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Clarion Call to Action

Parents' complaints spur Oregon districts to reexamine and revamp TAG programs

By MELISSA STEINEGER


"That students differ may be in con ven ient, but it is inescap able. Adapting to that diversity is the inevitable price of high standards and fairness to the students."
—Theodore Sizer

"Wasting the potential of a gifted mind is reckless for a society in desperate need of creativity and inventiveness."
—Carl Rogers

In the fourth grade, Hannah Grubb and her classmates unearthed archaeological "ruins" created by gifted students at other elementary buildings, and then recreated the history, language, and customs of the "lost civilizations." As a sixth-grader, she streaked through problem-solving curricula in an all-gifted classroom.

But in 1991 Grubb's family moved to Salem, Oregon. There, the seventh-grader languished in classes that lagged behind her capacity for learning. "I was completely bored," the McKay High School honors graduate recalls. "I'd done what they were doing in seventh grade when I was in fifth grade. I was miserable." Now a pre-med student at the University of Oregon's honors college, Grubb says the district's scant advanced-level offerings limited her chances for top-university scholarships.

Some 38,000 of Oregon's 500,000 students are identified as talented and gifted—defined in state law as performing at or above the 97th percentile on general aptitude, math, or reading tests. Historically, schools often have neglected the needs of highly capable students like Hannah Grubb. Super-smart students don't need different treatment in school, many people assume. Kids with quick minds ought to be fine on their own, they reason.

But talented and gifted youngsters can suffer when schools fail to engage them, research shows. The boredom and frustration can turn them off and drive them away. And by overlooking the brightest minds, schools rob society of a priceless resource, advocates for the gifted argue. "Neglect of these students makes it impossible for Americans to compete in a global economy," asserts a recent report on gifted education from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement. The problem, notes the 1993 report, National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent, is "especially severe among economically disadvantaged and minority students… whose talents often go unnoticed."

COMPLAINTS FILED

Armed with these and other findings, parents in Oregon's two largest districts recently have demanded better services for gifted children. Charging that schools are violating a state law requiring them to find and serve highly capable kids, parents in Salem and Portland have filed formal complaints against their districts—Salem three years ago and Portland last winter.

"The problem is that the school is making (a gifted child) sit in class learning the ABCs when he can already read and write," says Margaret DeLacy, one of the chief forces behind the Portland complaint and a member of the district advisory committee for gifted education. "We're involved because we see profoundly gifted kids being damaged by the school system. I watch those kids being hurt every day. It's like standing at a window watching someone get beat up."

The parents' charges came a decade after the state Legislature passed a law to ensure that Oregon's brightest youngsters are adequately challenged and nurtured. The Salem complaint and the investigation that followed offer lessons for other districts struggling to provide services while swimming against the twin currents of dwindling dollars and rising parent expectations.

Salem-Keizer School District—Oregon's second largest district with 32,000 students—encompasses the state capital where, in response to parent concerns, legislators in 1987 enacted a law to improve education for talented and gifted youngsters. The law, to be implemented by the 1991 school year, and the accompanying administrative rules require districts to:

n the law passed, Salem took a long, hard look at what it was doing for talented and gifted kids. It found that it was doing very little.

ore the new law, the district had waited until third and fourth grades to identify exceptional students as measured by a standardized IQ test. In fifth and sixth grades, gifted kids had been pulled out of their regular classrooms just three or four days a year for activities that might have no relationship to the child's interests, abilities, or academic experience. After sixth grade, services to gifted students ended.

district made big changes to meet the 1987 law. IQ tests alone were inadequate for finding bright kids, the law had decreed. So, under the revamped policy, all Salem-Keizer students in kindergarten through second grade would be screened through a "collage" of information—gathered from informal observations of parents and teachers as well as from formal assessment instruments—to gauge a child's abilities. In later grades, students would be screened through a combination of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, state assessment scores, and classroom-characteristic surveys. When a child showed promise, test scores would be combined with teacher input for review by a team of educators to decide if she qualified for gifted services. And there was room for discretion. A promising student whose scores didn't hit the 97th percentile still could be included a gifted program if the team agreed he had the potential to perform at high levels.

