Flypaper

“You can’t handle the truth.” I’m beginning to think there was great wisdom in these five words uttered by Colonel Jessup, the character played by Jack Nicholson in the 1992 film “A Few Good Men.” While he was totally wrong in the context of the film, his words seem quite right when applied to America in 2018. Our politics have become so polarized that people avoid asking all the hard questions about the Parkland shooting, unwilling to accept that even a small part of the truth may not align with their preferred narrative.

The powerful pro-gun lobby, with the NRA as its leader, has done everything in its power to shut down research on gun violence for fear that it may lead to increased gun control. But how can we have an honest debate about gun violence if we can’t even study the issue?

Similarly, since 2013, schools have been under enormous pressure—for good reason—to lower their suspension, expulsion, and student arrest numbers. Broward County was part of the PROMISE program (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports & Education), which was intended, according to the website, “to safeguard the student from entering the judicial system.” Sounds good to...

A January study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) examines academic “resilience”—the capacity of disadvantaged students to succeed despite adverse circumstances—in more than seventy education systems that participated in the 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2015 iterations of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Authors sought to determine the role that school environment and academic resources play in resiliency, and examined differences in rates of resilience in participating countries over time.

The study defines “resilient students” as those in the lowest socioeconomic quartile in their own country who achieve at or above Level 3 (out of 6) on all of PISA’s three subjects—reading, math, and science. “Level 3 corresponds, in each subject, to the highest level achieved by at least 50 percent of students across OECD countries on average,” explain the authors. They characterized school environment using the OECD’s survey data on truancy—how many students skipped a whole day in the last two weeks—and the frequency of classroom disruptions—insubordination, excess noise, etc. And the study measured school resources with an index comprising three variables: the availability of computers per student, the number of extracurricular activities offered, and the average class size of each school.

The study’s main...

One of the most illuminating presentations that I attended on the subject of giftedness was given by Dr. Linda Silverman of Colorado’s Gifted Development Center. The talk on perfectionism was the keynote of a regional symposium on giftedness in North Texas. In her presentation, Dr. Silverman took the position that perfectionism, when properly managed, can be a healthy attribute for gifted people. Her position was unsettling to a number of educators in the audience, many of whom held the growing viewpoint that perfectionism is inherently unhealthy.

In one particularly memorable exchange, an audience member took exception to the idea that perfection could be a healthy pursuit or that anything could be perfect. He challenged her with a question, asking if she felt her book, Counseling the Gifted and Talented, achieved perfection. She looked the audience member straight in the eye, and without a moment’s hesitation and with absolute conviction in her voice, replied, “Yes. My book was perfect.” She exemplified, on a personal level, the epitome of healthy perfectionism.

What is perfectionism?

Perfectionism is the striving for achievement or production that is without flaw or error. As a disorder, perfectionism is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental...

When it comes to today’s children, we often think about “privilege” in terms of the access to education, income, and good neighborhoods that some children benefit from and others do not. Certainly, these three forms of privilege matter for children’s welfare and for their shot at the American Dream, as Richard Reeves reminds us in Dream Hoarders.

But there is another form of “privilege” that is often overlooked in contemporary debates about children’s welfare and futures: that of growing up in a stable two-parent family—loving and being loved by one’s two parents, who are also committed to one another and to the integrity of their family. We know that children who grow up in such a stable, married family are more likely to flourish educationally, socially, and economically.

So how many of today’s young people experience this stable family structure throughout childhood?

The answer is about one in two, according to our new analysis of survey data files recently released by the U.S. Department of Education.¹ This figure is based on the proportion of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old high school students who were reported to be living with both their married birth mothers and biological fathers in 2016.² The...