Advanced Placement (AP) vs. Actual College

I was just in Louisville the past few days, meeting with various school and community leaders to write a piece on the recent desegregation case that's come before the Supreme Court. It's a long, complicated story with a long, complicated history, but race is, of course, not the only issue a large and varied school population faces. So I thought I'd share one issue here. The Jefferson County Public Schools include a number of magnet programs. More or less, the gifted and talented program for high school students is located at DuPont Manual High School, which is just across the street from the University of Louisville.

It's a great set-up; if students run out of, say, math classes, they can cross enroll at the university. Principal Beverly Keepers told me that in years past, as many as 100-plus students would cross-enroll. That number, however, has fallen in recent years. She identified two reasons. First, cross-enrollment is no longer "free" (i.e. underwritten by people's education taxes). State universities across the country have had to raise tuition in recent years and the University of Louisville wasn't thrilled to be filling its introductory classes with non-tuition paying students (though the professors, Keepers said, loved working with such eager pupils). Second, the Advanced Placement program at "Manual" (as residents and students call it) has greatly expanded. Students can take everything from AP Statistics to AP Studio Art. Some 80% of students receive scores of 3 or higher on their AP exams (out of 5); 23% of Manual AP scores are 5s.

AP classes are held at the high school. They're also portable in a way that specific classes at a specific university sometimes aren't. While some universities would gladly recognize freshman biology at the University of Louisville as being functionally equivalent to their own introductory biology classes, others don't. Keepers noted that her own daughter was not able to claim credit for one such science class when she went to college; the school wound up giving her "elective" credit for such a course. Many Manual students intend to go to college outside Kentucky. So they opt for AP courses that they can take with their friends, with portable scores, rather than head over to the University of Louisville.

I have a feeling this is happening at other rigorous high schools across the country, and I have mixed feelings about this. The quality of university classes is uneven, but so are AP classes. A poorly taught AP class with a lot of smart kids can easily produce a lot of "3" scores, but the kids will really flounder if they try to take upper level classes at a university next. Some schools also don't do the AP labs "full out." They tell the kids what should happen and why, but lack the equipment to do the necessary experiments. And the AP labs do involve quite a bit of hand-holding. I took AP Chemistry at the Indiana Academy, which was a very rigorous course. I scored a 5 on the exam, which implies that I knew what I was doing. But I was quite confused about lab procedures and such when I took Organic Chemistry at Princeton. Students who enroll in university courses will get the full university deal, sink or swim.

In addition, AP was originally supposed to be an option for kids who were ready for college level work, but who didn't have ready access to a college. Manual's block scheduling allows for college-length classes, and they have a college nearby. But AP still wins out. I am guessing there's a bit of the college application mania going on here. AP scores are readily comparable and, like perfect SAT scores, make you stand out on a scale that everyone else applying to selective colleges will also be judged on. Local university classes may not indicate the same thing.

So now Manual students tend to enroll at the University of Louisville only if they've blown through AP Calculus BC before their senior years. Then they enroll in the university's multivariable calculus class.

Across the country, AP classes are becoming a national curriculum for the most ambitious college-bound students. A rigorous national curriculum may be a worthy goal to pursue in its own right, but I'm not sure that, on the whole, students who are prepared for college work aren't better off just enrolling in college when they're ready.

Vying for NYC's Gifted Programs

As mentioned in previous posts, New York City is trying some new methods this winter for figuring out which children belong in the city's gifted programs. Unlike many big cities, New York has a long tradition of offering gifted education; indeed, the city's public magnet schools for the gifted are among the best accommodations in the country for such special learners (think Stuyvesant High School, profiled in Genius Denied). The city also starts gifted education in kindergarten, while some districts insist (wrongly) that it's impossible to tell the difference until 3rd grade.

This year, the city is promoting a test for 4- and 5-year-olds to choose students for spots in the limited number of kindergarten and first grade gifted programs. The school system has been aggressively promoting the test in neighborhoods where parents may not be as savvy about these things. So far so good.

But this is New York, one of the most competitive cities in the country. And given the general weakness of the public school system, this test has suddenly become quite high stakes. You can read a Daily News story about the issue by following this link:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/487308p-410292c.html

I sympathize with Anna Commitante, head of NYC's gifted program. She notes in the article that "It's unfortunate that it's turned into the belief that this is the only way to get a quality public education... Gifted doesn't mean the classes are better or the kids are better. ... These children learn differently and need modifications to their education program."

She's absolutely right. One of the problems with gifted education in this country is that so much of the rest of education is so mediocre. In many schools parents perceive, rightly, that the gifted classes are the only ones where academic expectations are kept high. But all children deserve to be challenged to the extent of their abilities. Unfortunately, many gifted programs feed into the nonsense by not covering academic material. Why should only gifted kids get to study myths or insects or the culture of Japan, or various other classic pull-out curricula? This special, more "fun" work invites resentment and the idea that gifted education is a reward. Many schools feed into the hysteria by choosing ridiculously high percentages of kids for their gifted programs and by creating quite arbitrary cut-offs that invite gaming the system.

Gifted education should never be a reward. It should be an educational intervention for kids who need it. This is one of the advantages of grade skipping as an accommodation. Clearly, it isn't a reward -- it matches the child to the curriculum that best challenges him. Maybe instead of having thousands of nervous 4-year-olds vying for spots in special classes, NYC should try having those who have already mastered kindergarten material start 1st grade, or 2nd grade, or, heck, 6th grade. My guess is that you'd see a lot fewer parents convinced that it's "gifted" or the private schools.

