A woman I know was concerned when her very precocious son was becoming bored and frustrated at school. He was an early reader - in fact, a novel reader - and quite articulate and curious. The first grade curriculum was just not a good fit for him.

When his mom somewhat apprehensively approached the principal of the local elementary school to inquire about testing to see if her son might be gifted, and to see what programming is available for kids who do test well above the norm, the principal’s answer was short and not so sweet: “I don’t believe in gifted programs. We don’t offer them, and I’m not interested in starting.”

According to John Cloud, writing in Time Magazine, my friend’s experience is not unusual. Mr. Cloud says that in the 1960s, while we were engaged in the race to the moon, educators honed in on gifted students, the result being a huge upswing in the number of Ph.D.s earned by the late 1960s. But soon after, education in the US swung toward more egalitarian models, and the emphasis shifted away from extra resources for gifted students toward inclusion programs that supported students at the lower end of the IQ scale:

Since well before the Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term “no child left behind,” those who write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids–about 5% of both populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range. Earlier this year, Patrick Gonzales of the U.S. Department of Education presented a paper showing that the highest-achieving students in six other countries, including Japan, Hungary and Singapore, scored significantly higher in math than their bright U.S. counterparts, who scored about the same as the Estonians. Which all suggests we may be squandering a national resource: our best young minds.

Mr. Cloud writes that we currently spend at least ten times more money educating the mentally retarded than the gifted - $8 billion vs. (at most) $800 million. And No Child Left Behind has apparently lead to even more radical cuts in programming:

The year after the President signed the law in 2002, Illinois cut $16 million from gifted education; Michigan cut funding from $5 million to $500,000. Federal spending declined from $11.3 million in 2002 to $7.6 million this year.

And because many districts limit the number of grades gifted kids are allowed to skip, extremely intelligent children are left to wallow in classrooms that may be “age appropriate” but are intellectually excruciating.

Mr. Cloud profiles a new academy for gifted kids started by a wealthy Reno couple - sort of a “gifted ghetto”. While Mr. Cloud notes that the school is performing an important service by seeking out and supporting gifted children and adolescents who are neglected by their public school systems, he advocates a solution that is closer to home: Ending policies that limit how many grades a child can skip. Let gifted kids work through school at their own pace. Mr. Cloud concludes:

We shouldn’t be so wary of those who can move a lot faster than the rest of us.

If we’re talking broad definitions, of course, all of our kids are gifted, wherever they fall on the IQ scale, and all children deserve an excellent education. But if Mr. Cloud is correct and our system is grossly neglecting our nation’s brightest young minds, we have yet another incentive to re-evaluate our educational priorities.

Posted by MommaSteph.