Business Week: Bill Gates Gets "Schooled"

This blog has, over the past year, criticized the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Small Schools Initiative for missing the boat when it comes to challenging bright kids. The theory is fine -- kids in small schools feel like they're part of a community. They're less likely to drop out.

Unfortunately, when the Gates Foundation has taken on troubled schools and split them into 3-4 small schools, too often they have not concentrated children by ability or interest (say, a selective math/science school). Sometimes, the schools have been downright hostile to the idea of ability-grouping, choosing to "detrack." But gifted kids learn best when they're challenged to the extent of their abilities in an environment with their intellectual peers. Because the gifted children from the previous big schools are scattered around these new Gates small schools, there are too few gifted kids in each individual school to justify programs that meet their needs. So, their needs aren't met.

Now some other publications are picking up on this. Business Week ran a cover story in its June 26 issue called "Bill Gates Gets Schooled." The opening anecdote describes one Manual High School in Denver. A low-income school with low test scores, Manual was a testing ground for the Gates's ideas. People working with the Foundation split the 1,100 student population into three small schools. But these new schools had no particular theme and became indistinguishable. The new principals had no experience managing schools. Even worse, notes Business Week, "Because the schools were so small, they couldn't offer as many electives as before. French was eliminated, leaving only Spanish for many students who already spoke it. Advanced Placement courses were reduced. Sports teams struggled just to field squads. When the famed choir was limited to one school, the popular director left, and that program withered, along with band and theater."

Fortunately for Manual's students, Denver laws allow kids to transfer to other schools if there's room, so most of Manual's best students managed to escape this downward spiral. But of course, that just accelerated the trend. With just 580 students enrolled for this fall, Business Week says, Denver is shutting the school.

Lest anyone think Manual was just a particularly rough test case, Business Week visited 22 Gates-funded schools around the country. Notes the magazine, "they deserve no better than a C when it comes to improving academic performance." Gates schools show only slightly improved reading achievement, and worse results in math. Kids do graduate at higher rates. But if they know less when they graduate, it's hard to see how that was an improvement.

Business Week notes that some schools have turned out quite well. Mott Haven Village Preparatory School in the South Bronx, for instance, has doubled its graduation rate, and, more importantly, posts Regents pass rates of 96% for math and 98% for English ("Regents exams" are the tough exams that show New York students have mastered the high school curriculum -- about half of state high school students pass the exams each year). Of course, it's not clear that being small is what pushed Mott Haven's success. The school has an excellent principal. Gates money pays for SAT tutoring which, when you think about it, often winds up being advanced, accelerated, one-on-one work.

But another school profiled, High Tech High in San Diego, shows the philosophical problems with some of the Gates Foundation's work. High Tech High graduates 99% of its students, with most being college-ready. High Tech High also has an amazingly charismatic principal, Larry Rosenstock. He attempted to work with a network of other schools to recreate his success. But it hasn't gone smoothly.

"One point of contention has been Rosenstock's belief that dividing students into honors and non-honors classes lowers expectations for ordinary students and undercuts the benefits he sees when teens learn as a team," says Business Week.

What Rosenstock -- and the Gates Foundation -- don't seem to understand is that only in the presence of absolutely top-notch teachers and principals (like Rosenstock) can un-tracked schools have a chance of succeeding. Most teachers aren't so adept at figuring out every child's needs and meeting them. It would be great if all teachers were Teacher-of-the-Year quality (the kind Rosenstock can lure with the $17 million his school received from Gates) and capable of meeting gifted kids' needs in the regular classroom. Even with the addition of Warren Buffett's money to the Gates pot, I don't see that happening on a national level any time soon. Untracked schools have a better chance of winding up like Manual in Denver instead. It becomes a great race to the middle -- the lower middle. Only 16% of students at Gates schools make the grade in math, Business Week, says, compared with 27% of students at traditional schools in the same districts. In other words, for all the Gates Foundation's money, students in the schools it funds have often wound up slightly worse off.

I have hope that this strange love of detracking is just a result of the ideology of the people the Gates Foundation has hired to manage its education programs. Foundations have a tendency to attract people with utopian do-gooder ideas that sometimes crowd out a realist commitment to results. But Bill Gates was a very gifted little boy. Now that he is stepping down from Microsoft to devote himself full-time to the Foundation, he may demand more accountability and evidence of results for his investments -- particularly among the brightest kids at his schools.

At least I hope so. It's a shame to squander the minds of gifted kids in low-income schools just to pursue a certain ideology.

New Jersey's Governor's School: Update from Laura Overdeck

Following up on yesterday's post... New Jersey's Governor's School, the prestigious, free summer program for gifted high school students, had been canceled due to budget cuts. Thanks to private donations, the programs will run as planned this summer.

