Terry James Mohaupt, Chairman,
Parent Affiliates
ILLINOIS ASSOCIATION FOR GIFTED CHILDREN
an affiliate of
National Association for Gifted Children
This comes from: Margaret
DeLacy of the Talented and Gifted ListServ
Subject: Education Week article
=====================================
Here's
the full text of the article. Permission to reprint granted by Margaret
DeLacy.
Education Week
American Education's Newspaper
of Record
June 23, 2004
The No Childı Lawıs Biggest Victims? An Answer
That May Surprise
By Margaret DeLacy
Education Week
Since education is high on the national agenda, hereıs a pop quiz that every
American should take.
There is overwhelming evidence that gifted
students simply do not succeed on their own.
Question: What group of students makes the lowest achievement gains in
school?
Answer: The brightest students.
In a pioneering study of the effects of teachers and schools on student
learning, William Sanders and his staff at the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment
System put in this way: "Student achievement level was the second most
important predictor of student learning. The higher the achievement level, the
less growth a student was likely to have."
Mr. Sanders found this problem in schools throughout the state, and with
different levels of poverty and of minority enrollments. He speculated that the
problem was due to a "lack of opportunity for high-scoring students to
proceed at their own pace, lack of challenging materials, lack of accelerated
course offerings, and concentration of instruction on the average or
below-average student."
While less effective teachers produced gains for lower-achieving students, Mr.
Sanders found, only the top one-fifth of teachers were effective with
high-achieving students. These problems have been confirmed in other states.
There is overwhelming evidence that gifted students simply do not succeed on
their own.
Question: What group of students has been harmed most by the No Child
Left Behind Act?
Answer: Our brightest students.
The federal law seeks to ensure that all students meet minimum standards. Most
districts, in their desperate rush to improve the performance of struggling
students, have forgotten or ignored their obligations to students who exceed
standards. These students spend their days reviewing material for proficiency
tests they mastered years before, instead of learning something new. This is a
profoundly alienating experience.
Question: How well is the United States preparing able students to
compete in the world economy?
Answer: Very poorly.
Of all students obtaining doctorates in engineering in American universities,
just 39 percent are Americans. According to the Third International Mathematics
and Science Study, "The performance of U.S. physics and advanced math
students was among the lowest of the 16 countries that administered the ...
assessments."
Question: What group of special-needs students receives the least
funding?
Answer: Our brightest students.
And itıs getting worse. For example, Illinois, New York, and Oregon recently
cut all state funding for gifted programs.
Given these facts, why has a board commissioned by the National Research
Council proposed to make things much worse? The boardıs report, ironically
entitled "Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Studentsı Motivation to
Learn," contains recommendations that amount to a recipe for completely
alienating our most capable children. Based on old, discredited, and sloppy
research, the committee, which did not include any experts on gifted education,
recommended the elimination of all "formal or informal" trackingeven
if participation was voluntaryin favor of mixed-ability classrooms.
Does tracking really harm students? Jeannie Oakes claimed that it did in a
popular but, to my mind, poorly researched book called Keeping Track published
nearly 20 years ago. However, a 1998 review of the evidence on tracking over
the past two decades, done by Tom Loveless, the director of the Brookings
Institutionıs Brown Center on Education Policy, found no consensus that
tracking is harmful or creates unequal opportunities for academic achievement.
This review was ignored in the NRC panelıs 40 pages of research citations.
Also missing was any reference to a 1993 report from the U.S. Department of
Education, "National Excellence," in which then-Secretary of
Education Richard W. Riley noted a "quiet crisis" in the education of
top students, pointing out that "these students have special needs that
are seldom met," and warning that "our neglect of these students
makes it impossible for Americans to compete in a global economy demanding
their skills."
Although research on schoolwide tracking cuts both ways, research pointing to
the importance of advanced classes and grouping for gifted students is
overwhelming.
A research review by Karen B. Rogers found that grouping gifted students
produces big gainssometimes exceeding half a yearıs additional achievement per
year in school when curriculum is modified appropriately. On the other hand,
she found that cooperative learning within mixed-ability groups produces no
gains.
In her 2002 book Re-Forming Gifted Education (also ignored by the NRC
panel), Ms. Rogers noted that under the mixed-ability-group instruction
recommended by the NRC, "few students, except those with exceptionally low
ability, will benefit."
Gifted students are truly our forgotten
children. Neglected in our schools and ignored by our policymakers, they spend
their days dozing through classes in which they arenıt learning.
A statistical analysis published in 1992 by James A. Kulik demonstrated that
the benefits from advanced classes for talented students were "positive,
large, and important" and said that [de-tracking] could greatly damage
American education." Student achievement would suffer, Mr. Kulik
maintained, and the damage would be greatest if schools "eliminated
enriched and accelerated classes for their brightest learners. The achievement
level of such students falls dramatically." He also found that students of
all ability levels benefit from grouping that adjusts the curriculum to their
aptitude levels.
A study of intermediate studentsı math achievement published in 2002 by Carol
Tieso also found that differentiated instruction combined with flexible
grouping improved academic achievement. Ms. Tieso concluded that students from
all socioeconomic backgrounds made gains, and that students enjoyed working in
differentiated groups and were more motivated than peers in a comparison group.
Even the National Research Council board acknowledged that teachers would
require a lot of specialized training to carry out its recommendations in
"Engaging Minds." Differentiation is hard to do well. Teachers must
know how to assess students who are years above grade level and then be able to
rewrite the whole curriculum to address their assessed learning needs. Although
the board members must know that this training has not been provided and is not
going to happen, they went ahead and recklessly recommended a policy that will
harm many capable, hard-working students in the hope that it might help some
struggling students.
They seem to be unaware of the daily realities affecting American schools.
Studies by the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented have
repeatedly found that teachers do not make significant modifications to their
instruction to accommodate gifted students.
This past November, Seattle teachers issued a resolution protesting a directive
requiring advanced instruction for highly capable students in their classrooms
because they had neither the time, training, and class size, nor the resources
necessary to carry it out. Ability grouping is significantly more
cost-effective, requires less training, and is more effective in this regard
than heterogeneous classes. Do we have education dollars to waste?
Gifted students are truly our forgotten children. Neglected in our schools and
ignored by our policymakers, they spend their days dozing through classes in
which they arenıt learning. Many suffer from depression. It is time to take
them out of their holding pens and give them a chance to stretch and to grow.
Margaret DeLacy is a board member of the Oregon Association for Talented and
Gifted students and a past president of the Portland, Ore., school districtıs
talented-and-gifted advisory committee. She is the mother of three.
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İ 2003 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 23, number 41, page
40