It is nice to think that maybe if our smart kids get a label, we can figure out what they need. That maybe if they are capable enough to pass gifted screening and tests that perhaps they will get the classes they need or the support we as parents really want for them. Unfortunately, though, giftedness is hard to quantify or qualify even when they can pass a test. And those tests don’t tell us much about their abilities or their challenges. So, instead of asking if a child is gifted, the real thing we should be asking is “what the heck am I going to do with him/her?” Because the issue is not whether they can pass the tests or get the classes or even if they can get on some waiting list for services that all seem to be this amazing answer to our prayers. The real issue is, will those programs or classes or services even matter in the scheme of things? Will they focus on the things my child needs? Will they eliminate the things about school that don’t work well for any kid? Will they keep our children happy? Will they make them love learning? Will they make them a better person and give them the futures we hope they will achieve?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the truth is, labels and classes are only a small part of the equation. The real issues are, how will our gifted children grow in ways that won’t make them feel weirder. How will they find teachers who love them and can see their true selves and who will guide them forward instead of hold them back? How will they discover themselves and stay true to who they are through the peer pressures to conform or do dangerous things or just plain make it through the years without being more full of doubt than self-worth?
It’s great to have children who learn quickly. It’s cool to be a parent of a smart kid. For about two minutes. Then it’s work. It is full-on, headache-inducing, anxiety-stoking, stay-up-late-and-worry-about-all-sorts-of-stuff, isolating and sometimes disappointing WORK. There’s nothing easy about gifted children. They don’t even achieve in ways that are easy to deal with. Instead of worrying about if they got their homework done by the end of the evening like other parents do, you either have to worry about whether they are throwing a fit because the work is annoying or that it is too easy or that they refuse to do it at all because they might not do it perfectly and god forbid they look less than smart. Or, you might have one of those kids who won’t stop- they don’t just do today’s section of the workbook, they do the whole thing and then don’t show any of their work and the teachers get mad and send it back the next day with notes for you to sign and a new packet of homework because now they can’t trust your kid to have an actual book. Or, maybe you will have the kid who reads all the extra stuff about the topic on the internet and writes a novel about the subject and they come home from school the next day in tears about how other kids bullied them for being weird or a know-it-all, or who knows what. It’s never just a “hey, is your homework done?” It’s a “NOW WHAT?!” and all sorts of mental hoop-jumping to try to figure out how to keep your kid on-track so they don’t drop out in third grade.
Maybe that doesn’t fit your kid. Maybe your kid is behind in that subject and refuses to do the work because they really don’t know how to do it and don’t want to do it because they can’t. And no one at school is aware of their learning gaps because they talk a good talk about things in-person and they have this gifted label that means your kid shouldn’t have gaps, right? But we know that’s not true. And that a lot of gifted kids don’t pay attention in class, or they aren’t interested in the topic, or they just plain old struggle with math or reading or whatever it is and they can’t do it. So, then we have to be the teachers and we have been working all day and don’t really want to have to figure out the new math and explain it to a child who is already at wits-end and refusing to even listen to us because we are the last person they want lecturing them at dinnertime. It’s always something.
It is not easy to have the child who you can’t talk to other parents about because they roll their eyes and say thing about how nice it must be to have such a smart and high-achieving gifted kid, while theirs struggle with something else. It’s not like they believe you when you tell them your child also is struggling with things, because giftedness is supposed to equal perfection in the world of stereotypes. But yet you know your child cries at night sometimes because they are lonely, or that they can tell their teacher is frustrated with all the times they raised their hand to answer something. Or that they have twice exceptional issues that have been masked for years behind their ability to guess on assignments in the lower grades and now in middle or high school they are failing miserably because they really can’t read well, or they have slow processing speeds and the classes go too fast, and they are never going to admit that to the teacher. It’s hard to have the gifted kid who is also a behavior problem because they are emotionally younger than what adults expect them to be because they know as much as a college student about American History. Or that teen who is so advanced that they can’t be in regular classes with other kids their age but the adults who are their academic peers are not appropriate friends for sleep overs. It isn’t easy having the kids who other kids think of as the smarty pants, teacher-pleasers, or the nerds, even if really, they are the coolest humans we know and we wish everyone else could see it.
Giftedness isn’t the be-all, end-all. Giftedness is just the beginning. The label is a tool, but only useful if there is something worth building. If your child is supposed to attend a fulltime gifted program they don’t want to attend because all their other friends are at the neighborhood school, then that tool is not as helpful. If the school district still makes gifted students take their age-based standardized tests, even though they are three grade levels ahead, it doesn’t matter if they are labeled or not- the tool isn’t getting them into the right world to actually help them love learning. And if the label means the school administrators assume they are brilliantly high-achieving in every area and puts them on a high-achieving track for classes, but they aren’t skilled at math or reading and they end up more and more behind because they are shuffled into courses that aren’t really their levels, that isn’t helpful either. There are so many scenarios where gifted labeling doesn’t actually help gifted kids get where they need to be, and so many ways that we can still fail our gifted kids no matter whether they get that label or not.
