Gifted Kids, NCLB and the Washington Post

Keven Carey at the Quick and the Ed has a bit of takedown on this Washington Post Op-Ed:

Worse than this benign neglect, No Child forces a fundamental educational approach so inappropriate for high-ability students that it destroys their interest in learning, as school becomes an endless chain of basic lessons aimed at low-performing students.

These predictable problems were reported as early as 2003, when the Wall Street Journal warned that schools were shifting their focus overwhelmingly toward low achievers. Expressions of concern from distressed parents and educators of gifted children have come in increasing numbers ever since.

No Child is particularly destructive to bright young math students. Faced with a mandate to bring every last student to proficiency, schools emphasize incessant drilling of rudimentary facts and teach that there is one "right" way to solve even higher-order problems. Yet one of the clearest markers of a nimble math mind is the ability to see novel approaches and shortcuts to attacking such problems. This creativity is what makes math interesting and fun for those students. Schools should encourage this higher-order thinking, but high-ability students are instead admonished for solving problems the wrong way, despite getting the right answers. Frustrated, and bored by simplistic drills, many come to hate math.

Talented writers fare no better in language arts education. Recently, a noted children's author recounted her dismay when fifth-graders attending one of her workshops balked at a creative writing exercise. She was shocked to learn that the reluctant writers were gifted. The children, however, had spent years completing mundane worksheets designed for struggling classmates and thus rebelled at an exercise they assumed would be yet another tedious worksheet.

Carey responds with some solid points about the piece:

1) The authors assert that the law is having "unintended but disastrous consequences" for gifted kids. Can I just say -- a pox on "unintended consequences." They're the Lay's potato chips of argumentation, a cheap, substance-free rhetorical device that newspaper editors are apparently helpless to resist consuming, even though (I hope) they know they should. It's not that unitended consequences don't exist, but if you're going to assert them you should have to offer some evidence that what you're saying is actually true. Which leads to:

2) Is there any reputable, empirical evidence to support the contention that NCLB is hurting the education of gifted students? If there is, I haven't seen it, and it's certainly nowhere in this op-ed. NAEP scores, SATs, some kind of "ceiling" effect on high-end scale scores -- anything? One thing I am 100 percent sure of: next spring I'm going to be reading a spate of newspaper articles about how a record number of students managed to--somehow--overcome the depradations of NCLB, ace the SATs, accumulate a freakishly accomplished resume of extracurricular activities, and yet get turned down by Harvard.

While Carey has some points, there is no evidence that says NCLB is hurting the education of smart kids and just like the authors of the op-ed, I have no emprical evidence to cite for this assertion:

NCLB does not harm the education of smart kids, the whole American public education system does, and has done so for decades.

American public education has, by necessity, focused on the kids in the main, middle part of the bell curve of intelligence and achievement. The schools used to track kids, smart kids into certain classes, average kids in other classes and slower learners in another. Often times, special ed kids were in a whole other track. While tracking had some very bad outcomes in some cases and it was difficult for schools to "mix tracks" that is have some one gifted in math be in average English classes, in some ways, this tracking gave smarter kids a slightly more difficult education commensurate with their skills, while still allowing average kids to ge the education they needed.

However, education "reformers" decried the practice as "socially unjust" and so classes became mixed with multiple skill levels. The theory was that classes with mixed skill levels would help all skill levels equally (how this was supposed to happen was never documented). The result is that smarter kids would complete their work and one of two things would happen. They would do other work and if necessary suffer those consequences or like my brother, goof off and get in disciplinary trouble. In short, the "system" is not designed to deal with smart kids.

The advent of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, charter schools, magnet schools, dual enrollment programs (high school seniors enrolling at local community or small colleges for credit in both high school and college) gave smarter kids an outlet for their needs and skills. However, students benefiting from these options tend to be in suburban and in some cases urban districts. Rural high schoolers generally don't have these options.

So while it may not be necessary to decry the "poor smart kids" the way the Susan Goodkin and David G. Gold do in the Washington Post, we should not by any means discount the notion that smart kids are not benefitting fully from American public education. The neglect of their needs is a real, if not fully documented problem.