Learn, Baby, Learn

One mother of two “profoundly gifted” girls has spent years struggling to prove to teachers, principals and other parents that her children’s incredible IQs were not her doing. “I told this one principal, ‘Look, it’s not my fault.’ Sure, I took them to the zoo, to the aquarium, but I have a child who taught herself to add fractions while riding in the car when she was 4 1/2.”

That child has now skipped three grades and still attends a special gifted program for math. “Other parents seem to resent us,” says the Philadelphia mother. “They think we’re pushing them or something. But we’re not trying to prove anything. Five years ago, I didn’t even know what gifted meant. We’re just trying to get an appropriate education for our children. Like everybody else.”

There was a time when the term “gifted child” was synonymous with the word “prodigy,” when it was reserved for the 4-year-old violinist, the 10-year-old poet, the 16-year-old doctoral student. There was a time when the identification of these children was rather simple. Those with artistic or musical inclinations were startling and obvious. And if your child began clamoring for Stephen Hawking’s oeuvre or quoting Proust, you could have her take the Stanford-Binet. A score of 135 or above would officially classify her as gifted.

But now the term has a much broader meaning, and the methods for identifying gifted children have become much more complex. Gifted now comes with a series of subsets: profoundly gifted, highly gifted, gifted and talented, and just gifted. In the last 20 years, gifted programs across the country have increased and diversified--there are accelerated programs, gifted magnet schools and prestigious private academies, many of which begin at the preschool level. At certain schools, gifted students attend weekly “pull-out” programs in science, math or the arts; in other districts, there are summer camps or classes after school and even online.

Parental support, once often reluctant, is now proactive, sometimes to an extreme. In some states there are now waiting lists not only for gifted programs, but also for the tests thatidentify eligible children. And as the definition of gifted has grown increasingly subjective, many schools are adopting prerequisites for identification as gifted.

Today, 12% of the student population in the United States receives some sort of gifted education, a marked increase from the 2% to 3% that long comprised those ranks. Which raises the question: Is 12% of the population truly gifted?

“We are definitely casting a wider net,” says Judy Roseberry, a retired Garden Grove principal who taught gifted students and ran a gifted and talented program for many years. “The teachers are much more sophisticated, and parents are now much better at identifying gifted children and understanding that they need something different.”

For a generation of parents, many raised themselves on Mozart in the womb, flash cards for 3-month-olds and Lamaze black-and-white patterned mobiles, the concept of gifted and talented comes a bit more easily than perhaps it did for their parents. Although the smartest kid in the class may not have the status accorded the star quarterback, the success and celebrity of people like Hawking and Bill Gates and the rise of the computer as personal deity has helped remove some of the anti-smarty-pants mentality that has plagued American schoolyards for generations.

So it is not surprising that as gifted programs proliferate, the demand for them increases even faster. For parents of prodigies or children with stratospheric IQs, these programs are salvation, plain and simple. Other parents, alarmed by the prospect of their bright children being herded through a declining public education system, see gifted programs as the only alternative to pricey or elitist private schools.

Programs for gifted children and, indeed, the definition of a gifted child vary widely. The percentages of students identified as gifted also run to extremes from state to state, from 0.22% in Nevada and 2.28% in West Virginia to 14.27% in Oklahoma and 22.9% in Maryland. California hovers near the mean with 6.12%, despite the fact that the Golden State is the birthplace of the gifted education movement. Stanford University professor Lewis Terman was the first to coin the term in 1922 when he sought to identify 1,000 gifted children using his newly developed Stanford-Binet intelligence test; most of the 1,528 students selected were from California.

Terman’s idea of nurturing gifted children through specialized programs has been controversial since its inception--many educators, parents and politicians consider it elitist and harmful to those children not designated gifted. Over the years, it fell in and out of favor depending on the bent of the education community, the specific school district and the mood of the country. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, for example, the importance of strong math and science curricula leaped to the top of the national agenda.

Then, in 1972, Congress ordered a review of the state of education. Commissioner of Education Sidney Marland reported that the U.S. was squandering one of its most precious resources--gifted children. The Marland report went on to lay out loose criteria by which these children could and should be identified.

“That was the beginning of the movement,” says Joyce VanTassel-Baska, director of the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. “This spurred states to provide plans and a funding structure for gifted education.”

While programs earlier in the century had been university-based, often offered by research teams studying intelligence or learning, this second push, VanTassel-Baska says, came more from local educators and parents.

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Gifted education remains a touchy subject. Much of the tension, not surprisingly, comes from funding issues. Tassel-Baska’s even tones become heated when she points out that while the population of gifted programs is comparable to that of special education classes, special ed receives 143 times more federal funding. “You would expect it to be more,” she concedes. “But not that much more.”

One of the most important things the gifted education movement has done is alert parents that the gifted child may not be an enthusiastic hand-raiser or even a good student. Often it is the child unable to sit still in circle time, or the one with the intense mania for dinosaurs, who has the perilously high IQ.

“People forget that gifted education was begun to serve those children who could not learn in ordinary classrooms,” says David Welch, the Missouri-based director of the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted. “From an educational standpoint, there’s no difference between a kid who tests two standard deviations above the norm than below. They both have special needs.”