North Carolina trains more gifted teachers

Teacher training is a thorny subject. On one hand, I believe that the current system of licensing teachers is horribly inefficient. Many prospective teachers major in education, rather than in the subjects they will teach, and too many districts have elaborate licensure systems in place that discourage mid-career professionals from considering teaching.

That said, studies have found that gifted education teachers who've done a significant amount of coursework in that area have better outcomes than those who haven't. So it makes sense that if a district is going to go to the trouble of creating a gifted program, it should make sure that the program's teachers know how to reach these special learners.

Yet few universities offer such courses to teachers. Fortunately, two universities in North Carolina have recently started programs specifically to train gifted education teachers (in ways that work around these established teachers' schedules). I am traveling in California on book tour for Grindhopping right now, so I don't have my HTML cheat sheet, but you can read about a program at Duke by following this link:

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2007/01/gifted.html

And you can read about a program in High Point, NC by following this link:

http://www.highpoint.edu/news_events/article.cfm?ArticleID=678&viewall=false

The Duke program in particular is exciting because it's run by the Talent Identification Program (TIP) that so many gifted kids have participated in. Every summer, TIP brings 1000 gifted middle schoolers to campus to take advanced coursework. Now Durham Public Schools teachers will be able to observe and work with the teachers of these courses. Students at programs like TIP often talk about how the three week summer camps enable them to endure the whole school year. Now, hopefully, some Durham students will benefit from that energy all year round.

Aztecs vs. Greeks (Murray part 3)

Today, Charles Murray turns his attention to the intellectually gifted, which he defines rather broadly as those with IQs over about 120. It turns out these articles are available online, so you can read today's installment here.

Basically, in this installment, Murray calls for the gifted to be given a challenging, classical education. He further states that we need to encourage gifted kids not to become just smart but wise. "The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them."

I totally agree with this, just as I agree that gifted kids need to learn grammar and logic. There's no point telling kids just to be creative and express themselves without giving them the tools to do so in a coherent fashion. As an art, music and history junkie myself, I also think it would be great to make sure children have a classical education, which Murray calls for (full of ethics, study of the Greeks rather than the Aztecs, which is how this essay gets its title, and so on).

Unfortunately, for all his lauding of a classical education, Murray fails to tie the knot demonstrating why studying the Greeks makes anyone good and wise. He repeats William Buckley's joke that it would be better to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard, but it must be pointed out that the vast majority of Harvard faculty have studied the Greeks and art and ethics, while the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book have not. If the Harvard faculty have not become wise (defined, here, I suspect, as envisioning a society with rules similar to ones Murray and Buckley would design) than we have a logical problem. Unfortunately, this essay doesn't address that. I guess Murray simply had to crank out a part 3 of a 3-part series.

But if anyone reads Aztecs vs. Greeks and decides to push for education that holds gifted kids' feet to the fire, intellectually, than I'll be happy. There is great satisfaction that comes from trying something difficult and achieving it. This is one of the reasons Jan and Bob Davidson give their fellowship awards every year; the projects kids undertake go far beyond what is ever assigned in school. The results are rarely easy to come across, and the projects rarely easy to produce -- at least if you're going to win. Likewise, it wasn't until I got to the Indiana Academy that I discovered how hard I was capable of working. I decided I wanted to take AP Biology and Chemistry simultaneously during the fall of my senior year, and I wanted to get As in both. That required not only doing well, but according to our grading system, doing a full standard deviation better than my very intellectually gifted classmates on each test. I struggled -- writing up lab reports at 2am -- but I did it. It's a lesson of perseverance and being in control of one's life I've since taken to book writing and other long, difficult projects. It's a lesson I worry too few gifted kids learn. No one should expect life to be easy, at least not if you're going to enjoy it.

Murray part 2: Is College for Everyone?

Today, Charles Murray continues his discussion of intelligence and education in the Wall Street Journal with an op-ed on college enrollment. The returns on a college education have increased, many employers demand a bachelor's degree as a credential that shows perseverence and capability and, consequently, many more high school graduates are enrolling. In the early 1970's, only about 10% of Americans over age 25 had a college degree. Now, at least 40% of people in their late teens attempt some college. We have not had a corresponding increase in overall intelligence in the population, which means that two things are happening. Drop-out rates are high, and college instruction has been dumbed down (or at least many colleges are having to focus on remedial education for high percentages of their students). That in turn creates degree inflation where employers start looking for master's degrees to signal intelligence, and so forth.

Murray believes that, on the basis of IQ, at most 15-25% of the population is capable of college level work, as most people think of it. So he calls for other options for young people to signal that they are skilled workers that don't involve a four year liberal arts education. He calls for an expansion of two year and vocational schools. Clearly he is not riding the New York City subways, as every ad on the wall is already for such schools that teach office technologies, opthalmic dispensing, welding, and the like. I think Murray is more conveying that people in his social class assume everyone who is going to make something of themselves should go to a four-year college. That pressures a lot of young people who want to make decent wages to go to four year programs (and then spend longer than four years, or drop out before finishing) when they'd be better served by other options. So Murray calls for dropping the snob factor. Over time, he believes, the market will do this. After all, a lot of plumbers make more and have nicer houses than the white collar workers whose pipes they work on.

