"...there's no room to grow any more here." —Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll

hildren who can paint like young O'Keeffes or dance like budding Baryshnikovs, who can interpret Shakespeare in fifth grade or write love sonnets in sixth, who can calculate the environmental impact of chlorofluorocarbons or build a computer model of a lunar land rover too often find themselves bumping against the ceiling at school. Gifted children in America tend to be wedged in by a pace that's too slow and a curriculum that's too narrow for their quick minds and abundant abilities. Their experience is not unlike that of Lewis Carroll's Alice, who runs out of room and annoys her companions when she expands "like the largest telescope that ever was" during her adventures in Wonderland:

" 'I wish you wouldn't squeeze so,' said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her.
'I can't help it,' said Alice meekly; 'I'm growing.'
'You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse.
'Don't talk nonsense,' said Alice more boldly; 'you know you're growing too.'
'Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,' said the Dormouse, 'not in that ridiculous fashion.'"

Rapid intellectual growth is one characteristic common to gifted kids, who typically know 35 percent to 50 percent of the curriculum before they ever get to class, according to a 1994 U.S. Department of Education report, National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent. In another publication, Guiding the Gifted Child, James Webb and colleagues report that gifted elementary students may have one-fourth to one-half of their class time "left over" after they gallop through their work. For exceptionally gifted kids, leftover time may amount to three-fourths of the school day.

"Large-scale studies over the past 50 years uniformly agree that these individuals function at levels far in advance of their agemates," U.S. Commissioner of Education Sidney Marland Jr. asserted in a landmark report to Congress in 1971. Gifted kindergartners perform like second-graders, said the Marland Report. By fourth and fifth grades, gifted children have outpaced the average seventh-grader. Gifted high school seniors, as a group, score higher on the Graduate Record Exam than college seniors.

Besides grasping information fast and zooming through classwork, gifted students have a "rich memory storehouse, intense curiosity, reflectivity, and openness to experiences," writes LeoNora Cohen in Teaching Gifted Kindergarten and Primary Children in the Regular Classroom, a 1990 report from the Oregon School Study Council. Cohen goes on to say that such children typically can generalize, think abstractly, and discover relationships in information. They can manipulate symbols and symbol systems. They pursue interests with tenacity and intensity.

But while gifted children share certain traits, they can't be lumped together, experts warn. Just as their gifts range from rocket science to opera, their emotional and educational needs diverge widely. Writing in Gifted Child Quarterly in 1988, G. Betts and M. Neihart identify six subtypes of gifted students:

• The successful gifted who conform and achieve, but who may be too perfectionistic and lacking in risk-taking behavior
• The challenging gifted who are creative, bored, and rebellious and may need assistance in becoming self-controlled and committed to the group
• The underground gifted whose shyness and poor self-concept may keep them from surfacing as part of the gifted population
• The gifted dropouts who may be angry, explosive, and burned out in the school situation
• The double-labeled who are both disabled and gifted, but who may be overlooked except for their handicap
• The autonomous gifted who are enthusiastic achievers, have a good sense of self, are intrinsically motivated, and psychologically healthy

The message behind this list is twofold. First, gifted students vary one from another as much as average or struggling students do. Second, despite their gifts—or sometimes because of them—many bright and talented students are at risk of underachievement and school failure without the right support and intervention. Schools have the power, research suggests, to steer gifted kids toward fruitful, fulfilling lives—toward becoming "the autonomous gifted"—by designing programs that allow them (and all children) to reach their full potential.

Efforts to meet the needs of talented and gifted students face obstacles both philosophical and pragmatic. They endure charges of elitism. Assaults from anti-tracking forces. Blows from budget axes whenever funds get scarce.

Beneath it all lurks Americans' ambivalence toward brains. On one hand, we admire smart people. Heroic doctors and lawyers have been the subjects of countless hit movies and TV series, from Perry Mason to M*A*S*H*. But scientists and professors often are portrayed in popular media as mad or absent-minded. These stereotypes spill over into schoolrooms. "In America we often make fun of our brightest students, giving them such derogatory names as nerd, dweeb, or, in a former day, egghead," observes the National Excellence report. "We have conflicting feelings about people who are smart, and we give conflicting signals to our children about how hard they should work to be smart."

As a culture, our true heroes aren't the brainy. They're the buff, the brave, and the beautiful—the Michael Jordans, Batmans, and Marilyn Monroes of screen and legend. More kids have heard of Mickey Mantle than of Jonas Salk. Wyatt Earp captures our imagination more fully than Thomas Edison. Entrepreneurs and inventors, from Henry Ford to Bill Gates, earn our respect as much for fueling our collective wealth as for contributing new ideas. Visual artists (as well as performing artists outside the mainstream of pop, rock, and Hollywood) rarely gain wide recognition, and often come under attack for work that challenges convention. Witness recent congressional efforts to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts.