On the webpage for the New Jersey Governor's School of Science (to be held at Drew University), the school specifically thanks John and Laura Overdeck for their generous contributions, which allowed the school to stay open. Mrs. Overdeck graduated from Princeton a few years before I did, so I contacted her through the school's alumni directory.

First, she told me she's reading Genius Denied!

Second, it turns out that she was a Governor's Scholar in Science in 1986, the program's third year. "It was an amazing, life-altering experience: it's a big reason I went on to major in astrophysics at Princeton," she told me. "I also made lifelong friends, one of whom was in my wedding a few years ago."

When Corzine announced the budget cut, NJGSS notified alumni, including Overdeck. "My husband John and I are wholehearted advocates of gifted education, self-pacing, accelerated curriculum, and programs that recognize and nurture young talent (he was an early attendee of Johns Hopkins' CTY-SET)," she says. "So after some discussion, we decided to offer to fund the Governor's School in Science for this summer." Their $200,000 donation would pretty much cover the program's costs.

But, amazingly, when Overdeck offered the state $200,000 to keep the program running, the state rejected it! She was told the program simply had to shut down. "This upset me enough that I notified the Newark Star-Ledger. Others had complained as well, and it hit the front page that week."

Long story short, NJ decided to accept the $200,000 and also recruited former state first lady Ruthi Byrne to raise the $1.9 million necessary to keep all six schools open this summer.

From her interactions with Corzine and others, Overdeck says she thinks state leaders believe NJ Governor's School should continue as a tuition-based program. The thinking is that some families can afford to pay, so why not ask them to contribute? But those families already have other options, such as summer programs at Harvard and other universities. What makes NJ Governor's School unique is that it doesn't charge tuition. Kids who can't afford expensive summer programs are as welcome as those who can. No need to apply for scholarships or financial aid. No one decides not to apply because of sticker shock. Says Overdeck, "John and I strongly believe it should remain free for all attendees. It's an honor to be selected, and tuition-free ensures that talented kids of all income groups can go."

As I said yesterday, I'm thrilled that NJ's gifted high school students still have this option, thanks to gifts from people like the Overdecks. Of course, I can't help thinking of the parallels. Can you imagine if Corzine had announced that there was no more funding for bilingual education, and that if people thought it was important, they could step up to the plate and raise the money themselves? Various state and federal laws mean he can't do that. But no one requires states to put their money where there mouths are when it comes to meeting the needs of gifted kids.

New Jersey's Governor's School survives

A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry about NJ's Governor's School. This program allowed 600 academically advanced high school students to study advanced material for four weeks over the summer at no cost to them. As private summer enrichment programs can run several thousand dollars, Governor's School was a life raft for bright kids without extra income. The program cost $1.92 million, which New Jersey retroactively cut from the 2006 budget. That means that 600 students received acceptance letters for the summer, and were then told to make other plans.

Fortunately, it turns out they don't have to. Thanks to some generous donations from corporations and private individuals, the programs will now run as planned this summer. Meanwhile, alumni and others concerned about gifted education are lobbying the New Jersey legislature and Jon Corzine, the governor, to make sure funding is restored for fiscal year 2007. You can read about some of those efforts here.

I am thrilled that students will have the opportunity to study arts, sciences, engineering, and other great things this summer. But I also want to point out that New Jersey isn't relying on private contributions to make sure that other kids with special needs receive the education they deserve. Hopefully Corzine and the legislature won't get the idea that this is the way things should work in the future.

Poetry Out Loud

Here's a fun new contest that readers of this blog might like to know about: the Poetry Out Loud annual poetry slam/bee from the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. The first national contest was held in April of this year. The winner, Jackson Hille of Ohio, walked away with $20,000 in scholarships.

Here are the details. Once upon a time, kids memorized and recited poems as a way of learning about this literary form. This method of learning fell out of favor for awhile, but now it's back. When you memorize a poem, you get closer to it -- and understand it better -- than you do when you're just parsing verses for meter and reading the footnotes about how others have interpreted the words. Indeed, most poetry was meant to be experienced out loud. Our oldest poems (The Odyssey, for instance) were experienced this way. When we're little, we hear nursery rhymes out loud, and delight in how the words sound together.

So now high school kids are reliving that experience, memorizing poems such as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, or Billy Collins' Forgetfulness and hamming it up on stage as they recite them. About 500 schools participated last year; the Foundation intends to make it truly national this coming school year.

