At Miller Elementary school, we have many projects going. I have students doing cartooning, architecutral drawing, puzzle design, building a trebuchet, using building kits to create kenitic sculptures, researching global warming and even some research on dead languages. We certainly stay moving.
Byline: JOHN CLOUD/THORNBURG With reporting by Christine Badowski/ Chicago; Betsy Rubiner/ Des Moines; Sean Scully/ Los Angeles
AMERICANS DON'T SEEM TO HAVE any problem with teenagers who show genius in sports (LeBron James) or entertainment (Hilary Duff). But we have a deeply ambivalent relationship with intellectually gifted kids. For every lovable Doogie Howser, M.D., we fear there's also a William James Sidis. Little William was born in 1898 to an experimentally minded psychologist, Boris Sidis. He trotted William through school so quickly that the boy was enrolled at Harvard by age 11. William graduated with a math degree at 16, but soon after he lost interest in math and spent much of his life working at clerical jobs and writing esoteric books. Boris Sidis had offered his prodigy to the public as proof that young children can learn prodigiously; reporters would hound William Sidis as a failure for the rest of his life. He came to resent his parents for driving him and died alone at 46.
Dickensian tales like Sidis' may help explain why most educators mistrust the whole idea of grade skipping. We catch a whiff of elitism around parents who want their kid to leapfrog others. What's called radical acceleration--finishing high school at 15 or younger--is viewed with particular skepticism, since one suspects today's striving parents may be no less aggressive in pursuit of their child's glory than Boris Sidis was. Judith Roseberry, president of the California Association for the Gifted, says several couples a year approach her seeking to have their fetus identified as gifted. "They say, 'We're positive he is. I'm playing him music ... I'm telling him about art when I go to the museum,'" says Roseberry.
What gifted means hasn't always been clear. Older definitions, for instance, wrongly exclude the artistically talented. But most experts define the term as the top 3% to 5% of scorers on IQ and other standardized tests. For the smartest of these kids, those who quickly overpower schoolwork that flummoxes peers, skipping a grade isn't about showing off. Rather, according to a new report from the University of Iowa, it can mean the difference between staying in school and dropping out from sheer tedium. "If the work is not challenging for these high-ability kids, they will become invisible," says the lead author of the report, Iowa education professor Nicholas Colangelo. "We will lose them. We already are."
Since it was signed in 2002, the No Child Left Behind law has focused attention on the kids who can't keep up, but research shows that gifted kids are also at risk. In a 2000 study for Gifted Child Quarterly, Joseph Renzulli and Sunghee Park found that 5% of the 3,520 gifted students they followed dropped out after eighth grade. Astonishingly, that's almost as high as the 5.2% of nongifted kids who dropped out. Untold numbers of other highly intelligent kids stay in school but tune out. "When we ask exceptional children about their main obstacle, they almost always say it's their school," says Jan Davidson, a co-author of the new book Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds. "Their school makes them put in seat time, and they can't learn at their own ability level."
The Iowa study, which carries a similarly alarming title, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, says exceptional children are kept with age-mates because most educators believe, incorrectly, that grade skipping will endanger these kids socially and academically. The report also says schools don't want to upset slower kids by removing their apt peers.
Released this week at nation deceived .org, the report is a distillation of hundreds of past studies on grade skipping and other forms of acceleration (everything from taking a year of math in a semester to early college entrance). Those who follow education debates know that most school-reform ideas--charter schools, phonics and high-stakes testing leap to mind--are promoted on the strength of highly contested evidence. By contrast, as far back as 1965, Milton Gold said in his book Education of the Intellectually Gifted, "No paradox is more striking than the inconsistency between research findings on acceleration and the failure of society to reduce the time spent by superior students in formal education." Forty years later, the authors of A Nation Deceived--Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline, who teach at the University of Iowa, and Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales in Australia-- must tell us, once again, that "we are not aware of any other educational practice that is so well researched yet so rarely implemented."
