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Any sensible culture would know what to do
with Annalisee Brasil. The 14-year-old not only has the looks of a South
American model but is also one of the brightest kids of her generation.
When Annalisee was 3, her mother Angi Brasil noticed that she was stringing
together word cards composed not simply into short phrases but into
complete, grammatically correct sentences. After the girl turned 6, her
mother took her for an IQ test. Annalisee found the exercises so easy that
she played jokes on the testers--in one case she not only put blocks in the
correct order but did it backward too. Angi doesn't want her daughter's IQ
published, but it is comfortably above 145, placing the girl in the top
0.1% of the population. Annalisee is also a gifted singer: last year,
although just 13, she won a regional high school competition conducted by
the National Association of Teachers of Singing.
Annalisee should be the star pupil at a
school in her hometown of Longview, Texas. While it would
be too much to ask for a smart kid to be popular too, Annalisee is witty
and pretty, and it's easy to imagine she would get along well at school.
But until last year, Annalisee's parents--Angi, a 53-year-old university
assistant, and Marcelo, 63, who recently retired from his job at a
Caterpillar dealership--couldn't find a school willing to take their
daughter unless she enrolled with her age-mates. None of the schools in
Longview--and even as far away as the Dallas area--were willing to let
Annalisee skip more than two grades. She needed to skip at least three--she
was doing sixth-grade work at age 7. Many school systems are wary of grade
skipping even though research shows that it usually works well both
academically and socially for gifted students--and that holding them back
can lead to isolation and underachievement. So Angi home schooled
Annalisee.
But Angi felt something was missing in her
daughter's life. Annalisee, whose three siblings are grown, didn't have a
rich social network of other kids. By 13, she had moved beyond her mother's
ability to meaningfully teach her. The family talked about sending her to
college, but everyone was hesitant. Annalisee needed to mature socially. By
the time I met her in February, she had been having trouble getting along
with others. "People are, I must admit it, a lot of times intimidated
by me," she told me; modesty isn't among her many talents. She described
herself as "perfectionistic" and said other students sometimes
had "jealousy issues" regarding her.
The system failed Annalisee, but could any
system be designed to accommodate her rare gifts? Actually, it would have
been fairly simple (and virtually cost-free) to let her skip grades, but
the lack of awareness about the benefits of grade skipping is emblematic of
a larger problem: our education system has little idea how to cultivate its
most promising students. Since well before the Bush Administration began
using the impossibly sunny term "no child left behind," those who
write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the
bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted
students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids--about 5% of both
populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly
Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the
gifted range. Earlier this year, Patrick Gonzales of the U.S. Department of
Education presented a paper showing that the highest-achieving students in
six other countries, including Japan, Hungary and Singapore, scored
significantly higher in math than their bright U.S. counterparts, who
scored about the same as the Estonians. Which all suggests we may be
squandering a national resource: our best young minds.
In 2004-05, the most recent academic year
for which the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has data, U.S.
universities awarded 43,354 doctorates--more than ever during the 50 years
NORC has gathered the data. But the rate of increase in the number of U.S.
doctorates has fallen dramatically since 1970, when it hit nearly 15% for
the year; for more than a decade, the number of doctorates has grown less
than 3.5% a year. The staggering late-1960s growth in Ph.D.s followed a
period of increased attention on gifted kids after Sputnik. Now we're
coasting.
To some extent, complacency is built into
the system. American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating
the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn't even tabulated in some
states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800
million on gifted programs. But it can't make sense to spend 10 times as
much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to
nurture those with the greatest potential.
We take for granted that those with IQs at
least three standard deviations below the mean (those who score 55 or lower
on IQ tests) require "special" education. But students with IQs
that are at least three standard deviations above the mean (145 or higher)
often have just as much trouble interacting with average kids and learning
at an average pace. Shouldn't we do something special for them as well?
True, these are IQs at the extremes. Of the 62 million school-age kids in
the U.S., only about 62,000 have IQs above 145. (A similar number have IQs
below 55.) That's a small number, but they appear in every demographic, in
every community. What to do with them? Squandered potential is always unfortunate,
but presumably it is these powerful young minds that, if nourished, could
one day cure leukemia or stop global warming or become the next James
Joyce--or at least J.K. Rowling.
In a no-child-left-behind conception of
public education, lifting everyone up to a minimum level is more important
than allowing students to excel to their limit. It has become more
important for schools to identify deficiencies than to cultivate gifts. Odd
though it seems for a law written and enacted during a Republican
Administration, the social impulse behind No Child Left Behind is radically
egalitarian. It has forced schools to deeply subsidize the education of the
least gifted, and gifted programs have suffered. The year after the
President signed the law in 2002, Illinois cut $16 million from gifted
education; Michigan cut funding from $5 million to $500,000. Federal
spending declined from $11.3 million in 2002 to $7.6 million this year.
