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National Association for Gifted Children Opening Address, 11/15/12

Chester E. Finn, Jr. (reprinted with his permission)

         It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: I am honored, touched and grateful for this award, and I thank NAGC for it and all of you for being part of this grand occasion.

         As you likely know, I’m a relative newcomer to this field—not to education policy, where I’ve been knocking about since before many of you were born, but to the education of high-potential youngsters. I am not, let’s be clear, a classroom practitioner nor any sort of authority on the curricula, pedagogies and instructional supports that may be best suited to these boys and girls. And I should confess up front that I am not deep into the mysteries of giftedness, how to define it, and how and when to know whether someone possesses it.

         But I’ve become something of a zealot, partly in consequence of research we’ve done at Fordham and, wearing my other hat, at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. At Fordham, we came at this topic because we found ourselves puzzling over whether today’s education policy emphases and priorities have been gypping what I’ll just call high-potential kids. And let me be explicit that the version of potential on my mind is principally cognitive, even academic. (I surely admire gifted musicians, artists, dancers, even break-dancers, but they’re not my policy concern.)

         First, we wondered whether de-tracking elementary and middle schools was a good thing for such kids. Answer: not really

         Then we wondered whether throwing open the doors to Advanced Placement classrooms was good for such kids. Answer: mixed blessing

         Then we wondered whether today’s push—which we’ve strongly supported—for standards-based reform was turning out to be good for such kids, particularly the version of standards-based reform that has been advanced, even mandated, by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.  Answer: big problem

         Then we wondered whether high achievers stay that way, in particular whether kids who are near the top of the academic-achievement heap in third grade are still there in eighth. Answer: there are worrying drop-offs and likely waste of human potential.

         And then, of course, being curious folks, we also wandered into other domains, such as what’s the story with selective high schools for gifted students, and whether the charter school movement should go beyond lotteries and maybe include the kinds of schools that admit pupils according to various interests or emphases, potentially including giftedness.

         Three big considerations underlay all of this inquiry:

         First, the equity point. Call it equal opportunity for all youngsters to get the education they need. Equity in education is so often defined, as NCLB has done, only in terms of lifting low-performing students to some level of adequacy. That’s a worthy-enough goal in its own right but manifestly inequitable from the standpoint of youngsters who have already cleared that bar.

         Second, international competitiveness and this nation’s future on a shrinking, flattening planet. I’m persuaded that more and more of our future prosperity and very likely our national security, not to mention our health, our cultural vitality and much more, will hinge not on individuals who make it to minimum adequacy so much as on those who soar to extraordinary heights, who become tomorrow’s inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, poets and policy leaders. Are we as a country doing all we should to cultivate those parts of our population?

         And third, what I will simply term mounting skepticism about some of today’s education pieties, particularly the homage to differentiated instruction, which appears to me to boil down to the assumption that teachers will be able to do right by every child in classrooms that are profoundly heterogeneous in terms of student ability, motivation, prior attainment and special needs. There are, I know, some teachers who pull this off magnificently. But how many of our three million plus teachers really meet that challenging test?

         Let me sharpen these points, maybe even phrase them in politically incorrect language.

         First, are our national reform priorities gypping America’s smart kids?

         Second, are we eating our country’s own seed corn by not cultivating tomorrow’s intellectual leaders?

         Third, are today’s fashionable education theories wrong-headed about what can realistically be accomplished by ordinary teachers in ordinary classrooms?

         As best I can tell, the answers to all three questions turn out to be yes—and the consequence is a human capital catastrophe for the United States. It may not be as dramatic or abrupt as the fiscal cliff awaiting us in January; it’s more like a wasting disease than a heart attack; it may even be so stealthy that at any given point we’re barely aware of it. But it needs attention or we’ll be very sorry.

         This is not a problem that’s fashionable to talk about, however, or one that awakens much interest or engagement from education leaders, politicians and policy makers. Nor, I might add, from philanthropists, pundits, business leaders, etc. (though the business leader part is changing a little so long as you place a STEM wrapper around the challenge.)

