Tuesday, January 9, 2007
The Jan. 3 front-page article "Schools Seek and Find 'Gifted' Students; Montgomery Pursues Aggressive Strategy" missed the point -- repeatedly.
Bethesda's Bannockburn Elementary School, where 70 percent of students are labeled "gifted," seems like a wonderful school, where every child is challenged and supported as she or he should be. Yet the article suggested that the Montgomery County Education Forum opposes Bannockburn's approach. Not true! At Bannockburn, labeling the majority of students as gifted and talented results in a challenging curriculum for all students, which is the goal of our organization.
Rather than representing MCEF as strictly oppositional, reporter Daniel de Vise might have visited Silver Spring's Weller Road Elementary, where Montgomery County public schools identified only 14 percent of students as gifted and talented. It is a tragedy that 86 percent of Weller Road's students are tracked out of the high-quality education afforded to Bannockburn's students. Don't they deserve the same consideration?
MCEF's quarrel is with labeling students, not with educating them. MCEF fully supports the content of gifted-and-talented programs and advocates making such content available to all.
EVIE FRANKL
Co-Chair
Montgomery County Education Forum
Silver Spring
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I am grateful that your editors enclosed the label "gifted" in quotes in the headline "Schools Seek and Find 'Gifted' Students." The use of quotation marks in this way is indicative of ironic words. Yet the irony was scarcely mentioned in the text of the article.
The term "gifted" has become a marker for all sorts of misguided efforts to "assess" and "accelerate" children. The earnest expectant mother playing a Mozart CD loudly in the final trimester of pregnancy and the dad who boasts about his 6-year-old's IQ are the absurd caricatures of the striving-through-our-children that is recognized today as so 20th century.
Yet politicians and the public (and the press?) have been slow to catch up.
No educational research has produced a finding that "giftedness," narrowly defined by IQ, correlates with any positive attribute of adult success. In fact, there is reason to suspect a negative impact on child development where the application of this label distances children from their peers or pits them against one another in a competitive quest for such illusory superiority.
TOM FARQUHAR
Head of School
Bullis School
Potomac
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Sadly, the Jan. 3 article about gifted education perpetuated the myth that gifted education is elitist and unnecessary. But the article lost credibility by focusing primarily on one school in one county, and it missed the crucial point that gifted education is a necessary form of special education for advanced learners.
No one would ever deride the special education needs of remedial students. But when it comes to special education for high achievers, attacks abound as if for sport.
Volumes have been written on the impact that education can have on the social and emotional needs of advanced learners. All children have gifts. Some children require remediation to bring out those gifts. Other children require acceleration.
TAMARA DERENAK
Alexandria
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