But if we ask instead what the heck we can do with them, and look at the different options… or even question existing options and push for new ones that work better for what they need… we can get farther than just looking for the label. I’ve found most people who care so much about the label are either really optimistic and hope the schools will somehow get it right for their child once they have the label, or they are just raising high achievers who sometimes pass those same tests and aren’t actually in need of gifted services and their parents use the gifted label like some kind of trophy. Because it sounds cool to those who don’t know any better. It sounds like a win in a school system that is based on competition and rising to the top of the standardized and industrial movement that values the ones who can jump through the hoops best. But it’s not a win for those who don’t jump through hoops well and who question the whole basis of the system and refuse to jump at all sometimes. It can be more of a loss than a win, and that loss can carry through their lives and create all sorts of social emotional heartache. They may never find their niche in the system and they may always think they aren’t great learners. And yet they could have been if they’d had different options.
So many dropouts were once gifted children. So many people in prison were once gifted children. In fact, giftedness is supposed to only be found statistically in three to five percent of the population, yet about twenty percent of prisoners were found to be gifted, according to Marylou Kelly Streznewski in her book Gifted Grown Ups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential. And kids who come from low income or non-caucasian and non-asian homes have even higher risks of dropping out before obtaining their high school diplomas. I’m not making this stuff up- researchers such as Joseph Renzuli and Sunghee Park have done studies to see who is dropping out, and found that non-white/non-asian kids had a much higher risk of dropping out of high school and almost half of those who did were in the lowest socio-economic status. It’s no surprise that poverty and racial biases impact whether kids want to be in school or can focus at all on their learning. So gifted labels don’t combat those social issues nearly enough to keep them motivated. Gifted labels often don’t do a whole lot unless the people using that knowledge will craft individualized learning support that actually use additional knowledge about who their students really are and what they need and want. Not many gifted programs have the flexibility and political support to be able to actually pull that off.
I’ve written about what we can do as a country to improve educational opportunities and hope you will read more of my writing such as my SENG Vine articles, The Ultimate Plan to Help Gifted Education (and Improve Education for All Kids in the Process) (sengifted.org), and Talking Circles: You Aren't Going to Get There Paddling That Old Boat (sengifted.org). But in the end, we need to look out for our kids (yours and mine together, and all the other ones falling through the cracks,) and find ways to save them while the education system catches up on saving itself. It’s not going to happen in time for our kids. So, we have to ask those questions ourselves and ask them loudly:
What will the district do for our child WHEN THEY ARE LABELED GIFTED? What will the district do for our child WHEN THEY ARE STRUGGLING EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE GIFTED? What will the district do for our child WHEN THEY DON’T FIT INTO THE SYSTEM YOU BUILT FOR THE GIFTED? And what will we all do for the children WHEN THE FUNDING FOR GIFTED CHILDREN IS ALLOCATED WRONG? There are so many questions we should all be asking. Why are programs continuing to pretend to serve the gifted but are just higher-level copies of the regular standardized programs for all kids? Why are we still using identification strategies that leave so many kids out? Why are testing and curriculum companies continuing to sell terrible products to so many districts that are labeled as being for gifted students when we all know the gifted kids don’t fit into neat little curriculum and testing boxes? Why are districts not individualizing learning more, especially now that the whole world went virtual for a while and they had the perfect excuse to change the system and rebuild it so much better for all kids?
I have so many questions, but they all stem from the one that I think we should all be asking FIRST. “What the heck will you (the district, the school, the teacher, the legislators, etc.) do for my child?” No matter the label. No matter what talents they express or don’t express. And whatever misbehaviors or lack of motivation they may or may not show. What the heck will you do to make sure all of our children achieve? What the heck will you do to make sure we find ways to reach all of the gifted kids who your tests don’t find, that your teachers don’t like, or that your funding can’t afford to serve because you are so focused on serving them in expensive ways instead of just serving them better without trying to stuff them into your little boxes?
It’s obvious I care deeply about these questions. After years of watching districts fail to find and serve students, and seeing so many line up for the school to prison pipeline, and having kids I’ve loved very much die at their own hands because they have been failed so miserably by the system and those who believe so strongly in making them step in line. I am jaded and mad and so sad. There are better ways to reach our kids. There are better ways to find what they need and how to best support and encourage them. And there are certainly better ways to help them find what they want to do and to get them where they need to be. But until everyone cares this deeply, until everyone has seen what it can do to a whole community to lose out on a special gifted soul who is imprisoned or dies way too young, those of us who care this deeply need to talk about how hard it is to raise and nurture our gifted kids. They are not just smart kids. They are not just high achievers. But if we stop at asking if they deserve a label, we miss the whole thing.