Gifted kids are forgotten students in today's schools

By Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg

I confess: I love gifted kids. I love the way they grasp advanced concepts in a flash. I love the gut-punch of the amazing, fresh ideas they have.

So I was horrified, years ago, when some "egalitarianists" in the Texas legislature tried to abolish gifted/talented education altogether on the grounds that giftedness was an "elitist" offense against democracy.

While the effort failed, and gifted education is still available in many school districts, that anti-gifted attitude is surprisingly endemic in our federal and state governments today.

Standardized "minimal-skills" tests, not "academic excellence," are the real drivers of U.S. education. First conceived as a reasonable way to measure performance and make teachers "accountable," these standardized tests have evolved into the dictators of our educational goals, not mere tools of measurement.

Recently, a Clinton administration official summarized national goals in math and science as "raising low test averages." This national obsession with standardized test scores over the past decade has not made our kids better educated; it has dumbed down our entire public school system and focused disproportionate attention on the lowest common denominator in our schools. No wonder parents of bright kids are looking toward home schooling, private schooling or voucher-system "choice" to escape this adamantine government commitment to mediocrity.

The failure of this lowest-common-denominator approach to education is apparent for all to see.

In 1995, eighth-graders in poor nations such as Bulgaria and Slovenia were more knowledgeable in science than American eighth-graders. In 1996, American 12th-graders ranked far below international averages in math and science. Our corporations are now so desperate for well-educated employees with high technical skills that they have to import these workers from abroad.

Does the White House get it yet? No. President Clinton has passionately called for a "national" standardized test. Education Secretary Richard Riley wants every third-grader to be able to read. What about the kids who can read in kindergarten and who are reading Charles Dickens in the fifth grade?

The notice the administration gives these amazing kids is pathetic. Take, for example, the Presidential Award for Academic Excellence. It's a handsome, gilt document that kids can achieve if they've had straight A's for a couple of years in a row and scored in the 90th percentile or above on nationwide tests.

When my kid got one, he stuck it under a microscope to see whether Clinton's signature on it was real. It wasn't. I eagerly called the Department of Education to ask whether there were special national programs set aside to enrich and encourage these fabulous kids. There weren't.

Fortunately, parents of gifted kids are leading a revolution -- trying to refocus government attention from the far low end of the intellectual spectrum, to the middle and upper end, which constitute the vast majority in our schools. Grass-roots efforts in Texas, California, Georgia, Connecticut, Florida and North Carolina are making legislators rethink state educational priorities.

For instance, in 1996, Texas reversed the anti-gifted, dumb-down trend of previous years and mandated gifted education in English, math, science and social studies in all Texas schools, to be followed by gifted programs in fine arts, leadership and technology by 2002.

Many parents are taking back their kids' education, too, by enriching them at home -- an effort that has inspired businesses to produce great educational software for all age levels. Web sites are exploding all over the Internet, devoted to tutoring kids with homework or to directing them to fabulous subject-information sites.

It was while my son and his friends were eagerly cruising some great educational sites that I got an idea. The Internet is an astounding new tool, an engine for academic excellence made to order for gifted and talented kids. If Clinton and Riley wanted to creatively sponsor some "excellence in education," they could start by developing an inexpensive program for the much-neglected brilliant kids in America: an online "national gifted academy."

With the Internet, we can put the smartest kids in America in direct touch with the smartest adults in America. A virtual auditorium could be sponsored and set up by the U.S. Department of Education, committed to letting gifted kids meet and dialogue with "cutting edge" guest lecturers. For instance, wouldn't it be great for our brightest kids to have Bill Gates talk to them about the future of technology, or for young composers to attend an Internet master class taught by John Williams?

And why not develop a whole national "enrichment" curriculum, with virtual gifted teachers in Internet classrooms? The brightest kids in America are just a mouse-click away. Elementary school kids might be working problems in algebra and geometry, with cool graphics. Secondary school kids could attend virtual "enrichment" classes in exploration taught by scientists in the field, design taught by new-age engineers or exotic biology taught by some genius who has just discovered a new life form. These bright kids love knowledge that's alive, real-time, cutting-edge.

Initially, these virtual classrooms can start with a student body made up of the thousands of kids who win the president's Award for Academic Excellence or the thousands more who score more than 1,000 on the SAT as seventh-graders -- as a reward for their exemplary hard work and an acknowledgment of their status as national treasures. Later, the program could be expanded to embrace other educational populations.

So, while lawmakers drone on about establishing some stale national test, I keep remembering our intrepid local administrators who took academic excellence into their own hands: They bravely resisted the call to "mainstream" incoming first-grade geniuses and, instead, doubled the gifted program to take in bright normal kids, too.

The results were astounding. The geniuses were natural leaders and set the pace for the class. By Christmas, the children were in educational hyperdrive, excitedly doing third-grade math and English. By year's end, it was hard to tell which kids were the born geniuses and which were inspired to behave like geniuses.

Maybe there's a lesson here: Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. The way to improve public education is not to dumb down the smart kids with more standardized tests, but to turn them loose, let them soar -- let them lead us to a higher national standard.

Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg, a Houston free-lance space writer, is also a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

To comment

If you would like to comment on editorials, columns or other topics in USA TODAY, or on any subjects important to you: Send e-mail for letters to the editor only to editor@usatoday.com. Please include address and daytime phone numbers so letters may be verified. Letters and articles submitted to USA TODAY may be published or distributed in print, electronic or other forms.

• Go to Columnist index
• Go to Opinion front page
• Go to News front page

Front page, News, Sports, Money, Life, Weather, Marketplace

©COPYRIGHT 1998 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.