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The national academy for gifted and talented pupils, a central element in Tony Blair's drive to make state schools attractive to middle class parents, is to be scrapped next month. Since it was created in 2002, the academy has provided support, master classes and summer schools for more than 200,000 children and training for thousands of teachers in how to identify and support able pupils. The U-turn will see much of the academy's £20 million funding targeted instead on deprived teenagers as part of the Government's bid to improve social mobility and get more poor students into top universities. Critics...

The label of gifted, as prized to some parents as a "My Child Is an Honor Student" bumper sticker, is about to be dropped by the Montgomery County school system. Officials plan to abandon a decades-old policy that sorts second-grade students, like Dr. Seuss's Sneetches, into those who are gifted (the Star-Belly sort) and those who are not. Several other school systems in the region identify children in the same manner. But Montgomery education leaders have decided that the practice is arbitrary and unfair.

SCARSDALE, N.Y. — The Advanced Placement English class at Scarsdale High School used to race through four centuries of literature to prepare students for the A.P. exam in May. But in this year’s class, renamed Advanced Topics, students spent a week studying Calder, Pissarro and Monet to digest the meaning of form and digressed to read essays by Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon — items not covered by the exam. A similarly slowed-down pace came at a cost for some students in one of Scarsdale’s Advanced Topics classes in United States history; it was still in the 1950s at the...

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children. The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes. In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of...

Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy. At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area this year, more than 2,500 applicants vied for 485 seats. Asian American students got 219, or 45 percent of the total, while white students got 205, or 42 percent. About 38 percent of the school's...

Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy. The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of...

Minorities, poor get "highly gifted" lift A new DPS system awards some kids an extra boost to make things more equitable.By Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post Article Last Updated: 03/04/2008 06:34:50 AM MST Polaris at Ebert second-graders Guinness Vanos, left foreground, and Jlynn Terroade, both 8 years old, join other students in learning dance techniques during a physical-education class.(Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post) More minority and poor students in Denver are being classified as highly gifted under a new system that gives extra credit to children who are economically disadvantaged or nonnative English speakers. Denver Public Schools is...

ELITIST GIFTED PROGRAMS The Seattle government school system received an outside review of its gifted education program. The results ... the district should "aggressively diversify its program" because it is "elitist." Why is it considered elitist? Because three-quarters of the students enrolled in the gifted program are white. District wide, whites only make up 40% of the student population. This would mean that in an egalitarian world only 40 percent of the gifted students would be white. If the number is higher .. than there's a big problem. Students are admitted into the program after testing in the 98th or...

With reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act high on the agenda as Congress returns from its recess, lawmakers must confront the fact that the law is causing many concerned parents to abandon public schools that are not failing. These parents are fleeing public schools not only because, as documented by a recent University of Chicago study, the act pushes teachers to ignore high-ability students through its exclusive focus on bringing students to minimum proficiency. Worse than this benign neglect, No Child forces a fundamental educational approach so inappropriate for high-ability students that it destroys their interest in learning,...

There's a growing movement in the US that says the educational concept of "No Child Left Behind" is putting an emphasis on basic skills even as it leaves super-achieving kids behind. Bob Davidson is a dot-com millionaire who has co-written a book with his wife Jan titled, "Genius Denied."

A boy genius who transferred seven years ago from a California public school to college and his single mother are seeking compensation from the state for having to pay for university and other special schooling since 1997. Leila J. Levi and her son, Levi M. Clancy, of Venice Beach, Calif., say in a civil lawsuit that state public schools failed to meet their statutory obligation to provide a "free and equal educational opportunity" to Levi, now 14 and described in court documents as "highly gifted." The case has turned reluctant heads among public-education officials regarding the treatment of highly gifted...

