Gifted Education Policy Changes I’d Like to See — Part 1 of 3

In this 3-part series, I share my views on how we can improve the ways gifted individuals of all Levels of Giftedness can be better served by educational views and systems.

In 2017 I retired from my private consultancy. I gave away all my testing materials for the mere cost of shipping to my friend Kathi in Maine. She works for a school district and loves having materials to share the best tests for a child needing assessment. And she is an amazing teacher, too. I did this because I would have been too easily tempted to give just one more test to someone begging for it. Seriously. I find it hard to say no when it’s about things I love to do, have a passion for.

While still giving tests and guidance, the majority of the gifted people brought to me as children, and represented in my longitudinal study, were boys. It isn’t that there aren’t as many girls who are gifted — including extremely gifted — but that girls usually do okay in school. They don’t cause problems that worry parents or teachers.

No matter what Level of Gifted or personality type girls have, school seems to fit girls better than boys. There are so few in my study, in fact, that it is hard to draw as many conclusions about them as for the boys in the study. It was when I looked for the personality type frequency percentages…