our years ago an explosive research report triggered an intellectual detonation at the heart of the education establishment. Provocatively entitled, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students, this was the Templeton National Report on Acceleration, the concept of advancing gifted students beyond their age peers by allowing them to “grade skip.” It was a fiercely contrarian notion challenging the then educational orthodoxy.
The report’s authors—Dr. Nicholas Colangelo and Dr. Susan Assouline, of the University of Iowa, and Dr. Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales—soon discovered that the sheer weight of evidence they had assembled was having a considerable impact. In the first four years following publication, 55,500 print copies were distributed, the online edition was downloaded 89,000 times, and the website for A Nation Deceived received 2.5 million hits.
Responding to this interest, with the aid of a $2 million Foundation grant, Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline set up the Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration (IRPA), based at the Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development (Belin-Blank Center) at the University of Iowa. To get the best possible input on strategy from the outset, the first step was to hold a summit. “We got together people who are well-known in the field of gifted education and have a particular interest in acceleration,” Colangelo explains. “The summit was very much a guidance tool for us.”
They formed focus groups and the summit gave the research a clear policy agenda. On the third anniversary of the publication of A Nation Deceived, the IRPA conducted a survey to assess its impact. More than 5,000 people responded and the attitude was considerably more positive, with 99 percent of respondents believing the report would have a long-term, positive effect. “You could not even get a conversation going prior to 2004,” observes Colangelo.
But how far have attitudes changed within the education establishment? Colangelo believes there is much less resistance now to single subject acceleration, where a student grade-skips in only one discipline. “Until Nation Deceived came along, even that—having just one subject accelerated—was a point of contention,” he recalls. “Now, because of Nation Deceived, one subject acceleration has become quite acceptable.”
There is more entrenched distrust of whole grade acceleration, where a student advances to a higher grade in all subjects. “The biggest concern regarding whole grade acceleration is that it is both an academic and a social event. It’s very public. Everyone knows if someone grade skips.” Yet schools are coming round to saying they will not dismiss acceleration out of hand and many are developing written policies. Parents too are becoming more confident, walking into schools clutching a copy of A Nation Deceived and finding they are now taken seriously when they request acceleration.
The Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration (IRPA) includes a worldwide competition for grant funding: the acceleration issue is now being debated internationally and ten percent of the respondents to the follow-up survey were from overseas. Nine grants for research on acceleration, to both individuals and agencies, have already been awarded, across a broad range of research topics: one is looking at acceleration in Canada, another is doing work on acceleration of minority students. All the award winners were invited to present their findings at the Wallace National Research Symposium on Talent Development in May, 2008.
The technical research being conducted by the IRPA includes the development of more sophisticated and specialized criteria for evaluating students for acceleration. The Iowa Acceleration Scale has been revised and updated and the Institute is also developing similar scales for single subject acceleration and for early entrance to kindergarten or college. “Our main focus right now is a web-based decision-making hierarchy for the accelerative options presented in Nation Deceived.
Outreach and dissemination are also being vigorously pursued. Colangelo and his colleague, Susan Assouline, have done 42 keynote presentations on A Nation Deceived over the past four and a half years, at both national and international conferences. In the media, many household-name publications in the United States have carried features on acceleration. Colangelo’s prediction is, “I think that the real indicator that acceleration is an effective intervention for gifted students is that eventually it will just take its place and it won’t have all the fanfare that it has now. But that’s not going to happen for quite a few years.”
What is the biggest question they are addressing? “The great question is how acceleration forces us to take a look at our basic beliefs about human similarities and differences,” says Colangelo. “In most Western societies, we like to speak about individual differences, but we stop short of truly acting on them. Acceleration is the mirror for the big question and I can’t imagine a bigger question in education than a true respect for individual differences.”