Genius Denied

How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds

Jan Davidson, Bob Davidson, Laura Vanderkam

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781416595687
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With all the talk of failing schools these days, we forget that schools can fail their brightest students, too. We pledge to "leave no child behind, " but in American schools today, thousands of gifted and talented students fall short of their potential. In Genius Denied, Jan and Bob Davidson describe the "quiet crisis" in education: gifted students spending their days in classrooms learning little beyond how to cope with boredom as they "relearn" material they've already mastered years before. This lack of challenge leads to frustration, underachievement, and even failure. Some gifted students become severely depressed. At a time when our country needs a deep intellectual talent pool, the squandering of these bright young minds is a national tragedy.
There are hundreds of thousands of highly gifted children in the U.S. and millions more whose intelligence is above average, yet few receive the education they deserve. Many school districts have no gifted programs or offer only token enrichment classes. Education of the gifted is in this sorry state, say the Davidsons, because of indifference, lack of funding, and the pernicious notion that education should have a "leveling" effect, a one-size-fits-all concept that deliberately ignores the needs of the gifted. But all children are entitled to an appropriate education, insist the authors, those left behind as well as those who want to surge ahead.
The Davidsons show parents and educators how to reach and challenge gifted students. They offer practical advice based on their experience as founders of a nonprofit organization that assists gifted children. They show parents how to become their children's advocates, how to win support for gifted students within the local schools, and when and how to go outside the school system. They discuss everything from acceleration ("skipping" a grade) to homeschooling and finding mentors for children. They tell stories of real parents and students who overcame poor schooling environments to discover the joy of learning.
Genius Denied is an inspiring book that provides a beacon of hope for children at risk of losing their valuable gift of intellectual potential.

Genius Denied

WHEN RACHEL was four years old, she told her mother she wanted to write a story. The little girl couldn’t physically write the words yet, so she asked her mother to write them down for her. Her mother agreed to do so and then marveled as Rachel dictated an elaborate ten-page tale called “The Time of Great Recise” about a recently orphaned heroine struggling with her grief. Rachel knew no word that meant “strife,” but also the process of overcoming it, so she coined “recise” to mean just that. She was too young and her ideas too big to be limited by the English language.

For Rachel, growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, writing proved to be her own means of “great recise.” She was always different. When she played with other children her age, she wanted to talk about her Chronicles of Narnia books and the science fiction fantasy worlds she dreamed up, while they wanted to talk about toys. Troubled by this, she looked forward to school. She imagined there would be other children like her there—children who vacuumed up information, children who had hundreds of questions, children who loved to solve fascinating problems. So she watched the school bus from the window and looked forward to all she would learn.

But school, too, lagged behind her mind. Rachel knew how to read already and read voraciously. By second grade the rest of her class was reading two-paragraph selections from a reader while she raced through the comprehension questions to devour a few more pages in her Madeleine L’Engle books. She used words her classmates didn’t understand, so she was the quirky child. In elementary school that was mostly okay. She came to class dressed as Jo March to tell the other eight-year-olds the plot of Little Women, and she soaked up their rapt attention. She produced a science fiction trilogy of short stories that earned her a place in her school’s gifted program, although all that meant was a few extra hours a week of word puzzles and the like. She read books on everything from politics to physics and formed opinions on world affairs that seemed strange coming from a curly-haired child. And some force kept compelling her to write. She would skip anything else to make the words that jumbled in her head appear on the page.

Rachel’s parents knew she was a high-maintenance child—energetic, emotional, and very, very bright. Then they had her tested and discovered that her IQ (intelligence quotient) was so high, a score like hers occurred less than once in a thousand people. A small town like hers might encounter such a child in its elementary school every few years at most. Rachel’s frenetic mind was years older than her body.

While it was a comfort to have their suspicions confirmed, Rachel’s parents worried about the rest of her schooling. Would officials, administrators, and teachers work with them to meet her needs? They soon learned how difficult and hostile school can be for a child who is different.

