The Life and Death of a Prodigy

That's the title of a New Yorker article I read on vacation. I took six old magazines for beach reading, and this was in one. Unfortunately, the article is not available online. It's from the Jan. 16, 2006 issue.

This is the story Brandenn Bremmer, a child prodigy in Nebraska who was pegged with an IQ of 178, who shot himself a year or two ago when he was 14. His parents are still devastated, and the story is of his life, is how one lives and grows up as a child prodigy, without siblings, living on a farm in an isolated part of Nebraska.

In fact, his life was pretty good. His mother noticed he was extremely bright when he was just a baby. He knew the alphabet at 18 months, and could read Dr. Seuss books at age 2. When he was 4, his parents took him to see Linda Silverman, a specialist in giftedness in Denver. He tested with an IQ of 146. A year later, he tested at 178.

Here's what the article says about Silverman and IQ tests:

The scale that Silverman used on Brandenn classifies people who score between 130 and 144 as "moderately gifted" (the range for average intelligence is from 85 to 115), those who score between 145 and 159 as "highly gifted," between 160 and 174 as "exceptionally gifted," and above 174 as "profoundly gifted." The probability of someone's having an I.Q. above 176, according to standard I.Q.-distribution theory, is roughly one in a million, which means that at any given time there ought to be fewer than three hundred people in the United States with an I.Q. as high as Brandenn's.

Since 1979, Silverman's testing facility and practice, the Gifted Development Center, has given nine hundred and eleven children I.Q. scores of 160 or above, including sixty-four in the 200s. Unless almost every young genius in the country is coming through her office, then, she is recording a far higher incidence of profoundly gifted children than the statistical distribution of I.Q. results should allow. The particular I.Q. test that Silverman, almost alone among her peers, relies on may have something to do with this. Although she begins each assessment with one of the more widely employed I.Q. tests, when a child scores extremely high Silverman goes to the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Form L-M.

The Stanford-Binet was first developed in 1916, and enjoyed the status of the most widely accepted I.Q. test through three iterations, up to and including the Form L-M. The Form L-M (after the first names of its authors, Lewis Terman and Maud Merrill) came out in 1960, was updated in 1972, and then was replaced in 1986, by the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition. The update was never well liked by psychometricians, and several more recently developed tests, such as the Stanford-Binet Fifth Edition and the current Woodcock-Johnson exam, are considered more comprehensive and reliable. Silverman uses the Form L-M because it's the only version that officially calculates scores above 160. "There's nothing else to use with kids this gifted," she told me. But some critics of the test say that it not only assesses higher scores; it tends to produce them. "The Form L-M uses children from several decades ago as its comparison group, so of course the scores are going to skew much higher if it's used on today's kids-every generation of children is more academically and environmentally advanced than the previous generation," Susan Assouline, the associate dean of the gifted-education program at the University of Iowa, said. "It's not a useful test in this day and age."

Modern-day I.Q. tests were designed primarily to assess learning difficulties-to find the children in a typical classroom who might be lagging behind and in need of remedial attention. "These tests are most reliable at scoring average children or determining whether a child falls somewhere outside of average, but they're not intended to assess various levels of extreme giftedness," Sidney Moon, a gifted-psychology expert at Purdue, said. And a number of Silverman's colleagues say that there's no practical reason for an I.Q. test to measure high levels of intelligence. "Many of us who are lifers in the field agree that there are the gifted, and then there are the rare few who are really superstars among the stars," said Tracy Cross, a professor of gifted studies at Ball State University, in Indiana, and the editor of the Journal for the Education of the Gifted. "It's hard to argue that those superstars don't exist." But, Cross said, "I don't believe there's much difference between a person with an I.Q. of 160 and one with 170, or 180."

Silverman disagrees strenuously. When I visited her at her house, an A-frame high in the hills above Golden, Colorado, she bristled at her peers' lack of interest in these distinctions-and at the standard public-school practice of placing exceptionally and profoundly gifted children in classes designed for merely advanced students. She described an effort, in the nineties, to eliminate gifted programs in public schools as "a form of discrimination that makes me think of Nazi Germany."

Brandenn started school in the local Nebraska district, and finished fourth grade after two years in school. Then his parents began to homeschool him. When he was six, they skipped grades five through eight and enrolled him in a distance-learning high school. He took mostly commercial, vocational classes--not the honors or college-bound curriculum. The school didn't offer that track. There was no homework or papers, just tests administered in town by a neighbor. He finished in a few years, then played piano for three years. His social life was limited, and consisted mostly of going to retreats for a few weeks each summer with other gifted children.

The long and short of it is that he had no real friends, just the kids he met in the summer with whom he talked on the phone or wrote emails. His parents were his closest companions. He didn't go to school. He did pretty well on the high school courses, ending up with this kind of transcript:

4.03.2001: Personal Finance, B+
4.04.2001: World Geography 1, A
4.04.2001: Multicult Literature, B
4.10.2001: Small Engine Repair, B+
4.10.2001: Career Planning, A
4.19.2001: General Math 2, B+
4.19.2001: World Geography 2, A
5.15.2001: American Government, B+
5.18.2001: Ninth Grade English 1, B
5.19.2001: First Year Spanish, A
5.29.2001: American History 1, A
5.31.2001: American History 2, A
5.31.2001: Health Sciences 1, A
5.31.2001: Ninth Grade English 2, B+

His piano teachers were not impressed with his abilities. He started college at age 14, taking an introductory biology course, and needing help to write a proper paper. He took one test before his suicide and got a B- or C+. He emailed his few friends from the retreats that he was bored and sick of being isolated on the farm, and was not enthralled with his parents. Then a few days later he shot himself.

I write about this now because I had three thoughts about this story:

1) What if this kid was a fast starter, reading early, etc. but his growth curve slowed? And he ended up quite bright, but not the kind of prodigy genius that people thought. Also, how much does socialization matter in terms of learning and growth? Suppose he would have attended school with other kids? Suppose his parents had managed to get the school to deal with his intelligence while allowing him to be in classes with other kids his own age?

2) The schools he attended, the distance learning HS for example, did they offer a truly rigorous curriculum? Perhaps he did well because he was smart, but the school material wasn't demanding.

3) Is there a testing industry on the high end? Do people have a financial interest in naming children as prodigies? And the questions about the validity of IQ tests on the high end sound quite valid to me, given what I know about psychometrics. I think perhaps if we want to measure giftedness we need a new test.

UPDATE: Links to comments, reports on this story are here, here, and here.

The New Yorker has a forum on this story here. In the forum, several people who say they knew Brandenn post comments about the story and why it was flawed.

One thing I didn't mention is that in the story, it says that Brandenn's organs were a perfect match for a child dying in the same hospital. An unusual coincidence that saved the child's life. Brandenn's mother says she thinks Brandenn killed himself because he was so sensitive that he knew that child needed his organs. Many commenting in the New Yorker forum noted that this is a strange rationalization to justify his suicide.