"Gifted" is not a "Special Need"

I have a son in the Kansas public school system and he is in the "gifted" program. Kansas implements exactly what you describe. "Gifted" funding is drawn from the same pool as "Special Needs". I am quite pleased with this because it means his program will not likely be cut. However, I completely agree with the point that more funding is needed accross the board in public education.

The rationale in KS goes something like this....

"Special Needs" encompasses any student who is not adequately served by the normal curriculum.

Because of the arrangement here, we go through an annual assessment process to determine if he still requires the additional resources just as the traditional "Special Needs" students do and the requirements to be placed in the Gifted program are much more strenuous than those in place when I was in similar programs as a kid. I have seen no evidence of a social stigma attached to being in the program amongst his peers.

It's not a question of "grouping them with" the special needs students, I think it's more a way of getting educators to realize that if an ordinary classroom environment is not the best place for a student 2 standard deviations BELOW the mean? It's probably not going to be the best environment for students two standard deviations ABOVE the mean either. And there ARE serious issues faced by highly gifted students related to the asynchrony between their intellectual and their social/emotional development. These sorts of issues are easy to ignore, becuase the kids are smart and people figure they will just get along without any help.

I don't think any gifted ed advocates are doing this out of a desire to take money AWAY from special needs kids though. They just want it recognized that their "needs" are also "special".

What precisely is the special need of the gifted student, not being bored? I can see an argument for nonacademic needs, but for the purely academic stuff, being bored and having to do stuff you find tedious are life. I really don't mean to be flippant here and I apologize for any offense. I'm assuming we're talking about something more than the typical AP class type stuff.

In my part of Virginia, there are gifted programs, which work about like the Kansas example above. I think it's mostly test-score related, but there's a way to appeal and say "I think my kid is smart and just hasn't shown it yet" etc., maybe by teacher referral. They don't seem very controversial; I certainly support having them. (I myself am an AVID Tutor among other things, pls. check out "AVID if you are curious. It is not for the gifted, really, but the hard-working but not quite gifted students who want to get into college and emulate their more traditionally academic-oriented peers.)

What precisely is the special need of the gifted student, not being bored?

Depends on what the goal of the educational system is.

Is it to bring everyone up to a certain minimum or standard level of education and proficiency? If yes, then the system we have right now is just fine (for cynical values of "just fine") becuase obviously the gifted students are going to get to that level in spite of the classroom situation, while just as obviously, the special needs students actually need extra attention to even have a decent chance at that.

But if the goal of the system is to maximize education and proficiency on anything like a student by student basis, then the gifted students just as obviously need special resources. To make up numbers and then simplify them, a kid two standards over the mean in potential will get to the average level of proficiency almost no matter what. He might get a little higher than that on his own, maybe a sigma up. But is he going to get to his maximum potential doing nothing but standard readers and arithmetic workbooks? Highly doubtful.

The question you pose implies you believe the function of the school system is the first, rather 19th century type option. I think it ought to be the second one, but I recognize that this means making a lot of damned difficult resource allocation decisions in one of the worst ways possible-- we're allocating resources to determine someone's educational attention (in turn charting the broad course of someone's choices later in life) based on what we think they can achieve later in life based mostly on our own flawed assessments.

Yeah. That sounds like fun, politically and personally.

I think there are some things to consider in dealing with "gifted" students. One is that a significant number of them become bored enough that they channel their energy towards anti-social endeavours. It is clearly not in the interest of society for this to happen.

The second is societal return on investment in education. I've always felt that extra money spent helping the gifted is likley to be returned many times over twenty years later, in things like scientific breakthroughs etc. I once worked in a plasma theory group, of something like 19 PHds. I was amazed that three of them came from the same high school (N.Y. school of science)- even though our group was national (plus maybe 30% foreigners). Clearly a small portion of the country with a very good gifted program was disproportionately contributing to a national resource.

Florida is another state in which Gifted programs fall under the aegis of Special Education, although they're operated very differently from programs for children with developmental difficulties.
I went through public schools in Florida, and was enrolled in the Gifted program, and it was a huge help to me in ways I can't entirely articulate. It gave me the at least occasional company of my intellectual peers -- a boon to a child who's an outcast in regular classes -- and gave me a chance to actually think in a classroom setting, not just regurgitate memorized facts -- which is all my regular classes ever asked of me. I was more focused and engaged in those classes, because they gave me something to engage with, something to focus on, instead of having to listen to the teacher repeat things in different ways -- things I'd understood the first time. They kept me excited about learning, and taught me that being smart was not actually a bad thing (fortunately, I, unlike some of my classmates, also got that message at home).
Mr. Ledford, unless you have been or have had close contact with a Gifted student struggling in a standard classroom, there isn't a very good way to explain just how much of a disservice the prevailing style of education does to a Gifted student, even more so than an average student. Yes, it doesn't allow them to reach their full potential. Yes, it can lead to antisocial behaviors. But it can also be crushing to them, mentally and emotionally. And the idea that the smarter students should be helping the slower ones doesn't do the smart kids any good at all -- instead, it sets them even farther apart, and is usually frustrating for all parties, because kids don't necessarily know how to explain what they understand, especially not if, to them, it's obvious.
I know this blog deals in theories and generalities, but I'm not a teacher. I am and have been a student, however, and this is what I take away from it.

