Please call them advanced or high achievers–not gifted or talented!

I just read an excellent piece by Jonathan A. Plucker, “Common Core and  America’s High-Achieving Students.”  It is on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute website.

For the most part, the piece uses terms appropriately–‘high achievers,’ ‘advanced.’ But, unfortunately, the terms, ‘gifted’ and ‘ high-ability’ also slip into the piece. Those are labels placed  on children.  Using those labels is not helpful in advancing the important argument of the piece–which is that we need to focus on the needs of advanced students in the roll-out of  Common Core.

As I see it, we go off the rails when we group students by ‘ability,’ or ‘giftedness’ as those concepts are fluid  and the labels create unnecessary divisions among students. Far better to group students by ‘current performance’ levels or by calling them ‘advanced.’  These terms relate to the academic tasks at hand.  They  are about the WHAT that is being studied and  mastered, not the WHO that the student supposedly has been labeled.

Terms related to current performance levels, skills and knowledge are also fluid and subject to change—which is a good thing. They don’t carry the baggage associated  with labeling children as gifted or not.