Programs for the gifted few or talent development for the many?

Students at all ages and grade levels are entitled to challenging and appropriate instruction if they are to develop their talents fully, Mr. Feldhusen points out.

The gifted education movement grew out of the pioneering research of Lewis Terman and Lita Hollingworth and took flight after the launch of Sputnik in 1957.The momentum continued to build with the subsequent publication of the Marland Report in 1972, which documented neglect of the gifted in American schools.¹ With small-scale financial support from the federal government and larger support from most state governments, educational programs were developed in nearly all the states. Elementary programs favored the pull-out enrichment model, while secondary programs favored the use of special classes.²

Supporters of the development of programs included a number of organizations: the National Association for Gifted Children, the Talented and Gifted (TAG) Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, and state associations for the gifted, as well as a host of individuals, among them James Gallagher, E. Paul Torrance, A. Harry Passow, Abraham Tannenbaum, Paul Witty, Barbara Clark, Joseph Renzulli, Irving Sato, Dorothy Sisk, Julian Stanley, and Joyce VanTassel-Baska, who led the field with their research and expertise in developing procedures for identifying and educating gifted children. The magnitude of growth in gifted education is documented in National Excellence: A Case for Developing America‘s Talent, a 1993 report from the U.S. Department of Education.³

Strong attacks on the emerging field came in 1985 with the publication of two books: Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality, by Jeannie Oakes, which criticized the grouping practices of American schools; and Educating the Ablest: Programs and Promising Practices, by June Cox, Neil Daniels, and Bruce Boston, which rendered a negative evaluation of the vapid pullout enrichment programs that the authors characterized as having seen their day.⁴ In 1988 Paul Chapman took both the intelligence and the achievement testing movements to task for having come to dominate school practice to the advantage of the Nordic population and the disadvantage of black, Hispanic, and low-income youths.⁵

Paul Kingston and Lionel Lewis in The High-Status Track, an edited volume published in 1990, presented the views of 13 scholars who indicted the secondary- and college-level institutions in the U.S. that have risen to elite status with clearly excellent academic programs but, as the authors see it, restrictive admissions policies that systematically block many minority and low-income youths from enrolling. Graduates of these elite schools move into career tracks that practically ensure the attainment of high-level professional positions, while young people who do not attend such institutions rarely attain equal professional status. ”These schools,” they write, “are socially elite, largely enrolling offspring of the upper-middle and upper classes. Moreover, their graduates are prepared for privilege and enjoy disproportionate access to high-status occupations.”⁶

In The Manufactured Crisis, their 1995 defense of American schools, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle also attacked gifted programs as elitist and biased. They wrote:

Despite their seductive appeal, and despite their frequent promotion by privileged Americans, enrichment programs are not the way to improve American education. There is no evidence that they accomplish the goals claimed for them, and they tend to weaken some of the most impressive traditional strengths of America’s schools.⁷

Berliner and Biddle are wrong in asserting that no evidence exists that gifted programs accomplish their goals. Indeed, there is much evidence that they do. However, by focusing programs on the elite few, programs for the gifted probably do little to improve schools overall.

It is clear that programs for the gifted are under severe attack. However, in Dumbing Down Our Kids, Charles Sykes says that it is the children who suffer when gifted programs come under attack and disappear.⁸ And Ellen Winner has argued in her recent book, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, that no society can afford to ignore its most gifted members and that all must give serious thought to how best to nurture and educate talent.⁹ Thus the goal for all of us must be to find ways to develop the talents and special aptitudes of as many young people as possible, while recognizing the special needs of highly talented youths for learning experiences at a level and pace appropriate to their abilities.

