Bryan Costello

EDU303
Prof. Wilson
March 5, 2014
Journal Article 2

Citation:
Author: David Nagel
Article Title:Is American Education Neglecting Gifted Children?
Date Accessed:March 05, 2014

Is American Education Neglecting Gifted Children?

There is a big problem when dealing with the gifted students, teachers and school districts do
not know how to deal with them. Teachers are not prepared to teach the gifted children along with
other children. There is no set way to currently deal with and attend to the needs of these gifted
students nationally. If gone unnoticed this maybe catastrophic from America as a nation. Other nations
are taking measures and designing different ways to support their gifted youth and providing the proper
educational design suited for these individuals. America could be passed up eventually by these other
countries who have acknowledged their gifted youth and America's role as a superpower could be
overcome and replaced because after all knowledge is power.
There is still hope, NAGC President Ann Robinson, who is also director of the Center for Gifted
Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has a solution to this problem. The solution is
to design a policy to be upheld throughout the nation to make an appropriate program suited for the
gifted youth of America throughout the states, districts, and schools. There should be programs to
prepare teachers to be able to serve the needs of these children and also, to be able to provide a
curriculum that would be suited to fit the gifted youth in our schools.
Another problem with gifted students is being able to identify them. Schools usually identify
gifted students through tests which is not the only way to identify gifted students. Different students
can be gifted in different ways, because there are different types of knowledge. For example, some
students show excellence in musical areas whereas others could show the same excellence as in other

areas such as, science, nature, social interactions, math, reading, and the arts.
The article goes on to name the ways that the educational system in America has failed the
gifted youth of our nation. The lack of preparation for our gifted children can be viewed through the
under performance in the areas of science, math, and engineering. The students are not being pushed to
their full potential around the country, the curriculum these students are held to is not challenging them
or helping them challenge themselves and this causes them to not grow in knowledge over those years.
Another failure in our educational system is the lack of leadership. The leaders in the
educational system need to hold all of the different districts around the United States responsible for
their ignorance of the gifted population rather than meeting the standards set for the (No child left
behind). Even the test results of the gifted students are very inconsistent and vary from year to year
and someone needs to be held accountable. The article stated that for every school district who had
outstanding performs in their gifted programs there are many more districts doing nothing with their
gifted programs if there is even a gifted program in these districts.

The approach to making decisions about the gifted programs is usually handled at a district level which
gives a lot of ways for differences within the gifted programs between districts and if this occurs
imagine the differences between states and the whole system would suffer from this lack of
communication and bad decision making with out the communication with other districts and states.
A solution to this problem would be to give authority to either the individual states or to the
head of the eduction department to make changes or adjust curriculum for the gifted program as a
whole rather than the many different districts throughout the nation making their own decision about a
group of children that could very well be the future leaders of our country or head scientists or doctors.

The future of the United States as a leading country is at stake and America is defeating itself by
not acknowledging the problem at hand with the ignorance of the gifted program and population in

America. The gifted program could be the answer or the problem when concerning our future as a
country and this needs to be acted upon as soon as possible.