If your kids are bored for the summer, memorizing great poems (and doing some recitation for neighbors) would be a good way to spend the time and get a jump start on participating in this contest. If you really want to give them a challenge, have them memorize a poem in another language! (and use a language dictionary or online resources to figure out roughly what it means). For more information on Poetry Out Loud, check out the Poetry Foundation's website.

Florida Students Get "Majors"

As part of a push to make high school more meaningful for kids, Florida legislators passed a law last week that requires students to declare majors. Students take a variety of core courses, then four electives in their major, and four other electives.

In theory, this is a good idea. Too much of high school focuses nothing on the world beyond it. So I'm inclined to wait and see how it goes. Perhaps schools will start expanding their offerings to include advanced science classes for science majors, specific literature genres (say, 20th century, or women writers, or Latin America) for literary types.

But I worry that, instead, this well-intentioned program will lead to bad results for gifted kids. Many high schools are a bit narrow-minded on what constitutes a career. South Carolina instituted "career clusters" recently to boost student interest. This link leads to some literature about each of the clusters. I'm not sure I could have chosen journalism, for instance -- or that a budding Egyptologist would find much to interest her (unless she could somehow link it to the hospitality industry). Kids who want academic majors would also, under the Florida majors plan, have far less time to take arts electives like orchestra or choir. This will force kids with "multipotentiality" to commit to one interest, or else fund their study on their own after school.

Ideally, schools would have adopted the "majors" approach on their own, and kids would be free to move between schools in a given area. That way, if students were interested in a focused, in-depth study in a career or academic area, they could attend that school. But it's easier to enact policies on a state level, so that's what Florida has chosen to do. We'll see how it turns out.

William Huston, the "Brightest Boy"

Today's New York Times has an obituary on William Huston, who was chosen by Thomas Edison as the nation's "brightest boy" in 1929. Edison had bemoaned the lack of interest in math and science among youth (sound familiar?) and sponsored a nationwide scholarship contest to find the brightest young person and give him a full scholarship to college. Girls were not part of this contest; apparently Mr. Edison never considered that the brightest kid in America (if such a thing can be determined) might be female.

Anyway, William Huston won the contest and a scholarship to MIT. He died May 25 in Arizona at age 93. You can read about his life here.

For all the talk of prodigies flaming out, Huston offers a different version of this tale. Tagged at a young age as being the nation's brightest boy, he didn't let that label get to him. He did "rocket science" research for NASA, had a seemingly rewarding family life (a long marriage and six children), and basically didn't berate his children with tales of being the brightest boy (they say he never mentioned it). Given how many people constantly rehash their glory days as, say, high school football players, I found the tale pretty refreshing.

The Decline of the Chemistry Set

Quick quiz: What do Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, internet guru Vint Cerf, and Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard have in common? Besides their later tech accomplishments, all spent their childhoods blowing things up with chemistry sets.

And unfortunately, they may be the last generation able to do so. "There's no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids -- particularly boys-- to science," Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffmann told Wired magazine recently. "Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out."

Yep, chemistry sets are fun stuff for bright kids who want to do more real science than the ball-dropping "experiments" in school allow. But good luck finding a decent one these days.

According to Steve Silberman's recent story in Wired on the topic, the crackdown began after Timothy McVeigh used commonly available chemicals to construct the bomb that tore through Oklahoma City in 1995. General terror worries after September 11 prompted more concern. Then add the crystal meth epidemic to the mix. Thirty states have passed laws in recent years restricting sales of chemicals and equipment that can be used to make that drug. According to Wired, in Texas, you have to register Erlenmeyer flasks with the state's Department of Public Safety. The rise of the internet means enterprising kids can now concoct explosions straightaway, without having to tinker with the set for a while, first. And did I mention how litigious people have become? Imagine the lawsuits a real chemistry set could inspire.

But all this means that the old Porter Chemical Company Chemcraft labs-in-a-box can no longer be sold. That set had enough equipment to perform 800 experiments. The new Mr. Wizard Science Set, by contrast, comes with only five chemicals, including laundry starch. Ho hum.

The only "real" set still available, according to Wired, is the Thames & Kosmos C3000, which retails for $200. But even this top-of-the-line set comes with a list of chemicals you must purchase elsewhere in order to actually do certain experiments. Ted McGuire, the company's head, told Wired that "A lot of retailers are scared to carry a real chemistry set now because of liability concerns... The stuff under your kitchen sink is far more dangerous than the things in our kits, but put the word chemistry on something and people become terrified."

That's too bad because, in case anyone hasn't noticed, America is cranking out fewer scientists than we once did. The kind of science practiced in a lot of classrooms looks nothing like the real thing, where you have to come up with questions and find answers that aren't in the back of the book. Chemistry sets help you do that. Too many inquisitive kids these days, unfortunately, are going to have to settle for a sanitized version of the subject.

