http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/n...-gifted-from-the-just-well-prepared.html
Schools Ask: Gifted or Just Well-Prepared?
By JENNY ANDERSON
New York Times
February 17, 2013

When the New York City Education Department announced that it was changing part of its admissions exam for its gifted and talented programs last year, in part to combat the influence of test preparation companies, one of those companies posted the news with links to guides and practice tests for the new assessment.

The day that Pearson, a company that designs assessments, announced that it was changing an exam used by many New York City private schools, another test prep company attempted to decipher the coming changes on its blog: word reasoning and picture comprehension were out, bug search and animal coding were in.

If you did not know what to make of it — and who would? — why not stop by?

Assessing students has always been a fraught process, especially 4-year-olds, a mercurial and unpredictable lot by nature, who are vying for increasingly precious seats in kindergarten gifted programs.

In New York, it has now become an endless contest in which administrators seeking authentic measures of intelligence are barely able to keep ahead of companies whose aim is to bring out the genius in every young child.

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Ability grouping in all schools would reduce the pressure to get one's children in a gifted school. I have a 2nd-grader with an IQ in the 110s who is currently working on fractions successfully with EPGY. The public schools won't even try to discover what he knows, because it is more convenient and politically palatable for them to keep all children at the same place.

"George P. Davison, who runs Grace Church School in Manhattan, said that he knew how much test prep inflated results because when siblings of current students applied, they tended to score a few points lower."

I take it sample selection and mean reversion are not covered at the Grace Church School ... (To say nothing of birth order effects)

I do wonder what the gifted programs look like in NYC, then. Are they programs that truly serve the needs of HG kids or are they like our GT programs that work maybe a year ahead and work quite well for bright kids but not really gifted kids?

I wonder b/c, although we have nothing like NYC's prepping industry locally, we do have a lot of parental prepping, teacher prepping for kids who they think are GT, and alternative means of getting into GT even if you don't have the ability scores (which aren't that high in and of themselves). Even that amount of prep/alternative admission winds up filling out GT classes with mostly high achievers and very few actually gifted kids. As a result, the programming itself is generally not appropriate for gifted kids.

Much of our GT programming is geared at more of the same faster rather than greater depth or abstraction (although I must give credit to the few teachers who do try for the later over the former). Even when the curriculum is designed with the gifted child in mind, not the prepped high achiever, though, the depth of the conversations in the classroom are limited by the student body, which again, is generally not made up of gifted kids.

I recall one of dd14's middle school teachers bemoaning to me how they were giving out As to kids who turned in the work on time and had the formulary responses but not the kids who were doing innovative or high quality work. It reminded me of this blog on the "formula" for getting high SAT writing scores on the essay: http://www.applerouth.com/blog/2009/06/01/in-praise-of-folly-writing-the-sat-essay/ Kids who follow the formula score highly, but are we really teaching the gifted kids or grading in the GT classes in such a way as to distinguish who is doing gifted work? Locally for me, no.

Cricket2
They kind of squished together different tests and different schools in this article. THe private schools use the ERB which is pieces of the WISC, Hunter uses pieces of the SB V and the public gifted system had used the OSLAT and Bracken and switched to OLSAT and Naglieri.

The private schools are independent so their interests and use of the tests are different. They do not purport to be for HG or above but some get good differentiation.

The public schools have two tiers - 90% on combined score gets you regular GT which gets enrichment. 97% and above gets you citywide gifted. Citywide gifted is accelerated not just enriched. In practice all citywides need a 99% score to get in and in the last years there have been more 99s than seats in the 5 schools. In some areas the regular GT can be classes of 99s as well as they were shut out of citywide.

The parents of pepped kids think there is little difference, as its a question or two on a test on a given day, and then the kid is in a great school. In he regular GT classes I doubt it's a problem. After all, 90 is pretty different from 97. However in the citywides, the prepped kids are fairly obvious to the teachers, and to the kids after awhile. They need much more support to move as quickly or as deeply. It's such a disservice to the kids but the parents do it because they think the schools are so much better, I think because they see the stuff and the curriculum not the speed or the effort required.

A high end HG or PG is not challenge as much as they could be by this system but its still a lot better than being in a regular classroom. There is a lot less boredom.

