A Few of My Thoughts on Education

I am dedicating this week to publishing my ideas on a specific area of public education.  I'd love to hear your opinions and debate the issue with you.

I never thought I would use my blog as a platform for a persuasive essay, but the time has come for me to address an issue that has bothered me for many years—for at least as long as I’ve had kids in school, and may even date back to when I was a student myself.

I can’t remember the last paper I wrote.  It must have been my senior thesis at BYU—a case study using my grandparents as an example of a typical family of the 1940s and 1950s.  Much has changed since I wrote that paper.  Statistics appear at your fingertips through Dr. Google.  Editing doesn’t require a retype on the typewriter (I’m really dating myself with that comment!), and if a computer were within reach, a printer most certainly would not be, let alone google docs to share your knowledge with the push of a button.

So much has changed.

Schools have also changed markedly since I was a student.  Back then, in the good old days, teachers managed classrooms of 20-35 students single-handedly, receiving no help from full-time aids or assistants. Students took one standardized test a year—maybe even every other year.  IEPs were some unknown person’s initials.  Today, education concentrates on money, testing, the Common Core, and oh yeah . . . money.  Sadly, adults are losing focus on what is important—the kids, especially neglecting a select group of kids.

One thing that hasn’t changed much in twenty-five years is the social acceptance allowing a complete discussion relating to the education of our gifted kids.

If a child is a gifted athlete, parents will cater to those abilities, finding the most competitive teams and leagues for their child.  The young athletes shine in that environment and continue to improve their skills (often with academics placed on a back burner), then scouts will see them during a stellar football game, court them with money and promises, and their professional trajectory is based on their gifts.

If a child is a gifted musician, parents pay for lessons and teachers and search for experts to hone their child’s skills.  Microphones and amps and become life, along with auditions, stages, and hours of lessons. 

I am grateful for school programs that help identify these gifts in our children—PE classes, music, art, and sports teams all play a role in developing well-rounded people.  I would hate to see public school funding for these programs cut, because not only do they bring beauty and joy to life, they also help schools pinpoint children whose gifts may fall through the cracks created by poverty or lack of parental support. I am forever grateful for the opportunities provided for my children through public schools.  These opportunities enrich and bless my children in ways that I cannot.

As much as I adore the elective activities included in our schools’ curricula, developing these extraneous skills shouldn’t be our schools’ primary focus. The main role of education should be academics—developing their minds and teaching our children to think. Lamentably, public education is failing the academically and intellectually gifted—those students school should be benefiting most.

Why is it that when we talk about a gifted child athlete, people fawn over them, or when admiring a gifted musician or artist, people stand in awe, but when we talk about academically and intellectually gifted children, jealousy rears its ugly head and the phrase “Every child is gifted,” enters the conversation? I am sick to death of hearing, “Every child is gifted.” I agree that every child is special and every child is individual and every child has attributes that are inherently theirs—abilities that separate and differentiate them from every other being that has ever lived on Earth.

But let’s be real.  Not every child is a gifted student.  There. I said it.  And I meant it.  Are the PC police going to find me now?

Let me establish some parameters for the discussion of “gifted” students.  A rough guideline used by educators is an IQ test:

High IQ:

    Mildly Gifted -- 115 to 129
    Moderately Gifted -- 130 to 144
    Highly Gifted -- 145 to 159
    Exceptionally Gifted -- 160 to 179
    Profoundly Gifted -- 180

While most schools don’t perform the traditional IQ test, other tests (such Otis-Lennon or Stanford-Binet) are used to establish and define a child’s level of giftedness.  Why is this important?  Carol Bainbridge writes:
"These ranges are based on a standard bell curve. Most people fall in the range between 85 and 115, with 100 the absolute norm. This range is considered normal. The farther away from the absolute norm of 100 a child is, the greater the need for special educational accommodations, regardless of whether the distance is on the left or right of 100."

This is the elephant in the room that I need to address—the need for special educational accommodations for our gifted kids.  It isn’t the topic of choice recently.  Those topics would include Common Core, standardized testing, technology in the classroom, improving America’s international standing in academics, and the ever-popular “What are we going to throw money at next?” or its flip side “What are we going to not fund in the future?”  Believe me, I have plenty opinions on each of these subjects, but first things first.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tomorrow:
There is a difference between academically and intellectually gifted.