Last evening, Johns Hopkins University friends and alumni received an email alerting them to a December 27, 2011 piece in the Baltimore Sun, featuring the new executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY), Elaine Tuttle Hansen.
Dr. Hansen takes over the reins to CTY from Dr. Lea Ybarra who served in that capacity from 1997. Hansen, who joins CTY after nine years as president at Bates College in Maine, is up front in expressing her opinion that “the United States is squandering some of its best talent by failing to identify and push the best students.”
Founded by the legendary Dr. Julian Stanley, a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University, CTY’s mission is focused on highly able students.
With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) focusing the nation’s attention and resources focused on the struggling learner, our best and brightest are often left languishing in classrooms across the nation. Back in 1992, Gross wrote in the Gifted Child Quarterly, that “Research both in the United States and in Australia has noted the decrease in motivation among extremely gifted children confined to the regular classroom.” Things have only got worse. Indeed, being academically gifted, by CTY standards, has all the verve of a Lady Gaga performance at a funeral service. Stefani Germanotta, who goes by the noms de guerre, Lady Gaga, along with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergey Brin are known to be CTY alumni.
One of the most important tasks for Dr. Hansen, I believe, is the development of a robust relationship with the Johns Hopkins School of Education. Gifted education, I believe, must receive something close to the attention that Special Education receives. The School of Education, in partnership with Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), offers master's degree programs in education for those interested in becoming teachers. A gifted and talented education component, on par with the existing professional immersion programs in special education (ProSEMS) and general education (ProMAT) can capitalize on the research and experience accrued by CTY and SET. It is somewhat incongruous that a world leader in gifted and talented (GT) education does not have a highly visible GT program in the School of Education.
A CTY partnership with the School of Education can also address the well-known reluctance of educators to implement proven strategies in GT education. Academic acceleration, for example, receives a jaundiced view from most educators, despite a robust body of research documenting its success—when done appropriately. For example, in 2009, Wells & Lohman, wrote in the Journal of Advanced Academics, that “When accelerated students were compared to older classmates of similar achievement who were not accelerated, the accelerated students showed greater gains in achievement than nonaccelerated classmates in and throughout high school. In other words, accelerated students do not just keep up with their older classmates, they actually perform better.”
It would be wonderful to see Johns Hopkins and CTY join hands to utilize their reputations and intellectual capital to make a robust investment in efforts to dispelling the pervasive myths about GT. That must include a bona fide commitment to training every teacher in GT education.
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