The trouble began when Rachel started middle school. Every night she scribbled and typed a bit more for a novel, an arching saga that swelled to four hundred pages. Meanwhile, at school, her English teacher insisted that the class circle nouns in sentences, and then she sent everyone home with more worksheets of the same. The pointlessness of it stunned Rachel. She had to take time from writing about other galaxies to underscore verbs. She began to dread the wasted hours.

Then there was the matter of social hierarchy, which grew more important with every passing year. Rachel talked too much in class. She wanted to argue points with the teachers and other children. She couldn’t cope with lunchroom conversations about clothes and boys and the tedious matter of who sat next to whom. She was always on the outside. Middle school dances and parties—she’d rather be writing. When sentences stirred in her brain, her thoughts dashed inward, away from everything else.

She mourned having no one to share her love of words with, but so it went. While her teacher assigned a list of spelling words for students to study, she wrote her own stories under the desk. She read everything she could on science and threw herself into a distance-learning writing course from Johns Hopkins University. And every year she looked forward to a month-long summer canoeing trip as part of a wilderness program in Canada. There, in groups of eight girls, she eased the pressure on her mind by pushing her body to its limits. The outdoors didn’t stifle her like a classroom. She slowly grew in confidence with the help of fellow wayfarers who accepted her as she was.

That was four weeks a year, however. The rest of the time grew worse and worse. By tenth grade the meaningless work assigned simply to keep everyone busy made her despair. It became a routine, like an assembly line: Read the stilted prose of a biology book and answer the end-of-chapter questions. Spend weeks wading through what happens in an assigned novel instead of discussing what it means. Memorize the names of medieval kings. Cough them up on a quiz and forget them. Rachel could see no end to it. Her parents asked for special courses or distance-learning opportunities, but the school refused. It had never been done before, administrators said. The school wouldn’t count her Johns Hopkins writing courses toward her diploma, so she kept taking English classes that dwelt on sentence structure as she wrote long stories every ten days at home. She raced through school books, then read The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina under her desk.

The school did promise that she could take college courses in her junior year, but not a moment sooner and only if she took certain prerequisites. Simply testing out of these prerequisites would not be allowed. So she waded through “technical education” and took so many classes that one term she didn’t have a lunch break. She packaged lunches in bits that she could eat in the halls. Students weren’t allowed to eat in the halls, and she often got in trouble for that.

Being exiled from the cafeteria only increased her social isolation. She couldn’t fit into her small-town high school’s world of homecoming queens, high school fashions, and locker gossip. To fill lonely hours on nights and weekends, she worked more than she needed to. A teacher assigned a ten-page story in English, and she wrote a twenty-eight-page novella called I-Ana on string theory and canoeing. She hoped the college classes to come would tap that jumble of ideas inside her head, a jumble that had nowhere to go and was slowly driving her crazy.

But then she saw the list of college courses offered. All introductory classes. Sciences that were offered at the high school were not allowed. No physics, no psychology. Mostly things she knew. She asked for an exception to choose from the course catalogue. The school refused to grant it. It had never been done before, they said. The local college refused to help without her high school’s permission. Those were the rules, they said, and there was nothing anyone could do.

After that, Rachel started falling apart. She was tired of jumping through hoops. She felt herself shrinking, she said, as the world of her high school pressed in on her. What did classes matter when she knew everything taught in them? Not learning made her miserable. She decided that she was the crazy one, that she was too different. It was better to stop trying. She started getting C’s on her report cards. She became even more withdrawn, writing about her demons and the futility of life. Her listlessness terrified her parents. They took her to a psychologist. Severe depression was the diagnosis—the depression of an ambitious child who flies straight into a brick wall.

Children with learning disabilities are by law given “individual education plans” to address their specific learning needs; some districts do the same for gifted children. Acknowledging Rachel’s exceptional intelligence, the school drew up an individual education plan for her. As part of it, some teachers created a behavioral checklist for her in tenth grade. It was a prescription for how to fit in: Don’t talk so much in class; keep it to a sound bite. Don’t be so aggressive. Don’t answer all the questions. Don’t discuss things so much. Tone it down. Don’t challenge the classroom status quo.

