ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. — It was 7:58 a.m., and Bruce Hecker’s 12th grade English class at South Side High School had the focused attention of a college seminar, with little chitchat or sluggishness despite the early hour. Students discussed the relevance of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” to the McCarthy hearings and to  current competing fears of terrorism and technological surveillance.

The conversation that morning in December 2019 followed the lead of the seven or eight most vocal students. Occasionally, Hecker interrupted to encourage participation from a handful of students who receive support services to keep up with the class’s rigorous curriculum.

The students Hecker called on hesitated, cleared their throats and said “um.” But when they did speak, their comments were clear and cogent.

“If you’re a kid and you break a vase,” one student reflected on the theme of scapegoating in Miller’s play, “you don’t get these concepts. But your first thought is still to blame the dog.” His peers laughed in appreciation.

More than 30 years ago, Rockville Centre began a gradual but determined effort to do away with gifted classes in its elementary schools as well as many of the tracked classes at the middle and high schools. The goal wasn’t to eliminate all tracking, South Side Principal John Murphy said. Upperclassmen can still choose to take more challenging math, science and foreign language classes. It was, instead, to avoid creating a caste system by assigning students to remedial, average or advanced classes before they’d had a chance to develop their academic potential.

Those assignments often became self-fulfilling prophecies even though they didn’t always accurately reflect students’ abilities. This can have a long-term impact; the rigor of high school courses has been found to be the No. 1 predictor of college success. In Rockville Centre, tracked classes also led to racial and economic segregation in a high school where a fifth of the nearly 1,100 students are Black or Latino and the rest of the student body is nearly entirely white.

Early on, administrators found that many Black and Latino students and students from low-income families avoided the most challenging classes even after being given the option to enroll in them. So now, some of South Side’s college-level classes, like Hecker’s 12th grade English, are not only open to all, but also required.

Around the country, gifted and talented programs have come under fire for exacerbating school systems’ already stark racial and economic segregation. In 2019 in New York City, a group commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio, The School Diversity Advisory Group, recommended doing away with all gifted and talented programs, while that same year Seattle attempted unsuccessfully  to eliminate its programs as a way to alleviate school segregation. Screens used to select students for high performing schools and advanced classes based on grades and test scores also face mounting criticism for exacerbating segregation. Last winter, a district near Philadelphia agreed to reduce its number of tracked classes at the middle and high school levels and increase access to Advanced Placement courses in response to a discrimination lawsuit brought by parents..

But some educators, parents and students worry about what might replace screened classes and accelerated programs. Is it possible, they wonder, to teach all students at all levels together in one class? And, if it is, will teachers receive the support they need to succeed?

“I have gone to a lot of conferences about educational diversity that were held during the weekday during the school year,” said Amy Stuart Wells, professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a proponent of eliminating gifted programs. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) “There were no teachers at these conferences. There was a lot of talk about moving kids around. There were a lot of recommendations thrown out there. But when it came to how they’d really work, the attitude was, ‘Let’s let the teachers worry about it.’ ”

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

Even when school systems do have a plan for how to bring students at different academic levels together while supporting and challenging each student, those plans don’t necessarily succeed at undoing long-standing racial and economic segregation.

In Washington, D.C., new magnet schools based on the University of Connecticut’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model, which aims to provide special programming for students at all performance levels, have been met with enthusiasm, but so far have produced uneven outcomes in terms of improved school test scores, and have had little impact on school diversity. And while educators at South Side have good reason to point to their school’s academic success, students and parents say that pushing students so hard to excel takes an emotional toll, and have demanded less rigor. Some have even asked for a return to more tracking.

As school systems around the country work to address entrenched educational inequities, these experiments provide insights into the benefits and challenges of doing away with tracked classes and gifted programs.

It was 1989, and as a new Spanish teacher in Lawrence, New York, Carol Burris was assigned an eighth grade class called Language for Travelers. Its students weren’t fooled by the elegant name. All had taken a foreign language the previous year and failed, and they knew that ending up in Burris’ class meant expectations had been lowered. “There was a real culture that ‘We hate school and we hate language,’” Burris said. Out of 29 students, 27 were boys. Most were Black and Latino kids living in poverty.

