Ep 32. Identifying and educating advanced students
with Jonathan Plucker 

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software.  It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair.

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You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.

 

Ep 32. Identifying and educating advanced students with Jonathan Plucker 

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[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host. 

 

You are listening to episode 32 of Chalk and Talk. My guest in this episode is Dr. Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education and director of the Education Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University. I have been eager to dedicate an episode to advanced education, and I've also received messages from teachers and parents with questions about acceleration and academic streaming, which are closely related topics. 

 

Jonathan is a renowned expert in these areas, so I was thrilled when he agreed to join us and share his expertise. In the episode, Jonathan discusses flaws in traditional advanced identification methods and advocates for universal screening to ensure equitable access to advanced programs. 

 

We cover various interventions, including acceleration and discuss the drawbacks of de-streaming or anti-acceleration policies. We also discuss equity concerns. We talk about flexible ability grouping and the need to challenge stereotypes about advanced students and more. Jonathan emphasizes that education should meet the needs of every student, including students who excel academically and he provides concrete advice for doing that. 

 

A key takeaway from this episode is that offering advanced programs benefits all students. And ideally, every school should include advanced programming. Jonathan's passion for his field and deep understanding of the research really shined through in this conversation. 

 

It made me reconsider the best ways to serve advanced students and all students, really. I learned a lot from this discussion and I hope you do too. And just a reminder that the resource page for this episode has links to articles and other resources discussed in the episode. 

 

Now without further ado, let's get started.  

 

I am honoured to be joined by Dr. Jonathan Plucker, and he is joining me from Connecticut today. He is a professor of education and director of the Education Policy Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. He previously served as the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Julian C. Stanley Endowed Professor of Talent Development at Johns Hopkins in the School of Education and the Center for Talented Youth. 

 

He has a Ph.D. in educational psychology, a B.Sc. in chemistry education, and he was a teacher in a New York elementary school before getting a Ph.D. He has over 300 publications and is author or editor of 10 books on education policy, talent development, and creativity. He has worked with educators and policymakers in most U.S. states and several other countries. 

 

He has been ranked several times as one of the top 100 most influential academics working in education in the US, and his work has been cited in the top quarter of one percent of all education researchers. And I am very excited to hear about his work today. Welcome, Jonathan, welcome to my podcast. 

 

[00:03:38] Jonathan Plucker: Thank you, Anna. This is going to be a really fun conversation. 

 

[00:03:42] Anna Stokke: Let's start by defining our terms. So one of the things we'll be talking about today is students who really excel academically, and I'd like to make sure that I get the terminology right. In the past, such students were often called gifted. Is that the correct terminology, or is advanced a better word, or what terminology should we use? 

 

[00:04:05] Jonathan Plucker: It's a really important question, and I know it's going to sound to lots of people like this is a semantic difference, but if you'll just bear with me, it's not. Traditionally we have used the term gifted and that led to lots of sort of traditional education practices where we played what I like to call “Find the gifted child.”

 

We increasingly don't use that term anymore. We talk about advanced students, that's my preferred phrase. There are other terms, but I like that more because a lot of people have problems with gifted education, and it's that G word that clearly throws them off. 

 

Who has a problem with academic excellence or with advanced education or with advanced talent development? We have no problem with that in sports. Yes, we talk about gifted athletes, but more often we talk about talented athletes, advanced athletes, advanced musicians, advanced arts students, people who have artistic skill. In general, we've kind of moved away from the G word to sort of broader language. 

 

And part of that, to be very frank, is a lot of our sort of technology to help identify highly, highly talented students. Really did a good job of finding kids who were performing very well, but we just tended to miss lots of kids who had high potential, who should have been advanced, but weren't getting those opportunities. 

 

And so, again, I know to lots of people, they've been like, “Hey, we've used gifted for decades, it's fine.” It's really not. It's not about finding the gifted child, it's about finding students who need more academically.