"It seems rooted in one of the unhappy corners of our nature to spurn those whose excellence is intellectual or creative," notes Carol Ann Tomlinson of the University of Virginia.

Uneasiness with mental or artistic brilliance grows from America's history. Democracy (which embraces equality) butts heads with intellectualism (which suggests elitism), many observers have noted. As a nation, we bristle at anything that has the scent of superiority.

At bottom, it's the "equity versus excellence" debate, and the literature on gifted education is full of it. Tomlinson describes the clash of competing ideals. "While we pay homage to excellence by understanding that much of our greatness as a nation has stemmed from encouraging ingenious individuals to develop their abilities and the fruits of those abilities," she writes, "we are also shaped as a nation by the refrain that all men are created equal. We find it difficult to attend simultaneously to the voices of equity and excellence."

This dilemma shows in the federal record. Initiatives on behalf of high-ability students flicker on and off like fireflies on a warm summer night. Interest first sparked 40 years ago when the Soviets launched Sputnik. U.S. fears of Soviet superiority in science and technology spurred Congress to earmark money for cultivating talent in math and science. Funding dwindled, however, as emphasis in education shifted to equity in the 1960s.

The Marland Report, which took the first indepth, nationwide look at America's brightest students and the schooling they receive, rekindled interest. Published in 1972, the report was blunt in its findings. "Educators, legislators, and parents have long puzzled over the problem of educating gifted students in a public education program geared primarily to a philosophy of egalitarianism," the report begins. "Disturbingly, research has confirmed that many talented children perform far below their intellectual potential. We are increasingly being stripped of the comfortable notion that a bright mind will make its own way. Intellectual and creative talent cannot survive educational neglect and apathy."

Marland points to the glaring absence of minority and disadvantaged children in many gifted programs. Perhaps most troubling of all was the finding that nearly 60 percent of schools polled for a national survey said they had no gifted pupils. The statistic, which the report calls "depressing," may be attributable, the author speculates, to "widespread ignorance, apathy, and indifference, or outright hostility toward the notion that gifted and talented young people merit attention to their needs."

An Office of Gifted and Talented was created in the U.S. Education Department in 1974, only to shut down a few years later. The office was resurrected in 1988 under the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, which also established the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented and created training and demonstration grants for local programs. Picking up on Marland's indictment of the ethnic and socioeconomic imbalance in gifted programs, the Javits Act stressed "the discovery and stimulation of underserved and undiscovered gifted students," in the words of researcher James Gallagher. Then, in 1994—nearly two decades after the Marland Report—the Education Department issued a second major report on the state of gifted education. National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent records gains in gifted education, noting that in place of the few scattered programs that existed in the '70s, programs for the gifted had taken root across the nation. But the main message is hauntingly similar to the message of the earlier study. National Excellence points to a "quiet crisis" in education for the gifted.

"The United States is squandering one of its most precious resources—the gifts, talents, and high interests of many of its students," the report asserts. "In a broad range of intellectual and artistic endeavors, these youngsters are not challenged to do their best work." And, once again echoing the Marland Report, it charges schools with failing to find and serve gifted students from poor families and minority communities (see the "Research Review" for a discussion of serving gifted poor and minority students). Overlooked as well are students with "unorthodox talents," such as musical and artistic abilities that go beyond the traditional focus on intellectual and academic gifts, the report asserts.

"Just at that moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was; she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave...; but on second thought, she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her. "

Twenty years ago, only seven states had legislation and funding for talented and gifted programs. By 1993, all 50 states had policies in the form of legislation, regulations, rules, or guidelines that supported the education of gifted and talented students, Harry Passow and Rose Rudnitski found in a study for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. State policies are a mixed bag, with some glaring inconsistencies. For example, some states mandate services, but provide no funding, the researchers note in State Policies Regarding Education of the Gifted as Reflected in Legislation and Regulation. Other states have no mandate, but provide funding.

While state mandates clearly strengthen the position of gifted education programs, they do not inoculate gifted programs against fiscal or philosophical constraints. "It has long been argued by advocates that a state mandate is needed if programs for the gifted are to thrive, but the situation does not appear to be that simple," write Passow and Rudnitski. "Many states have policy statements dealing with the gifted, but these seemed to collapse as soon as there were pressures to place educational priorities and resources elsewhere."