Are any Gifted Exchange readers reading this series? I'm curious what you think about Murray's take on college. Is the idea of making college near-universal foolhardy? Is it better to make "some education after high school" the goal? There are policy debates going on right now in Congress about subsidizing the interest on student loans as a way to increase access to higher education. But do we suffer from a lack of access?

Intelligence in the Classroom - Charles Murray

The Wall Street Journal is running a 3-part series on the op-ed page from Charles Murray, scholar of intelligence and general gadfly. Since giftedness is so caught up in questions of IQ, we'll be talking about the subject for the next few days here at Gifted Exchange as well. (Unfortunately, Wall Street Journal content is generally only available to paid subscribers online, but I'll do my best to summarize).

In today's installment, "Intelligence in the Classroom," Murray takes on the very American notion that education is salvation. You name the social problem, and "better education" is listed as the way to solve it. The point of the No Child Left Behind act is that, with the right expectations, proper discipline and excellent teaching, any child can learn to function at the kind of level that will enable him or her to succeed in the modern economy. We bemoan that 36% of fourth graders score "below average" on the reading part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, "the nation's report card") and put various standards and accountability practices in place to hope this rises.

But one question goes unasked, Murray says. What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? After all, mathematical models tell us that about 36% of fourth graders should have an IQ under 95. We do not live in Lake Wobegon. We can't all have above average IQs. So "if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught."

Further weighing on the situation, Murray writes, is the reality that a person's general intelligence (which he calls "g" and which may or may not be measurable by current IQ tests accurately) is largely unchangeable at least after you get to kindergarten. It is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, he writes. These things are set in the womb and in a baby's first few years of life. "No change in the educational system will change that hard fact."

Americans naturally don't like to hear things like this. Murray mocks the story of "a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist." That, he writes, is an underachievement story. A gifted child was not being challenged. When challenged, you "might be able to get a spectacular result," he writes of another gifted child example. Neither is a case of someone in the 49th percentile of intelligence. And 49% of us are going to have to be under that bar.

Murray does say that "This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved." And here I think he massages over a point to get to his raw thesis on intelligence.

The lack of discipline and structure and high expectations at many American schools is so profound that many children who are in the top half of the intelligence distribution are performing as though they were in the bottom half. We have many stories of underachievement going on. Claiming this is just part of the problem of low IQ is like saying that men and women are not equally capable of doing math. At the very, very top end of the intelligence spectrum, maybe there is some difference in brain wiring. But most of us are not there. Most of us aren't even close to the point where the different wiring comes into play. The vast majority of men and women are equally capable of grasping mathematical concepts, and the lower number of women in math programs in college and even graduate schools is likely more related to societal expectations than anything else. Likewise, some children just may not be able to ever read well enough to follow the logic of, say, Kierkegaard's writings. But when schools don't even expect poor children, minority children, or what have you, to be able to read at all by the end of 3rd grade, or 12th graders to be able to read a newspaper, then we have an underachievement problem.

Murray also does not address a few studies we've discussed on this blog last year about adopted children. While adopted children with low IQs who are raised in higher IQ families do not wind up with IQs approaching those of their more intellectually gifted family members, they do wind up reasonably higher. Especially when we are talking about IQs on the lower end of normal, an increase to a normal range can translate into a huge benefit in achievable lifestyle. This suggests that there is at least something one can do to raise intelligence, albeit not by as much as we'd all like. And of course, it suggests social policies that few people would support. While Head Start may be popular for, in theory, giving disadvantaged children a chance to catch up before school, in reality, the time to intervene is immediately after birth. The image of the state rushing in to take babes from their mothers' arms since "we can do better" is a bit too fascist for anyone to tolerate.

Uncomfortable as Murray's statements may be, though, I'm glad he's bringing them up. Innate intelligence is not often talked about in schools. Even gifted education advocates shy from talking about it. The "alternate" methods of identifying gifted students we've discussed on this blog often try to catch and label kids who are trying hard, regardless of IQ or "g" or whatever you want to call it. But sometimes it is best to stare uncomfortable things in the face. It is best to see what they are, so we can then react based on the facts.

Challenging Gifted Kids in the UK

Over the holiday season, the issue of gifted education has been garnering headlines in the UK, due to a report on how the country is neglecting the brightest 10% of its children (particularly those from working class families). You can read a Guardian article about the report here. The report blames an extreme egalitarian and "anti-elite" mindset in the schools -- a mindset that finds the idea of gifted education distasteful (sound familiar?).

Fortunately, the UK is looking to do something about the problem. Another article from the Guardian, which you can read here, reports that schools minister Lord Adonis (don't you just love that name?) wants 800,000 gifted pupils to receive vouchers to pay for summer or online classes. This credit system could be used to supplement the education bright pupils receive at their local schools. Lord Adonis (I'm sorry, I can't type that without picturing a romance novel cover...) has been spearheading a registry of Britain's gifted students for better tracking, and apparently has been infuriated by the attitude he's encountering from some schools. About 30% of schools have not registered with this gifted database, and 20% claim they have no gifted pupils. That's highly unlikely, but may be the schools' way of telling Lord Adonis to buzz off.