The experience stayed with Burris, and when she became South Side’s principal in 2000, she found like-minded educators worried about the damage tracking could cause and who, over the past decade, had started to dismantle it.

Rockville’s administrators knew that removing academic tracks would be fraught. So, the district started by replacing separate gifted classes in elementary school with individualized, project-based “talent” classes for all students.

Those classes proved popular. Once parents bought into the idea that there didn’t have to be winners and losers, it was easier to move academic integration into higher grade levels.

The district also planned how to help students with weaker skills manage accelerated classes. Before Rockville Centre detracked math in the ninth and 10th grades, for example, it added support math classes in middle school so that all students graduated eighth grade having completed algebra.

At each step, the district used outcome data to guide its reforms and convince the community that  the efforts were working and, in particular, that the strongest students weren’t being shortchanged.

Today, the school requires subject teachers in each grade to teach the same content at the same time. Such coordination facilitates support classes that meet every other day during the school day, with one teacher for every six or seven students. Students in these classes are pre-taught material, making them better prepared to understand material in their mainstream classes.

Taking such a systematic approach to shrinking the achievement gap may sound obvious. But around the country, efforts to broaden access to accelerated classes and, in some districts, to mandate Advanced Placement classes for all students have been implemented without ensuring that students have the background material necessary to succeed.

Related: Up to 3.6 million students should be labeled gifted, but aren’t

South Side also turned to the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, a Swiss-based program that offers a demanding high school degree. (Forty-three percent of South Side students earn a full IB diploma, according to the principal.) The model was chosen as South Side’s main honors program in the mid-1990s not only for its rigor, but also for its flexibility. Compared to Advanced Placement classes, which require students to master a large and specific body of factual knowledge, the IB program focuses on depth of analysis.

So, for example, South Side replaced Dickens’ ”A Tale of Two Cities” with James Joyce’s ”Dubliners,“ both of which provide students the opportunity to analyze a complex and canonical work of English literature. Russ Reid, who taught English at South Side for more than 40 years, explained: “If you take ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ out of the curriculum, there are those that go, ‘Oh, my God, you’re not teaching Dickens.’ But a reluctant learner sees that 450-page novel and says, ‘The hell with it.’”

“It’s hard to argue that ‘Dubliners’ is an easy read,” Reid added. But each story is relatively short. “If students read 12 stories and blow off the other three, they’re not going to be lost. I don’t think we’re teaching to the middle when we’re talking about ‘The Dead.’ But we have made it more manageable.”

As academic integration advanced, students’ test scores improved —  not just for weaker students, but also for students already achieving at a high level.

Nothing was simple about the experiment undertaken at Rockville Centre, but having only one high school with a relatively low-needs population did make it easier. Just 15 percent of the roughly 1,000 students at the school receive free or reduced-price lunch, a federal marker of poverty.

By contrast, in Washington, D.C., 77 percent of public school students are economically disadvantaged. Many students from higher-income families go to private schools or move to the suburbs to avoid attending schools where a large proportion of students perform below grade level.

This trend intensified when, in 2005, D.C. Public Schools closed its gifted and talented programs. So, in 2012, the district created an office of advanced and enriched instruction to keep more middle-class families in the system and simultaneously serve the learning needs of its high-performing, low-income students. Like Rockville Centre, the goal was to provide enrichment without exacerbating racial and economic inequity or further segregating an already segregated school system.

To achieve that tricky balance, D.C. turned to the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM), used in  more than 4,000 schools nationwide, and internationally. Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis, professors at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, created their model to help diversify accelerated classes and gifted programs by encouraging school systems to broaden their concept of giftedness and ferret out student potential beyond what’s measured by standardized  tests. The method assesses qualities such as motivation, curiosity, empathy, creativity and self-regulation, and exposes young students to a wide range of enriching experiences to discover what excites them.

Renzulli and Reis are proponents of diversifying gifted programs, not eliminating them. In fact, they believe it’s unreasonable to expect one teacher to teach students at all levels effectively together. “A lot of lower-achieving kids feel even worse about themselves when they’re forced to be in classrooms where the content is consistently above their level,” while the learning needs of higher performing students are regularly ignored, Reis said.