What's needed is a new model for gifted
education, an urgent sense that prodigious intellectual talents are a
threatened resource. That's the idea behind the Davidson Academy of Nevada,
in Reno, which was founded by a wealthy couple, Janice and Robert Davidson,
but chartered by the state legislature as a public, tuition-free school.
The academy will begin its second year Aug. 27, and while it will have just
45 students, they are 45 of the nation's smartest children. They are kids
from age 11 to 16 who are taking classes at least three years beyond their
grade level (and in some cases much more; two of the school's prodigies
have virtually exhausted the undergraduate math curriculum at the
University of Nevada, Reno, whose campus hosts the academy). Among
Davidson's students are a former state chess champion, a girl who was a
semifinalist in the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge at age 11
(the competition is open to kids as old as 14) and a boy who placed fourth
in both the Nevada spelling and geography bees even though he was a
12-year-old competing against kids as old as 15. And last year the school
enrolled another talented kid from a town 1,700 miles (some 2,700 km) away:
Annalisee Brasil, whose mother moved with her to Reno so Annalisee could
attend the school (her father was working in Longview at the time).
The academy is being watched closely in
education circles. The Davidsons are well-connected philanthropists who
made their fortune in the education-software business--Jan and a friend
conceived the hit Math Blaster program in the early 1980s. She and her
husband sold Davidson & Associates for roughly $1.1 billion in 1996.
They have given millions of dollars to universities and tens of thousands
to Republican politicians like George W. Bush and Senator John Ensign of
Nevada. Gifted kids often draw only flickering interest from government
officials, but Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings attended the
Davidson Academy's opening.
At the academy, the battered concept of
IQ--complicated in recent years by the idea of multiple intelligences, including
artistic and emotional acuity--is accepted there without the encumbrances
of politics. The school is a rejection of the thoroughly American notion
that if most just try hard enough, we could all be talented. Many school
administrators oppose ability grouping on the theory that it can perpetuate
social inequalities, but at the Davidson Academy, even the 45 élite
students are grouped by ability into easier and harder English, math and
science classes. The school poses blunt questions about American education:
Has the drive to ensure equity over excellence gone too far? If so, is the
answer to segregate the brightest kids?
HOW WE SEE THEM
AS A CULTURE, WE FEEL DEEPLY ambiguous
about genius. We venerate Einstein, but there is no more detested creature
than the know-it-all. In one 1996 study from Gifted Education Press
Quarterly, 3,514 high school students were asked whether they would rather
be the best-looking, smartest or most athletic kids. A solid 54% wanted to
be smartest (37% wanted to be most athletic, and 9% wanted to be best
looking). But only 0.3% said the reason to be smartest was to gain
popularity. We like athletic prodigies like Tiger Woods or young Academy
Award winners like Anna Paquin. But the mercurial, aloof, annoying nerd has
been a trope of our culture, from Bartleby the Scrivener to the dorky PC
guy in the Apple ads. Intellectual precocity fascinates but repels.
Educators have long debated what to do
with highly gifted children. As early as 1926, Columbia education professor
Leta Hollingworth noted that kids who score between 125 and 155 on IQ tests
have the "socially optimal" level of intelligence; those with IQs
over 160 are often socially isolated because they are so different from
peers--more mini-adults than kids. Reading Hollingworth, I was reminded of
Annalisee, who at 13 spoke in clear, well-modulated paragraphs, as though
she were a TV commentator or college professor. For an adult, the effect is
quite pleasant, but I imagine other kids find Annalisee's precision a bit
strange.
In Hollingworth's day, when we were a
little less sensitive to snobbery, it wasn't as difficult for high-ability
kids to skip grades. But since at least the mid-1980s, schools have often
forced gifted students to stay in age-assigned grades--even though a 160-IQ
kid trying to learn at the pace of average, 100-IQ kids is akin to an
average girl trying to learn at the pace of a retarded girl with an IQ of
40. Advocates for gifted kids consider one of the most pernicious results
to be "cooperative learning" arrangements in which high-ability
students are paired with struggling kids on projects. Education professor
Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales in Sydney has called the
current system a "lockstep curriculum ... in what is euphemistically
termed the 'inclusion' classroom." The gifted students, she notes,
don't feel included.
