Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment How many times to test?

DD1 passed the math portion of the school's gifted exam last year, and did 50% better than required in math and verbal for the performance area of the test. But her verbal IQ tested as very low, which is normal for bilingual children as they tend to compute more slowly, have slightly smaller vocabularies and finally have more open interpretations of questions than monolingual children. So she didn't get in, short one poitn.

Now she has been recommended for testing again. She's up to a 5th-6th grade reading comprehension level and still working a couple of grade levels ahead in math, though the math is 100% parent-led (I do not want her not learning new concepts for years so I do enrichment). That is just to say, she's hardly a prodigy, though she's smart.

Should we re-do the test? The school district has improved its testing model and has created a testing environment for kids that is less prone to "cheating" (IQ test prep) which makes me super happy. But it's two days of testing.

Ugh, so undecided. The main reason I'd like her in the program would be to force her to be challenged in school. I think she's the type of kid who will get "acceptable" no matter what the material. But it will be actual homework for her, vs. now which involves her doing math problems in 2 minutes and then spelling the same words she has spelled correctly all week. It's such a waste of time is all.

However we do benefit time-wise from not ever having to think about homework...

I would test - the testing is probably much less stressful for your dd than it is for you

Before testing, I'd ask specifically about the verbal portion though - our school district has specific guidelines re testing and qualifying for our gifted program for children for whom English isn't their first language or isn't the language spoken at home. Not sure if your dd would qualify for any accommodations or alternative testing etc - but it's certainly worth looking into and understanding what the options are before testing. You should be able to ask whoever tests at your school, but if they don't have an answer or say there's nothing they can do, I'd also ask at the district level.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Thanks! Two Saturdays is a big deal, though, so it's not stressful but it is work.

They have an exemption for language which I do not support on ethical grounds. Effectively, if your home language is not English (about 30 - 40% of the school district reports a home language in addition to, or other than, English), you don't have to pass the verbal portion.

This creates an unfair advantage among the mathematically gifted, because only some of those children need to be verbally gifted as well, if that makes sense. If mommy speaks French and daddy speaks English, you can put French as the native language. Then the child needs only test in the math portion. But if mommy and daddy both speak English, even if daddy doesn't live at home, or mom is severely disabled, no matter: you have to pass verbal AND math portion. Parents each speak four languages and have homes in three countries? Exempt. Mom only at home, her great great grandmother was a slave, grandfather walked to Chicago in the 30s? No exemption for you!

I disagree with that in so many ways I can't begin to count. I know it's tough to be totally fair but I just cannot bring myself to say, "My child had this beautiful luck and advantage, so can you please hold her to a lower standard than the child who didn't have the good fortune to live abroad?"

I see your point but the way things work here is so perverse that I just can't bring myself to ask for a personal exception.

However if her teacher recommends it--because I know he would not do so if it weren't fair, like if he says, "This is just not accurate", then I'd consider submitting an exemption.

I respect your reluctance to accept any special treatment, but...

Let me point out that, in fact, children who have grown up bilingually have a different developmental trajectory in terms of their language development, so it makes sense not to penalize them because of this difference. And of course, we should not penalize other minority groups because of their circumstances either, but does it make sense to insist that, just because we don't have complete equity for all groups, we should not try to promote equity for any groups at all?

I realize that reasonable people can disagree on these attempts to restore equity in an inequitable world...

"just because we don't have complete equity for all groups, we should not try to promote equity for any groups at all?"

aeh I completely agree that there should, in an ideal world, be some way to test bilingual children, but in this situation, in which a large portion of privileged children speak a second language, and economically disadvantaged children are less likely to, what it ends up as is a way for people with advantages to appeal for special privileges.

I'm willing to participate in testing for my child's sake, just not to ask for an exception for myself, knowing what I do about how that works.

Anyway, who knows. She's been immersed in English for a year now and rather than reading one grade level ahead is reading 6th grade books, so maybe she's made up the gap.

