RSS
Home
From Special Ed to gifted to somewhere in between
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Creative Commons Flickr /laffy4k
In a comment made on my recent article, Problems with the rush to label children, one commenter, Caroline observed that “the wildly different viewpoints about being "diagnosed” is very interesting. For those who feel over diagnosed, they see Special Ed services as undesirable, but “the more-privileged families tend to see special-ed identification as a desirable benefit, not a bad thing.” She hit the nail on the head when she stated, “but what they're angry about is what they perceive as the inability to get SUFFICIENT support services.”
As I see it, affluent people want more services for children labeled Special Ed. Meanwhile, lower income, and minorities who feel that children are being unfairly labeled don’t want to end up in the system at all where they won’t get the help even if they need it. So as I see it, everyone agrees. Special Education programs do little to truly advance the children back to mainstream education.
Moving on to Gifted programs… many of the same problems exist… in reverse. More upper income and Caucasian children are given gifted status than black and low income children. Still, just as in the previous case, this does not reveal that there are less gifted minority and low income students, but that they are virtually ignored when it comes time to test for giftedness. I have recounted my own family’s experience with giftedness labels in my previous article, Gifted or not.
In addition, just like in the cases of Special Education, gifted programs are no better at serving gifted students than Special Ed programs are at serving Special Ed students. So at the end of the day, the only kids really getting an education that meets their needs are those that are truly middle of the road, mainstream children.
My question is, how many of these middle ground students do we really have?
I contend that each and every child has a gift… somewhere.
Each and every child has a disability, even if gifts negate it.
Each and every child is average at something.
I wonder if Montgomery County, Maryland schools are on the right track? They have eliminated the gifted label (but not the special-ed label as far as I can tell), and put the kids back in the classroom together. This allows children to work and brainstorm together, perhaps learning from each other and improving weaknesses in the midsts of the strengths of others. While this is still not an ideal situation for each individual student, it does remove a bit of the bureaucracy that wasn’t working in the first place.
Related Articles:
Comments
