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Bostonian - I was responding to another poster who suggested that those who promote equal opportunity think that *all* kids have equal potential, and I presented another perspective because the people I know who promote social justice do not think this. We can discuss the details of distributions, but that misses the point. It is just the kind of argument that you make above that leads to racial stereotyping in schools that discriminates against individual kids. There is a well documented phenomenon of average characteristics of a group being applied inappropriately to individuals. The strategies schools use for identifying gifted kids are far from perfect in this regard.

Actually I think that a gap by age 3 is suggestive of environment. Remember that adoptive children's IQs follow their adoptive moms until they leave home. I saw huge differences in how I interacted with my son from birth to 3 just within my small local circle. Compared to how I treated my son, the other moms basically treated their kids like loaves of bread. Cute loaves that were very kissable, but...well, you get the picture. Of course, my son may have been more reinforcing of my interactive behavior than other toddlers. And as the children grew, I saw that they had certian advantages that my son didn't have - for example, they were excellent at waiting around, while my son had a rather short fuse for it, even though my son was in day care 20 hours a week since 7 weeks of age and did plenty of waiting there. You should have seen the pictures they took of him with sad, saucer-like eyes staring off vacantly into space. "Look that this adorable picture we took of your adorable boy, Mrs. Grinity!" ((shudder))

Sorry that I have no point here - just to say that I think both Genetics and Environment (including prenatal) have an effect on IQ in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Breastfeeding, for example, does increase IQ IF the child has a varient of genetics that allows BF to increase IQ. Chronic stress probably feeds back to the genome and turns off certian genes for 'relaxed exploration of the environment' that would normally be on.

One can think of lots of things that would prevent a child from reaching the upper level of their genetic potential range. Certian genes probaly protect one from particular environmental challenges. Isn't the whole complicated ball of wax amazing?

My guess is that all the current research is flawed in that so few people understand that for a positive reinforcer to be potent, it has to be potent to that particular individual. So putting a child in an 'enriched environment' and measuring that it didn't help is only strong evidence if the particular enrichments actually did provide positive reinforcement to that particular child. Not only positive, but more strongly positive than the other reinforcers in the environment.

Smiles,
Grinity

Yet I've met many educators (not my friends; people on many committees and panels I've been on) who DON'T think the way you mentioned. I've been horrified at some of the stuff I hear, such as:

• (In reference to pre- and post-tests of a certain skill) If you raise the scores of lower performers while allowing scores of higher performers to stagnate, you've narrowed the achievement gap, and this is great!
• Basing entry to a class based on prerequisites (including passing a test) is elitist!
• We need to make the introductory classes less demanding so that more students will take them!
• We should encourage students who failed an introductory class to go into this discipline for a living! They just need opportunities to succeed, and they will!

What I'm saying is that there are a lot of people out there who do believe in ideas that are just wrong.


I'm interested; can you provide references for this?

AFAIK, all kids get the same test for giftedness. My kids aren't in public schools, so I could be wrong. But my impression was that everyone takes the same test at the end of 3rd grade or so, and the ones who get a certain score get into the gifted program. I agree it's not perfect, but it doesn't seem super-biased...except:

It seems reasonable to set the cutoff as a percentile rank for an area (say, per school or small group of neighborhood schools where results are similar, rather than all of New York City). Everyone who scores above some cutoff (~97th percentile?) is admitted to a local gifted program. The ones who are past the 99th should get services that are different from the ones in the 97th-99th.

This seems reasonable if your goal is to create an appropriate learning environment for kids who learn faster than the kids around them, and that's the top ~3% of the environment that they're in, as opposed to an environment that predominates on another side of the city, which they're not in.

You've just described what seems to be one of the prevailing philosophies of the school district my DDs are in.

I agree this is a serious problem.



There is a large body of scholarly research on this - you can find some of it by doing a search on "unconscious bias."


Systematic testing may happen in some school districts, but not ours. Some (very little) testing happens, but only as a result of parent or teacher recommendation. Being a squeaky wheel matters.



Here are the arguments I've heard that say this strategy is unfair: the tests are not a perfect measure for what they're being used for. They can be gamed -- test preparation by a family with resources may get one child over the cutoff, while another is just under due to the environmental factors described above by Grinity. What if a kid is sick the day he/she takes the test? And a corollary to this is that the cutoffs are arbitrary from the perspective of which kids might benefit from the program. Is the kid in the 96th %ile really better off without the services those in the 97 %ile get? Not necessarily, it depends on the individual kids, i.e. factors beyond what the test measures....

I was gobsmacked. I had no idea the thinking was so extreme.

I was talking to two people about a classroom practice that claimed that narrowing the gap this way was great. Worse, the standard for "good students" was arbitrarily chosen and not even based on an objective measure.

I said, "But the good students didn't learn anything." One of the people I was talking to looked at me strangely and said, as though the point was obvious, "But they were already proficient." As though it was perfectly okay to let a group of kids sit in a class learning nothing for months. I said, "Well, what about becoming better than proficient? What about becoming outstanding?" No answer. Silence. Then I mentioned the arbitrariness of the standard and got more blank looks.

I'll add something else that I learned yesterday. I've learned that in public middle schools in California, you aren't allowed to go past geometry. I was told that there's no (standardized?) middle school test for Algebra II, and even though a public school can teach it, the student won't get credit for it.

(I hope I'm wrong; CAMom or anyone else, please correct me if I am).

Were these two people teachers?

Yes, they all were (the two I was talking to and the ones advocating the method of narrowing the gap).

This reminds me of the fish-feeding analogy that some corporate guy gave us when I was a manager at Petsmart. He was explaining why different kinds of fish need different kinds of food, but it works as well for kids and education. If you have a horse, a dog and a lizard, it doesn't matter what kind of food you feed them if you're feeding them all the same thing -- two out of three are going to starve to death. Feed them hay, the horse is happy and the other two die. Feed them steak, the dog is happy and the other two die. Feed them bugs, the lizard is happy and the other two die. Each one has to have his own diet in order to thrive, or indeed to survive. And you may protest, "but I feed them all every day! I give them plenty to eat!" but if they can't eat it, it is useless. Same with education.