Intel’s recent announcement that it will cease sponsoring and underwriting the prestigious Science Talent Search, which it took over from Westinghouse in 1998, is another nail in the coffin of gifted education in the United States.
Unlike many European and Asian countries, which are awash in academic competitions, Olympiads, and other status-laden contests that bright students vie to win, American K?12 education has relatively few that anyone notices. There is, of course, the National Spelling Bee, which Scripps has valiantly stuck with since 1941. But spelling bees are for middle schoolers. The big deal for high schoolers, especially those with a bent toward STEM subjects, has long been the Science Talent Search, which President George H. W. Bush called the “Super Bowl of science.”
Intel’s turnabout surprised former CEO Craig Barrett and disheartened many of us who care about both STEM and gifted education. It’s another sign of America’s inattention to its high-ability learners, especially those from disadvantaged circumstances. That neglect is what triggered the publication of our new book, Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. All sorts of data—from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from research studies like the 2011 Fordham Institute report “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students,” and from elsewhere—have shown that high-achievers made smaller gains in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era than did low-achievers. Policy efforts that raised the floor and eased the achievement gap did so at the expense of strong students, who were already nudging the ceiling. Under NCLB, schools and teachers had scant incentive to work hard with kids who were already “proficient.” And so they didn’t—especially in places full of poor and minority kids, many of whom needed extra help to become proficient.
At the same time, data from international measures such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) make painfully clear that the United States isn’t pushing nearly as many of its young people to higher scores as are our competitor nations. These include not just the “Asian tigers,” but also Canada and a number of European countries (see Figure 1). Although we fare better in the early grades, by the time kids are fifteen (when PISA tests them), our high-end results are anything but high.
Figure 1. Percentage of high scorers on PISA, math and science, 2012
America does an especially bad job of getting poor kids into the high-scoring ranks. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports PISA results by socioeconomic quartiles linked to parent occupation and education, family wealth, home educational resources, and more. This “ESCS” index is controversial. Yet the data shown in Figure 2 are both instructive and depressing. Of the twelve countries we studied, the United States surpasses only Hungary in getting lowest-quartile youngsters into the top-scoring echelons. Less than 3 percent of American students in the bottom ESCS quartile reach PISA’s top tiers in math, yet 21 percent of disadvantaged Singaporeans achieve this. And when we compare these kids to those from the top quartile, we see that a high-ESCS test-taker in the United States is eight times likelier than a low-ESCS student to be a top scorer in math. In Canada, that ratio is four to one, and in Korea and Finland, it is three to one. (Comparisons based on parents’ education show very similar gaps.)
Figure 2. Percentage of students at levels 5 or 6, PISA math, ESCS top and bottom quartiles, 2012
America’s poor kids can do so much better than most of them are doing in the today. Consider the recently publicized example of Abdisamad Adan, a Harvard freshman from Somaliland, about as poor a place as can be found on the globe. Abdisamad grew up with eighteen brothers and sisters in a small home without electricity. He caught a break when Jonathan Starr, a former hedge fund manager, started the Abaarso School of Science and Technology, a boarding school in Somaliland meant to serve the country’s brightest boys and girls. Abdisamad thrived there. He gained admission to a college preparatory school in New York—and then, impressively, to Harvard. Talk about upward mobility—this amazing story is the result of ability plus a great school designed to develop the ambitions and intellects of promising students.
Then there’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for Hamilton, the Broadway smash of the moment. He also recently won one of this year’s twenty-four MacArthur Foundation “genius” awards. When Miranda’s father moved to New York as a young man, he spoke no English—but when Miranda was six, he was accepted into Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for intellectually gifted children that seeks to identify able kids from all parts of town. His first theatrical successes occurred within the Hunter College system, which cultivated his genius and created his opportunity.
Looking beyond U.S. borders, most of Failing Our Brightest Kids reports what we learned about how eleven other countries educate gifted students, based on conventional research, site visits, and on-the-ground reports. We parse the data and took advantage of expert analysis by others—especially Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessman. Here’s some of what we found:
- Although countries with strong overall achievement also tend to have many top scorers, the United States cannot assume that raising the water level will do enough for the gifted education boat; it’s far too small to contain all who belong in it.
- Culture matters. When parents value education and push their kids, it makes a difference. Where competition is appreciated rather than shunned, more kids push themselves. (That’s what’s been so great—and rare—about the Science Talent Search.)
- Policy matters too. No Child Left Behind makes it essentially impossible for states to test kids on “out of grade level” material, a policy intended to prevent the tests from being dumbed down for low-achievers. The notion is benevolent, sure, but this policy also makes it impossible for states to truly track academic gains by high-achievers. A provision in the House and Senate reauthorization bills would solve this problem—at least, it would void the current ban—but this is not yet law.
- Waiting for high school to beef up the offerings for high-ability kids is a mistake, particularly for smart students from disadvantaged circumstances who depend on the school system from day one to help them realize their potential.
- “Differentiated instruction” sounds great, but in the end, it’s no substitute for separate learning opportunities, supplements, acceleration, and enrichment programs. Rare is the teacher who can do right by her ablest pupils at the same time she provides slower learners the attention that they need.
After digesting what we learned, we issued a number of recommendations for how we could do a better job.
Perhaps most important, we need to get this topic back onto the policy agenda and rekindle the debate about a society that prizes excellence as well as equity.
We should conduct universal ability screening. Almost every U.S. public school student now takes state exams in (at least) reading and math from third grade on. Let’s identify, say, the 5 percent with the highest scores in a school, district, or state in third or fourth grade, much as Singapore and Western Australia do. Instead of using IQ or aptitude tests like they do, however, we should use existing—and universal—achievement metrics, then supplement their ranks with kids whose promise is spotted by their teachers.
Student progress should be based on mastery. The single best thing our education system could do for high-ability students (and everybody else) would be to enable them to move through their curricula at their own pace. Instead of age-based grade levels—placing all eleven-year-olds in fifth grade and holding them to the same performance standards—let students proceed on the basis of mastery, one unit or module at a time, subject by subject, with no obligation for all to move at the same rate.
Besides allowing for acceleration, schools and districts should encourage flexible ability grouping within classrooms, multi-age and multi-grade groupings, the use of technology for “blended learning,” and whatever else they can to facilitate the educational individualization that we already demand for disabled children.
We should not be afraid of separate classrooms, after-school and summer programs, and even separate schools for high-achievers. Places like the Bronx High School of Science and Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology are educational treasures. But we don’t have enough of them—and we almost never provide their equivalent for elementary and middle school students, which would do much to launch more high-ability poor kids on a trajectory to success.
It’s unfashionable, even politically incorrect, to push for better education for smart kids. One can easily be labeled elitist and swiftly admonished that attention and resources should focus laser-like on the “truly needy.” But plenty of smart kids are also needy, especially those without middle class families and suburban guidance counselors to help them navigate the turbulent waters of American K?12 education. And the country itself is needy: It’s in need of more top-flight scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs to ensure its future security, prosperity, and competitiveness—which is exactly why Intel’s suspension of its Science Talent Search sponsorship is so shameful.
Former University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman was a finalist in that competition in 1961. “It was the Sputnik generation, when America was competing with Russia to get into space,” she recently told the International Business Times. “It was a national obsession. People in school cheered us on like we were star athletes. I got letters from the heads of corporations.”
Shame on Intel for pulling the plug and making matters worse. But shame on all of us for neglecting millions of young people who deserve better—and who have the potential to do great things for their country as well as for themselves.
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at Education Next.
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