Among the Northwest states, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon have state mandates for gifted education, but not all provide state funds. Washington, on the other hand, has no mandate, yet it allocates money. Here's a look at gifted education policies in the Northwest states as reported in the 1996 State of the States Gifted and Talented Education Report from the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted:

Alaska: Alaska has a mandate for identification and programming through state law. More than $8 million in funding was provided for 1995-96. Districts are required to use the state definition of gifted and talented, but are not required to follow the same identification procedures statewide. Programming services are mandated pre-K through grade 12; most services are provided through a formal gifted and talented program approved by the education department. A professional endorsement in gifted and talented education is offered and required for teachers (six credits are required for endorsement).

Idaho: Idaho has a state mandate for both identification and programming through state law. However, there is no state funding for local programs. Only a consultant position is funded through the general fund. There is a state definition, which districts are required to use. But districts are not required to follow the same identification guidelines or process statewide. Programming services are mandated for K-12, using a combination of formal gifted-and-talented and regular-classroom programs. The state monitors district programs, and programs are accountable. There is a professional endorsement in gifted education, which requires 12 hours of training. Special training or endorsement is required for teachers working with gifted kids. The state funds a gifted-education professional at the regional, intermediate, and district levels to provide support to school-based educators.

Montana: The state mandates identification and programming through administrative rule. About $150,000 per year for the past several years has been allocated to gifted-education services. Dollars go to districts through discretionary funds based on application. There is a state definition of gifted and talented and a mandate for identification, but districts aren't required to use the state definition for identification or to follow uniform procedures. Programming services are mandated for K-12, using a combination of formal gifted program and classroom programs. The state doesn't monitor programs, but local programs that are grant recipients are required to report on gifted education through state accountability procedures. There is no professional endorsement in gifted education, and no special training is required for teachers to work with gifted students.

Oregon: Oregon has a mandate for both identification and programming through state law. There are no state funds allocated specifically for gifted education, but $100,000 annually has been appropriated for inservice training through school-university partnerships (see Tailoring Teacher Training to the Community for details). Programming services are mandated for K-12, with a combination of formal gifted programs and classroom programs. The state monitors program plans and annual enrollment, and local agencies are required to report on gifted education through state accountability procedures. There is no professional endorsement in gifted education, and no special training or endorsement is required to work with gifted kids.

Washington: Washington has no state mandate for programming or identification in either law or rule. However, the state allocates funds specifically for gifted-education services. Funds dropped from nearly $4.5 million in 1994-95 to less than $4.3 million in 1995-96. But State Representative Jim Clements recently spearheaded a $2.5 million increase in gifted education for the next biennium. Discretionary funds go to districts based on application. While there is a state definition of giftedness, there is no mandate for identification. The state monitors the number of students served. There is no professional endorsement in gifted education offered, and no special training or endorsement is required for working with gifted kids.

" 'Oh you foolish Alice!' she answered herself. 'How can you learn lessons here? Why, there's hardly room for you, and no room at all for any lesson books.' "

Nationally, state directors of gifted programs say anti-ability grouping sentiment is the most potent force affecting the delivery of gifted education services. Ability grouping ranks "among the most divisive areas in American education," notes educational consultant Mark Stevens in a 1992 report to the Ohio Department of Education.

Opposition to grouping kids by ability stems from studies showing that single-ability groups can harm average and below-average learners. These findings have fed into reform efforts that stress cooperative, mixed-ability learning groups, especially for middle schoolers. The movement toward inclusion—keeping kids together in the regular classroom—began in the 1970s, about the same time as middle school reform. That's when special education began merging with mainstream education. Federal programs that once pulled out special student populations—kids with limited English skills, migrant children, disadvantaged students, American Indian children—now encourage schoolwide reform efforts that serve diverse learners in a common setting.

While most advocates for gifted students agree that super-smart kids can and should be served in the mainstream, many argue that the total elimination of ability groups hurts top students who clearly benefit from spending some class time with their intellectual peers.

"Research has documented the benefits of grouping gifted students for instruction," asserts Patricia Bruce Mitchell in State Policy Issues in the Education of Gifted and Talented Students published by the U.S. Education Department in 1994. "The research findings on the negative effects of grouping low-ability students should not be allowed to cancel out the positive effects of grouping gifted students."

Ability groups are harmful, research has shown, when they crystallize into rigid, full-time placements—or "tracks"—for minority, disadvantaged, or struggling students. Tracking has largely been discredited as a valid approach. But there is a place for ability groups, most gifted-education advocates say. Flexible grouping—in which groups are sometimes mixed, sometimes not—allows teachers to match kids up to meet changing educational needs and goals.

