Gifted Education and National Security Concerns

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Gifted Education and National Security Concerns
By Andrew D. Carson, Ph.D.

Gifted education in the United States of America faces a funding crisis because the educational problems that it purports to solve are not generally viewed as sufficiently pressing. Other issues, such as responding to poverty through educational opportunity, responding to academic failure generally and among English language learners in particular, and reducing gender-based discrimination in education are deemed higher priorities than is providing supplemental or enhanced educational opportunities for the highly intelligent. When compared to the woeful situations of these various special populations, the gifted seem to have few real problems, and therefore are provided diminished funding.

Why Funding for Gifted Education Has Decreased

One might argue that funding for gifted education has declined in recent years due to a number of reasons.

First, there has grown in the United States over the past century an increasing egalitarianism and decline of the xenophobic, eugenic concerns that prompted many of the calls for gifted education in the early 20th century. Our society has become increasingly multicultural. Many legislators see gifted programs as being racist, largely White enclaves. The current political realities cannot support an educational entitlement that seems to so consistently reward members of the White community, particularly when, as is occurring in some states such as California, White (Anglo) voters no longer constitute a majority of voters.

A second reason for the decline of support for gifted programs is the elimination of fears driven by the Cold War. The Cold War--and Soviet success in the early Space Race--was the best friend that gifted education ever had. Fears spurred by the launch of Sputnik and the apparent success of Soviet military engineering in general helped to spur the passing of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which, along with other Cold War legislation in education, proved such a boon for gifted education. But then the West won the Cold War, and the Soviet threat evaporated with the dismantling of the old Soviet empire. And just as the need for large standing armies must in peacetime be questioned, the need for a Cold War-oriented gifted program was then evaluated, and found wanting.

If the growing multiculturalism and victory in the Cold War have removed the two great supports for traditional gifted education, the coup de grace has been delivered by the No Child Left Behind Act of 1991 (NCLB). NCLB directs such substantial resources to raise the lower range of student performance that there are scarcely any remaining funds for children at the higher end of achievement. In many states, requirements to redirect resources to NCLB have resulted in essentially all funding being cut from gifted education programs.

A closely related trend is to the redirection of resources toward special education in general and away from so-called elective programs, such as music and art. Such elective programs provide vehicles for the expression of culturally valued talents that often appeal to the gifted. In an era of extremely tight educational budgets, both gifted programs and culturally rich electives have been viewed as optional "nice to haves" rather than critical "must haves."

Finally, there is the "War on Terror." Even without the present War on Terror, states would have been hard-pressed to fund NCLB as originally conceived. The present war spending, coupled with a struggling economy brought on at least in part by the combination of terror attacks and the prospect of a prolonged war, has ultimately tightened the screws that much harder on states, and the missing revenues must come from somewhere. It is simply easier to gut gifted education than to gut general education, special education, or immigrant education.

Of Arguments to Be Made for Gifted Education

Many of the arguments that traditional gifted programs nurture a precious national resource are less compelling unless the precise ways in which this resource will be used to advance the common good can be articulated. Simply saying that gifted education advances the private good of students, that is, helps them to achieve their own "potential," seems an inadequate argument when it also seems clear that the public education system as a whole seems to be failing so many students. Community institutions that serve as advocates and watchdogs for the common good have legitimate concerns that although gifted education may create individual students who achieve a little better education a little more quickly, it is not readily apparent how such private gains translate into public goods for the communities from which those students arise. If the only good a gifted program does is to help involved students to "escape" from their community of origin and move to upper class lifestyles elsewhere, the broad brush of local community institutions can hardly be expected to applaud the additional spending required for such education. To gain the necessary broad consensus for the additional funding required for high-quality and widespread gifted education, we must be able to demonstrate in tangible ways how such education is essential not only for the recipients of such education but also for the polity as a whole.

First 50 years: 1901-1950. Such demonstrations were made and made in a compelling fashion (by then contemporary standards) in the first half-century of gifted education, for it was through gifted education that we could identify the natural leaders of society, those most fit to preserve the light of culture, science, and so on. Once identified, one could ensure that they would receive a sufficiently excellent education to allow them to rapidly find their place in society and become productive leaders. This process would largely separate the wheat from the chaff. Most of the advocates of early gifted selection and gifted education were essentially social Darwinists, if not outright eugenicists. Such arguments would not and do not sit well in today's ethos, but in their day they made compelling good sense for those funding education. It was assumed that getting the right people into the right social positions would benefit society as a whole.

Second 50 years: 1951-2000. Likewise, in the second half-century of gifted education, the logic of needing to identify the best scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and officers swept all before it. The tremendous fear of falling behind the Soviets carried its imperative of matching and surpassing the Soviet education system in all matters that had bearing on victory in the conflict. If a community lost its children to MIT, Caltech, and the Air Force Academy, it was all for the common good. Of course, many other types of gifted education were boosted along with education that supported the allied effort in the Cold War, but the primary means for obtaining widespread public support for the effort was to win the Cold War and save the population from the Red Menace.

It is difficult to find support for traditional gifted programs with such arguments today. Although there is general agreement that scientific and creative skills are important for a modern society, as well as some evidence that as a nation we do not turn out a sufficient number of home-grown scientists and engineers, the reality of most teachers' experience in the contemporary public school is that multicultural issues are a more pressing social concern. Thus, although many teachers might acknowledge that (traditional) gifted education is important, it is difficult for them to become terribly excited about it, for it does not relate directly to the important concerns that they confront in their classrooms and local society every day.

To obtain broad popular support, one aim of gifted education should be to increase the number of gifted adult workers able to make contributions to an important set of national priorities. Another priority may be to provide for the general education of educated citizens, broadly considered; such citizens might exhibit creativity, imagination, sound reasoning, and the whole host of the traditional virtues of giftedness. Yet the political realities are that his will not be enough to ensure adequate funding for gifted education, particularly in today's economic and political climate.

