Why It’s Sometimes Hard to Find the “Right School” for Your Gifted Child©

Deborah L. Ruf, PhD, 2022

In this post, we look at one common reason behind why gifted children have fairly universal, inevitable problems in the typical kindergarten through 8th grade school setting. In this short post, we consider how most schools are set up and designed.

In almost all cases, schools group and educate children by age rather than ability or level of performance, and this practice makes school time go too slowly and repetitively for bright, gifted children. A clear side-effect is they don’t get to learn nearly as much as they could have been learning from an environment that is a better fit for them. It can also affect the gifted child’s happiness, excitement, behavior, and cooperation.

According to David Lohman (1999)[i], co-author of both the Cognitive Abilities Test and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the achievement range — what students can do, such as reading or math — within a typical public school’s same-aged, mainstreamed (mixed ability) 1st grade classroom (average age 7) is already 12 grade equivalencies! Age alone is a convenient, yet inefficient, way to group learners. It should be fairly clear that grouping kids by age alone for instruction makes about as much pedagogical sense as grouping them by height.