Tanya Strahin, a drama and Gifted and Talented science teacher at Marshall Middle School, submitted her resignation last week, according to School Superintendent Dr. J. David Martin. The announcement that her resignation had been accepted was made after Monday's closed School Board session. Strahin's resignation has resulted in a division at the northern Fauquier school, between those in support of the teacher's departure and those against. Some parents at the school feel that a forensics project assigned in March may be at the center of the controversy. According to a student in Strahin's class, they were to design a crime...

<p>GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Under South Carolina's old rules, TiShanna Smith wouldn't be considered gifted. Under its new rules, she is.</p> <p>Every Tuesday, the fifth-grader at Greenview Elementary attends a three-hour advanced class in which she studies algebra and researches topics such as the history of hot-air balloons. "The 'challenge' class helps me get ahead," says 11-year-old TiShanna, an African-American from a single-parent family, who was identified as gifted by a special test intended to boost minorities. "When my older brother comes home, I help him with his homework."</p>

OUNTAIN GROVE, Mo. — Before her second birthday, Audrey Walker recognized sequences of five colors. When she was 6, her father, Michael, overheard her telling a little boy: "No, no, no, Hunter, you don't understand. What you were seeing was a flashback."At school, Audrey quickly grew bored as the teacher drilled letters and syllables until her classmates caught on. She flourished, instead, in a once-a-week class for gifted and talented children where she could learn as fast as her nimble brain could take her.But in September, Mountain Grove, a remote rural community in the Ozarks where nearly three in four...

Age-13 collegian opening way for vouchers?Single mother's lawsuit insists only university can meet his needs Posted: February 11, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com In a case some believe could establish a legal precedent for school vouchers, the mother of a 13-year-old student attending a state university is suing California for not providing her son a free education according to law. Levi Clancy of Los Angeles began walking at 5 months and was reading high school-level books in two languages at age 5. He enrolled at Santa Monica Community College at 7 and last month entered the University of California at Los...

<p>YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Matthew Benton, a self-possessed sixth-grader with an "A" average and an I.Q. of 132, is likely to pass the Ohio Proficiency Tests next month with ease.</p> <p>But his prowess on the tests, which are used to assess schools' performance, won't help Bennett Elementary, where Matthew is in a citywide program for academically gifted students.</p>

With all the problems facing public education in Texas, some people might think that gifted and talented students are a happy exception. After all, these kids are bright, so they just cruise through the system and shoot into college, right? Not always. An ironic problem with gifted students is that they can easily become bored with average curriculum that doesn't challenge them. If their school district is too concerned with helping struggling students who aren't passing mandatory exams, the gifted students might get overlooked or sidetracked. As a story in Monday's Enterprise indicated, they might act up in class, miss...

The assessmentBy Dr. Yvonne FournierSeptember 30, 2003I had my first-grade son tested because his teacher asked me to. He turned out "superior." The psychologist told me he is very bright. I knew that all along. After all, I have tried to give him a good foundation for learning. Then why is he doing poorly in school?Some children who enter school as "superior" or "gifted" have received many gifts of learning from parents, older siblings, grandparents and child care teachers. "Gifts" might be intangible - reading, going to a museum, watching Sesame Street - or they might be physical gifts of...

Question No. 9 in the ``word meanings" section of the practice test for admission to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology reads: ``Apparently he `instigated' the argument. ``Which means, he A) incited, B) ignored C) enjoyed or D) settled, the argument." The correct answer, of course, is ``A," for ``incited." While Fairfax County School Board members may not be instigating any arguments, some are discouraged that only three blacks and 13 Hispanics were admitted to this year's 450-student freshman class at the school. Some School Board members such as Robert E. Frye, at large, are not satisfied with...

BALTIMORE –– Maryland school districts and nonprofit groups are trying to address the under-representation of minority children in gifted programs. Officials want to correct biases in the ways children are determined to be gifted. They're trying to make sure precocious pupils from poor families don't lose out on gifted programs simply because their parents don't know about them. ... The program expanded the list of factors used to identify children as gifted beyond standardized test scores.