"Cooperative learning is designed to be used with either homogeneous or heterogeneous groups," says Donna

Harrington-Lueker, writing in the Executive Educator in November 1991. "What seems reasonable is to allow teachers the flexibility to determine which lessons lend themselves to heterogeneous cooperative learning groups and which to homogeneous learning groups and make professional decisions to place students accordingly."

Along with flexible grouping, flexible pacing is another strategy for staving off boredom for rapid learners. In a 1988 publication from the Council for Exceptional Children, N. Daniel and J. Cox define flexible pacing as "any provision that places students at an appropriate instructional level, creating the best possible match between students' achievement and instruction, and allows them to move forward in the curriculum as they achieve mastery of content and skills." In short, students learn at their own pace. Daniel and Cox tout the power of the approach in uncompromising terms. "Flexible pacing is the best way of providing for the varied instructional levels and accelerated rates of learning common to gifted students," they say.

In-class strategies such as flexible pacing and flexible grouping are necessary because, as LeoNora Cohen says, "A pull-out program for a few hours a week will not be sufficient…because gifted children are gifted all the time, and their instruction in basic subject areas must be modified to meet their learning needs."

Cohen, like many gifted educators, believes that "although intellectually and academically gifted children will go farther, faster, and with a higher level of mastery…the basic principles used in educating gifted and talented children are sound educational principles for educating all children." She and colleagues Ann Burgess and Tara Busick offer five rules for planning appropriate gifted programs. Each rule is paired with a corresponding rule for all children (examples are the authors' in their words):

1. Gifted children should be viewed not as "The Gifted," but as individuals, each of whom has a unique pattern of abilities and interests that need to be nurtured. (All children should be viewed as individuals with gifts and interests to be found and nurtured, not just as having deficiencies.)
2. Gifted children should spend at least part of their time with others like them by ability and/or by interest. This avoids the serious social-emotional problems of isolation and feeling different that plague gifted children. (All children should have the chance to interact with others of their choice. Such interactions are crucial to learning and instrumental in becoming cooperative citizens.)
3. Gifted children should work in basic skill areas such as reading and math to their level of ability. That is, they should move as fast and as far as they are able. Boredom and unchallenging work begets cycles of frustration and puts gifted children at risk for dropping out, just as work that is too difficult causes other children of lesser ability to drop out. If a basal reading series is used, at least two series (or alternatives) should be available to allow for this form of natural acceleration. (All children should be allowed to work at their level of ability.)
4. Gifted children should be allowed to investigate indepth areas in which they are greatly interested and should be encouraged to become producers of new information, rather than consuming what others have done. Rather than writing a research paper on cats, for example, a fourth-grader might keep a careful log for six weeks of the development of her cat's litter of kittens. Each day she might note the weight, behaviors, temperament, and eating habits of each kitten. She will learn infinitely more from such an experience, she will need to read about cats and kittens for a background to help her decide what to observe, and she will add something new to the field about her cat's kittens. (All children should have the opportunity to engage deeply in areas of great interest and to develop a sense of competence.)
5. To optimize their potential, gifted children need counseling and guidance, whether from a counselor or from supportive, caring teachers. (All children need to have counseling and facilitation to maximize their potential.)

A theme raised by Cohen and repeated throughout the literature on gifted education is the need to make adaptations for able learners. Gifted-education specialists are in agreement that "one size does not fit all"—not all children, nor even all gifted children. In a 1994 report for the U.S. Education Department, James Gallagher pinpoints three major areas where adaptations can and should be made to challenge and motivate bright children: the learning environment, curriculum content, and skills mastery.

In the learning environment, gifted students need to be placed with pupils of similar ability so that instruction "can be pitched at the appropriate level" and students "can stimulate each other," Gallagher says. Cluster grouping—the strategy of placing high achievers in one classroom with a teacher trained in gifted education—has proven to be a powerful boost to achievement, according to researchers (see Cluster Grouping). The other key feature of an appropriate learning environment, he says, is competent staff "who can continually challenge" bright students.

Gallagher is firm on one point: Changes in the learning environment by themselves, without corresponding changes to the curriculum, "do not yield impressive gains." Such changes "seem nonproductive and lead to the clarion call of many gifted students that 'school is boring,' " he says. Gallagher offers four major ways in which content can be modified (or "differentiated," as many experts term the approach) to meet the needs of gifted students:

• Content acceleration: The presentation to gifted students of curricula that were intended for older students—teaching algebra and geometry to elementary students, for example. [Gallagher notes that students, as well as content, may be accelerated—that is, moved more rapidly through the school program. The "virtues and dangers" of acceleration "have been debated for six decades," he notes. "The available literature on this topic reports strongly favorable outcomes of student acceleration," he asserts. "It appears that many of the fears (of negative consequences) are unfounded in the majority of cases."]

