A couple years ago I read a letter-to-the-editor from a Duluth parent explaining that her child who had visited newer Twin City schools came home embarrassed at how dowdy the Duluth public schools were. It was the sort of superficial thinking that launched the drive for the Red Plan. She and her child needed something newer and shinier to buck up their sagging self esteem much like a raft of striving 1990’s Americans needed MacMansions that they couldn’t afford and which now clog the foreclosure market.
As for me I sort of think of the Red Plan as Dr. Dixon’s “gifted child.”
“It appears that the zeal to have one’s child identified as gifted and talented and placed, therefore, on an advanced and accelerated track in school is misplaced. A newly released study finds that only 3 percent of gifted and talented children live up to their potential. The study’s author, educational psychologist Joan Freeman, tracked 210 gifted children into adulthood and discovered that only 6 achieved a level of vocational success commensurate with their abilities.”
