Sandra Watkins is an associate professor in educational leadership at Western Illinois University. Darren Erickson is principal of Tampico Elementary School in Tampico, Illinois, and a sixth-year student in the WIU superintendent program.
Let’s begin with a question: Have you checked the achievement progress of your high-ability learners on the Illinois Interactive Report Card lately? If not, you might find a shocking trend in the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) results for students in the “exceeds” category.
In many cases, while the number of students who “meet or exceed” state standards has increased, the percent of those who “exceed,” i.e. those who truly excel in the classroom, has decreased.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was designed to shine a light on low-achieving students, especially those in racial and socio-economic subgroups, in order to provide accountability for districts to improve learning. Many dollars and much time have been spent trying to increase student achievement — especially for the lowest quartile and those students who may be “on the bubble” in terms of just missing the “meets” standards.
If school boards want to ensure that the needs of all students are met, they need policies that provide direction for administrators, and in turn teachers, regarding expectations for student learning and achievement. If school boards say in policy that they want all children to achieve “to the best of their ability,” that should include not only ramping up the learning supports for low-achieving students but also addressing the needs of high-ability learners. We contend those needs should include provisions to implement accelerated learning when indicated.
While attention has been focused on low-performing students, attention also should be paid to high-ability learners to ensure these students are not left behind either.
NCLB requires school districts to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) with the goal of 100 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards by 2014. Sanctions come into play when a school or a district fails meet the percentage for “meets or exceeds” set for AYP. But when high-ability learners fall from the “exceeds” category to “meets” on the ISAT from one grade to the next, such shifts often go unnoticed. And there are no ramifications.
This loss is not counted against the school or the district because it is not calculated for AYP. The state and federal government do not differentiate between students who “meet” and those who “exceed” on the ISAT. They are viewed equally and have the same impact on AYP.
Teachers and principals say they spend the majority of their time working with the struggling learners or students in the middle in an attempt to get these students to “meet” standards, with little regard as to whether they “exceed.” As a result, the instructional needs of high-ability learners can go unmet. When that happens, underachievement sets in, and mediocrity and complacency become the standard for their behavior.
This is a tremendous loss to their school district, the state, the nation and the world. So what is the responsibility and role of school boards with this dilemma?
History of acceleration
Historically speaking, school boards have been involved with decision making on high-ability learners since the beginning of local board control. Academic acceleration was alive and well before the 19th century and considered a very viable option.
In “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students,” Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline and Miraca U.M. Gross define “acceleration” as “an educational intervention based on progress through an educational program at rates faster or at ages younger than typical.”
In the third chapter, “History of Acceleration in America,” the authors list 18 different ways to accelerate learning and write about students in one-room schoolhouses learning at their own pace.
Students were accelerated at mid-term, at the end of the year, and if they transferred from another district, an assessment was made to facilitate the right academic fit. Age was not the sole criteria for a child’s academic placement. Student performance and academic achievement were used to seek the “right educational” placement.
This practice began to change in the 20th century when mandatory attendance policies were enacted on a rapidly growing population. Along with this, developmental stage theorists advocated that all children made similar progress in their cognitive as well as their social-emotional development.
Educators responded by “industrializing” schools and establishing grade-level requirements and grade-specific curriculums to make schools practical and efficient. The potential ability of students and their current achievement levels were disregarded by most school districts, and the sole criterion used for grade placement was chronological age.
In essence, according to W.T. Southern and E.D. Jones in their 1991 “The academic acceleration of gifted children,” subject-level and grade-level acceleration began to die.
But that did not prevent some very well-known people from accelerating while they were in school. Listed among accelerated students in “A Nation Deceived” are:
• Martin Luther King Jr, who graduated from high school at age 15;
• Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, who graduated at age 16;
• Southern writer Eudora Welty;
• and the poet T.S. Eliot
“While the myth says that students who skip will rarely fit into society, the reality shows that those very students tend to lead American society to greater heights,” Colangelo, Assouline and Gross wrote.
Various types of acceleration include strategies that address students individually through small groups, or large group/whole class instruction. Different forms of acceleration include individual subject-level acceleration (for example, a third-grade student taking math with the fourth-grade), whole grade acceleration or “skipping a grade,” early entrance to school, self-paced instruction, curriculum “telescoping” (completing a course in a reduced amount of time, resulting in advanced grade placement), and curriculum compacting (reducing introductory activities and drill in practice in order to cover higher level materials within the subject).
