Susan Goodkin writes a strong piece in the Washington Post about the harmful effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on gifted education. In the editorial, Leave No Gifted Child Behind Goodkin explains, "By forcing schools to focus their time and funding almost entirely on bringing low-achieving students up to proficiency, NCLB sacrifices the education of the gifted students who will become our future biomedical researchers, computer engineers and other scientific leaders."

NCLB Inhibits Gifted Child Achievement

One of the most disturbing points that Goodkin makes is that NCLB may shut-down the academic potential of gifted children. "Perhaps these schools, along with the drafters of NCLB, labor under the misconception that gifted students will fare well academically regardless of whether their special learning needs are met. Ironically, included in the huge body of evidence disproving this notion are my state's standardized test scores -- the very test scores at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reflecting the schools' inattention to high performers, they show that students 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."

For the sake of gifted children, I hope we can begin to dismantle NCLB, a program that is proving both ineffective at improving performance for low-scoring students and harmful for gifted children.