Final Draft of the letter sent to The White House and then published as an Open Letter in Education News, August, 2008 and in TEMPO Magazine, February, 2009.
August 4, 2008
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Subject: Education’s “Wag the Dog”
Dear Mr. President:
“No Child Left Behind” is commendable, noble, and truly needed. Giving a minimum education to everyone in the country affords great benefits to all. Finding the Gifted and teaching them to be talented is even more important because these are the people who will become the next generation of leaders in business, politics and education. The problem is that so much of our energy and resources are dedicated to the first, that there is little left for the second.
It is true that many public school districts have a department and Director of what is usually called Advanced Academic Studies which is over Gifted and Talented as well as Advanced Placement. All of these people I have met are very skillful and dedicated educators. But the resources dedicated to them are minuscule compared to the effort of just getting the masses to pass. Unlike some in education, I do believe there should be a minimum bar that all students must clear in order to graduate and that it must be measured by a quantified assessment. But let’s face it; the bar is currently set so low average students can pass it by the time they are in the 9th or10th grade. Far too much time is spent on teachers teaching to this test.
If one of the top priorities of the secondary education system is to train students so that our colleges and universities will be able to build them into talented leaders; then we are only partially successful. Look at our top graduate schools. Most are filled with non-American students; this especially true in the sciences. Much of this is because we are not finding many of our gifted students early enough so their giftedness can be trained into useful talents. If we do not find these gifted kids between the 1st and 8th grades, there is a good chance many will dropout of school in the 9th grade, just like the academically challenged student. The gifted get bored with the repetition-learning used in the classroom and pace of the average class and many end up dropping out and becoming gang leaders, scam artists and internet pirates, where if found and trained they likely will be our future leaders. While they may number only 5% or so of the students, virtually all of them will become leaders.
Research has clearly shown that giftedness knows no cultural or racial boundaries. But look at typical G/T classes, most are populated with Asians and white boys with a smattering of Blacks, Hispanics and girls. The gifted are out there in equally numbers, but we have to find them. The good students are easy to find; that is the model student making all As. Their parents are beating down the Principal’s door to get them into G/T, but this is only a small percentage of the gifted students. The rest are much harder to find.
True we have had a Federal Plan since 1972 and a Texas State Plan since 1990 with a mandate to identify and serve G/T students, but there is limited resources and no political urgency compared to the all-out effort that is being made in expenditure of teacher/administrator time and resources to make sure every student pass a minimum exam..
Only 27 states require that Gifted and Talented students be taught by G/T certified teachers. That includes three states, of which Texas is one, where this is only an OPTION. Any university with a G/T curriculum will tell you that G/T kids learn differently from the rest of us and unless we train even the best teachers in G/T techniques, the results will be lacking. So why don’t we require that only G/T certified teachers find and teach G/T students?
So what I am requesting is 1] Take some of the political and economic pressure off the public schools by emphasizing less the passing of every last student and more on finding the gifted and training them, 2] Place an emphasis on finding these gifted kids early, ideally in the first grade, 3] Encourage the States to require that they use certified G/T teachers to find and teach the G/T students. We are doing exactly that for our special education students. We should do the same for our most brilliant kids, many of whom we are losing.
Sincerely,
Richard F. Kantenberger
Texas Certified Math, Science, Special Education, and Gifted and Talented Teacher.
Member, Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented
President, Kantenberger International, Inc. (retired)
cc: Secretary Margaret Spelling, U. S. Secretary of Education
Governor Rick Perry, Governor of Texas
Commissioner Robert Scott, Texas Commissioner of Education
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Preaching to the GT( Gifted and Talented) Choir
Published in TEMPO Magazine, Feb. 2009
Preaching to the GT Choir
By Dick Kantenberger
Member,
We love to talk about GT and giftedness. We love talk to each other about it by the hour. We go to seminars and talk and listen all day about GT and sometimes several days at a time. We read and write books and articles about giftedness primarily aimed at other people in GT and to the students and parents of gifted or potentially gifted children. There is nothing wrong with these things at all. First, we enjoy talking about GT because we are very interested it, and second, there are many students and parents that need the help that gifted and talented education can give them. But if we are going to broaden the support for gifted and talented education in this country, we are going to have to broaden our message.
Look what Special Education has been able to accomplish. But how long did it take them? Both GT and Special Ed have been studied in academia for about 40 years prior to World War II, but after the war special education grassroots advocacy organizations began to spring up, like the American Association on Mental Deficiency, United Cerebral Palsy Association and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Then in the sixties an increasing level of school access was established for children with disabilities at the state and local levels.