The Nation Deceived authors, longtime academic investigators not known as partisans in the education wars, have amassed persuasive evidence showing that, for decades, accelerated students have performed almost as well on standardized tests as older classmates, even those with similar IQs--meaning that an accelerated 7year-old with an IQ of 133 typically scores nearly as well as on the same test as a 133IQ 8year-old who has had an extra year of school. Accelerants far outscore their equally gifted age-mates who did not move ahead. Radical accelerants also do well, even after jumping years of classes: a 20year longitudinal study of Australians who had skipped at least three grades found they were more likely to earn advanced degrees than equally gifted students who didn't skip.
But our greatest fears about acceleration are not pedagogical but psychological. The leapfroggers may ace exams, but isn't it depressing to leave friends and become the runt in a class of older strangers? How does a 12year-old react when her 15year-old classmates start making out after school and getting their driver's permits?
In interviews with educators in eight states this month, TIME reporters heard such worries repeatedly. Debbie Pena, supervisor of gifted education for the Garden Grove Unified School District, south of Los Angeles, says her school system discourages grade skipping and instead approaches the challenge of exceptional children with this question: "How is it [that] we can meet the needs of gifted kids in a regular classroom without saying, 'Gee, you're 5, but you can read at a seventh-grade level, [so] let's put you up to at least sixth grade'? It doesn't make sense at a social or emotional level," says Pena.
Even the most enthusiastic proponents of grade skipping would have qualms about placing a 5year-old in an ordinary sixth-grade class of rowdy tweens. But most kids who are accelerated--even radically--turn out fine. Accelerated students are nearly as likely to participate in extracurriculars as nonaccelerants and rate no differently on personal-adjustment scales. Some early entrants to college find freshman year difficult, but by the end of that year, they score virtually the same as older classmates do on psychological inventories. Some researchers have found a little-fish-big-pond effect on the self-esteem of kids who are moved into classes with intellectual equals for the first time. But the effect is usually small and temporary (and, some speculate, healthy for the often outsize egos of highly talented students).
A 2001 study of 320 adults who were accelerated as highly gifted kids 20 years ago found that more than 70% had no regrets about the experience. Among those who were dissatisfied, nearly half wished they had accelerated more, not less. A 1996 study also found that students who had been accelerated made more money than gifted kids who had decided to move at the normal pace. That doesn't mean acceleration leads to success, of course. But it does mean that acceleration doesn't usually carry long-term negative consequences.
Andrew Fowler, 17, is typical of grade skippers. After vaulting over first grade in Ames, Iowa, 11 years ago, he was worried about leaving friends behind. The first year "was kind of hard," he says, but "by the end of the second year, I was fine ... It wasn't like I didn't see all the other people I knew ever again." Fowler, who just started Cornell College in Iowa, sounds as though he may not have accelerated fast enough. "It was kind of boring throughout elementary school," he says. "In middle school, it began to get more challenging."
Since it first appeared in 1981, David Elkind's The Hurried Child, which has sold more than 300,000 copies, has prompted educators to wonder whether parents are racing their children through childhood. "'Let kids be kids.' You hear that a lot," responds Colangelo. "But a lot of times, when you make no move, you are causing harm ... Would you rather your kid be miserable in class every day just so he can get his driver's license at the same time as everyone else?"
Acceleration doesn't always work out, of course. Angela Carr, 34, a teacher at Kaplan Educational Services in Chicago, says her early entry into a South Side elementary school, at age 4, as well as a subsequent grade skip, hindered her upbringing. "I was so much younger than my peers," says Carr. "In high school, I was teased about being a virgin. Soon, I wanted to do the things my friends were doing, even though I was younger." As a teen, Carr started drinking with older classmates. Now she realizes that although she was "book smart," she lacked the maturity to be in high school.
Carr has also had more recent problems with acceleration. Because he tested well, Carr enrolled her son Alonzo Jr. in kindergarten at age 4 in 1998. But he wasn't socially prepared, and he began overturning chairs and tossing books in class. Alonzo was eventually diagnosed with a behavior disorder. Last year, the Carrs decided to have him repeat Grade 4. Working with age peers for the first time, he now gets straight A's.
A Nation Deceived doesn't ignore such cautionary tales. It includes the results of a study released this year showing that 63% of early entrants were judged by their teachers to have adjusted "relatively well" or "very well" to school--but that leaves 37% who, like Alonzo, had adjustment problems. Colangelo and Assouline say errors can be avoided by screening potential accelerants--judging not only academic prowess but also levels of motivation, emotional development, motor coordination. "We're not saying it should be a quick decision," says Assouline. "But we have every reason to believe that when the decision is carefully made, the student will do fine."
