Gifted

Welcome to Shady Glen, where the women are blonde, all the men are good-looking and the children are gifted.

Your child's school isn't perfect.  That is a fact easy to acknowledge but difficult to accept.  Your child isn't perfect either.  That is a fact difficult to acknowledge and difficult to accept.

There's a crisis of confidence at Shady Glen Elementary, a real potential for a run on the bank, as concerned parents begin to pull their kids out and send them to private schools.  The cause?  The principal's refusal to institute a gifted program.

The concerned parents point to their gifted children and worry they're being held back, forced to stand by in idle boredom while the teachers work with the slower kids. 

The principal, surveying an auditorium filled with parents, responds that, by definition, most of your children can't be gifted. 

The concerned parents nod their heads collectively, each agreeing that most of the other children can't be gifted while remaining convinced that their children are gifted.

The parents who believe their children are gifted need to believe this, for they cannot accept anything less for their competition-bred children.  They need to believe the school is perfect too, for only the best will do for their perfect children, and they couldn't be seen settling for anything less than the best.  This parental perfection illusion can be surprisingly effective, convincing vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people that an obviously imperfect school is perfect, so long as the illusion is constantly reinforced by a combination of peer acceptance ("everyone goes there") and high standardized test scores (objective proof of the school's superiority). 

These are common issues, I imagine, especially at schools filled with the offspring of achievement-oriented parents.  So what led to our crisis?

Last year Shady Glen Elementary's test scores dropped.  Not much of a drop, but enough to shake the parental foundation of faith in the school's perfection, leading to urgent meetings of concerned parents, resolutions that something must be done and the retention of academic consultants, resulting in the formulation of educationally-appropriate action plans to boost scores.

Standardized tests are designed to test how well the students learned the state-mandated curriculum for their grade level.  This means that a student who is not working at grade level should get a low score while a student who is working at grade level should get a high score.  Students working above grade level should generally get the same score as students working at grade level for the test only covers the curriculum for the grade level, nothing more, no extra credit. 

So if you want to boost overall test scores, you'd get the most bang for your buck working with the students who are below grade level.  You'd devote any extra time strengthening the skills of the students working at or near grade level.  You wouldn't waste any time with the students who already work above grade level, for those kids will achieve the maximum score without your help. 

You can imagine what happened once the teachers at Shady Glen Elementary rolled up their sleeves and implemented the action plan to boost test scores.  Attention was taken from the gifted kids and lavished on the slower kids, angering the parents of the gifted kids. 

Soon these angry parents started talking and organizing and complaining.  This group of angry parents, some with truly gifted offspring, attracted many more suddenly angry parents, convinced that their kids were gifted too and concerned that if they didn't join up now, their kids would be excluded from the new gifted program.  The principal's refusal to play the gifted game poured oil on the fire, immediately prompting the angriest parents to pull their kids out of the school. 

Although the early exodus was tiny, it included some truly gifted kids.  The remaining parents, convinced their children were gifted too, concerned that the gifted kids who departed were already getting ahead of the gifted kids left behind, upped the ante, petitioning the school board, dividing the faculty, dialing up the acrimony, trafficking in rumor and innuendo.   

All the while, the exodus of gifted and near-gifted  and supposedly gifted kids continues.  To leave your child in the school is to admit that your child is, well, less than gifted, a fact difficult to acknowledge and difficult to accept.  These departures will lead to further declines in test scores, which in turn will further undermine the school's status in the minds of the remaining concerned parents, which in turn will lead them to move their kids to private schools, which in turn will lead to further declines in test scores.  And so on.  Thus the crisis in confidence breeds a classic run on the bank, except in this case they're running away.

I blame the standardized tests, which upset the delicate balance needed to sustain the necessary illusion of educational perfection.  If the parents didn't measure the school by its standardized test scores, the parents wouldn't have insisted that the school damage itself by boosting the scores.  And if the school didn't respond to the parents by resolving to boost the test scores, the school wouldn't have tried to standardize the kids by teaching from the bottom up.

For our kids are all gifted, just not in a standardized way. 

Comments

[dave s]

here in Virginia, the state looks at the average scores - so running up the scores for the high-scoring students helps the school's image as much as does running up scores for the low scorers. Consequently, the incentives for our schools are to maximize scores for all students.

it actually seems to be working, the teachers are putting a lot of effort into teaching to the tests and the tests seem to be a pretty good match to what you'd want the kids to learn.

[DarkoV]

Whenever the words "kids", "special", &/or "gifted" collide, I shut the mouth and engage the mental replay of Bill Hicks' treatise on "Children" (from,among other cd's, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000096FOC/ref=pd_art_ftr_2/102-7064083-5804910?v=glance&s=music

"Shock & Awe"). It calms me down and gives me a realistic perspective. I've got two kids; I try to stay away from the malestrom named "gifted kids".

[MFS]

Large groups of parents frighten me. Large groups of irate parents promoting their perfect children *really* frighten me. (And I speak from horrible experience: two years as the school board president for a private school in a tony neighborhood. I was an anomaly in so many ways, not the least of which was that tony I'm not.)

Don't such outcries rather remind you of the scene in Jackson's "The Lottery"? Someone must be holding the chip with the mark on it; someone's child will be deemed gifted and someone else's will not. (*head shaking*)

And folks wonder why we opted for a family-centered learning project.

Simple.

We don't want to be stoned.

On the flip side, at M-mv, we're following with interest the story of the "Gifties" who graduated one of Chicago's magnet schools. As columnist Neil Steinberg notes, "[L]et some gifted students express pride, and adults fret that they'll make the average kids feel bad. That's just tough; wait until real life gets ahold of them."

Thanks for your email message today. My thoughts on giftedness are like yours, a little wobbly. But on one thing I'm rock-steady: Parents like the ones you've describe -- folks engaged in the performance art of "power parenting" -- are creepy.

Let them run, O.L. Smaller class sizes will only benefit the students who remain.

[kmsqrd]

I was a 'gifted' kid. In elementary school it didn't mean a whole lot. The whole grade was together and then split for different parts of the school day so you could be in the reading group that moved a little slower and in the math group that moved through the cirriculum fairly quickly. Except for the year Mom pulled rank, it worked out well. By moving and shuffling us around as group A or B the class ended up being reasonably talored to our educational needs. As for being labeled gifted, it always felt more like a burden than a blessing.

[Amy]

We lived in southeast Florida (Tropicopolis) when my kids were little. The big kid tested as "gifted" in kindergarten. This meant a separate classroom with middle to upper middle class white kids whose parents could afford to have them tested repeatedly until they got into the program. All the parents knew which psychologists were "easiest" - coincidentally also often the most expensive. The percentage of children in the gifted program far exceeded the percentage of kids who could have an IQ over 130 if the bell curve held true. (115 for minorities.) I don't know if it was meeting the kids' needs for enrichment or whatever, though they seemed to have the best teachers and move through the material more quickly, but it was meeting the parents' needs.

One Christmas I wrote a spoof email catalog I circulated among friends called Gifts for the Gifted. It included Build Your Own Entrance Portfolio to Harvard, a Home Planetarium, a DNA kit for Backyard Cloning. I was being snide but some people thought it was real and wanted to know where they could buy the stuff for their kids. Anyway, most of it has become real, in a kind of weird way:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2003/article/0,18881,537113,00.html