So, there I was, a “freelance writer,” as the Hartford Business Journal likes to call me, with my nose up against the glass, begging for them to bring me on to write columns and shine the publisher’s shoes and stuff.
And they bring me in, and give me the writing test and the math test, and, before too long, they discover the awesome reality: I am gifted.
What should an organization do when a gifted guy walks in the door? Besides the big salary and the full-time research assistant and the best corner office, you do what the Business Journal did. Send him off to seminars. Let him travel the globe in search of intellectual stimulation.
And the important thing is, the best bosses don’t care if the mediocre, ordinary, employees get jealous. The gifted assets must be fed and watered and nurtured. Nothing is more important than that. The big-time consulting firms work sort of like that. They quickly identify the best and the brightest munchkins off Ivy campuses and encourage them with trips and free tuition to graduate school and chances to travel the globe with the company soccer team.
Passing Muster
About the only folks that can’t seem to make the “gifted” strategy work are the public school educators. They see the gifted students as a burden, as a distraction from the important work of mainstreaming the “special education” students. They want to make sure the struggling students don’t look too terribly embarrassing on the standardized tests.
The dirty little secret of the conspiracy to ignore the gifted kids is the ugly matter of race. Back in the old days, “college prep” kids could be “tracked” within a public school — effectively isolating them from the children of Joe the Plumber, without labeling the smart kids “gifted.” The tracking system was quietly dismantled because it was, in many cases, too “white” to pass muster in school systems striving for integration.
The irony, of course, is that the tracking was often a blessing for gifted minority kids who needed isolation from their pals to avoid destructive peer pressure.
One sees the challenge in towns such as Manchester, which, among all of that town’s struggles related to keeping its school system and individual schools integrated, announced this summer new “criteria” for identifying “gifted” elementary school students.
Fiddling With Criteria
Of course, everyone knew what that was about, even before the details were revealed. There weren’t enough minority kids in the “gifted” cluster of kids, so the definition of gifted had to be fiddled with, quite aside from whatever, in theory, the gifted program was designed to encourage.
The danger in such stuff, which goes on all across the country, was hinted at in research this summer from the well-respected Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C., which warned of an overemphasis on low-achieving students at the expense of the very brightest. “Too often,” the report said, “the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school.”
Say a little prayer for just a bit of snobbish focus on the gifted students. And, of course, the gifted columnists, if there is more than one.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
