In Ohio today, approximately 250,000 students—rich and poor alike—are formally identified as gifted. These “high flyers” have tremendous potential to become the entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers, as well as the civic and cultural leaders of the future. Yet all too often, they sit in one-size-fits all classrooms, bored with material they already know and held back by a system that too rarely challenges them. Our latest charter public school profile is a look at Menlo Park Academy in Cleveland, a school designed to uniquely support gifted students.
We believe that this look at Menlo Park—and the success of students Cael and Teagan—will show that creating specialized schools for gifted students can be done and that the charter public school model is perfectly suited for such a task.