 

And I know that's very, very colloquial, but that's really our goal here, right? It’s not to find the, you know, student who quite frankly may be an advanced math student, but has access to all of the advanced coursework, high-quality curriculum, highly trained teachers, they don't need more because they're getting what they need. 

 

But there may be a student in a less-resourced school who is not getting any of those things who could be performing at the same advanced level. Does that mean that they're not gifted? I've heard some people argue that. That, to me, is just a crazy conversation. 

 

No, they're advanced. We just haven't gotten them there yet. And then, finally although I could talk about this for hours, I do think that people do have this stereotype that there's a very limited number of gifted students. There's really no empirical support for those beliefs, they're just opinions.

 

I like the term advanced cause it's just broader. How many students can work at an advanced level? How many students need more advanced services academically? Who knows? Let's see how many we can get there. Maybe it's not two percent. Maybe it's 20 or 25%. Maybe it's more. Who knows? At least that should be our goal. 

 

But if you keep using that gifted term, it's so archaic now. I think it just pigeonholes you into serving too few students. It leads to all sorts of equity issues, it makes the hair on the back of people's neck stand up. it just doesn't serve us very well. So throughout this conversation, you're going to hear me talk about advanced students, bright students, I'll be surprised if I actually slip and say gifted. 

 

[00:07:32] Anna Stokke: What you're saying makes a lot of sense. So it's just using the word gifted, maybe makes things a little too limited, and there's sometimes this implication that there are very few people that were born with this talent, right, and there are very few people who are these kind of geniuses when in fact, there are a lot of students out there that could work at an advanced level that we're maybe not reaching. So you won't hear me use the term gifted either.  

 

[00:07:57] Jonathan Plucker: Awesome.  

 

[00:07:58] Anna Stokke: And we will talk about advanced students today, but nonetheless, even the word advanced, so some people might say it's damaging to use words like advanced to label a student. You know, maybe it creates too much pressure for a student who is determined to be advanced, or maybe it makes other students feel that they're not as competent if they don't get to go into an advanced class or if they're not labelled as advanced. 

 

What are your thoughts on that? 

 

[00:08:25] Jonathan Plucker: As you can imagine, I have heard this assessment of the danger of a label for a long time. And let me just share a very quick anecdote that I think is kind of funny. There was a Stanford professor a few years back, whose work I'm sure you are familiar, who put out a video in which she was interviewing Stanford students and they were all talking about the gifted label and how much it harmed them. 

 

And my daughter, who was a senior in high school at the time, was walking through the room as I was gritting my teeth and watching this video. And she like stopped behind me for about 15 seconds, she listened to a couple of the students, and then as she walked out of the room, she said, “I would love to be so damaged that I have to go to Stanford.”

 

And it just really kind of made me kind of snap up and go, “Oh yeah, this makes no sense whatsoever. Their lives were ruined by this label, so they had to go to Stanford.” And I thought, you know, kids are tougher than that. And think when we talk about, “Oh, these like sensitive snowflakes," if they hear this label and they don't get it.

 

I guess I would respond with two different things. The first would be kids are so much tougher than we give them credit for. And then this is a point that I'm going to come back to throughout our conversation. And then the second part, bridging back to talking about it terminology, then just don't label them. 

 

Just provide them with advanced services. You don't have to label children. That's something that adults do. And the kids know who the talented people are among their peers. So in that case, okay, then don't call it the advanced math program. Just provide them with advanced math services. 

 

I don't care. I really don't think that most children care either. So, I get where the concern comes from, but I just don't see any actual boots on the ground basis for where it causes any problems whatsoever to people. I mean, so if you take it to its illogical conclusions, right, so no one should go to Harvard, no one should go to McGill, no one should go to Toronto, no one should go to Berkeley because, “Oh my gosh, they're going to have this horrible label. What's gonna happen to them during, during their lives because of all this damage we've put on them?”

 

We would never say that in a million years, right? But we say it if they're younger. I, again, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. 