We tend to assume that the highly gifted
will eventually find their way--they're smart, right? The misapprehension
that genius simply emerges unbidden is related to our mixed feelings about
intelligence: we know Alex Rodriguez had to practice to become a great
baseball player, and we don't think of special schools for gymnasts or
tennis prodigies as élitist--a charge already leveled against the Davidson
Academy. But giftedness on the playing field and giftedness in, say, a lab
aren't so different. As Columbia education professor Abraham Tannenbaum has
written, "Giftedness requires social context that enables it."
Like a muscle, raw intelligence can't build if it's not exercised.
People often wonder how to tell if their
child is gifted. Truly gifted kids are almost always autodidacts. Take Max
Oswald-Selis. He moved to Reno from Sydney with his mother Gael Oswald so
that he could attend Davidson. Max is 12. The first time I saw him at the
academy, he was reading an article about the Supreme Court. He likes to
fence. He loves Latin because "it's a very regimented language ...
There's probably at least 28 different endings for any given verb, because
there's first-, second- and third-person singular and plural for each tense
..." He went on like this for some time. Max didn't get along
especially well with classmates in Sydney and later Kent, England, where
his mother first moved him in search of an appropriate school--and where
she says he was beaten on the playground.
Max is Gael's only child, so when he
taught himself to read at 3--she says she hadn't even taught him the
alphabet--she wasn't sure it was so unusual. Then around age 4, he read
aloud from a medical book in the doctor's office, and the doctor
recommended intelligence testing. At 4, Max had the verbal skills of a
13-year-old. He skipped kindergarten, but he was still bored, and his
mother despaired. No system is going to be able to keep up, she thought.
Gael, a math teacher, began to research
giftedness and found that high-IQ kids can become isolated adults.
"They end up often as depressed adults ... who don't have friends or
who find it difficult to function," she says. Actually, research shows
that gifted kids given appropriately challenging environments--even when
that means being placed in classes of much older students--usually turn out
fine. At the University of New South Wales, Gross conducted a longitudinal
study of 60 Australians who scored at least 160 on IQ tests beginning in
the late '80s. Today most of the 33 students who were not allowed to skip
grades have jaded views of education, and at least three are dropouts.
"These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships
because, having been to a large extent socially isolated at school, they
have had much less practice ... in developing and maintaining social
relationships," Gross has written. "A number have had counseling.
Two have been treated for severe depression." By contrast, the 17 kids
who were able to skip at least three grades have mostly received Ph.D.s,
and all have good friends.
At the Davidson Academy, all the kids are
skipping ahead quickly--in some cases they completed more than two years of
material last year. There's no sixth grade or ninth grade or any grade at
the academy, just three tracks ("core," "college prep"
and "college prep with research"). The curriculums are
individualized and fluid--some students take college-prep English but core-level
math. I sat in on the Algebra II class one day, but it wasn't so much a
traditional class as a study session guided by the teacher, Darren Ripley.
Kids worked from different parts of the textbook. (One 11-year-old was
already halfway through; most Americans who take Algebra II do so at 15 or
16.) Occasionally Ripley would show a small group how to solve a problem on
the whiteboard, but there was no lecture.
THE FOUNDERS
ULTIMATELY THE ACADEMY'S MOST important
gift to its students is social, not academic. One of the main reasons Jan
and Bob Davidson founded the school was to provide a nurturing social
setting for the highly gifted. Through another project of theirs, the
Davidson Institute for Talent Development, each year the Davidsons assist
1,200 highly gifted students around the U.S. who need help persuading their
schools to let them skip a grade or who want to meet other kids like them.
Often the kids are wasting away in average classes, something that drives
Bob Davidson crazy: "I mean, that's criminal to send a kid [who already
reads well] to kindergarten ... Somebody should go to jail for that! That
is emotional torture!"
Davidson, 64, carries an air of peremptory
self-assurance. He unself-consciously enjoys his place in the plutocracy.
During a tour of the Lake Tahoe manse he and Jan, 63, call Glen Eagle, he
showed me his red Ferrari, his private theater and the two 32-ft. totem
poles just inside the entry. They are made from cedar at least 750 years
old and feature carvings of the Davidsons and their three kids, who are now
grown. Bob sees his work for the gifted as akin to the patronage that
sustained the artists and inventors of the Renaissance. His view of
giftedness is expressed through simple analogies: Educators often
"want people to have equal results. But that's not likely in our
world. You know, I would love to be equal to Michael Jordan in my
basketball talents, but somehow I never will be."