         I want to speculate with you this afternoon on why we’re messing this up. I think I’ve spotted ten possible explanations. Most of them dwell primarily in our larger political culture. But several of them may be at least partly the responsibility of you and your colleagues and organizations.

         First, nervousness about elitism, which is fed by underrepresentation of poor/minority kids in many G & T classrooms and specialized schools. Never mind that the underrepresentation is due in no small part to the failure of the K-12 system itself to identify and counsel such kids into a sufficiency of classrooms, schools and programs, which inevitably gives an advantage to upper middle class youngsters with pushy, well-educated, well-connected parents. We’ll come back to this topic in a bit, because at least in the academically selective high schools that Jessica Hockett and I recently studied, the demographics turned out to be surprising.

         Second, a mindset, particularly in a time of budget crunches, competing priorities and plenty of government pressure to focus on low-achieving students and bad schools, a mindset that says high-ability kids will do fine regardless of whether the education system makes any particular provision for them or earmarks any resources for their education (or the preparation of their teachers, their curricular materials, etc.). Let me note that this attitude is widespread in private philanthropy as well as in public policy. Despite assiduous efforts on our part, for example, we at Fordham have found mighty few funders interested in issues of high-potential kids and how well they are or aren’t being educated.

         Third, and closely related, is the widespread belief that “equity” concerns are confined to issues of income, minority status, handicapping condition and historical disenfranchisement, not about meeting everybody’s needs, and that K-12 education and its reformers need to focus on providing access and getting everyone up to some modest floor level, with little heed to where the ceiling is located or how to get more kids nearer to it.

         Fourth, we’re schizophrenic as to whether giftedness constitutes a “special need” or not in American education. Mostly the answer seems to be no, even though the number of kids now being served by special ed in our schools has crept up to about 13 percent of the student population, more like 20 percent in some states.

         Fifth, in the real world, everybody knows that our highly selective colleges and universities are awash in far more qualified applicants than they can handle. Which might lead your average policy maker to say, well, obviously we must be doing OK with K-12 education at the high end. Besides, look how many more kids are enrolled in AP classes today than ten years ago. What’s the problem?

         Sixth, from an employer’s perspective, our immigration policies, messed up as they are, have generally made it possible to import the talent and skills that can’t be found domestically, again diminishing anyone’s sense of urgency regarding doing better about this sort of thing on the home front.

         Seventh, as you know, the field of gifted education has been kind of hazy regarding who and what it’s really focused on. Part of me admires the big-tent view of giftedness, but, to be blunt, avoiding a clear definition and specific numbers has blurred the whole topic. Some people talk about the talented tenth, some about the top one percent. I know a large foundation that is bent on finding the one person in a million (that’s their estimate) who qualifies as a genius. Contrast this with other claimants on the education system that are a lot more precise. We know concretely how many kids of different ethnicities there are in a given pupil population. Ditto kids in poverty, as gauged by eligibility for the federal free lunch program. We’re pretty definite about how many youngsters have learning disabilities (though there’s reason to question some of those designations.) I recently learned that a reasonably stable ten percent of the population is left-handed. But how many are gifted? There’s little agreement on this key point. Nor does it help this argument, at least in policy circles, to advance the woolly claim that everybody is gifted in some way.

         Eighth, this field suffers from a paucity of convincing research as to what works, what kinds of programs and interventions produce what kinds of student gains (both academic achievement and any additional indicators you’d like to offer) under what circumstances and compared with what. Jessica and I became more aware of this problem when doing our own literature review for Exam Schools, which yielded exactly two smallish studies examining the actual effectiveness of these selective-admission high schools versus a control group of almost identical kids who attended ordinary high schools. More troubling still, the results of those two studies indicate little advantage for the exam schools. Which means that the burden of proof is now on them to generate the kinds of longitudinal data and comparative studies that they have done little of in the past because they were able to trade on reputation, friends in high places, and market signals, namely more demand for places in such schools than there is supply. Trust me, that just doesn’t cut it in today’s world of rigorous analyses and comparisons.

