I don't know anyone -- certainly not in education -- who doesn't believe that we should strive to ensure that every student leaves schools with a set of basic skills . One of the many problems with No Child left behind, however, is that its mandates are almost exclusively set at the bottom end of the achievement spectrum, with little actual incentive to MAXIMIZE student achievement among those who are capable of doing more than the minimum. The result is funding cuts for programs for our best and brightest students.

But across the country, programs like this can be hard to sustain. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires that virtually all children become proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014, and this demand is forcing many school districts to focus attention — and money — on students who are not proficient in reading or math. Many families of exceptionally bright children like to say that it is the gifted who are being left behind.

In the years after the lawÂ’s signing in January 2002, Illinois jettisoned its $19 million allocation for gifted programs and Michigan cut spending to $250,000 from $4 million. Here in Connecticut, 22 percent of the stateÂ’s districts eliminated or shrank gifted programs in 2002, and others have since scaled back. It doesnÂ’t take a gifted person to figure out that the law is siphoning off the money.

“N.C.L.B. swallows up resources,” said Jeanne H. Purcell, Connecticut’s consultant for gifted education.

The federal government provides less than $10 million for gifted programs, and only half the states offer additional money. But districts needing to pay for after-school tutoring or other score-raising remedies needed under No Child Left Behind inevitably poach dollars from programs for students who already score high.

“Our education reform is so focused on making sure everybody is mediocre that we haven’t thought about meeting the needs of those students already exceeding those goals,” said Susan Rhodes, principal of Iles Elementary School in Springfield, Ill. “Everybody assumes those children are going to continue to grow. But it’s like an athlete with potential. If they don’t have a coach, that skill is not going to be drawn out.”

But what is worse, is that the kids KNOW they are getting screwed. I might not have blogged about this article at all, but for the fact that it dovetails so nicely with a conversation I had yesterday with one of my students, who is frustrated by the many district-mandated activities and strategies designed to drag the lowest performing students up to standard.

"Mr. RWR," she said to me, "it is the same in every one of my classes! We've got so many special activities to boost our test scores on the TAKS test, but not any to take us deeper into what we are learning about. It's like everything is focused on the bottom 20%. When do the top 20% get something special to keep us from being bored out of our minds by the constant pressure to pass a test that we could have passed before the school year started?"

And she is right. When will we stop shortchanging the kids with the sharpest minds in order to ensure that the weakest links are not left behind?

Posted by: Greg at 11:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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