 

[00:10:54] Anna Stokke: Just to back up on one thing, I think you were talking about a video put out by YouCubed. And also, people seem fine to label students as really talented and that sort of thing when it comes to sports, right? Like it doesn't seem to be a big issue, but when it comes to education people get really worried about these kinds of things. But yeah, you're right. I mean, we don't even need to put on the label, we can just provide the services, right?  

 

I have a two part question for you. So how have advanced students traditionally been identified and how should advanced students be identified? 

 

[00:11:32] Jonathan Plucker: Traditionally, we've looked at test scores, sometimes teacher and parent nominations, teacher rating scales, very rarely peer nominations, almost never self-nominations, grades, sometimes, but mostly traditional test scores. 

 

And again, this is something we could talk about for, you know, hours, like sort of classic identification models, et cetera. And my colleague, Tracy Cross, who is at the College of William Mary, he once put it, I think, very, very succinctly, is that no matter what you use, you'll almost never get a false positive. If you're looking for students who need more, almost any measure that we've come up with, if you find someone on that measure that you think needs more, they probably do. They probably do. 

 

The problem is, there are always false negatives with any measurement. And you never know how many false negatives you have, people that you've missed. Did you miss most of them? Did you miss one out of a thousand? Like those are huge huge ranges. The precision is really hard for us to know. It's kind of an, it's a known unknown if you will. This is very much in general, a very, very important caveat. 

 

School district would take teacher nominations, parent nominations. Then they would go and give the nominated students an ability tests usually. So let's say the CogAT or the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, anything like that. And you'd see who was in the top 5 percent or so, and those would be your “gifted students.” 

 

I'm doing air quotes, “gifted students,” and then you would serve those students. And then people would say, “Okay, well, how many gifted students do we have in this, you know, school?” And it would be, “Oh, it's the 5 percent that we identified.” Right, but you restricted the number of potential students who need more at every single level in that system. 

 

It did take us decades to figure out that we were creating artificial scarcity. And now most, at least most American districts, definitely do not offer enough advanced services for the number of students who would actually benefit from them. So for example, we learned that teacher nominations can be pretty biased. This is not surprising, right? We've had dozens and dozens and dozens of studies on this. Teachers tend to, in terms of race, socioeconomic status, they tend to identify students who, quite frankly, look a lot like they do. That's not a mean comment, that's just human nature. 

 

A lot of the sort of nominating instruments that people designed weren't of the highest quality. So, it was pretty easy to monkey with them and just, you know, really make those scores look like what you think they should look. Same thing with parent nominations. There's more than a little bias in there. 

 

We’ve had these traditional systems that we know miss kids at every step. And what we've been trying to work with schools to do is to flip a lot of these things around. So some of my colleagues would say, for example, “Well, everybody knows the problems with teacher nominations, right? Just doesn't make sense. You miss far too many kids. It's biased. Don't use teacher input at all.” 

 

I'm sorry, as a former classroom teacher, that makes no sense to me. Because I really did try to make sure I wasn't missing students. So what we recommend now is that the last step be teacher input. So instead of making them a gatekeeper, which they're not trained to be, we make them a safety net, which teachers are really, really good at. 

 

So after we've done the testing, after we think we found every student who needs more, then we get the team, advanced learning coordinator, whomever, to sit down with each teacher individually and say, “Here's who we think needs more in your class. Who did we miss?” And I've been a fly on the wall of many of those meetings. 

 

I have never, ever seen one where the teacher didn't say, “Oh, you missed at least one student.” Teachers are very good safety nets. And so we just tried to be smarter about these things. We've certainly learned that if you restrict the number of seats before you even try to see who needs more, you're almost always going to run into supply problems. 

 

And so, in many, many countries, we have such an artificially small set of advanced services when many other students could be benefiting from it. So, more supply, being smarter about how we use the various techniques we have. That and lots of other stuff really tends to give you a much more diverse, much larger group of students who need more. 