I don't think you should discard an option just because some people can use it to game the system and obtain services their child would not otherwise qualify for. The option to exempt the verbal scores for multilingual children was created for a good reason, and your child matches the profile it was intended to fit.

I wouldn't let other people's dishonesty cause me to walk away from something my child honestly needs.

What you're concerned about re the test is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. The gifted program criteria require a child to test gifted in mathematical ability and verbal ability. *IF* the different entry criteria for ESL students simply reduces the bar for verbal ability (while testing in English), then yes, it's possible a few ESL students who are gifted in math and not in other areas *might* qualify that otherwise wouldn't have. 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. This wouldn't enable students who are gifted in math but not other subjects any way to slip into the program.


I don't know anything about the school district you are in, but this would not happen in our school district, and yes, we have a lot of privileged children who speak a second language, and yes, economically disadvantaged children here are less likely to have learned a second language - with the huge exception of when English isn't their *first* language. There's a big difference in a privileged child who's life has been enriched by learning a second language and a child (privileged or not) who's been raised in a bilingual or other-lingual home and not had the same exposure to the English language that the majority of children growing up in the US have daily in their homes. The intent of testing accommodations or criteria differences for *those* children is put in place to take away the bias or the test toward children who've been raised in an English-speaking home.

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.
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polarbear

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.

I didn't write the law/policy/whatever involved here, so I can't say what the intention was, but it seems to me that if you have a child who would receive VIX scores that are not representative of their abilities due to multilingualism, then that child is exactly the population the exemption is designed to serve. You can't directly compare monolingual children to multilingual children, because they have different language trajectories. If "language mastery" were a thing that could be converted to a mathematical value and plotted, the graph of a monolingual child would look more like a linear function, and a multilingual child would look more like an exponential function (in the language being tested).

Ethnicity is irrelevant.

"I can't say what the intention was"

I can, because the policy is clear. The exemption is intended to make room for children who have been disadvantaged, not for children whose families have voluntarily given them an extra tool in their academic toolkit. It was specifically put in place based on recommendations, available publicly, that the school district was not providing allowances for children of disadvantaged (poor, migrant, ELL) backgrounds. It is NOT for bilingual children who attended private school, or whose parents have been in the United States for 15 years on a highly qualified work visa and who have had the child in English-language high-quality pre-schools for three years.

"Ethnicity is irrelevant."

Ethnicity is not irrelevant because segregation based on know-how that gets passed down from generation to generation affects us all. There are clearly different cultural beliefs and different knowledge among social groups that are leading to a segregated system within the schools.

I would like to emphasize that this is actually an issue that is being debated and addressed actively by the school district. So while you may see no problem with segregating people by race based on cultural differences that lead to people taking advantage of different services, our school district has a problem with it. They just haven't solved it yet.

When there are rules and regulations that only some people are exploiting, we can choose to be part of the abuse of loopholes, or choose the honest route. Many people stop trying in society because they believe that they are shut out from achievement due to unfair advantages for other groups. That is where we get vicious cycles of racism. When the path to achievement is fair, more people (not all, but more) will participate and we all benefit from added talent, stability, etc.

"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself." - Jane Addams

I'm not religious but this pretty much sums it up for me. I'm not going to make an exception for myself or my family.

I have no desire to discuss abuse of loopholes intended for poor migrants and new immigrants to my own advantage. I won't do it. My child will get her education and I will do it though hard work, dedication, and creativity. If that leads to participation in a gifted program, great. But abusing loopholes is not an option.

Let's just assume for the sake of argument that the school district's policy is that only children of two non-native speakers, who have been in the country for fewer than three years, can apply for the linguistic exemption, since I believe that in the near future that's what they'll be implementing, anyway, due to the fact that they are working extremely hard to make this a program for children who have special needs, and not for children who have special privileges.

Supposing that were the case, does anyone have any advice on multiple testing?