Education Week - May 13, 2015 - 23

Service. It allows for the fact that affluent school districts
with well-read parents can more easily afford to hire enough
librarians.
School libraries are just one area where K-12 education
could benefit from money from a new endowment and the
creation of two national digital-library systems. One system
should concentrate on public and school library needs and
the other on academia, even though the two systems should
be universally accessible and share resources such as content
and infrastructure and people. Along the way, the endowment
should promote recreational reading, the very activity
to which the young Warren Buffett so passionately devoted
himself. That means increasing the number of books in both
school and public libraries. Just how many in-depth and upto-date
works on the stock market can you find in a typical
school library? And would that library let a future Buffett call
up the right databases?
Here's another reason for educators not to forget public libraries:
They can help draw parents into the world of books,
so that mothers and fathers can be better role models for
young readers, and sources of more stimulating conversation
for their offspring. Parents' reading tastes are not necessarily
the same as their children's; hence the need for school and
public libraries alike to help K-12 students.
Simply put, we need to create "book floods"-as some experts
have described them-in both schools and communities
at large. And we should nudge students and parents alike
to read. The average 15- to 19-year-old spends only about
six minutes a day reading, according to the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics. Just 47 percent of adults read at least one
novel, short story, poem, or play in 2012, compared with 56
percent in 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts says.
A national digital endowment could encourage such innovative
responses as cellphone book clubs for all ages, a concept
PAGE 24 >
JIM DUNCAN, honored as a 2011 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, is
the executive director of the Colorado Library Consortium in Centennial.
These are his personal views, and not those of the consortium. DAVID
H. ROTHMAN, a former poverty-beat reporter, is the brother of an
e-book-loving retired teacher, and runs LibraryCity.org, a libraryadvocacy
website. He is based in Alexandria, Va.
"
Too many school
library collections
are skimpy and
outdated, and don't
reflect the diversity
of our country
today or the latest
developments
in science and
technology."
Giftedness Is More Than
A Function of Education
By Celi Trépanier
F
to reading and math are "essentials, not
luxuries" for public education. The contradiction
here is stark: We have new Americans
who already speak a "foreign language"
that would provide the nation with
greater international competitiveness in
business and a useful edge in geopolitics,
yet these students are hampered in developing
those skills by state and national
education policies. Without actively and
continuously cultivating bilingual skills in
bilingual students, we are limiting our nation's
language resources.
Although there are reasons for disagreement
on language issues in policy debates,
there are two important points that teachers
and schools should consider when thinking
about English-language learners:
* Multiple language abilities are a resource
for all students. Instead of viewing
students who do not speak English as a
first language as deficient, we should help
students develop both first-language skills
and English skills.
* Learning is improved when students
are able to build upon what they already
know. Students who are learning English
will learn that language better, along with
other subjects, if they also learn in their first
languages simultaneously.
As we, as a nation, discuss the reauthorization
of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act, and as state legislatures work
to improve the education of our youths, we
should pay attention to the policies being
proposed for English-language learners.
For Samuel, I know that his experience
and learning outcomes in school would
have been much better if state policy had
allowed for continuous education in Spanish,
instead of trying to push him into an
English-only classroom. The school had
the personnel resources needed, but was
limited in what it could do because of policy.
Policies that provide schools with the
opportunities to do what is best for their
students, including providing bilingual developmental
instruction, are policies that
allow teachers to make professional decisions
based on research.
The way in which we feel and think is
mediated by language. I know that no
matter how fluent I am in Spanish, my
deepest thinking happens in English (my
first language). If I were not able to work
from my strength in English and bring
those skills to learning Spanish, I would
not have been able to learn Spanish well,
or quickly.
