Cultivating Talent & Serving Underrepresented Gifted Students
By Paula M Olszewski-Kubilius and Eric Calvert
There have been a number of articles circulating recently on topics within gifted education. The main focus has been on the general lack of services for gifted students within schools, and particularly the underrepresentation of minority and low-income children within existing gifted programs. We at Center for Talent Development (CTD) welcome discussion around these important issues and support this raising of overall awareness.
The issues raised in recent articles have been core concerns of ours for some time, as well as a major focus within CTD research. CTD’s mission is to uncover student talent and provide services to academically gifted students and their families. Based on our experience and scholarship, and as a service to our readers, we would like to add just a few thoughts to the conversation.
The field of gifted education has been consumed, historically, with issues surrounding the identification of gifted students. Rightly, much recent research and discussion has been about finding ways to identify children who are all too often overlooked. The search for some magic means has been unsuccessful because the reality is that any test, whether it measures achievement or IQ, will be influenced by a student’s previous opportunities to learn. And, conceiving of gifted education as a single program with a pre-determined number of seats, for which students must ferociously compete, creates a rationing mindset.
Rather than seeing “The Gifted Program” as a one-time assessment or class in a single room, it would be beneficial to reconceive gifted education as a diverse continuum of services, including early enrichment for all students, so talent and abilities can emerge and be noticed. Equally important are acceleration opportunities for students who are functioning above grade-level in particular areas, as well as individualized opportunities for students to pursue their unique strengths and interests. In other words, we need different kind of programs for student who have different kinds of talents and who are at different stages of developing those talents.
We applaud strategies such as early universal screening for giftedness, but would add that screening for giftedness must be continuous throughout a student’s educational path. Additionally, we encourage our colleagues in the field of gifted education to join us in researching the potential of front-loading talent development interventions. This flips the traditional sequence of identification followed by service, thus providing gifted education-like services to students from disadvantaged backgrounds prior to formally assessing these students for gifted identification. The Young Scholars program in Fairfax County, Virginia and Project Excite in Evanston, Illinois are good examples of this approach.
We also encourage school leaders, gifted education advocates, and policy influencers to explore important recent research on this topic from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation (JKCF) in Closing the Excellence Gap, as well as the Talent on the Sidelines Report published through the University of Connecticut. In the upcoming fall edition of our newsletter, Talent, we will stay with this issue as I discuss talent development for students with financial need, while a highlight will be placed on a former JKCF Young Scholar who served as a college ambassador for CTD’s Civic Education Project.
Recent articles surrounding the topic: