By his own admission, Julian Stanley, the gifted education pioneer who passed away August 12th, 2005, at the age of 87, was not an inspired student.
He was always a bright boy but, when he was growing up in the 1920’s and ‘30’s in rural Georgia, he never bothered working too hard at school. Certainly, in those days, schools in his town had no special instruction for gifted children like him. On the other hand, the schools didn’t have any money either, so they herded children toward graduation as quickly as possible. Stanley skipped fourth grade. He completed college in three years, graduating when he was 19. Being younger never bothered him. “I got by,” he said. But academics didn’t excite him much. He was a “casual college student.” He floated through, not sure of his passion.
Then it was 1941. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Like many young men, Stanley enlisted. The military took him from England to Algeria, Italy and Corsica until he was discharged a month after peace came in August, 1945. His 28 months overseas made him grow up fast. But what affected him most were the long hours of sitting, waiting, watching for battles or orders to come. He had a lot of time to think. “My mind was like a corn field,” he said. “The Air Corps let it lie fallow for four years.”
I, too, had a lot of time to think in the classrooms of Clay Middle School in South Bend, Indiana during the early 1990’s. My previous school in North Carolina grouped students by ability for all classes and let me skip three years ahead in math. Then I arrived for 7th grade at Clay, where a counselor scratched her head when she saw my transcript showing a completed algebra course. The school gave me a different algebra book and had me sit in the back of another 7th grade math class. I tried to teach myself. I learned little all year.
That winter, though, I received a letter saying I had been chosen to participate in the Midwest Talent Search because of my 99th percentile achievement test scores. I took the SAT, a test normally given to high school juniors and seniors, and did well enough to take a geometry course that summer at Northwestern University. There, for three wonderful weeks, I stretched my brain in an environment with other kids who loved to learn.
Julian Stanley, that “casual college student,” was the man who made those three wonderful weeks possible. In 1969, he first hit upon the idea of giving out-of-level tests to bright young people to find exceptional talent. All talent search participants score above the 95th percentile on grade-level standardized tests, but on out-of-level tests, their scores spread over the whole bell curve. Talent searches identify the brightest of the bright. Over the past three decades, more than a million bright students have participated in searches inspired by Stanley’s idea.
But it took time and some serendipity for the talent search idea to germinate in the fallow field and start to grow.
After Stanley returned from World War II, he decided maybe he did have ambitions after all. He went to graduate school courtesy of the GI Bill, and became a psychology professor, landing at Johns Hopkins University in 1967. He focused on statistics and research methodology from 1949 until, in the late 1960’s, he started to notice some of the bright youngsters who showed up at the university from time to time.
One day he met Joe Bates, a young teenager in a computer class for kids. Bates amused himself and amazed others by teaching advanced programming languages to the graduate students. Stanley decided to give Bates the SAT to see what he could do. The young man scored very high on both the SAT math section and verbal section. Stanley, wary of leaving such a bright boy in a regular school, approached various high schools to see if they would meet his academic needs. No one would. So Stanley arranged for Bates, at age 13, to attend Johns Hopkins on a trial basis. He did quite well, and by age 17 had earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science.
Another mother who heard about Bates asked Stanley to test her son. That boy, too, did well enough to enter Johns Hopkins at age 13. Within a few years, Stanley landed more than $250,000 in funding to conduct his first talent search. In 1972, he administered the SAT math section to 450 bright middle schoolers. Those who scored highest became the first cohort in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) and have been tracked since the 1970’s (Stanley later included high verbal scores – he didn’t at first, he said, because his own background was in math; SMPY eventually became the “Study of Exceptional Talent” or SET). Soon Johns Hopkins began offering summer classes to give these youngsters and others who scored well on the SAT a chance to stretch and grow their brains.
The concept quickly spread, and led to the creation of the Talent Identification Program at Duke, the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern (which I attended) and the Rocky Mountain Talent Search (the Johns Hopkins program became the Center for Talented Youth in 1979). Now every year, thousands of middle schoolers participate. Many attend the summer programs as well.