Despite this, Renzulli and Reis do encourage the use of their model in systems like D.C.’s that don’t offer gifted programs because they believe that discovering and deepening students’ individual passions — a mainstay of gifted education — is useful for all students.

To accomplish this in mainstream schools, their model calls for flexible small group instruction within classes — based at times on ability, at times on interest — as well as a focus on project-based learning so students can pursue their passions. They also encourage all SEM schools to have a full-time talent specialist so that the burden of differentiating instruction doesn’t fall entirely on the classroom teacher.

Ida B. Wells Middle School, D.C.’s newest SEM school, opened just last year. Although roughly two-thirds of its students entered the school performing below grade level in math and three-quarters below grade level in English, according to the city, the school said it was able to recruit a small group of high-achieving Black and Latino students, including a handful from private schools and gifted programs in neighboring states. They came for the enrichment, as well as for the school’s low teacher-student ratio, made possible by having all classes inclusive of students in special education, a quarter of the school’s population, and English language learners. The model means that there’s funding for every class to have two teachers, and for English and math classes to have three, with abundant opportunity for small group instruction.

Related: Twice exceptional, doubly disadvantaged? How schools struggle to serve gifted students with disabilities

In addition, Ida B. Wells’ talent specialist Nila Austin provides pullout classes for both struggling and accelerated students, as well as enrichment classes that all students can choose to attend.

A speech elective that Austin offers called Soap Box is open to all. In class last December, each student performed a speech on a topic of personal importance. One sixth grader decried colorism, explaining how darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields while lighter-skinned slaves worked indoors, and described “bizarre tests” later used to determine “how Black” a person was, like the pencil test in South Africa, which judged the kinkiness of people’s hair.

Students in need of extra academic support also receive this kind of personally meaningful enrichment. Before Ida B. Wells’ sixth grade English class began reading Mildred Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” Austin assigned her small group of struggling readers Kondwani Fidel’s “Hummingbirds in the Trenches,” which explores similar themes of race, class and trauma, but is more accessible in language and setting. They also studied the psychology of trauma, wrote their own trauma narratives and had the opportunity to meet  Fidel. When asked if students in her support class feel stigmatized, Austin said, “Students ask me all the time how they can get into that class.”

And yet, eight years in, it’s not clear how much impact D.C.’s SEM program has had on the kinds of outcomes most commonly used to measure academic success.

Students at most SEM schools in D.C. are more likely to perform below grade level than at or above it. A couple of SEM schools have seen striking improvement in their standardized test scores in just a few years, even though most students haven’t reached grade level, but other SEM schools have seen minimal or no improvement. (Ida B. Wells is too new to provide such data.)

The model has also failed to create greater racial or economic diversity in D.C.’s schools. At more than half of D.C.’s 11 SEM schools, nearly all of the students are economically disadvantaged.

Ida B. Wells’ Principal Megan Vroman acknowledges that there are benefits to racial and economic integration, but she said she also sees advantages when students attend schools like hers that aren’t integrated and instead “reaffirm their identity.”

But the schools’ overall low academic performance concerns some in the field. “All education should be enriching. But in some cases, all students getting enrichment may mean that no students are really getting opportunities to take on more advanced work,” said Adam Tyner, associate director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who co-authored a report on ways to increase the representation of Black and Latino students in gifted programs.

Renzulli and Reis themselves have noted that teachers don’t always implement SEM in ways that serve the learning needs of their highest-performing students. Much of the research done on SEM, which has been in schools for decades, has shown positive results, including increased math and literacy skills, increased creative output from students and even long-term impact on college and career choices. But Renzulli and Reis conducted many of the studies, while others were written by administrators who’d had success with the program.

Still, Renzulli and Reis are impatient with the idea that all progress can be measured in a few years by standardized tests. “Creative productivity, which is the ultimate goal of the model, isn’t always something you can measure in achievement scores one or two years in. Students first have to develop interests. They have to develop habits of mind over time,” Reis said.

Matthew Reif, director of extended learning and academic recovery for D.C. Public Schools, believes SEM has helped D.C. create a more engaging and challenging learning experience, even if that’s not yet captured in test scores. The most important SEM outcome to date, he said, is an ever-growing number of D.C. educators who want to bring SEM to their schools.

