Struggling to Teach the Very Brightest

A mother who battled to find programs for her son says the L.A. district has a lot to learn. Their story reflects a broader question - how public schools deal with the highly gifted.

Los Angeles Times Article October 17,1997

By: AMY PYLE
TIMES EDUCATION WRITER

Fitting the mind of an adult into the body of 6-year-old is a
tough squeeze.
Finding a place in the public school system that satisfies the
needs of that mind and that body is tougher still.
This is the search that consumes Leila Levi, a former
schoolteacher who refuses to accept second-best for her son, Levi
Meir Clancy.
How smart is Levi? Testing him is complicated by his youth, but
formal exams intended for older kids have pegged him above the 145
IQ range, one measure of the "highly gifted" designation, bestowed
on fewer than 1% of Los Angeles Unified School District's
students.

Reality hints at an even higher intelligence. At home in Venice,
Levi reads novels in English and Spanish and adds three-digit
numbers in his head. Boosted by pillows so he can reach the
keyboard, he runs smoothly through sophisticated computer programs
such as ClarisWorks. He wants to be a bioengineer.

Nevertheless, the odds that such children will be sufficiently
challenged in school are discouraging, experts say.

Educators throughout the nation are advocating "mixed ability"
classes, and are struggling with the very word "gifted," sensitive
to its anti-egalitarian overtones. Many districts do not even
recognize "highly gifted" as a distinct category. L.A. Unified
does, but its top gifted administrator stresses programs at the
students' local schools--including creating independent-study
programs for the most extraordinary children.

The Los Angeles district, whose sheer size gives it more options
than smaller districts, offers fewer than 400 slots in special
accelerated elementary school classes for its 1,600 elementary
school-age youngsters who have been identified as highly gifted.

As a consequence, parents such as Leila Levi fear that these
children will never reach their potential--growing up, instead,
without brilliant peers, made to feel odd or ostracized, becoming
discipline problems.

Among the experts who consider those fears valid is psychology
professor Ellen Winner, who shocked gifted advocates in her 1996
book, "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities." She suggested that
the "moderately gifted" belonged in regular classes.

Highly gifted children, by contrast, "are at risk," she said. "A
lot get bored or teased in school and they tune out or become
disinterested in their abilities and end up underachievers. They
need to be in classes with other kids who are like them."

Many parents turn to special classes in desperation after other
options fail horribly. Though there are so-called "gifted"
programs of some sort in most of the district's schools, some
provide as little as one hour a week of enrichment--hardly
adequate to satisfy children like Levi.

The question of how to educate Levi is a metaphor for the broader
question of how public schools--and society at large--should deal
with our most intellectually gifted. For parents, it is a journey
radically different, and far more chaotic, than the well-worn
paths that have been smoothed for gifted athletes, musicians or
artists. Search Plagued by Obstacles

Leila Levi opted for one of the special programs--an L.A. Unified
magnet school--only after two years of navigating.

They were two years in which she slammed into a succession of
frustrating walls: The wall of the principal who doesn't believe
in skipping grades, because that was how his son missed decimals;
the wall of the first-grade teacher who never fulfilled another
principal's proposed compromise of sending Levi next door for
third-grade math and science; the wall of the district, which
eventually offered Leila the choice of Eagle Rock Highly Gifted
Magnet, but provides a bus for only half the trip.

Leila firmly believes her son's needs are as unique as those of a
severely retarded youngster. She and some other parents of the
very bright believe their children should be provided a tailored
learning plan similar to those required for special education
students.

"It's their legal and moral responsibility," Leila said. "And
what's more, he's a gift to society. They should want to do it."

By law, special education students must be tested, transported and
closely monitored. No such standards apply to the highly gifted,
or to the simply "gifted" students, who make up about 6% of the
school population and generally fall in the above-125 IQ range.

It would be easy to dismiss parents such as Leila as pushy or
unrealistic, or to point out that their children will probably
succeed regardless of the education they receive, while disabled
kids probably will not

As a baby, Levi barely slept, began walking at 5 months and spoke
well at age 1, mixing English and the Spanish he heard from his
bilingual mother. At age 3 he came to Leila while she was doing
the dishes and solemnly suggested they needed to talk.

Leila recalls her only child saying: "Mommy, you have to learn
another language because I have to learn another language. By the
time I'm in the work force, being bilingual won't be good enough
and the best way for me to learn another language is for you to
learn it and teach it to me."

