CTY has a temporary pilot project where they are accepting other scores for admission. This may be useful if you already have relevant scores and don’t want to take another test.

https://cty.jhu.edu/testing/testing-pilot

It’s interesting that they are accepting only achievement tests, and don’t seem to care about degrees of achievement.

It always bugs me when these places base cutoffs on grade placement rather than age.

I’m with you, Kai. Accelerated students are penalized with that framework.

Kai & aquinas, that has crossed my mind previously as well. Unfortunately, it appears to be the standard, somehow, at most of CTY's peer organizations.

I can understand it to some extent: using age advantages students who have had greater access to advanced content via their grade acceleration. This is why best practice includes provision for calculating individualized achievement scores using grade norms in the case of grade-retained students (so that instructional deficits are not interpreted as individual deficits). One can, however, think of it the other way: using grade disadvantages those who are most likely to need access to services, since they are the ones most likely to have been grade advanced. It seems to me that the solution ought to be to remove caps on the number of students who can qualify, and stick with age. (Since the usual reason for equity-based decision-making is equitable distribution of limited resources.) I can't imagine that the number of US persons who would legitimately qualify for CTY or similar, and who would have an interest in pursuing eligibility, can be so large that they would need to limit eligibility. Limits on accessing courses would occur naturally, in the form of registration maxima, but at least the pool would include a greater number of those eligible.

BTW, SET's eligibility framework is more age-based, with hard cutoffs for age <13.0, and age adjustments for age 13.0-13.7. But that's because everyone is taking the same significantly out-of-level test.

That makes sense, aeh.

In the face of constrained (?) resources, there could also be indexed scores for grade accelerated students, whereby grade-based scores are adjusted for age. The two data points, together, likely provide the most accurate picture of individual eligibility, moreso the greater the acceleration. Practically speaking, this would be easy to model.

My theory about restricting numbers (both for in-school gifted programs and programs such as CTY) is that part of the draw is that it's an exclusive club. I think a far more equitable system would be to allow anyone who is interested to attend and then not lower standards.

I have a recent master's degree in gifted education. I went into the program with a strong bias toward self-contained gifted education and came out having decided that the vast majority of gifted programs are elitist and unethical.

Agreed. There are generally more students who qualify (in an absolute, hypothetical sense) than are admitted. And yes, there is an elitist quality to many GT programs--at the same time, having any kind of criteria (objective or otherwise) will unavoidably exclude some students/families who wish to participate. And criteria are important to appropriate placement, not only to admissions--just as every post-secondary institution in the USA uses placement testing/criteria for course selection with already-admitted students. The challenge is finding criteria that accurately represent the population of purpose, but do not discriminate on the basis of a protected class (minimally and legally), and are equitable (however one defines that ethically).

Open enrollment has much to be said for it, but it still does not addres those who are unaware of resources, do not perceive themselves as falling in the target population, lack the ancillary resources necessary to access the proffered services, etc. for whom proactive child-find is needed. And, of course, the reality is that resources are not infinite.

No easy answers...

I would love to hear more! This is something that has occupied my thoughts this past year.

The obsession with testing and cutoff scores means that lots of students who could absolutely benefit from services are shut out because they had a bad day or don't test well or English isn't their first language or whatever. This makes the programs elitist. You can only gain entry if you score at a certain level on a certain day. It doesn't matter if you would benefit from the program and the program would benefit from your presence.

The only sorts of programs that are ethically defensible are those that provide students who gain entry into the program something that they need that would be inappropriate for students who do not gain entry. So providing enrichment to the identified cohort that all students would benefit from is not ethical. An example of this sort of enrichment might be art lessons or planting a garden. Denying enrichment to unidentified students who would benefit from it even if that enrichment isn't appropriate for all students is also not ethical. And example of this would be participation in weekly sessions using Beast Academy for math.

It is also unethical to claim to have a gifted program and then not provide services that address the core issue--which is that gifted students need advanced academics, both in terms of opportunities to move more quickly than age peers as well as to encounter content and questions that go beyond what is normally found in the regular curriculum. What's funny is that you can provide both of these things through a combination of acceleration and ability/interest grouping--neither of which require a special program.

I hear your concerns. I asked because I suspect you see more forest, whereas my lens is a few trees.