The grassroots advocacy for Special Education began to swell as Congress approved Public Law 94-142 “Education for All Handicapped Children Act” in 1975, but it did not prove effective until legislation for federal funding was approved two years later. It mandated that school districts provide such schooling in the “least restrictive environment” possible. But Special Education did not take off until 1990 with the passage of “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” (IDEA). Before IDEA, the condition of Special Education in this country was pretty bleak. In 1970, American schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws that excluded children with major disabilities like deafness, blindness and mental retardation. There is no doubt that Special Education programs have helped a great number of students assimilate into the public education system. However, 80% of students in Special Education are there because of weak underlying cognitive skills according to LearningRx. Therefore, identifying and retraining these cognitive skills is essential for over coming learning struggles on a permanent basis.
The goals of Gifted and Talented education are to identify and train the cognitive skills of gifted students whose vulnerability is such that it is estimated we are losing about a million kids a year because the public and the state and federal politicians still mostly have the misconception that if a child is gifted then “don’t worry about it, s/he is bound to turn out OK”
Unless we want to wait another forty years, it seems to me our goal is clear. As much as we love talking about GT among ourselves, we must accelerate the GT grassroots ground-swell by directing our message to the general public and especially to our state and federal legislators.
Currently we in Texas have almost as many identified gifted students as we have special education students (actually it is 1 to 1.4), but in public education we spend 11 times more on Special Education than GT. Sadly that number is pretty good compared to the national average where Special Ed out-spends GT by over 100 to 1. That’s because many states spend virtually nothing on GT. But even our 11 to 1 ratio is not all that noteworthy because a handful of school districts are spending most of the money while most school districts are spending little or nothing. My own affluent school district is spending 43 times as much on Special Ed as GT. Go into any public school in the country and you will find twenty or so Special Ed teachers for every one (or none) GT teacher.
We in GT education are the “tree-trucks” of our movement. However, we need many “leaves” on our “trees”. The “leaves” we need, if we are to accomplish our goals, are the support of the general public and the state and federal legislators. Tree-trucks can not grow many leaves on their own, so we all need to make a concerted effort over a period of time to grow many “limbs” which can in turn grow many “leaves”. This means that since we are small in numbers we all have to take a pro-active role in educating all of our non-GT teachers, councilors, principals, and the parents of our GT children. So, all of us need to contact the general public and the state and federal governments, especially the state legislators. With a new Congress in
Legislation in
a] Most important is to contact your own state senators and representatives via personal contact, telephone, letter, fax, or e-mail and ask them to specifically support Gifted and Talented education by passing and funding legislation to 1] require state certification exams of Gifted and Talented teachers, and 2] that all identified Gifted and Talented students be taught by state certified Gifted and Talented teachers. 3] Place an emphasis on finding these gifted kids at the beginning of elementary school. BE SURE TO ALWAYS ASK FOR THESE SPECIFIC ACTIONS. To find all of your legislators click on: http://www.ncsl.org/?tabid=17173, then [1st] select your “State” and [2nd] select “Legislator”, then click on “Legislature Links”. There you will find all the senators and representatives and their addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail links.
b] Contact your local school district superintendent and request these same actions.
c] Write to your local newspaper education reporters, and letters-to-the-editor expressing your concerns about gifted education. Many specific GT concerns can be found on http://ednews.org/articles/25922/1/
d] Call local radio talk-shows to express your concerns.
e] For more detailed help contact the National Association for Gifted Children at http://www.nagc.org and click on “Advocacy & Legislation”, then “Toolkit”. Also contact your state Gifted and Talent organization at this same web-site by clicking on “State by State”.
Be aware that a few individual names may be out of date, but you can Google your state association shown and find the latest contacts in your state. We need to do this now while all of these politicians are getting their agendas prioritized.
In order to get a gauge of what it was the lawmakers in
It will not be easy and we have a long way to go. From an early draft of this article, Roxanna Cramer wrote, “From another choir member: A good article, but unfortunately the timing is bad. G/T kids have never been sympathetic “poster children”, especially in comparison with handicapped kids. And in this time of economic downturn, chances of getting more attention focused on G/T kids is practically nil. Science and Math stand a chance, but no body can see the symphony uncomposed or the novel unwritten…” I found a 14 year old boy in ISS (In School Suspension) for refusing to do his class work. In talking with the boy and his father I found the kid read War and Peace when he was 10. He wants to be a writer and has taught himself Greek and Latin. I love Roxanna’s comment and I’m sure most Music and Language Arts teachers do too. We have a long way to go. From an Assistant Principal in my own district I received the following message “Why did you send me this obnoxious article?” From another “unsigned”, “ I didn’t realize that “gifted” meant being educational snobs” So you see, it will not be easy, however, that is no reason not to try, especially considering the value of the commodity we are dealing with.