 

Now, I would argue they were always there. They were always just false negatives and it wasn't their fault. Now we're getting better at being more sensitive to that. 

 

[00:16:46] Anna Stokke: Sure, and probably some of those students didn't even have access to the advanced programs in the first place, or weren't aware of them. So, I mean, some of the things I see in my own province, and I don't think you'd be too impressed with the services we have for advanced students here. So first of all, students would have to choose to seek out the advanced program, or the parents. 

 

It's often the parents, right? And sometimes, you can write a test to get into the program, which seems to me to be a good idea, but the student has to decide that they're going to apply to that program in the first place, right? And we're talking about younger students. 

 

We're not talking about university students here. Would you sort of be of the opinion that the schools need to be proactive in trying to seek out these students and encouraging all students to write tests that might get them into advanced programs? 

 

[00:17:40] Jonathan Plucker: Yes. We generally call that universal screening. I don't think there's any rationale for not doing it that way anymore. It's generally not much more expensive, it's not that much more time-intensive. And we know that, especially for lower-income students who have high readiness, they are often invisible. 

 

And so making sure that everyone sits down for that test, or just if you're collecting any sort of data, you're doing it for every single student. We know that makes a huge difference. And in fact, if we go into any school or school district where we get pushback on people saying,  “We just don't have that many talented students, we don't have that many gifted students,” the first thing we say is, “Okay, just go back and look at the data that you already have in hand. We'll come back and you tell us how many students you have that probably need “more” just based on those data.”

 

And they we always come back and they always say “Son of a gun, we have a lot more students who are ready, it's often math, who are ready for advanced math than we ever knew possible.”

 

And I'm in no way questioning whether these educators care about these students. Of course they care about these students, that's why they're doing this, right? But just when it comes to talent, we have just become so good at looking right through these talented students as if they're not even there. Even though they're, if they're already performing at these levels, that means that if they haven't had these opportunities, like they have really beat the odds to show you that they're ready for even more, that's the student that we're trying to find, right? 

 

The student who is thriving intellectually without advanced opportunities, totally against the odds. Let's now provide expanded opportunity to them and just watch them rocket forward, right? But yes, a universal screening I think is a must have for this. It's very important. 

 

[00:19:52] Anna Stokke: In other words, if there's an advanced program available, let's universal screen and let's try to encourage as many students who are ready for that advanced program to take that program. Otherwise, we're going to miss a lot of students. 

 

[00:20:05] Jonathan Plucker: Yeah, and I think one of the best examples of this is an increasingly popular policy called automatic enrollment. Texas is just using it this year for the first time. North Carolina's probably had the most comprehensive statewide program since right before the pandemic, 2019. And essentially anyone who gets a certain score on the state's end-of-year math assessment in North Carolina is automatically placed into advanced math the following year. 

 

It's caused some problems because a lot of school districts did not have capacity, because they, again, they were artificially restricting the numbers. There was no ill will here. That's just how we've done it for decades. And suddenly they had so many more advanced math students than they realized that they had. 

 

And so we know that universal screening really works. We just have been missing far too many talented students for far too long. And I do think it's interesting for your listeners, but a lot of this work is being done in math education. And we're seeing very positive results. 

 

[00:21:13] Anna Stokke: And we'll come back to this, we'll talk about this sort of thing throughout the conversation today, but let's talk a bit about equity and you've already mentioned it a bit. So a criticism of advanced programs is that they have been dominated traditionally by students from White, Asian American or Asian Canadian and upper-income backgrounds. So advanced programs are sometimes seen as inequitable or elitist. So can you say something about that? 

 

[00:21:43] Jonathan Plucker: Yeah. I mean, I think we need to be honest within the field of advanced education that, that the sort of equity history of advanced learning of gifted programs is not pretty at all. And again, I totally understand where the pushback comes from, where people who went to school in the seventies, eighties and nineties when we had these special programs for bright students. 

