November 24, 2015 School Board Testimony - Austina DeBonte and Susan Cobb

Welcome to our new school board members.  My name is Austina De Bonte. Many people know me as the HiCap lady. I co-founded the Northshore HiCap Parent Advisory Board back in 2008. Three years ago I was elected President of the statewide NW Gifted Child Association, and now I provide presentations, parent coaching, and professional development for educators statewide.

But people wonder why I am so driven about this topic, especially since my kids are not affected by the Challenge decision.  Here’s why. I have learned some shocking truths that radically changed how I parent my own kids, and this fuels my passion to this day. This is counterintuitive at first, but it is vital background to understanding the importance of the Challenge decision, and it affects way more kids than just the ones we identify as “HiCap.”

Let’s start at the beginning. We all know how important it is for kids to learn how to learn. To wrestle with a tough problem, to persist through failure, to ask for help, and to stick with it. A mountain of research has articulated the characteristics of grit, perseverance, and growth mindset as being the single most important skillsets for students to develop for long term success - not just in school but in life. In today's rapidly changing world, what our schools need to teach is not just history or physics, but above all, the self-confidence and ability to learn new, challenging, novel things as our world continues to evolve.  Our district understands the importance of growth mindset, so I realize that I am preaching to the choir on this point.

And our schools do a great job teaching these foundational skills for most students - from the early grades, most students have constant practice in staring a hard problem in the eye, giving it an effort, trying again, and eventually emerging victorious, whether it is mastering subtraction, or learning how to write a persuasive essay.

But what most people don't realize is that our highest ability kids – 15% or more of the population - are most at risk here. It is extremely difficult to teach them these life skills of grit, perseverance, and a growth mindset. Why? The root problem is that these kids’ elementary school experience was one where everything came easy. Even with rigorous common core standards, many kids know 50% or more of the grade level material on Sept 1 - not because their parents are drilling them with flash cards, but because through some quirk of their genes, their brains are sponges and pick up new ideas everywhere. They learn so quickly, with so little effort, that even topics that challenge most other kids are easy for them.  They are often bored and some tend to misbehave, because they are not fully engaged at school. The “extension activities” they are offered are definitely more engaging, but they still aren’t actually hard for these kids. When you have a bright kid like this, no amount of talking about grit, perseverance, and growth mindset will be effective. It just won’t stick, because these kids have zero frame of reference for the relationship between effort and results. They have never experienced it in their own bodies. This puts them at a critical disadvantage as they move into secondary school and towards real life.

How does the story play out?  If these bright kids are allowed to “skate” through regular classrooms where they pick up new ideas without effort, they never learn how to tackle a genuinely hard problem. Eventually, they find themselves in middle school geometry, or high school physics, or AP World History, and are faced, possibly for the very first time, with a topic that is not intuitive for them—and have no experience, no strategies, and limited emotional reserves to tackle it.  Some of these kids will buckle down, figure it out, and persevere, and they will become our national merit scholars and valedictorians.

But a surprising number of our bright students don’t persevere, even though the challenge they are experiencing in the moment may not even be that big. In fact, for our most talented students, they may not hit that crisis moment until high school, and some, not until college. Whenever it happens, the challenge quickly turns into an identity crisis—their school experience taught them that being smart meant that everything would come easy. Now that things aren’t coming easy anymore, the child starts a cycle of self-doubt: “Does that mean I’m not smart anymore?”

As Dr. Dan Peters of the nationally-known Summit Center says, “When they start to underachieve, the natural response for self-preservation is to actually stop caring. They're like: "I don't care about school anymore, this is stupid, this is boring." You'd rather be disengaged and do bad, than TRY and do bad. Typically, over time we start to see elements of anxiety and depression that kick in.” Underachievement in secondary school among kids who were highly successful in elementary school is rampant – and is hugely frustrating for both parents and teachers who know that these kids have plenty of ability, yet can’t seem to actually use it.

Research has borne this problem out.  The high school dropout rate among the hicap population hovers around 20%, according to two different bodies of research (Sylvia Rimm, NAGC).  A study found that a similar 20% of the prison population has high IQ scores (Strewsninsky). Our highest ability hicap kids dropping out of high school and going to prison are definitely the worst cases; but there are even more bright kids who may not qualify for hicap but are at risk of this same cycle of underachievement.  In fact, Angela Duckworth’s seminal research on grit found that IQ was NOT correlated with success in secondary school. Rather, the number one factor that predicted success was GRIT, not any measure of innate talent or ability to learn quickly. The evidence is everywhere that many bright kids are not destined to do well in the long run, even though they may have started out ahead of the curve.