The results in Rockville Centre are more concrete. In 2019, 98 percent of South Side students graduated with a New York State Regents diploma, while 89 percent of all students and 67 percent of economically disadvantaged students earned a New York State Regents with Advanced Designation. Statewide, a third of the students received an advanced designation diploma.

But 10 students interviewed in a group last year at South Side High School also said that the school is a competitive pressure cooker and that they feel pushed to take advanced classes. A white student whose parents both have advanced degrees said she feels stressed, as did a Black student who is on track to be one of the first in his family to attend college.

When the experiment at Rockville Centre started in the late 1980s, Principal Murphy said, it was families of the highest-performing students who were skeptical. Today, resistance comes from parents who believe the academic pressure is not good for their children. In 2018, parents demanded that the school lower its graduation requirements. In response, though every student must still take the IB English and history classes in 11th and 12th grades, this year the school removed the requirement that they sit for the IB exams. Students can also exempt themselves from some of the longer writing assignments that the IB requires.

Hecker, the English teacher, said he sees that requiring high-level classes does have its costs. But he believes the cost of segregating students based on academic performance is far greater.

“I think it’s better for struggling students to be in my classroom and not in some other room wondering what’s going on in those classes where the real learning is happening,” he said. “I think that is completely demoralizing.”

This story about SEM schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post Getting rid of gifted programs: Trying to teach students at all levels together in one class appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW YORK — To Eva Santiago, her son’s education has always felt like an impossible dilemma.

Before elementary school, the boy was diagnosed with autism, ADHD and anxiety, and in kindergarten he was placed in a small, self-contained class for kids with disabilities.

But he was articulate and curious, so when he was 6, Santiago took him to be tested for the city’s exclusive gifted-and-talented program. She was pleased when his score earned him one of the coveted spots.

But in his larger gifted-and-talented class, he became anxious and easily upset. He fought with students and teachers and spent most of the school day roaming the halls. After he kicked a security guard and the school called the police, Santiago said, she begged administrators to return him to a self-contained class. There, at least, his teachers could manage his behavioral challenges — even if it meant he breezed through his school work and learned little.

“Other kids would still be doing the assignments and he would be done,” recalled Santiago. “He just didn’t know what to do with himself.”

The boy’s experience is typical for a category of students known as “twice exceptional,” or 2e. These kids — believed to make up at least 6 percent of all students who have a disability — possess high academic aptitude but struggle with ADHD, mild autism, dyslexia or other learning and behavioral challenges.* They are notoriously difficult for schools to serve effectively for two reasons, say advocates, parents and some educators. Often, their intelligence masks their disability, so they are never assessed for special education or don’t receive the services best suited for them. In other cases, they’re placed in special education classes tailored to their disability but grade levels behind the school work they’re capable of.

“We see kids whose challenges don’t show up on their report card, so they aren’t getting services,” said Jennifer Choi, a parent and founder of the advocacy group 2eNYC and a trustee of the nonprofit Twice Exceptional Children’s Advocacy. “And we see kids who are gifted, but they also have a disability, who lose the ability to participate in any sort of accelerated program because those programs often decline to provide special education services.”

But a handful of school systems across the country are searching for better ways to accommodate bright students with disabilities. Colorado trains teachers across the state in twice exceptionality, for example, while Montgomery County, Maryland, is perhaps the only school district to offer self-contained classes for students in elementary school who need both an accelerated curriculum and more support than they would receive in a mainstream classroom.

Now parent activists in New York City are fighting to get the country’s largest school system to be more responsive to 2e students. Last fall, after Choi’s group presented the New York City Department of Education with a survey of more than 500 parents that described the challenges facing 2e students, the agency began to offer training to staff in gifted-and-talented programs on how to work more effectively with students who have ADHD. In the last few years, three of the city’s most selective public high schools — Brooklyn Technical, Bard College and Townshend Harris — have sent teachers to learn about twice exceptionality from employees of the Quad Preparatory School, a six-year-old private school that focuses on educating these students. And in New York state, lawmakers introduced bills in 2017 that would require teacher training about twice exceptionality and programming for twice exceptional students.