Categorizing and labeling

It is immoral to identify a large majority of the nation’s young people as “ungifted,” which implies that they are devoid of talent, and it is equally immoral to provide no or inappropriate educational services to precocious youths who are ready for high-level, fast-paced, in-depth instruction. We do the former when we carry out an elaborate process with tests and rating scales that results in the labeling of approximately 5% of the school population as “gifted,” thereby indirectly labeling the rest as “ungifted.” We do the latter when we insist that precocious youths be placed in heterogeneous or inclusive classrooms that pay no attention to their educational needs, a point argued in a 1993 research report.¹⁰ That report, based on classroom observations throughout the U.S. and on an extensive survey of classroom practices, concluded that most gifted and talented children receive little or no instruction appropriate to their levels of readiness, even though most states and the federal government have set up offices and provided funding to local school districts for special programs and services for academically gifted youth.

The original Marland Report advocated services for precocious youths in six areas: general giftedness, leadership, creativity, psychomotor abilities, academic talent, and artistic talent. But schools have focused almost entirely on general giftedness. Identification schemes promulgated by Alexina Baldwin and Jay Wooster in 1977 and by others later showed school personnel how to crunch numbers from I.Q. tests, achievement tests, and rating scales to derive a single index of overall ability, rank the index numbers, and draw a cutoff above which a child is declared “gifted.”¹¹ A national study in 1982 showed how arbitrary and potentially fraught with error and psychometric ignorance this type of generic identification process can be.¹²

After having been identified through an elaborate process of seeking the “truly gifted,” a child is admitted to one of the ubiquitous pullout enrichment programs. Tuesday and Friday mornings at 10, Jane, Tom, Mary, and Bob leave their classroom and go to the “GT room” for instruction in higher-level thinking skills, for work on independent projects, for field trips, and so on. Research published in 1991showed that worthwhile learning did occur in these settings, but it was never demonstrated that children not identified as “gifted” would not also have profited from the activities. 13 Moreover, critics have found a lot wrong with the approach, declaring that the pullout/enrichment model should be replaced with increasingly more specialized and challenging academic services geared to children’s levels of precocity.¹⁴ Subsequent research by James Kulik suggested that special groupings of high-ability youths in particular academic areas do lead to higher academic achievement.¹⁵

But it is now 1998. While the pullout/enrichment model is still in widespread use, countervailing forces — the inclusion movement, the promotion of detracking, heterogeneous grouping by age and grade level, and the serving of precocious youngsters in regular classrooms — grew in strength in the late 1980s and 1990s, inspired by Jeannie Oakes’ work and by Robert Slavin’s work with cooperative learning.^{1 6} Thus many precocious and highly talented young people get no specialized instruction whatsoever, and the goals and practices of existing programs are often ineffectual for them.

The residual effect of all these years of failing to meet the special needs of precocious youth is, paradoxically, a continuing pressure in the public schools to degroup, detrack, and group heterogeneously, often disregarding any signs that some children are so advanced that regular classroom instruction is of little value to them. These children are expected to cool it, teach others who are less able, and socialize. In rapidly increasing numbers, such children are fleeing to private schools if their families can afford them, to the state-supported residential schools for precocious youths now operating in 11 states, to early college admission, to dual enrollment in college and public school, to summer and Saturday programs at colleges and universities, to home schooling, to magnet schools, and to charter schools. It should also be noted that, in defiance of the faddish inclusion movement, some public school districts continue to offer special schools or special full-time classes for gifted and talented youths. These schools and classes can be extremely beneficial for highly talented youths, especially those who are academically talented.

Talent orientation

Traditionally, programs for the gifted have focused only on those who are deemed “generally gifted” or are “academically gifted.” Instead, I believe children exhibit a wide diversity of talents in the vocational/technical area, in the academic disciplines, in the arts, and in the personal and social domains. In identifying the talents of our young people, we should make use of tests, rating scales, auditions, and classroom observations by teachers. Moreover, while we should be concerned with nurturing the talents of all young people at all levels of ability, we need to pay special attention to those who are very highly talented and often neglected in school. All young people need challenging learning experiences, and we can provide them only when we know the nature and level of their talents. Elsewhere, I have spelled out procedures that schools can use in talent identification and development in education (TIDE),¹⁷ and a number of schools are already accomplishing these tasks well.

