Special School for Gifted Students : FOR

Should the Los Angeles schools establish a special high school for highly gifted students?

A group of San Fernando Valley educators and parents recently proposed such a school to members of the Board of Education. Two have said they like the idea.

The district has classes for exceptionally bright students in elementary and junior high schools. It has advanced placement courses for high school students but no special high school like, for example, the Bronx High School of Science in New York.

A proposal several years ago to create an L.A. County high school for the highly gifted was dropped for lack of countywide interest.

Q. Why should a special school for very highly gifted students be established?

A. The problem is that in a regular school setting there is a certain small percentage of students who just cannot be challenged. Most of the regular curriculum is irrelevant for them. They’ve already learned it. If they haven’t learned it already, they can learn it at a much more rapid rate. The very brightest students can learn at least three times as fast as average or even above-average students.

The question arises: Can’t the regular high schools provide for these students? The answer is no, because they can’t recruit a faculty that can provide a complete program for these students.

I have an MIT degree and I’ve spent most of my life as a student, studying, preparing materials. I have an IQ that fits in with my students and I am not overqualified to work with these students at the junior high level. So what about at the high school level? The district is having enough trouble finding chemistry and physics teachers, much less finding teachers who can teach courses appropriate for these kids.

A special high school would attract into education people who would provide for these students.

Q. Some critics of this idea say that these kids are so bright, they’re going to succeed even without special attention. Is this true?

A. That is a fallacy. It’s really the exception that does make it. A study done a number of years ago in the San Diego schools found that their highly gifted students were underachieving for the grade level.

The idea of education is to develop each student to the limit of their abilities. These students are more years behind their potential than any other students.

Another way to look at it is that these kids are the cheapest to educate, if you consider the amount they learn. If they learn three times as much for 10% more cost, that’s very cheap. To have them going through a regular education system and wasting time is also wasting money.

Q. Some critics of this idea say establishing a special high school for the very bright would be elitist and anti-democratic. How do you answer that?

A. No. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. I taught at a private school in Arizona, which you would probably think on the surface would be a very elitist school. And yet the school taught the kids about the problems in society. Many of them went into the Peace Corps or other public service occupations.

The same thing would be true of a separate school for the highly gifted. They would be made far more sensitive to the problems of society than they would be in a regular school where they separate themselves from the rest of the student body. In our plans for such a school, we had as a requirement for all students that they would work for at least one semester on a project where they helped out at a hospital or a home for the elderly. After they learn theoretically about the problems of society, they would see it in actual practice.

And of course we have special provisions to make sure there would be a reasonable ethnic balance.

Q. IQ tests have been discredited as a means of identifying bright students because they are said to discriminate against minorities. Why use IQ tests?

A. This is a question. But the school district has had difficulty finding better means of identifying these students. We wouldn’t limit someone whose language is different from that of the IQ test, so we would need other means. We wouldn’t want to miss anyone.

Q. Opponents argue that in the real world, students have to be able to mix with people who are not highly gifted. Does your plan address that?

A. As was said by Leta Hollingworth, one of the early pioneers for the highly gifted, you have to learn to suffer fools gladly. My contention is that the very bright kid thrown in a regular school system, where he stands out in abilities from all the others, does not learn to suffer fools gladly. He’s in a state of conflict constantly and is very unhappy.

Q. What happens in the other schools when you take all the gifted away? Doesn’t it make it even more difficult for them to have programs for the above-average, the college-bound?

A. Yes, if you took all the gifted. But I’m not talking about all the gifted. I’m only talking about the highly gifted, and this is only a couple kids per school. These are the kids who are total misfits. They just don’t belong in that system because they can’t function in it. Sometimes these are referred to as the severely gifted.

Q. What is the value of accelerating students’ rate of learning?

A. It’s really a matter of avoiding boredom. You develop very poor work habits if you don’t have challenges.

Q. Do these students need challenges that are not academic?

A. We hope we can provide that. These would be full high schools.

Q. What evidence is there that these students are not being served now?

A. One clear way of measuring this is advanced placement exams. A number of my students leave with passes in advanced placement chemistry, physics and calculus. There are no courses in high school that go past these so they cannot take any physics, chemistry or mathematics in high school. It is almost a universal agreement among our former students that they did much more work in junior high than they did in high school.

Q. Why are schools for extremely bright students good for the nation?

A. One of the arguments for schools such as this is the benefit to these kids. But these schools also benefit society. Whatever money we invest in these students, society will receive more than tenfold. How much is an Einstein worth to a society? Immeasurable. Our society is in great need of leadership. Not only in science and engineering, but in political science, economics, literature, art. We are doing a terrible job with our most talented people.