Under the new identification process, the number of identified gifted kids mushroomed from 250 to 2,500—a whopping 10-fold increase.

Under the new plan, gifted students in Salem are supposed to get services from Day One through graduation. Teachers are taught how to assess the grade level and learning rate of their gifted students. Curriculum must be geared to meet gifted kids on their own level. To make sure that happens, the district spent three years training all its teachers on how to challenge high-ability kids during the regular school day. One teacher was named as an advocate for gifted kids in each building.

Changing the talented-and-gifted program to meet the law and provide more services to more kids had an unexpected effect: It made the program less visible, district officials lament. The old pull-out enrichment classes were visible and quantifiable. But when the district shifted its focus to embedding challenging instruction in day-to-day activities, gifted-education services were camouflaged. Behind such camouflage could hide either the presence or absence of services.

To a group of Salem parents, absence seemed to be the norm. Despite the district's efforts to improve gifted services, parents said the efforts were spotty, at best.

UNHAPPY PARENTS

One of the unhappy parents was Susann Kaltwasser, whose fourth-grade son was identified as intellectually gifted in the early 1980s. Two younger Kaltwasser children were later identified as gifted, as well. A former reading specialist who gave up teaching to be a full-time mom, Kaltwasser has been involved with gifted-education issues for more than a dozen years. She's served in leadership positions in various groups, including three years working for the Oregon Association of Talented and Gifted to educate parents on issues in gifted education—an endeavor funded by a federal Jacob Javits gifted-education grant through the Oregon Department of Education. She lobbied state legislators to pass the 1987 law. Currently, she operates the national TAG (talented and gifted) Parent Network, which offers a site and information exchange on the World Wide Web (http://www.teleport.com/~rkaltwas/tag).

From the parents' viewpoint, the district was failing its brightest students in two key respects: identification and services. Kaltwasser's group charged that the district was assessing youngsters inconsistently from school to school and from student to student. Identification methods were not spelled out and parents were not included, they claimed.

"Parents could ask the teacher to show what they were doing for their child, and the vast majority couldn't tell you," says Kaltwasser. "There was no way for you to know if anything was happening for your child."

After about two years of trying to work individually with teachers and schools, the parents approach ed the school board asking for establishment of a gifted-education committee to let parents work formally with the district. By February 1994, after what Kaltwasser des cribes as months of foot-dragging by the district, a dozen parents felt they had no choice but to file a formal class-action style complaint with the state Education Department. Their criticism of the district's program alleged:

"The complaint went to all the basic tenets of the law," says Robert Siewert of the Oregon Department of Education. Faced with the precedent-setting Salem case, Siewert moved cautiously. "To have done a 'quick and dirty' and found the district out of compliance—you don't get a good, fair picture," says Siewert, Oregon's administrator for special education, including programs for the talented and gifted. "On the other hand, if you give the parents plenty of opportunity to express their concerns and to clarify the issues so you're investigating the right things, you do get an investigation that results in something you can trust. That isn't something you do in 90 days."

In fact, after parents filed their complaint in 1994, it took a year and a half for the department to issue a final report on the allegations. Those months, Siewert says, were spent designing an investigation; gathering an interview team of nine gifted-education specialists from throughout the state; identifying a random sample of 250 gifted Salem students; reviewing files; interviewing a random sample of 30 gifted students, their parents, teachers, and associated administrators; and crunching the numbers on enrollment and gifted-education data. With all the information in hand, Siewert analyzed the facts and wrote a "Final Determination" report—a document that for the first time defined for all school districts the Department of Education's expectations and requirements for gifted education in Oregon.

