10 Big Hurdles to Identifying and Educating the Nation’s Smartest Kids

10 Big Hurdles to Identifying and Educating the Nation’s Smartest Kids

1. Just 8.8 percent of U.S. students are classified as “high achievers” in mathematics, according to the most recent international assessments. That’s well below the average of 12.6 percent for affluent nations.

2. No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal law, incentivizes “just getting kids over a bar,” Finn says. “In the public policies affecting our schools — state and federal — there’s almost no incentive to boost a smart kid up the scale or take someone who’s ‘proficient’ and push them to ‘advanced.’ ” [We’ve written before about proficiency and the tendency, under high-stakes testing, for schools to focus resources on kids who are “on the bubble.”]

7. One promising practice from overseas is screening all kids at third or fourth grade — after they’ve had a few years of school — and directing special resources to the top scorers. Here in the U.S., all third-graders are tested, but the high scorers don’t get anything. Meanwhile, screening for gifted programs usually happens in kindergarten, which creates a heavy bias toward those who come from more affluent homes.

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more on gifted education in this IMS blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gifted

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