Toss a piece of chalk in a local classroom, and chances are strong it will land on the desk of a budding genius — or at least one labeled as such.
In Montgomery County, nearly 40 percent of third-graders earned the “gifted and talented” designation after a round of tests and recommendations last spring. That is, nearly 4,000 Montgomery 9-year-olds have “the potential for extraordinary accomplishments,” according to most definitions.
At Bethesda’s Bannockburn Elementary, the numbers rise to 72 percent, relegating only 19 youngsters to a life of more average expectations out of a class of nearly 70.
In Fairfax County, students in its advanced academic centers — a refuge for the highly gifted — have nearly doubled in the past decade to 8,400 — 14 percent of all students in third through eighth grades. Another 26 percent of students receive gifted instruction at their home schools.
Fairfax’s first level of gifted services, designed to nurture the genius in all, is offered to every student in the county beginning in kindergarten.
The numbers smack of self-congratulation on the part of parents and school systems. But they also reflect a shift from seeing the student as a knowledge vessel — some deeper than others — to the student as consisting of multiple vessels, some deep, some shallow, and ever-changing.
“It seems to be an American cultural thing to believe you were either born smart or you weren’t, but we’ve learned over the years that that’s not the case,” Fairfax School Board member Jane Strauss said. “We’ve moved a long way from the bell curve.”
According to psychologists and school officials, the reasons for the shift range from hyperaware parents to a profusion of aptitude tests.
“Our earliest conception of gifted was IQ-based, and that’ll keep things at a certain percentage,” said Tracy Cross, executive director of the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William & Mary. “But over the years we’ve come up with a bunch of new conceptions of giftedness — artistic, kinesthetic, spatial reasoning — and tests that can identify students across a wider range of ability.”
So while future musicians and architects may not have been in gifted classes a generation ago, today they probably are.
Concerns remain, however, that some parents have become pushy, causing gifted education to become the new normal for their children, while students at schools with less savvy parents are overlooked.
“It’s a much bigger issue than many admit to — in all districts,” said Michael Durso, a Montgomery County school board member and former principal at Springbrook High School.
No school board wants to tell parents their child isn’t necessarily on the cusp of greatness.
“It means delivering a message that some parents are not prepared to receive,” Durso said. “And it’s tough being the messenger in those cases.”
It becomes especially tough when the messenger runs up against parents empowered by the broadened conception of giftedness.
“These Gen-X parents are very involved with their individual children, which is a change,” Strauss said, adding that many parents test their children themselves with diagnostic materials they find online.
And Washington-area Gen-Xers live alongside thriving first-generation immigrant communities, often from Asia and India, intent on their children’s strong start down the path to American success.
It’s not always a bad thing, Strauss said.
“Some parents are criticized for always wanting a gifted child, but I’d rather deal with that than the alternative,” Strauss said. “A sense of optimism for your child is a good part of human nature.”
