Gifted Students Accountability Rating System

One of today’s hot topics in education is educating the gifted student. In Texas we now have a new accountability rating system where it is not just how many students passed or failed. There are now indexes where not only how many students passed or failed is measured, but now they measure the progress of students as well as how many students exceeded standard. This is where most schools struggle, the number of students not exceeding standard. For years now our focus has been on the struggling students, moving them to ensure they met standard, but now with the new accountability system we can no longer just focus on the struggling student, we have to focus on all students.

After reading, An Historical Introduction to American Education,
this is one area that was not addressed and I was curious to see how the way in which we instruct gifted students evolved. Goddard (1933) discusses that in the 1920’s two large schools began working independently with gifted students and proved to have success (p. 357). “These children need special consideration and special treatment from a three-fold standpoint. First, in the interest of the children themselves, second, in the interest of the schools, and third, in the interest of the community.” (Goddard, 1933, p. 357).

When looking at my specific campus, effectively meeting the needs of our gifted students is an area where we need to improve.
We offer intervention programs for our struggling students as well as tutorials after school, but there are not any pullouts or enrichment programs for our gifted students. The teachers are expected reach our gifted students in during regular instruction, which is a difficult task. Often times, our teachers do not understand how to instruct our gifted students. They have a hard time understanding that it is not more of something, but it is extending their learning. Goddard (1933) writes, “For instance, the writer recently found some classes in Germany where the gifted children were being provided for by an enrichment of the course of study. Further investigation showed that these were merely children who had done well in their regular classes and it was thought they might do more work. Accordingly, they were put in a class by themselves and give twice as much arithmetic as they had been doing.” (p. 356). I believe that this is how the majority of our teachers believe they are supposed to instruct gifted students, giving them more work instead of extending their thinking. “But enrichment of experience is not necessarily having more of the same kind of experience,. Education, rightly understood, is experience. And so it comes about that the enrichment which counts in the education of gifted children is given them a broader experience; utilizing their time in those activities which call forth their interest and contribute to their mental, moral, and social development.” (Goddard, 1933, p.
356).