The mission statement for Mesa Public Schools’ (MPS) gifted/talented is to provide “appropriate services for students who require differentiated educational services beyond those normally provided by our regular school program." MPS addresses the needs of the gifted students on the elementary level primarily through a once-a-week pullout service, while also supplementing regular classroom instruction with an Educational Services Plan (ESP), which is to provide “opportunities for a student to work within a specific subject area in more depth, more complexity, and at a more advanced level."
One of the biggest flaws of the gifted program in MPS is the lack of interaction between the gifted teachers and the regular classroom teachers. Regular classroom teachers do not regularly (if ever) provide any enrichment, compacting, differentiation, or clustering for their gifted students. Although the two teachers do work together (usually) while writing ESPs, many regular classroom teachers don’t hear from the gifted teacher for the rest of the school year. “It is essential that regular classroom teachers see the connection to their work and provide appropriate activities for gifted students in regular classroom settings." This utter lack of communication between the two most important teachers does little if anything to support Mesa’s gifted students. Just changing this one piece in the structure of gifted education in our district—encouraging and even requiring frequent interaction and collaboration about the students—could lead to a marked difference in how both teachers approach a single student.
Staffing an effective program is key to its success. Staffing on a tight budget is always difficult, but when all federal funding for gifted education was eliminated in April 2011, gifted programs in Mesa began to suffer even more. Spread thinner than ever before, teachers who were supposed to serve, (according to federal guidelines for special education) around 60 students each, now found themselves in some cases responsible for gifted education in grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 (one full day of instruction per grade per week) at three elementary schools. One teacher in the district is currently not only in charge of the four gifted classrooms she teaches, but she is also supposed to be teaching enrichment and continuing education to the teachers, to be a resource for questions they may have in addressing gifted kids, and to be testing anyone who qualifies or is recommended to be tested—in all three schools. In MPS, her experience is more the norm than the exception. Overloading an “administrator, counselor, or part-time teacher merely admits the low priority of the program in the district and suggests that both the organizer and the program will have inadequate support." There is no way one person can effectively service over 1800 students, but that is what our district is asking of our gifted teachers.
Pullout classrooms are taught by gifted-certified teachers, focusing instruction on creative problem solving—“critical thinking, creative thinking, problem solving strategies, research skills, communication skills, and self-development skills." The pullout program is intended to be enrichment-centered, where higher-level critical thinking and independent work are the primary areas of focus. Unfortunately, because the pullout class is completely independent from the grading system of the regular classroom (and has no weight on a student's permanent record), and because the gifted class’s grade is an arbitrary number determined by the teacher to reflect “student effort and outside-the-box thinking," many of Mesa’s gifted elementary kids don’t rise to the challenges presented there. Additionally, nothing is done in the gifted classrooms to differentiate the material taught, “rendering the grouping pattern less effective than research suggests it would be if differentiation of curriculum were carried out."Although well intended, the pullout program is missing the boat for many of the students MPS is trying to serve. Developing individual plans for each gifted student while in the gifted classroom and while in the regular classroom does seem daunting, but it is possible.
MPS has a second service in place that attempts to address the discrepancies in the regular classroom on the other four days of the week: the Educational Service Plan (ESP). An ESP is designed to supplement the regular classroom with “opportunities for a student to work within a specific subject area in more depth, more complexity, and at a more advanced level." Regular classroom teachers are required to implement these ESPs, often with little input, advice, or direction from the gifted teachers. While a good idea, an ESP does not provide the daily challenge and differentiated learning that gifted students require. ESPs are not an “integral part of the regular school day” and most do not include differentiation and acceleration. Many students never complete their ESPs; for other students, the assignments and thinking often turn into “more busy work, and heaven knows we got enough of that. I don’t need more work—I need different work.”
MPS is the largest school district in Arizona, serving 63,597 students during the 2013-2014 school year.* The gifted/talented program currently in place, according to MPS, serves approximately 1,255 students—less than 2% of its population. With experts estimating that gifted students statistically comprise 2%-5% of the student population, students in MPS are being drastically underserved. Ironically, Paradise Valley School District includes “approximately 33,000 students," and provides gifted services for “around 2,000” gifted students—around 6% of their students.
Over the last few years, MPS has lost some of its student base to other schooling options—homeschooling, open enrollment in other districts, and charter schools are a few of the options available—but it is statistically improbable that up to 2,000 students have found viable options elsewhere. It must be assumed that the identification process is partly to blame. Students are identified primarily through testing, which is supposed to be administered three times a year, according to state mandate, but testing is only consistently available in the spring. Part of the problem may be MPS’s attempt to spread their gifted teachers too thin, as mentioned above. All of this information, when analyzed together, demonstrates MPS’s low commitment to its gifted kids.
Support for the gifted in MPS doesn’t really exist, to be frank. Not only do some teachers bristle when suggestions are offered on how to enrich or differentiate for gifted students, parents don’t appear to be organized into an effective voice for their kids either. Relatively little information is provided to parents when their child is accepted into the gifted program—no parent education programs, no written materials (just a letter sent home), no school-sponsored meetings. “If both program improvement and program advocacy are long-term goals of local programs, then a greater mobilization and education of parents is necessary."
The basic structure of the gifted program in Mesa Public Schools (MPS) and how it provides and supports our gifted kids has many weaknesses, but I have to believe that the program is salvageable. Fostering better communication between regular classroom and gifted classroom teachers, improving pullout instruction to include differentiation, individualization, and more accurate evaluation of classroom performance, increasing the number of certified gifted teachers and administrators who solely serve the gifted in each school, and encouraging parents to become active voices in their gifted kids’ educations would be wise first steps towards improvement.
