Background

If you have a child or are the teacher of a child who is "gifted," you know or at least have strong suspicions of his or her giftedness. Similarly parents and teachers of children who also have "learning differences or disabilities" (sometimes called twice-special children), "know" they are special.  

Gifted children may be incredibly bright and mature for their age or both incredibly bright in some areas and seriously under-perform in others. They may even develop behavior that begins to get in their way, stunting their progress and growth. They are often called "Gifted but with Learning Differences or Disabilities."

Well fortunately, there are a lot of resources available to help. Growing Gifted Children provides parents with information to facilitate informed decisions regarding children's education.

It is interesting to note that there are many such children. The National Center for Education Statistics indicates that the median across the country for children classified as gifted and talented is approximately 3.6% of the total school enrollment. In some states, the estimates are considerably higher.

There is no breakdown of this total among the four categories in which we are most interested (i.e., gifted, highly or profoundly gifted, and gifted with learning differences). Particularly in the area of determining the number of gifted children with disabilities, good data is obscured by lack of identification. The number of children in this group is believed to be hugely underestimated because the disability can mask the giftedness. As a result, the child's giftedness is unrecognized—a loss to society as well as to such children. Their education can fail so pitifully behind their potential and neither they or anyone else may be aware of it for many years, often never.

However, some observers estimate the number of gifted/learning disabled students to be in the range of 1-1.5% of the student population, or 30,000-40,000 students. That would leave about 100,000 students in the gifted, highly gifted and profoundly gifted categories.

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