philobiblius

"Vast sums are yearly squandered to no purpose. If the books selected consist of extracts and compilations, wholly unsuited to the capacity of children - if the house is cold or crowded, inconvenient and uncomfortable - and especially if given over to the management of an incompetent teacher, the school becomes a scene of anarchy and confusion, and all is waste-the young mind becomes disgusted with books and schools and teachers, and hates learning forever after.

...

"The entire premises... should be an enchanting spot, sheltered alike from the cold blasts of winder, and the summer's scorching sun; a place of love, of kindness and good will; and not a place of whips, consternation, despotism and terror."

J. D. Pierce, Sup't of Schools, Michigan, December, 1836 (Senate Document 7)
from
Journal of the Senate of the State of Michigan, January, 1837.

(also from System of Public Instruction and Primary School Law of Michigan (Document No. 6)
Prepared by Francis W. Sherman, Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1852)

More from the 1968 report to President Johnson on "Gifted Persons."

"These twin requirements of increasing instructional speed and quantity without decreasing quality have generated new administrative arrangements and stimulated an educational technology that can aid the development of programs for gifted students. The newer administrative arrangements -- better methods for apportioning students, teachers, and the talents of both -- include:

1. Nongraded classes: This term does not imply that students receive no grades for performance. Rather, it recognizes that a student might be capable of performing at the sixth grade level in mathematics and science, at the fifth-grade level in social sciences, and at the eighth-grade in English. Nongraded classes permit students to move among the grade levels for each area of study, rather than taking all classes at one level. Some schools -- those in the Pittsburgh area, for example -- have experimented with cooperative arrangements involving schools at different levels (for example, junior and senior high schools), and a number of colleges permit outstanding high school students to enroll in college courses while completing high school requirements.*

2. Team teaching: ... Team teaching, in short, enables each teacher to do what he or she is best at, and gives all students the best instruction that the staff can provide in each subject.

3. Individually prescribed instruction: ... IPI, in essence, allows students to choose their own assignments each day in consultation with the teachers, permits each to work alone on that assignment, and then checks the student's performance to diagnose any learning problems he may have and gauge his readiness to undertake more difficult work. Each student moves at his own pace in each subject, working as fast as he can, as far as he can. Carefully planned curricular materials, including film-slides and recordings as well as printed matter, perform much of the routine instructional work, freeing teachers to provide help to those students who need it, and freeing students from the necessity of listening to group lectures they do not need.

4. Flexible scheduling: There is no intrinsic reason why each class period should last 50 minutes, but -- with the exception of occasional two-hour laboratory periods -- most classes do, whether in English or algebra or playing the oboe. By recognizing that some units of learning can profitably be taught in less time than others, and by structuring the class day in varying multiples of 20 minutes, say, flexible scheduling permits the student to spend more or less time on each subject as appropriate.

5. Self-directed learning or independent study: Long used by good teachers as a means of relieving exceptional students from unnecessary repetition, this approach is particularly appropriate in small schools where special programs for the talented are not feasible. It can also be used in larger schools where a relatively few students have such unusual abilities or talents that they do not fit anywhere in the regular or special programs. Some of the more innovative schools -- Nova High School in Fort Lauderdale, for example -- have built their whole program around some combination of independent study and nongradedness.

6. Resource centers: These provide facilities and equipment for enabling gifted students, individually or in groups, to carry on activities appropriate for their talent development. Such a center may serve students from a single school or from a whole group of schools.

Each of these methods recognizes that (1) students differ in their rates of learning, even though they may be the same age and share the same classroom; (2) a uniform rate of class progression based on the learning ability of the majority can bore fast learners and frustrate slow learners; and (3) children -- even young ones -- have a genuine appetite for learning which can be stimulated by offering each the precise kind and amount of knowledge he is ready to consume. Continuing this chef's analogy,we might say that administrative arrangements such as those outlined above permit a school to offer a daily smorgasbord of learning in place of the same menu for everybody.

*Meeting the Needs of the Able Student Through Provisions for Flexible Progressions, C.M. Lindvall with the collaboration of J. Steele Gow,Jr., and Francis J. Rifugiato. A report of the Regional Commission on Educational Coordination and the Coordinated Education Center. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962.

"No greater foe to the genuine equality of opportunity which our educational, as our political system, implies, can be found than the belief that equality can be attained by ignoring or denying diversity of gifts or by submerging all elevations in the vast ocean of the commonplace.
...
"The supreme test of a teacher's efficiency is not how well he has awakened sluggish minds, or how far he has led the capable, or what excellencies he has discovered, but how few he has "failed." Reward for, or even recognition of, high achievement in any line save athletics is singularly lacking.
...
"Soon we shall hear that college itself has been appropriated by the aspiring crowd and the inspiring dictum shall go forth that human society owes every child a college education.
...
"It is undoubtedly true, as we are continually being reminded, that the public schools as they stand, do not produce the citizenship needed for the work ahead of the country.' But in all fairness, how can they be expected to when the whole tendency of teaching and of administration is toward the minimizing of distinctions by virtue of which alone special efficiency of any sort is possible?"

~ Frank P. Whitney,
Equality and the Schools in Education, Vol. 33, No. 2 (October, 1912)

Dr. Borland has returned to the battles of taking gifted children and programs away, in the name of "reforming" gifted education. Here is the first of his blogs on the topic:
http://www.creativitypost.com/education/problematizing_gifted_education_part_i_why_problematize

This is his book on the same theme from 9 years ago:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Rethinking_gifted_education.html?id=ZIZJiXMUYS0C

This was my response to the blog entry:

With all do respect, Dr. Borland -

I start from a different set of premises than yours. The field of gifted education has, at its core, the goal of ensuring that gifted children receive an appropriate education.

The *methods* of how we go about doing so are highly contests. In fact, for all that you talk about going to the roots to have "gifted education without gifted students" as a novel approach to be adopted, it is neither novel nor radical (in the sense of diverging from roots). Gifted education grew out of just such an environment and there plenty of places which have neither gifted programs nor gifted students so far as the schools are concerned.

"Differentiated curriculum" is a lovely notion with its own roots going back to a period before the field of gifted education came into being. Currently, it presents the notion of trying to reach each student (not each gifted student) in the ways that are most effective. However, as research has shown us repeatedly over the last few decades, differentiation happens far more in school literature and even law than it does in the bulk of our classrooms.

Nor has our practice reached a "dead end." It has certainly encountered any number of obstacles, but there is a substantial difference between those and a place in which there is no progress nor from which there can be progress.

There have been successful programs and unsuccessful programs for as long as there has been gifted education. Schools such as the North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics work. To suggest that such institutions are in any way at a dead end seems to me absurd. Conversely, the bandage programs designed to make G/T parents quiet while not providing substantial programming are, as you suggest, at a dead end - but they have been since their creation, because they are not gifted programs!

None of the proposals I have read that follow the notion you have advocated for several years now address the single greatest need of gifted students --> other gifted students. Nor do they address the second greatest need of gifted students in schools --> teachers who understand their needs. Without those two factors addressed, while your new-fangled programs may not seem to be at a dead end, the gifted students may well be.
*************


For 80 years, one drum beat has echoed through the national reports: "that all teachers [should] be given instruction in regard to what they can do for the gifted child."

It is not that our gifted programs have reached a dead end, Dr. Borland.

They have never been given a chance to start.