Many of the children in DD's magnet would not qualify under these rules that require very high scores in both reading and math. I see how that makes the teachers' jobs easier, but it seems sad to me. Some kids' abilities are uneven, but it doesn't make them average.
My 6-year-old DS has a 141 WISC score for non-verbal and 114 for verbal. He is brilliant in math and visual-spatial ability but I doubt he will be able to get into the magnet when the time comes, unless that WISC verbal score doesn't really correlate with reading ability (or it was an erroneous score). His GAI is currently above the cut-off but he will need the reading and math scores over the 98th percentile. So far he has advanced reading ability and was reading well before Kindergarten but I don't know if it will last. So here is a kid who will probably need to be subject accelerated a few years for math, and will be ahead of some of the kids in the magnet for math, but won't qualify. Who knows if he'll even qualify for the cluster group!
The other thing that really irks me is that i think it is possible for parents to prep a kid for the CogAT and it's a bad test anyway, esp. for 2e kids. So are the kids who are scoring 139+ really gifted or were they prepped? Who knows! And how many 2e kids are being left out?
