by Joy Lawson Davis
(with Donna Y. Ford
& Josh Shaine)
Yesterday I read with dismay
and irritation a commentary published in the Washington Post entitled: ‘Why Geniuses Don’t Need Gifted Education’. After reading I immediately thought of all
the gifted children in schools and communities across the nation who may be
placed at an even greater disadvantage simply because of the publication of
that brief and poorly justified commentary. I also thought of the thousands of
times I have in my thirty year career heard a parent, school administrator or
teacher say that gifted services were in jeopardy of being dismantled, cut from
the budget or reduced to almost nothing all because new leadership were of the
mindset that is perpetrated by articles like the one in the Post – that gifted
students or ‘geniuses’ as Mathews specified would make it anyway without
specially funded, specially designed, specially set-aside services just for
them!
My head was spinning after I
read the article and I shared feed back with two colleagues (Donna Y. Ford and
Josh Shaine) whom I greatly respect and the three of us decided that together
we would share our ‘retort’ to the Post article here on this blog hoping that a
wide audience would read and respond sharing their feedback as we will do here.
We were especially concerned that this article which was written to speak
specifically to one type of genius or gifted child- the one who is born in
circumstances where it may be likely that parents or school resources (without
special services) would be sufficient to nurture and help them develop their
high intellectual capacity. The article made absolutely NO MENTION of the
genius child who through no fault of his or her own would be born in a
household where parents are working day to day to make ends meet, where
resources are limited, where the nearest university campus is an hour away,
where they may sit in classrooms idling away their genius because ill-trained
teachers don’t recognize or respect the gifts they have. Worse, there are some
children & youth in communities whose teachers don’t believe that they can
even BE GIFTED or PERFORM AT A GENIUS LEVEL.
What about gifted services
for those types of geniuses? Those children still need and will probably always
NEED GIFTED SERVICES. I will take my position even further to suggest that ALL
GIFTED CHILDREN WILL ALWAYS NEED GIFTED SERVICES. Why?
The gifted education
classroom for many will be the first and only place that they actually find a
set of peers who think like they do, enjoy and have passions like theirs, where
they can find a friend and in doing so – find themselves.
And what about Black
geniuses? It was obvious that Post article was not making reference to those
students. Black geniuses are being discovered and increasingly spoken about. It
was Dr. Martin D. Jenkins in the early 20th century who noted that Black
gifted students would continuously have difficulties accessing services that
are more freely provided their White peers. In his early work, Jenkins and his
mentor, Paul Witty studied a black female genius with an IQ of 200. When
Mathews mentioned the Termites studied by Lewis Terman in his article, he was
certainly not speaking of Black geniuses or even females for that matter!! It is
well known that Terman’s study group were white , middle - upper income males (Davis, 2013).
In my work with Black gifted
students over the past three decades, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve
been told personally by someone that the gifted program ‘saved me’ or from a
parent – the gifted program or the summer enrichment program ‘saved my child’
turned his/her life around…
The gifted education program,
well designed and well implemented is the only place a bright, creative student
with high energy, and a voracious mind can have opportunities to experiment
with ideas, be challenged to think beyond the norm and be challenged to create new knowledge.
The gifted program, well
implemented and accessible to all geniuses, regardless of their ethnicity, can
provide a global think tank for gifted children from other cultures, other
neighborhoods, and provide opportunities for them to be compete at a level that
cannot be provided for in the regular school environment.
I believe there are thousands
of genius children and youth who are Black, Brown, some poor, some rural,
urban, who are craving Gifted education programming. These young people need
more advocates, more attention, more programming- not LESS. As we compete
globally and recognize that our students in the U.S. are not performing to up
to par with their foreign neighbors, this is hardly the time to say: GENIUSES
DON’T NEED GIFTED EDUCATION!
Josh Shaine provides key
pluses and minuses in the Mathews commentary here: https://www.facebook.com/joshshaine/posts/10100181937811968?notif_t=like
While there may be some
geniuses who may fare well independently, we believe that for most - special
programs in public schools, support programming funded by private entities like
the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, Oliver Scholars Programs, SEED program, University
programming (summer, after school, early college, etc), State and regional Governor’s
schools (like those in VA and NC) are GREATLY NEEDED.
From where we sit, gifted
children need more!! We are under-serving students of color, poor students,
rural students, urban students at astronomical rates (Ford, 2013). We MUST DO
BETTER! WE MUST SERVE THESE CHILDREN AND MEET THEIR NEEDS FOR INTELLECTUAL,
ACADEMIC, AND CREATIVE CHALLENGE. Less programming, less attention to the
geniuses in America’s communities is definitely NOT the answer!!
For more reading:
Davis, J.L. (2013). Martin D. Jenkins: A Voice to be Heard. In A.
Robinson & J. Jolly (Eds), Illuminating
Lives: A century of contributions to gifted education. New York: Routledge
Press.
Ford,
D.Y. (2013). Recruiting and retaining culturally
different students in gifted education. Waco: Prufrock
Press.
To read Mathews’ commentary,
go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-geniuses-dont-need-gifted-education/2013/12/01/4dbd2342-56e0-11e3-835d-e7173847c7cc_story.html