Salem-Keizer did not fare well. The January 1996 report found the district out of compliance with the law in four of the five allegations. On the fifth allegation, identification of gifted minority students, the district was found in compliance—a finding that raised the parents' ire and made headlines. The state's conclusion that Salem-Keizer is making reasonable efforts to identify and serve talented and gifted minority children "flabbergasted" parents, reported The Oregonian on June 19, 1996. "The state is 'reinforcing a system of keeping kids of potential out of TAG programs' by saying the district's policies are OK," Susann Kaltwasser was quoted as saying. Siewert countered the charge. "Salem has taken as good a shot at this as any district in the state," he told The Oregonian. "I'm not willing to say they have failed to make a good-faith effort."

Siewert notes that minority group enrollment is sometimes so small that statistical comparisons are difficult. For instance, 1.28 percent of the Salem-Keizer enrollment is American Indian, while .56 percent of the district gifted enrollment is American Indian. Allowing for normal statistical variation, those percentages are reasonable, Siewert says. Even in the case of Hispanic students, where total district enrollment is 9 percent and gifted enrollment is a mere 1.3 percent, Siewert says that normal statistical variation makes it hard to say with certainty that discrimination is occurring.

Steve Nelson of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory argues that there is a "highly significant difference" statistically between overall Hispanic enrollment and gifted Hispanic enrollment in Salem-Keizer. But he agrees that discrimination alone won't explain the gap. "There are other factors at play that go beyond race, gender, and ethnicity to explain the variability in kids' performance in school and on standardized tests," says Nelson, Director of Rural Education for the Lab. "Mobility, poverty, and language proficiency are the Big Three in predicting school success."

"Overall," Siewert says, "(Salem's gifted program) wasn't as bad as the parents were alleging. The district was doing some very good things. But in all cases where you have a large system, it isn't always being done consistently and isn't always being done right in every place.

"There were many cases," he says, "where it looked like (gifted-education services were) going on, but the district couldn't 'show their work.' There were cases where (providing services) just wasn't happening. The district was doing OK, but this is truly a pass-fail system—either you are or you aren't—and so we found them not in compliance."

THE NITTY-GRITTY

It was a tough message. Charlotte Sachtjen of the Salem-Keizer gifted-education program was one of a cadre of district personnel who responded to the state's concerns.

"There were times it was very frustrating," says Sachtjen. "There were times when it was extremely painful. There were times when we all shed tears. But we put that aside and our main focus really was, what are our programs and services to kids and are we communicating them to parents? When it really got down to the nitty-gritty, there were things that needed to be done that weren't being done. So in my mind, it was very painful, but it was a good thing."

Through focus groups, community meetings, district inservice, and teacher training, the gifted-education department put together a plan to correct, monitor, and evaluate the program. After the state's findings, the district brought in a consultant to provide daylong workshops on instructional strategies for meeting children's level- and rate-of-learning needs. Other changes included providing teacher time to plan challenging curriculum and clustering gifted youngsters—putting all or many of the gifted fifth-graders at one school in the same classroom, for instance. Clustering not only allows students to challenge each other, but it also can put the task of teaching them in the hands of the most capable or experienced teacher.

Clustering differs from the widely discredited practice of tracking—grouping students by ability for most of the school day, often throughout their school years. Clustering, in contrast, groups gifted students only in their areas of strength. Rather than being elitist, as some critics charge, clustering provides the same thing for gifted students that other children receive in heterogeneous grouping: consistent opportunities for learning challenges, according to gifted-education expert Susan Winebrenner. In her book Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, Winebrenner says that clustering can be a humbling experience for a gifted student, who is suddenly challenged to work at a peer level. Gifted students also benefit by having the company of their peers while working on differentiated curriculum. And there's a bonus benefit: Achievement levels often improve for all students in classes where gifted kids are clustered.