Oh, drat. I addressed the commenter, not the post. Sorry.
Seriously, lumping Gifted in with Special Ed is the only was Gifted got funded in Florida at all. And at least in my district, it took little or nothing away from the other types of special needs kids -- they had far superior facilities to ours, and more teachers. But it did mean that we got something we needed, too.
I'm not saying it's the most ideal way to do it, but it worked pretty well for us, and none of the special needs teachers I've met in Florida seemed upset by it. (Particularly not the ones whose kids were in Gifted.)

1) 2007 California education budget is $55.1 billion.

2) Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) got $0.0495 billion. Retards, cripples, and the Officially Sad dip into GATE funding with priority over the Gifted.

3) Budgeted GATE funding is $0.64/kid-day bonus. Disbursed funding is ~$0.05/kid-day. Play Mozart slowly.

4) $6.0 billion went for 11% of K-12 students as Special Education disbursements. Cripples, retards, and behavioral zits got 15.7 times as much funding each vs. GATE students.

FEMA protractedly studies a proper response to Southern California burning, with a million refugees so far. The future value of Special Education is apparent: Hire the handicapped! They're fun to watch.

I find much of Al's far-flung commentary puerile and his attitudes overly uncharitable (but appreciate the tongue in cheekiness and pure weirdness - ? - of much of the style and imagery.) However, he has a point: it is not fair to fund gifted education at such low levels. Put some effort into educating, inspiring, and nurturing the gifted (but I may disagree with Al here: especially gifted minority, who fight an uphill battle against negative peer attitudes) will repay itself handsomely with what they can contribute to our society, as well as no apologies for it also just being good for them.

"Mr. Ledford, unless you have been or have had close contact with a Gifted student struggling in a standard classroom, there isn't a very good way to explain just how much of a disservice the prevailing style of education does to a Gifted student"

not sure what qualifies one as Gifted, so I can't say that I necessarily qualified. also, I'm not sure if the important bit is the "struggling in a standard classroom." I went to a smallish (class size:169) catholic school in SC, but it had tracks for high school (honors/AP, A1, A2) and while there were good things about the honors classes vs. A1, it was still possible to be bored and unchallenged. In fact, there was probably more ability spread in the honors classes than in the A1.

I liked the tracking and benefited from it, but you were assigned to a track based on one standardized test you took in eighth grade and locked there. At least, moving down was easier than moving up, and A2->A1 was extraordinarily difficult. And if you were a late bloomer intellectually, too bad for you.

As far as achieving one's full potential goes, I wonder how much intensive early intellectual stimulation helps. The best grad students I knew almost invariably came from good big state schools and most had a "lost year" as an undergrad. It was certainly the case that the harvard undergrads didn't outperform the UNC or berkeley undergrads.

But I only went to high school once, and it was smallish parochial one in charleston and my experience could have been very different had I been the only smart kid in a very rural county. YMMV and all that.

While I don't necessarily agree with gifted programs trying to gain extra funding by pulling from "special needs" funds, I do think that gifted students do have special needs.

Two things to consider here: First, gifted does NOT mean motivated. While many gifted students are driven, some are too easily distracted or bored. Second, how well you do later in life is more often a function of how hard you work, not raw talent.

That being said, I believe a major part of education should be teaching students to work hard and effectively. For average students, even the drudgery of everyday assignments can sometimes be enough for that, requiring a few hours to do normal homework assignments. For gifted students that can just coast by, they don't pick up much of a work ethic, which will hurt them down the line.

Whether that requires a whole lot of extra money to establish special classes or not, I don't know.

I believe that using "special needs" funds for gifted students is definitely a lawsuit in the making, because IDEA (the national law) defines the students to be served. Gifted students aren't named.

However, I do support gifted education, and I am surprised you are talking just about high school students. When I was in elementary school, I remember that I simply shut down in 4th grade and refused to participate because I was bored out of my mind.

My sons were luckier and had a elementarygifted program that challenged them. Now my son is having to work hard in high school, and I am thrilled.

Many of the smart "gifted" kids I knew in high school, were the types who ended up spending most of their time doing anti-social things like: smoking dope, skipping school and hanging out at the video arcade all day, drag racing on the freeway, drinking booze all day, etc ... Every single one of them were largely extremely bored, even while enrolled in the "gifted program" for smart kids.

With really bored kids/teens like these, I don't know what the solution is, other than maybe sending them straight to college and skipping high school altogether. There were a few of these kids I knew growing up, who never went to high school and enrolled straight into a local university or community college.

I'm starting to see more and more parent groups, school administrators, and even state legislators work together to reach an appropriate solution. In Florida, a bill is being proposed that would require districts to spend a minimum amount of money on gifted programs. I wrote more about this on my blog at http://www.talentedandgifted.info. I think that everyone recognizes a problem, but everyone has their own solution. Nothing will get done unless everyone works together to fix it.