Once students have been identified, schools can provide learning experiences that encompass a wide variety of areas. My colleagues and I have conducted research that suggests that precocious youths typically have strong talents in three or four areas.¹⁸ We don’t know much yet about less-able youngsters, but two projects carried out by Kenneth Seeley in 1984 and Kenneth McCluskey and others in 1995 give us clues that talent strengths can be identified and used to draw underachievers, school dropouts, and delinquents back into the mainstream of education.¹⁹

My colleagues and I have developed a framework for meeting the needs of young people with diverse talents throughout the K-12 grade spectrum. All young people need recognition as legitimate human beings, and this we visualize as the base of a pyramid, a foundation on which all else is built. A wide variety of learning experiences can then be seen as rays extending vertically upward from this base, with the length of each varying according to an individual student’s talents and interests. Thus the longest rays would be nearest the center and represent relatively stronger talents. From this variety of learning experiences students can derive increasing understanding of their own talents and capabilities, and from that understanding they can build a personal commitment to develop their talents. Using this model, school counselors are assigned the task of helping all students gain acceptance in some appropriate groups, while the coordinator of gifted programs and services (with the new title of “talent development specialist”) would have the task of identifying, with the help of teachers, students’ specific strengths and aptitudes and organizing as many activities, classes, and services as possible to serve the needs of youths with special talents.

The TIDE alternative

Talents are capabilities in specific domains of aptitude. Some young people are very highly talented academically, artistically, in technical areas, or in interpersonal activities, while others have moderate or low levels of these special talents. Academic talents (e.g., mathematics, social studies, writing, science, literature) show themselves in classroom learning and on standardized achievement tests. Artistic talents are revealed in art classes, competitions, and performances. The technical areas of talent include computers, industrial technology, home arts, agriculture, nursing, and so on, and high levels of performance in these areas, both inside and outside of school, are evidence of such talent strengths. Finally, the interpersonal talents include special ability in leadership, teaching, counseling, care giving, and so on. Indeed, we agree heartily with Howard Gardner, who has said, “It is clear that many talents, if not intelligences, are overlooked nowadays; individuals with these talents are the chief casualties of the single-minded, single-funneled approach to the mind.”²⁰

We were thrilled theoretically and practically when we first saw Francoys Gagne’s model of talent development, suggesting that the direction of the development of human abilities is from broad, general aptitudes toward increasingly specific talents.²¹ Gagne has pursued acareer-oriented, programmatic line of research, establishing the nature and development of human talents.

Our own research at Purdue University and with many public schools, hundreds of teachers, and thousands of young people convinces us that there is an urgent need in all schools to help students at all levels of achievement and ability to identify their special aptitudes and talents. All schools also need to provide instruction, services, activities, and guidance tohelp students optimize the development of their talents.²² Many talents can be identified through testing, but observation and ratings of students in real, challenging learning activities are the ideal ways to discover and nurture students’ domain-specific talents.

We must broaden our conception of human talents beyond the narrow academic focus that now prevails in schools. The assessment of talents is both an “inter-student” process of finding those with high levels of talent and an “intra-student” process of helping each student find his or her own talent strengths. We must recognize that talent identification is a long-term process that depends on a wide variety of tests and challenging learning experiences in which teachers and others provide feedback that helps students come to understand the nature of their own talents and to commit themselves to their long-range development.

It is undesirable to identify some students as “gifted” and the rest as “ungifted.” All students at all ages have relative talent strengths, and schools should help students identify and understand their own special abilities. Those whose talents are at levels exceptionally higher than those of their peers should have access to instructional resources and activities that are commensurate with their talents. The one-size-fits-all mentality that is at least partly an outgrowth of the inclusion movement reflects a mistaken view of human development. Highly talented young people suffer boredom and negative peer pressure in heterogeneous classrooms.²³ Students at all ages and grade levels are entitled to challenging and appropriate instruction if they are to develop their talents fully.