Two key changes are at the heart of the Salem plan: to improve documentation of efforts in gifted education and to increase district-parent communication. Improved parent communication began with a meeting in September 1996 for all interested parents to lay out the "good, the bad, and the ugly" of the state's findings, in Sachtjen's words, and to detail the district's plan to respond. The department revised the gifted-education handbook for parents—also translating it into Spanish and Vietnamese—and improved communication about gifted-education activities in school newsletters.

Throughout the process of self-scrutiny, the district focused heavily on its lack of documentation of assessment and services—a lack which the state repeatedly pointed out in its findings of noncompliance.

"It wasn't that we had not made efforts to be in compliance," says Sachtjen. "But there wasn't specificity (in documentation), and even though we had some process throughout the school district, we hadn't, in my mind, institutionalized it."

The spotlight on documentation brought some key issues into focus, Sachtjen says. To document something, one first must define it clearly. So the district crafted specific criteria and guidelines for assessing level and rate of learning. It identified teaching practices for reaching kids at the right level and moving them along at the right rate. And it came up with criteria for documenting that such instruction had occurred. If teachers could show how they provide challenging instruction to gifted students, the district reasoned, the program's camouflage might be pulled aside. Parents could be more certain their kids were getting the services state law promises.

An interim audit the district ordered found huge improvement in documentation. But for parent Susann Kaltwasser, whose youngest child graduated in 1997, the district's efforts are flawed because of their heavy emphasis on documentation. She asserts: "There's been a lot of effort to document, but not to change teaching and outcomes."

District efforts are being monitored by the state for the next two years. Despite lingering parental skepticism, early anecdotal reports from schools indicate that the Salem-Keizer reforms may be having an effect. At least some students now find their classes more challenging, Sachtjen says.

One of those students is Nathan Knottingham, a senior at McKay High School. Knottingham, who serves on the school's gifted-education advisory committee with educators and parents, totes a thick appointment book wherever he goes. He needs it to track his schedule—which includes swim team, tennis, drama, church, Model United Nations, volunteer work, and a part-time job. "I book myself to feel challenged," Knottingham explains. Those bountiful bookings backfired in his junior year when teachers began implementing the program revisions generated by the state's investigation. Knottingham suddenly found his advanced-placement classes more interesting—and more demanding. His jam-packed schedule got tougher to manage.

Still, for Knottingham and others, the district's changes came late. He spent years bored and frustrated in classes where he finished assignments in the first 15 minutes of the period and spent the rest of the class trying to fill time. "Wasted semesters," he says, matter-of-factly.

SNOWBALL EFFECT

The Salem complaint has spurred districts around the state to examine their own programs for talented and gifted students. In Beave r ton on Portland's urban fringe, Beverly Hobson, coordinator of curriculum and assessment, made a careful review of the district's program in light of the state's findings. She also sought further clarification and input from both state and Salem officials. "Our goal," says Hobson, "is to improve our program and services every year."

In Eugene, gifted-education coordinator Betsy Shepard says the Salem case highlighted the importance of linking instruction to the gifts and aptitudes kids bring to class. To help teachers better meet the needs of gifted students, the district recommends materials such as Middle School and Gifted Students by James Curry and John Samara, which provides a seven-step process for developing curriculum units for gifted students. Another resource it suggests is

The Engine-Uity Limited Series, which offers hands-on methods for individualizing curriculum.

Eugene hasn't faced organized parent concern about its gifted-education program, Shepard says, but that may be because of the flexibility the district offers. Open enrollment lets students pick any school. They also can tap into classes at higher grade levels, enroll in honors programs, or move on to the University of Oregon if they're ready. "I don't want to say it's all roses, because it's not," says Shepard. "But we are very flexible, and I think that helps students get the education they need."

While Beaverton and Eugene parents have not filed Salem-style complaints, Portland parents have. In March, eight parents filed a 21-page complaint with the state Education Department about gifted-education services in Portland Public Schools—Oregon's largest district. The main charge: Portland is failing to provide instruction to identified gifted students at appropriate grade levels and rates of learning.