While not a pure voucher program (the government recently rejected a flat voucher payment to parents of gifted kids) the system would give kids credits that could be used at a variety of programs that would compete for the business through the government system. Some of the suggested programs are university summer school classes (think programs like TIP or CTD in the U.S.) or online programs (think programs like Stanford's EPGY courses in the U.S.). While well-to-do parents of gifted kids can afford such programs, parents of gifted kids from lower socioeconomic levels often can't pay for challenging extra curricular programs, and so the kids are stuck with the schools they get. That, in turn, wastes potential.

Given all the focus in the U.S. on raising the achievement of kids who are lingering behind grade level, it's nice to see that the UK is also taking the issue of challenging the brightest children seriously. If this program passes in the UK, maybe American educators will be similarly inspired.

No Child Left Behind Turns Five

President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law five years ago today. One of the few truly bipartisan laws to pass Congress over the past few years, NCLB aimed to raise the achievement levels of poor and minority children while improving school accountability, giving parents choices and throwing federal weight behind proven education methods. USA Today has a thorough round-up of how the law has affected schools, teachers and kids here.

The centerpiece of the law is annual testing of all children. Parents of gifted kids have complained that the focus on testing (and keeping gifted kids' test scores in a certain grade to boost averages) has reduced support for gifted education, and has taken time away from the more accelerated material gifted kids are ready for. Standardized grade level tests -- which most gifted kids can ace without trying -- also tell nothing about whether individual gifted children are learning to the extent of their abilities.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has started talking a good game about making sure No Child Left Behind doesn't also mean No Child Let Ahead. When she spoke at the opening of the Davidson Academy in Reno this summer, she said the law should do more to encourage high achievers (of course, like all politicians, Spellings knows her audience). In an online "Ask the White House" session, she told one "Lora" from Boone, N.C. that "We are also in the process of looking at whether measuring individual student growth can be included in NCLB. This way of measuring how much each student learns in a year can help us show progress for kids who are above grade level. While we certainly have a lot of work to do in this area, you are right that we need to make sure our gifted students are also receiving a quality education." (you can read the whole chat transcript here.)

Whether anything will happen, though, remains to be seen. I am curious what effects people have seen from NCLB in their own schools with regards to gifted education over the past five years. I suspect that schools that value gifted children and gifted education have continued to find a way to challenge them within the guidelines of NCLB, while schools that have long been itching for a way to abolish or trim gifted education have used the law as a club to do that.

It's popular in some quarters to reflexively bash NCLB, but I don't think that's too smart. A number of districts have improved test scores for low income students over the past few years, a result that is worth celebrating to the high heavens. The USA Today article highlights one Philadelphia elementary school that has seen the proportion of kids scoring at grade level on state reading tests rise from 2 in 10 in 2003 to 7 in 10 in 2005. If those results are being repeated elsewhere, then society will be reaping major benefits 10-15 years from now in higher incomes, reduced crime, etc. Some principals and superintendents are also using NCLB as an excuse to clean house of non-performing teachers and to revamp underwhelming curricula. That's another result worth celebrating.

But it does seem that there should be a way to focus on raising the ceiling and the floor. Testing individual progress -- on a sensitive enough scale (i.e., out-of-level testing for gifted kids) and holding schools accountable for the results would seem like one way. Breaking out results for children identified as gifted could give parents a better idea of which schools nurture such talents. NCLB was also supposed to spur competition between schools, which in theory could have led to special gifted programs at some magnet schools in big cities. Unfortunately, many districts have made it tough for kids to transfer, which reduces the effectiveness of this element of NCLB.

I'm curious about Gifted Exchange readers' verdicts on NCLB at five. Please post and discuss. (I also want to thank readers for linking to this site so often -- when I Googled "Margarent Spellings" and "gifted education" to research this piece, Gifted Exchange came up first!)

A Perfect Mess

One of the most popular New Year's Resolutions is to "get organized." Indeed, January is the official "Get Organized Month." We promise ourselves that this year will be the one where we clean out the garage, the attic, our desks, and hence, our lives.

Now an interesting new book, A Perfect Mess, takes that pursuit of neatness-above-all to task. You can listen to an NPR interview with Dave Freedman, one of the authors, here.

The authors advance the theory that messiness has a correlation to creative giftedness. They did a survey that found that higher paid people, who have more responsibility, often do have more clutter in their desks and offices. The clutter reflects the desire to keep many slightly unrelated things together, since these seemingly unrelated things often can be linked together to come up with creative solutions (CEOs who are usually photographed in their spic-and-span offices, often have 2-3 administrative assistants who organize the clutter in the "public" office where the chief entertains visitors. In other words, they cheat to create an impression!). Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is a saying for a reason, and creative people don't like to really have things out-of-mind (they push them to the back, and to the bottom of the pile, to be retrieved later). Indeed, they usually know where most important papers are, even if the piles look bad to others.

Anyway, as I write this on my desk that's overflowing with papers -- an index card listing chunks of a novel I just wrote that needed particular revisions, stamps, business cards, page proofs of another article I just wrote on New Year's resolutions, news clippings on the Brown v. Board of Education school in Topeka, KS that might just be turned into a charter school, my running log, the press kit for Grindhopping -- I find this quite comforting. Which is precisely why this book will do well. Reviews have made this point. It's a very comforting thesis ("Actually, Mr. Boss, my mess is a sign of my genius!") The authors also belabor the point for 200 pages when they could have made it in 20.

But... I do believe that messiness can be one of the side effects of giftedness. Walk through a hall of academic offices, and you'll see people happily buried in piles of papers and manuscripts. Perhaps these people know that while a cluttered desk may be the sign of a cluttered mind, by that logic, an empty desk suggests something even worse.

