It’s hardly controversial nowadays to stay that the US needs to find and encourage students with a talent and passion for STEM subjects – a recent U.S. News and World Report article even referred to that goal as a priority for national security. Efforts to encourage girls and young women to take an interest in STEM subjects are becoming widespread; groups like Girls Who Code, who recently visited Washington DC to meet with lawmakers about the issue, are springing up in many states.
Yet even with all of the interest in this issue, and many good-faith efforts to help students who self-select into special extracurricular programs, in the day to day “trenches” of US secondary education there is little policy in place to ensure that gifted students are recognized, challenged, and nurtured. Only one state (Kentucky) currently requires teacher-training programs to include coursework in identifying and working with gifted students; only two states (Kentucky and Iowa) require similar coursework in administrator-training programs. Only in Iowa do school counselor training programs require coursework in the “nature and needs of gifted students.”
State funding for gifted and talented programs varies widely, from $0 to figures close to $65 million. Often, parents who aggressively advocate on behalf of their children can find programs and services after a lot of effort – but less-savvy parents, or parents who simply live in a state with extremely limited funding for those programs, will have a much more difficult experience.
Many teachers and parents argue that these facts present a clear case for the need for a federal policy for gifted and talented education – a set of identification criteria, a required level of funding, required training for educators, etc. Others argue that states’ needs and best practices may vary too widely, and that policy needs to be built at the state level; some point to the controversial Common Core standards as evidence that broad-based national policy is not always the best solution for education. Others, of course, argue that gifted students “will do just fine on their own” and that little additional resources should be allocated to those programs while so many students are falling far behind grade level.
Educators, parents, and other stakeholders in gifted education – what do programs look like in your state? What positives and negatives do you see in the policies you are currently using? What would your ideal solution look like?