Margaret DeLacy, one of the complainants, has been involved with gifted education since her oldest child was identified as gifted about 10 years ago. A medical historian, DeLacy used her research background to compile the minutely detailed binder of supporting documentation that accompanied the complaint letter. DeLacy and her seven co-signers say the district is failing to follow its own guidelines—guidelines the parents see as minimally acceptable. She suspects that many more parents of gifted children are dissatisfied with the district's services, but hesitate to complain for fear of making things worse for their child.

"For the kids," she says, "it's like being in jail. They're sitting there all day listening to stuff they already know. It's as if a teenager somehow was shrunk into a seven-year-old's body and was put in a second-grade class."

At first, she says, such youngsters might try to explain that they don't belong in the class. Then they might try to prove they don't belong by, for example, calling out rapid-fire answers to teachers' queries. Eventually, they can drift into apathy.

"It's a human rights issue," she says. "Schools have no right to confine children unless they are giving them an appropriate education."

Gifted services could be provided at little or no additional cost, DeLacy believes. Schools could cluster bright children in one class or at one school, she says. Or they could pitch an advanced math class to the top third of the class. Or allow children who can handle advanced curriculum to move to a higher grade classroom for that subject—a technique called acceleration. Such steps wouldn't solve all the problems, DeLacy admits, "but it would help a lot at no additional cost."

Sue Hagmeier says she understands DeLacy's concerns well. When Hagmeier's oldest child entered school, the youngster came home in tears almost daily—bored and frustrated by the slow pace of the class. "I felt," says Hagmeier, "like I had an emergency on my hands."

Hagmeier began advocating for her child, learning the ropes of the system. In time, she became chair of the District TAG Advisory Committee (DTAC) and later was elected to the school board.

DTAC, a committee of district parents, wrote a position paper several years ago that was used by a district task force as the framework for the district's gifted-education guidelines. The guidelines call for all gifted students to be identified; their appropriate level of instruction to be assessed; an individual and specific plan for delivery of services to be written early in the school year; and seamless delivery of appropriate services to be given throughout the student's time in the district.

To identify gifted students, Portland uses the Frasier model, which relies on an observation matrix—having the teacher record observations of the child's problem-solving skills, inquiry strategies, reasoning ability, memory, motivation, humor, and other traits. Developed by Dr. Mary Frasier of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, the model was devised in part to help identify minorities and other children who might be missed by relying on standardized test results.

Of the 58,000 Portland students last year, about 5,000 were identified as talented and gifted. In rounded figures, the district's gifted-program enrollment by ethnic group is:

One key point made in the guidelines is that gifted kids can't be lumped together as a homogeneous group. There are gifted kids, and then there are really gifted kids—students with abilities so great that their instructional needs are distinct from other gifted children's. These "exceptionally gifted" children are those performing at the 99.6 percentile or higher on national tests. Typically working five or more grade levels beyond their age in one or more subject areas, these 150-plus IQ students often have their own set of intellectual, social, and emotional needs.

Services in the district are generally determined on a school-by-school approach. Teachers develop a written plan for gifted students that tailors instruction to match their level and rate of learning.

MODIFYING CURRICULUM

Modifying content for the gifted student can take several forms.

The teacher may let a child move quickly through the curriculum. Or he may present more advanced or complex concepts and materials. He might ask the student questions that require advanced thinking processes or that stimulate inquiry, active exploration, and discovery. Or he might allow the student to demonstrate what she has learned in creative or novel ways. For example, the student might design a game around the theme and characters of a novel in lieu of a book report. The goal: to encourage students to think about subjects in more abstract and complex ways.

Progress, Hagmeier believes, has come slowly. Still, it has been made. The child who five years ago came home in tears is "pretty happy" in middle school, and Hagmeier's second child—also identified as gifted—is doing reasonably well with school, she says. "I wasn't really aware of progress during any six-month period," she says, "but when I compare the experiences of my two children, I see that progress has been made."

