Learning vs. Education--Where Do We Go from Here?

Science fiction and fantasy love the gifted.  Heroes like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Benedict Society, and especially Ender Wiggin1 are social outsiders who discover their gifts and use them to save the world.  That must be why my boys love these books.  They can see themselves in their pages.

Fairy tales love the underdog who in the end discovers special gifts that triumph over evil. As a child, Beauty and the Beast was my favorite story.  Belle was a bookworm who discovered that it didn’t matter if you were like everyone else.  I could be Belle as I read her story.

Movies love the gifted.  Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets’ Society, Shine, and A Beautiful Mind address the joys of being gifted while presenting many of the challenges in realistic ways, while Batman and Iron Man use genius thinking and applied technology in order to save the world.

The music world, the sports world, the technology world—they all champion genius, and through buying their music, attending their games, and buying their products, we all consciously or unconsciously show our support for creative thinking and superior achievement.

So why is it that our public school system can’t seem to find a place for gifted kids?  Your comments this week gave me much to think about.

Many of you saw yourselves in my posts, for the first time in your lives recognizing the responsibility the school system shoulders in teaching our kids to learn.  Myke said, “I’m nearly convinced that public school did fail me,” and Karen added, “This was such a validation for me.”  Others of you, who had participated in gifted education, shared your experiences. Dawn described her son’s public school experience like this: “David has the brain of a rocket scientist but no ambition to build one. . . . [School] failed us both dismally.  He didn’t need more homework, he needed better CLASS work to stimulate his young mind.” And Robin said, “I learned in high school that I didn’t have to study or work hard to get As and Bs . .  . so I wondered why should I?” Pondside confirmed that this isn’t just an American school issue, when she wrote about Canada: “ I’ll never, ever forget walking into his classroom one day to find a teacher dealing with two special needs students and an aid dealing with another, while the rest of the class chattered and moved about.  There, in the middle of the room, with his head on his desk, was my son.”

Lauren, a young woman I have known most of her life, added insight from the perspective of the academically and intellectually gifted.  She wrote, “I feel like I spent most of my effort working to figure out what a teacher wanted rather than actually learning. . . . I never developed the skill of figuring things out myself. . . . I have spent much of my life working for something I don’t really agree with: grades. . . . Public schooling . . . often forces the creativity out of students in the process [of fostering an academic skill set].”

These experiences saddened me and made me see that this problem is even bigger than I thought.  Why has no one stood up before now in defense of gifted kids whose needs are being ignored?  I don’t know the complete answer to that question, but I do have one guess. 

Living in a democratic society, we believe that we all are guaranteed the same rights—rights to religion, rights to representation, rights to pursue happiness.  Tied up in all that is the belief that an educated people is a better people.  So far I agree.  I understand that lurking in our country’s history are the ugly heads of racism, segregation, sexism, bigotry, and prejudice. I know that inequality in education has been legislated in other periods, and I can accept the fear that any attempt to educate children differently could turn into elite classes and remedial classes. 

“No Child Left Behind” was implemented with good intentions for a few students that resulted in negative consequences for most of the rest. Testing has become rampant in our schools.  Tests are administered at the beginning of the year to compare with tests at the end.  Tests are given to monitor how a child ranks against his peers, how a child improved this year, how a child can write a story.  Classroom tests for students serve a dual purpose in that they also exist to monitor teachers.  Teachers’ salaries are often based on classroom results.  These tests measure how effectively that teacher taught her class that year.

In theory, anyway.

In reality, these tests have swayed the momentum of education from learning something because it’s interesting (history) or exciting (chemistry) or necessary (writing) to learning something “because it’s going to be on the test.”  Education has been narrowed to tests, and in the process, it has almost completely eliminated learning just for the pure joy of learning. This frustration is felt not only by students, but by their teachers as well. G left this comment: “This year I ventured to [teaching at] a charter school. . . . It’s refreshing to finally be able to have the freedom to extend and enrich, rather than be a walking DIBELS or AMS score.” Teachers are so linked to their test scores that they routinely ignore the gifted (and the high achieving) in their classrooms to focus on the low students.  While it is important to help those who struggle, test results shouldn’t be their motivation.  Kerri said her achieving but not gifted son “gets to sit back and (do busy work), wait while many students are trying to catch up with the help of Title 1 tutors, aides, etc.”  Karen added that making most students wait for the slowest kid in the class “demeans those who were chomping at the bit to go further.”  I couldn’t have said that better myself—chomping to go further, but instead bored and more bored.

