(excerpted from The Washington Post, Leave No Gifted Child Behind By Susan Goodkin, Tuesday, December 27, 2005; Page A25

"Conspicuously missing from the debate over the No Child Left Behind Act is a discussion of how it has hurt many of our most capable children. By forcing schools to focus their time and funding almost entirely on bringing low-achieving students up to proficiency, NCLB sacrifices the education of the gifted students who will become our future biomedical researchers, computer engineers and other scientific leaders."

Not surprisingly, with the entire curriculum geared to ensuring that every last child reached grade-level proficiency, there is precious little attention paid to the many children who master the standards early in the year and are ready to move on to more challenging work. What are these children supposed to do while their teachers struggle to help the lowest-performing students?"

Some schools, "...along with the drafters of NCLB, labor under the misconception that gifted students will fare well academically regardless of whether their special learning needs are met."

"Ironically, included in the huge body of evidence disproving this notions are my state's standardized test scores--the very test scores at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reflecting the school's inattention to high performers, they show that students achieving 'advanced' math scores early in elementary school all too frequently regress to merely 'proficient' scores by the end. In recent years the percentage of California students scoring in the 'advanced' math range has declined by as much as half between second and fifth grade."

Comment from Executive Director, Amy-Anne Kibler:
In a traditional school setting, all students must learn the same thing at the same time. This does not allow children to work at their own rate, If the teacher in a traditional setting must teach to the lowest-performing student, the other students must wait. In a Montessori setting, students learn at their own rate, so there is no waiting for others to "catch up" to them; they may progress at their own ability.

At MSMV, we use standardized testing as a Practical Life exercise; we do not teach to the test, nor do we place emphasis on testing outcomes. However, our recent longitudinal study of IOWA test scores indicates what we have known all along; the Montessori Method works!