Stanley’s original idea, he told me when we met at the Davidson Fellows Award Ceremony in Washington, D.C. in September, 2003, was that “We found kids in order to help them.” Talent searches and summer programs have shown thousands of bright kids that there is a world beyond their schools. They have helped students determine their talent in comparison with other bright students, not just their local classmates. They can show which students need more challenging work. A student who scores an 800 on the math section of the SAT at age 12 has very different needs and abilities from one who scores a 300. Stanley has referred to talent searches as “benignly insidious.” Since talent searches occur outside of school, they are more easily accepted by the education establishment. They are insidious because they encourage bright children and their families to demand accommodations for their clearly shown special needs. When more families demand accommodations, schools must change.
At least that’s the idea. As even talent search coordinators agree, the approach is often too benign, and not insidious enough. Schools love to laud their high scorers at award ceremonies – and then ignore them the rest of the year. My school system tried to lure parents to the district with a notice that area students who participated in the Midwest Talent Search scored above the search-wide average. Yet my school offered nothing to most gifted students beyond a year’s advancement in math. When I wrote about talent searches for USA Today in January, 2003, I found students who took algebra over the summer, then came back to school and went right back into algebra. That made them even more bored than before. When schools don’t nurture talent, bright students don’t develop a work ethic which, as Stanley has said, is as important as a child’s intelligence. He once told Johns Hopkins magazine, “I used to sort of worship I.Q., but you can't major in I.Q. A high I.Q. and 50 cents can buy you a 50-cent cup of coffee. There's a lot to the work ethic.” Talent search summer programs show students the benefit of that work ethic for only three weeks a year.
So in his last years, Stanley spent his time promoting public residential high schools for the gifted and public early-entrance college programs that allow students to stay with their peers (“Each state ought to have at least one,” he said). In particular, he has praised the Texas Academy of Math and Science (TAMS), which allows students to replace the last two years of high school with the first two years of college. This combination of acceleration – with social peers – can give gifted students a chance at having it all. In any case, that combination is preferable, Stanley has pointed out, to the “pull-out” programs many schools put in place to provide enrichment material to gifted students. “They teach whatever the teacher is interested in, and often do not gear the curriculum to the child’s talents,” he said. “People who want to do math may be doing extra work in social studies. It’s just special instruction. The emphasis is on creativity, but it’s creativity in a vacuum. ‘Brainstorm the uses of a brick or rhymes for June and moon,’ they’ll say. The buzzwords are creativity and leadership. I don’t know if Einstein was a leader or not.” At the Center for Talented Youth, Stanley said, the talk was about “creativity connected to skill.”
The first SMPY cohort did well connecting skill and creativity. Many became professors. One mathematically talented young man Stanley remembered became a cardiologist. Others have made their marks in business, law, and theology. Some are practical, some theoretical. Few have had spectacular lives, but most people, intellectually brilliant or not, do not have spectacular lives. “Gifted kids are like other kids, except that they think at a more advanced level,” Stanley said. “Being gifted doesn’t have anything to do with your personality, ambition, or hard work.”
But nurturing talent and helping a child find his or her passion does greatly increase the chances that the grown-up gifted child will have, if not a spectacular life, at least a more productive one that contributes to his or her own welfare and society’s advancement. Stanley’s years at war letting his mind lie fallow helped him discover his passion for statistics and research. That interest led him to be interested in the young Bates and what he could do. That happy result led to a million gifted children discovering through talent searches the extent of their abilities, and many thousands having those talents nurtured, at least for a few weeks, at search summer camps. That is a profound legacy even if Stanley, who developed a statistician’s perfectionism over the years, wasn’t convinced he’d done all he could. He wanted schools to nurture talent all year long. “If you find a kid who is scoring a 700 on the math section of the SAT in 7th grade, schools should give him something extra,” he said. “Many places just don’t use this information.” They put their blinders on, assuming gifted children will be happy in honors classes, or that the only gifted students are the ones earning straight A’s. Said Stanley, “Teachers are often not good judges of giftedness. We find kids who score well on the SAT as middle schoolers, but who are not in the gifted program. Every gifted child is different. Each has different needs.”
But unfortunately, while more and more schools recognize their gifted kids, “They still aren’t given what they need,” Stanley said. “They need opportunities to develop their talent.” That’s work those of us indebted to Stanley have a responsibility to continue.
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