Hagmeier believes educators need to remember that gifted kids are still kids, not "small adults."

"They need to be able to behave like a kid around things they are interested in," Hagmeier says. "A specific challenge for those of us who care about them is to protect them from loneliness, to find for them opportunities for the kinds of joyful interactions that all kids are entitled to."

When asked to grade Portland's gifted-education program, Hagmeier gives it a "shows improvement" mark.

"Substantial progress has been made," she says. "I really believe that some basic beliefs and attitudes (among educators) have changed, and that there has been a substantial loosening up of practices to accommodate kids better."

Hagmeier is, however, sympathetic to those parents who disagree with her. "These are families who have done everything they're supposed to," she says. The district, she says, should be more responsive and flexible in dealing with their concerns.

One new Portland school is specially designed to challenge bright students. WinterHaven—a magnet school launched last year with a math, science, and technology focus—has drawn a high proportion of gifted students to its K-8 program. Housed in the Brooklyn Elementary School, WinterHaven's 100 students are grouped K-2, 3-4, and 5-8. Students spend half-days with a math and science specialist and half-days with a language arts and social studies specialist.

Parents play a key role at WinterHaven. They teach Wednesday electives—called interest classes—on traditional academic subjects such as chemistry, German, and anatomy. They also devise more unorthodox offerings, like "Demolition Derby," where kids take apart clocks and other mechanical devices to see how they work. At the end of the 1996-97 school year, WinterHaven's teachers decided to spend two weeks of their own time, unpaid, refining curriculum for the next year.

Markham Elementary School teacher Gene Casqueiro understands that kind of dedication. A kindergarten teacher, Casqueiro recently spent $60 of his own to buy two books on dinosaurs that he thought would benefit his gifted students. Folding himself comfortably into a kindergartner-sized chair, Casqueiro prefaces any discussion of gifted education by saying: "Every child in my class has a gift—my job is to find it."

The 17-year-teaching veteran is featured in a district video on ways to incorporate challenging curriculum into the regular school day. When he recently gave his five-year-olds an assignment to each build a miniature cardboard chair, for example, Casqueiro enlarged the gifted students' project. The gifted kids were required to turn in measurements and a materials list along with their chair.

Children's learning starts from the concrete and moves to the symbolic, says Casqueiro. For instance, a kindergartner starts by stacking and then counting blocks to grasp the concept of "three." From there, she can make the connection to the symbol "3." Even gifted kids must grasp these steps in sequence, although they may be farther along than other students.

"You can't just give them a fourth-grade book," says Casqueiro, "because they may not be emotionally or experientially at that level." Instead, he uses three primary techniques promoted by Joyce Juntune, past Executive Director of the National Association of Gifted Children:

These techniques work with all children, not just gifted youngsters, Casqueiro maintains. As with any successful educational experience, parent involvement and student motivation are also crucial.

The Department of Education is mid-investigation in the Portland parents' complaint. Whatever the outcome there, Siewert, the state administrator for gifted education, believes the Salem-Keizer case sounded a clarion call to action.

"For school districts in the state," he says, the department's findings in the Salem case are "a clear statement of the intent of the department on how we apply the law. In that respect it set a baseline so every district in the state knows what the department intends to have happen in districts; how we will know it has happened; and how they would know, looking at themselves, if it has happened. They can look at our process, our results, and our expectations and apply that to their own programs."

But on the larger issue of providing solid education for gifted students, Siewert finds the situation more troublesome. "We have," he says, "a minimalistic law that deals with only a portion of the talented and gifted children and focuses on a particular instructional outcome—accelerated learning. To that extent, I think we're asking the very bare bones minimum of school districts in terms of who they're serving and what the service is. You don't have to go out and invent new curriculum. You don't have to buy new stuff. You have reading curriculum, you have social studies curriculum, you have math curriculum. All you have to do is get the kid to the right place in the curriculum at the right time.

