National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent: Introduction

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent - October 1993

Foreword

More than 20 years have elapsed since the last national report on the status of educating gifted and talented students. Much has changed since that report alerted Americans to the pressing needs of these youngsters and challenged policymakers to provide them with a better education.

National Excellence: The Case for Developing America's Talent discusses these changes. It also describes the "quiet crisis" that continues in how we educate top students. Youngsters with gifts and talents that range from mathematical to musical are still not challenged to work to their full potential. Our neglect of these students makes it impossible for Americans to compete in a global economy demanding their skills.

Americans can celebrate improvements over the past two decades in how we educate gifted and talented students. The public is more aware that these students have special needs that are seldom met. The number of programs for gifted and talented youngsters has grown substantially. Many states have enacted legislation encouraging local school districts to provide special opportunities for high-achieving and talented students. And, most significantly, model programs for gifted and talented students have challenged educators to improve curriculum and teaching strategies and encouraged them to raise expectations for all students.

But American education is now at a turning point--one that requires us to reach beyond current programs and practices. As the nation strives to improve its schools, the concerns of students with outstanding talents must not be ignored. International tests comparing American students with those in other countries show that students at all levels of achievement are not performing as well as students in many other countries. It is clear that many more American students must learn more complex material, and to do this they must work harder.

All of our students, including the most able, can learn more than we now expect. But it will take a major national commitment for this to occur. By recommending ways to move beyond our "quiet crisis," this report can point us in the right direction.

Richard W. Riley

Secretary of Education

Acknowledgments

Manley Lanier "Sonny" Carter, Jr., served as a member of the steering group for this report until his untimely death in a commuter plane crash in 1991. A man of many talents, Sonny was an astronaut, a "Top Gun" pilot, a physician, a professional soccer player, and most importantly, a devoted father and huand. He was the embodiment of excellence, grace, and modesty. Unassuming despite all his many achievements, he cared deeply about American education and spent much of his time working with young people. He combined professional excellence and personal integrity in a way that serves as a model for us all.

Many people contributed substantially to the development of this report. A steering group provided overall guidance and advice to the U.S. Department of Education throughout the process of developing the report. Their counsel was invaluable in shaping the document. They are:

David Bennett, president, Education Alternatives, Inc., St. Paul, Minnesota.

Manley Lanier "Sonny" Carter, Jr. (deceased), NASA astronaut, Houston, Texas.

Carol Charles, middle school teacher, Olympia, Washington.

Martha Bridge Denckla, director, Developmental Neurobehavior Clinic, Kennedy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

Bessie Duncan, supervisor, Gifted and Talented Education, Detroit Public Schools, Detroit, Michigan.

David Henry Feldman, professor of child development, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts.

William Foster, chief of staff, New Jersey Department of Labor, Trenton, New Jersey.

Mary Frasier, professor and director, Torrance Center for Creative Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.

James Gallagher, Kenan Professor of Education and director of the Carolina Policy Institute for Child and Family Policy, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Lotte Geller, teacher, Roeper School for Gifted Students, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Judith Berry Griffin, president, A Better Chance, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts.

Kenneth Hope, director, MacArthur Fellows Program, MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois.

Samuel Kostman, retired superintendent of Queens High Schools, Queens, New York.

Leroy Lovelace, teacher, Wendell Phillips High School, Chicago, Illinois.

Al Ramirez, executive deputy superintendent, Illinois State Board of Education, Springfield, Illinois.

Joseph Renzulli, professor of gifted education and director of the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented Education, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.

Valerie Terry Seaberg, State Director for Gifted and Talented, Maine Department of Education, Augusta, Maine.

William Thurston, mathematician, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California.

Stuart Tonemah, president, American Indian Research and Development, Inc., Norman, Oklahoma.

Special appreciation goes to Sally Reis for providing invaluable background information for consideration by the steering group and also for reviewing many drafts of the document. Other reviewers from outside the Department include Mary Ruth Coleman, Karen Rodgers, Beverly Parke, Emily Stewart, Barbara Clark, Carolyn Callahan, Harry Passow, Evelyn Levsky Hiatt, Nancy Mincemoyer, Sarah Smith, Linda Barnett, and June Cox. Thanks also go to Bruce Boston for providing early drafts of the report for the group's consideration.

Many people within the Office of Educational Research and Improvement contributed to the development of this document. Nancy Paulu worked extensively on the document and gave it its polish. Annora Dorsey wrote and edited sections of the report. Other contributors included Margaret Chavez, Ivor Pritchard, Nelson Smith, Milton Goldberg, Barbara Lieb, Beverly Coleman, Norma Lindsay, Lois Peak, and Eve Bither.

The report was developed under the leadership of Pat O'Connell Ross, Director of the Javits Gifted and Talented Education Program.