Besides the plethora of standardized tests that must be prepared for and administered (sucking up most of the classroom instruction time available for the last 4-6 weeks of school, depending on the school district and the tests used), there is the issue of funding.  I hate that this issue has to involve money, but money is important for gifted programs.  Unfortunately, there isn’t any.  Here are some facts about funding gifted education: "Funding for gifted education programs today is inadequate and upsetting. The National Association for Gifted Children (2009) notes that the federal government provides only two cents of every hundred dollars spent on education to gifted children. . . . Not only do gifted education programs suffer from a severe lack of funds, they also experience frequent cuts from their tight budgets. Ward (2005) discusses how the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is negatively affecting gifted students around the United States by cutting elective programs for gifted children in order to raise money to boost the test scores of the lower-performing students (Ward, 2005, p. 46). 2   Parents of lower-performing students would never stand back and let their students’ budgets be cut this way. It would be national news.

More from your own personal experience: Cindy said, “They recently cut all enrichment funding at our schools [in Illinois], and it took a parent lead group raising money and writing grants to get some mediocre programs put back in place.  Very discouraging.”  I know that our school district also cut all funding for gifted education—no field trips, no teacher conferences, no nothing. Why is this not in the forefront of educational funding discussions? 

Why are we sitting back and allowing this to happen in our schools all across the country?  I have held the hope that somehow this issue would be addressed satisfactorily, but it just keeps getting worse. “It is a crime,” Sue stated, “that, more and more, our public education aims for the lowest common denominator.”  And Gabe wrote, “It’s all about ‘cookie cuttering’ our kids, trying to make them all the same.” What schools and society refuse to admit as fact is that we are not all the same, the gifted will “always be ‘different,’”3, and that the gifted “are special ed kids too.”4

Using the rungs of the ladder as an analogy, picture each child you’ve ever known (or the child you once were).  Each one is born with intellectual abilities or disabilities that place them on a rung of that ladder.

This is my question for public education: Is it better to assemble all the kids onto one middle rung of the ladder, or to assist each child in climbing just one rung higher?  Would those on the higher rungs be satisfied moving down a few rungs, just because public education thinks that is the best solution?  I hope the answer is no.  I have to believe the answer is no.

Think where our gifted kids could be if the funding were there to push them higher and further—places we haven’t yet dreamed, but places they are fully capable of reaching?

The underlying issues with education are this: Teaching to help the lowest child in the class is losing most of the rest, not just the gifted.  Teaching to tests is not improving our international academic standing.  Teaching to the lowest denominator is not fostering creativity or extraordinary achievement.

Matt commented that “dealing with the gifted is frustrating.”  I agree.  It is.  It’s hard and it’s exhausting and it seems like it’s easier to shove them in a corner with a book than try to find a solution.  I get that.  I also agree with Laraine’s comment that it probably isn’t realistic to assume that a public institution, dedicated to serving all, can possibly reach the one.  If it were just one kid, then I would agree, but this is an entire demographic of kids whose needs have been ignored for far too long. 

So—kids are gifted and school is failing them.

So—kids aren’t gifted and school is failing them.

Sounds to me like something is wrong with our schools, and I think I’ve identified the problem.

School districts today are so focused on test results and teaching kids to perform well on tests that they are missing the biggest assignment they have.

Schools are failing to teach kids to love learning.

Meg said, “The educational community abhors making distinctions when it comes to individual performance . . . but if and ever our government sets up a standardized test that rewards teachers and students who display ‘standout’ performance then the whole culture would change.”

