The most significant obstacle to the education of Talented or Gifted children is not the lack of Talented and Gifted teachers, coordinators or programs. Those things, where they exist at all, are makeshift patches to a leaky boat. Those who care about the education of our brightest students had better attend to the boat itself and stop wasting time and energy advocating for ever more elaborate patches. There's no funding for patches, and they don't get at the root of the problem.
So what about this boat? How did it get so leaky? What can be done? Long story.
Some kids are taller than others. Some have better vision. Some weigh more than others. Some have more musical talent. Some are more mechanically inclined. Some kids are smarter than others. None of these qualities is a virtue in itself. They are just the circumstances into which various children are born.
Schools do a pretty good job of accommodating differences among children's heights, weights, visual acuity, and to a lesser degree, musical and mechanical aptitudes. But then none of these qualities is central to our mandate. The attribute that bears the most directly on the mission of schooling is intelligence, and that is where we really drop the ball. This isn't entirely the fault of schools, as our school inevitably reflect the long-standing ambivalence of our national culture toward intelligence, but we could do better.
So what's the explanation for our inability to deal with intellectual diversity? Institutionally, it's our practice of grade leveling by age, a process in which children whose birthdays are spread across a 364-day range are pronounced to be in the same 'grade' and we are told to hold them all (which winds up meaning 'hold them down' in some cases!) to the same standard. Is there any reason to believe that there is a single standard that has any relevance to children whose ages vary by 15 to 20 percent? Is there any reason to imagine that even if they were all born on the same day they should be identically prepared to pass a given test on a given day? Of course not. This practice has no basis in reason or in a knowledge of children. It is just what's cheapest and easiest for the grownups. At least it started out that way.
It seemed so simple. Put the annual crop of children in a single grade and in straight rows. Deliver the lessons. Administer the exams. Administer discipline as needed. Repeat for 12 years (kindergarten is a fairly recent invention). Issue diplomas to the 20% who made it through. Well, up until recent times. Now we are up to 60%.
The faults (and the hidden expenses) in this approach were largely invisible until the mid-20th century when, for the first time in history, over 50% of teenagers were attending high school. It's true. Even with today's headlines about dropout rates (which are horrendous) there is a larger percentage of teenagers graduating from high school today than even enrolled in high school prior to World War II. (I hope you weren't longing for those good old days in which everyone graduated from high school! Never happened.)
So what about these percentages? How do they play out today? It is likely that 90% of school aged children enter a public school at age five or six. (Kindergarten is not mandatory in Oregon, by the way). Nearly all of those students are placed in a grade-leveled classroom where they do identical work for the next several years. Along the way, about 13% of them (over 20% in some districts) are identified as having one or another sort of learning disability and are enrolled in Special Education. Another 4 or 5 percent (again, over 20% in some districts) are identified as Talented or Gifted. According to the law, students in Special Education and in Talented and Gifted programs are entitled to something more than is offered to the average student in the average classroom. Statewide, nearly one student in five is officially acknowledged as requiring something that cannot be provided in the grade leveled classroom! How cheap and efficient are these grade-leveled classrooms looking now?
But maybe you are a 'glass half full' sort of person. Isn't the ability to meet the needs of 80% of our students a pretty good argument for keeping the grade-leveled classrooms? Here's where the numbers get really bad. Nearly half of those students whose needs are supposedly being met in the 'regular' classroom are failing to graduate from high school!
The most generous interpretation that one could put to the numbers is that roughly 50% of students who enter the grade level classroom and who do not receive services through Special Education or TAG go on to graduate from high school. That's some kind of efficiency!