It's impossible to say how many students who should be accelerated are kept with their age-mates, but more than 22,000 of the 87,000 seventh- and eighth-graders who take the SAT as part of talent-search programs each year score at the level of college-bound seniors. "If they can do that kind of work, the typical curriculum is going to be way below their needs," says Colangelo.
Why isn't that more obvious to school administrators? Consider the case of Davin Gros. Davin is a rangy, sweet, brilliant kid who lives with his mom, stepdad and three siblings on a remote stretch of Iowa cornfields outside Thornburg (pop. 91). Davin, who turns 15 this week, has blindingly blue eyes and blondish-brown hair that he colors jet black. The day we met was a Thursday, but Davin was at home. After a long struggle with the school system, his mom Laura Knipfer now home schools him.
Her fight to have Tri-County Community School teach Davin at a level commensurate with his rare intelligence--he has an IQ of 146--began when he was in first grade. Davin was always bored, but instead of recognizing his academic promise, Knipfer says, the school carped about her boy's fidgeting and poor handwriting.
Despite earning strong scores on his Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) in Grade 3, Davin wasn't invited to join the school's talented-and-gifted (TAG) program until the following year--an oversight Knipfer attributes to the family's social standing in a small town. Laura runs a day-care service in their home, and her husband Russell is a truck driver. "We're low income, and I'm not in the local political game," she says. (School superintendent Jody Gray denies this and says Davin was enrolled in TAG as soon as the school recognized his gifts.)
Davin eventually came to loathe school. He says he would sometimes do his own research--on whether dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded, for instance--only to have teachers require answers directly from the textbooks. Davin could do many math problems in his head, but he says he was told to use a pencil. Outside class, he often could not relate to age-mates. There were playground incidents, some serious: his mom says that students threw rocks at him once and that he retaliated by giving one of his tormentors a massive wedgie.
By the time Davin was ready to start sixth grade, the family thought he might get along better with older students. He was ready academically; only 11, he had scored 18 on the ACT, just 3 points below the average for college-bound seniors. But the school set up roadblocks common in acceleration cases: administrators said Davin was socially unprepared to skip ahead because he couldn't get along with kids his own age. They also said TAG could meet his needs. Davin says TAG was just "extra homework"--not advanced material--and that he found most of his age-mates immature. "They just like to make fun of certain people, and I wasn't interested," he says.
Gray admits that her school--which has just 350 students in 13 grades and, as far back as she can remember, has never grade skipped a student--wasn't quite sure what to do with Davin. "We have kids who score well, but they weren't in the same league," she says. "And I'll be honest, I don't think we were prepared for a student like Davin. I know his parents were frustrated at times."
But Gray says school officials became frustrated too. She says they have an obligation to make sure a potential grade skipper will excel in all his higher-level classes. (Since Davin had not scored in the gifted range on ITBS's spelling and punctuation sections, the school was worried about his language skills.) Gray also says the school feared that skipping Davin could do more harm than good. Other kids already saw him as "elitist," she says. "And now when you're talking about a fifth-grader going into seventh ... you don't want him to be ostracized more." Eventually the school decided Davin would be able to skip most of Grade 6, but his parents pulled him before Tri-County could fully implement a carefully planned curriculum. "They gave it one day," Gray says with a sigh.
The Knipfers dispute that--they say they tried to work with the school for months--but it's immaterial now that Davin is being schooled at home. His mom teaches him using old college texts and the staggering array of home-schooling resources available online. She also gets help from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, based in Reno, Nev., which currently assists more than 500 extremely gifted children, many of whom have fought acceleration battles at school. Like all Iowa home-schooling parents, Knipfer must submit her lesson plans to the state, and Davin still takes (and does well on) required state tests. Knipfer admits it has been hard at times: she had to cut back on her day-care business. But Davin is much happier. He is closing in on a black belt in Taekwondo and plans to study oceanography in college.
