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Horace Mann believed that public education was a benefit to everyone and therefore should be paid for by taxes. As secrectary of the first board of education in the country he created the first public school system in Massachusetts. He is known as the father of public education.
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First gifted school opens in Worcester, MA. Other states begin to follow and offer some programming for gifted, but it is not very widespread.
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Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon produce 1st intelligence test based mainly on vocabulary and thinkings skills. Its original purpose was to identify inferior intelligence.
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Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman revizes the Binet intellengence test and renames it the Stanford-Binet.
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Lewis, Terman, the father of the gifted child movement, searches for gifted children with IQ's of 135+ and preferably 140+. In the beginning the search was limited to California but became nationwide in 1983 through the SMPY.
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Psycholoist Leta Hollingworth of Columbia University, concerned with the special needs of gifted children, locates gifted individuals and creates the Special Opportunity Class at PS165 in New York City to extend learning experiences for them.
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The Gifted Children: Their nature and nurture is considered the first gifted education textbook.
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Ann Issacs, educator, artist, composer, and child psychologist first became intererested in giifted education while teaching preschool children. She noticed high achievers were underserved. This led her to a life long focus on advocating for the gifted and in 1954 the NAGC was founded with her help.
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Our nation's shock at the Soviet Union launching Sputnik, resulted in a more intense focus on science and math in schools and increased funding for identifying the brightest students in these areas.
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A Nation at risk highlighted our nation's deficits in academic standards and advocated the need to provided advanced curriculum for gifted learners.
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The National Association of Gifted Children creates detailed guidelines including identification of gifted children, quality program components, teacher certification requirements, and curriculum appropriateness.
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No Child Left Behind creates a new definition of gifted: ...who give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.
Many believe that the NCLB focus on students functioning below standards has been at the expense of those functioning above.
