No child left behind does not mean talented children should be dumbed down to conform. What are the rules for gifted children? No one knows. But there are multitudes of laws & mandates for special needs children and vagueness for gifted children. Just as we take care of our special needs, we must also encourage our gifted children.
How the U.S. is Failing its Brightest Kids
Leaving children bored, socially isolated and unmotivated is not my idea of how our next generation of children should be treated.
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“Estimates vary, but many say there are around 3 million students in K-12 classrooms nationwide who could be considered academically gifted and talented. The education they get is the subject of a national debate about what our public schools owe to each child in the post-No Child Left Behind era.”
The lack of consensus on how to identify gifted children is stark. Testing, nomination by parents, luck?
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Skip A Grade? Start Kindergarten Early? It’s Not So Easy
The experts on identifying gifted children are all over the map but seem to generally agree on the randomness of the process.
“In addition, IQ tests become less useful as children get older because there is less “headroom” on the test, especially for those who are already high scorers. “It’s like measuring a 6-foot person with a 5-foot ruler,” says Linda Silverman, an educational psychologist and founder of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development.”
The controversy of serving the gifted children is scattered in approach across the nation.
“This is the biggest controversy in gifted education. Peters says many districts focus their resources on identifying gifted or advanced learners, while offering little or nothing to serve them.”
In Malden in particular, there is very little acknowledgement, announcement, pride or even a hardy pat on the back for the children of the Gifted program. Check all of the local news on any given week for the last few years and you will be hard pressed to find any announcement, news or entreaties for applicants to Malden’s Gifted Program. One would think it was a secret or that we are ignoring it. The children’s dance and soccer teams get more mention in the news than our Gifted program, which gets nearly ZERO.
I had to dig deep and do a search on the Malden Public Schools web site to find a single solitary bland reference Malden’s Gifted Program for children. Really????
“In most states the law governs the identification of gifted students. But only 27 percent of districts surveyed in 2013 report a state law about how to group these students, whether in a self-contained program, or pulled out into a resource room for a single subject or offered differentiation within a classroom. And almost no states have laws mandating anything about the curriculum for gifted students.”
Every child needs to be challenged. Malden needs to be challenged. We need to do a better job of advertising that Malden does a great job of serving the Special Needs children but we also have children in need who NEED to be challenged to excel
