EDUCATION

After several years of thumbing my nose at conventional wisdom on many fronts, I’ve finally worked up the guts to tackle the one topic that truly makes my knees knock: gifted children. Talk about a hot button. The “gifted” lobby is one of the best organized and most vocal that I have seen. I’ve seldom heard a discussion about special education where someone doesn’t pipe up, “And that includes gifted,” usually to a chorus of nodding heads. I’ve also heard whispered snarky references to “gifted parents.”

I didn’t give much thought to gifted education for a while because, in my neck of the woods, there hasn’t been a lot of money to identify or support gifted students. (As advocates correctly point out, gifted programming is often the first thing to go when the fiscal scalpel comes out.) But suddenly there’s money again — at least my school board is testing bright students again and talking about setting up gifted classes.

I have several problems with segregated classes for gifted students. For one thing, I’m far from convinced that we have a credible working model of what gifted means. I spoke with Dona Matthews, co-author (along with Joanne Foster) of Being Smart About Gifted Children: A Guidebook for Parents and Educators. Matthews is director of the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College, City University of New York, but spent most of her career at the University of Toronto. She confirmed my suspicion that criteria for giftedness are all over the map, both in Canada and, according to her initial impression, in the US as well.

Originally published in Today's Parent, April 2005