No Child Left Behind?
Short-changing gifted children

An editorial in the WP awakened in me an old concern about the education of gifted children. In Leave No Gifted Child Behind Susan Goodkin talked about an unintended consequence of the focus on getting all children to meet proficiency standards: the neglect of the special needs of gifted children:

Perhaps these schools, along with the drafters of NCLB, labor under the misconception that gifted students will fare well academically regardless of whether their special learning needs are met. Ironically, included in the huge body of evidence disproving this notion are my state's standardized test scores -- the very test scores at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reflecting the schools' inattention to high performers, they show that students achieving "advanced" math scores early in elementary school all too frequently regress to merely "proficient" scores by the end.

No one could be more dedicated to giving all children true educational opportunity--especially the poor. However, I have personally witnessed the devastating impact of the failure to meet the special needs of one gifted child: my daughter.

She began her elementary education a year early in a school that provided the means for all children to work at their own pace. The problem is that she got very far above grade level, and then we moved. She started second grade in a conventional school, which had a program for gifted children that only provided a few hours a week for arts and crafts.

After a few weeks, she came to me crying and asking why she had to go to school, since she wasn't learning anything new. The only answer I could give her was that it was the law. Skipping a grade level would have made her two years younger than her classmates.

Fortunately, we could move to a different school district that had individualized instruction. Otherwise, she would have learned to hate school and feel like a freak. How many children like her do we sacrifice? How many parents are left with no alternatives?