In a real world of overcrowded classes, it's difficult to imagine an education system supple enough to meet the needs of extraordinary kids like Davin. But allowing more grade skipping would help. One of the advantages of acceleration is that it doesn't require more money--only a shift in attitude. "Unfortunately," says Colangelo, "the dialogue now is on remediation, bringing up the kids at the bottom to a basic level. I'm all for that, but it has diverted attention from the needs of high-ability kids--and they do have needs." Perhaps A Nation Deceived will help convince schools that the gifted sometimes need to run ahead before they can walk at their own pace. --With reporting by Christine Badowski/ Chicago, Betsy Rubiner/ Des Moines and Sean Scully/ Los Angeles
[QUOTE:]
"If the work is not challenging for these high-ability kids, they will become invisible. We will lose them. We already are."
--NICHOLAS COLANGELO, author, A Nation Deceived
Experts define gifted students as the top 3% to 5% of scorers on IQ tests
A 2001 study found that 70% of kids who skipped ahead had no regrets
Thomson Gale Document Number:A122249016
From "Youth Violence: An Overview," working paper, Center for the Study of Youth Policy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Experts have long debated whether violent behavior results from biological factors (such as a genetic predisposition to violence) or from environmental factors (such as poverty and racial discrimination). In the following viewpoint, Delbert S. Elliott describes various environmental factors that he says contribute to juvenile crime and violence. According to Elliott, these detrimental influences include violent and permissive families, unstable neighborhoods, and delinquent peer groups. Elliott is the director of the Institute of Behavioral Science's Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
As you read, consider the following questions:
Across America, people are afraid. This fear is not restricted to those living in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in our large cities, but extends to residents of affluent suburban communities, and even small towns and rural areas. For many, the violence signals a general breakdown in the social order. There seem to be no safe places; the violence extends into our homes, neighborhoods, schools, daycare facilities, shopping malls, and workplaces. The perpetrators are often relatives, friends or acquaintances of the victim. So much of the violence seems petty, senseless, or random, suggesting a wanton disregard for human life. And both perpetrators and victims are increasingly our adolescents and children....
Most violent behavior is learned behavior. We all have some potential for violent behavior; we have observed others using violence and know how to do it. But while it may be a part of nearly everyone's behavioral repertoire, most persons have non-violent ways of achieving their purposes which are effective in most situations. Further, their commitment to conventional norms and values inhibits their use of violent behavior, and they are embedded in social networks (family and friends) and situations where this type of behavior would have serious negative ramifications. Under these circumstances, violent behavior becomes irrational.
Unfortunately, for too many youth, violence is either the only or the most effective way to achieve status, respect, and other basic social and personal needs. There is little prosocial modeling of alternative ways of dealing with conflict. Like money and knowledge, violence is a form of power, and for some youth, it is the only form of power available. When such limited alternatives are combined with a weak commitment to moral norms (internal controls) and little monitoring or supervision of behavior (external controls), violent behavior becomes rational. The potential rewards are great, the perceived costs minimal.
The initial causes of violence are found in the early learning experiences in the family. They involve 1) weak family bonding and ineffective monitoring and supervision; 2) exposure to and reinforcement for violence in the home; and 3) the acquisition of expectations, attitudes, beliefs, and emotional responses which support or tolerate the use of violence.
Early exposure to violence in the family may involve witnessing either violence or physical abuse. Research suggests that these forms of exposure to violence during childhood increase the risk of violent behavior during adolescence by as much as 40%. Still, most youth who are victims of physical abuse do not go on to become serious violent offenders. While exposure to real violence and physical abuse on the part of family members has stronger modeling effects, heavy exposure to violence on television is also causally linked to later violence. In many homes, television is the de facto babysitter, with little or no monitoring or supervision of content. When there is strong family bonding, effective teaching of moral values and norms, and effective monitoring of behavior, the effect of exposure to violence on T.V. is probably negligible; without this protection, its effect can be quite strong. What is learned is not only how to do violence, but a desensitization to violence and rationalizations for disengaging one's moral obligations to others.
Even if violence is not modeled in the home, research suggests that the absence of effective social bonds and controls, together with a failure of parents to teach (and children to internalize) conventional norms and values, puts children at risk of later violence. In fact, parental neglect may have an even stronger effect than physical abuse on later violence, as it appears to be more damaging to the subsequent course of youth development and involves three times as many youth.
