Gifted and talented education has gotten shunted to the margins over the last 20 years in the national push to get all students up to standards. Many exceptionally bright students are never identified, educators say, and others are shut out of programs. But they need challenging, inquiry-based, accelerated instruction to help them reach their potential.

Smart kids can learn on their own, people often say, while struggling students need our extra resources. But many truly gifted children struggle themselves with their evident differences and need their teachers’ help. This is especially so for gifted low-income students.

“The belief that gifted students can fend for themselves is misguided and inequitable,” wrote Florina Rodov and Sabrina Truong, who co-taught a 9th-grade ELA class at the HS for Media and Communications in Manhattan. In a December 2014 editorial for the Hechinger Report, they described one exceptional student, an emotionally sensitive boy whose writing and drawing were “transcendent” but who also had learning disabilities. The boy needed more support than they knew how to give, they confess, and eventually was lost to a gang.

“Giftedness can diminish over the years if it’s not developed,” warns Annette Bindert, a teacher and the chapter leader at the 30th Avenue School in Queens, one of six gifted and talented schools in New York City for students testing at the 97th percentile and above. Exceptional students may acquire vast amounts of knowledge on their own, she said, but they may be unable to use it to do higher-level work. “You can’t teach yourself to synthesize and apply information. You need instruction for this,” Bindert said. “In reality, gifted students are a type of special education student.”

 

Beware standardization

It’s not always easy to identify these kids. Rodov and Truong warn that other factors can mask giftedness. “Many gifted students are impoverished, underperform due to distraction and boredom, or possess disabilities that most well-intentioned teachers are not trained to handle,” they wrote.

A new report by a foundation headed by former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold Levy describes a yawning “excellence gap” at the top of the testing scale between low-income and wealthier students. Similarly, black and Latino students are drastically underrepresented in city gifted programs, a trend that has, if anything, gotten worse in the last 10 years.

Before 2008, New York City community school districts developed their own gifted qualifications, usually a combination of IQ scores and teacher recommendations. That could cut two ways, but it did allow teachers to place children who didn’t necessarily excel on a standard IQ test.

Former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein eliminated that option and instituted two uniform tests: the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment. The result was even fewer poor, black and Hispanic students qualified for gifted programs. From 200 schools with gifted programs in 2006, the city was down to 88 in 2014.

Two years ago, the Bracken assessment was replaced by the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test [see illustration], which assesses spatial reasoning. The idea was to offset the class bias inherent in early childhood verbal and math tests.

So far, however, the new test has failed to better integrate gifted programs. Four high-poverty areas — Districts 7 and 12 in the Bronx and Districts 16 and 23 in central Brooklyn — currently offer no gifted programs at all.

 

Steps toward improvement

Donna Ford, an expert in gifted education at Vanderbilt University, likes the Naglieri Nonverbal test as a way to combat bias in intelligence testing. But a change in tests alone does not address “problematic policies and procedures” that stand in the way of identifying gifted students, she says.

New York City, for instance, only tests for giftedness between kindergarten and third grade, while other districts identify students all the way through grade 12.

General education teachers are not taught to identify gifted students, according to Betty Eck, who teaches with Bindert at the 30th Avenue School. So it is often parents with means who seek out and pre-register their young children for gifted and talented tests.

Several school systems around the country, faced with similar challenges, are trying new approaches. An experimental program in Louisiana waives the entry-score requirements for students who show promise, on the theory that teachers can develop giftedness in highly opinionated, imaginative or persistently inquisitive children. Georgia offers a menu of tests for its gifted programs, including evaluations of creativity and motivation, for children in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Vanderbilt’s Ford says teacher training to identify giftedness is “fundamental.” Districts should do outreach to low-income communities and communities of color to get more students tested, she said. She even suggests that every school building in a district have a comparable percentage of students in gifted classes.

If gifted students are not identified, “they tune out and stop doing well,” she warned. “Gifted education is a special need.”