There it was, written down for her to follow: how to take that precocious mind and learn to be like everyone else.

* * *

Joshua played the piano with a brilliance that defied his tiny body. At age two he saw his uncle perform and told his mother he wanted to try. Even as a toddler he never banged his hands against the keyboard. He played notes on their own, concentrating on the sounds. Though normally an active little boy, he could sit patiently on the piano bench for half an hour or more, mesmerized by the shiny black and white keys. He played and played, and he got better, jumping from “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to Mozart like leaping from puddle to puddle. His feet couldn’t reach the pedals. Yet when Joshua was five, his teacher convinced his parents, Margaret and Vladislav, that their son might qualify for admission to the Juilliard School’s pre-college program. They brought him to the grand building behind the Lincoln Center in New York City and let him play for the judges. Joshua and his teacher had to choose music that wouldn’t suffer because his fingers couldn’t yet reach an octave, but he passed the audition anyway. He became the youngest child ever admitted. He and his mother began making the pilgrimage to Manhattan every Saturday, following the other little prodigies into Juilliard’s halls.

Meanwhile, during the week Joshua attended a normal public elementary school in suburban New York. His precocity extended beyond the piano. He learned to read before starting school. His immigrant parents assumed school would be like playing the piano—you moved ahead as quickly as you learned. It wasn’t. When Joshua finished assignments long before the rest of the class, his first grade teacher told him to keep quiet at his desk. The little boy had a hard time sitting still without a piano in front of him. He talked to the other children and tried to make them laugh, and he wound up in the principal’s office at least once a week for causing trouble. Margaret met with Joshua’s teacher and asked her to give him more work—something to read, something to do. The teacher instead turned these meetings into a litany of Joshua’s behavioral faults. He had to learn to behave and cope with boredom. Nobody got anything special. Everyone had to do the same thing. So Joshua kept going to the principal’s office, learning early on that being different made him bad.

Joshua’s family lived in a good school district. People bought houses there because the schools promised to expose children to a wide variety of opportunities. One of those opportunities was music class, which was required every year. It wasn’t quite Juilliard. Margaret later learned that the elementary school music teacher once ran to another teacher in tears after class because, as she said, “I don’t know what to do. Joshua can teach me.” At this time Joshua was making his concerto debut, playing Haydn’s D-Major Piano Concerto with the New York String Society. But this didn’t matter. Joshua couldn’t go to another room to play the piano during music class or even sit in the corner and read. He had to spend hours clapping the rhythm for quarter notes and other things he had learned long ago.

Joshua’s school, like Rachel’s, had a gifted program, of sorts. It was open to any reasonably bright child who showed an interest, and it consisted of little more than puzzles and extra work in addition to the worksheets and end-of-chapter comprehension questions. Joshua barely had time for that because of his hours of daily piano practice and his weekends filled with lessons. He loved piano; his face would light up as he talked of his favorite piece, a concerto by Shostakovich. It had a simple structure, he said, a little of everything, and it was a bit out there, though not so out there as something by John Cage, though of course Beethoven was considered out there for his time. Perhaps classical in the sense of Rachmaninoff, whose showiness hid a classical construction. Composers’ names and styles flowed off the boy’s tongue.

The children at Juilliard he saw once a week shared this fascination, but not the children at his middle school. There, people didn’t understand his lack of interest in sports and his frustration with the school’s militant devotion to grade-level and only grade-level work. Over the years his friends dwindled in number as they had less and less to talk about. He went through the same awkwardness as other thirteen-year-olds, made worse by the precocity that already made him different. The three to four hours of daily practice wore him down, too. With long, boring school days already filled with mindless distractions, he had little time for anything else. He grew tired of being different, tired of not fitting in. And, increasingly, he began to suffer from stage fright. In the past, Joshua had played at benefit concerts in full halls. He even played the role of a young Beethoven in an A&E Biography series, performing music by Mozart and Haydn. Now he became petrified of failing before thousands of people. He had seldom been truly challenged, and so he had never failed at anything. The possibility made his knees go weak.