He thought maybe Chinese would be a good start.

For kindergarten, Leila chose the bilingual immersion program at
Grandview Elementary in West L.A., figuring that reinforcing the
two languages spoken at home would keep her son's mind busy.

The following summer, she enrolled him in a third-grade math class
in Culver City Unified, then volunteered to help out. She said
what she observed took her breath away: She had been a teacher for
years but had never seen a student learn as quickly as her son.

Back at Grandview in the fall, Levi came home in tears, saying he
was helping teach the first-grade class.

The state's top administrator for gifted education, Cathy Barkett,
says such use is common, and unfair.

"Teachers tend to teach to the middle and . . . the students at
the top often are misused as teachers," said Barkett, who moved
her own children to an all-gifted class in suburban Sacramento.
"The message to them is, 'You've met that standard, so help
someone else.' "

Leila decided she needed ammunition if she was to get Levi what he
needed. She asked to have him tested and was told he was too
young. She insisted, and eventually won.

Usually, students are tested only if their teachers suggest it two
years in a row, and even then months of delays stretch beyond the
end of second grade--frequently too late to nab a coveted spot in
the magnet gifted programs, most of which begin in third grade.

But Leila had an advantage over the average parent: She knows the
ropes because she taught middle school art until 1996. She also
knows how to take on L.A. Unified's bureaucracy, having once
launched a State Department of Education investigation into
treatment of limited-English speakers that ended with sanctions
against the district this fall.

When Levi's impressive test results came back, Leila pressed for
alternatives. First the psychologist who tested him recommended
the Brentwood Science Magnet, which had set aside two highly
gifted classes. But when Levi arrived there, Leila discovered the
accelerated classes did not begin until third grade, where he was
not welcome to enroll at age 5, and an interim plan for him to
spend part of his days in those classes never materialized.

In frustration, Leila pulled Levi out of school altogether and
taught him herself for 10 months. She started with the
basics--mostly math and English--but said he consumed most of the
elementary school curriculum in just three months. During the
course of the year, he read hundreds of books, including a
50-volume set on countries around the world, and began questioning
his mom about such theories as group consciousness.

Worried that she would accelerate Levi to the point where no
public school could accommodate him, Leila tried to help him gain
the experience to match his intellect. She took him to art
openings and other cities, helped him learn to roller-blade and
play chess, and took him with her to a computer graphics class at
UCLA Extension.

Levi remembers it as a freeing time, when he could pursue
interests at his own pace.

His mother has a different recollection.

"It was exhausting and it got to the point where there wasn't much
I could do for him anymore," she said.

She realized she would have to try the district again this fall.

"When he asks a question, I always kind of gasp for air," she
said. "I don't know if I can go there. . . . I have a master's
degree, I've been a teacher for years, but I feel so inadequate."
A Long Commute to a Special Class

At 6:25 a.m., Levi is napping in the front seat of Leila's car as
she pulls up in front of Hillcrest Elementary in the Crenshaw
district, a 20-minute drive from their Venice condominium. The bus
waiting for him there will bump over surface streets all the way
to Eagle Rock, picking up four other children along the way, and
Levi may not arrive home until nearly 5 p.m.

Just a month into the school year, Levi's accomplishments already
are legendary.

Nine-year-old Jennifer Ho, who boards the bus in Chinatown, says
in reverent tones: "Did you hear about him? He's 6 years old but
he's in fourth grade!"

The mother and child chose Eagle Rock from the list of three
elementary magnets for highly gifted children in L.A. Unified's
"Choices" brochure, which was sent to all district parents for the
first time last year. One non-magnet--Carpenter Elementary in
Studio City--also has a popular program for the highly gifted, but
no transportation is provided. (Cracked one mother: "You have to
listen to the mommy tom-toms" to know it even exists.)

Eagle Rock accepted Levi into its mixed second- through
fourth-grade class and he now works with ease at the top of that
continuum.

That is partly his own doing. Just a few weeks into the school
year, during his long morning bus ride, Levi got thinking about
the time his mom persuaded a college counselor to waive her
prerequisite art courses. Right then and there he penned a note to
his teacher:

Dear Mrs. Muraoka: I think this homework is too baby. So, if you
can, bump it up a couple of grades. --Levi.

Joyce Muraoka responded, giving him fourth-grade math books the
next day and fifth-grade the day after that.

