Learn, Baby, Learn

One mother of two "profoundly gifted" girls has spent years struggling to prove to teachers, principals and other parents that her children's incredible IQs were not her doing. "I told this one principal, 'Look, it's not my fault.' Sure, I took them to the zoo, to the aquarium, but I have a child who taught herself to add fractions while riding in the car when she was 4 1/2."

That child has now skipped three grades and still attends a special gifted program for math. "Other parents seem to resent us," says the Philadelphia mother. "They think we're pushing them or something. But we're not trying to prove anything. Five years ago, I didn't even know what gifted meant. We're just trying to get an appropriate education for our children. Like everybody else."

There was a time when the term "gifted child" was synonymous with the word "prodigy," when it was reserved for the 4-year-old violinist, the 10-year-old poet, the 16-year-old doctoral student. There was a time when the identification of these children was rather simple. Those with artistic or musical inclinations were startling and obvious. And if your child began clamoring for Stephen Hawking's oeuvre or quoting Proust, you could have her take the Stanford-Binet. A score of 135 or above would officially classify her as gifted.

But now the term has a much broader meaning, and the methods for identifying gifted children have become much more complex. Gifted now comes with a series of subsets: profoundly gifted, highly gifted, gifted and talented, and just gifted. In the last 20 years, gifted programs across the country have increased and diversified--there are accelerated programs, gifted magnet schools and prestigious private academies, many of which begin at the preschool level. At certain schools, gifted students attend weekly "pull-out" programs in science, math or the arts; in other districts, there are summer camps or classes after school and even online.

Parental support, once often reluctant, is now proactive, sometimes to an extreme. In some states there are now waiting lists not only for gifted programs, but also for the tests thatidentify eligible children. And as the definition of gifted has grown increasingly subjective, many schools are adopting prerequisites for identification as gifted.

Today, 12% of the student population in the United States receives some sort of gifted education, a marked increase from the 2% to 3% that long comprised those ranks. Which raises the question: Is 12% of the population truly gifted?