Together we can make a difference!
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Meade
We are looking for parents, teachers, and students who support advanced and gifted education for Rochester Community Schools in Michigan. Please subscribe to Rochester SAGE to receive updates.
Also, please visit the "How to Help" link in the upper right.
Expanding International Baccalaureate Opportunities
Mike Wilkinson in the Detroit News has written an article “More Metro Detroit districts start own International Baccalaureate programs” about nearby districts that believed not enough of their students could be served by the International Academy and have decided that their districts can rectify this problem. Farmington, Southfield, Oxford, Walled Lake, Novi, and Clarkston have IB programs or are implementing them. Rochester Community Schools is not and I do not know if it is still under consideration at all for our district.
I enjoyed talking with Mike while he was researching for this article and am thankful he has made known that there are advocates for the IB Curriculum in the RCS school district. (Mike has more articles in the Schools section of the Detroit News.)
While Mike has focused on the IB Diploma Programme for high schools, he mentions that some districts, like Oxford, are working on a K-12 International Baccalaureate curriculum covering primary and middle years as well. I still believe that a K-12 IB school for Rochester Community Schools would be of great benefit for our district and give a choice to families for education.
Read more…
10 Myths about Gifted Education
Here is a wonderful video created by gifted students Mythbusting some of the common myths about gifted and talented programs. I encourage you to watch it and pass it on!
If the video doesn’t display in your email, click “Read More of this Post” to view on the website.
Hat-tip to Alex “Sandy” Antunes at Science 2.0. More from Alex in the complete post…
Lori Higgins of the Detroit Free Press wrote an article five years back titled FROM GIFTED TO AT RISK: Money for Michigan’s Brightest Students Dwindles: Parents Choose Homeschooling, Private Schools. In it, she talks about how funding for gifted education has been severely cut and many parents are choosing to switch to private schools or homeschooling to meet the needs of their gifted children. Since then we have seen even more cuts in gifted education as budgets get even tighter and many parents of gifted students often don’t advocate for gifted education as loudly as parents of children in other programs being cut.
This, of course, has had detrimental effects on gifted students. From the article, “Left unchallenged, though, gifted children can falter, advocates say. They become bored in school. They become at risk of dropping out. A widely cited study from 1991 found 1 in 5 dropouts was considered gifted. ” We are also made to feel that our children are a tiny portion of school population and overlooked for the greater good. But experts say generally 5% to 7% of the school population is gifted and about 2% of children are profoundly gifted. I would guess that given the district demographics of Rochester Community Schools, we are looking at 10-15% of the school population being gifted. Unfortunately, our district does not test for giftedness.
Lori has some statistics worth quoting and also provides definitions of a gifted child, characteristics to help recognize giftedness, and resources for gifted students.
Read more…
April 29th is Gifted Education Day!
The state of Georgia has declared April 29th to be Gifted Education Day and advocates for gifted education around the country are joining in!
Some ideas for ways to celebrate and advocate on Gifted Education Day:
- Thank your child’s teacher(s) for the differentiated instruction they provide
- Contact the Board of Education asking for more opportunities for gifted students
- Send an email to Governor Snyder requesting Michigan also declare a Gifted Education Day
- Read a book like Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom and share the ideas with your child’s teacher
- Join the Michigan Alliance for Gifted Education. Be sure to tell them you are a Rochester SAGE member!
- Check out items for gifted children at Prufrock Press and Bright Ideas
- Feature a program at the PTA meeting to promote academic excellence
- Invite newspapers, media, etc. to visit gifted education classrooms
- Wear buttons or pins promoting Gifted Education Day
- Provide a book or other item for advanced and gifted students in your child’s classroom
- Reply to this post with questions you have about gifted education
- Encourage a friend to sign up for Rochester SAGE!
Happy Gifted Education Day to all gifted students and parents, teachers, and others who support them!
Together we can make a difference for gifted children!
Thank you for reading Rochester SAGE.
Rochester Supports Advanced & Gifted Education
Action Alert: TALENT Act
This is an April 15 press release from Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Contact information for our senators appears at the end of this post.
In anticipation of the upcoming debate to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known in its current form as No Child Left Behind, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania introduced legislation last night which would make sure that federal education policy no longer overlooks the needs of high-ability students.
The new proposal is called the TALENT Act, or the To Aid Gifted and High-Ability Learners by Empowering the Nation’s Teachers Act.
Read more…
Stephen Henderson in the Detroit Free Press
Stephen Henderson in the Detroit Free Press has been writing an excellent series of columns regarding the state of education in Michigan today. I recommend reading his columns:
State must radically raise school standards
Devise better ways to reward, improve and discipline teachers
Tests and beyond — state must choose smarter ways to measure school success
While none of his columns are aimed at gifted learning, implementation of his suggestions could benefit advanced and gifted students.
Read more…
MEAP: Comparing Similar Districts
Based on a suggestion by Mike Reno, I compared MEAP Scores from Rochester Community Schools to other similar districts. Mike provided a list of districts, but this should not be considered a list of all comparable districts. The results are favorable for Rochester Community Schools and portend what scores will be like once the MEAP Cut Scores are adjusted.
Read more…
Lessons from the World of Sports
In Slate Magazine, Bill James asks “Why are we so good at developing athletes and so lousy at developing writers?”
The population of Topeka, Kan., today is roughly the same as the population of London in the time of Shakespeare, and the population of Kansas now is not that much lower than the population of England at that time. London at the time of Shakespeare had not only Shakespeare—whoever he was—but also Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and various other men of letters who are still read today. I doubt that Topeka today has quite the same collection of distinguished writers.
Why is this?
There are two theories that present themselves. One is that the talent that assembled in Shakespeare’s London was a random cluster, an act of God to locate in this one place and time a very unusual pile of literary talent. The other theory is that there is talent everywhere; it is merely that some societies are good at developing it and other societies not so good.
The same question could be asked of any number of areas of talent. Bill James says that we should learn from sports.
Read more…
MEAP Scores 2010
The State of Michigan has released MEAP Scores today. They are available on both the Detroit Free Press website and the State of Michigan Office of Educational Assessment and Accountability website. The OEAA website also breaks down the scores by the levels of Advanced, Proficient, Partially Proficient, and Not Proficient. However, it is more difficult to do a year to year comparison as only one year’s data is shown at a time. Rochester Patch has also provided breakdowns by school and district averages for Rochester Community Schools.
I’ve included Rochester Community Schools (our district), Albion Public Schools (our superintendent-select’s district), and statewide data.
Why is Advanced and Gifted Education Necessary?
Keeping a child who can do sixth-grade work in a second-grade classroom is not saving that student’s childhood but is instead robbing that child of the desire to learn. – Ellen Winner, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. – William Butler Yeats
Two of the most important qualities our school system can help instill is a love for learning and the ability to overcome adversity. That requires an appropriate level of instruction, academics that stimulate the intellect, and a pace appropriate to the learner. How would typical students fare if they were placed a year or two behind their grade level? They might ace all the exams, but they would be bored, not learn, not develop study skills, and wouldn’t fit in. According to the Morland Report on gifted children in 1972, “because the majority of gifted children’s school adjustment problems occur between kindergarten and fourth grade, about half of gifted children became ‘mental dropouts’ at around 10 years of age.” (The Survival Guide for Parents of Gifted Kids, by Sally Yahnke Walker, Free Spirit Publishing, 1991, 2002).
The following article will examine why advanced and gifted education is necessary in our schools to make students college-ready, career-ready, and life-ready.
Rochester SAGE - Supporting Advanced & Gifted Education 