The Label of Gifted Education
About 2 ½ years ago, one of my blog entries was titled
The Label of Gifted: Is There a Better Way? You might want to revisit it and also look at the reader comments that follow the article. Today I am no closer to an answer to the question about the label of “gifted.”
In a recent
Washington Post article,
Labels Aren’t What Kids Need, high school English teacher Patrick Welsh brought up a number of issues about identification and programming for gifted education that are worth considering.
One of the problems with the term is that educators and parents often look at kids as gifted or not gifted, rather than looking at abilities on a continuum. Can a gifted program meet the needs of all able children? Can the needs of a highly gifted child be met in a regular gifted program? What happens to the child who is very capable in math but not in language arts? What happens to the youngster who is intensely interested in geography, but the gifted program is designed for more mainstream subjects?
Kids who are selected for a particular program often are given enrichment activities, from which all students would probably benefit. While the students in the gifted program may be capable of moving more quickly or studying a topic more in depth, can you understand why the parent of a “regular student” may want his less capable child to also be exposed to this enrichment?
How does a school handle the problem of some parents regarding the label of gifted as a status symbol? (Note: I am not saying that the kids are not very capable, but I am saying that SOME parents regard the label as a status symbol without truly understanding the real needs of a small percentage of students.)
How do we handle the affective consequences of labeling, both for students who are identified and students who are not? As Welsh states in his article, “When we apply this tag to a tiny group of children . . . we are in effect saying that the rest are ungifted and untalented. We’re denigrating hard work and perseverance, telling children that no matter how much effort they put forth, they just can’t measure up to their special peers.”
“Just as bad, we’re telling those on whom we deign to bestow the coveted label that they have it made; we’re giving them an overblown sense of their intellectual abilities and setting them up to fall short when they face real challenges later . . . What most parents don’t realize is that the gifted label can harm not only those who don’t receive it, but also those who do.” (See the
research of Carol Dweck.)
Welsh goes on to suggest a highly sensitive topic: “. . . school administrators are caught in a political and moral trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children can progress academically without being held back by lower-income kids.” Can we be honest with ourselves? How much of this is true?
When I was a kid, the term gifted was foreign to my ear. Everyone did, however, agree that some kids were very smart in some areas. Some kids were even very smart in all areas. At least in the district where I went to school, the system may have done a better job of trying to challenge all of the students all of the time.
There obviously is no perfect solution to the controversy of the label “gifted” and how it should be handled. But, let’s not shut the door on some of the realities of the dilemma by feigning to believe that there must be a perfect solution.