 

And they just didn't see anyone who looked like themselves in those programs, of course their knee-jerk reaction is to be like, “Those are not equitable programs.” But I guess my response is much more optimistic, which is, yeah, we didn't do this well then. We did use teachers as gatekeepers, we did make it opt in rather than opt out. 

 

We almost never universally screened we almost always had far too few seats within those services compared to the students who would have benefited from them. Yes, we were far too focused on labelling, which creates all sorts of stereotypical problems. But we know not to do those things anymore. 

 

And when we work with schools and they take a much more inclusive, expansive approach to this, we find that those equity concerns start to melt away. I don't know anyone who has completely solved that, but we have lack of equity throughout our community. Western societies, right? All societies for that matter. 

 

We can't solve poverty, for example, but we can make sure that students who are economically not secure can still have opportunities to shine and we've gotten so much better at that part. And so, I mean, again, we have, we have not solved this, Anna. Are we so much better than we used to be? 

 

Let me tell you a very, a very quick anecdote. I was on a panel and I can actually tell you the date because that night I came down with COVID. So it was January of 2020, and a very well-known American educator was sitting next to me and just blasted away at gifted education programs. 

 

And you know, “We should move away from the label. We should be much more inclusive in how we find students.” And just went through this whole litany and then handed the microphone to me. And it was clear that it was a shot at me. And I just said, “I agree with everything you just said. Can we just do all those things?”

 

And he was absolutely shocked. And we talked afterwards, and his view of advanced education was what he saw in the late seventies and early eighties, which wasn't a very good model, and so, we've gotten so much better at this. I'm not saying it's not a concern, but we know why that happened and we know, for the most part, what to do to keep it from happening moving forward. 

 

And I, I should say, we've done studies that provide fairly convincing evidence that every classroom in Canada, United States, et cetera, has advanced students in it. You may not think that, they may not look what you think advanced students look like, but the percentage of students who actually start the school year already working above grade level is much bigger than people think it is. 

 

And again, statistically, we think we have the evidence that they're in every single classroom. We just have to help people understand that. And then a lot of these equity concerns start to melt away. They aren't solved. But we are making really good progress. 

 

[00:25:28] Anna Stokke: Let's talk a bit about the academic needs of advanced students. At the moment, do you think that the academic needs of advanced students are being met in regular classrooms?  

 

[00:25:42] Jonathan Plucker: I guess it depends what's going on in the regular classroom. I think more often not the answer is no. Some students can move a lot faster than other students. Our back-of-the-envelope estimate is that about 15 percent of students start the school year three or more grade levels ahead of their actual chronological grade in reading. 

 

The number in math is a little bit smaller. So that's a student who, say, goes to fourth or fifth grade and is reading at the seventh, eighth, or ninth-grade level. How confident are we that that child is being challenged at the seventh, eighth, or ninth-grade level every single day? Which I think should be a base level expectation, meet the students where they are. 

 

If they're 10 years old, but they're reading like a 10th grader normally would, then they should be challenged like a 10th grader would be in reading. And that goes for math, science, social studies, et cetera, technology. So I don't, I just don't think that we're there yet. So again, some students can move a lot faster. Some, even at a young age, are finding their passion and want to go so much deeper and really dive into it. 

 

That's not how we design schools in the West for the most part. And for that matter, in most countries that I've worked in it's harder to go faster. It's harder to go deeper. That's not how the curriculum is designed, it's not how teachers are trained. Very few sort of teacher preparation programs cover advanced learning in any meaningful way. So why are we surprised when teachers don't know how to do that? They've never been shown. 

 

Just as in, I've not seen any schools, Anna, where the advanced learning program has solved the equity problems a hundred percent. I've yet to see a school where they've really figured out advanced learning within the regular classroom 100%. 

We still have a lot of work to do. 

 

[00:27:46] Anna Stokke: Can you talk about interventions? So what interventions for advanced students have a solid research base?  