He considered quitting the piano. His mother said he could if he wanted to. She just wanted him to feel normal, she said. Joshua didn’t like being so different, either. So one of the world’s most promising young musicians considered leaving his first love.

Squandered Talent, Wasted Time

Rachel and Joshua are real children. In small-town Pennsylvania and suburban New York they discovered that for gifted students like themselves, school can be an act of mental cruelty—or at best a waste of time. They are just two of thousands of such precocious, frustrated children nationwide who have watched the educational establishment shrug at their special gifts. They have seen their zeal for discovery buried in inertia. They wonder why school has to be so boring and why learning can’t be more of a joy.

Every day we hear tales of their troubles. One teenage girl tells of being mocked as a “rocket scientist” by a teacher trying to gain rapport with a class. A mother is told to put her child on Ritalin to drug the boredom away. An eager, extroverted six-year old girl has to be dragged to school because she dreads the dull hours so much. A seventh grade boy learns algebra over the summer, but has to repeat the class in eighth grade because his school can’t be bothered with accommodating his new knowledge. Schools label some gifted children as dull troublemakers because they refuse to do meaningless work. Others simply endure social isolation for speaking differently and caring about things different from other children their age.

While many gifted children eventually triumph in their quest to learn, few have an easy time of it. Indeed, we know that most highly gifted children are chronic underachievers—doing enough to get straight A’s, but hardly enough to stretch and grow their minds. Gifted education pioneer Leta Hollingworth once wrote that “in the ordinary elementary school situation, children of 140 IQ waste half their time. Those of 170 IQ waste practically all their time.” Except for a few bright spots, the situation has only worsened since Hollingworth conducted her research in the 1920s and 1930s. In America today the educational system—which is focused on the lowest common denominator—is more likely to crush a bright child’s spirit than nurture her intellect.

Two realities drive these children’s torments. First, America prides itself on being an egalitarian nation. The highly gifted seem privileged and thus undeserving of help. In tight times, funding for gifted education becomes a luxury. Massachusetts, for example, recently slashed an already meager gifted education budget from roughly $400,000 a year to zero. California’s then-Governor Gray Davis vetoed a 2002 bill that would have helped gifted students attend college early, because the state is required to provide a free education for all children through age eighteen: He claimed it was too expensive. The 2002 federal education budget allotted only $11 million for gifted programs, and this was mostly for research projects, not classroom instruction. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 increased educational spending—but almost entirely for those on the lower end of the achievement ladder. Overall, researcher Joyce Van Tassel-Baska estimates, America spends 143 times more on special education than gifted education.

Money alone won’t make children learn, although it helps. But even well-funded schools suffer from the second problem: America has also become an anti-intellectual nation. When Harvard University lowers its standards to recruit students who can win football games or capture championships in women’s squash, it’s no surprise that the rest of the country is prepared to compromise on academic achievement. If you walk into any American high school, the trophies you see displayed in the hall case are unlikely to be those of the student who won the state math contest. USA Today’s annual All-USA Academic lists showcase students with significant community service achievements more than those whose contributions have advanced human knowledge.

Evidence of this neglect rolls in. American businesses lament the shortage of highly skilled workers, and universities import many scientists and engineers from abroad. The number of American students scoring above 1000 on the SAT declined so much over the past few decades that the test had to be adjusted to “recenter”—and thus raise—the scores. Observers note that standard textbooks have declined as much as two grade levels in complexity since early in the twentieth century. Princeton University recently instituted basic writing classes to assist some of the highest-achieving kids in America who show up at college unable to write essays.

Quite simply, schools do not challenge their most intelligent students. And not only do they not challenge their gifted students, they push them back toward the middle, lauding doctrines of “socialization” and radical egalitarianism, which deny that some children learn faster than others. As we hear again a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgement
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Genius Denied
• 2. The Sorry State of Gifted Education
• 3. The Lowest Common Denominator
• 4. Parenting Pushy Kids
• 5. Patrons, Teachers, and Mentors
• 6. School Solutions: “I Do Not See Boredom Here”
• 7. Raising the Ceiling and the Floor
• What You Can Do
• Notes
• Bibliography