         Ninth, maybe because of the elitism issue, and perhaps due also to a shortage of resources, I think the gifted education world has been a little meek when it comes to lobbying and special pleading, not to mention heavy handed political engagement such as financial contributions and doorbell ringing on behalf of friendly candidates. Nor am I sure how vigorous this world has been in recruiting such candidates. (We’re talking school board, county council state legislature, Congress, too. Despite the current partisanship and gridlock on Capitol Hill, surely there are still some individuals there who could be sympathetic to the gifted-education cause, who maybe even benefited from it themselves, and who surely want their kids to. Yet I’m hard-pressed to name anyone in Congress who can be described as a vigorous advocate on this topic. I suspect the same is true at the state level, which is actually far more important.)

Tenth and finally, I want to circle back to the touchy matter of bad ideas in educator land. These are most often encountered in ed school faculties and courses but they also dominate many professional organizations and publications, are heard from those who roam the land providing professional development, at the big annual wing-ding of the American Educational Research Association and on and on. I already mentioned the wishful proposition that differentiated instruction will magically equip every teacher to succeed with every kid in a heterogeneous classroom. This is a close cousin of the view that tracking, even ability grouping, is pernicious. The idea that competition is bad for kids. (Hence, for example, the persecution of high school valedictorians.) The idea that selective admissions is bad for public schools and programs within them. The idea that everything should be open to everyone regardless of actual preparedness, prior attainment or other qualifications. The multiple intelligences notion that everyone is surely gifted in his or her own way. I really could go on. You may not agree with me that these are bad ideas. But I will tell you this for certain: insofar as they rule our education system, they are definitely bad for gifted education, at least for the kinds that I think the country needs more of.

Those are ten plausible—well, I think they’re plausible!—explanations for why American education at this point in our history is not doing a good job with its high-potential students, at least not with enough of them, and of course those most likely to be short-changed are low-income kids and those without well-educated, savvy, pushy and generally upper middle class parents, the kind who know how to navigate the system, get a headstart on preparing for access into available classrooms, programs and schools, how to lean on the political system and the bureaucracy and, if need be, the means to move to another school or district or into the private sector. I’m not really worried about my three little granddaughters, all of whom I will posit have immense potential. Their parents can navigate this system and, if they need backup, my wife and I and other grandparents, family members and friends are available for additional pushiness, navigation help or resources. But one wonders how many millions of high-potential young people who lack such parents and other supports are not navigating this system very well. We’re well aware that the system has neither the capacity nor the motivation to find them and counsel them and push them, much less the capacity to do right by them in class, much less to provide them the additional supports they need outside of school. If you stick with the “talented tenth” view of giftedness, we’re talking about roughly five and a half million kids within the K-12 system. How many of them do you suppose are being educated to the max?

But the news isn’t all bad. I also want briefly to share some reasons for modest optimism about the present situation turning around in the future. I’ve spotted five developments on the positive side that appear at least somewhat promising.

First, I think gifted education could turn the equity argument to its advantage. I base this on some of the demographics that Jessica and I encountered in connection with our Exam Schools research and an important conclusion that we reached. The academically selective public high schools that we studied—and we found 165 of them, a really tiny number considering the size of the U.S. high school enterprise—are not, taken as a group, bastions of privilege for rich white kids. The incidence of poverty among their students is almost the same—37 versus 39 percent—as in the larger high school population. White kids are actually underrepresented, as are Latino youngsters. African-American students are significantly overrepresented, when compared with the country as a whole, and Asian-Americans are hugely overrepresented. What these schools are can fairly be described as refuges for high-achievers from families that are not wealthy, who cannot afford the posh suburbs or the private-school option, and who are otherwise likely to be trapped in urban dropout factories. Yes, I oversimplify, and yes, the individual schools on our list rarely match the demographics of the particular communities in which they’re located. But they do serve lots of poor and minority kids and would serve even more if they had the capacity and, of course, if the feeder system for gifted youngsters from poor and minority backgrounds were stronger than it is. There’s a powerful equity argument waiting to be made here—and an elitism allegation ready to be rebutted. 

