Book Review: Coleman, L. (2005). Nurturing talent in high school

The travails of the American high school have recently received a great deal of attention. In addition to major high school reform initiatives by the National Governors Association and the federal government, many states and numerous think tanks have begun to address the perceived decline of our high schools. The shortcomings are well known: embarrassingly low graduation rates, large achievement gaps, a lack of highly qualified teachers in certain subject areas, tremendous social pressures inhibiting learning, and high college dropout rates by students who were not adequately prepared for postsecondary education, to name but a few issues. Observers have noted a distinct lack of attention to the needs of high ability students. Indeed, if a high school has Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) programs in place, we often consider that a major achievement—yet recent work by the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented suggests that we know less about how AP and IB meet the needs of gifted students than is generally assumed (Callahan, Hertberg, & Kyburg, in press). The state of research on secondary gifted education mirrors that of general high school research: We don’t know much, but what we do know isn’t cause for optimism. In this context, the field’s recent activity regarding talent development in high school is refreshing and exciting. In addition to the AP/IB work noted above, the recent publication of the Handbook of Secondary Gifted Education (Dixon & Moon, 2006) can serve as the foundation for future work in this area. It is against this backdrop that we were excited to read Laurence Coleman’s Nurturing Talent in High School: Life in the Fast Lane. Coleman spent the better part of a year living at a 2-year residential high school (i.e., the “Greenhouse Institute”) with what is considered a highly foreign culture to most: youth who choose to leave home and attend an academically rigorous secondary school. Coleman does not evaluate the school’s quality or prestige, but focuses on the school’s effect on the lives of students. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of the lives of gifted adolescents. Few previous studies have examined the multi-faceted lives of talented teenagers this comprehensively, and certainly not within this unique setting. The school pseudonym reflects one of the two major metaphors Coleman uses to describe the school’s effect on its students. The school acts like a greenhouse “removing weeds and pruning unhealthy branches” while also “adjusting the fertilizer and the amount of water” (p. 111), in that it shelters its students from outside influences that could inhibit intellectual growth and cultivates positive elements to help students grow even stronger. It should come as little surprise that a school as academically (and socially) demanding as the Greenhouse Institute is not the right fit for everyone who matriculates. Nonetheless, Coleman portrays the school as a place well prepared for making potentially difficult decisions easier both on the students who decide to return to their home schools as well as for those who stay. Mandatory study times, required public service, and evening office hours for teachers are but a few examples of how the school helps its students bloom. Similarly, Coleman also uses the metaphor of the school as “life in the fast lane” for its students because it not only fosters intellectual development but accelerates student learning to a pace more akin to most college atmospheres than that of a high school. Only students who go out of their way to apply to (and are accepted by) this school can attend, thus raising the floor at a school where the nearly limitless ceiling is frequently the center of attention. Life is further accelerated by constant homework and the ever-present demand of keeping up with each other. Both metaphors connote external factors as the focus of motivation, but Coleman found abundant evidence of the students’ considerable internal drive to learn and excel.