In June 2008 I released my unacknowledged letter to President Bush as an open letter. I am the first to admit he had other very serious problems to deal with. It was published by Education News and is shown below.
The misunderstanding about Gifted and Talented issues is widespread. A public school administrator in
There are many who do “get it”. From Kate Gladstone, “The educational system also tend to ignore and under-represent gifted/talents among those with disabilities of any sort (especially among the neurological disabilities) – see the work of Meredith Warshaw at www.hoagiesgifted.org/twice-exceptional.htm . Amen to this and Amen again. I taught all math courses from sixth-grade math through calculus at a well known psychiatric hospital for a year. Obviously all the students were special education, but I was surprised to find that 15%-20% of these kids were gifted too. This is three to four times what I had expected. This truly is an area that needs to be given much more study and research.
Bert Franks, MD in
Ann Sheldon, Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Gifted Children about an article that I wrote in May 2008, Education’s Wag the Dog: Lost Geniuses,
www.ednews.org/articles/25922/1/.html . She wrote to me: “This article is a must read for every state lawmaker. We can not continue to be a world class country if we continue to ignore our most gifted future leaders”. She then sent a copy of the article to every GT teacher and lawmaker in the State of
It is clear that we in GT try to absorb everything we can GT. We spend a lot of time studying and talking to each other, but unless we intensify the spreading of our message, it may be another 40 years before our goals of GT are recognized and met. Do not assume that your principals, councilors, and other non-GT teachers really understand giftedness. Most do not. Some will tell you they do, but that usually does not go beyond understanding a few words, like the meaning of acceleration or asynchronous development, but they do not know the symptoms of identifying the hard to find kids in minority groups, the poor and even girls, and they do not know how to go about implementing the necessary curriculums for the students they do find. Thirty clock-hours on Saturday mornings alone with not do it. The principals and administrators don’t have or want to spend the money. That’s were Special Education was fifty years ago. We’d better get started now!
GT Bio 12-08:
Mr. Kantenberger is a 17 year teacher, baseball and tennis coach in
Dedication:
I would like to dedicate this article to Dr. Rick Olenchak, Professor, Psychologist and Director of the Urban Talent Research Institute at the
Education's Wag the Dog"; Geniuses Lost
Educations “Wag the Dog”: Geniuses Lost
Published in Education News, May, 2008
By Dick Kantenberger,
Member,
It is like someone shouted “FIRE” in a theater, but nobody moved. Is the theater empty? No, it’s full of people, but still nobody moved or even cared. We are losing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of potential geniuses every year in the United States because we are just not finding them before it’s too late, which in most cases is about the time they are suppose to start 9th grade.
It’s not like this is some unknown phenomenon. Thomas Jefferson put it succinctly in 1782 while Governor of Virginia when he wrote “By…(selecting) the youth of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated”. It’s not that academia in
Outside of education few understand that the gifted student learns differently from the above average or the Advanced Placement student. They learn much more quickly, they can retain it far longer, and they can synthesize and analyze the newly learned material and begin hypothesizing almost immediately. Most of us regular learners can do the same thing, except it takes us much longer. In other words, it takes hard work for us to learn and to be successful. No wonder the gifted kid gets bored very quickly when asked to do repetitive drills in school and homework The GT teacher has to recognize just how gifted a student is and to constantly keep finding a level that will be challenging and interesting to the student. It takes extra teacher training to do that. The more severely academically-challenged students are, the more they are at risk, and the more special attention they require. The gifted are no different. The more gifted they are, the more they are at risk, and the more special attention they require. One important point on giftedness, just because kids are gifted does not mean they are or will automatically become talented. They have to be trained before they are talented. This is true whether they are to become a scientist, a baseball player, an auto mechanic, an actor, or a CEO. If not trained, all of these people are lost to society. If we don’t find these at risk gifted kids, usually by the time they are in 8th grade, they may be lost to us. It has been reported that some will turn up as drug dealers, internet pirates and scam artists. They are too smart to do nothing.