Vacation Homework

Gifted Exchange readers with middle or high school children may be personally involved in one of the latest educational controversies: the idea of homework, especially over weekends and vacations. As schools close for the holidays today, many kids will come home with assignments to be completed before they return in January. Is that a good thing or bad thing?

Two books that hit shelves this year from respected education writers (Alfie Kohn's "The Homework Myth" and Sara Bennett's and Nancy Kalish's "The Case Against Homework") claim the latter. These books have gotten a lot of attention. Bennett and Kalish were on the Today Show, for instance. On national television, they told parents that the amount of time kids devote to homework has "skyrocketed," to the point where kids are losing out on quality time with family, educational play opportunities, etc.

I've long been suspicious of this claim, so I'm glad to see that Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews has likewise poked some holes in this argument. In late November, his column, The Weak Case Against Homework, notes that the studies both sets of authors cite hardly show an oppressive load. In the past two decades or so, the time 6-8 year olds spend on homework has increased from 8 minutes a day to 22 minutes a day. As Matthews points out, that's less than the time it takes to watch one episode of SpongeBob Squarepants. For 15-17 year olds, the ones supposedly crushed by homework these days, the daily homework burn rate has increased from 33 minutes in 1981 to 50 minutes in 2003.

Maybe 22 minutes or 50 minutes is too much if such work takes time away from other edifying pursuits. But 15-17 year olds, by some estimates, spend about 2.5 hours each weekday on TV and other non-studying related screen time (ie, cruising MySpace and IM-ing friends). Matthews notes in amazement that Kalish and Bennett try to nuance this figure by claiming it's so cozy to cuddle up and watch Lost together as a family.

Matthews (and I) agree with the anti-homework crusaders that much of the homework kids get assigned is dumb. Worksheets may drill and kill. Far better to assign reading and ask kids to bring in comments to class for discussion. It amazes me how many teachers do not ask kids to read a chapter in a textbook, or a primary document, before the subject is first broached in class. Won't kids get more out of a lecture if they're not encountering the material for the first time? Extended research may also be best done at home, when kids can synthesize and delve into issues before being whipped over to the next subject by a bell 50 minutes later.

But... and here's the big "but." Spending two hours a day watching TV is pretty dumb, too. Why not devote more energy to calls for better homework and more academically rigorous schools instead of penning an ode to watching Lost together as a family? Bennett and Kalish got the idea to write their book because their own children were suffering under a high load of homework in a very upscale school. The average child, on the other hand, hardly suffers from this excess of expectations. I'm still reeling from a figure I cited on this blog last week (that only 18 of 100 high school freshmen graduate from a 2-year college within 7 years or a 4-year college within 10). Spending a few hours over Christmas vacation reading or studying hardly seems like a worse way to spend the time than playing video games.

Ages 6 and Up?

I spent my weekend doing some Christmas shopping. There are a few children on my list. Some of them are extremely gifted. This raises the question that I'm sure many parents on this blog have encountered. What on earth do the age guidelines on toys mean when it comes to developmentally advanced kids?

The Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates these little "Ages 9 through 12" messages found on toy boxes. If you want to read their reasoning on the different categories, you can find the PDF file here. The CPSC chooses the guidelines based on many different criteria. Some, such as motor control and choking hazards, apply to most kids. Others, such as complexity, role-playing, strategizing and other things, can lead to the same problems if you follow the guidelines as you get by putting a highly gifted 8-year-old in a regular 3rd grade classroom. Once, I was considering a toy labeled for 3-5 year olds that said it would help a kid learn her letters in a fun way. The 4-year-old in question, though, was already reading whole books and writing stories. If I'd chosen the alphabet game, she probably would have just made a castle out of the box (not that she wouldn't anyway... 5-7 year olds can really get into creative role-playing, and so do gifted 4-year-olds).

I'm curious how people get around this. How do you choose toys for bright toddlers that don't have small parts, but still involve a reasonable level of complexity? How do you choose toys for gifted preschoolers that don't involve high levels of motor control, but also won't bore the kid? Are there any particular toys you'd recommend for shoppers facing these dilemmas? We still have a few shopping days left...

Middle School Honors Classes Come to Grosse Pointe

Thanks to a Gifted Exchange reader for sending in this item. According to The Grosse Pointe News, the Grosse Pointe, Michigan school board recently approved a proposal to add honors science and social studies classes in middle schools. The board chose to do this in order to make the curriculum more rigorous. While many middle schools in Michigan and elsewhere have honors math or English classes, for some reason other subjects tend to not be viewed as needing such rigor. There's no real reason for this, but so it goes. Grosse Pointe decided to change this and do ability grouping (or "readiness grouping") for most subjects. For this they should be commended.

I also don't see why it's particularly controversial. Is math so different from science in a way that makes ability grouping OK for one and not the other? But true to form, some educators decided that they needed to protest. The Grosse Pointe News is subscription-only, but I thought I'd share a few choice quotes from recent articles.

For instance, Roger Hunwick, a social studies teacher, says that "separating diverse learners" is against teaching philosophy. Dissident board member Alice Kosinski says that "Tracking and segregating students is contradictory to our strategic plan." Strategic plan for what -- mediocrity?

