The most neglected students with special needs in California are the gifted

Schools have generally worked hard to meet the special educational needs of a range of pupils: pupils with learning difficulties, pupils learning English, pupils with behavioral problems and pupils whose households struggle with poverty. But they have grossly neglected one major group of students with special needs: the academically gifted.

Many school districts across the country have cut programs for students who are catching on quickly. The trend toward eliminating or scaling back such programs began about fifteen years ago. But it gained steam in 2021, as the Black Lives Matter movement made schools reckon with the troubling fact that they were far less likely to identify Black and Latino students as gifted than white and Asian students.

Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in the struggle between parents for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents. Classes and sometimes entire schools for gifted students often had richer curricula and more resources. They became classrooms for high achievers rather than for students rightly described as gifted.

These programs were originally designed to meet the needs of students with intense, often irregular learning patterns. It used to be believed that they did not need special attention because they often excelled. Because standardized tests required schools to aim for student proficiency, all the attention was focused on those who had not met that mark. Those who exceeded it were considered fine.

But they’re not all good. Gifted children, more than others, tend to shine in certain ways and struggle in others, a phenomenon known as asynchronous development. A third grader’s reading skills may be at an eleventh grade level, while her social skills are more like those of a preschooler. They often find it difficult to make contact with other children. They are also at risk of being dropped from school because classes are slow.

I don’t know if I would have been classified as gifted as a child, but I was definitely bored out of my mind in primary school. It felt like everything was repetitive to the point where paying attention in class was worthless. I started acting up, simply to keep myself busy.

My third-grade teacher tried a few strategies, including sending messages I came up with just to get me out of class. Nothing worked. So they sent me to fourth grade, even though school policy forbade it.

That was a disaster. I was cut off from my friends and worried about constant criticism from adults and children asking why I was in the upper grades. It didn’t work academically either. I enjoyed the challenge of catching up, but once that happened, school became boring again. The problem wasn’t the third grade material; it was the pace of learning.

When I started teaching in the late 1970s, it was a pleasant surprise to see this need being met – although it was a little off-putting to hear a ten-year-old girl describe herself as a “mentally gifted minor” in a school board meeting. “MGM” was the name given to the programs, later renamed “GATE,” for Gifted and Talented Education.

However, it has never become clear what exactly gifted education was. In some districts, it came down to highly sought-after schools for top performers. It was sometimes an enrichment for certain students. Teachers had to receive special training, like any teacher with special training, but it seemed like a bull’s-eye. At the schools my children attended, the gifted program essentially meant extra homework.

When giftedness became a matter of prestige rather than a particular learning style and need, all opportunities were closed. Maybe the problem was that we called it “gifted” instead of “asynchronous development”; No one is going to fight to get their child into an asynchronous development program unless they need it.

There is little doubt that racism played a role in identifying children as gifted, even though the label was based on supposedly objective criteria. But the solution to that problem is eliminating bias, not the programs themselves.

To its credit, the Los Angeles Unified School District has retained gifted education, with programs that focus on various academic and creative skills. One is intended for gifted students, who may already be knowledgeable in some areas while they are still sophomores in high school. But the proportionate lack of enrollment of students of color led the district to relax its admissions requirements before recently changing course. The criteria should be quite simple: whether a student must and can get through the academic material extremely quickly.

California does not require schools to offer gifted programs and stopped funding them in 2013, so schools have little incentive to maintain these programs. The answer is certainly not to eliminate the programs completely. Opening them up to all children doesn’t seem to have helped either; That led some to slow the pace, defeating their purpose.

Differentiated education – where a teacher tailors lessons to the different needs of students – sounds good, but is difficult to implement in a large class.

My oldest child was fortunate enough to participate in a small program at her public school that was open to all until the spaces were filled, which solved much of the differentiation problem. It involved few tests and many individual projects. Students chose their own books to read and report on. Their projects could be written reports or, if their talents lay elsewhere, films, plays, songs or board games – as long as they showed that they had learned the lesson. It gave students the freedom to work at their own level, avoid boredom and show their talents.

But that program was led by two extremely gifted teachers who knew how to bring out the best in every student. It’s much easier to grade a test than to evaluate a project, and I don’t know how widely the program can be replicated. In any case, it no longer exists.