But such an uncomplicated view of
intelligence--one that esteems IQ scores and raw mental power--has had at
least one awkward consequence for the Davidson Academy: it doesn't mirror
America. Twenty-six of the 45 students are boys; only two are black. (A
total of 16 are minorities.) The school is unlikely ever to represent girls
and African Americans proportionately because of a reality about IQ tests:
more boys score at the high end of the IQ scale (and, it should be said,
more score at the low end; girls' IQ variance is smaller). And for reasons
that no one understands, African Americans' IQ scores have tended to
cluster about a standard deviation below the average--evidence for some
that the tests themselves are biased.
Not everyone at the academy embraces a
strict IQ-based definition of giftedness. Its curriculum director, Robert Schultz,
emphasizes the importance of interpersonal skills, passion and tenacity in
long-term success. Still, the Davidsons point out, correctly, that they are
serving an underserved population, kids whose high IQs can make them
outcasts. The academy provides a home for them and also functions to check
their self-regard since they finally compete day to day with kids who are
just as bright. Because everyone at Davidson performs so well, says Claire
Evans, 12, "other kids can't say, 'Well, I'm better than you because I
did this good.' I did that good too!" (Of course, being labeled
prodigies in stories like this one probably inflates them, but researchers
have found that outside labeling has less effect on your self-concept than
where you fit in with peers you see every day.) Going to Davidson has been
an adjustment for kids used to "being on the top of the pile," in
the words of Colleen Harsin, 36, the academy's director. Harsin has heard
Davidsonians arrive at difficult realizations: "I'm not as smart as I
thought I was." "Somebody's better at math than I am. That's
never happened."
A NEW ISOLATION?
NO MATTER THEIR IQS, THESE ARE STILL KIDS
on the rocky promontory of adolescence. Hormones crackle; tempers rise. The
boys shove; the girls gossip; a kid hits another kid during volleyball.
"They are O.K. with the team sports, but this is a group that really
loves the individual sports--the rock climbing was a big hit," says
Kathy Dohr, the gym teacher. You do get the sense sometimes that the
Davidson students are alone together. An older boy who says he was beaten
up at other schools told me, "I can't say I have many friends here,
but I'm not hated ... The school does tend to be pretty much sort of
cliquish."
The academy has been good for Annalisee
Brasil, even though dividing into two households has been expensive and
stressful for the Brasils. She has made friends at the academy and at the
university, where this summer she completed a precalculus course so that
she can take college calculus in the fall. She has also developed an
interest in biochemistry. Socially, Annalisee is finally learning to get
along with others in a close-knit setting. "It's been interesting
having to deal with that and getting used to, you know, the judgments of
other kids," she told me in February. "We get into arguments a
lot, because we're all really smart people with opinions, and it doesn't
always turn out that great. Sometimes I take things a little too
personally. You know, I'm the typical sensitive artist, unfortunately."
The Davidson kids feel less isolated, but
have the Davidsons simply created another kind of isolation for their
students? When I asked curriculum director Schultz this question, he
replied in an e-mail that schools can nurture traits like "civic
virtue and community development." And he warned of the alternative:
"Essentially these individuals are left to their own devices [in
regular schools] and really struggle to find a space for themselves ...
Some successfully traverse society's pitfalls (for instance, Albert
Einstein); others are less successful (for instance, Theodore Kaczynski).
In either case, unless performance was noted as deficient (in Einstein's
case, he was believed to be a mute) via school personnel, schools did
nothing to provide services. This continues today."
But there is something to be said for
being left to one's own devices and learning to cope in difficult
surroundings. Einstein is a good example: it's a myth that Einstein failed
math, but he hated his Munich school, the Luitpold Gymnasium. Like many
other gifted kids, he chafed at authority. "The teachers at the
elementary school seemed to me like drill sergeants, and the teachers at
the gymnasium are like lieutenants," he later said. Einstein was
encouraged to leave the school, and he did so at 15. He didn't need a
coddling academy to do O.K. later on.
That's not to say the best approach is a
cold Dickensian bed. But Einstein's experience does suggest a middle course
between moving to Reno for an élite new school and striking out alone at age
15. Currently, gifted programs too often admit marginal, hardworking kids
and then mostly assign field trips and extra essays, not truly accelerated
course work pegged to a student's abilities. Ideally, school systems should
strive to keep their most talented students through a combination of grade
skipping and other approaches (dual enrollment in community colleges,
telescoping classwork without grade skipping) that ensure they won't drop
out or feel driven away to Nevada. The best way to treat the Annalisee
Brasils of the world is to let them grow up in their own communities--by
allowing them to skip ahead at their own pace. We shouldn't be so wary of
those who can move a lot faster than the rest of us.
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