The Condition of Education

The U.S. Department of Education released its annual Condition of Education report recently. This phone book-size list of statistics has a lot of fascinating information (a list of indicators is available here), but two things in particular touch on subjects we've discussed on this blog.

First, the "boy troubles" are for real. Women now comprise 59% of all graduate students, including 50% of professional degree students (ie, law, medicine, business). While the parity is nice, it's come about partly because of an 11% drop in men seeking professional degrees. Women continue to earn the vast majority of undergraduate degrees. The findings are so striking that that's the statistic the Associated Press chose to highlight in its article on the Condition of Education report.

Second, homeschooling is rising, and it's becoming an interesting blend of working at the kitchen table and other things. Over two percent of all US students are now homeschooled according to this indicator. While the majority of homeschoolers (82%) received all their instruction at home, some 12% of homeschoolers attended school for up to 9 hours a week, and 6% were enrolled between 9-25 hours.

These are positive statistics, because they show that at least 18% of schools are willing to show some flexibility on homeschooling. Most districts maintain that you're either all in or all out, and some homeschooling families want nothing to do with their local schools, for religious or ideological reasons. But many parents of gifted kids homeschool because they don't see any other options for getting their kids the challenge they need. Many of these parents would like to have their children take music, art or gym classes with other students, or specialized subjects (for instance, Mandarin) that the parents themselves might not be able to teach. That 18% of schools are willing to consider such options is a start. By the time a third say it's OK, we'll reach critical mass-- and see a lot more a la carte education. More flexibility is always a good thing for kids who don't fit inside the educational box.

Individual tracking comes to NCLB

On this blog, I've complained that No Child Left Behind testing doesn't track progress for gifted kids. For starters, NCLB compares groups of students over time -- say, African American fourth graders in 2004 vs. African American fourth graders in 2005. Since these aren't the same kids, the test results can show broad changes in a school, but don't show whether individual kids are learning. Second, the use of grade level tests means that children who score at the 99th percentile for their grade don't register a change one way or the other -- so you don't know if they're in a holding pattern or growing.

At least NCLB is now addressing the first problem. The federal Department of Education recently chose two states, North Carolina and Tennessee, to participate in a pilot program that tracks individual student progress. A kid in fourth grade in 2006 will be compared against his own test scores from 2005. If he doesn't show adequate yearly progress, the school can be held accountable.

If the pilot program produces usable data, then the program could spread to other states. That's a start. Then we need NCLB to ask schools to use above grade-level tests for gifted kids. A fourth grader who scores at the 75th percentile on a 7th grade test, and then at the 88th percentile on an 8th grade test a year later, is making progress. We don't know if that's true if she just takes the fourth grade, then fifth grade test.

Indiana Academy graduation, 2006

I spent this Saturday at the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and the Humanities in Muncie, Indiana. The school flattered me greatly by asking me to give the commencement address. So I did, and had a great time doing it. I was also thrilled to see that there were about 140 kids graduating. When I graduated in 1997, fewer than 100 of us walked across the Emens Auditorium stage. It's great that this public, residential school for gifted kids is growing. May it continue to do so!

You can read my speech at my website.

I am happy to report that the graduates did not throw rotten eggs at me. In fact, some seemed to like the speech :)

Boy Troubles

I was excited to learn yesterday that Richard Whitmire, an editorial writer at USA Today (and my former colleague), had just landed a six-figure book contract to expand on his recent New Republic article called “Boys and Books.” In that essay, Whitmire called attention to the declining academic performance of boys. He lists reasons for their sliding college enrollment rates. (Unfortunately, the New Republic website is subscription only)

Schools, Whitmire says, not only don’t shortchange girls, they favor them. That’s not intentional – it’s just that the standard college curriculum and today’s workplaces require a lot of verbal and reading skills. Boys, for whatever reason, on average, are slower to learn these skills as children. Then there’s the social aspect. While middle- and upper-class fathers read at night after work, in many blue-collar type families, reading is a “sissy” thing (as Whitmire puts it). Fathers do a lot less of it. Then the boys go to school and all day long do something they think isn’t very important – and so they disengage.

I have mixed feelings about this thesis. Whitmire has some interesting excuses for boys’ failures in school. Take this one: “Basing grades on turning in homework on time guarantees lower grades for boys. Studies consistently show boys have more trouble than girls turning in homework on time. Some educators and parents explain this by saying that many boys simply forget or decline to turn in completed homework. Here's the boy-thinking: If I answered the homework question to my satisfaction, the task is done. Why turn it in?” Yet even in very male worlds like banking and consulting, you get no credit for solving a problem until you share the answers. Those are systems set up by men who are probably a lot more egocentric than the average boy. I’d buy the forgetfulness thesis first. Maybe boys will be boys when it comes to having their growing brains leap around frenetically.

