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Essay on Gifted Education in American Schools
The story of gifted education in American schools is a lot like the story of the emperor's new clothes; vast looms have been constructed to weave a cloth that we can't actually see, children have been identified and labeled, special programs have been organized and evaluated, and not wanting to be thought fools, not wanting to appear disrespectful or envious or unappreciative of the beautiful weave, many of us have remained silent. As in the story, increasing amounts of money are spent to support gifted education, but unlike the story, the weavers are not leaving town; firmly entrenched within powerful governmental and educational positions, solidly supported by current economic and political rhetoric, they will continue to maintain that their clear vision allows them to see what the rest of us do not, that gifted education is a just, democratic way to provide for children's individual needs and meet the needs of society.
Declaring that there is something undemocratic about gifted education, something fundamentally wrong with labeling a small group of children in a way that entitles them to a highly differentiated, almost always superior, education is a bit like saying that the emperor has no clothes-it is both patently obvious to many and yet not something we talk about. It is striking that some of the most obvious critiques of gifted education rarely find a public voice.
Situating Gifted Education beyond Critique
Elaborate critiques of tracking and differentiated instruction have been offered. Oakes's landmark book Keeping Track provides extensive and elegant testimony to the ways in which schools both create and perpetuate existing social and educational stratification by providing children with vastly different educations and possibilities. Many others have also explored the ways in which race, class, and gender often become the key determinants of students' educational futures, and there is growing acknowledgment of the prejudicial and often devastating effects of such differentiation..............