Executive Summary

The United States is squandering one of its most precious resources--the gifts, talents, and high interests of many of its students. In a broad range of intellectual and artistic endeavors, these youngsters are not challenged to do their best work. This problem is especially severe among economically disadvantaged and minority students, who have access to fewer advanced educational opportunities and whose talents often go unnoticed.

Reforming American schools depends on challenging students to work harder and master more complex material. Few would argue against this for students performing at low or average levels. But we must also challenge our top-performing students to greater heights if our nation is to achieve a world class educational system. In order to make economic strides, America must rely upon many of its top-performing students to provide leadership--in mathematics, science, writing, politics, dance, art, business, history, health, and other human pursuits.

A number of indicators point to the need to change the way we educate our talented students. For example,

Compared with top students in other industrialized countries, American students perform poorly on international tests, are offered a less rigorous curriculum, read fewer demanding books, do less homework, and enter the work force or postsecondary education less well prepared.
Not enough American students perform at the highest levels on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, which provide one of the few indicators available of how well our students achieve.

The tendency for Americans to hold low academic expectations is not new. Throughout history, Americans have shown ambivalence about high academic and artistic performance and interest. We prize creativity and academic success, particularly if it leads to a practical accomplishment. But some also pin negative names such as nerd or dweeb on students who excel academically, and high-achieving minority students are sometimes accused of "acting white."

Most American students are encouraged to finish high school and earn good grades. But students are not asked to work hard or master a body of challenging knowledge or skills. The message society often sends to students is to aim for academic adequacy, not academic excellence.

Effective programs for gifted and talented students exist throughout the country, but many are limited in scope and substance. Most gifted and talented students spend their school days without attention paid to their special learning needs. Recent studies show that:

Gifted and talented elementary school students have mastered from 35 to 50 percent of the curriculum to be offered in five basic subjects before they begin the school year.
Most regular classroom teachers make few, if any, provisions for talented students.
Most of the highest-achieving students in the nation included in Who's Who Among American High School Students reported that they studied less than an hour a day. This suggests they get top grades without having to work hard.
In the one national survey available, only 2 cents out of every $100 spent on K-12 education in the United States in 1990 supported special opportunities for talented students.

To improve education opportunities for America's top students, the following steps must be taken:

Set challenging curriculum standards. The content standards, curriculum, and assessment practices must challenge all students, including those who are talented.
Provide more challenging opportunities to learn. Communities and schools must provide more and better opportunities for top students to learn advanced material and move at their own pace. Flexibility and variety are essential. Learning opportunities for exceptional students must be available both inside and outside the school building.
Increase access to early childhood education. All children, but particularly poor and minority children, must have opportunities to participate in high-quality early childhood programs that emphasize the development of their strengths rather than focus on their deficiencies.
Increase learning opportunities for disadvantaged and minority children with outstanding talents. These youngsters need extra support to overcome their barriers to achievement. Schools must make more high-level learning experiences available to these students.
Broaden the definition of gifted. States and districts need to rethink their definitions and assessment strategies to serve a wider range of talented students. In the past 20 years, new research has challenged the view that intelligence is fixed and can be measured by one test.
Today, researchers know that intelligence takes many forms and therefore requires that many criteria be used to measure it. This understanding has led educators to question traditional definitions of intelligence and current assessment practices and procedures. Educators must identify outstanding talent by observing students in settings that enable them to display their abilities, rather than relying solely on test scores.
The following definition, based on the definition in the federal Javits Gifted and Talented Education Act, reflects today's knowledge and thinking:

Children and youth with outstanding talent perform or show the potential for performing at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when compared with others of their age, experience, or environment.
These children and youth exhibit high performance capability in intellectual, creative, and/or artistic areas, possess an unusual leadership capacity, or excel in specific academic fields. They require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the schools.
Outstanding talents are present in children and youth from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, and in all areas of human endeavor.
Emphasize teacher development. Teachers must receive better training in how to teach high-level curricula. They need support for providing instruction that challenges all students sufficiently. This will benefit not only students with outstanding talent but children at every academic level.
Match world performance. The United States must learn from nations whose top students perform well and take steps to ensure that high-achieving American students compare favorably with their counterparts around the world.

The nation's governors and the President recognized the need to improve education for students with outstanding talent when they convened in 1989 for the historical Education Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia. They defined six National Education Goals and declared that meeting them by the year 2000 "will require that the performance of our highest achievers be boosted to levels that equal or exceed the performance of the best students anywhere." Our challenge is to raise expectations for all students in America, including those with outstanding talent.

The general objects--are to provide an education adapted to the years, the capacity, and the condition of everyone, and directed to their freedom and happiness--We hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.
Thomas Jefferson
Notes on Virginia

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[Part I.]