How does it work for children who prep but truly aren't that high on the IQ scale once they land a seat in these schools? I guess their parents just prep them for the school tests the same way.
We're very far away from NYC and competitive lottery seats for gifted programs, so I can't speak to that. We do have a HG school in our area though, and I've known several families who pushed to have their children admitted by submitting private testing. We were told by other parents and also warned by the school when our ds was entering K that some of the psychs in our area would do everything they could to "help" the kids do their best on the tests - not outright cheating but there was a definite concern on the school's part that certain psychs were consistently giving out IQ #s that didn't hold up through the years, and a general belief among parents that if you wanted the best shot for your child to meet the program benchmarks for admissions, you could more easily achieve that through certain testers. I also know a few squeaky wheel moms who talked their child's way into the program by explaining away scores that didn't quite meet the program's requirements. Soooo.. what happened to those kids? Within a few years of entering in K-1, most of them either left the program voluntarily because it was difficult for them, or they were asked to leave. The program doesn't test every child every year, but they reserve the right to retest (IQ and achievement) at any point in time), and basically the kids who didn't really truly meet the program's high ability bar showed up as kids not able to keep up or somewhat different than classmates in ability, and they were retested and asked to leave.
Note - this is all "old data" as my kids are long past kindergarten so I'm no longer in the loop for kindergarten testing gossip
polarbear
