Let me be clear.
There is not a single child with a Hispanic last name, or of African heritage, in the entire gifted program, and the vast majority of people claiming the exemption are not ESL students (nor is my daughter an ESL student or ELL). Instead, people from two immigrant communities in particular, who generally are first or second generation immigrants, make up between 70 and 80% of the population in the primary gifted program. The same populations make up between 20 - 40% of school populations in general.
Let's not pretend this exemption is being used by Hispanic farm worker migrant families, or that we are among those needy families. It is not, and we are not.
What is happening is that the exemption is being used by people who know to test, know to prep, and know how to work the system. I know these things but I refuse to use them in a way they were not intended.
My daughter is not ELL. She is bilingual, and yes that does artificially depress monolingual verbal IQ, but she is not in the population the exemption is intended for. Just because others use the exemption, doesn't mean it is okay.
"I can't imagine that a school district grants an ESL-type accommodation to a student who's from an English speaking family and just happens to have learned a second language as enrichment."
I agree, but what happens is that if your home language includes another language, you can list "ESL" or "non-native speaker" on the form, and there are plenty of people who do. They would end up having to count hours of native-speaker exposure, English-language pre-school (another perverse incentive: if you go to subsidized pre-school, you lose the language exemption for the gifted program), family members speaking English, months in the country, etc.
The school district knows this and is agonizing (behind closed doors) over how to give ESL / ELL disadvantaged kids a chance, while they know full well that it is a very fuzzy line and EXTREMELY hard to tell who is truly an ELL and who is a bi- or trilingual native speaker child of two PhDs in a six-language household. Believe me they have thought of this. They just haven't thought of a way to implement a fairer system.
The reason for the grabbiness is that if you get into the gifted program you get the IB your 11th year in school. Free.
"OTOH, do you know exactly how ESL students are tested? It's possible they are given an alternative test which is design to test the same "verbal" types of abilities but without relying on English."
I do know. You take the test and then get an exemption for the language part ex-post-facto based on an appeals process. The standard is lower primarily because many of the neediest ELL children are neither fully fluent in English (their street language) or their native tongue (they know only home language).
But this is really besides the point, because I have seen the statistics and the review of the program, and I know what my limits are in terms of participating in an unjust system.
What I really am wondering is how much her scores could change organically. If she improves her verbal IQ score massively, or math IQ CogAT by 10 pts, she could get in. Subject tests are no problem.
Incidentally, standing on principle has won some battles. I complained about test prep last year and now 100% of kindergarteners and first graders are tested in school, with prep, their first 6 weeks. So please don't suggest that standing on principle gets you nowhere (as some did on this and other boards when I debated putting my kid through a test that I knew was being gamed by others). That is hundreds of kids in a more just world, than my kid got to be in. I'd much rather be a force for justice and change, than just try to get mine.