Gifted Education and the War on Terror. However, there is a major national concern that would warrant a new infusion of funding for gifted education, and that is the War on Terror (or the War on Islamic Fascism, as some have lately termed it). The Bush administration has argued that this will be a long and protracted struggle, and it would seem that both major parties believe this to be the case, although their proposed solutions differ. If it is indeed to be a long struggle, then we need to think not only about the general human resources that we have already educated and prepared for entry into the workforce; we also need to think about the types of highly educated and intelligent workers that we need to field in five years, ten years, or even twenty years. We need to think on a wider scale, and more like we thought in the passage of the NDEA during the cold war. To fight effectively the war on terror, we need not only a different set of hard (e.g., military, intelligence, international policing) or soft (e.g., diplomacy, foreign aid) strategies, we need a more intelligent set of workers for roles in such operations.

The human capital requirements for a long-term battle against the individuals and organizations that plan and carry out terrorist attacks may be quite different from those required during the Cold War. Although we will continue to need abilities in math and science, we will also need language skills and abilities in social fields such as history, anthropology, sociology, and so on. In other words, where in the Cold War we focused on the natural sciences and math, in the new struggle we may need to focus on the social sciences at least as much as on these other sciences. And that means we may need to identify a different set of gifted children and provide a different curriculum than we have in traditional gifted education programs.

Toward an NDEA-2

To the end of creating a legislative tool to provide educational opportunities sufficient to meet the needs of the war on terror, I therefore propose a reauthorization of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), a cold war law to boost educatitional requirements needed at the time, but with the new legislation focusing on the new range of abilities and skills required to prepare America for a very different type of war, this one against terror broadly conceived. Policy experts can do a better job than I in fleshing out the strategies for victory in this war, but it seems to me that victory will require a range of personal abilities and areas of expertise that are not the direct aim of our current system of general and gifted education. I will consider some possible features of the reauthorized NDEA (which I shalll refer to as NDEA-2).

First, we will require a broad assessment program for identification of students with abilities required for work in high-need areas. This will probably require the development of new assessment instruments, methods, student information system, and program evaluation tools. Traditional nomination tools and ability tests (which have focused on traditional concepts of IQ) are likely to prove insufficient for the new purpose, although more research is required to determine how such existing assessment systems might be modified for the new purposes. It may also be necessary to create entirely new assessment systems. Perhaps traditional IQ tests might be broadened to tap the range of abilities required for the new priorities. Every previous major war has spurred similar advances in assessment in education, gifted education, and occupational selection, and there is no reason to suppose that the present war will be any different.

Second, we need to develop new education programs--some for general classroom use and some for gifted students--that would support the development of skills in high-need areas.

Third, we must direct funding not only to communities with historically high levels of identified gifted, but also to communities in which students are educationally disadvantaged. Such disadvantage might take the form of historic underfunding of schools, but might also arise from having a high percentage of immigrant students. However, the goal here is not simply to provide more equitable funding across schools, regardless of income level of immigration status. NDEA-2 funding would still focus on identification and training of students with high likelihood of developing high-need skills.

Fourth, NDEA-2 will need to provide opportunities to develop new and effective skills among teachers in developing high-need skills in students. The original NDEA supported the creation of a number of institutes across the nation that could provide intensive training to teachers to achieve the new national education priorities. We need to consider reviving the institutes, and improving on their original model.

Fifth, to ensure that funding is efficiently spent, provisions for effective program evaluation and administration will be required. An initial goal of such research may take the form of a broadly conceived, mini-Manhattan-style project. As evaluation of what works becomes available, ineffective approaches may be pruned and more effective methods retained and disseminated. Thus, we need to have a central coordinating body will be required to evaluate and administer the overall NDEA-2 funding over the course of the time.

Nothing in the NDEA-2 would prohibit additional emphases being added to gifted education, so long as they did not conflict with the primary goals of identifying specific areas of talent and developing high-priority skills. Thus, gifted education supported through NDEA-2 might still be tailored to meet local needs, while still providing the talent pool and development of expertise required for the common good. NDEA-2 funding might be directed on a capitated basis regardless of type of education program. However, different methods of organizing the funding might be required for different types of programs, e.g., traditional schools, magnet schools, charter schools, and so on.

Conclusions

We need big ideas to revive gifted education in the United States. The funding realities are such that the days are numbered for traditional gifted education--either that, or we can expect it to be only partially and sporadically funded. The proposed new initiative would respond to a major societal need by marshaling the ability of the educational system to identify and train students to contribute over the long term to the War on Terror, by increasing the pool of qualified individuals capable not only in math and science, but also in the various linguistic and social areas that the current war so sorely requires.

It appears that every half-century or so, we need to redefine gifted education and identify a rationale for broad public support for the development of great talent. Undoubtedly, different priorities offer different opportunities to children based on the raw abilities, interests, and motivations that they bring to school. This is to be expected, but simply because different students might be expected to benefit most from such changed priorities should not be reason in itself to avoid making the change.

On a final note, it is easy for many bright people to become cynical about the motives of those who advocate for preparedness for war, and for the redirection of national priorities in many areas--including education--to support a general war effort. But this is, unfortunately, a war in which cynicism does not help the cause of otherwise bright people. Like it or not, we live in the times in which we are placed. Others have thrust war upon us, and this war is a very big deal for most of our fellow citizens. It is therefore not wise to approach the issue with an air of detached indifference, and remain above it all, in one's ivory tower of giftedness. The fact that it may strike some as odd that gifted education might even be relevant for the War on Terror itself speaks volumes about how the continued relevance of traditional gifted education.