Schools Seek and Find 'Gifted' Students

"We can't just say it's about the 100 dresses," Peterson said, addressing the middle group as the students embarked on an exercise to predict the content of the book they were about to read. "We have to go a little deeper."

Later that morning, Matthew Derry, 8, delivered a book report on a Lemony Snicket text, complete with rudimentary footnotes and the proper use of the term "misnomer."

Definitions of giftedness vary. In theory, the term encompasses 5 to 10 percent of students at the upper limits of academic aptitude. In practice, 12 percent of the U.S. student population receives gifted education in some form, said Van Tassel-Baska. More than a dozen states provide no funding for gifted education.

Both Maryland and Virginia fund gifted education. Twelve percent of all Virginia students receive the services, according to state officials. Maryland does not count its gifted students. D.C. figures were not available.

Montgomery is spending $9.1 million this year for the core of its gifted education services. Seven elementary schools host centers for the highly gifted, a small subset of the gifted population that represents roughly the top 4 percent of all students. Five middle and high schools have similar programs. Twelve schools host International Baccalaureate accelerated programs, and every high school offers college-level Advanced Placement study, all under the umbrella of gifted education.

Teaching gifted students can present a challenge. One day last month, a boy in Peterson's class at Bannockburn took his teacher to task for handing out a jovial but somewhat idealized account of the first Thanksgiving and asking students whether they would have liked to attend.

"This one that they describe on this paper," he fumed, "or the real one?"

A large contingent of Montgomery parents has lobbied for more gifted education, even as an opposing group has argued that the label creates an academic caste system.

The county's screening process has evolved in a continuing effort to identify more low-income, black and Hispanic students who are gifted. Nonetheless, those groups remain underrepresented, and a coalition of community groups has urged the school board to abandon the gifted label.

Evie Frankl, co-chair of the Montgomery County Education Forum and a leader in the movement to do away with officially sanctioned giftedness, believes education leaders award the designation liberally as "a gift to the white middle class, to keep them in the school system," rather than to serve the goals of diversity and inclusiveness.

Program officials contend that the gifted label buys virtually nothing, on its own, in terms of additional goods or services to the student. It serves mostly as a flag to teachers, parents and students that children should be considered for advanced study at various points in their academic careers. Being gifted does not qualify a student for admission to a highly gifted magnet program or to an AP class, but students so labeled might be more apt to apply.

Parents at Bannockburn Elementary mostly downplay the giftedness of their children, perhaps as a matter of modesty or tact; overzealous advocacy for the gifted can be viewed as elitism.

Liz Gouldman, co-president of the school Parent Teacher Association, said she was surprised to hear how many Bannockburn students had been identified as gifted, writing in an e-mail, "We really don't sit around and talk about that topic much in our PTA."

Alice Sartain, the mother of a third-grader who volunteered at school on a recent morning, said, "I guess I don't know what to compare to, because I've only ever had kids at this elementary school."

Across the room, at her desk, 8-year-old Sophie Sartain finished a sketch of chickens coming home to roost.