Handicapping our future - low funding for programs for gifted students - Back to School: Dumb and Dumber - Cover Story

National Review, Sept 25, 1995 by Bob M. Thornton

THE education of America's gifted children is a dangerous disgrace. Bright youngsters have special needs, well documented by research, which have been all but dismissed by American education. As Milton Friedman has observed:

Instead of emphasizing strengthening the opportunities open to the able, we have tended increasingly to shift into a state of victims in which the emphasis is on raising the people at the bottom. Now, no social progress has ever come from the bottom up. It's always come from the top small number pulling up the society as a whole and raising it.

In most states, spending on the gifted has been elective and parsimonious, while spending on special education has been mandatory and bountiful. For instance, nearly 85 per cent of the Federal Government's K - 12 education moneys are spent on programs for the disadvantaged and handicapped, and on bilingual and vocational programs. Compare those efforts to the only federal initiative for the gifted, the 'Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program,' just begun in 1989. Its share of federal K - 12 educational funding is 0.1 per cent. Further exacerbating the situation, state and local governments spend only two cents out of every $100 earmarked for K - 12 on opportunities for gifted and talented students.

Excellent initiatives for gifted students do exist, but they are sporadic, limited in scope, and under constant attack. These programs are generally the first eliminated when funding reductions occur in a school system and as the need grows to find more money to spend on special-education mandates. These cuts are generally sold to the public through politically correct spins. Administrators argue that special classes for bright children might send the message to other children that they are not as smart. Furthermore, they say, any assistance for the gifted occurs at the expense of other students. Many influential educators also characterize special assistance for gifted students as 'undemocratic' and have even suggested that helping them is simply a manifestation of ethnic and racial prejudice. Others soothingly explain that gifted students need very little teaching and no special support, since they are born with a built-in thirst for knowledge and achievement that schools cannot blunt or help. However, there is recent, overwhelming research evidence of the damaging consequences of underachievement, which this attitude fosters. Indeed, Friedler, et al., in a paper published in 1993, argue that 'our school systems are actually giving tacit approval to creating underachievement in one ability group so that the needs of the other ability groups can be served . . . This . . . is egalitarianism at its worst.'

Politically correct attacks on initiatives for the gifted are linked to a trend sweeping through our schools under the new buzzword, 'inclusion.' Theoretically, inclusion consolidates exceptional and regular students in a classroom arrangement where all share identical learning opportunities. This structure places our brightest youngsters in groups with other children who have different educational needs. The stated purpose is to assure that all children -- physically and mentally handicapped, chronically disruptive, learning disabled, regular, and gifted -- are accepted for what they bring to the learning mix.

Presumptively, the inclusive teacher keeps all students working together on activities, providing each of them a relevant learning experience. Even if this were possible, it would require special training and a large support staff. However, many school districts have yielded to fiscal temptation -- and political and judicial directives -- and dumped this full range of students into such classes without paying for the extra training and support. In consequence, inadequately trained teachers are compelled to spend most of their time dealing with students who are struggling to keep up. The inevitable result is a curriculum and teaching climate recast to suit the needs of the weakest learners.

The result of that, in turn, is that both average and gifted youngsters grow bored and lazy, display little academic achievement, and become more difficult to manage. An inclusive classroom may or may not be the least restrictive placement for a disabled student, but for the gifted and regular student it is too often the most restrictive environment.

Accompanying inclusion in American education was a 'restructuring' of the school curriculum. Today's restructured curriculum emphasizes self-esteem instead of the mastery of content. In this restructured education, gifted students are under pressure not to appear 'smart' in order to be more acceptable to their peers and teachers. Moreover, bright minority children are frequently accused of 'acting white.' The other children, meanwhile, may feel really good about themselves -- until they're forced to compete in the marketplace without the necessary skills.

Educators have recently observed that this profound change in curriculum emphasis could be damaging to cognitive development, critical thinking, and national test scores. However, these warnings have come thirty years too late. The Great Decline of SAT scores from 1963 to 1980 revealed genuine deterioration in the education of our college-bound students. During this 17-year period, America's brightest young people quit learning, a trend that has become even more pronounced today. These youngsters clearly found that since the curriculum had been 'dumbed down' to help weaker students, they did not have to continue to learn in order to keep up. Currently, bright high-school students, who receive top grades, routinely spend less than an hour a day on homework because it requires so little effort. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, over half the 17-year-olds in this country have not arrived at Piaget's cognitive-growth stage of formal operations, i.e., the ability to think critically. This is due to our restructured curriculum, which focuses more on repetition than on the advancement of hypothetical thinking. This cognitive decay has led several influential educators to simply 'declare victory' and proclaim that the disease is the cure. That is, formal operations (critical thinking) are too difficult for most American students to master, and so they must be abandoned.