For most gifted programming, I think you’re right - cross-grade grouping and acceleration (SS or global skips) would cover off most needs, and not be unnecessarily exclusionary. It would also maximize opportunities for students to grow when coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, while respecting the needs of individual learners. I hope the educational policy zeitgeist ultimately arrives there.

To this point…
…I think you’re speaking to highly specialized instruction, particularly for more extreme gifted outliers.

For instance - and I’m sure every poster here has several similar examples - my DS9 and I are running a summer “book club”, in which the two of us read and discuss themes in more unusual books that would not normally be covered in school. The current book is HG Wells’ “The Island of Dr Moreau”, which DS selected. DS has delved into topics I would never have dreamed he’d enjoy at this age, and his insights, frankly, would be a better fit for undergrad literature and philosophy discussions than elementary school.

Today’s discussion ranged from intersubjectivity, to genetics, skin grafting surgical techniques using shark tissue, the origins of religion, and an exploration of the epistemology of pleasure and pain (and moral vs embodied pleasure/pain). My role here is, in my view, to help DS hone his ability to formulate and test arguments, and to support learning terminology that furthers his inquiry. So I’m a sounding board and catalyst for exploration - a humanoid idea-grappling dummy - rather than a teacher.

In no way do I believe this kind of exploration is feasible, even in HG magnets, until late high school. DS has a particularly accommodating teacher and education plan, which allows for a lot of deep-dive independent studies, but it doesn’t provide the same fulfillment that a seminar/Socratic discussion generates. And so, like many families here, I try to keep my beastie fed with brain snacks so he doesn’t have to go rogue!

But I’m saying nothing new for this crowd. Our kiddos don’t fit in neat categories, so our individual children’s “best” solutions may not be widely generalizable.

It's always annoyed me immensely with CTY courses, especially as a non US family, our age/grade correlations are not necessarily the same. And my interactions with CTY lead me to believe that this approach isn't about acceleration anyway (which you would hope an organization that exists for gifted kids would be considering), it's about slight variations in age / grade.

When faced with enrolling our child into a course, for which their CTY teacher (from a related course they were finishing) had recommended them as ready for and likely to delight in, they were knocked back due to age, not grade. Or rather we were told it was grade, but the grade the child should have been in was what counted in that instance.

And SET is AGE for taking the SAT, not grade. They do know that age matters, but they're assuming only slight fuzziness in grades and (presumably) trying to accommodate what has been taught as a result.

Absolutely. Our experience was that "best" with regard to in-school academics was more like "least worst," and that things besides academics were the reason for attending school at all.

Just…ugh. These kinds of discontinuities seem so unnecessary.

MumOfThree or others, have your children taken any of the CTY AP classes? Those are my current plan of last resort for DS. Curious to see how much acceleration (if any) they allow.

We haven't done any AP courses no.

As an international homeschooling family I took some liberties with the youngest child's "grade" and enrolled them in "The Process of Writing" which is for "gr 5-6", when halfway through our yr4. Which wasn't much of a stretch, but with her birthdate I think she would have been considered start of yr4 in the USA. On completion she was then allowed to progress to the next course "Writing for an audience" for gr7+, while still 9-10yrs old.

It seemed like in individually paced classes they'd let her run through a sequence based on successful completion of the previous course. But they pulled the "needs to be with kids her own age" card on "live" classes offered Summer 2020.

At the moment we are thinking very seriously about starting her at Crimson Academy. Who mostly do British curriculum but also have some AP courses.

We have not. For AP-level coursework, we have used online college courses at the local CC or regional state uni, but I know this isn't a practical option in many communities, in addition to being sometimes not that affordable (we have state-subsidized dual enrollment). Discussion happened via asynchronous forum postings (or, in some cases, videoconference breakout rooms). With async discussion, the age or nominal grade of posters didn't typically come up, except in one case where students were asked specifically where they were in their education, resulting in two DE students having to out themselves as high school students. Age wasn't an issue at registration, although the institutions in question reserved the right to ask pre-high school age students to come in for an eyeball.

I think the options for online math courses prior to dual enrollment are somewhat better than for humanities, with providers like AOPS carrying students up through calc. The best stable solution for humanities-type discussion I've experienced both as a parent and as a child has been to be part of a multi-sibling/cousin system of GT learners. Which, of course, isn't something most people can control!