“We’re committed to meeting the unique needs of our students with disabilities, including those pursuing accelerated programs,” the city Department of Education said in a statement. “We hold trainings for school staff and parents on personalized learning strategies that can be used in the classroom or at home, and will continue to work with communities on innovative ways to serve all students.”

But parents say there’s a long way to go.

Related: The vast majority of students with disabilities don’t get a college degree

One of the biggest barriers to educating 2e students, advocates say, is simply proving they exist. Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, all students are entitled to the special services and accommodations necessary to enable them to learn. But to qualify for those services under the law, a student’s disability must “adversely affect educational performance.”

Schools and courts are left to determine what that means. If students are passing their classes and advancing from grade to grade, they’re more likely to be denied costly accommodations and services, which can include everything from a smaller student-teacher ratio to tutoring, to speech and occupational therapy. In the 2eNYC survey, more than a quarter of parents said they’d been told, “Your child is too smart for [special education services].”

That’s essentially what happened to Choi. Her son struggled in preschool, bouncing from school to school to school. At 5, he was diagnosed with ADHD. Under special education law, ADHD is considered a disability under the “Other Health Impairment” category, and can contribute to a determination that a child is eligible for special education services if it interferes with learning. Choi brought both her son’s diagnosis and his preschool teachers with her to the meeting that would decide what special education accommodations and services he’d receive in elementary school. She was sure that with his teachers present to testify to the constant oversight he needed to stay on task, he would either be placed in a mainstream class with a special education co-teacher or in a self-contained classroom for students with greater disabilities.

She was shocked, she said, when the disabilities evaluator at her son’s public elementary school noted that he was performing at grade level and determined that he didn’t qualify for any special education accommodations or services. After that, Choi enrolled her son in private school and successfully sued the Department of Education to have his tuition reimbursed.

On the flip side, the academic pace of small, self-contained classes designed for children with severe disabilities is often too slow for kids with pronounced academic strengths, say parents and advocates. That was the case with Santiago’s son. He worked far faster than the other students in his self-contained classes, she said, and there was little of the in-depth learning that he thrived on.

After three years, Santiago decided her son needed a setting that better fit his academic abilities. The vice principal at her son’s school, a guidance counselor, a psychologist and lawyers from Advocates for Children, which provides educational legal advocacy for low-income families, all wrote letters in support of her claim that her son’s educational needs were not being met. With those letters, she was able to convince the Department of Education to pay upfront for her son to attend the Child’s School, a private school for students with disabilities.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

Like Santiago, some frustrated parents are turning to private schools to serve their kids. In 2013, Kim Busi, a former professor of psychiatry whose son is on the autism spectrum, started the Quad Preparatory School with the goal of serving high-achieving kids with learning and emotional disabilities. The school opened in the basement of a synagogue with three students; today, it serves 113.

At the school, everything from curriculum to classroom design is tailored to students’ individual needs. On a recent weekday, two students were huddled with a teacher in a hallway strewn with orange and green bean bags, learning to code on a computer. In a nearby classroom, five students on striped beach chairs listened attentively to their teacher. The walls behind them were covered with colorful signs; the classroom was set up explicitly for kids who need stimulation, Busi said. In the room next door, the walls were bare and white — an educational setting meant to accommodate students who are easily distracted.

Class size never exceeds ten, and students spend a third of their day working individually with a teacher. The goal, Busi explained, is personalized learning that fully accommodates students’ abilities and disabilities. Two fourth graders, for example, are already studying with the school’s advanced high school math teacher, according to Busi. Students are also assigned a mental health counselor who works with them on developing goals for their social and emotional growth.

But this individualized education is expensive; Quad tuition is nearly $75,000 a year. And, because most parents have, like Choi, successfully sued the Department of Education for tuition reimbursement, it’s a cost that’s largely borne by taxpayers. In 2017, the agency spent $375 million for tuition to private schools for students with disabilities.

On their end, parents say that suing the DOE is a costly and exhausting process. They add that if the money were invested in public schools, some of those dollars would benefit other public school students as well.

Even without the resources of a place like the Quad, public schools could do a better job accommodating 2e kids, say some education experts.