My name is Susan Cobb.  I’ll pick up where Austina left off.

All of this is preventable. If schools actually challenged our bright kids to put forth real effort, not just in high school, but in middle school, and even in the early elementary grades, these kids would develop the essential skills of grit, perseverance, and growth mindset. We’re not talking about more busywork, and we’re certainly not talking about creating a pressure cooker environment. Just content, concepts, and curriculum that is at the student’s true level, and provides genuine challenge in complexity and depth, with an appropriately quick pace. This is none other than Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development – the optimal place of learning is just ahead of what you already know, not too easy, and not too hard.

The trouble is, it takes a LOT to actually challenge these kids, way more than people realize. Common core doesn’t even come close. Across our top 15% population, it is not unusual for a child to be operating not just one, but several grades ahead of their agemates, not just in content, but in ability to synthesize, apply, and reason abstractly. Further complicating this is their innate sensitivity, intensity, and especially perfectionism. These characteristics are so endemic in this population, that some experts say that identifying high potential kids based on these characteristics is just as valid as their test scores. Perfectionism can prevent these kids from reaching outside their comfort zone to challenge themselves because it risks them experiencing failure. That inborn perfectionism is reinforced sky high when a child spends years in elementary school getting 100% on every test. It takes a very unique teacher with some specialized training to really be able to draw these kids out - creating that safe environment where the child will truly put forth effort and risk not getting it right on the first try. Our bright, high ability kids truly are a special needs population, and they need special attention from the earliest grades for best long term outcomes – most especially when they come from disadvantaged situations.

Unfortunately, these kids pass the state tests without trouble, don’t need help with the curriculum, and appear to be doing well, and so their true level of ability flies under the radar of even the best teachers. And there are a lot more of them than we realize.

The EAP and AAP programs do a great job serving some these kids, however these programs serve less than 3% of our population, and only in grades 2-8. Another less than 1% of hicap kids grades K-8 are served in the classroom through differentiation, which so far has not been nearly as effective as we had hoped in providing actual challenge for these identified kids. But even more troubling is the 10% or more of our population that are not explicitly classified as hicap, who are equally at risk of failing to develop grit, perseverance, and growth mindset.

These kids exist in every ethnic group, in every economic class, in every corner of our district, but they become harder and harder to find and support the older they get.

Our society continues to believe that kids who are smart have the least to worry about. We tell ourselves, “They’ll be fine. They will be successful no matter what.”  We worry about the struggling kids, the achievement gap – and this is a valid concern, for sure. But ironically those academically struggling kids will learn grit, perseverance, and growth mindset over their school career far better than the kids who start school with the most innate ability. The good news is that this is in our power to change – as long as we take the time to build and sustain programs that challenge each child at their true level of learning, from elementary school, through middle school, and beyond.

The Middle School Grade Reconfiguration taskforce is considering removing dedicated Challenge classes that provide greater depth, complexity, and especially faster pace in our middle schools and institutionalizing broad scale differentiation. This is particularly surprising, given that both parents, teachers, and administration agree that it has been a very hard road to implement differentiation for just a few dozen hicap students who were placed in regular classrooms last year, even when focusing training at that small group of teachers.

Attempting to replace the Challenge Program with a wide scale differentiation approach in our middle schools seems like a very risky plan with no built-in accountability. We do not believe it is possible to differentiate to the extreme level needed for these kids to actually develop grit, perseverance, and a growth mindset. Sadly, the kids who have the most to lose are the bright ones who will continue to fly under radar, who will not naturally reach out of their comfort zone to challenge themselves, and who will continue to pass the state tests – right up until they finally confront a genuine challenge and then risk slipping into a downward spiral of underachievement. We all know a kid in our lives who fits that story.

We implore the elected members of our school board not to let this happen on your watch.  “Equity and challenge for all” needs to include our bright, high ability students as well.  If they are not challenged, really challenged, they will not develop the grit, perseverance, and growth mindset they need to succeed long term. 

Please note that we are not just advocating for the top 3%, but for a large percentage of kids who are the ones that have given NSD its reputation as a high-performing district. If we don't continue to challenge them, in an effort to bring up the struggling, we will see district performance as a whole suffer as our high-potential kids "check out."

Respectfully submitted by: Austina De Bonte & Susan Cobb