Second, there is widening awareness, largely thanks to PISA and TIMSS data, of just how poorly America’s advanced students are doing compared with those in other lands. This evidence has emerged, and been underscored, in any number of places, including the writings of Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessman. And we see it creeping into opinion columns by popular writers like Thomas Friedman and into the concerns of major employer organizations such as the Business Roundtable. In other words, we’re no longer focused exclusively on the performance of average U.S. students versus their international counterparts but also on the unsatisfactory rankings of our advanced students when compared with those in other lands.

Third, we’re seeing the emergence of new forms of education delivery and school organization that will widen the options available to high-potential students. Greater interest in performance-based advancement in school rather than lock-step grade levels. Individualization via technology, both in school and at home, including access to online courses of every sort and at every level, many of them free. This contributes as well to parents’ capacity to supplement their children’s education. The emergence of STEM-focused schools, early-college high schools, dual enrollment programs, widening summer opportunities, after-school enrichment options, and more. In other words, high-potential youngsters are no longer educationally confined to what happens within the walls of ordinary brick-and-mortar schools between 8:30 and 2:30 between September and June.

Fourth, some schools and school systems are getting a bit more sophisticated about how to meet the educational needs and challenges of gifted students, as well as more aware that such kids are found in ample supply in the low-income population as well as the upper middle class. Some of these programs, supplements and other arrangements are recounted in the NAGC’s fine new paper called “Unlocking Emergent Talent”.

Fifth and last, and I admit to not knowing whether this is a flash in the pan or a sign of something more durable, but check out the recent New York Times Magazine article on “parenting prodigies,” then check out the recent of Scientific American Mind, titled “Think Like a Genius”. I wonder if these are further evidence of widening interest in and perhaps acceptance of this aspect of education. Incidentally, the latter publication includes a swell piece by Paula, Rena Subotnik and Frank Worrell on renewing our commitment to gifted education. I don’t know whether this is the choir singing or the congregation beginning to join in or some of both, but I am determined to see it as a positive sign. Note, too, that the same publication has a worrisome piece on “evil genius”, focused on how original thinkers are sometimes less honest and better at justifying ethical lapses.

Which is a welcome reminder that high potential is a valuable thing but definitely not the entire story. Character matters as much as intellect. So do good habits, motivation and such traits. This was underscored for me when I visited Townsend Harris High School in New York, on the campus of Queens College, as part of our research for Exam Schools. Townsend Harris is not, in fact, an exam school in the same sense as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Yes, it has high threshold requirements for admissibility that include scores on state tests, but it doesn’t pick its students exclusively on the basis of those scores. They also look at middle school grades and attendance because, they say, they’re not just interested in brainy kids; they want students who have actually demonstrated the capacity to be serious and successful learners. This more holistic appraisal of young people seems to me to be a good thing and we were pleased to see how many of the selective-admission high schools around the country handle admissions decisions much like selective colleges do. 

 Townsend Harris High School is awash in applications from the children of Asian immigrant families who live in Queens and, for the fraction of those applicants that it has room for, it appears to do a very good job. But let me underscore that this is a single high school, an institution with no ability to influence the feeder system that produces its applicants, nor any ability to grow or replicate itself to serve more kids. I left it, and other schools like it, nearly all of them besieged by many more qualified applicants than they can accommodate, wondering why we keep this supply so limited considering the present demand—but also wondering how many more hundreds of thousands of high potential kids are never even making it into the demand side of that part of the high school market because we haven’t done right by them in grades K-8. How much human potential is our society failing to realize? How much human capital are we squandering?

More, for certain, than we can really afford to waste. That’s a challenge you have been facing and responding to, and one to which I’m proud to contribute my bit.

On which note, let me conclude, as I began, by thanking the NAGC for the honor it has bestowed on me today and for the good and important work that it, and all of you, are constantly engaged in. May you be fruitful and multiply.

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