Pupils Find Fast Track Ends After Junior High

Reed Junior High School ninth-grader Jon Sorenson, who has taken every math class offered by Los Angeles schools, says the district’s treatment of its smartest kids just doesn’t add up.

“There’s no math classes I can take when I get to high school,” said Sorenson, 13, who has already received college credit for a second-year calculus course that he took at the North Hollywood school.

Sorenson’s problem is not as rare as it might seem. Several hundred students identified by school district psychologists as highly gifted, having IQs of at least 145, graduate from accelerated elementary and junior high school programs such as Reed’s only to find that no high schools offer the same fast-paced learning.

Many of the district’s brightest students are forced to either start college early or coast through high school classes covering material that they’ve already learned, say students, teachers and parents critical of the present system.

Parents Want School

The absence of a high school for advanced studies has prompted a group of San Fernando Valley parents to revive a 1986 proposal to create one. The parents, whose highly gifted children attend Carpenter Avenue Elementary School in Studio City, say private foundations and corporations are willing to help pay a large part of the proposal’s multimillion-dollar price tag.

But money, though significant, probably won’t be the biggest obstacle facing a high school for the highly gifted, according to those in and out of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“It’s the bureaucracy,” said Paul Mertens, a history teacher who has taught highly gifted students at Reed for 19 years.

District officials say regular high schools are doing a good job of teaching the highly gifted. There are already a number of district programs, including about 25 advanced placement courses, through which students can earn college credit by passing tests, said Daniel M. Isaacs, the district’s high school division superintendent.

“Our kids go on to every major university,” said Lorna Round, the district’s associate superintendent of instruction. “So their educational needs are being dealt with.”

Regular School Programs

In fact, most of the district’s 3,700 highly gifted students do not go to such schools as Reed or the highly successful magnet schools that have special programs, said Sheila Smith, who heads the district’s gifted and highly gifted programs. “We work very hard on our regular school programs,” she said.

But that approach wastes the district’s most precious resource, said Milton Kopelman, principal of the 50-year-old Bronx High School of Science in New York. The school, which admits only those students who pass a rigorous examination, is nationally known for its graduates, four of whom have won Nobel Prizes in science.

“It is vitally important for governments to do something with their gifted students,” Kopelman said. “You can’t let them just hang out in regular schools, saying that because they are so bright they will be OK.”

Districts are reluctant to create schools for highly gifted students because of complaints that they are “skimming off the best kids,” Kopelman said. Unfortunately, “there are many regular schools where youngsters look down on kids who are interested in achievement.”

Reed Principal Charles Stewart, former principal of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, said most principals will admit privately that schools often fall short in teaching the highly gifted. But he warned that students can be pushed too hard.

“If a school becomes a junior university, there is the possibility of burnout, of kids getting turned off because of too much pressure on them,” Stewart said.

Lack of Work

But ninth-grade students attending Reed’s highly gifted program said in a recent classroom interview that they are worried that they won’t have enough work when they attend regular high school classes next year. Many of them have been together in highly gifted programs since grade school at Carpenter Avenue.

The students, whose IQ levels put them in the top 0.5% of the general population in intelligence, said they learn more from exchanging ideas with other smart youngsters. Such teachers as Mertens and math teacher Bill Fitz-Gibbon constantly push and challenge them, the students said.

Most agreed that a high school for advanced studies is a good idea. But a few, such as Marissa Goodman, said they have grown tired of being secluded from regular students. “They think we’re nerds,” she said.

Jennifer Kibrick, 15, said she hopes that the high school is a magnet school that will draw more minority students than the Reed program. Reed and Carpenter have drawn some criticism because their highly gifted programs are not required to comply with ethnic quotas that apply to magnet schools.

Admission is based solely on IQ, with the highest-scoring students being admitted first, school officials said. The Reed and Carpenter programs predate the district’s magnet school program, which was created to attract white students to minority neighborhood schools, district officials said. The two schools, unlike magnets, do not provide transportation for students traveling to them and receive no special funding.

Spots for Minority Students

To prevent criticism about minority enrollment, supporters of the advanced studies high school said they will set aside a certain number of places for minority students. Robert Claire, a parent and one of the organizers of the drive to create the high school, said the school will be academically challenging and ethnically diverse.

“No one questions spending for the educationally and physically handicapped; why not the highly gifted?” Claire said.

So far, Claire has enlisted the help of school board President Roberta Weintraub, the East Valley board representative. “I’m 1,000% behind the idea,” she said.

West Valley board member Julie Korenstein said she’s interested in studying the notion.

Both said the idea has come at a good time. The district in the next few weeks will begin studying an ambitious expansion of its magnet school program, Weintraub said.

“There have been feelings by other board members about this being elitist, but high IQ occurs for all races, incomes and nationalities,” she said.

District statistics bear that out. Of the district’s 3,700 highly gifted students, about 34% are white and the rest are minority, including 30% Latino, 6% black and 25% Asian, district records show.

Administrators Critical

Because such a small number of gifted and highly gifted students are among the district’s nearly 600,000 students, many administrators are reluctant to support a school that would take away their best students. Others say students who are isolated with only the very brightest don’t learn how to get along with other students.

“Society is not just upper-edge people,” said Joan Martin, coordinator of the Van Nuys High School Magnet centers for math, science and arts.

Of the students from highly gifted junior high schools who attend the Van Nuys High School Magnet, those who do well “are the ones who get along with people, who lose the arrogance they hang onto that they get from schools that put a gifted label above their forehead,” Martin said.

But former Reed student and Harvard physics graduate Ron K. Unz said an advanced studies school would inspire regular students to higher achievement “by showing how much can be achieved.”

“One of the problems with not having these kinds of schools, and having people around who are just as smart as you, is that you get the idea that you’re the smartest guy around,” Unz said.