I don’t know if the solution to help gifted kids (and all kids) in an academic setting lies is grouping by ability, tracking systems, classrooms of all high- medium- or low-achieving kids, or what.  What I do know is that the system is broken for all of them, and if we somehow can get public education focused back on learning for learning’s sake, then all of them will benefit.  Wouldn’t you much rather catch your own caterpillar and watch in change into a butterfly than read about and define the term metamorphosis?  Wouldn’t you rather dream up your own fairy tale than write for a prompt?  Wouldn’t you rather figure out how long it would take you to save $100 for a skateboard if you earn $5/week, than do sheets and sheets of math facts?  I think we all would, and so probably do our kids.

I have had an underlying reason for this recent obsession with gifted education.  I do not believe that every child is born intellectually gifted.  I have kids that fall on different rungs of the intelligence ladder. As a parent, I have always mothered from this perspective, “In order to treat you all fairly, I have to treat you differently.”  That doesn’t mean that I love my gifted kids more or treat my not gifted kids any differently.

I’ve written this week about growing up as a gifted kid.  I wrote about my two oldest sons, who are also gifted.  Of my two younger boys, Micah is in the gifted program at our school, and Hyrum, who is completing kindergarten, is too young to have been assessed yet.  Hyrum is still in that stage where everything he learns is exciting and wonderful and new and he has to share it with me whenever he can.  He has had a fantastic teacher this year5 who recognizes his abilities and passion for learning and pushes him to learn new things.  Kindergarten has taught him to obey rules, to wait his turn, and that there is something new to learn every day, whether it’s germination, addition, subtraction, or story writing.  It has been a fabulous year for him, and I could have asked for nothing better.

Micah started out the year excited to be attending the gifted program after a slight complication delayed his attendance for a few weeks.  He has one of the best teachers I have ever had the pleasure of working with, and she tries to challenge him as often as possible.  She took one whole afternoon of school to teach the kids about a cicada, just because they found one on the sidewalk.  She has implemented graphing systems for Micah to track his grades and has recommended books to challenge his reading ability.  She asked the class to write a poem for the district writing competition, and when Micah asked what the most difficult kind of poem was, she challenged him to write a doublet, which won the district writing contest. Of the over 500 third graders in MPS, two of Mrs. S’s students placed in that writing competition.  She is that good.

Even though she is doing her best with Micah, in a classroom full of kids on different rungs of the ladder, Micah’s interest in school is waning.  I see it in his grades—slipping from perfect to not so perfect, to why does it matter, I know the answer?  I see it in his effort—penmanship that is less than stellar, problems missed out of carelessness.  I see it in his excitement to attend school; even his ELP class hasn’t captured his attention.

I took the three little kids to the zoo and I was amazed as I watched their minds process details and information about the animals.  Micah’s mind leaped from the fact that stingrays and sharks are cousins to ask a question to which the guide didn’t even know the answer.5

I’m scared.  I see Micah walking that same road that his older brothers walked, and I am powerless to stop him.  I see the light of learning slowly being extinguished, and no matter how hard I fan the flame, it's going out. 

Resolve with me to fight for our kids and the light of learning that they carry. “If we wish our children to change the world in the ways in which they are capable, we need to open up opportunities for them.”7  Find ways to help in your schools and change your policies.  The solution for me isn’t home school, since my kids already get all I have to give (and listen so much better to someone else anyway), but if it is for you and your family, be strong in your decision.

I don’t know the answers.  In fact, I barely know where to begin.  What I do know is that it’s not too late for him.  And I refuse to go down without a fight.8
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Notes
1Especially Ender.  Ender’s Game is one of the best books ever for young gifted kids.

2Somehow in my research I lost the reference for this quote.  So I'm not perfect. Neither is P!ink.

3Mommy to 4

4Karli

5 The boys' teachers are discussed in depth in this post.

6In case you wanted to know, stingrays don’t have eyelids either, as Micah has correctly surmised from what he already knew of sharks.  His mind works in such an exciting way, in a way that is seldom utilized during a school day.

7Quote from my gifted teacher friend Dawn

8If you had told me that one day I would write a blog post with notated references and scholarly links, I would have laughed.  Now I know that anything's possible if you are passionate enough about the subject.  Next week--back to the fluff and stuff that normally fills this space.  Oh--and Tucker comes home.  There is that small item of business.  Thanks for bearing with me on my week-long rant.  I'd love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment!