By JACK ENCARNACAO
The Patriot Ledger

Massachusetts spends $1.8 billion each year on special education, but consistently ranks near the very bottom in state spending on programs for students who are unusually gifted or talented.

In a region which once prided itself on academic enrichment programs, Quincy and Brockton are among the few communities with school programs dedicated to expanding the horizons of elementary or middle school students whose performance sparkles above their peers.

Advance placement classes offer some alternatives for high-performing high school students, but most towns’ schools have little or nothing special to offer such kids for the first eight years of public education.

The money for gifted and talented programs disappeared in the 1990s, educators say, the victim of changing priorities, tight budgets and the education reform movement that led to MCAS and No Child Left Behind.

“That money dried up,” said Diana Reeves, chairwoman of the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education. “There has been no money at the state level whatsoever.”

For two decades, state and federal mandates have shifted more and more dollars into programs for children with special education needs because of physical limitations and learning disabilities.

Massachusetts is seventh in the nation in the percentage of students receiving special education services that can cost even moderate-size school districts tens of millions of dollars over the years.

Massachusetts was also dead last among the states in spending on gifted and talented programs in 2003, the last year for which figures are available, according to the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education. The state continues to rank in the bottom 10, the association said.

The near-zero availability of state grant money was tied in part to the 1993 Education Reform Act that gave rise to the state MCAS test, along with a shift from gifted programs to the practice of placing students of all academic strengths into the same classroom and dialing lessons up or down to match each student’s ability.

Jane Killinger, director of grants for the Weymouth Public Schools, said Weymouth has seen cutbacks in education for gifted students over the past two decades.

“I would say probably for the last 10, 11 years, Weymouth has not had any special programming for gifted students or advanced learners,” she said. “We've been trying to have teachers handle that inside the regular classroom by offering extra activities.”

She is only 10, but Emily Lynch of Weymouth started middle school this year, a full year younger than her classmates.

That is due in no small part to Weymouth’s primary school teachers who saw in Emily an advanced ability and steered her accordingly, her mother said.

“It was just so evident that she was writing and reading at a level that was way beyond her peers,” her mother, Kathy Lynch, said.

But simply moving bright children rapidly through the regular education program may not be all the answer.

Some school officials say placing children of all abilities in the same classroom is a better way to teach them, but others say it is an uphill battle to keep gifted students challenged.

“We know we have to do better,” said Leo Egan, a superintendent in charge of curriculum at Weymouth Public Schools. “Massachusetts should never be 50th in anything to do with education.”

Reeves said when she came to teach in Massachusetts from the Midwest, she was surprised to find that the state regarded private schools as the best place for gifted students.

“Which of course is erroneous,” she said. “There are gifted kids at every level of society and only a few people can afford to send their child to a private school.”

Still, education reform makes it nearly impossible to develop separate programs for gifted students, some school officials say.

“If you look carefully at ed reform, it actually prohibits you from pull-out programs if it replaces the regular class,” said Carver Public Schools Superintendent Elizabeth Sorrell. “This is mainly to protect kids below grade-level from being offered a lesser curriculum.”

Teachers who specialize in working with gifted students are also a dying breed in the state. Egan said state colleges no longer offer teaching degrees in gifted and talented education.

“If you're in Massachusetts, you need to go out-of-state to become a teacher of the gifted and talented,” he said.

In high school, Advanced Placement courses challenge gifted students with college-level material, but specialized programs for gifted students no longer exist in most schools surveyed by The Patriot Ledger.

Quincy and Brockton may be among the last holdouts south of Boston. In Quincy, Central Middle School houses the district’s Advanced Placement center with a full-time, self-contained program for students of exceptional ability who can keep up with college-level courses even earlier than high school.

Students in the program come directly from the elementary school enrichment programs for talented students in fifth grade.

Brockton schools have separate elementary and middle school buildings devoted to gifted students.

Among South Shore towns, Hingham and Weymouth still have programs that pull gifted kids from the classroom, but they still spend most of their day in a regular classroom.

It’s a different story in the southern United States, where programs for gifted students flourish, said Dr. Joseph Renzulli of the University of Connecticut, a recognized expert on gifted and talented education.

Advocates of gifted programs hope the success of the academically talented classes in the South will influence the rest of the country.

“What the major policy-makers in education, all the way up to the White House, are beginning to realize is that we better start making some investments in young people, who are going to be our future scientists, engineers and mathematicians,” Renzulli said.

There is movement in Massachusetts to reinvigorate gifted education. In the wake of a 2005 summit held by the Massachusetts Association for Gifted Education that attracted high-powered education officials, the state began to offer grants to help districts pay for professional development and supplies.

“Since the summit, I think there has been a change in the way that people are perceiving what gifted is and what a program for gifted could be,” Reeves said.

The focus on MCAS in Massachusetts often results in a gifted child “learning nothing,” Reeves said.

“The motto is ‘no child left behind.’...But in gifted circles it’s ‘no child held back or left bored,’” she said.

Joan Lynn, a curriculum supervisor in Duxbury Public Schools, said the current model - teaching gifted students within the setting of the regular classroom - is superior to the old practice of placing them in specialized classes.

“The kids who were pulled out lost out on what the rest of the class was doing,” she said. “They went and did some probably very challenging material, but it never connected to the other curriculum.”

And these days, skipping the regular curriculum might mean failing the MCAS.

Lynn said the new approach also avoids the thorny issue of having to exclude students whose parents think they are gifted but whose aptitude is simply above-average.

“How do you target which kids go?” she said. “Is it all about one test. You give him one test and he’s gifted or not gifted based on one exam? And how do you do that with a 7-year-old?”

Jack Encarnacao may be reached at jencarnacao@ledger.com.