Gifted and Grifted

An op-ed in the WaPo highlights perhaps the most serious flaw with Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program: As schools are compelled to direct their time, attention, and funding almost exclusively toward increasing the proficiency of low-achieving students, the education of gifted children is sacrificed in the process.

The act's laudable goal was to bring every child up to "proficiency" in language arts and math, as measured by standardized tests, by 2014. But to reach this goal, the act imposes increasingly draconian penalties on schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" toward bringing low-scoring students up to proficiency. While administrators and teachers can lose their jobs for failing to improve the test scores of low-performing students, they face no penalties for failing to meet the needs of high-scoring students…

Not surprisingly, with the entire curriculum geared to ensuring that every last child reaches grade-level proficiency, there is precious little attention paid to the many children who master the standards early in the year and are ready to move on to more challenging work. What are these children supposed to do while their teachers struggle to help the lowest-performing students?

An inevitable consequence of the program, this was, in fact, precisely what I predicted when I first heard about the idiotic NCLB plan—because it’s exactly what happened to me throughout my education. By the second grade, I was reading on a college level, but, in the absence of a gifted track, an ad hoc solution of independent study was proposed; I spent most of my day off in a corner by myself, with a box of ancient workbooks. I’d read a story in one workbook, answer questions about it in another, then use a third to grade myself. Over and over, working my way through the workbooks. When I got bored with that, I could do the same thing, except using audio tapes and answering questions from laminated cards.

Only during math, art, and music did I have the opportunity to interact with my classmates (who regarded me as a “stuck-up” alien). Once a week, I got to meet with a speech therapist to work on fixing my sibilant S, which I actually looked forward to; in hindsight, it was just a thrill to get some attention for a change.

High school, where there was an honors program, was slightly better—but there was no honors track for some required classes, like health or government or geography. I’d read the entire textbooks by the end of the first week, and spent the rest of the time in class with a novel tucked inside my notebook. And I remember pretending to be worried about a math or chemistry test, just because everyone else was, even though I never had to study. I liked school, but I spent much of it quite bored, and I imagine I wasn’t the only one.

Boredom, however, is the least of the problems that can occur as a result of inattention. It can also actually retard gifted students’ progress.

[S]tudents achieving "advanced" math scores early in elementary school all too frequently regress to merely "proficient" scores by the end. In recent years the percentage of California students scoring in the "advanced" math range has declined by as much as half between second and fifth grade.

Even more disturbing: As many as 20% of high school dropouts are gifted. In some states, since the institution of NCLB, the rate of progress for high-achieving students in low-performing schools has begun to decline. Commenting on the op-ed at Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris notes:

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand why this is a frightening trend, presuming it's real and widespread. How is America going to compete with the rest of the world if our brightest kids--the ones we will be relying on to create new technologies and new industries in a knowledge-based economy--stop progressing?

Sure there are morally compelling reasons to focus on low-performing students. But let's not kid ourselves--there's a moral price to be paid for ignoring the potentially high-achievers.

Already, the attack on science—from conflating non-scientific beliefs like Intelligent Design with science, to the reluctance to fund new technologies like stem cell research—is creating a very real threat of a national brain drain, as scientists are given increasing reason to look elsewhere for better institutional opportunities. Our immigration policies have made American study an impossibility for many of the world’s best and brightest, who now choose Britain, Canada, or Australia instead. And now many of our own brightest students are being, well, left behind. A nation full of slack-jawed morons will find that scientists aren’t the only intellectuals who seek out a new home—and as goes intelligence, so goes future industry, and so go jobs.

Imagine what a train wreck it would be if a C-student is elected president.

Oh. Right.