For Samuel, the pressure to get him into
an English-only classroom took his innate
intelligence and curiosity and made him
a learning orphan. In the future, smarter
language policies would make Samuel, and
countless others like him, feel at home in
either language. n
JOE LEVITAN has worked with bilingual students
for many years, including time teaching in
diverse inner-city middle schools in Boston, New
York City, and Baltimore. He currently directs
educational programming at the Sacred Valley
Project in Cusco, Peru, an international nonprofit
organization that provides access to secondary
schools for Quechua women in that country. He is
pursuing a dual doctorate in educational leadership
and comparative and international education at
Pennsylvania State University.
ace it, the vast majority
of people think
that gifted children
are the smart, highachieving
students in
a special, sometimes
elitist program at
school. It's a universal
misperception.
When I was an education student
in college, the elementary school
where I was student-teaching had
a full-time gifted program. The
classroom had no desks-the gifted
students got to sit in bean bags for
their instructional time instead.
In the regular classrooms, where
students sat in desks, the field trips
were visits to local museums and
other cultural events. In comparison,
the gifted students were allowed to
go on overnight field trips.
Like many, I wondered why gifted
students received so many more
perks than other students. Was it
simply because they were smarter?
My opinion back then, as a studentteacher,
was that any student, gifted
or not, could benefit from learning in
a bean-bag chair or gain educationally
from overnight field trips. What
made gifted kids so special?
As a student-teacher, I understood
that the identification of a child as
gifted, and his or her subsequent
placement into the gifted program
at school, was exclusively a function
of the school system-its teachers
and its schools. The gifted were the
"smarter" students, and smarter was
determined by school performance
and testing. And the smarter, highachieving
kids were rewarded with
getting to sit in the bean bags. Giftedness
seemed solely an educational
label designated by the school.
I know now that many gifted children
are not like the stereotypical
gifted child sitting in those bean-bag
chairs.
Giftedness is so much more than
an educational designation administered
by a school system. It is
brain-wiring from birth, an inborn
trait that has strong emotional and
social facets, not just educational
behaviors. Giftedness is a degree of
brain functioning one is born with,
and a gifted person's above-average
intellectual ability is only a part of
his or her life.
A gifted person may not only be
born with strong reasoning, creativethinking,
and analytical skills. The
brain is not used only for learning
and academic endeavors. Our brains
are also where our emotional and
social abilities, traits, and responses
emerge, and gifted individuals can
often have more intense emotional
and social needs and issues than
others. Some research suggests that
physical and sensory traits such
as extreme sensitivity to lighting,
smells, skin stimuli, and sounds may
also be part of some gifted children's
challenges in life.
Simply put, although gifted
children are generally recognized as
being high achievers, the emotional,
social, and sensory traits usually go
unrecognized in schools. Historically,
schools have done an inadequate
job of identifying and serving gifted
students, and this has perpetuated
the damaging misperceptions about
being gifted.
In defense of schools and teachers,
the inadequacies in gifted education
originate most often with those who
hold the educational purse strings
and are far removed from the classroom.
Teachers and schools are left
to educate gifted students with the
means they are given.
Inevitably, the educational facet
of giftedness is addressed in school,
although insufficiently much of the
time, while the emotional, social, and
sensory traits associated with giftedness
are unknown by most educators
unfamiliar with gifted children.
When a gifted child begins to have
"
Historically, schools have
done an inadequate job of
identifying and serving
gifted students, and this
has perpetuated the
damaging
misperceptions about
being gifted."
problems at school-which can
arise from any number of associated
emotional, social, and sensory
issues-the problems are rarely
attributed to the child's giftedness.
To the contrary, it is all too common
for the gifted child to be labeled as
arrogant, lazy, or unmotivated, and
the solution is that he or she just
needs to work harder. And, too often,
the child's giftedness comes into
question.
This needs to change.
Somewhere down the line, the
identification of giftedness in a child
came to be associated exclusively as
a function of the school. A school's
purpose is to educate its students, so
it may be fair to say that the educational
needs of gifted children have
become the only aspect of giftedness
PAGE 25 >
CELI TRÉPANIER is an advocate for gifted
students and a former public school teacher
from Lafayette, La. Her first book, Educating
Your Gifted Child: How One Public School
Teacher Embraced Homeschooling, was
published in February by GHF Press.
EDUCATION WEEK | May 13, 2015 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary | 23
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Education Week - May 13, 2015

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