Woe to the gifted children of Massachusetts.

 

 

 

For the Bay State’s brightest kids, the ones who teach themselves to read at 3, who complete 500-piece jigsaw puzzles before entering kindergarten, and, who in the future, could find the cure for cancer, propel humankind into the next universe and potentially shake the country out of its economic doldrums – think Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs or Google’s Larry Page – there’s no help, unless they live in one of the state’s few school districts that still provides gifted and talented education or their parents have the money to send them to private schools.

 

The tragedy for these kids, who usually hold higher than average IQs, is that they’re not a priority for the state’s education officials.

Instead, the Commonwealth’s poor performing students, and even the average ones, are the main concern, with the state making sure they perform well enough on the state’s standardized test, which is the barometer for measuring their academic progress as well as their teachers’ competence.

That’s the message from the Massachusetts Association of Gifted Children (MAGE), a state group that lobbies on behalf of gifted education, as well as the sentiment from public and private school educators working with some of the Bay State’s brightest children.

“Everyone thinks of Massachusetts as an education state,” says Diane Modest, Framingham Public School’s director of gifted and talented education.  “Look at our universities:  We have MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College and yet we do little to support gifted and talented education.”

Modest oversees the gifted education program for about 200 students in Grades 1 – 8 on an annual budget of less than $20,000 – all of which is provided by the town of Framingham.

Massachusetts stopped funding gifted education nearly two years ago.  “When we fail to cultivate talent, we’re losing our future potential (as a country),” says Jane Clarenbach of the National Association of Gifted Children. “We’re at risk of losing at least a generation of innovators and creative people.”

How Massachusetts Stacks Up

The Bay State doesn’t mandate gifted education. The last time it spent money on gifted education was during the 2008 – 2009 academic year, when Massachusetts had a $520,000 budget for this curriculum.

Today, the closest thing Massachusetts offers gifted students is the Dual Enrollment program, which allows high school students, usually in their junior or senior year, with a grade point average of at least 3.0, to take courses, paid by the state, in some of the state’s four-year universities as well as its community colleges.

The program, initiated in 1993 but stopped in 2001 due to a lack of funding, was restored by Gov. Deval Patrick, says Heather Johnson, a spokesperson in the governor’s office. It has a budget of $750,000.

The state that spends the most money per student on gifted education, says Clarenbach, is Georgia, which allots nearly $1,000 a year per student.

Annette Eger, with the Georgia Department of Education, says the Peach State’s gifted education program is flexible and available to kids in all grades, allowing them to enter it anytime during their academic career as well as only take gifted classes suited to their academic strengths.

“It’s a rigorous and challenging curriculum,” Eger says.  “It allows students to work independently and is content-rich beyond the typical grade level.”

Georgia’s gifted education program, she says, gives its students the opportunity to take college classes and work as unpaid interns.  Some students have worked in their local fire or police departments while others have been in hospitals, architectural firms and in attorneys’ offices.

The Blame

According to education professionals in Massachusetts, the single biggest factor that’s lowered interest for gifted education is the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, “which focuses public Kindergarten – Grade 12 energies and monies on seeking proficiency in reading and math … for all students and ignores the needs of the most able students who could benefit from high-level math and science courses,” reports Gifted Child Today.

A number of states, including Massachusetts, learn about their public school students’ academic proficiency by testing them on their core curriculum. 

The Bay State started administering a standardized test, called the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), to its public school students in 1998, as a result of the state legislature approving the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993. 

“The MCAS doesn’t test or teach for 21st century skills, which are creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication and problem solving,” says Timothy Monroe, head of The Sage School, a private school for gifted students in Foxborough.

“Standardized tests (like MCAS) lower the bar to make sure underperforming kids are meeting expectations and narrows the teaching,” he adds.

So what is the priority of Massachusetts’ public schools?

It’s to prepare all students to “succeed in postsecondary education, compete in a global economy and understand the rights and responsibilities of American citizens, and in so doing, to close all proficiency gaps,” says J.C. Considine, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“Instead of inspiring and aspiring to excellence, we have settled for proficiency,” says Diana Reeves, a MAGE board member.

Nine years ago, the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, in a report to the state legislature, estimated about 4 percent of the Commonwealth’s public school students from Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5 were gifted and that another 8 percent of Massachusetts’ public school students in Grades 6 – 8 were also gifted.

If those percentages hold up, then, based on the Department’s enrollment numbers for the current academic year, published on its website, there could be around 35,000 gifted students in the Bay State today.

But MAGE president Vicky Barr estimates that 10 or fewer of the state’s 393 school districts offer gifted and talented education.

“The push (in schools) is to bring the bottom up – not push up top performing students,” says Barr, who’s also a 4th grade teacher in Waltham Public Schools

Talent Lost

Teachers are expected to spot gifted and talented kids, says educational psychologist E. Jean Gubbins, with The Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, who has studied ways to teach gifted children.

“We do a great job of spotting talent with sports, but we don’t do it in academics,” says Dr. Gubbins.

This approach, she says, can lead to a loss of talented kids who aren’t developed. 

“It is a special need.  We can’t just say because these kids are smarter, they’ll be just fine and figure out their education.  They need direction and development,” Dr. Gubbins says.

India and China, says Monroe of the Sage School, are tracking their best math students, pushing them into programs that will lead to careers in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

Profiling the Gifted Child

“Gifted children are inquisitive, fast learners, verbally articulate at a young age, read early, sometimes as young as 3, and a few teach themselves how to read; some even complete 500-piece jigsaw puzzles,” says Elizabeth Smith, a psychologist in Natick, who tests kids’ cognitive abilities.