The question regarding acceleration shouldn’t be “Why?” but rather “Why not?” Overwhelming research indicates that acceleration is highly beneficial to advanced learners. It provides high-ability students opportunities to achieve at levels commensurate with those abilities.
Acceleration is beneficial not only to the students but to districts as well. The benefits include higher tests scores and increased achievements for students. Unlike special pull-out programs, acceleration not only costs the district nothing but can also reduce the overall costs of serving students.
Teachers can spend time working with students who truly need more practice and assistance during class, while the advanced learners can work on appropriate material, not simply work as peer tutors and teacher’s assistants, or work on low-level non-instructional activities (word searches, additional worksheets that offer no new challenges or coloring, etc.) during valuable instruction time.
Providing an appropriate, challenging education for advanced learners may be the biggest crisis facing our schools today. Unfortunately, many people don’t even realize this issue exists, nor do they realize the negative impact it is having on our country.
The perception is that schools are where we send our children to learn and grow academically. But for some students, this isn’t the case. The cover story that begins on page 10 looks at the dilemma facing two high-ability learners: Jack and Elizabeth.
In their current school, all of the emphasis is placed on the students who are on the “bubble” or in the middle because of great pressure to achieve AYP. The high-ability learners seem to be left behind.
What districts can do
The Illinois School Code, in Article 14A, defines what it means to be “gifted and talented.” The language in this definition, which went into effect for the 2006-07 school year, “is to provide encouragement, assistance, and guidance to school districts in the development and improvement of educational programs for gifted and talented children,” and says these programs must comply with the requirements stated within the Code.
It also states that local programs must be approved by the Illinois State Board of Education in order to qualify for state funding “if available.”
And that’s where the problem begins. Since the law was enacted, no state funding has been made available to districts for gifted education.
However, according to the Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration (IRPA), the issue of acceleration for students, which is not addressed in 105 ILCS 5/Art. 14A, is left up to local boards of education. That opens the door for districts to create their own administrative procedures to handle the needs of high-ability students.
Just as the law requires for gifted programs, acceleration procedures should be accessible, equitable and open to all students demonstrating superior ability, making sure gender, race, socio-economic status, English language proficiency, or other factors don’t prevent students from participation.
Acceleration procedures need to ensure there are no non-academic barriers involved for accelerated students, such as inability to participate in extra-curricular activities. These procedures also need to ensure consistent monitoring for effectiveness and unintended consequences, as well as an appeals process defined to address issues that may arise.
Acceleration procedures should address issues like standardized-test policies, credits, class rank and transcripts. They also should stipulate the acceleration programs that will be provided, who will participate in the decision-making process, and the mechanics of how those decisions will be implemented and monitored.
Teachers also should rethink current practices and views of how high-ability learners are served. Currently, standard practice may be to simply do nothing extra. An education system that continues to ignore the academic needs of high-ability learners harms not only the individuals, but society as well.
Ironically, schools have no qualms in accelerating student athletes or musicians who possess the physical gifts to perform beyond their same-age peers. Underclassmen populate varsity sports rosters in districts throughout the country. A musically talented freshman can earn his or her way into top high school bands. Why should we refuse to do the same for students possessing academic gifts?
Our country prides itself on our progress toward equal access and equity in education. School boards can advocate for high-ability learners in their district by adopting district policies and procedures and then by monitoring the academic achievement of those students on a regular basis to determine if the plan is working to address the characteristics and needs of the high-ability learner.
School boards should be prepared to ask and answer these big questions: Are high-ability students gaining or losing ground as they progress though our schools and the school district? And if the answer is “losing,” what is the board willing to do about it?
References
Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline and Miraca U.M. Gross, “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students,” The Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2004
Digest of Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_055.asp
Illinois Interactive Report Card, www.iirc.org
Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration, http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Resources/Policy_Guidelines/
National Association for the Gifted and The Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted, “State of the states in gifted education 2008-2009,” Washington, D.C., 2009
National Association for Gifted Children, “A brief history,” http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=607, 2010
No Child Left Behind, Public Law 107-110 U.S. Department of Education, 2001, www.ed.gov/policy/edsec/leg/esea02/index.html
W.T. Southern and E.D. Jones, editors, “The academic acceleration of gifted children,” New York, Teachers College Press, 1991, www.accelerationinstitute.org/Resources/Policy_Guidelines/
Sandra G. Watkins and Zhaohui B. Sheng, “Are state and national standards leaving the advanced learner behind? The crisis ahead,” Forum on Public Policy, 2008, http://www.forumonpublicpolicy.com/summer-08papers/archiveessummer08/sheng.pdf