There is also evidence that certain individual temperaments and acquired biological deficits may complicate or interfere with parents' efforts to develop good internal controls in their children. Antisocial personality and attention deficit disorders, a fearless and impulsive temperament, exposure to lead and other neurotoxins, and serious head injuries, for example, may make it difficult for even the best parents to develop strong family bonding and good internal controls and provide effective monitoring of their children.
Families with a high risk for child abuse are those with parents or caretakers who have limited problem-solving skills, poor impulse control and a history of violent behavior during adolescence. These caretakers are frequently young, low-income, single-parent, minority women with four or more children in the household. Fathers, when present, tend to be part-time employed and have a limited education. These families have few resources and are experiencing both social isolation and economic stress. They have few alternatives and limited social supports from extended family or friendship networks which might provide social controls on their behavior and non-violent alternatives for managing their children.
Some neighborhoods also provide opportunities for learning and engaging in violence. The presence of gangs and illegal markets, particularly drug distribution networks, not only provide high levels of exposure to violence, but violent role models, and positive rewards for serious violent activity. Single-parent families, ineffective parenting, violent schools, high dropout rates, high adolescent pregnancy rates, substance abuse, and high unemployment rates are all concentrated in such neighborhoods.
While these neighborhoods are areas with high concentration of poverty, their critical feature that is most directly related to the high rates of violence, crime, and substance use, is the absence of any effective social or cultural organization. High levels of transiency make it difficult to establish common values and norms, informal support networks, and effective social controls. High chronic unemployment results in social isolation from legitimate labor markets, and undermines the relevance of completing school. Illegitimate enterprises and gangs emerge, in part because the neighborhood has no effective means of resisting such activity, and in part as a means of providing some stable social organization for youth and some economy for the neighborhood. Not all poor neighborhoods are disorganized, however, and those that are effectively organized have low rates of violent behavior, crime, and substance use. Poverty is linked to violence through disorganized neighborhoods.
The effect of living in such neighborhoods can devastate the family's attempt to provide a healthy, conventional upbringing for their children. Not only are there few social reinforcements for conventional lifestyles to support this type of parenting, but conventional opportunities are limited by racism, discrimination, social isolation from the labor market, and few resources. There are often greater opportunities for participation in gangs and the illicit economy, which offer relatively quick and substantial rewards that seem to offset the risks associated with violence. One effect of participation in these types of activities is that youth are at high risk for becoming victims as well as perpetrators of violence; a second is that such youth frequently abandon the pursuit of more conventional goals, drop out of school, get pregnant, and become enmeshed in health-compromising and dysfunctional lifestyles that arrest the normal course of adolescent development. Such youth are ill-prepared to enter conventional adult roles.
While patterns of behavior learned in early childhood (e.g., aggressiveness) carry over into the school context, the school has its own potential for generating conflict, frustration, and violent responses to these situations. A successful non-violent social adjustment at home increases the likelihood but does not guarantee a successful non-violent adjustment to school and peers. These are new social systems which have to be negotiated, where one must find her or his own niche. They each have their own performance demands and developmental tasks to complete. Failure to meet these school and peer performance expectations (e.g., academic success, peer approval, personal competence and independence, self-efficacy, and a capacity for developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships and intimacy) creates stress and conflict. The combination of new conflicts and reduced levels of monitoring and supervision in these contexts increases the likelihood that violence will emerge in response to these problems.
During junior and senior high school, a clear adolescent status hierarchy emerges, and much of the violence at school is related to competition for status and status-related confrontations. Ability tracking also contributes to a collective adaptation to school failure and peer rejection by grouping academically poor students and aggressive troublemakers together in the same classes. Delinquent peer groups tend to emerge from these classes, and individual feelings of anger, rejection, and alienation are mutually reinforced in these groups. The strongest and most immediate cause of the actual onset of serious violent behavior is involvement with a delinquent peer group. Here is where violence is modeled, encouraged, and rewarded, and where justifications for disengaging one's moral obligation to others are taught and reinforced. The effects of early exposure to violence, weak internal and family controls, and aggressive behavior patterns developed in childhood all influence the type of friends one chooses, and the type of friends, in turn, largely determines what behavior patterns will be modeled, established, and reinforced during adolescence. However, a strong bond to parents is a protective factor which insulates youth from the influence of delinquent friends as long as the friendship network is not dominated by such youth.