So why are we still losing these potential leaders? Part of it is because most Americans think that because these kids are very intelligent that they don’t need any help; “If there’re that smart they will work it out and be OK”. But these kids are just as vulnerable as the academically-challenged students and the Special Education students. Let me say it again, these gifted kids are just as vulnerable as the academically-challenged and the Special Education student. Few in this country are not aware of, and approve of, the Special Education programs, and rightly so. Also few in this country are not aware of the government program No Child Left Behind, which is aimed at the academically-challenged and to provide them with a high school education. It is an admirable goal, but even the school superintendents and principals around the country are complaining to the government (both States and National) that they are forced to use so much energy and financial resources on No Child Left Behind, it has diluted their efforts in one of their primary goals of preparing students so our universities can train them. And at the same time many of the gifted, our future leaders in industry, education and government, are falling through the cracks.
Dr. Donna Y. Ford at Vanderbilt University told me recently via e-mail that from the data she pulled from the Office of Civil Rights that we are losing over 250,000 African-American GT students every year, and if the national count is indicative of the figures compiled by the Texas Education Agency, the loss of GT students among Hispanics is over twice that of African-Americans, and if you count the poor of all races the loss is four times that of African-Americans. I am amazed that parents and leaders in the Hispanic, African-American, Women Movements, and advocates of the poor are not up in arms over this situation. Clearly, Thomas Jefferson was right in 1782, but nobody listened. Will we listen now?
We are currently only finding the easily identifiable GT students, and the word “find” my not be the right word. Many parents of Asians and middle class white boys are beating down the principal’s doors all over the country to get their children into GT classes and programs. Research has shown for many years what
There are so many little characteristics a teacher must look for, and that is why they have to be properly trained. It is the total collection of characteristics that is needed in order to make a judgment. For instance, exquisite handwriting and very bad handwriting can be both a characteristic of a potential gifted student. By themselves they don’t mean much, but coupled with several other clues they could identify a potential GT student. But, either sign should send a message to the teacher to start looking for other signs. A rude and disruptive kid may be a sign of an academically-challenged student, or one who has goofed off so long that he or she is way behind and doesn’t care any more, or they also may be a gifted student who is bored to death because they learned the material in the first ten minutes of class and are repulsed to doing repetitive drills and homework. Some highly gifted kids will in time refuse to do any work at all in school What is critical with all of these students I just mentioned are that they are at risk of dropping out of school before they begin high school. That is why we need to find them and get them into special educational programs, whether Special Ed or GT, before they drop out. That’s why the period between the 3rd and 8th grade is so important.
Recent research on identifying and serving diverse gifted students published in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted by K. L Speirs Neumeister, C. M. Adams, R. L. Pierce, J. C. Cassady, and F. A. Dixon wrote “Few, if any, teachers mentioned gifted characteristics that are prevalent in minority populations such as oral tradition, movement and verve, communalism and affective characteristics… Only 15% of the teachers recognized that boredom or non-interest may be common in gifted students. Teachers were less likely to notice gifted characteristics in students having a skill deficit in one area, poor work habits, or behavioral or family problems.” The authors concluded that the results of the survey indicated a need for more professional development on how giftedness manifests itself in minority and economically disadvantaged populations and on multicultural education.
The state and national governments press the school districts to accommodate the academically-challenged students and the Special Education students. These programs are heavily funded. Of course there are some issues with No Child Left Behind that need to be modified and very likely will be in the near future, but Gifted and Talented education is not only under-funded, it is also hamstrung by the state legislatures. Only 27 states have laws requiring Gifted and Talented programs in their public schools, but only seven states require that certified GT teachers teach the GT students that have been found, but three of these, and sadly Texas is one of them, only make it OPTIONAL that GT students be taught by certified GT teachers. But that’s not the end of the story. In
To give the GT students a level playing field, our state legislators are going to have to shift more money to train and certify new GT teachers. In
So it is clear, we must train and certify many more teachers in GT to 1] Find the poor, the girls, and the minorities that are being lost, and 2] To train these students to be the leaders that they should be and have the potential to be.
The big question is what can you as an individual do about it. While the national government sets the tone, it is basically the state legislators (representatives and state senators) and the state education agencies that have the power because they control the money and the priorities. Most legislators are not aware of the problem, while most state agencies and district superintendents are so pressured with federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind, they can only give lip service to the GT problem, which they mostly are aware of and understand.
The real power lies with you. If you would call, or write, or fax, or e-mail your state representative and state senator and the head of your state education agency and ask them 1] to require state certification exams of Gifted and Talented teachers, and 2] that all identified Gifted and Talented students be taught by state certified Gifted and Talented teachers. 3] Place an emphasis on finding these gifted kids at the beginning of elementary school. We are doing exactly that for our special education students. We should do the same for our most brilliant kids, many of whom we are losing.
Dick Kantenberger
713-465-6077
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)