http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/nyregion/30gifted.htmlCity Faces Many Challenges in Search for New Gifted Test
By SHARON OTTERMAN
New York Times
June 29, 2010
City education officials revealed this month that they would begin searching for a new gifted admissions test in response to complaints about low minority representation in gifted programs and concerns that professional test preparation services skew the results.
But any new test is unlikely to alleviate what many parents consider the most anxiety-producing part of the process � sending 4-year-olds into an exam that could decide their schooling for the next six years. In fact, the city may even begin testing even earlier.
While the city says it is open to considering other options, it will most likely continue to rely on standardized tests for prekindergarteners as the central admissions criteria for the elite programs, and under the new protocol, which would begin for the 2012-13 school year, it could begin testing 3-year-olds born late in the year.
The current test is valid only for children 4 and older, but a new test could work for even younger children, allowing the city to speed up the admissions calendar to make it simpler for parents who are balancing private school deposits and kindergarten wait lists, education officials said in interviews and public testimony over the past several weeks.
Over all, the search for a new gifted test is not an easy one, as the city faces a series of constraints that make selecting gifted students in a million-student system more complicated and political than in the suburbs, city officials said. A look at what happened with the current testing contract helps explain why.
<rest of article at link>
As usual for such articles, well-known facts about intelligence, discussed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence and other places, are ignored.
Blacks score about 1 standard deviation below whites on IQ tests such as the WISC and the Stanford-Binet, and those tests are not "biased" in the sense of underpredicting minority student academic achievement. Hispanics score about 2/3 of a standard deviation below whites, and East Asians about 1/3 of an s.d. above. Intelligence is positively correlated with family income, because smart people tend to earn more money, and intelligence is highly heritable.
There are, of course, bright and dull children from all racial groups and income levels, but there is much evidence that the distributions differ. People should be treated as individuals, and grown-ups should not be shocked by "disparities" that have obvious explanations.
