Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The numbers don't add up...

I just looked on my states education site and was a little confused... It says that my state has about 629,000 students from k-12... it also says that there are 99,000 in rolled in the gifted program... but if the gifted program is supposed to be the top 3%... Why aren't I seeing only 18,000-19,000 kids in the gifted program.... Am I missing something or do I live in a state that has somehow found a way to dumb down the gifted program the way they did the normal public school system.

Everyone is gifted!

No, seriously, many educators/school systems have a lot of trouble accepting that some kids are way brighter than others.

I calculated that 15.7% of the students are in your district's gifted program. It may be that they've admitted everyone whose IQ score (or whatever score they use) was at least 1 standard deviation above the mean (this would be an IQ of ~115 or higher). I'm speculating here because the numbers match.

Val

In our school, in the elementary at least, a child qualifies for math & language arts pullouts seperately. There are about 4 kids out of 90 who qualify for both, and another 2-3 who qualify for one of the two.
Then another kid could be identified by the school as gifted artistically or musically, but there are no programs for them in elementary school in our district.

Same as perviously posted... In our district a child could be served for math, reading, and/or pure IQ/cognitive. If they count all the kids it would be a vastly higher number than just the cognitive (traditionally defined gt). I don't care if they are inflating the numbers to make it seem more worthy as long as it isn't getting watered down.

h'mmm how did Washington state fare?

Where is all that data Dottie? I would love to see how we're doing here in the "land of the gifted". I am sure the number is very high. Out GT program has a cutoff score of EITHER a 132 on the NNAT OR a 132 on any one section of the Cogat.

We are at a little over 10% statewide but the county data would be much more telling. There is a big disparity throughout the state in population and resources.