Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Are gifted education programs a waste of money?

They are accelerated in math and language arts. They still do grade-level science and social studies curriculum but supposedly at a "deeper level." I know that their teacher will let them test out of grade-level curriculum and then do something related that is more interesting/engaging.

Interesting. The paper is available for free.

Here's how the kids get into the GT program:


Admission to the district GT program is based on a set of points gained through scores as follows:

• A standardized test (Stanford Achievement, aka SAT) (56 possible points)
• The non-verbal portion of the NNAT (30 possible points)
• Your report card (20 possible points)
• Teacher recommendation (10 possible points)
• Whether or not you have obstacles (15 possible points)
• Total is 131 points

You qualify for the program if you get...62 points. See page 35 of the manuscript for the form showing the points.

This could be achieved with the following:

• SAT scores from 70th-79th percentile in all subtests (12 total points)
• The second lowest score band (104-107) listed on the NNAT (10 points). Not sure what 104-107 means in terms of percentiles. Anyone know? I read in one place that they correspond roughly to IQ distribution scores. Is this correct?
• 90-94% on the report card (15 points)
• Top teacher recommendation (10 points)
• Three obstacles (15 points)
• Total is 62 points

So, this pretty much means that average kids can qualify if they get good grades, their teachers like them, and get extra points for the obstacles listed on the form.

The study compared kids close to the cutoff on both sides. So it compared average kids in a gifted program with other average kids not in a gifted program.


Gotta go.

Maybe it's not quite that simple, Val. You've chosen a particular combination of scores that you feel is most non-gifted, but some other kids without obstacles etc. would achieve the cutoff score with, say, a higher SAT score. Not only that, but the very next page of the report shows that kids at the cutoff point have an 80% chance of receiving G/T services. Which of the 62-pointers do you think are more likely to receive services-- the well-liked kids with obstacles who are completely underwhelming academically, or other ones? ETA: I see now that it's based on a lottery. Of course.

I generally agree with a lot of the rationalizations in this thread, though. From what I can tell, a lot of G/T services are along the lines of enrichment that wouldn't necessarily result in increased achievement scores. I don't think that's the way it would be in an ideal world, but that's probably the way it is a good deal of the time.

The scores I picked were noted in the paper; I should have mentioned this but I was late for collecting kids:


So in reality, scores can be even lower than 62 for the GT program. In fact, the scores seem deliberately set up to catch kids with the 70th percentile scores on the SAT, 104-107 on the NNAT, 80-84% on their report cards, a strong teacher recommendation, and 15 bonus points. Add it up on page 32: you get 56.

By way of comparison, an IQ at the 70th percentile (15 point SD) is 108. A 35 year-old white woman who is ~5'5.5" tall is at the 70th percentile. For a white man, it's 5'11". Taller than most but not super-tall. Stuff clusters very tightly around the average when you have a normal distribution of data, and even 20 percentage points above average is still not too far away from there. (You would expect a normal distribution for scores on standardized tests; they make them that to be way).

For comparison, one standard deviation (84th percentile/IQ of 115 or height of about 5'7" or 6 feet) IS starting to move away from the average. Two standard deviations is an IQ of 130 or a male height of 6'3." Now THAT'S tall by white people standards.

IMHO, a score of 56 or 62 on this scale are very, very low for the purposes of defining someone as "gifted." This is merely kind-of-maybe-above-average.

Note also that you get three bonus points just for being in a minority group, so the qualifying score gets pushed down a bit more for some of the students.

Sure, you could play with the numbers and use high scores in one area and low scores in another. But you could also push some scores below the 70th percentile (0 points) and put some in the next score band to compensate up to 62.

The point is that the authors claim to be reporting on "high achievers," but they weren't. They were focusing on average-ish achievers.

The school district clearly set up the cutoffs to catch a lot of average-ish kids, and they're the ones most likely to score at the low end of this particular scale. Sure, there were probably a few gifties in the group the paper studied, but most of them probably weren't. Why? Well, if you define gifties as only 3% of the population, then at most a small number of the entire GT group would be gifted. Then remove anyone with a score over 72, as the authors seem to do, and you lose a lot of the gifties.

So the real question they studied was: "Did inclusion in a GT program in a large urban school district raise test scores among average students?" Their answer was "No."