And then there's the kicker from dissident board member Angela Kennedy. She notes, "I am concerned about the trend of high school academics demanding college level achievement. I cannot support the transformation of middle school into high school. I'm worried that we are raising a generation of uber children who can read early but never enjoy literature, who are challenged but not engaged (and) who burn out before graduate school."

Uber children? Graduate school? New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg mentioned a fascinating new study in a Wall Street Journal column the other day that found that only 18 of 100 high school freshmen will graduate from a 2-year-college within 7 years of starting high school, or a 4-year-college within 10 years. Kennedy's worries that rigorous classes will make children burn out before graduate school are a bit misplaced. Very few children even make it to the point where graduate school is an option under our current educational set-up.

On the other hand, some evidence does suggest that children who try accelerated classes, even if they don't do so well, are more likely to go to college than those who don't. So cheers to Grosse Pointe for taking the risk of adding honors classes for middle schoolers, despite the opposition.

Specialization

As a belated birthday present to myself, I went to a matinee performance of the Nutcracker today. New York City Ballet has been performing this Christmas masterpiece for over 50 years now, ever since George Balanchine stamped his vision on Tschaikovsky's music.

Starring several children, the Nutcracker is always a crowd pleaser. But it was watching the young adult principal dancers of the NYC Ballet company that really got me thinking. In fields like ballet, becoming a top-tier professional takes decades of practice. With dance, especially, you have to commit to training your body into the correct form and technique quite young -- often, younger than a child could rationally make a decision about wanting to be a professional dancer on her own (well, all of us probably did want to be professional ballerinas at some point -- but before a child could rationally size up the situation and decide it was feasible). Unless the child's parents make a decision that they will commit the child to that kind of intense training, the child will not become a principal ballet dancer years hence.

Other fields don't have quite the same unforgiving age elements as dance, but certainly it is easier to learn to play an instrument and read music when our brains are new enough to learn other languages easily. Early problem solving training also makes new mathematical leaps second nature. All of these issues raise the question for parents: When are you being a pushy parent when you allow or encourage a child to spend hours a day training in a subject, and when are you trying not to cut off a child's future career choice?

It's a tough question. Certainly if a child hates an activity, or is even indifferent, making big commitments of time, money or energy toward a future career is silly. Making a living as a musician or a dancer is almost impossible. If the child doesn't love it, he'll never survive. So following the child's interests is key. Asking for an evaluation from a trusted adult who's had a career in the field is important. Maybe 2 or 3 adults. Prodigies I've interviewed also recommend allowing "breaks" from time to time. If the child gets truly frustrated with her instrument or her arabesques (not just tempted by what's on TV), don't force it. If you force it, the kid will quit for good. Children who love what they're doing will eventually come back to their avocation, maybe with a different teacher or a different approach.

Beyond that, I guess it just has to be a gut decision -- and one with no guarantees. You can study ballet intensely for decades and still never wind up in the NYC Ballet program. But if you don't study intensely for decades, you definitely won't.

Gifted Adults (and Grindhopping)

This post will be both about a serious topic... and a shameless plug for my new book, which I just learned is now available at Amazon.com (not just for pre-order; they're actually shipping! You can order in time for Christmas, in case anyone on your list likes career books). It's called Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues, and is published by McGraw-Hill. The thesis is that if you're a young, ambitious person with out-of-the-box career aspirations, you don't have to pay your dues in the corporate grind to get anywhere. You can hop out of it, and build a micro-business or freelancing venture doing what you love, without much capital or experience. Indeed, thanks to technology, there's never been an easier time to do just that.

So what does this have to do with gifted education? Well, it turns out that Grindhoppers, as I call them, are often grown-up gifted children (gifted adults, in the official terminology.) Like gifted children, gifted adults tend to have certain characteristics that make them different from average. There's a list of some of the characteristics posted here.

Many of these characteristics make climbing up a typical corporate hierarchy difficult. For instance, gifted adults tend to be perfectionist, both toward themselves and others. There's little "go along to get along." They can also be very aware of slights and moral issues, all of which are part and parcel of group dynamics. They often feel out-of-sync with others, so they don't like to identify with groups. They question authority and rules. They have many interests and learn things rapidly -- far faster than a career track ("we promote people to senior account manager only after 3 years") says they can.

Of course, while all these characteristics make climbing a hierarchy unpleasant, they make gifted adults into great entrepreneurs. As anyone who's run a business knows, when you're in charge, and when it's your idea on the line, you have to learn to do everything. You have to learn to do it yesterday. And you have to be better than everyone else at what you do, which makes perfectionism a good thing. You can also run your business based on whatever morality you think is right. For instance, one of my Grindhoppers' new start-up ventures, GreenPrint, was profiled yesterday in Walter Mossberg's column in the Wall Street Journal. GreenPrint stops your printer from printing wasted pages, e.g., ones with just a line of text, like the copyright statement at the bottom of a webpage. This particular Grindhopper really values the environment, and so can run a company that exists both to make money and to save trees.

I certainly did not ask my subjects' IQs, nor did I ask if they'd been in gifted classes growing up. But I could certainly sense the same impatience that I'm sure many readers of this blog see in their children.

Anything but IQ

New York City's public schools, according to a news release from Florida State University, recently decided to switch from using IQ tests to identify gifted students, to using something called the Gifted Rating Scale. The GRS was developed by FSU prof Steven Pfeiffer, who was the head of Duke's TIP program for awhile, and has written about gifted educaion. You can read about it here.

