BRIGHTEST STUDENTS FINALLY GETTING SOME ATTENTION

Saturday, September 25, 2004

The Templeton Foundation has published a valuable introduction to a much neglected subject, the educational acceleration of gifted students. Hurray.

The authors of A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students are Nicholas Colangelo and Susan G. Assouline of the University of Iowa and Miraca U.M. Gross of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The title, the authors admit, is provocative, but they stand behind it. "Deceiving our brightest students is no longer defensible," they say (the complete report, and the supporting documents, are available at www.nationdeceived.org).

Acceleration in all its forms -- they list 18, including starting school early, skipping grades, taking more advanced courses in a single subject, extracurricular enrichment and so forth -- is one of the best researched areas of education. Yet it is also one that is rarely practiced, given how many children could benefit from it.

"We are not aware," the authors say, "of any other educational practice that is so well researched, yet so rarely implemented."

This is, of course, in marked contrast to other areas of education (new new math, whole language reading instruction) that are widely adopted before any research has demonstrated that they make things better rather than worse.

Why would that be? The authors cite a dozen reasons, none of them based on evidence. It's accepted doctrine that "age trumps everything else" in assigning children to classes, but why should that be the case? Gifted kids are not only more academically advanced than their age-mates, but often emotionally and socially ahead as well. They may well get along better with children older than they are.

Look, I had one of these, and he doesn't mind being used as an illustration. He was reading Lord of the Rings in first grade and he taught himself to program in Unix starting at age 8. His school labeled him "severely gifted" (which gives you an idea where they were coming from) and having no idea what else to do with him, had him skip second grade. He took four years of high-school math in middle school, in one of the programs for mathematically gifted youngsters originated at The Johns Hopkins University by Julian Stanley and his colleagues. He aced AP calculus in ninth grade and started college (with intensive Chinese at the University of Minnesota) the following summer, and, when we got back from China the following year, graduated from college in three years. The further ahead he was academically, the better off he was socially -- to address one of the primary concerns about acceleration.

I am proud of him, of course, but my point here is quite different. Staying in lock step would have ruined him. It nearly did. His fourth-grade teacher told us, "You have to get him out of here. All he's learning is that it is normal to pay attention 10 percent of the time."

No one is arguing that acceleration is always the right decision, but doing nothing for a child who is eager to move on to more challenging work is (more) often a wrong decision. "The evidence indicates that when children's academic and social needs are not met, the result is boredom and disengagement from school," the report says.

Many teachers don't learn about the pros and cons of acceleration during their preparation, because it's contrary to the reigning egalitarianism in schools of education. Or they worry that other children's feelings will be hurt. That's unlikely. "Kids are used to seeing age-peers progress at different rates in many settings such as sports or music," the authors say.

But even if it were widely true, would that justify sacrificing the future of the brightest children to preserve the self-esteem of the less accomplished? Children are not means to somebody else's ends.

One of the most agreeable aspects of acceleration as a solution to an educational problem is that it need not cost any money. Kids are going to be sitting in a classroom anyway; it's no more expensive if the kids next to them are a year or two older. Or, if they do stay in high school but take college-level courses, their parents can save the cost of a year or two of college.

Talent searches, like the ones Stanley established more than 30 years ago, are effective in locating children who will benefit from more academic challenges. Nationally, more than 200,000 seventh- and eighth-graders take the SAT every year, many scoring extremely well.

The University of Denver (www.du.edu; click on Youth & K-12 for a link) conducts such a talent search, for fifth- through ninth-grade students in Colorado and six other states in the region. It also offers a summer institute on campus. If the only thing your child ever says about school is, "I'm boooored," go check it out.