On the other hand, I would agree that many classrooms are more girl-friendly than boy-friendly. I came across this fascinating list of classroom practices that hurt boys. Culprits range from distracting, frilly decorations to journaling to the lack of male teachers in many schools. Sitting still through boring classes is hard for girls and boys, but boys can be more rambunctious about it (and are labeled as ADD more often). Competition drills get frowned upon, and class discussions reign.

Of course, you don’t have to be male to dislike class discussions on people’s feelings. I always hated them because, well, the teacher knows things the other children in the class don’t. There’s limited info to be gained from listening to your classmates blather before they’ve had time to study the material. A recent Simpsons episode made fun of these stereotypes by having Springfield Elementary split into girls and boys schools. The girls talked about their feelings about math but, much to Lisa’s chagrin, never did any of it. So she dressed up as a boy to study their math, only to learn the boys found it fun to beat each other up constantly. They bounced off the walls.

As the show suggests, I don’t think splitting up boys and girls is the answer. Then people become too inclined to give credence to gender stereotypes. As Whitmire points out, the answer is to look at schools that overcome the gender gap. These schools tend to have high expectations for everyone and work with kids to find what works for each of them. That’s not a terribly snazzy solution to this latest educational crisis but, on the other hand, you do get results.

Miss America vs. the Spelling Bees

A few weeks ago, I complained on this blog that spelling bees gave a false impression of what intelligence is. That may be true, but on the other hand, they're getting some amazing attention of late. USA Today has an interesting piece today pointing out that, this year, while ABC dropped the Miss America pageant, it is broadcasting the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in prime time. Clearly, something has happened when a major network decrees that letter-slinging 12-year-olds make better TV than swimsuit-clad co-eds.

I have a theory on this. The Miss America pageant has turned viewers off these past few years by becoming horribly confused. It's not really a "beauty pageant" anymore, it's a "scholarship contest." So the contestants wind up being pretty, but not too pretty, talented, but not too talented (they can't be professional performers), and they have to feign interest in the most politically correct causes imaginable. The girls are smart, but they're not judged on their academic prowess. Who wants to watch that?

On the other hand, the Scripps National Spelling Bee has no such confusion. Candidates win by spelling words correctly. Anyone can figure that out. I compare it to the Miss USA pageant, which is pretty much all about looks. Miss USA has seen its TV ratings rise of late, and so has the spelling bee. Are you all tuning in to the spell-down finals on June 1?

Another Early College Program

One of the things I'm trying to do with this blog is to help parents of gifted kids find the resources that are available to them. To that end, I want to share another early college option I've come across: Simon's Rock College in Massachusetts.

This small, private liberal arts college is set up specifically for younger scholars. Students usually enroll after their sophomore year in high school. They live on campus, and either complete 2-year degrees and transfer, or complete a 4-year degree. Simon's Rock is affiliated with nearby Bard College. You can read more about their programs at www.simons-rock.edu.

One of the reasons I find Simon's Rock appealing is that the institution really does try to create the "collegiate" feel that students enrolling early elsewhere miss out on. The Portland Press Herald (of Maine) had an interesting article two weeks ago about a 14-year-old girl who was admitted to the University of Maine -- and indeed was given a full scholarship -- but wasn't allowed to live on campus. You can read the story here.

I understand the university's point. College dorms are sometimes a more adult environment than 14-year-olds should be exposed to, even if the 14-year-olds are mature. And the university is no doubt worried about liability. On the other hand, living with other scholars is a big part of the fun of going to college -- discussing ideas with other bright young people, making friends, and all that. Simon's Rock lets 15- and 16-year-olds do that in an environment set up for them. It certainly isn't cheap -- tuition, room and board top $41,000 a year -- but it is an option for kids too bored with high school to see staying two more years.

Entrepreneurship Education

Yesterday I met with Steve Mariotti, a former high school teacher (and business executive) who founded and runs the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. NFTE's offices are located on Wall Street. Indeed, much of the backing comes from banks and investment firms. Most of NFTE's main work, however, is done in low-income high schools across the country, and in low income communities around the world.

Basically, students take a course in entrepreneurship that uses a text book called How to Start and Operate a Small Business. Kids learn about profits and losses, calculating rates of return, writing business and marketing plans, dealing with customers and all those things. Many of the schools that use the curriculum have students start a (very low capital) business and ask them to try running it for part of the course's duration.

