If you take a trip down memory lane, you might recall the words: “gifted education” or you could barely remember having taken the test at around the age of 7. In some situations, parents have a lack of information in regards to what to do if their child is gifted or even what “giftedness” is, and according to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, “Parents may assume that yearly school testing covers gifted identification; after all, what are all those tests for? However, because there are no national policies outlining gifted education practices, identification is highly dependent on the state, school district, and the local school.”
This heavy reliance on the state, school districts, and individual schools leads to dependence on individual school resources, causing many gifted students in the United States to not have access to the resources of a gifted education program. Ignorance to the topic of gifted education can play a major role in the educational placement of young students. The organization, Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG) stated: “Many of the teachers and administrators that children encounter in the school systems now have no idea how to really identify gifted children and are stuck on misunderstandings and stereotypes and biases that have no basis in real gifted education theory or research.” Identifying students for the PACE program in District 200 relies on testing and teacher or parent recommendation which could lead to many gifted children not having their skills properly identified. In District 200, the first screening occurs in second grade for students that will be put in the Grade 3 PACE program. Early testing can be beneficial to many young students, but it relies heavily on how students perform on tests, and parents and students are not always aware of many other opportunities to identify children with gifted cognitive abilities.
Ellie Hay, a sophomore at WWS who had been in the PACE program, said that “…based on what I’ve experienced, they need to devise a better way to select ‘gifted students’ because giving students a test when they are in second grade is not a good gauge of how they are as a student, because they could just be very intuitive or, on the other side of it, they could be incredibly smart and just be bad at taking tests.”
We need to combat the stereotype that gifted students don’t need as much support as lower level students through the provisions of educational resources for the whole community on what “giftedness” is. Barbara Clark, writer of “Growing Up Gifted: Developing the Potential of Children At Home and At School”, writes, “Children who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, leadership capacity, or specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to develop such capabilities”. Gifted students, parents, educators, and other community members should all be provided with this information and more so that every student can learn as they best learn. With more information and knowledge, more children could be identified for gifted education programs outside of the CogAT which tests verbal, non-verbal, and quantitative skills beginning in the second grade.
Reach out to schools near you to better educate yourself and others on local resources and make an effort to spread the information with your community in order to help give every child the best opportunity to learn.
