The reluctant pied piper of homeschooling

I’ve had two interactions in the last week that move me to write again about the importance of addressing gifted education in our public schools. The first was at a meeting where a mom passionately explained why her district had to have a program in place to try to draw in more students. She pointed out that although only three kids in her neighborhood of many kids were attending their local public schools, parents could be drawn back in now what with the economy and the difficulty of keeping up private school tuitions. But, she said, many of those parents weren’t going to come back if there wasn’t clear support by the administration for accelerated learners.

The second encounter happened when I was walking on the street and heard a car idling behind me. I looked back and saw a mom I’d known when my son was a preschooler — we haven’t seen much of each other in years. Without any unnecessary chitchat, she got right to the subject at hand. “So tell me about homeschooling,” she said. “My son is doing very well at school, and he’s miserable. The school is giving him nothing. All he’s learning is what’s on the test, and he already knows that. We can’t afford private school, but I have to get him out of there. He’s bored to tears.”

The phrase “bored to tears” brought back the memory of my son in his third-grade classroom. I was across the room helping another child and I glanced at him. He was literally fighting back tears. At home, he was never idle, never unengaged. But at school, he was practicing patience and waiting, all for no benefit to his own education. That was his last week of public school.

So I got to thinking: I read all these well-reasoned articles about how parents pulling the highest achieving students to homeschool them or put them into private schools is hurting our public schools. The theory is, we should sacrifice our children to the greater good and leave them there. We should work with the system rather than opting out.

But ask any parent who has opted out, and they will say the same thing: Yes, the system needs to be changed, but not on my kid’s back. Until they see clear support from administration and teachers, they’re going to do what’s best for their children.

Here’s what we know about gifted learners:

First of all, you don’t have to use the g-word, but the fact is that just as there are learners who need a longer time to process information and understand concepts, there are learners who do this in a shorter timeframe. Whatever you want to call it, and however it happens, these kids do exist and the public schools do need to serve their needs.

Second, a child who learns at a faster pace needs to use her brain just as a child who needs extra physical activity needs that physical activity. Teachers readily admit that they have students who really need to run around and move, but so many teachers refuse to admit that their “smart” kids need to be stretching their brain in the same way.

Third, the traditional ways of “dealing with” having an accelerated learner in a classroom are detrimental to that student. Those ways are:

• Give the accelerated learner more and more of the same thing that she has already mastered (busy work).
• Have the accelerated learner do the same work as everyone else, faster, and then have him help other students (unpaid teacher’s aide).
• Let the accelerated learner do the same work, then let her go into a corner and read or entertain herself while she waits for the others (practicing patience).
• Have a pull-out program that doesn’t interface with what’s happening in the classroom, so that the accelerated learner misses what’s happening in the classroom and then gets extra work loaded on top of what he’s already doing in the classroom.

Obviously, none of these approaches addresses the accelerated learner’s need to learn more and learn more deeply.

A fourth thing that we know about gifted students is that they do not always do well in school. Bored, frustrated, angry, and becoming more self-loathing as their differences are either denied or misunderstood, gifted students have a higher high school drop-out rate than the general population, are often not appropriately prepared for college, and end up seeing other students who develop healthy study skills and personal drive surpass them. They don’t know why this happens because their needs were not properly met in their earlier education.

So how can an under-funded, stressed-out public school system serve accelerated learners?

First of all, schools have to admit that accelerated learners exist and that they have legitimate needs. Denying their needs now is just like the old days when schools labeled dyslexic kids “stupid,” even though their disability had nothing to do with their ability to think.

Second, school administrators have to make it clear to teachers and parents that accelerated learners are part of the school community and have needs that the school can and wants to address.

Third, all teachers must be taught how to differentiate their teaching, not just for kids who are struggling to learn what’s on the test, but also for kids who can do the test without any apparent effort. As an example: my daughter wanted to take the STAR test this year, so we downloaded some sample questions to make sure she understood how to take such a test. One page of questions involved separating words into their syllables properly. She has never studied this. In fact, I have never knowingly explained what a “syllable” is. Yet she had no problem answering all the questions correctly.

Gifted students often enter the school year already knowing the material on the test. They will literally be bored to tears, or to gross misbehavior, if they are forced to “study” something they mastered without any visible effort.

Administrators may say that they can’t afford to train all their teachers in acceleration, but really, any decent teacher can train him or herself in the basics. Pick up a copy of Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom, which answers such questions as How can I manage my classroom when students are doing different things at the same time? and How can I make changes in the way I teach when we have no budget for training, materials, or resources? For $35, a district can start the education process and take it from there as they have funding and willpower.

Fourth, school districts must ditch the outmoded and discredited idea that gifted learners do best by staying with their age-based peer group. If a student has one area where he is far accelerated past his classmates and doesn’t have a “cluster” to work with in his own grade, he must be given the opportunity to work with students at a similar level in another grade.

Furthermore, if a student is advanced in all subject areas, acceleration has been proven to be the most effective and least harmful way to provide an appropriate learning environment for that student. Teachers and administrators are the only people left who argue that acceleration is harmful to kids for whom it’s appropriate. At the California Association for the Gifted Conference that I attended recently, a teacher who is also a parent related sitting in on meetings where administrators shamelessly admitted that they were against acceleration not because there is research to show its harmful affects (because that research doesn’t exist), but rather because when a child enters the school system in kindergarten, the district budgets for getting that child’s tax money for 13 years. And darn it, they’re going to get that money if it’s budgeted for!

Fifth, districts need to embrace all the ways to provide a better learning environment for gifted students, from bringing back all the “non-essential” subjects that help gifted children have outlets at school (art, music, drama, clubs, athletics) to keeping up on the latest methods for accommodating students that are basically “free,” such as cluster grouping by grade.

In reality, the needs of many gifted kids are not necessarily met when the parents pull them from public schools. Private schools are not necessarily better equipped, or even more willing, to accommodate unusual learners. Homeschooling is not the best option for a family that won’t or can’t fully embrace it as a lifestyle and not just a last-ditch attempt to save their kids from deadening boredom.

If our public schools’ mission is to provide appropriate education for all students, then all public schools have the absolute obligation to admit the existence of accelerated learners, confirm that they have needs that can be met within the public school system, and then work to provide the resources to support those children as part of our diverse community.

Until that happens, I expect that I’m going to keep playing the uncomfortable role of the reluctant pied piper, walking down the street and doling out advice to frustrated moms who aren’t finding receptive ears at their public schools.