• Content enrichment: Extra lessons or assignments used to elaborate the student's richness of understanding of existing curriculum goals. The gifted child is kept mainly in the regular classroom, and content enrichment is used to extend the regular program. While the rest of the class is studying the Western Movement across the early United States, for example, the gifted student could be doing a project on diaries of wagon-train members or the special perspective of American Indians on the influx of settlers. Content enrichment gives gifted students material designed to broaden their understanding within the general educational goals.

• Content sophistication: Attempts to challenge gifted students to learn complex and sophisticated information from the curriculum that the average student might not be able to master. This approach works best in special-class or resource-room settings where the teacher can instruct a group of gifted students at a higher level without fear of leaving other, less rapidly developing students behind. For example, a unit might focus on a new system of ideas such as the physics of chaos and what the implications of these ideas might besubject that would require a wealth of prior knowledge, which gifted students may have but other students may not have.

• Content novelty: Content not covered in traditional school curricula. Examples are topics focusing on cross- disciplinary areas, such as the impact of technology on American society or the demographics of poverty. Topics such as this have special meaning for gifted students, who typically like to tie apparently unrelated facts together. It is important for gifted students to reflect on the linkage between bodies of knowledge so that they are aware of the potential impact of one field on another…and reflect on what might be done to forestall possible negative consequences.

Finally, skills mastery refers to providing cognitive skills, such as creative problem solving, that increase the ability of gifted students to think productively.

"...Alice thought to herself, 'I wonder what they will do next! If they had any sense they'd take the roof off.'"

Creative problem solving, flexible grouping, and other instructional strategies get their power from the teachers who use them. "The success of good instruction for the gifted depends on the quality of the teacher, whose chief roles are facilitator and manager," Cohen says. "A good teacher of the gifted organizes resources for children; provides exposure to new ideas and opportunities for exploration; tunes in to children's interests and questions; stretches, rather than stresses; uses negotiation and contracts; provokes inquiry; advocates for children; empowers children."

Training for general-education teachers in how to serve gifted students is the field's biggest need nationwide, state-level gifted education directors say. In all the Northwest states, fewer than 10 percent of teachers have three or more semester hours (or the equivalent) in gifted education, according to the 1996 State of the States report. States or colleges that require any specific coursework on the gifted are scarce, Cohen reports. In a national survey of teachers of grades three and four, more than 60 percent of the public school teachers polled said they had no training in gifted education, the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented reported in 1993.

These figures help explain the finding that "most regular classroom teachers make few, if any, provisions for talented students," as reported in National Excellence. "The vast majority of talented students spend most of the school day in a regular classroom where little is done to adapt the curriculum to their special learning needs…. From kindergarten through high school, the education available to talented students is largely insufficient because most schools have not been committed to addressing their needs seriously."

Funding is the other big challenge in gifted education. In one national survey, only two cents out of every $100 spent on K-12 education in the United States in 1990 supported special opportunities for gifted and talented students. Together, the staffing and funding shortfalls create a yawning gap between needs and services for gifted kids. "Even where there are legal or administrative mandates for providing services," write Webb and colleagues in Guiding the Gifted Child, "the lack of trained personnel and funds cause programs for the gifted to be miniscule."

The common assumption that bright or brilliant students will shine without any special help is not borne out in the research. Several studies have shown that for more than half of the nation's gifted students, school achievement fails to match their abilities. One study cited in the Marland Report found that most gifted students were working at least four grades below that at which they could be working.

Equity and excellence in education need not be mutually exclusive, many commentators have observed. Instead, they can and should exist side by side in the nation's classrooms.

"Equality in education does not require that all students have exactly the same experiences," write Ellen Fiedler, Richard Lange, and Susan Winebrenner in the Roeper Review, September 1993. "Rather, education in a democracy promises that everyone will have an equal opportunity to actualize their potential, to learn as much as they can."

Without these opportunities, the gifts and talents of many students will be lost to them and to the nation. Like Alice, scrunched into a Wonderland room too small for her quickly growing body, gifted students will be confined to classrooms that fail to serve their educational needs, thereby stunting their promise. Says Tomlinson: "When students stand for extended times in spaces with ceilings of expectation that are too low, the students' capacity is bent, misshapen, and malformed, exactly as their bodies would be if encased in physical spaces with ceilings too short for their stature."

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