But many children now considered gifted are not so noticeably different from their peers. Many are able to learn in a regular classroom, although they may complain of being bored in some classes. These are the students who, two decades ago, might have been placed on accelerated tracks, a program that pulled certain kids out for advanced classes. But in the 1980s, many school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, did away with the tracking system. At the time, some parents and educators argued successfully that segregating students was educational elitism.

So, has “gifted” simply become a new label for what were once considered straight-A students? “I wouldn’t say the definition of ‘gifted’ has become inflated,” says Welch. “But I think the word is being misused. Some say that every child is gifted. I don’t believe that. I believe every child has gifts, and every child deserves enrichment, but all of us are not gifted.”

Originally, the term applied to those who scored 140 or more on the Stanford-Binet, although even Terman had to lower his cutoff to 135 to find 1,000 students who qualified. As education theory has evolved, people have questioned the ability of standardized tests, so often culturally biased, to predict ability. Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence--that many types of intelligence are not reflected in standardized tests--has also gained popularity.

Currently, students must score 150 or higher on the Stanford-Binet (or an equivalent on another IQ test) to be identified as highly gifted in California. Just plain gifted programs often require a minimum of 120, but many do not require an IQ score at all; instead, students are evaluated based on teacher recommendations, academic records, interviews and other more interactive testing.

Although few will argue with the notion that highly gifted children need a place of their own, educators are not all in agreement with what to do with the second tier of gifted children. Should they remain in a regular classroom, learning patience and the dynamics of a heterogeneous society while boosting the level of discourse? Or should they too have a separate program designed specifically for their needs?

“We should treat exceptional students the same way we treat exceptional athletes,” says one parent of two highly gifted children.

“Every child deserves special attention,” counters an Orange County educator.

“Gifted education is not like tracking,” says Roseberry flatly. “It is a different way of teaching children who have a different way of learning.”

Rare is the parent who does not want his or her child in the best school, in the best program, and from preschool to college, the competition for admission has grown ever more fierce. This generation of parents, themselves better educated as a group than their own parents, often views the label “gifted” as a permanent leg-up for their kids.

“We as educators have been our own worst enemies in this,” Welch says. “We’ve used the term ‘gifted’ to convey status, on our programs and on the kids. There should be no more prestige for gifted than for a learning disability.”

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Brentwood Science Magnet, an elementary school, originally offered a multiple-grade program for the highly gifted only. When the decision was made about a decade ago to separate the grades, it was apparent that there were simply not enough highly gifted students to fill out a class, so the school began picking out gifted students as well.

According to Lillian Walker, an instructor and the coordinator of Gifted and Talented Education at Brentwood, what began as a group of about 90 highly gifted students is now a mix of about 200. And in the 20 years she has taught at Brentwood, she has seen a marked increase in the number of parents who want their children tested. “Parents think they will get an edge somehow, that their chances to get into a top-notch university will improve. But [gifted education] should be looked at as a response to a need, rather than something special.”

Some children may test high, says Walker, but lack the academic or social skills to succeed in an accelerated environment. “I’ve seen kids get into the program, and it was not a good experience because everyone knew who was who. Everyone knew who was succeeding and who was not. And do you want that for your child?”

Recently, the school has begun tightening requirements for testing. In the past, if a parent asked that a child be tested, the school would most often agree. Now, Walker says, educators will require three pieces of evidence that a child is gifted: academic records or letters from teachers, for example, before they will test.

“It’s expensive, for one thing,” she says. “But more importantly, it’s not good for a child’s self-esteem to go through the test and then be told, ‘No, you didn’t make it.’ ”

According to Sheila Smith, the Gifted and Talented coordinator for L.A. Unified School District, many other schools in Los Angeles

are tightening their requirements for testing as well. The number of students involved in gifted programs, she says, has more than doubled in the last 15 years. Recently, the district launched a system of enhanced programs within existing schools specifically to serve children already identified as gifted who are languishing on waiting lists.

Parents of gifted children often find themselves buttonholed by other parents wanting test tips or advice on how to prep their children for the interviews. The Internet is full of sites devoted to aiding parents of gifted children, touting books and workshops and support groups, offering sample tests and advice and, in one case, a list to help identify “gifted” infants. The recommended reading packet sent to interested parents by the California Assn. of Gifted is six pages long and does not even include the growing subset of quarterly magazines and journals with such names as “The Gifted Child.” Diane DiBarri, past president of the California Assn. of School Psychologists, says she has seen a growing anxiety in parents who feel that if their children do not get into gifted programs, they will somehow miss out.

“Parents think they have to do things when the child is 3 to get into Stanford,” says DiBarri, who provides counseling at Wilcox High and Montague Elementary in Santa Clara. “I see kids who think if they get one B, it’s all over. I try to tell the parents to relax, that even if their child does not get labeled ‘gifted,’ they can get into accelerated programs.”

Immigrant families are often especially anxious that their children excel, she says, because the children are considered, quite literally, the family’s future. But the pressures are universal. “It’s an American tradition. We want our children to do better than we did. But a generation ago, that meant that they went to college,” she says. “Now, we’ve got this huge, relatively successful middle class, and to expect [the kids] to exceed our goals is often pretty ludicrous. They can’t all be surgeons or Nobel laureates.”