why is Elmo's face on newborn diapers? Something is not computing between the stated aim of Sesame Street to teach older children their letters and numbers and civility and citizenship and the reality of its marketing. There is a lot to be said for educational television. But there is probably more to be said for watching as little television as possible.

The BASIS for success?

I recently read a fascinating piece in the Economist about a group of charter schools, called the BASIS schools, in Arizona. Founded by Michael and Olga Block in the late 1990s, these schools feature an extremely accelerated curriculum and a commitment to hiring great teachers (and negotiating their salaries individually, and paying performance bonuses a la Wall Street). Most interestingly, the schools explicitly model their curricula on the best practices exhibited in other countries that routinely trounce the US in international comparisons. For instance, we know South Korea does math well. What can we copy from that system? Of course, the US does things well, too, and in this piece, Olga Block talks about the openness of American classrooms and the questioning nature of American students as being things she wanted to keep.

One of the exciting things about the education reform movement of the last few years has been watching all the different experiments around the country. Not every person would be thrilled to attend a BASIS school (Olga Block talks about how she didn't originally see extracurricular activities as being particularly important for a school). But the idea of high expectations is universally a good idea. We have a lot of untapped talent in this country, and a lot of children who have never truly been challenged. If the BASIS schools can take anyone who wins the lottery to attend, and have such children taking college-level classes through much of high school, it seems to indicate that most schools could aim a lot higher than they are currently doing.