Brightest Students May Not Shine in School--It’s Boring, Boring, Boring : Gifted: Department of Education report criticizes the current emphasis on remediation and bringing up low test scores, while the needs of high achievers are ignored.

When she sent her son to kindergarten, Cathy Silva expected the bright, happy child to flourish, getting lots of A’s, making friends and competing in sports.

But by the end of first grade, Russell wanted to drop out. By second grade, he was literally sick of school.

“It was just boring,” said Russell, now 10. “In math, they’d spend two weeks working on something I’d learned in a day.”

Russell could read 120-page novels and do complex mathematics in his head when he was 7. He couldn’t see why the teacher insisted he “waste time” coloring work sheets. He started coming home with stomach aches.

After taking her son for expensive testing and consulting with experts, Silva realized why Russell found school so frustrating. He is among a small fraction of the population described by experts as “highly gifted”--defined as having an IQ over about 170, or prodigious talent in such areas as mathematics, music or chess.

Such children are way out of sync developmentally, having the mind of perhaps a 15-year-old at the age of 7, says Linda Silverman, director of the Gifted Child Development Center in Denver. She distinguishes the “highly gifted” from the “moderately gifted”; she defines them as the top 3% to 5% of students who are included in gifted and talented programs.

One might expect such children to shine in school. But experts say the opposite is true.

“In a regular school curriculum, these kids are never asked to work. They end up crippled in their ability to probe and gain knowledge,” said Phyllis Aldrich, who heads a Young Scholars program in New York’s Saratoga and Warren counties.

“The United States is squandering one of its most precious resources--the gifts, talents and high interests of many of its students,” said a Nov. 4 report from the U.S. Department of Education. The report criticized the current emphasis on remediation and bringing up low test scores, while the needs of high achievers are ignored.

The report called for a more challenging curriculum for gifted students and a better system of identifying them.

Silva, a full-time mother of three with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, said the elementary school refused to make even minor adaptations for Russell, such as letting him use the third-grade math book in second grade or giving him a spelling list with words related to his interest in meteorology. So she decided to teach him at home.

She took a graduate course in gifted education, attended conferences, subscribed to journals, and sought assistance from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth in Baltimore. She formed a support group for other parents of gifted children.

“It’s taken an incredible amount of work,” she said in an interview at her home in rural Saratoga County, about 20 miles north of Albany.

Silverman said highly gifted children are so developmentally advanced that their needs cannot be met by the accelerated reading groups and “enrichments” supplied by most gifted and talented programs.

But gifted programs have been under attack in recent years as schools struggle to trim budgets. They also have been criticized as elitist. The very definition of “giftedness” has been debated, as some seek alternatives to IQ tests.

“In the ‘90s, I feel we’re in a zealous, anti-intellectual period,” Silverman said. “So doing something for kids with intellectual ability seems a luxury.”

Robert Slavin, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, said studies show fast learners benefit from acceleration--skipping grades or taking advanced classes. But he is skeptical of claims that the gifted need customized enrichment programs. “There’s much less evidence for that,” he said.

“In an ideal world, every child would have an instructional program uniquely structured to their needs,” Slavin said. “The problems gifted children have may not be all that different from those of many other students who are slightly square pegs in round holes.”

When Ken and Cathy Silva took Russell to the Hollingworth Center for Highly Gifted Children in Casco, Me., tests showed he had an IQ of more than 180 and scored at the seventh-grade level in mathematics and the ninth-grade level in reading. He had just turned 8 years old.

His sister Erica, then in kindergarten, scored in the same IQ range, the mother said. “We were shocked,” she said. “Her school-related achievement isn’t as high as her brother’s. She didn’t seem that unusual.”

“But having a high IQ doesn’t mean you do everything well,” Cathy Silva said. “The children have different strengths and learning styles.” While Russell focuses on math, computers and chess, Erica has a passion for dance.

Cathy Silva said she decided to teach Erica at home along with Russell when she learned that gifted girls often hide their talents to conform in school.

Highly gifted children typically learn by prolonged immersion in a subject area, said Deidre Lovecky, a Rhode Island psychologist. Their need for complexity and in-depth study is not met with the brief, repetitive lessons of the usual elementary school classroom, she said.

Russell’s father, an engineer, tutored him in math at home. Russell also attended the one-day-a-week Young Scholars Program in Saratoga Springs, which provides advanced studies for fourth-through sixth-graders with high scores on an achievement test four years above their grade level.

Last summer, he took a three-week course in algebra and trigonometry at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth in Baltimore.

He went back to public school this fall. But instead of entering fifth grade, like other 10-year-olds, he’s in seventh grade, with ninth-grade math and German. His mother’s inch-thick binder of evidence of his abilities convinced school officials to accept him into the middle school.

“He’s had no trouble adjusting socially or academically,” she said.

Erica is now in fourth grade, with other 9-year-olds, at a private school for girls. The Silvas’ youngest child, 5-year-old Suzy, is in kindergarten.

Although she criticizes both public and private schools for being too rigid to meet Russell’s needs, Cathy Silva said she can understand their resistance after seeing how much time, money and work she put into planning his education.

“Sometimes I think I could have tried harder in advocating for him,” perhaps forcing the elementary school to skip Russell from second to fifth grade, she said. “But then he would have lost something he has now, which is a wonderful fresh start.”