“They seem to understand things on a higher level than their peers.  For example, they watch the news and see something on war or poverty, they understand it,” Dr. Smith says.  “They often crave more information to understand whatever topic they’re studying.”

Gifted kids, she warns, can also be lonely, isolated from their peer group because they don’t think as typical kids think.

"A gifted kid gets on the bus and might turn to the kid next to them and say, ‘What do you think of busing?’  And the other kid replies, ‘I don’t like these seatbelts.’  But the gifted kid is really trying to talk about Martin Luther King and busing as it was in the South in the 1960s,” says Framingham’s Diane Modest.

Dr. Smith says if a teacher doesn’t know what to look for,  he or she might think the gifted child has an attention problem.

“They’re bored in class and act out,” she says.

Dr. Smith says, in her experience, the cutoff for a student to be accepted into a gifted education program is an IQ of 130.  The average IQ, she says, is 100. 

While most kids start learning by building basic knowledge in a topic or subject, Modest says, gifted kids gather information by asking questions.

“They work their way down to knowledge and ask more difficult questions.  There’s an interaction with academic ability, abstract thinking and creativity,” Modest says.

While The Sage School in Foxborough only teaches kids up to the 8th Grade, Monroe says some members of its alumni take Calculus in their high school freshman year, something most high school students might not do until either their junior or senior year.

In Framingham, Modest also says they have students completing school work two years ahead of their peers who aren’t in the gifted program.

In 1993, the U.S. Department of Education defined gifted children as having an “outstanding talent to perform or show the potential for performing at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when compared with others of their age, experience or environment.”

It also said, “These children … exhibit high performance capability in intellectual, creative, and/or artistic areas … or excel in specific academic fields. They require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the schools.”

Finally, the report said, giftedness is found “in children and youth from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, and in all areas of human endeavor.”

The Word “Gifted”

One of the biggest problems that educators and experts in the gifted education field say hinders their efforts at restoring this curriculum is the word “gifted.”

“It isn’t elitist,” says Jane Clarenbach, of the National Association of Gifted Children.  “It’s the funding (for gifted curriculum) that’s elitist.”

She asks, “If you only rely on local tax dollars for education, and the budget is cut, where are those dollars going to come from.  Communities like Stamford, Connecticut and other well-off towns pay for this.”

“This is a very diverse community,” says Modest.  “There’s nothing elitist about gifted education in Framingham.”

“It’s funny, if we say someone is a ‘highly gifted gymnast’ that’s okay but when we think about high-intellect or high-achieving in academics, there’s a problem,” says University of Connecticut’s E. Jean Gubbins.  “There’s something about the cache of certain words.”

Becoming Your Child’s General Contractor

Charles Beckman, a spokesman for The Center for Talented Youth, part of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, suggests that parents look at themselves as general contractors when it comes to their kids’ education.

“The idea is to find the right program to construct the best education for your child,” Beckman says.

So if you don’t live in one of the Bay State’s few public school districts that offer gifted education, districts such as Brockton, Barnstable or Triton, but you’re the parent of a highly intelligent child, what are your options?

One answer is to move to that district.  Another answer is to seek out a private school, like the Sage School in Foxborough, which costs around $20,000 a year. 

Another possibility includes moving to Reno, Nevada so your child can attend the The Davidson Academy, which specializes in teaching high-achieving students.

But The Center for Talented Youth offers something that might fit the budgets and lifestyles of a lot of parents – online courses in math and science, and even Advanced Placement courses, that can be taken either during or after school for about $700 per course, says Beckman.

“Some high school students take our AP classes before they take their AP class at their local high school,” Beckman says.  “It’s a way for them to better prepare for the class when they take it at their school.”

As with other gifted programs, in either public or private schools, each child’s cognitive ability must be measured to find out if they can handle the course work  before they’re admitted to The Center for Talented Youth.  This can be done by completing the Wechsier intelligence test.

“The test measures verbal and non-verbal skills and memory,” says Kathryn Trogolo, director of admissions at The Sage School in Foxborough. “It shows how a child processes information, and it calculates, through a series of scores in different domains, a child’s IQ.”

Child psychologists, she says, administer the test.

“Some families will coordinate these classes with the school their child attends, so they can take the class during the school day,” says Beckman.  “Other kids take them at night.”

The teachers for these online courses, he says, have at least a bachelor’s degree in the subject and a number of them also hold advanced degrees, including a doctorate, in the topic.

“You don’t get a classroom on the screen,” says Beckman.  “Not everyone gathers at the same time.  You gain access to the materials, watch a video that explains the day’s lesson and, if you’re taking a math class, do some problem sets, which are emailed to the instructor.

“The instructor then lets you know how you faired,” he adds.

The grades from these classes, Beckman says, can be submitted as part of a student’s college admissions application.

The online classes start for kids as young as Pre-K but most kids are taking these classes, Beckman says, when they are between the 5th and 9th Grades.  The children are taking classes in math, science and writing as well as in computer science and even computer security, Beckman says.

So is there a future for gifted and talented education in Massachusetts?

It’s hard to say. The state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education maintains an advisory council for gifted and talented education and notes from one of the council’s last meetings, in March 2011, posted on the Department’s website, said it was decided they were going to possibly re-name the council by taking out the term “gifted.”

Calls to the council seeking comment about the status of gifted and talented education in Massachusetts were not returned.

Doug Page is a freelance writer and lives with his wife and two children in Medfield.