A few evenings ago, I posted the following message on my Facebook page:
Educators: Stop filling “gifted” students’ heads with biases against “regular” students. The problem is yours, and you’re infecting children with it.
Comments immediately popped up. One woman wrote that this had happened to her as a child; “It took a few years to wipe the elitism from my head.” Another remembered how her third-grade teacher “treated her ‘gifted and talented’ students like royalty while shaming other students in her class.” Someone suggested that calling a program, and the students in it, “gifted” was perhaps part of the problem. And a friend from college recounted a story that reflected the inequitable ways children are – or are not – identified for gifted.
As a 25-year veteran of high school and college teaching who works closely with pre-service English teachers, I am usually the last person you’ll find saying anything negative about educators. Yet, as I spend this sabbatical semester facilitating a small publishing elective at a local high school, I have been reminded of my complicated relationship to gifted education.
This publishing elective is part of a critical literacies-oriented program a group of us have developed over the last several years. Students at the high school can opt into the program, Humanities Amped, by writing a statement about why it interests them, and it has been purposely untracked from the beginning. At first, students in the gifted program, like all the other students at the school, could make this choice for themselves. Now, though, they have now been barred from doing so lest it affect the size of the school’s gifted program. The gifted program carries special weight because it is a major recruitment draw for its large, public school. Like too many such schools in too many districts around the country, ours is in competition for high-achieving students – who mean higher average test scores for their schools – with every other high school in the district. Meanwhile, the powers that be work to battle threats to funding and stability from the growing charter school presence in this deep south capital city.
One of the students in my current elective was in the gifted program until 10th grade, when she opted into our Humanities Amped, which meant taking ELA and history courses through that program rather than through Gifted. As she reflected on the experience of shifting from one program to the other, her narrative was full of references to her gifted status, and to her growing recognition of how many assumptions she had internalized about her “traditional” (aka non-“gifted”) peers.
She described walking into the small, creaky, occasionally moldy trailer that served as the Humanities Amped classroom, hearing and seeing and feeling what seemed to her the chaos of that space, and wondering if she had made a terrible mistake. This first impression reinforced all the negative ideas about the non-“gifted” she had received to that point in her schooling. Only over time did she begin to see how institutional choices made “traditional” classrooms seem less rigorous, focused, and productive than her previous Gifted classrooms. Indeed, the trailer classrooms themselves reflected this reality: although Gifted classes are capped at much lower student numbers than traditional classes, those small gifted classes were seen as requiring real classrooms within the actual school building. The trailers were assigned to larger, non-Gifted classes in which students often had to literally climb over desks and peers to move around the room.
My conflicts around gifted education grow out of two contexts: one is contemporary, as I have watched the ways Gifted has been institutionalized as just another academic track, like AP, Great Scholars, and Honors, in the public schools where I have lived for the past decade-and-a-half. Such intensive, multi-pronged tracking serves a purpose here that is similar to its purpose in other urban districts, which is to keep ethnically- and economically-privileged families from fleeing the public system entirely. Since my days student teaching on the north side of Chicago, it has been clear to me that, to put it bluntly, skin tone gets lighter as the tracks go higher, in terms of which students get into those privileged programs. I don’t judge caregivers who pursue these opportunities for their children, but I also know that little will change for all children until parents and educators alike acknowledge the ways special opportunities for the few marginalize the many in our schools as they do in so many other institutional spaces.
The thing is, I benefitted from tracking and from Gifted early on in my own schooling. I was an obsessive reader and writer from earliest childhood. I tested out of kindergarten and was placed in the top sections of each grade level throughout elementary and middle school. I consistently scored in the 99th percentile on the California Achievement Tests we sat for each year.
In third grade, when the Gifted program started at my northeast Philadelphia school, I was in the first cohort. I loved everything about Gifted: getting pulled out of class to work with a small group of select students; our kind, attentive, Gifted teacher; our clangy little meeting room behind the cafeteria; working on individual research projects. In fifth grade, we staged Julius Caesar for the rest of the school (I was Calpurnia!), which involved weeks of rehearsals and preparation of our costumes (sheets from home became Roman togas!) and sets. I should note that we did not do the final act of the play, though I didn’t realize that until my re-introduction to Caesar many years later.
By the end of grade school, I had fully internalized the identity that had been constantly reinforced to me: despite my moodiness and my tendency to act like two different people inside and outside of school, I carried in all situations a sense of myself as intelligent and as a talented reader and writer. This early conditioning was crucial to my survival as both schooling and my home life went downhill in middle and high school.