Of course if the study is really measuring only the impact of GT programming on average kids, one might be tempted to say, "Who cares?" I'm happy if that's not cost-effective, if limited GT resources should be spent on GT kids. My question was really not whether the GT program and study caught a lot of average-ish kids, but whether the study measured enough above-average-ish kids at the cutoff to make the results meaningful in the intended way. Unfortunately, we don't know anything about the giftedness of the kids at the cutoff; we just know their matrix scores. We certainly can't guess that the scores on that silly matrix map to IQ, and certainly not to intelligence, whatever that is. (Says the guy who skimmed exactly two pages of that report so far.) The study may well be too flawed to be meaningful at all, I guess, although it's not so clear to me just from the logic you've presented here.

It additionally occurred to me that if we were to accept that GT programming should result in higher achievement scores, then a failure to improve achievement scores of kids at the boundary would still be cause for a valid complaint about the overall cost-effectiveness of the program-- it wouldn't matter how gifted those kids were, and it wouldn't be necessary to disprove an effect on more highly gifted kids. That is, the bar being set too low for identification and entry could be a big problem, and such a study might help point that out. And if the GT programming would theoretically result in increased achievement scores for higher-achieving or smarter kids, I see no reason for just assuming that the effect would peter out completely before reaching kids at the cutoff; that would be cause for investigating further instead of making a questionable assumption.

I don't have time to read the whole study. I'm left wondering why, since they must have had data available for the higher achievers too, they would focus just on the boundary kids (ETA: It looks like they must not have had enough data based on attrition rates of high achievers, and the fact that most high achievers stayed in the GT program). To that extent you've heightened my skepticism of the study. Still, a program doesn't have to be a complete waste to be wasteful. Note also the key words "well run" from the OP.

I will have to think further about whether or not gifted programming should result in a measurable effect of some sort. It seems desirable to have some sort of metrics about the success of a program, in addition to reports of happy students, although ordinary achievement test scores might not be the proper metric. I agree with Bostonian that gifted kids deserve to be taught, in addition to deserving to be socially and emotionally happy. I also don't like throwing money down a hole. (Of course, I live in an area with no gifted programs, so the whole discussion, as my most-hated boss would have said, is "mute" for me.)

The authors of the paper do consider this issue (p19 of the pdf http://www.class.uh.edu/faculty/simberman/bci_2011.pdf):

"One particular concern is that the lack of results may be due to top-coding of the exams.
Since GT students are high-achievers many of them may not be able to exhibit growth on
achievement tests as they are very close to getting every question correct. To address this, in Online Appendix Figures 7 � 11 we provide distribution plots of raw scores on each of the 7th grade Stanford Achievement Tests for students with Euclidean distances between -10 and 10. In all cases the mass of the distribution is centered quite far from the maximum score. For example in math the modal score is 62 out of 80 while for reading it is 67 out of 84 leaving substantial room for improvement."

But the kids with "Euclidean distances between -10 and 10" are precisely the average students with low test scores that I mentioned. They aren't high achievers and it's no surprise that there's "substantial room for improvement" on a grade level test.

Hmm. I read up on this recently and wrote something about it for work that synthesized a large pile of research on the subject. There is plenty of evidence out there that accelerating, skipping, and early entrance to K or college are beneficial for GT kids. Enrichment programs have the least evidence in their favor, but IIRC, there is at least some. All this media furor is focusing on this one study, largely because the conclusion is "exciting" and controversial and makes for a good chance to throw rotten fruit at the "pushy parent." Meanwhile it ignores decades of much better research. Nothing is about this is atypical about science reporting. But of course, to regard this study as "proof" that there is no point to ANY kind of gifted education, or even as proof that there is no such thing as giftedness, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a major way.

Pull-out programs vary enormously, in my experience, and it doesn't surprise me at all to learn that some have no effect on test scores. My pull-out program in elementary was pretty great, but by high school it was useless "enrichment" that did absolutely nothing for my skills, though it was mildly interesting.

Our gifted program seems to be excellent. It starts in 4th grade. The kids in 4-6th grade cover 4 years of math in 3 years, so they eventually take Geometry in 8th grade, Algebra II in 9th grade, Pre-Cal in 10th grade, Calculus AP-AB in 11th grade, and Calculus AP-BC in 12th grade (if you want to go that route).
So the gifted program kids end up skipping 1-2 years of math over the regular program. I'm sure the English part is similarly accelerated.
I don't think that is a waste of time or money.

Why aren't they using above grade level test to measure growth?