Mariotti came up with this idea when he noticed that his students at his South Bronx high school were not interested in many academic things, but they were interested in money (aren't we all?) Specifically, they were interested in ways of making money. Many had a street-smarts sense of marketing, and they enjoyed hearing about Mariotti's experience running an import-export company. I'll back up there for a second -- Mariotti started his career at Ford, started an import-export business, then was mugged in the early 1980's by a group of New York City kids. They shoved him around a bit when they realized he had only $10 in his wallet at the time. Shaken by the whole experience, he decided to confront his fears and try to change a few kids' lives by becoming a teacher. Thus his job in the South Bronx, and thus the eventual founding of NFTE.

The Harvard Graduate School of Education has done some research on NFTE's programs in Boston's schools. The results are fascinating. Only a small percentage of the children who take the high school course in entrepreneurship actually continue running small businesses. Many realize it's a far tougher job than working for someone else!

But low-income students who study entrepreneurship for a year do experience a 32% increase in their level of interest in college. A control group of Boston students experienced a 17% drop during that same period. Students who studied entrepreneurship showed an increase in time spent reading independently; students who didn't spent less time reading on their own. A follow up study found that NFTE students scored about five times higher than the control group on a scale measuring something called "locus of control." That's a fancy way of saying how in control of your own life you feel. People with high scores believe that they can change things in their lives and make things happen that they wish to see happen.

That last finding is pretty exciting. Those of you who've read Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People know that this locus of control (called "Be Pro-active" in 7 Habits) is the first habit. People who take control of their lives achieve far more than people who don't. That teenagers who've no doubt suffered a lot of discrimination, deprivation and other things can learn to see themselves as the architects of their own existence is cool, to say the least.

The more I've been thinking about the curriculum, the more I've been thinking that parents of gifted kids can adapt some elements for their own children's education. Learning how to run a business requires a kid to draw together information from vastly different areas. Rather than learn something because the text book says he should learn it, he learns it because he figures out that he needs to know it. He does this on his own (and hence increases that locus of control measurement).

Certainly running a business ropes in the 3 R's -- reading marketing literature, writing a business plan or letters to advertisers or literature for customers, using arithmetic to calculate unit costs and profits. And it's also very practical. Interviewing the lady who runs the beauty parlor down the street connects you with the real world in a way that very little in school does.

So parents looking to turn their kids on to a challenging project might try this for the summer. Brainstorm business concepts and, if you're able, provide some small amount of start-up capital (ie, $20 to make post cards about a dog-walking business to distribute to neighbors). Check out several books on starting a business from the library, and have your child make reports on the business's progress (i.e. to you, the main investor). Who knows, at the end of the summer, he might decide to continue. But even if not, he'll have learned some interesting lessons about money, budgeting, and taking control of his education.

Gifted Kids Skip Standardized Tests

In high school, I once opted out of a grade-level standardized test because it would have required me to miss several days of my above grade-level math class. This required some intense negotiation with the school. Grade-level tests are pretty much useless to gifted kids. When taken broadly by all kids, though, test scores can make a school look good or bad. So there's a trade-off. The gifted kid taking the grade-level test is bored, and has her time wasted. But the school gets the benefit of having a high score included in its average. Obviously, given the stakes these days, schools will do anything they can to keep kids from opting out. In most states they aren't even allowed to do so (my school took the line that such tests were like jury duty-- though eventually they relented).

In this era of increased standardized testing, this battle is heating up even more. The Sacramento Bee ran an article last week called Kids Skipping STAR Test noting that 135 students at Davis Senior High School refused to take their grade-level tests. These STAR tests were given right before the SAT and AP tests. So students and their families elected to have the kids stay home and study for the AP exams and SAT, which matter more for individuals.

The school was furious. Only 34 parents requested exemptions last year.
As the principal pointed out, the results of the STAR test are used to rank schools. Davis is, no doubt, a school that posts high test scores. Now the test results might not show that. Indeed, with 100 more high achievers opting out, the school's test scores will drop.

I see the school's point. But of course, my sympathies lie with the bright kids who opted out. The principal may claim that the evidence of so many 99th percentile scores would indicate that Davis is a good school, but gifted kids will score at the 99th percentile on grade level tests even if they're not learning a thing. Such scores tell you nothing about the quality of the school with regard to gifted kids. A school that challenged gifted kids would show a rise in an individual's test scores. To get that for kids who start at the 99th percentile, you have to test them above grade level.

I'd like to see a testing rubric that does just that. A few months ago on this blog, we discussed testing software that would let you answer questions at a higher and higher level until you hit your max. That would give you an indication of your real grade level. You could take a similar test at the end of the school year. If you scored higher -- good for the school. If you didn't, the public should know that -- even if you're testing three grades above level, and would have scored a 99 both times on a grade-level test.

