I'm guessing what's happened is more in line with they've increased the percentage of kids who are scoring in the top quartile of standardized testing in their state, and that's not a bad thing at all
Just not the same thing as saying they are increasing the number of intellectually gifted students.
See, but I do believe that there is a belief there amongst some at least that all kids who are ided as gifted are gifted not just performing highly. I don't know anyone with a child who is ided as gifted who doesn't think that his/her child is actually gifted and not just performing very highly due to good instruction or whatever (and we do have #s similar to this article).
This article brought up a few questions for me including whether we can assess "gifted" accurately b/c, I believe from googling the original study, they weren't just looking @ 15-20% of the kids now performing highly on achievement. I believe that they were looking @ 15-20% of kids scoring highly enough on
both achievement and group ability tests to now be considered gifted. (Now I'm going to have to double check that to make sure that I'm not wrong!)
What does that say about the tests we are using to assess giftedness? What does that say about the nature of giftedness itself (at least at the levels that a child can be taught to perform at -- maybe not PG type of giftedness as I've never seen a child "trained" into that level of gifted personally)?
eta: I've seen plenty of questionable behavior in terms of teaching to the test for ability tests going on both by GT teachers at some of our elementaries and from parents themselves. Maybe it is excessive teaching to the test moreso than increasing the actual abilities the tests are testing.