"The ideal is for a school to have an instructional system flexible enough to meet the kid at the doorstep of their instructional need and allow that kid to make progress according to their abilities at any academic level. I believe that every kid has the right to receive an education. There are a number of very bright kids in the state who are not receiving an education. What they're receiving are repetitive tasks which they already know how to do."

Tailoring Teacher Training to the Community

The Oregon Department of Education provides about $100,000 annually for inservice on gifted education. The money is funneled through six universities around the state. With the help of local advisory groups, the universities develop plans for using the money in their region.

In Portland, for instance, schools can pick a topic—open-ended math, say, or integrated reading—and apply for funds to bring in an expert for a workshop in that area. Portland State University's continuing education department administers the program.

School-based decisionmaking lets each community tailor training to meet local needs, says Kim Sherman of the Oregon Department of Education. Schools can zero in on their weak spots or interest areas, whether it's curriculum differentiation, clustering, identification, or some other issue related to gifted education. And universities can get feedback useful to their own teacher-training programs about gaps in the education curriculum.

Training is focused on areas relating to the state law, such as instructional options for meeting the needs of gifted children, assessment of rate and level of learning, and identifying children from minority and other traditionally underrepresented populations.

Cheryl Livneh, director of continuing education at PSU, says the program allows great flexibility in meeting the local needs of schools, gives local schools a sense of ownership in the program, and allows the universities to leverage state dollars by also offering the sessions through the continuing education department.

For instance, when one region wanted to bring in a national expert with a hefty speaking fee, PSU was able to also offer the workshop through its continuing education department for a fee that helped cover the additional expense.

Such leveraging allows each university to stretch the $17,000 or so it receives each year from the state.

In addition to PSU, participating institutions are Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, Western Oregon University, Eastern Oregon University, and Southern Oregon University.

For more information, contact Kim Sherman at (503) 378-3598, ext. 640.

Regional Resources Reports, handbooks, and Web sites from Northwest states are available to educators looking for guidance in designing programs for gifted and talented students:

A 1990 monograph, Teaching Gifted Kindergarten and Primary Children in the Regular Classroom by LeoNora Cohen and colleagues was developed by the Oregon School Study Council to help Oregon educators meet the needs of gifted children as required by state law. Topics include characteristics of giftedness; identification and assessment issues; effective instructional approaches; and curriculum differentiation. Find it in the ERIC database (ED319125). Limited copies are available for $17 from the Oregon School Study Council, 5207 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-5207, (541) 346-5044.

A series of technical assistance papers was issued by the Oregon Department of Education in 1990 to assist schools in designing programs for gifted students. The series, edited by Charlene Balzar and Bob Siewert, provides information on the identification of talented and gifted students, suggested programs and services, and ideas for modifying curriculum and instruction. Also available is the Oregon Handbook for Parents of Talented and Gifted Children, which provides a list of characteristics common to gifted children and a glossary of terms specific to gifted education. Find them in the ERIC database (ED330145 - ED330149). Revised editions of the parent handbook and the paper on program and service models will be available this winter. For ordering information, call Kim Sherman at (503) 378-3598, ext. 640.

Under a 1993 law, all Idaho school districts must meet the instructional needs of children with intellectual, academic, creative, artistic, or leadership talent. To help schools comply, the Idaho Department of Education published the Best Practices Manual for Idaho Gifted and Talented Programs. It explores practical aspects of identification and assessment, program planning, teacher training, and evaluation. Emphasis is placed on underserved groups. Find it in ERIC (ED386872).

A Web site called Gifted Education Connections is offered by the Northwest Educational Technology Consortium of the Northwest Laboratory. Moderated by Michael Hall of the Montana Office of Public Instruction, the site offers regional contact information, resources, and Internet links. Find it in Web Moderators Project at http://www.netc.org/.

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