Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Despite the political rhetoric demanding a push for higher standards in public education, America’s talented and gifted students continue to face an uphill battle. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasizes holding schools accountable at minimum levels of proficiency, has forced some districts to disproportionately fund instruction for core subjects and remedial special education.
Moreover, talented and gifted students now face losing funds from the Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, which is the only federal program dedicated to increasing educators’ knowledge about and ability to meet the unique learning needs of gifted and talented students. The Department of Education recently proposed a policy that would designate funding for gifted and talented kids to other areas that are not part of the intended purpose of the 2008 Javits Act.
This has drawn the ire of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has been a longtime advocate for talented and gifted education. `The United States can’t afford to continue leaving our gifted and talented kids behind,” Grassley said in a statement last week. “If we want to stay competitive in a global environment, it’s time to stop shortchanging our most promising young people.”The Department of Education proposal prompted Grassley to write a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, urging her to reconsider the proposal, which would give priority to grant applications that propose using strategies designed for gifted and talented students to raise the achievement of nongifted students. Grassley agrees that these programs do have some merit, but argues that the small amount of funding Congress allocates to benefit gifted and talented children should be used for its intended purpose.
“I do not feel that adequate attention is currently being paid to this area of vital national interest at the local, state, or federal level,” Grassley wrote in the letter. “Unfortunately, despite the lip service paid to the importance of education and advanced learning to global competitiveness by many of us on the federal level, the Javits program has never received the funding support necessary to reach its full potential to focus nationwide attention to this critical population of students.”
This is not the first time light has been shed on the prospects of talented and gifted students being left behind. In 2004 the University of Iowa’s Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development published a report, “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students,” which revealed that America’s schools routinely avoid academic acceleration, or double promotion, which the authors concluded is the easiest and most effective way to help highly capable students.
Moreover, the report debunks a number of myths surrounding accelerated education, including the common misperception that a child who skips a grade will be socially stunted. Fifty years of research indicated that an overwhelming majority of accelerated students interviewed were more ambitious than their counterparts, earned graduate degrees at higher rates than other students, felt academically challenged and accepted, and did not fall prey to the boredom that plagues many highly capable students who are forced to follow the curriculum for their age-peers.
Despite the report’s research evidence, schools, parents and teachers have yet to accept the idea of acceleration. “A Nation Deceived” presents the following reasons why schools hold back America’s brightest kids: limited familiarity with the research on acceleration, philosophy that children must be kept with their age group, belief that acceleration hurries children out of childhood, fear that acceleration hurts children socially, political concerns about equity, and worry that other students will be offended if one child is accelerated.
On the bright side, publication of the “Nation Deceived” report has had a positive influence on the downward trend of gifted education. The study received prominent national attention, thus prompting the report’s lead author, Belin-Blank Center Director Nicholas Colangelo, to conduct a three-year survey to monitor the report’s impact.
“This received considerable media exposure,” Colangelo said in a statement. “It was the first time, to my knowledge, that gifted education came into the popular press. That was a big breakthrough for the field of gifted education because it’s been very difficult for the topic of gifted education to get to the mainstream.”
The online survey, designed to assess the impact of the report three years later, was released internationally Sept. 1 through Dec. 31, 2007. The research survey included 19 questions, one open-ended field for comments, and 14 categories for respondents. Over 2,400 people made comments.
Colangelo said he was pleased with the results, noting that 3,868 respondents from the United States completed the survey, including people from all 50 states, as well as 401 international respondents, for a total of 4,269. Most of the people who completed the survey were parents of gifted children and educators, Colangelo said.
Colangelo said this was not a random, scientific survey. Rather, it was sent to gifted education listservs, to general education listservs, to colleges, and it was also open to the general public.
“We thought that with the Internet and the speed of communications, that three years was a reasonable amount of time to assess the impact,” Colangelo said. “We’ve been very pleased at how this report has moved the subjects of gifted education and acceleration into the mainstream and helped change, not only attitudes, but policies in some cases. People realize that acceleration has to be seen as a legitimate and researched intervention and can no longer dismiss it based on their own biases.”
Because of the ongoing outpouring of interest from parents, educators and administrators, one major impact was the creation of the Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration at the UI Belin-Blank Center, Colangelo said. David Lohman serves as the research director for the institute, whose mission is to provide research on acceleration, act as a clearinghouse for information, serve as a resource for K-12 schools and administer research awards so that other scholars can pursue research on gifted education and acceleration.
“Three years ago, it would not have been possible,” Colangelo said. “But now we have an institute that is dedicated solely to furthering research and providing information and consultation. This is an important offshoot from the original report that will continue to benefit countless parents, educators and gifted students.”
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