While the American Government has plans to reduce support for all forms of education, GATE classes might suffer most.
The best and the brightest children in American public schools are once again having whatever support is now given to them on the federal level taken away in favor of using those resources for all students, under a proposal from the U.S. Department of Education. The argument is that gifted students will still receive their gifted programs; they will just be shared with all of the other students.
This means that the classroom teacher, who already can have a wide range of learning abilities in the class, will have to prepare a set of strategies that were intended to be used in a GATE class for all of the students’ benefit. The concern is that it is almost impossible to prepare three or four levels of instruction to meet the needs of all of the children in a given classroom.
A possible solution would be not to have multiple lesson plans, but rather to engage every child in the same classroom activity -- one that is presented at different stages of difficulty by addressing higher levels of thinking and different learning styles, and allowing different ways for the students to understand and apply their learning. This will not be an easy task, however, especially considering that approximately 61% of the American classroom teachers have no training in gifted and talented education.
Even assuming that every teacher was capable of preparing a lesson this way, an important point is that gifted children have special needs that need attention, and differentiated education is vital for their success. Once gifted children are identified, their schools need to create the kinds of education programs that will challenge them to perform at the appropriate level for their abilities, and this usually takes special programming.
Lack of Government Support
Already there is precious little help for GATE at the federal level, somewhere just over $7 million for the Javits Act last year and a grand total of zero dollars for this year. And now even the Javits programming is under attack. For balance, the budget for NCLB was $24.6 billion in 2007.
At present, there are no federal statutes that safeguard the civil rights of gifted children. Further, aside from some competitive grant money available through the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act of 1994 and followed by Public Law 107-110, better known as The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which incorporated the Javits Act, the federal government does not fund gifted education.
The federal government mandates and funds numerous other educational concerns and issues through a number of entitlement programs, but when it comes to gifted education, providing the resources and protection to nurture the country’s greatest intellectual ‘gifts,’ practically everything is left to the states and localities. One of the problems of not having a federal mandate regarding gifted education is that every state has a different interpretation regarding what is necessary and what is not.
This means that there are vast differences in the levels of services provided among the states and local districts, and whether their programs are pull-outs, push-ins, or homogeneous classrooms, it is important that gifted children receive special services.
And now, the U.S. Department of Education is planning to dilute even that support.