Sidney Marland, Education of the Gifted and Talented: Report to the Congress of the United States by the S. Commissioner of Education (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972).
Joseph Renzulli, The Enrichment Triad Model: A Guide for Developing Defensible Programs for the Gifted (Mansfield Center, : Creative Learning Press, 1977); June Cox, Neil Daniels, and Bruce Boston, Educating Able Learners: Programs and Promising Practices (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); S. M. Moon, John F. Feldhusen, and Deborah R. Dillon, “Long-Term Effects of an Enrichment Program Based on the Purdue Three-Stage Model,” Gifted Child Quarterly, vol. 38, 1994, pp. 38-48; and John F. Feldhusen, Steve M. Hoover, and Michael F. Sayler, Identifying and Educating Gifted Students at the Secondary Level (Monroe, N.Y.: Trillium Press, 1990).
S. Department of Education, National Excellence: A Case for Developing America’s Talent (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993).
Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); and Cox, Daniels, and Boston, op. cit.
Paul Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1988).
Paul Kingston and Lionel S. Lewis, The High Status Track (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. xi.
David Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis (NewYork: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 211.
Charles Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
Ellen Winner, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
Karen Westberg, Francis X. Archambault, Jr., and Scott W. Brown, “A Survey of Classroom Practices with Third- and Fourth-Grade Students in the United States,” Gifted Education International, vol. 12, 1997, pp. 29-33.
Alexina Baldwin and Jay Wooster, Baldwin Identification Matrix for the Identification of Gifted and Talented Students (Buffalo, Y.: DOK Publishers, 1977).
E. Susan Richert, James J. Alvino, and Robert C. McDonnel, National Report on Identification: Assessment and Recommendations for Comprehensive Identification of Gifted and Talented Youth (Sewell, NJ.: Educational Improvement Center-South, 1982).
Vicki Vaughn, John F. Feldhusen, and William Asher, “Meta-analyses and Review of Research on Pull-out Programs in Gifted Education,” Gifted Child Quarterly, vol. 35, 1991, pp. 92-98.
Cox, Daniels, and Boston, cit.; and F. P. Belcastro, “Elementary Pullout Programs for the Intellectually Gifted -Boon or Bane?,” Roeper Review, vol. 9, 1987, pp. 208-12.
James Kulik, An Analysis of the Research on Ability: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Storrs, Conn.: National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, 1992).
Oakes, cit.; and Robert E. Slavin, Cooperative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990).
John Feldhusen, Talent Identification and Development in Education, 2nd ed. (Sarasota, Fla.: Center for Creative Learning, 1995).
Ibid.; and John F. Feldhusen, Betty J. Wood, and David Yuu Dai, “Gifted Students’ Perception of Their Talents,” Gifted and Talented International, in press.
Kenneth Seeley, “Perspectives on Adolescent Giftedness and Delinquency,” Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 8, 1984, pp. 59-72; and Kenneth W. McCluskey et al., Lost Prizes, Talent Development, and Problem Solving with At-Risk Students (Sarasota, Fla.: Center for Creative Learning, 1995).
Howard Gardner, “If Teaching Had Looked Beyond the Classroom: The Development and Education oflntelligence,” Innotech Journal, 16, 1992, p. 31.
Francoys Gagne, “From Giftedness to Talent: A Developmental Model and Its Impact on the Language of the Field,” Roeper Review, 18, 1995, pp. 103-11.
John Feldhusen, “How to Identify and Develop Special Talents,” Educational Leadership, February 1996, pp. 66-69.
James Gallagher, Christine Harradine, and Mary Ruth Coleman, “Challenge or Boredom? Gifted Students on Their Learning,” Roeper Review, 19, 1997, pp. 132-36.