Giving Compass' Take:

•  Lauren Barack, writing for Education Dive, explains how pull-out programs for gifted students help them to develop other skills to further their education. 

• How can donors help schools with planning and implementation stages of pull-out programs?

• Read about why some educators think we should do away with gifted programs altogether. 

While some believe a gifted education is meant to help higher-performing students gain access to advanced material, a new study from the National Center for Research on Gifted Education has found that many of these pupils are not getting this exposure, wrote The Hechinger Report.

The survey took a look at three states in the South and Midwest, with three-quarters of the schools surveyed noting that they don’t design a separate curriculum for gifted students. Additionally, what students learn differs dramatically depending on the class, as individual educators are able to actually choose what they want to teach.

Gifted students may not be moving faster academically in the gifted classes their schools offer. Instead educators may be focused on developing critical thinking and creative thinking skills instead of accelerating student learning.

Schools sometimes offer gifted activities through programming that includes pull-out classes mixed into the regular school day. But these extra sessions do not always align with an academic curriculum, according to the National Center for Research on Gifted Education's survey. Instead these extra programs are helping students develop other skills, including those focused on processing.

For schools hoping to use gifted education to push students further in their education, administrators and curriculum directors may want to consider aligning these pull-out courses for gifted students to the specific curriculum in a district. The question is, though, whether districts want to use gifted programs to give students advanced material or to help them develop other thinking skills. In other words, do districts want students to learn more, or learn more deeply? Answering that question will help them decide how to tailor gifted programming for pupils.

Read the full article about pull-out programs for gifted students by Lauren Barack at Education Dive.