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In Quaker Valley, the 'g' word is a no-no What's best for the brightest: last of three parts Tuesday, June 12, 2001 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In 1995, between 40 and 50 children in the Quaker Valley School District's elementary school were labeled as gifted. Today, three are.
It's not as though all the music prodigies, computer whizzes and budding novelists decided to leave the district, which last year had among the highest scores in Pennsylvania on state assessment tests.
It's just that after years of wrestling with parents and paperwork, Quaker Valley officials decided to tackle the task of teaching gifted children in a different way.
Unless a parent insists on it, the Quaker Valley schools no longer measure a student's IQ or write up a formal Individual Education Plan. All that testing and meeting time, officials decided, can now go into instruction.
And while the district still offers advanced classes and special teaching techniques, it offers them to a broader range of students, who get those services based on their abilities, rather than whether they possess a "gifted" label.
To skeptical parents, "we said, trust us, let us skip these identification battles and we'll put the time and people spent on paperwork and meetings to better use: in the classroom," said Linda Conlon, who coordinates the district's program in the middle and high schools.
What is the best way for our schools to work with exceptionally bright children? In this last installment of her three-part series, Staff Writer Mackenzie Carpenter continues her examination of the debate about the way society should nurture gifted students.
Rural school districts struggle with funding, bias in teaching gifted students
"We try not to use the 'g' word, ever," said Conlon, who trained with Joseph Renzulli, a nationally known gifted expert who also advocates a more inclusive approach rather than one that adheres to the IQ-based model of gifted education.
Quaker Valley still uses all the teaching tools advocated by gifted experts: frequent pretesting to gauge a child's mastery of a subject; acceleration, either in one subject or skipping a whole grade; curriculum compacting, in which a child can complete a compressed course of study in two months, for example, instead of a year; even grouping by ability, both inside and outside the classroom.
"Despite the lower numbers, our students are in no way less gifted than they were in the past, nor do we have fewer of them," Conlon said. "We have simply chosen a different way to serve students, a way that is not contingent upon classifying them first."
Reaching new students
The changes aren't just semantics. It means students who don't make the standard 130 IQ cutoff but who have special talents have access to advanced classes, competitions and other activities that they might be excluded from in other districts.
In fact, Conlon said, the gifted education now reaches nearly half the district's students, compared with only 15 percent before.
"Gifted status is no longer a season ticket to all the educational goodies," Conlon said. "Children with strong abilities in math get to go to math competitions. Creative children get to do Odyssey of the Mind," a problem-solving competition. "The bookworms get to do the English Festival."
In this region, Quaker Valley is pretty much alone in implementing this philosophy.
Other districts tend to sort themselves into three different genres.
Some, such as Mt. Lebanon, have reduced their emphasis on formal gifted programs, arguing that those children are better off in mixed-ability groups, with gifted students getting advanced work inside regular classrooms.
Others, such as Pittsburgh or Chartiers Valley, follow a pullout model, where gifted children are taken out of the classroom to pursue projects or an advanced curriculum. In Pittsburgh, for example, children are bused to gifted centers one day a week; in Chartiers Valley, it's closer to two hours a week.
And a few districts, such as North Allegheny, combine a gifted student labeling process with both pullout programs and ability grouping in regular classes.
Quaker Valley followed that model, too, until the mid-1990s, recalled John Hoover, principal at Osborne Elementary School, when a group of school psychologists from districts around the region met to brainstorm better ways to deliver services to gifted children.
The psychologists agreed that the cumbersome process of identifying students as gifted was frustrating. Many complained that in order to meet with parents to discuss the individual education plans, teachers sometimes had to find substitutes for their classes.
Some in the group were bothered, too, that gifted programs weren't reaching everyone. Some children might have extraordinary talents in one area only -- math or languages -- but might not test at the required 130 IQ to be eligible for services.
Taking a risk
"Sometimes the IQ discriminates," noted R. Gerard Longo, Quaker Valley's superintendent. "A child can be gifted in sciences but not in language arts. There are children with IQs of 129 or 120 who are also very able and can benefit from additional services."
Hoover said the school psychologists realized that under state law districts did not necessarily have to test students' IQs or develop individual written plans for them as long as they met gifted students' needs.
Quaker Valley was willing to try such an approach, he said, but other gifted teachers who went back to their districts reported less enthusiasm. It would be too difficult to persuade parents to let go of the sought-after gifted designation -- the politics would be too risky, they said.
But in this diverse but relatively small district of 2,000 students, which spans 11 municipalities ranging from wealthy Sewickley to working class enclaves like Leetsdale, most parents apparently have decided to go along.
There were protests in the beginning. At school board meetings, parents complained they were "losing" something.