The first step, according to Debbie Carroll, a private educational consultant in Connecticut and a co-chair of the subcommittee on Twice Exceptional Advocacy of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, is for schools to educate their staff about 2e students. Teachers need to be able to recognize when students aren’t reaching their potential even though they may be passing their classes, she said, and they need to understand that smart kids with behavioral problems may not just be willful or lazy, but may in fact need support. She also points to strategies that teachers in general education and accelerated classes can use to support kids with disabilities to keep them in mainstream classes, like giving autistic students more opportunities for breaks if they’re feeling overwhelmed.

Sarah Jackson, an instructional specialist who oversees programming for 2e kids in Montgomery County, Maryland, said she trains hundreds of teachers and administrators each year on twice exceptionality. Most of the district’s roughly 2,000 students designated 2e are served in general education classroom with an additional special education teacher. But roughly 40 elementary school students who need more individualized attention are taught in self-contained classes in grades three through five. District administrators believe that with the assistance of in-class supports and a special daily class focusing on self-advocacy and executive functioning, all 2e students should be mainstreamed into general education classes or into advanced programs by the time they reach sixth grade.

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not.

But given concerns over the use of scarce education dollars, some educators are skeptical about the 2e movement. While they acknowledge that children can be academically advanced yet struggle with disabilities, they worry that the 2e movement disproportionately benefits middle-class and affluent families. Well-off parents are the ones who typically agitate for special services and accommodations for their kids, even in cases where the child’s disabilities are not pronounced, these educators say. In New York City, affluent parents are also more likely to prepare their children for the admissions test to gifted-and-talented programs, which are under scrutiny for a lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity.

Some parents arrive at school with neuropsychological evaluations showing that their children are slightly above average in some academic areas while exhibiting minor behavioral or learning challenges, said one New York City school social worker. Then these parents insist that their children’s schoolwork and grades should mirror the capabilities indicated by the assessment.

“We all have strengths and weaknesses,” said the social worker, who declined to provide her name in order to protect her relationship with parents. “And it’s not always clear what’s a disability that the law requires us to address, and what’s just an area where a student struggles and could use a little more help.”

Wealthy parents are also more able to afford private neuropsychological evaluations, which tend to be more comprehensive than those conducted by education departments and can cost several thousand dollars. Often, assessments for children’s disabilities performed by public schools don’t cover areas such as attention, memory, language skills and social and emotional functioning, said Matthew Pagirsky, a neuropsychologist with the Child Mind Institute, which provides services to kids with mental health and learning challenges.

Some groups are trying to spread access to private evaluations to low-income families. The Robin Hood Foundation, a philanthropy in New York that supports anti-poverty programs, funds free neuropsychological assessments for poor children at Lenox Hill Hospital and Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report is based at the Teachers College at Columbia University.) Despite these efforts, some low-income parents are resistant to having their children evaluated, fearing their kids will face stigma.

That’s how Veronica Rodriguez felt when teachers first started telling her that her youngest son might need special help. At 2, the boy was speaking in full sentences and, early on, he seemed to learn new concepts with little effort. But when he enrolled in public elementary school, she received daily calls from teachers complaining that he would get upset easily and leave class, or start crying or screaming.

“His teacher would tell me, ‘He doesn’t know his name,’ when he had been writing his name from age 2,” Rodriguez said. School officials asked if there was something wrong at home. “They thought I was an ignorant mom with issues herself,” she said.

School staff encouraged her to have the boy evaluated, but she refused: “I felt like they were saying my kid was slow and I wasn’t having it.”

But after a teacher at a school her son started attending in second grade explained to Rodriguez that the boy could be both bright and have a disability, she took her son for an assessment at Lenox Hill Hospital. There she was told what she already knew: Her son had many areas of above-average academic strengths. He also had ADHD and was at risk for a mood disorder.

While she continues to have trouble finding appropriate services for her son, Rodriguez said that learning about 2e children has been an awakening. She would like to see schools get the same kind of education in twice exceptionality that she received.

“Teachers need to be trained to recognize and understand children who are 2e,” she said. “They need to try to remove the stigma that kids who have a disability cannot be smart.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct estimate for the share of children who may be twice exceptional. It’s estimated that 6 percent of children in special education are 2e.

This story about twice exceptional students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Twice exceptional, doubly disadvantaged? How schools struggle to serve gifted students with disabilities appeared first on The Hechinger Report.