But California doesn't have such an option in place. There are other compromises, of course. The state and the schools could develop some formula for subbing SAT scores and AP scores for grade-level tests. This would require an asterisk in the report. But personally, I'd be more interested in learning that students earned a lot of 5's on AP tests than a school's grade-level scores. The AP tests are enough above grade level that 5's do tell you something. We shall see if anyone tries anything along these lines. In the meantime, though, expect to see a lot more battles in this area over the next few years.

Indiana Academy Graduation

I'll be speaking to the graduating class of 2006 at the Indiana Academy in Muncie, Indiana in about two weeks. As some of you know, this is my alma mater, so I'm very excited about (and flattered by) this opportunity.

The Academy (as students call it) is one of about a dozen public, residential schools for gifted kids nationwide. It's also a little different from most in that the word "Humanities" is in the full school name, and these fields are a crucial part of the curriculum. Almost all of the 150 or so graduating seniors will be going on to college after graduating.

I've been working on a speech, but of course I don't want to take myself too seriously or offer too much life advice when I've only been out of high school nine years myself. So here's a question for Gifted Exchange readers. What do you wish your high school graduation speaker would have said to you?

One possible theme. I just turned in Grindhopping, my next book, to McGraw-Hill today. One of the chapters deals with the idea that fairy godmothers are lazy people. You need a lot of luck to build a good life and a good career, or even to get everything out of college you can. But you can't leave too much up to chance. You have to know where you're going and be prepared to seize on chance opportunities that will help you get there as they arise.

Oh, and another one. Be sure to see the world outside Indiana. Too soon you wind up getting caught up in work and school and family and travel gets a bit more difficult.

Thoughts?

Losing our Programming Edge

Though most folks have been paying attention to a different Duke team, Business Week has an interesting article in the May 1 edition about the Duke computer programming squad. Competing in the finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in San Antonio, they completed only one of the challenging problems posed to them. The Russian team that won nailed six. Business Week reads into this event a Red Flag in the Brain Game.

Young American students, apparently, do not have the discipline and dedication that winning international computer programming contests requires. Business Week then sets about finding reasons this is so, and actually blames the lovely, inviting green collegiate quads that detract from programming time, Ultimate Frisbee, and all that.

The blaming is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Business Week also notes that many young American programmers are worried that the good programming jobs are going overseas. The magazine then assures us that this is not entirely true -- people with a good head for business and a knack for managing teams will always be in demand here. True. But I'd go a step farther. I think the reason American teams aren't sweeping computer programming contests anymore is that young programmers -- with their logical brains -- are looking at the job market very logically and allocating their time based on what they see.

These programmers know they are good at math and science. They're realizing that people with great math skills can command high salaries on Wall Street. Plenty of people with science and math PhDs also choose to go into management consulting, because they find it more interesting than straight programming. It's those distracting activities and green quads again. As American per capita incomes rise, the brightest, most ambitious people migrate to higher-level, higher-margin jobs. Rather than being the people in companies doing research, they become the folks arranging for licensing deals to acquire that research. Rather than become programmers, they become the people who figure out which problems programmers need to solve.

There's plenty to fret about with American schools not training kids in science and math as rigorously as they might. But this latest lamentation sounds almost like old industrialists claiming the American economy is doomed because we don't make most of our own widgets anymore. Somehow, incomes keep rising. I think our young computer whizzes will do pretty well in life, regardless. Maybe they realize that spending all their time in dark rooms programming won't add as much to their future marketability as networking with their fellow classmates and professors will. We don't seem to be losing our edge in that.

Bullying

Jean Sunde Peterson, a professor at Purdue University's College of Education released an interesting study on gifted kids and bullying last month. The university's official press release is available here.

I'm always wary of studies on gifted kids and bullying, because of certain social stereotypes. We assume that gifted kids are the ones with the Coke bottle glasses getting their lunch money stolen and being called "nerd" or "geek." Indeed, since the bullying definition used in Peterson's study included name-calling, it's no surprise that about two-thirds of gifted kids said they'd been bullied. A slightly more surprising result: 16% of gifted kids identified themselves as bullies. And in fact, based on some other studies of bullying, it appears that gifted kids are no more likely to be bullied than other kids. Everyone gets it at some point or another. Perhaps we should be more surprised that one-third of gifted kids hasn'tbeen bullied.

The one difference that does matter is the one Purdue points out in the headline: gifted kids are especially vulnerable to bullying when it does occur. Anyone who's spent a lot of time around gifted young people knows they have a heightened interest in fairness and social justice. This makes it tougher to brush off bullying of themselves -- or others.

