Talent Development Model of Schooling

The talent development model is a conceptualization that redefines the purpose of formal education as the promotion, creation, cultivation, and enhancement of high-level academic performance for virtually all students, regardless of their background. This stands in contrast to the sorting model of schooling that has dominated educational practice from the inception of public education in the United States. In this entry, we will examine four specific models that have attempted to implement this talent development concept.

To a large degree, this call emerged in the aftermath of the publication of the milestone 1983 report A Nation at Risk, which sounded a clarion warning that unless the United States soon upgraded the quality of schooling for all of its children and youth, the United States would be in jeopardy of major erosions in its social and economic fabric. The report went on to proclaim that given “the rising tide of mediocrity,” there was an urgent need for school reform.

In 1991, leaders from the American business community, with the endorsement of the president and the secretary of education, initiated the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC). The corporation's expressed purpose was to raise private sector funding to support the development of a new generation of schooling designs that would “break the mold” and yield considerably higher quality academic outcomes. This initiative was informed by the widespread belief that school improvement efforts were too often fragmented and disjointed, with little coherence among the activities implemented, and that the efforts were not broad enough to capture the complexities of the schooling process.

In a similar vein, in the fall of 1993, the National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement issued a call for proposals for a new research and development center that would focus on addressing school reform in a truly comprehensive way. In the fall of 1994, funding was awarded for a proposed collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. Through this collaboration, the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk (CRESPAR) was established. CRESPAR was funded for 10 years for approximately $65 million, and no research and development center has ever received more annual yearly funding in the U.S. Department of Education's history. The centerpiece for CRESPAR's work was the actualization of a talent development model for comprehensive school reform.

Over the years, other institutions have deployed the term talent development to capture the essence of their educational pursuits. Prominent among these is the longstanding Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. In this regard a focus [Page 2112]has been on identifying “talented” youth and providing enriched educational programming to provide for their more advanced academic status. The University of California, Berkeley has run the Academic Talent Development Program to support “talented” students at the elementary and secondary school levels, through challenging and enriching summer school classes offered on campus. In a similar vein, the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University offers a Saturday enrichment program for K–12 “gifted students.”

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