Gifted Program Cuts Leave Brightest Students Behind

Jill Ingersoll, gifted and talented coordinator in the Southwestern Wisconsin School District, works on lesson plans for her students. Budget cuts will eliminate Ingersoll's position at the end of the 2003-04 school year.

By Sarah Jancich
Assistant Editor

After 16 years, South West Education Association member Jill Ingersoll, a gifted and talented coordinator, is preparing to leave the job she loves.

Like many districts throughout Wisconsin, her employer, the Southwestern Wisconsin School District, chose to cut services for its brightest students to cope with budget shortfalls.

In the fall, Ingersoll will return to the district as a regular classroom teacher, but she's disappointed to leave her gifted and talented students to whom she teaches specialized, accelerated lessons.

"It's scary," Ingersoll said. "It's also a feeling that I've let these kids down."

Wisconsin is one of 29 states that require academically gifted students to be identified and served, but districts receive no state or federal funding for specialized programs. Faced with shrinking budgets, state-imposed revenue caps and pressure from the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act to bring low-performing children to proficiency, many districts are cutting services for the gifted.

In larger districts, like the Appleton Area School District, cuts to gifted and talented programs leave fewer resources for students and for regular classroom teachers who depend on specialists to help them identify and tailor curriculum for gifted students. Appleton this year will lay off two Talented and Gifted, or TAG, teachers, leaving the remaining staff stretched to continue the program.

Smaller districts, like Ingersoll's, often eliminate the entire gifted and talented program with just one layoff, leaving academically gifted children with no specialized instruction.

"My issue with this whole thing is, what is going to happen to these kids? The kids are almost being punished," Ingersoll said.

Risking a bright future
A survey conducted last year by WEAC and the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators found that 60% of superintendents reduced programs for gifted and talented students as a result of state-imposed revenue caps on school districts. Nine years earlier, only 19% of superintendents indicated they reduced gifted and talented programs in the WEAC/WASDA study.

Ruth Robinson

Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted President Ruth Robinson blamed revenue controls and shrinking budgets for the cuts. "This is a big concern," she said. "There is a false perception that gifted and talented students will be OK on their own."

She said it's the gifted students who come from economically disadvantaged families who suffer the most when districts cut programming.

Families with greater means can send their gifted children to summer enrichment camps or Saturday programs, an option not available to poor families. "It's counterproductive to closing the achievement gap," she said.

Left without challenging curriculum, gifted students can become bored and earn low grades because they become inattentive in class. They may also be misdiagnosed with hyperactivity or attention deficit disorder.

In many cases, gifted students are able to get through school without trying very hard. Without specialized lessons, "the children don't learn study skills or the perseverance to tackle subjects they don't know," Deb Douglas, coordinator of Manitowoc Public School's EXCEL program, said. "It causes problems later in high school and college."

Underserved gifted and talented students are also at greater risk of dropping out of school. Douglas estimated that one-quarter to one-third of dropouts are gifted students who have fallen through the cracks of a one-size-fits-all approach.

Head of the class to left behind
Douglas, who provides professional development and curriculum support for the district's teachers who have gifted students in class, is most concerned about staff layoffs due to gifted and talented program cuts.

Without gifted and talented specialists, she said, classroom teachers don't get the support they need to meet the learning needs of all students.

Instead, because of ESEA, there's pressure on teachers to focus on lower-performing students, leaving less time for the needs of the gifted.

ESEA, a federal law misleadingly referred to by the Bush administration as No Child Left Behind, imposes severe sanctions on schools that fail to meet "adequate yearly progress," or AYP.

Schools achieve AYP by administering subject-area standardized tests annually in grades three through eight, and once in grades nine through 12. The goal of the law is to have every child test at grade-level proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.

"There are no expectations beyond mediocrity, [or] meeting proficiency," Douglas said. "In times of budget crisis, districts are eliminating those things not mandated by No Child Left Behind."

Posted May 6, 2004