 

[00:27:53] Jonathan Plucker: By far, the most solid base is acceleration, which is basically letting students to move at their own pace. I shouldn't even say that, it's really about letting students move through at a faster-than-normal pace. Everyone hears that and thinks grade skipping. Grade skipping is is not at the top of the list for me. 

 

There are over 20 different forms of academic acceleration. When I was an elementary school teacher, we had a fifth-grade student who took math with the sixth graders, and quite frankly, he probably should have taken math with the seventh or eighth graders, but it was just in math. He was just accelerated in that one subject, and during math time they worked out his daily schedule so that he could go and do that. 

 

That's acceleration. Single subject acceleration. It can be a special school where the entire curriculum moves faster, it can be grade skipping. It can be cluster grouping within the regular classroom where you've got one teacher, for example. who does have training in advanced math instruction, who has five or six of her students every day in math, who are that grade’s top math students who are ready to be accelerated. 

 

So cluster grouping so the teacher can really focus on the needs of that group of students rather than have them spread across several different classrooms. I've never seen a study, and we have several large-scale meta-analyses now that also provide evidence of this, I've just never seen a study of acceleration where it didn't work. 

 

There are always social and emotional concerns. “Oh, you know, if we accelerate students, you know, we can’t have a 12-year-old sitting with 13-year-olds, horrible things are going to happen. The research says that that's just not true. Even with more radical acceleration, problems are very, very rare in terms of social and emotional problems. 

 

 I would argue that acceleration is actually one of the most well-supported strategies we have in all of education. Like we know it works. And it has a very few downsides to it. And again, kids aren't snowflakes, right? So whenever I hear people say, well, “We could accelerate her, but what if it doesn't work?”

 

And I always say, “Then stop doing it.” She'll forget about it within a few days. You're the one who's going to remember, right? So, let's just try it and see if it works. Odds are it's going to work. If it doesn't, this is not medical testing, right? It's just we're trying to do something that we think the student is going to benefit from. 

 

Let them accelerate in some way. If it works, great. If it doesn't, let's tinker with it, and then we can just give up if we have to, and we'll try something else. But acceleration is probably one of the best tools we have in all of education. And again, to the point that we both raised earlier, right? 

 

In sports, coaches accelerate all the time. In the arts, music, dramatic arts, visual arts, coaches, teachers accelerate all the time for students who are ready to go faster, deeper, et cetera. It's just within academics that we're scared to do it for some reason. 

 

[00:31:16] Anna Stokke: When you're talking about acceleration, what I'm hearing, I think, is that you're talking about accelerating grade level, really, right? Accelerating curriculum.  

 

[00:31:27] Jonathan Plucker: Curriculum more than grade level. 

 

[00:31:29] Anna Stokke: Okay, got it. So what I've seen in my own province in younger grades, so say prior to grade nine or something like that, instead of acceleration would be what I'd call enrichment. So there might be an enrichment class for some students who excel in math. And they probably wouldn't really accelerate in terms of the topics covered. 

 

They'd essentially cover the same topics, but go further with it. So like harder problems or prepping for math contests. So what about that?  

 

  

[00:32:02] Jonathan Plucker: We don't have a lot of research on that, which is interesting because it was probably the first way that most American and Canadian schools addressed advanced learning - was what I would call that enrichment, going sort of deeper. We actually don't have a lot of empirical research on that. 

 

What we do has come out of Western Europe recently, and it's actually fairly positive in terms of evidence of additional student learning. Not as much as most forms of acceleration, but it's still significant. So it's definitely a positive. My concern about enrichment, I mean, it's my concern with all things, it's your concern with all things. 

 

If we're going to do it, we need to do it thoughtfully and we need to do it well and we need to evaluate it and make sure it's being serious. My own personal stereotype that I have to get past is just seeing 70s and 80s gifted programs that were enrichment-based that were mostly students just playing and having a good time. 