Like other children, some gifted children respond to bullying with thoughts of violence. As the researchers pointed out, this could be anything from kicking a trash can to blowing up the school. The problem is that gifted kids are often quite imaginative -- and may dream up more elaborate methods of revenge than a kid whose brain doesn't work that far out ahead. The infamous school shooters had psychoses that begged to be treated, but many of them were also of above-average intelligence. Clay Shrout, who in 1994 murdered his family and took a class hostage in Union, Kentucky, had a tested IQ of 160. At the sentencing of Kip Kinkel, the Springfield, Oregon school shooter, his psychiatrist noted, "He's cognitively bright, above average. Even though he has a learning disability, his overall IQ is high."

There is no easy way around this. In a world where 16% of gifted kids admit to being bullies themselves, ability grouping will create classes where being smart isn't a teasible characteristic, but won't get rid of bullying. The bullies will find something else to attack.

In general, when kids feel good about their accomplishments and their place on the planet, they don't bother bullying other kids, and they brush it off themselves. This isn't a call for self-esteem building exercises, though. When kids are challenged, work hard, and have caring adults around them, self-esteem follows. That will make bullying less of a problem for gifted kids and other kids alike.

Gifted Homeschooling

A few parents have remarked on this blog that they're investigating homeschooling their gifted kids. It's a popular option. When we were doing research for Genius Denied, the Davidsons told me that about half the families the Davidson Institute for Talent Development works with homeschool their children at some point during the kids' K-12 career. Few parents start off intending to homeschool. They're not religiously or philosophically opposed to public schools. It's just that the regular education programs their local schools offer don't work for their kids. Attempts to make accommodations go awry. So the parents take their kids out of school and attempt to teach them at home.

Of course, with gifted kids, this can be a problem too. As one mom told us, "Homeschooling an extremely gifted child is daunting. What works today is guaranteed not to work in six months. 'Canned' curricula are useless. Every single day is a challenging adventure."

So most parents of gifted kids don't wind up just teaching them at the kitchen table from the various curricular packages. They cobble together "school" from college classes, tutors, distance learning, and even half-day programs or pull-out programs at schools that are OK with that sort of thing. For instance, a kid might take calculus at the high school, music and art electives with her age-peers at the local middle school, study literature through an online provider like Stanford's Educational Program for Gifted Youth, and Spanish with a neighbor who speaks it fluently. That might work for one year. Then you have to find something else that works for the next year. Flexibility is key.

Fortunately, homeschooling parents tend to be wired types who like to help others in the homeschooling community. So there are a lot of homeschooling resources on the internet. I can recommend Hoagies' Gifted Education Pages on homeschooling, available here. While you're there, be sure to read the article in Reason magazine from Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation (available directly here.) He points out that this mish-mash style of education is actually closer to the way a lot of us assemble our careers than the cookie-cutter style too many schools promote. That may be small comfort when you're tearing your hair out because you carved out 6 months to learn multiplication and your kid learned it in 6 hours. But it might inspire a smile.

More Books for Gifted Kids

Thanks to everyone who's been posting on the Izzy the Impatient "books for gifted kids" thread. People have also emailed me some names of books, and DITD sent me along some lists. For instance, here is a list of recommended biographies for young gifted kids (I attached the cached page because the actual link was broken for me, but it might not be for you; search "Brookline books gifted kids" for the actual site).

If you scroll down on this list of books for gifted kids, you'll find them broken up by appropriate age. Looking them over, I'd say most of the "junior high/high school" books are fine for younger readers too -- just give them a quick look over before giving the OK. A few I'd really like to recommend: Katherine Patterson's books (from the Great Gilly Hopkins to Jacob Have I Loved) are beautifully written; I also loved Cynthia Voigt's Dicey's Song series. Madeleine L'Engle is exciting for all ages. I think I kept trying to draw the fifth dimension (not terribly successfully) after reading Wrinkle in Time.

Another interesting thing -- some of these lists break apart books for girls and boys. There is a certain comfort in reading about a hero or heroine of your same gender, but many books can easily cross gender lines.

That said, I was at a writing conference this weekend and listened to a panel given by children's book and magazine editors and agents. To a person, they said they are desperate for books for boys. They get very few of these crossing their desks. I wonder if this is a function of the fact that most YA and children's authors are women (as you can see from these lists I've linked to). It's easier, as a woman, to write from a female character's perspective -- Harry Potter being a notable exception (though even that's third person, not first). Maybe parents of boys reading this list can urge their children to grow up to be children's book authors, and expand the literature for future gifted boys.