{"id":1911389,"date":"2023-04-07T13:27:38","date_gmt":"2023-04-07T17:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gifted-students-suffer-when-public-schools-focus-on-underachievers-and-teaching-to-the-middle\/"},"modified":"2023-04-07T13:30:15","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T17:30:15","slug":"gifted-students-suffer-when-public-schools-focus-on-underachievers-and-teaching-to-the-middle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gifted-students-suffer-when-public-schools-focus-on-underachievers-and-teaching-to-the-middle\/","title":{"rendered":"Gifted Students Suffer When Public Schools Focus On Underachievers And \u2018Teaching To The Middle\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fgifted-students-suffer-when-public-schools-focus-on-underachievers-and-teaching-to-the-middle%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1911389&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p><em>The following is an excerpt from the new book \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mediocrity-Government-Schools-Failing-Students\/dp\/B0BSZBSP8Q\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Y542HRZJVC04&#038;keywords=connor+boyack&#038;qid=1680817671&#038;s=books&#038;sprefix=connor+boyack%2Cstripbooks%2C91&#038;sr=1-1\">Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today\u2019s Students<\/a>,\u201d by Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis.<\/em><\/p>\n<h2><strong>Stunting The Gifted<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Caitlyn Singam was in kindergarten, her teacher suggested to her parents that she be labeled as a special-needs student because she was intellectually backward. This was a shock to her father, who noted that the young girl was already reading, including advanced material, at that young age. The teacher informed Singam\u2019s father that she \u201cwas finishing her reading assignments \u2018too fast\u2019 to have any understanding of the material.\u201d When the dad suggested that his daughter might simply be an advanced reader, the teacher said, \u201cshe did not think it possible the girl could be so far ahead of her peers.\u201d Although gifted, she was being branded as deficient.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As Singam got older, she faced significant resistance from school administrators when her parents inquired about moving her up a grade or two. According to the spokesman for the school district, they decided to rigidly follow established protocols and \u201csimply wanted to ensure all of her needs were met.\u201d Never mind the fact that her needs were not being met by being held back to sit in a desk next to children who were similar in age but not ability. Singam recalled what his daughter\u2019s kindergarten teacher had warned him years before: \u201cPublic schools simply didn\u2019t have the means to support my daughter.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When politicians and pundits discuss education reform, they typically highlight the perceived need for more funding and programs. Their attention focuses almost exclusively on children at the bottom of the pack \u2014 the underachievers and disadvantaged children struggling to keep up with teachers\u2019 lessons. And while this is a laudable goal when providing education broadly to millions of children, there is a lack of attention on the high achievers \u2014 a result of the \u201cteaching -to-the-middle\u201d tendency of most government schools. David Lubinsky led a study at Vanderbilt University analyzing the relationship between top-performing children and future achievement. \u201cGifted children are a precious human-capital resource,\u201d he points out \u2014 and a severely underutilized one, since the government school system does not adequately support and challenge the students. The study focused on students scoring in the top 0.01 percentile on the SAT at a young age (or, in other words, those who ranked higher than 99.99 percent of their peers). And there was a problem they discovered: the students\u2019 early academic excellence was \u201cbelied by years of educational setbacks and systemic pitfalls.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another researcher on the project further highlighted the problem:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cThere\u2019s this idea that gifted students don\u2019t really need any help. This study shows that\u2019s not the case. These people with very high IQs \u2014 what some have called the \u201cscary smart\u201d \u2014 will do well in regular classrooms, but they still won\u2019t meet their full potential unless they\u2019re given access to accelerated coursework, AP classes, and educational programs that place talented students with their intellectual peers.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Singam\u2019s experience is not unique; many gifted students are not provided challenging, intellectual opportunities in government schools. Nearly 80 percent of teachers surveyed in 2008 agreed that \u201cGetting underachieving students to reach proficiency has become so important that the needs of advanced students take a back seat.\u201d The system forces gifted students to remain in a holding pattern while teachers perpetually focus on underachievers hoping they will catch up. It is a cruel punishment \u2014 a boring waiting game \u2014 that never ends for those who can excel if adequately challenged. Indeed, the Vanderbilt study found that \u201c13-year-olds in the top 3 percent of math ability who took the project\u2019s fast-paced math class were twice as likely to go into math or science careers than a similar group that didn\u2019t take the classes.\u201d But if a gifted child\u2019s spark isn\u2019t maintained, they look for stimulation elsewhere. Of the approximately one million school dropouts every year, nearly one out of ten earned mostly As. The biggest reason for quitting, cited by those top-performing students, is boredom. And worse, gifted children sometimes develop coping strategies to better fit in with peers, intentionally hiding their intellectual gifts and stifling their strengths since they are not praised and cultivated by the system they are in. This can produce feelings of alienation, anxiety, and a sense of shame that is completely counterproductive to helping them pursue their potential, which is ostensibly the entire goal of the education system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, there\u2019s an achievement gap in schools, but administrators and teachers are only focusing on the bottom, thus ignoring \u2014 and weakening \u2014 the top. One researcher remarked, \u201cYou could make an argument that [these neglected high-achievers] merit the greatest investment, because they\u2019re going to be the greatest producers, based on their early academic achievement.\u201d But that is increasingly at odds with the school system\u2019s priorities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Consider California, the pedagogical petri dish whose educational experiments often trickle down to (or are forced upon) other states. In 2021, the state\u2019s Department of Education announced a new framework for math in K-12 government schools that would structurally discourage gifted students from pursuing accelerated classes to study advanced concepts. With supposed inequity as the driving concern, the department\u2019s lengthy framework fretted, as summarized by one commentator:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cToo many students are sorted into different math tracks based on their natural abilities, which leads some to take calculus by their senior year of high school while others don\u2019t make it past basic algebra. The department\u2019s solution is to prohibit any sorting until high school, keeping gifted kids in the same classrooms as their less mathematically inclined peers until at least grade nine.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One is reminded of Winston Churchill telling the House of Commons in 1945, \u201cThe inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.\u201d Like in Ayn Rand\u2019s \u201cAtlas Shrugged,\u201d the moochers and government administrators despise those who excel and, thus, throw roadblocks in their path to retard their progress. Parents of gifted children should look to this school system with extreme suspicion, for it treats such students as an academic afterthought.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>This is an excerpt from the new book \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mediocrity-Government-Schools-Failing-Students\/dp\/B0BSZBSP8Q\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Y542HRZJVC04&#038;keywords=connor+boyack&#038;qid=1680817671&#038;s=books&#038;sprefix=connor+boyack%2Cstripbooks%2C91&#038;sr=1-1\">Mediocrity<\/a>\u201d by Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis, set to release on April 26, 2023.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Connor Boyack is the author of the Tuttle Twins children\u2019s book series, which teaches the ideas of a free society to the rising generation. He is also president of <a href=\"https:\/\/libertas.org\/\">Libertas Institute<\/a>, a free market think tank.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.federationforchildren.org\/\">American Federation for Children<\/a>. He is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at Liberty Justice Center.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is an excerpt from the new book \u201cMediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today\u2019s Students,\u201d by Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis. Stunting The Gifted When Caitlyn Singam was in kindergarten, her teacher suggested to her parents that she be labeled as a special-needs student because she was intellectually backward. This was a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1933,"featured_media":1911390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[7786,15962,7088,3799,3735,4072,14003,5008,23782],"class_list":["post-1911389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-daily-wire","tag-focus","tag-gifted","tag-middle","tag-public","tag-schools","tag-students","tag-suffer","tag-teaching","tag-underachievers"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1933"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1911389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1911390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1911389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1911389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1911389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}