<p><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3243344&page=1%5B/url%5D">http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3243344&page=1</a> </p>
<p>I hear that there will be an ABC News Nightline story on the Davidson Academy tonight (Monday 4 June 2007).</p>
<p>The profoundly gifted have as many problems getting their needs met as the profoundly retarded do. Unfortunately not all school districts take good care of even the average to highly gifted students. I don't blame the parents for leaving an education unfriendly environment. We were lucky, schools locally were able to meet our child's needs and individual needs are recognized. If only half as much money were spent on gifted education as on "special" ed. Unfortunately the public doesn't perceive the gifted as needing to advance differently from the masses. I bet our prison populations would decline if every child could receive an "appropriate" education.</p>
<p>ITA with Wis. My state funds gifted education with exactly zero dollars, and city or town special ed budgets are 25% or more of the total education budget. We have children attending special ed schools at $100K a piece, but not one cent is spent on gifted education. It's a travestry actually.</p>
<p>We have survived, because my child's two most profound gifts were met through compacted curriculum in math, and an excellent music program, which we supplement (to the tune of about $10-12K a year). </p>
<p>There is quite a prejudice and lack of understanding about the gifted, much less the profoundly gifted. It's amazing how people are willing to sacrifice the needs of the best and brightest.</p>
<p>I work for a school district, and the gifted education program is a complete joke. At the secondary level, they consider gifted students to be served by preAP/AP curriculum.</p>
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<p>What would you recommend in addition to or instead of that? </p>
<p>My son thought that the courses at EPGY</a> Online High School look more challenging than the courses shown on the TV segment about Davidson Academy. Possibly, Davidson Academy is still gearing up its curriculum. (Possibly, EPGY OHS still is too.) EPGY OHS is nominally a private school, and thus it has a list price for tuition, but the funding for financial aid is lavish and still increasing, so it will cost my son probably LESS to take a full load there next year than it would to attend the local public high school we are already paying for with our taxes, when incidental fees are considered. </p>
<p>Here in Minnesota, statewide public school open enrollment means all parents have the power to shop for schools. At least five public school districts, including my own, have started or plan to start school-within-a-school programs for profoundly gifted students. A common problem of such programs, and this was mentioned in the Nightline program last night, is that they tend to aim the curriculum level too low at first. (This, by the way, I think was avoided by EPGY OHS, particular in its humanities courses, which were taught just like Stanford undergraduate courses by Stanford professors.) My local school district's program of that kind has not yet begun. Based on the experiences of other school districts, it will be reasonably easy to build a good program for late-elementary-age advanced learners, simply by grouping them together. It will be MUCH harder to overcome the middle school ideology and build a strong middle school program for profoundly gifted students--that is where Davidson Academy is really pioneering, as EPGY OHS only attempts to be a college-as-senior-high program, and doesn't aim its courses at middle-school-age students.</p>
<p>Did anyone check out the school's website? The required SAT/ACT scores for admission seem a little modest to me. I'd topped those scores by the listed grades, and so had many of my friends, but I certainly wouldn't consider myself "profoundly" gifted, and I wouldn't guess that I'm in the "top-tenth of the top percentile in the country".</p>
<p>EDIT: Maybe the IQ tests are looked at more seriously?</p>
<p>Checking the Davidson Academy Web site for admission criteria, </p>
<p>I am reminded that IQ scores are given fairly great weight, and I would have expected students to get higher SAT or ACT scores than the minimums specified in the test score criteria. But it may be that several of the students who apply have had multiple grade skips beforehand, in which case the score levels, which are anchored to school grades and not to age, are somewhat more stringent.</p>
<p>That's a good point, tokenadult.</p>
<p>my understanding is that the admissions cut-offs are just that -- cut-offs. They look at many areas to determine whether the child would be best served by their school.</p>
<p>totally right-on post, that #2. As someone who has worked often in gifted education & advocates for the gifted, I have watched the neglect of the gifted become more pronounced every year. The economic & legal support for "Special" Ed is unreal, yet (as you pointed out) the gifted student is every bit as Different as the special ed student. I just wanted to quote the whole post, but that would have been silly. </p>
<p>You know where gifteds generally go? To homeschool, that's where. At least the <em>parent</em> understands the student, and if the family is lucky , they get a knowledgeable, committed, & gifted teacher, too. (The best teacher of the gifted student is someone who is also gifted, btw.)</p>
<p>And moving to Nevada gives you a nice geographical boost when applying to elite schools.</p>
<p>I know a case of a guy who moved OUT of Reno, NV a year or two before the Davidson Academy was founded. He is brilliant. His parents had a move occasioned by work, to another western state, and he ended up studying at Exeter. He had great, and well-deserved, college admission results. </p>
<p>Even Minnesota, which has students going to all the top colleges every year, is far enough away from the usual suspects to provide a geographical tip--probably the only tip factor my son will enjoy. For most of the most highly selective colleges in the United States, the base acceptance rate of Minnesota applicants is about double that of applicants nationwide. Maybe Minnesota kids don't do "reach" or "lottery ticket" applications as much as kids in other states, or maybe the admission committees want to be really, really sure that they get enrollees from all fifty states every year.</p>
<p>"And moving to Nevada gives you a nice geographical boost when applying to elite schools."</p>
<p>You also get a very low PSAT cutoff for National Merit Semi-finalist.</p>
<p>Time Magazine article mostly on the Davidson Academy, "Failing Our Geniuses": </p>