Gangs are a subtype of adolescent peer group, with a more formal identity and membership requirements. They tend to involve more homogeneously delinquent youth, often actively recruiting persons for their fighting skills or street smarts. In some instances, membership entails violent behavior as an initiation ritual. However, not all gangs are involved in serious violent behavior or drug distribution. They often serve some positive functions, particularly in disorganized neighborhoods. They not only provide youth a sense of acceptance, belonging, and personal worth (which most friendships do), but also a safe place to stay, food, clothing, and protection from abusive parents. But like delinquent groups more generally, joining a gang greatly increases the risk of serious violence, both perpetration and victimization. Likewise, leaving a gang or delinquent peer group substantially reduces the risk of serious violence.
The relationship between substance use and violence is complicated. Alcohol is implicated in over half of all homicides and of assaults in the home. Parents who abuse alcohol (and illicit drugs) are more prone to be physically abusive to and neglectful of their children. But while problem drinkers are more likely to have a history of violent behavior, they are not disproportionately represented among violent offenders as compared with non-violent offenders. Pharmacological studies find no simple dose-response relationship between alcohol use and violent behavior. While alcohol is clearly implicated in violent behavior, the exact mechanism has not yet been established.
In general, the use of psychoactive drugs has not been linked pharmacologically to violent behavior. The effect of marijuana and opiate drugs actually appears to inhibit violence, although withdrawal may precipitate an increased risk of violence. There is some evidence that drug addicts commit violent crimes to support their drug habit, but this appears to be a relatively rare phenomenon. The clearest drug-violence connection is for selling drugs; the drug distribution network is extremely violent.
Between 1985 and 1993 the firearm-related homicide rate for adolescents has increased over 150%, and firearms now account for nearly three-fourths of all homicides of young black men. Surveys estimate that 270,000 guns are taken to school each day. It is not clear whether the increase in gun-related violence is simply the result of greater gun availability. However, violent events involving guns are 3 to 5 times more likely to result in death than those involving knives, the next most lethal weapon.
Not much is known about why today's youth, in increasing numbers, are carrying guns. Anecdotal evidence suggests it is to "show off," to ensure "respect" and acquiescence from others, or for self-defense. In part, it appears to be a response to the perception that public authorities cannot protect youth or maintain order in their neighborhoods or at school. There is evidence that dropouts, drug dealers, and those with a prior record of violent behavior are more likely to own a gun than are other adolescents. And the vast majority (80%) of firearms used in crimes are obtained by theft or some other illegal means.
The successful transition into adult roles (i.e., work, marriage, parenting) appears to reduce involvement in violent behavior. In one national study, nearly 80% of adolescents who were serious violent offenders reported no serious violent offenses during their adult years (to age 30). However, nearly twice as many black as white youth continued their offending after age 21. Among those employed at age 21, rates of continuity were low, and there were no differences in rates of continuity by race.
Race and class differences in serious violent offending are small during adolescence, but become substantial during the early adult years. This difference does not appear to be the result of differences in predisposition to violence, but in the continuity of violence once initiated. Race, in particular, is related to finding and holding a job, and to marriage and stable-cohabitating rates. In essence, race and poverty are related to the successful transition from adolescent to adult roles.
It appears that growing up in poor, minority families and disorganized neighborhoods has two major effects directly related to violent behavior. First, when it comes time to make the transition into adulthood, there are limited opportunities for employment which, in turn, reduces the chances of marriage. Employment and marriage are two primary definers of adult status. Secondly, there is evidence that growing up in poor, disorganized neighborhoods inhibits the normal course of adolescent development. Youth from these neighborhoods have lower levels of personal competence, self-efficacy, social skills, and self-discipline. Many are not adequately prepared to enter the labor market even if jobs were available. They are, in some ways, trapped in an extended adolescence and continue to engage in adolescent behavior.