Member-only story
I had never thought about it until having a discussion about how difficult it is to deal with schools with 2e education. I actually work in a College of Education specifically under Special Education, but I had never really thought about the fact that gifted education itself is special education. Most of our local schools are removing gifted education from their curriculum….
2e and even gifted education itself are not statistics that most schools collect — or even know a good way to collect the stats. Getting an IEP for a 2e student is fairly impossible. In our case we started with an IEP for speech but after starting Kindergarten it was taken away after meeting the goals for speech and ‘doing too well academically’.
My own personal thought is that all students are gifted in something they just need a teacher and environment that can coax them out of their shell, find the light, and give them a chance to shine — all while preventing the constant harassment from classmates that prefer the norm in everyone.
The federal government does not provide funding directly to districts specifically for gifted education. All gifted funding is determined at the state and local level and is not mandated. So far there have not been lawsuits to push for gifted education based on the special education funding…. and the schools are struggling with the students who have fallen behind so the students who are bored and faced with classwork that is below their own ability isn’t even on the radar for schools trying to meet start requirements for minimums.
Add to that parents and students who are trying to get algebra and math removed from schools and converted to survival skills like balancing a checkbook and we have a perfect storm that is much more likely to be headed for a world like the movie ‘Idiocracy’ forecasted than a future that includes a cure for cancer.
The number of times I’ve heard a teacher tell students that ‘math is tough’ but they have to take it because it’s part of the curriculum… where the teachers also have not made any effort to link math to the real world. My son’s 5th grade math teacher had failed the math portion of the teacher’s exam 4 times before managing to squeak by a passing grade. His high school Biology teacher mentioned she was able to get past in school…