Not only is Levi the youngest in his class, but he is small for
his age--a full head shorter than his classmates, with room to
spare in his size 6 jeans. The classroom furniture is so big that
his feet dangle and he has to stand up on his knees to write.

At first he felt oddest during recess, when the older kids didn't
want him to play ball. But this brain magnet is a place where
students actually talk about books during recess, too, and
practice their parts for a Halloween performance of "Macbeth." A
place where Muraoka doesn't think twice about using words such as
"perusing" and "eccentric."

In such an environment, Levi feels comfortable enough to share his
thoughts without fear of being mocked. When Muraoka hands out a
new math game originally developed by the Mayans, Levi raises his
hand and asks whether she knew the Mayans sacrificed animals and,
by the way, so did the Egyptians. And they also put animal heads
on their Gods.

Acknowledging Levi's tangent, Muraoka tells the class about an
Egyptian history museum in San Jose visited by magnet students on
a parent-sponsored field trip several years ago.

Levi raises his hand again: Would she like to see a magazine he
brought to school, which has some Egyptian royalty in it?

Later, Muraoka observes that, like many home-schooled kids, Levi
struggled at first to stay focused on the lesson at hand, taking
out a book to read whenever he felt bored.

There are gaps in his learning, too, that she must find and fill.
When he digs in to his homework one night, he is so used to being
able to do math in his head that he can't remember how to regroup
for harder subtraction problems. Shown once, however, he zooms
through the rest of the page like a human calculator. Frustrated
Parents Driven to Activism

Last spring, Leila unwittingly joined the gifted parents lobby
when she attended her first meeting of the Committee on Gifted
Education at school district headquarters. She went there on a
personal mission: If lower-level administrators would not take
responsibility for Levi's education, she would go to the top in a
forum in which she could not be ignored.

At the end of the meeting, she shoved Levi's home-school notebook
in front of Sheila Smith, the district's gifted-programs
coordinator.

"I was so aggressive, I was almost embarrassed," Leila recalls.

That first meeting, she was stunned by how angry the other parents
were. She felt irritated that all the attention seemed to be on
high schools simply because most of the parents had older kids.

In the past, the committee has found little school board sympathy
for its primary causes--to make testing routine and increase the
number of special gifted classes to serve those identified. Last
year, members presented a plan to then-board President Jeff Horton
and never heard back.

Horton acknowledges that is because he is torn on the
issue--between agreeing the system could be improved and worrying
about the equity issues, including the traditional
underrepresentation of poor children in the programs.

Members are hopeful that times are changing because the new
superintendent, Ruben Zacarias, prides himself on having increased
the numbers of identified gifted students during his stint as an
Eastside regional superintendent.

An unexpected flurry of activity occurred last spring:
Applications far exceeded space at North Hollywood's Highly Gifted
magnet after the campus received heavy publicity for topping the
local heap on Advanced Placement tests.

Parents complained about the lack of slots. That uprising--among
some of the very parents the district likes to showcase whenever
funding for magnets is threatened--"made the district aware of the
need," said the district's high school director, Bob Collins.

Advanced programs were created at seven high schools around the
city to accommodate the overflow, though information was sent only
to those turned away from North Hollywood.

"The joke in the district is these are the stealth
programs--parents don't even know they exist," said founding
committee member Carol Knee, who got involved in spring 1994,
after she was informed that there was no room for her son in a
gifted middle school, even though he had attended a gifted
elementary.

Board member David Tokofsky, who took the helm of the board's
curriculum committee from Horton during the summer, believes it
will take such advocacy to bust through an administrative culture
he claims favors "equity over excellence."

The district's own delays in testing and a lack of emphasis on
getting quality programs into more schools have created a
constituency that will be hard to please with anything short of
separate gifted magnets, Tokofsky said.

Tokofsky has never met Leila Levi, but he can describe her
perfectly: always adamant, now angry.

"The thing is," she said, "I had the wherewithal to know where to
look. I had a clue--and it was still impossible."

Specially tailored programs for highly gifted students, with
enrollments:

ELEMENTARY

* Brentwood Science Magnet: 44

* Carpenter: 56

* Eagle Rock Magnet: 33

* Multnomah Magnet: 55

* San Jose Magnet: 121

****

MIDDLE

* Portola Magnet: 252

* Reed: 122

****

HIGH SCHOOLS

* Crenshaw Magnet: 10

* Eagle Rock: 47

* N. Hollywood Magnet: 245 Source: L.A. Unified School District