I’m going to get straight to the point.
You know this whole Talent Development business coming from NAGC – and their need to redefine gifted education?
It’s not about the kids. It’s about the money.
To understand this, let’s go back in time to meet Kerri L. Briggs. Briggs grew up in Midland and Houston Texas. She received her doctorate in 1996 at the University of Southern California.
Within less than six years of working for the federal government, Dr. Briggs was appointed Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education by Bush Junior (also a native of Midland and Houston, Texas).
In 2008, under Dr. Briggs’ direction, the Department of Education proposed a new priority for Javits grants – the only source of federal funding for gifted research. Specifically, all future grant applications would be required to demonstrate scaling up, “a tipping point where at least 60% of the students who could benefit from an innovation are experiencing it in their educational setting”.
The rationale was explained in the Federal Register:
In order to have a national impact with the limited funds available for new awards under this program, the goal of this priority is to expand upon, field-test, and evaluate research-based interventions that have shown evidence of success in increasing the number of economically disadvantaged, limited English proficient, or disabled students performing at high levels of academic achievement.
Now, I don’t know Dr. Briggs, so all I have to go on are basic records that anyone who does a google search can find.
[I’ll leave it to all the other Sherlocks to help figure out where exactly the idea of scaling up and gifted education originated – as I really don’t think it was Dr. Briggs’ brainchild. But, if you’re really interested in sleuthing, you may find it interesting that under Jeb Bush, Florida pushed the same gifted-scaling up agenda at the same time as Briggs did.]
All the same, the change in priority was eventually approved. Beginning in 2008, all Javits grant applications had to articulate scaling up academic achievement for underrepresented student populations.
Guess who got the money?
- Sally Reis, University of Connecticut
Amount: $450,000
Dr. Reis is the wife of Joseph Renzulli, the Director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. - Carolyn M. Callahan, University of Virginia
Amount: $423,284
Dr. Callahan is a former NAGC Board President and works at Renzulli’s alma mater and NRC-GT’s partner institution. - Tonya Moon, University of Virginia
Amount: $434,574
Dr. Moon earned her Bachelor and Master degrees at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She’s also the past Chair of the NAGC Research & Evaluation Network. - Ann Robinson, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Amount: $399,554
Dr. Robinson served on the NAGC Board at the time of the funding and went on to be the Board’s President in 2009. - Cheryll M. Adams, Ball State University—Center for Gifted and Talented Students, Teachers College
Amount: $405,241
Dr. Adams received her Ph.D. from University of Virginia and has previously served on NAGC’s Board. - Julia L. Roberts, Western Kentucky University
Amount: $446,111
Dr. Roberts served on the NAGC Board of Directors beginning in 2003. - Karen Rogers, University of St. Thomas
Amount: $80,962
Dr. Rogers served on the NAGC Board of Directors in 2007. She, along with Ann Robinson, also served on the Task Force that developed NAGC’s position paper that redefines gifted as a those children achieving in the top 10%.
My concern is that we have another tangled web of talent development going on here.
On one hand, you can take a look at the list above and think, “Well, of course these folks got Javits money. They’re clearly leaders in their field. They must know what they’re talking about.”
Or, you can examine the list closely and see a pattern of nepotism that controls the purse strings and leadership positions mainly for people who can prove their lineage, in some form, back to Joseph Renzulli.
The problem is, this gross misuse of power stifles the creative exploration of best practices in the field of gifted education. UConn may do some good work in the field of gifted, but they certainly do not have all the answers. We need bold new researchers willing to challenge stale ideas in order for our field to grow and flourish.
Rather than advocate for the whole gifted child and rally against scaling up, NAGC has become complicit in reforming the concept of gifted in a manner that financially benefits few researchers and businesses.
Wicked Smart 
Gifted education in the USA is a matrioska of paradoxes. People and educators should know that giftedness is a form of innate atypical development, a neurological reality, not only an ability, not a potential for recognized achievement, not a talent in a specific domain. Diluted, broadened to fit ideological beliefs, this word has totally lost its original meaning. A shame and an educational crime. Nagc doesn’t represent the interests of actually gifted children, it works against them. Thank you for being one of the few that gets it.
Françoys Gagné just did a lecture on Talent development and is pretty much in alignment with the NAGC. And I don’t agree it is about money. It is about sound research and the findings of the cognitive scientists regarding intelligence and “gifted”.The basis of the current definition of giftedness and Talent Development has roots in cognitive science that is backed by sound research. Gifted can be summed up in one word :potential. Potential is determined by an assessment and granted an IQ number which has very limited use. Thankfully most are moving away from this model. For brevity sake, I will defer to summaries of this concept of Talent Development in a series by Barry Kaufman posted in 2008 on Psychology Today:
“The psychological research clearly points to a developmental way of thinking about high ability, and there ought to be some sort of unity in terms of how schools align their practices with the latest scientific findings. In fact, the only thing all schools do seem to agree on is that giftedness is a fixed phenomenon– because no schools explicitly include provisions to constantly re-test all students (those who made the cut as well as those who didn’t). Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what the latest research shows about the malleability and constant ongoing development of different areas of expertise.
The authors end their article with six implications for school psychologists who work with gifted students. I think their suggestions are very sensible and I really hope school psychologists take note of them:
The identification of young students who are most likely to make significant contributions to society remains a critically important goal in American education.
Gifted assessment should be a recurring phenomena, not a one-shot event; some students not identified as gifted at an early age later develop the gifts and talents to make major contributions in innumerable fields, and some young students identified at an early age as gifted, for any number of reasons, fall off of a trajectory of academic excellence.”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201201/who-is-currently-identified-gifted-in-the-united-states?page=2
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200805/what-is-giftedness
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200805/is-every-child-gifted-probably-not-0?page=2
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200806/innate-talent-0
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200909/the-truth-about-the-termites
Ok, I have only recently started following policy and various social media tools. Frankly, I find all this talk about talent development, acceleration, grade skipping,etc. somewhat irritating. Working with my child on their math and reading to get them above grade level doesn’t make them gifted. Children are gifted because they think differently, have a different perspective. Being gifted, isn’t measurable. You can’t make someone be creative or gifted, you can only nurture and support. There is a shift toward “talent” development because they can take a kid, turn them into a variable, and plug them into their bell curve.
If policy makers are looking to these kids to change the state of our country, the focus should be on developing strong character. Maybe they will grow into adults who care more about what is right instead of money.
Hasn’t Javits been defunded? How can it still be a factor motivating NAGC?
It is true that Javits wasn’t funded for 2011 or 2012, however, to understand NAGC’s Bold Step initiative, which was years in the making, you have to take a look at the history of Javits that inspired it. It seems to me that NAGC’s various position papers that support their Bold Step all had task forces that soon formed after the scaling up priority was reset by DOE. I suppose one could argue that this was a prudent move on NAGC’s part, as you’ve got to follow the money, but I would equally argue that NAGC did not do enough to prevent this scaling up reform, which has done more to dilute the field of gifted than to serve it.
However you want to argue the point, the fact remains that years of promoting talent development as *the* scaling up egalitarian education model for raising student achievement has now set the stage for non-gifted grant dollars to become available to talent development researchers.
You may be tempted to say, “Yeah, there’s still money coming in for gifted education” – except these programs only seek to develop performing puppets, not nurture whole gifted children and their complex set of social-emotional and intellectual needs.
Improving general education best practices is a noble goal and one that I fully support. But, that is separate and distinct from meeting the needs and improving the field of gifted education.