The Gifted Left Behind

The New York Times today reports on schools that are cutting funding for gifted programs in order to meet the requirements for the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Schools are shifting funds to ensure that struggling students attain the law’s basic math and reading levels.

This highlights one of the biggest dilemmas facing education today: is the purpose of state-sponsored education to give every child basic competence in core skills like math and reading, or is it to help every child achieve his or her potential? It’s a tough question, and I’m not sure there’s a simple answer. I’d like to think it’s the latter, but in an era when there’s not enough money to do both, the question becomes “Do we shortchange the struggling or the gifted?” Would we be satisfied to become a nation with a high percentage of those who have core skills, but no one who is pushed to reach beyond themselves and excel? I’m overstating things a bit, here—there will always be those who stand out, despite the system—but I worry that NCLB will create more people who are never challenged or motivated to live up to their potential, even as it tries to address the also-critical problem of students who can’t read or do arithmetic.

Much of this depends on the parents, not just the school system, of course. I’ve been thinking, therefore: Students who struggle with basic skills are probably less likely to have parents who can help them with their schoolwork. I’m assuming most (though not all) of these students are from less educated families in the first place. Students from more educated families are more likely to have parents who can enrich their educations outside the classroom. There’s an economic factor, too: more educated families are usually better off, and better able to have one parent stay home, afford trips to museums and other cultural sites, and pay for after-school and summer programs. If this is the case, then I can’t blame schools for focusing their funds on the struggling students.

Still, I wish they didn’t have to make that choice. While President Bush’s “American Competitiveness Initiative” includes $250 million for elementary school programs to boost math achievement and $90 million to train 70,000 additional teachers for math, science and foreign language Advanced Placement courses, it also gives no new funding to the $12.7 billion Title I program for low-income students, the largest source of federal education aid to states. As Stateline.org (a program of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center) reports:

The gap between what states are expected to achieve under NCLB and what the federal government is willing to fund would increase if Congress were to approve Bush’s budget, said Jack Jennings, president of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy (CEP) in Washington D.C., which has done extensive studies on NCLB. In a recent analysis of Title I allocations, CEP found that the growing number of school districts that are failing under NCLB has resulted in less Title I money getting to the nation’s neediest school districts.

Can anyone else, i.e., the Democrats, do better? What are the tradeoffs? Higher taxes, other programs cut? Would scaling back our presence in Iraq mean more funds available for education, or is this too simplistic, not taking into account the mysteries of federal accounting practices? I wish I knew the answers. In the meantime, as my secondary school teachers taught me, I can at least ask a lot of questions.