 

And that's great. I want kids to play and have a good time. But then others would point at the programs and say, “Wait, how is playing and having a good time not something that every child should be doing?” There is no good response to that because they're 100% correct. I don't want it to be frivolous. 

 

 

I want, which is probably too strong of a word, but want it to be substantive. So that, like, yes, if you are going to go deeper, like I was a former elementary school science teacher. 

 

If I had more advanced students and I had extra time to do something, it's like, “Okay, I'm going to teach you about, I don't know, dispersion interactions in chemistry, something that you otherwise aren't going to get until maybe high school, but you're fifth graders and you're really into this. And, this actually helps you understand this a little bit better. This is going to blow your mind,” right? 

 

And just go a little bit deeper. I think that that's fantastic or you know, to actually see how some of these concepts get applied in the real world. So I remember teaching advanced math to third and fourth graders and they were doing sort of intro geometry stuff. And I was like, “Oh, photography is a great way to think about perspective.” 

 

And so we just did photography for a couple weeks where we just, like, talked about, “Okay, this is what you saw, this is what the picture looks like. Why are they so different?” Well, it's because perspective, right? And you need to think about shapes and stuff like that, curves.

 

That I think is good too. I think the combination of the two, acceleration and enrichment, probably does lead to the best outcome for students because it is both interesting and challenging and you can always make it a little different every single day with them. 

 

So it's probably the combination that works better than anything else. 

 

[00:34:59] Anna Stokke: With so many students struggling, though, so for example, in math, a lot of students struggle in math. You know, it might seem that it's just best to pour resources into identifying struggling students and giving them the support they need. I mean, advanced students are already doing well, right? 

 

Can't we just leave them alone? You know, maybe it's like advocating for Starbucks frappuccinos when you can't put food on the table. So what's the case for providing resources for advanced students too? 

 

[00:35:28] Jonathan Plucker: Well, in my view, public education or just education of the public in general, private school, public school, what have you, it isn't just about getting students up to sort of minimal competency. That's absolutely a goal that we should have for every single child that we do whatever we have to do to get them up to grade level every single year. 

 

Of course. But what do we do with the 20 to 30 percent of students who show up to school the first day and pretty much already know everything that's going to be taught that year? I think we have an obligation that's just a serious to those students. 

 

The goal isn't get everyone to grade level, throw a really big party because you got to the finish line, victory. And if the kid already starts past the finish line, we're done with them for the year. That traditionally is kind of how schools work, right? I think a much better way to look at it is every kid comes to school and they learn a year's worth of learning every single year, regardless of where they start. 

 

But that also means that we have to look to that student who's two - maybe two or three grade levels below, who has no family support, is growing up in poverty, is dealing with racism, discrimination, et cetera, who has never had any advanced opportunities who might be the most talented person in the entire school, but has never had a shot. 

 

I'm also worried about that student and getting them into advanced. And if you have this, the finish line is minimum competency, sort of grade, grade-level achievement mindset, then you're treating grade level as the finish line when it's the middle of that marathon for that, for that child, they can go so far past that. 

 

And I think especially, Anna, that this is a really big problem with what we would generally call it twice-exceptional students, students who have major learning challenges, but also really impressive academic strengths. We have lots of these students, students who may have a particular learning disability, but man, they're good at math. 

 

There's just something about numbers that works for them, and their learning disability doesn't hold them back, right? In most of our systems, one, we really don't have labels for that kid, right? So what happens? They get pretty good services to support with a learning disability. but not for their really exceptional advanced abilities. 

 

But if we, if we keep having this, “We have to fix the deficit,” mindset, the twice-exceptional student only gets help with their deficit and not what those amazing strengths they have. So, there is no finish line, is something that I'm constantly telling educators is there's no learning finish line. 

 

It's an infinite path forward. How far can we get every single student every year on that infinite path? That's our goal. And grade-level achievement should, should be like the first hurdle for us.