_______________
*Statistics cited in this section can be found under the Mesa Public Schools links page. If you have any questions as to where I found my information, please contact me. I'll be happy to discuss it with you.
One of the biggest flaws of the gifted program in MPS is the lack of interaction between the gifted teachers and the regular classroom teachers. Regular classroom teachers do not regularly (if ever) provide any enrichment, compacting, differentiation, or clustering for their gifted students. Although the two teachers do work together (usually) while writing ESPs, many regular classroom teachers don’t hear from the gifted teacher for the rest of the school year. “It is essential that regular classroom teachers see the connection to their work and provide appropriate activities for gifted students in regular classroom settings." This utter lack of communication between the two most important teachers does little if anything to support Mesa’s gifted students. Just changing this one piece in the structure of gifted education in our district—encouraging and even requiring frequent interaction and collaboration about the students—could lead to a marked difference in how both teachers approach a single student.
Staffing an effective program is key to its success. Staffing on a tight budget is always difficult, but when all federal funding for gifted education was eliminated in April 2011, gifted programs in Mesa began to suffer even more. Spread thinner than ever before, teachers who were supposed to serve, (according to federal guidelines for special education) around 60 students each, now found themselves in some cases responsible for gifted education in grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 (one full day of instruction per grade per week) at three elementary schools. One teacher in the district is currently not only in charge of the four gifted classrooms she teaches, but she is also supposed to be teaching enrichment and continuing education to the teachers, to be a resource for questions they may have in addressing gifted kids, and to be testing anyone who qualifies or is recommended to be tested—in all three schools. In MPS, her experience is more the norm than the exception. Overloading an “administrator, counselor, or part-time teacher merely admits the low priority of the program in the district and suggests that both the organizer and the program will have inadequate support." There is no way one person can effectively service over 1800 students, but that is what our district is asking of our gifted teachers.
Pullout classrooms are taught by gifted-certified teachers, focusing instruction on creative problem solving—“critical thinking, creative thinking, problem solving strategies, research skills, communication skills, and self-development skills." The pullout program is intended to be enrichment-centered, where higher-level critical thinking and independent work are the primary areas of focus. Unfortunately, because the pullout class is completely independent from the grading system of the regular classroom (and has no weight on a student's permanent record), and because the gifted class’s grade is an arbitrary number determined by the teacher to reflect “student effort and outside-the-box thinking," many of Mesa’s gifted elementary kids don’t rise to the challenges presented there. Additionally, nothing is done in the gifted classrooms to differentiate the material taught, “rendering the grouping pattern less effective than research suggests it would be if differentiation of curriculum were carried out."Although well intended, the pullout program is missing the boat for many of the students MPS is trying to serve. Developing individual plans for each gifted student while in the gifted classroom and while in the regular classroom does seem daunting, but it is possible.
MPS has a second service in place that attempts to address the discrepancies in the regular classroom on the other four days of the week: the Educational Service Plan (ESP). An ESP is designed to supplement the regular classroom with “opportunities for a student to work within a specific subject area in more depth, more complexity, and at a more advanced level." Regular classroom teachers are required to implement these ESPs, often with little input, advice, or direction from the gifted teachers. While a good idea, an ESP does not provide the daily challenge and differentiated learning that gifted students require. ESPs are not an “integral part of the regular school day” and most do not include differentiation and acceleration. Many students never complete their ESPs; for other students, the assignments and thinking often turn into “more busy work, and heaven knows we got enough of that. I don’t need more work—I need different work.”
MPS is the largest school district in Arizona, serving 63,597 students during the 2013-2014 school year.* The gifted/talented program currently in place, according to MPS, serves approximately 1,255 students—less than 2% of its population. With experts estimating that gifted students statistically comprise 2%-5% of the student population, students in MPS are being drastically underserved. Ironically, Paradise Valley School District includes “approximately 33,000 students," and provides gifted services for “around 2,000” gifted students—around 6% of their students.
Over the last few years, MPS has lost some of its student base to other schooling options—homeschooling, open enrollment in other districts, and charter schools are a few of the options available—but it is statistically improbable that up to 2,000 students have found viable options elsewhere. It must be assumed that the identification process is partly to blame. Students are identified primarily through testing, which is supposed to be administered three times a year, according to state mandate, but testing is only consistently available in the spring. Part of the problem may be MPS’s attempt to spread their gifted teachers too thin, as mentioned above. All of this information, when analyzed together, demonstrates MPS’s low commitment to its gifted kids.
Support for the gifted in MPS doesn’t really exist, to be frank. Not only do some teachers bristle when suggestions are offered on how to enrich or differentiate for gifted students, parents don’t appear to be organized into an effective voice for their kids either. Relatively little information is provided to parents when their child is accepted into the gifted program—no parent education programs, no written materials (just a letter sent home), no school-sponsored meetings. “If both program improvement and program advocacy are long-term goals of local programs, then a greater mobilization and education of parents is necessary."
The basic structure of the gifted program in Mesa Public Schools (MPS) and how it provides and supports our gifted kids has many weaknesses, but I have to believe that the program is salvageable. Fostering better communication between regular classroom and gifted classroom teachers, improving pullout instruction to include differentiation, individualization, and more accurate evaluation of classroom performance, increasing the number of certified gifted teachers and administrators who solely serve the gifted in each school, and encouraging parents to become active voices in their gifted kids’ educations would be wise first steps towards improvement.
_______________
*Statistics cited in this section can be found under the Mesa Public Schools links page. If you have any questions as to where I found my information, please contact me. I'll be happy to discuss it with you.
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