According to the article, about 400 school districts use the rating scale (so I'd love to know if any of your children's districts are among them). The scale measures children in six areas: intellectual ability, academic ability, creativity, artistic talent, leadership and motivation. Teachers evaluate the children on these scales.

Since Pfeiffer has spent so much time around gifted kids, I'm sure his GRS is meant to make the concept of giftedness and gifted education more palatable to school systems, not to undermine gifted education.

However, I have to admit I'm wary of it. Given how few teachers have extensive training in gifted education, basing the criteria on teacher observations seems prone to problems. Also, a highly motivated child, or a child who motivates others (and hence, is gifted in the leadership category) will certainly be a successful child -- but that's not what giftedness has traditionally meant. The traditional thinking is that gifted children need more advanced work than even a good grade-level class can provide in order to stretch their brains. Motivated children who are good leaders may not. Also, the "academic" scale seems designed to mollify people who complain about students who get straight A's and yet are not labeled gifted. But giftedness and good grades are not the same thing. That's one of the reasons that just using teacher evaluations is a problem.

Of course, I have not seen the scale in practice. I'd love to be proven wrong if anyone has seen it used to great effect. Either way, I do have a question. What's so horrible about IQ anyway? IQ tests may try to put a precise number on something that's hard to measure precisely, but we don't know exactly how many calories the human body needs per day, either. Yet we know that a starving person should be fed. Quibbling about definitions of giftedness, and how to measure it and identify it, can keep us from meeting kids' needs if we're not careful.

College Admission "Madness"

It's college admissions season again (with deadlines approaching!) That means we're in for another round of stories on how the college admissions process has become ever more insane. I always roll my eyes a little at these stories, because they've been repeated every year for the past decade. I remember a New York Times magazine cover story back in spring 1996 that followed four high-achieving seniors at a large high school who applied to Harvard. Only one got in. Harvard had an especially low admission rate that year because the SAT had been recentered, which raised most students' scores. Suddenly, people who hadn't been in the top buckets for colleges were, and decided to give it a whirl. Now, in 2006, we're getting stories like $15k to Get into Harvard: How to Stop the Madness about a young lady who's pondering spending $4500 to go volunteer in Thailand because it will look good on her applications.

The net result of all this furor is not positive. When Money/CNN runs a story talking about how one family is spending $15,000 to help get their kid into college, families who can't spend that kind of money start thinking maybe their child isn't college material. In reality, the vast majority of college-bound students wind up at one of their top choice schools. Most colleges actually admit most of their applicants.

The stories also mask another reality. Guess what? A lot of highly gifted kids actually enjoy the college application process (even as they fret about the very public nature of the outcome). Here's why:

1. College admissions is a Big Project involving multiple components that aren't simply handed to you in school. Essays, extra-curricular activities... Too many school assignments are one-off little projects. It's fun and mind-stretching to labor toward a big goal, where you have to figure out how all the pieces work together.
2. It's a Big Project with an obvious purpose. Why did I get graded on the coloring skills I used to shade in a map of all the former Soviet Socialist Republics in school once? I have no idea. But I knew exactly why I was putting a lot of effort into getting into a good college.
3. I learned about platform building. College counselors often talk about kids finding a 'hook' -- something that makes them stand out. What makes me a compelling candidate? What's my "story"? This is 100% the same question you need to ask when you're trying to sell a book proposal. It's a question you need to ask for any award, for landing some jobs, etc. It's also a question you rarely ask in school before the college application process.
4. College applications pit you against the best kids in the whole country (and world, sometimes). Gifted kids get a little bored being pitted against the same 2 other kids they've been in programs with since 3rd grade. New competition helps you sharpen the saw.

Are any families who read this blog going through the process right now? I'm curious if you find it stressful... or fun.

On Raising Mr. Smartypants -- A Parent's Perspective

I really appreciate all the blog topic suggestions Gifted Exchange readers have been sending me. I will try to get to all of them in the next few weeks, and please keep them coming! I wanted to share one fun and thought-provoking article that came over the transom from Kim Moldofsky, a regular reader of this blog. She wrote an essay for the Chicago Parent about "Mr. Smartypants," her son. You can read the essay here.

As she writes, on one hand, it's thrilling to have a six year old who likes to talk about Big Ideas from his booster seat. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to find a good school situation for such a child. Kim writes about her sadness as her first grader's essays devolved from his theories of the universe to "I like cars." Too often, gifted kids learn in school that curiosity only makes you miserable.

The essay still has its light moments, though. A favorite line: "I thank goodness I didn't breastfeed because those extra IQ points he might have gained would have put me over the edge. He already has so many ideas that seem way too big for his little head and questions that are too hard to answer. Even my husband, a veritable walking encyclopedia, gets exasperated at times. 'I can handle questions about sex, but this stuff about quantum physics is really awkward to address,' he says as he again attempts to hide our copy of Einstein for Beginners." I'm sure many readers will be able to relate.

Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom

One of the critiques levied against this blog when I asked a few months ago was that I'm impractical. I tend to have as utopian a vision of what gifted education should be as many educators who don't like gifted education have about schooling in general. In my world, all highly gifted kids should be in self-contained classes -- or even schools! -- that challenge them to the extent of their abilities in an environment with their intellectual peers.

