Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
NYT opinion piece on recent research into achievement gap:

Because in districts like mine, where every parent is vying for their kids to be ID-ed as "GT" early on... and some 25-30% of the district IS thus labeled, it tends to water the programs down so significantly for MG+ kids that the entire system just becomes pretty broad 'tracking' for college-bound kids. The vast majority are ideally intelligent (probably NOT gifted, in other words, but close) and advantaged by any definition of the term. Most of those come from the top 25% of incomes locally, and just anecdotally, a lot of them are fairly Tiger-like households.

It also means that anyone asking to have a truly HG+ child's needs met is initially met with scorn and derision, because everyone here has had a run-in with "that" parent. The entitled helicopter parent from hell, whose special snowflake deserves only the very very bestest of everything...

I'm interested in others' thoughts here. I have even suspected that IQ testing is starting to be viewed by some educators/administrators as proof positive that parents have jumped on that bandwagon. It explains a LOT of why parents are increasingly getting pushback re: outside testing and high scores.

I agree, this is why I am having such a problem with my school district. I have turned into just another pushy parent. There are ~100 kids (~20% of grade) taking honors geometry in 8th grade this year, and I know many of them are only there because they have been in tutoring for years. Very different than my child who takes the math teacher literally and will NOT ask mom & dad for help.

I am not looking forward to H.S. for him because the pressure to spend all your waking hours studying to survive in the honors classes is intense. Yet, if my son isn't in classes that challenging him he does even worse. We already went through this in the pullout 6th grade class.