My middle school was overcrowded. Gifted now pulled us out of one school to go to another one day a week. The offerings were uneven; we did cool activities in some classes while, in others, my peers and I were largely bored. I recall the 8th grade Gifted teacher announcing she was stopping the delivery of Time magazine to our group because we, the students, had too many questions when we read it together. My mother was outraged. Her explanation for this shift in the quality of the Gifted experience, which may or may not have been accurate, was that the district had shifted its rules for Gifted teachers. Whereas the teachers originally had to rank as gifted themselves according to the IQ tests we had all taken, my mother said, this was no longer a requirement.
By high school, the depression that would remain undiagnosed for many years yet was hitting me hard and was intensified by a dysfunctional home life that left me with little motivation for what felt more and more like random official requirements. I was as bad at math and science as I was good at English, so my grades were all over the place. I suspect that the bad grades I started to see on my report card didn’t send me down a huge negative spiral partly because they didn’t unsettle that fundamental sense of myself as intelligent that was already strongly rooted in my psyche.
Gifted in high school was purely by choice. My mom and I met with the Gifted advisor early in 9th grade so she could show him my poetry and urge him to find ways to support my deep interest in that area. Ultimately, though, I felt lost in that 5,000-student school and couldn’t see myself in what appeared to be the more privileged and just … different… students from outside my own neighborhood who seemed to be most invested in the Gifted activities there. As I developed a new, intense friend group at home and we figured out how easy it was to cut classes and full days at the public school half of us attended, my engagement with the whole formal education system took a nose dive – even as I continued to read and write obsessively.
Memories of my early Gifted experiences have always stayed with me, though, and I continue to speak with great affection of that Julius Caesar experience, which I still consider one of the great educational moments of my now-highly-educated life. Ironically, recounting those memories to others in recent years has forced me to consider, for the first time, what it was like for my peers who didn’t have that special experience. I have come to realize that the process of inclusion was unfair from the get-go.
What must it have been like for the student who performed well enough to be placed in the top section of our grade, but wasn’t selected to be tested for Gifted? What must it have been like for the students in the average and low cohorts of my grade (I think the cohorts were coded by grade level + letter, as in 3A, 3B, 3C, but we all knew what those letters meant) because they were already identified as not performing well enough to be considered “smart”? I have a brilliant friend and colleague – a poet with a PhD who has developed multiple youth arts programs around the country – who tells me how my stories of gifted experiences trigger her. More than once, after listening to my reminiscences, she has exclaimed, “Ugh! I hated those gifted m*****f*****s!”
This fall, listening to the students in my Humanities Amped elective – all of them smart, reflective, creative humans, and most of them never considered for Gifted – I am thinking hard about the hierarchal nature of too many of our educational systems, and the ways tracking reproduces social inequities by acculturating children to systems of sorting that will influence their views of themselves and each other throughout their lives. Teachers did not create these systems, but too many of us are too willing to support them. At times, some of us even seem to see teaching in the upper tracks (including Gifted) as making us special compared to our peers too. We may not be able to dismantle these damaging models of tracking on our own, but we can – we must – challenge ourselves and our students to interrogate our institutional privileges.
In Humanities Amped, critical conversations about social privilege are integral to the curriculum. When I describe our work, which includes participatory action research, restorative justice processes, and a deep orientation toward civic engagement, the first question I get in response is almost always, “Is this is a Gifted program?” It is not, of course, and what it demonstrates is that students laboring under all sorts of institutional labels are both capable of and eager for challenging intellectual engagement. The precondition for such engagement is self-awareness and truth-telling from the adults in their lives about the inequities of schooling.
For teachers in Gifted programs, this means reflecting with students and colleagues about the processes by which teachers and students are sorted into levels of more or less privilege. It means being honest about the ways gifted students and programs may be treated differently than others in our schools and districts. It means modeling humility and responsibility in owning our own varying levels of privilege, and exploring how such privilege can be activated to support those who have less of it.
Certainly, this is not easy work. It is work both personal and professional, as we are all always on a steep learning curve when it comes to the dynamics of privilege and marginalization. But it is work that can be done anywhere. It is work that is desperately needed. And its pleasures and satisfactions are profound.
Susan Weinstein is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University and the author of The Room Is on Fire: The History, Pedagogy, and Practice of Youth Spoken Word Poetry and Feel These Words: Writing in the Lives of Urban Youth, also published by SUNY Press.