"I thought, are they going to notice my son?" recalled Debra Rego, a Quaker Valley parent who teaches in the Pittsburgh city schools. But she, like other parents, came to accept and even commend the new approach.
"I do believe a label helps recognize who the bright children are, but things have changed dramatically. The teachers are listening. The children are being pretested and challenged. And if they're not, I'll be the first up there to say something."
District officials believe they have saved more than 950 hours of time that otherwise would have been devoted to paperwork for the gifted labeling process. Now, that time is spent in the classroom.
Parental sign-offs
Quaker Valley's individualized approach to education does present challenges.
Not only has it meant customizing the schools' computer system to create new types of grade transcripts, but each new educational project must get approval from a student's parents.
Once teachers decide a student needs something that isn't provided in the regular classroom, a group devises a plan, clears it with the parent, and then, the parent must write a letter to the principal asking formal approval. Having the parent articulate the proposal helps to increase the parent's understanding of it, and serves as a kind of a contract, Conlon said.
The new approach is much more flexible than the old gifted program, Conlon said.
Since children's situations change every year, they may need extra attention one year, but not the next year. "A science superstar might have a less than inspiring teacher one year and need help, but if next year she gets a different one who shares her passion, her need for special attention may disappear," she said.
Even though the district spends less time labeling children as gifted, it has added to its gifted staff, increasing it from a single half-time gifted teacher traveling between elementary buildings, plus counselors at the secondary school level, to one full-time gifted facilitator in each of the four buildings.
And these staff members are not there to teach students as much as they are to train other teachers, because in the end, getting teachers to sign on is the most important part. "Simply expecting classroom teachers to start 'doing gifted' makes them mad and resentful towards the children," Conlon said.
How does the new approach work at the classroom level?
Three elementary school teachers might oversee a total of 75 students, for example, who are divided into three rooms. One would have 20 to 28 students who master the curriculum at a faster pace; the remaining students would be assigned to the two other rooms. And despite the accelerated pace of the high-end classroom, some very capable students might require even more and be pulled out into small groups in a particular subject.
Students' reactions
How do the students like the district's program?
Hilary Palevsky, by all accounts extremely gifted and talented in all things -- "except sports, which I'm incredibly bad at" -- is one of about a dozen children in the high school straddling several grades.
Chronologically an eighth-grader, officially a ninth-grader, she could now be said to be "in 10th or 11th grade, depending on what day it is."
Hilary could have gone to college yesterday. This year she won first place in the statewide Junior Academy of Science competition at Penn State University and will graduate a year early on top of that.
Hilary gets her "enrichment" through independent projects and an online writing tutorial from Johns Hopkins University that Conlon helped set up for her.
While she was labeled as gifted at an early age in another school district, she has no formal individual education plan. She has no idea what her IQ is, and she doesn't care. "I'm no more gifted than someone who plays sports well," she said, her wide dark eyes shining with amusement. "I got the little [gifted] label in first grade. It doesn't mean much."
For every child prodigy like Hilary, there also are later bloomers like 10th-grader Melissa Gilmore.
She not only has never been identified as gifted, she was only considered a "solid but unspectacular student" until last year, when "something broke through," Conlon said.
The daughter of a nurse and a doctor, she decided she wanted to become a physician herself. And that's when she went to the district with a proposal: Could she study trigonometry -- which the most advanced children take in 10th grade -- over the summer after her ninth-grade year, and if she passed the exam, could she then skip forward to Advanced Placement calculus?
Conlon was slightly taken aback, but she and other officials decided to let Melissa give it a try.
Melissa, a slight, serious 16-year-old with a delicate face, shrugged.
"It wasn't that hard. I went to cheerleading practice, then I'd come home and study a few lessons, and then go to the pool. Sometimes a friend would come over and help me."
"She blew us away," said Conlon.
Despite results like Melissa's, some parents still aren't sold on the district's program, and a handful continue to insist their children be identified as gifted.
Pam Nelson, an advocate for parents of gifted children who's based in Beaver County, is skeptical that Quaker Valley's success can be duplicated elsewhere, especially in rural communities, where the gifted label is the only legal tool parents have to force districts to comply with the law.
"In some districts, you get nothing if you don't get the label. Gifted programs are a way for some districts, for no cost, to give some gifted children a chance to go outside the box and be with children like themselves. In a good district, it's not necessary, but who's going to trust that that happens? It's the law that makes those districts attend to these children," Nelson said.
Quaker Valley's approach "is not perfect," Conlon said. "I'm sure that every year we miss someone or something or don't solve a problem adequately, but we really believe that what we've accomplished here is doable elsewhere, if schools really want to change.
"It's not true that we could do this only because we're Quaker Valley. When we started, we had virtually no resources -- only a superintendent and administrators who were determined to do right by these children."
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