Obviously, few gifted kids experience this. Most people, alas, are still required to live in the real world. The vast majority of gifted kids still attend regular classes in regular schools. They may be in the top math or reading group, but most of the day still features grade 3 curriculum if you're 8 in September, grade 4 if you're 9, and so on. Many parents and schools, for whatever reasons, don't feel comfortable with whole grade acceleration. Many parents don't feel they can homeschool effectively. So how can schools maximize outcomes for gifted kids in the regular classroom?

I've been reading the "orange bible" on the subject, Susan Winebrinner's "Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom." A perpetual best-seller among teachers, this book describes multiple ways of differentiating heterogeneous classrooms. It would make a great holiday gift for any educator.

One of my favorite suggestions is to allow kids to "buy back time" from the various lesson plans. If kids can show they already know how to do the most difficult work in any given unit at an 80% competence, they can buy the time to work on their own projects. The teacher should help the child set goals for this individual project (such as writing a book -- one chapter this week, one the next, etc., or working on geometry, covering spheres this week, angles the next, etc.) Then the kid keeps track of progress toward the goal (a way of learning self-discipline, by the way). This option is available to any kid in the classroom, but tends to work best for gifted kids. This eliminates the kid sitting around waiting for everyone to finish up. She already has permission to go play to her strengths in her "choice time" (not "free time").

Of course, I can't help remembering, reading this book, that systems are only as good as how they work when the average person implements them. Any teacher who can implement all the suggestions in the book -- who designs individual plans for the kids in her class, encourages them to write books or do other big projects and tracks progress toward a goal, and is willing to squeeze the curriculum into an hour a day for a kid if that's all she needs -- is already an outstanding, energetic teacher. Any student would be lucky to land in that classroom, gifted or not!

It's easier to teach roughly the same thing to everyone in a class. The beauty of ability grouping (or "readiness grouping" as we called it in the last post) is that it fails better. I wish all teachers were energetic and excellent, but a self-contained gifted class will still meet these students' needs to some extent even if the teacher is not so energetic or excellent. Heterogeneous classrooms led by mediocre teachers will not.

But anyway, I'm curious what other methods your children's teachers have used to differentiate within a regular classroom.

Readiness v. Ability

Blog reader Robin, the mom of a highly gifted sixth grader, sent me this link to the Duke Gifted Letter the other day. This particular issue has a two expert back-and-forth about abilty grouping.

While the evidence from various studies shows that ability grouping is the best option for gifted kids (kids learn best when they're challenged in an environment with their intellectual peers) it remains somewhat controversial. Schools usually tolerate different math groups, for instance, but won't differentiate for most other subjects until high school.

Anyway, one of the experts interviewed for the Duke letter said that "readiness" was a much more potent word than "ability." Reading into her words, I think she means that ability implies something set and unchanging -- it's a value judgement. But readiness is a simple statement of the facts. Some kids are ready for more advanced reading, and some aren't ready yet. That doesn't mean they won't ever be ready. They just aren't right now. "Readiness grouping" implies a correct match, at a particular point in time, for a kid's needs.

So I think it's a great phrase, one gifted advocates should consider using instead of "ability grouping." I'm curious what everyone else thinks.

On Being "Well-Adjusted"

Please keep posting on the parenting books thread -- I really appreciate it! One of the comments, though, had me thinking about the concept of gifted kids being "well-adjusted," so I thought I'd do a separate post on the topic. All parents want this for their children -- for them to have a happy social life, be resilient, etc. Unfortunately, I think this is more possible for gifted children once they grow up than it is for them when they are children. That's because adults can set up their lives in ways that make them happy, fulfilled, etc. Children don't have this option -- mostly because that's part of being a kid.

For instance, I'm pretty happy with my life right now. What a reason to be grateful, right? I work from home, so my desk is as messy and disorganized as I wish. It's got bits and pieces of different projects scattered everywhere. No one let me get away with that in school! I work on projects when I want to work on them. And I choose my own projects. So naturally I gravitate towards ones I find fascinating. I always had a bit of trouble sitting still; fortunately, by running my own small business, I rarely get stuck in meetings that don't directly pertain to me. I have friends of all different ages, and I rarely spend too much time with people who aren't smart or inquisitive. Because the bulk of my social interactions are with such people, I can handle other interactions with a lot more patience than I had in 8th grade when the only conversation going on at the lunch table was about the mall. Nothing about my life looks much like the average kid's class in school, where you interact only with people your age, and only do assignments someone else tells you to do. So no wonder I'm much more relaxed and well-adjusted than I was as a kid!

I've been thinking about how some of these adult choices could have been put in place when I was a kid -- or if that's even possible. Some parts are. For starters, it's more possible for gifted kids to be well-adjusted in self-contained gifted classes than in mixed-ability classes. In mixed-ability classes, you are simply the "smart one," while in gifted classes, other sides of your personality can come out. Voila! You are magically more well-rounded and well-adjusted, just by changing classes. Gifted kids also magically become more well-adjusted when they're allowed to pursue their favorite topics in depth, and when they're challenged. Suddenly, your brain is more engaged. Smart people like it when their brains are engaged. Life is more fun!

But I do understand that it would be pretty hard to run a school where you come and go as you please, do all fascinating work and only interact with people you like. Maybe there are benefits that come with adulthood. I guess this is something to tell a gifted kid who's getting frustrated with school and the rules of being a kid. For all we romanticize childhood in our culture, if you've got an adult brain in a kid's body, it's often better to actually be an adult. So hang on... it'll get better as you get older.