Abandoning Our Gifted Children
I would like to make an appeal to common sense. In the National budget for 2006, $9.6 million dollars was allocated for gifted education. The total budget for the Education Department in 2006 was $84 billion. This means, less than 0.02% (yes, point zero two, NOT 2%) is spent on gifted education. Yet, gifted students make up approximately 5% of the population in public education. And why is it that we spend less than 0.02% on 5% of the student body? Likely, because there are too many people (and sadly these people are as likely to be teachers as people in the general public) who make statements like “gifted kids will be fine, they already know what they need to know”. While others argue that all children benefit from all the money spent on education (but having been a teacher I know this is not true). So, because we, as a nation, refuse to spend money on children with amazing abilities to learn at rapid speeds and at higher intellectually challenging levels than their age-mates, we force these children to sit in classrooms where it is shown they will already know as much as 75% of the material being taught. And for most of these kids, it would only take one or two presentations of the material they did not know to have mastered it. Yet, because they are grouped with children of all ranges of abilities from full mental retardation to the average student (thanks to the current push for inclusion), these gifted students are forced to spend weeks of constant repetition learning what they learned long before they entered the classroom. If this doesn’t convince you an injustice is occurring, imagine you go to a movie theater. Now, imagine being forced to watch a part of a movie ten or twenty times before you could move on to the next scene in the movie because someone in the theater just couldn’t catch on to what the current scene was about. Yet, let me go further. Suppose the manager of the theater had to pause the movie for several minutes at a time while they tried to explain the movie to each individual moviegoer having trouble understanding the scene. Yet, you understood it the first time through. Would you consider this fair? Then why do we force gifted children to sit in classrooms where they are hearing (over and over and over again) things they already have learned, often bored to the point of wishing they were not gifted (as many gifted kids will eventually put all their efforts into appearing as though they are not gifted). There are many nations around the world that spend a lot more money and effort developing the amazing abilities possessed by their gifted populations. And this explains why so many of the jobs in our country that require higher levels of thinking and intelligence are taken by people from foreign countries. Why have we, as a nation, decided to abandon our children who demonstrate amazing intellectual abilities? Why do we not try to promote these abilities so that we may all benefit from what these children can eventually accomplish? If we truly want renewable energy sources, cures for diseases like cancer and AIDS, and solutions to the many problems we face in today’s world, why is it we ignore those with the most potential to accomplish these goals? Do we not care, or are we just unaware that these children are being ignored? If we care, it is time for us, our local schools boards and the administrators to demand that we offer more programs for our gifted children and full day programs for our most gifted children. And let us hope our politicians will listen. And if not, let us replace them with those that will. We must return to some degree of ability grouping within schools. To ignore the needs of these children should be considered criminal and is without a doubt detrimental to the future of our country. If this plea has fallen upon deaf ears, I fear I mistakenly started this appeal with a plea to what was never present to begin with.