So my view is that the regular GT works well for kids who can work ahead but The teacher really matters as they haven to work with a range in their classroom. The citywides really challenge the regular bright kids and hit a sweet spot for a lot of HG kids. I think the high HGs and even PGs could be served as well but that's more dependent on other factors. What really makes the citywides valuable is the range of skill sets is narrower so a lot less problems for the younger kids about bad fit with classmates.

DeHe

This.

All of it.

It is maddening.

The difference between our "prepping" and that referred to in the article (and in the local GT parlance) is that we are teaching our DD how to conform well enough to be clearly identified.

Once she knows the "rules" she can run laps around "prepped" kids-- even those four to six years older.

That is what HG+ really looks like. ~sigh~

To be honest, I am kind of amazed by the range of abilities in DD's magnet school--and these are all kids who test 99th%+. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but if I didn't know that those were the requirements I would think we were looking at a class of 90th%+. I know there are LDs in the class and there certainly ARE some kids who are way out there, beyond DD (which would make sense, as she scored MG!) So anyway, since we have kids who are working hard to handle the curriculum, which is generally 1-2 years ahead, and this is a 99th% group...I can see a real issue for HG kids if other places are more watered down.

Agreed; no, we're not teaching them anything except how to excel at mediocrity. Swell.

That said, his blog post was certainly eye-opening. I knew that you had to pack in as much as possible and use lots of examples, but all this seems completely reasonable. I knew that they don't spend much time on those essays, but figured a few minutes, not 90 seconds. And for those who didn't follow the link, here's the astounding bit:


In today's lesson, we have a perfect example of how standardized tests encourage people to excel at mediocrity. (This is by no means a criticism of Mr. Applerouth; I'm impressed, in fact. I wish more had come of this and IMO, it deserves a edu-scandal equal to the one caused by our friends the hare and the pineapple).

Yes, and while I fully believe that our town skews "high" in terms of ability in offspring...

when you're identifying 30% of your middle school population as "Talented and Gifted" then unless this is a school housed in a remote National Laboratory or something... or maybe a preschool which caters to the faculty of an Ivy...

there is clearly no way that all of those kids are even 99th percentile.

I've also been (crisply) informed by local organizers that there is "no difference" between kids like my DD (99.9th) and her peers who are more like barely squeaking over the 90th percentile. Yeah-right. Not unless there are 2E issues at work.

In our (upper income, university town) school district, 25% of the kids test as gifted, defined as 96% or above on the OLSAT (or a test like the WISC, etc.).
That has been the argument as to why the school board has been trying to get rid of or at least limit our gifted program, which runs one grade level ahead. That "too many kids" are testing into it. that seems like such a silly argument.
We have at our high school about 30 NMF/commended scholars a year, quite a lot, and the high school offers 20 AP classes. Alot of IQ is linked to- the education level and income level of the family, so I am not surprised if alot of kids in our district hit the required metric.

Maybe they have the 90th percentile kids.

Then you make them feel bad about their kids.

That's mean.

I think that there are different modes of intelligence.

So, you have different types of abilities, some of which are more obvious than others at the 99-point-whatever level.

JonLaw--yes, I agree....there are obviously some kids who are more gifted in math and others who are more verbal, for instance. This makes things tricky, because some of them are ready to write pages and pages while others need a lot of help with basic composition. Some could be working 3-4 grades ahead in math while others are probably best served by a compacted curriculum one grade ahead at most. Then there are quite a few outside the box kids who are obviously artistic, creative, and not as "schooly." The limitations of the magnet model are pretty obvious; yet it's the best option I can see for us right now. The best thing they've done is incorporate a ton of fairly open-ended special projects which the kids can customize to their interests and talents.

I think that is the failing, ultimately, of radical acceleration.

It does a lousy job of truly meeting gifted needs (since it doesn't account for asynchrony and pacing differences), and the greater the asynchrony, the more badly it seems to meet those needs.

Like ultramarina, though, as long as AP/Gifted is intended for 90th+ and not for 99th+ students, acceleration is the best we can do.

It just makes me mad that this is mostly true because actual differentiation isn't available for the kids that are most in need of it-- because honestly, I can see the logic behind the angst directed at gifted programs that cater to the not-quite-gifted...

because those kids are "ideally" intelligent, and realistically, most of them don't have unmet needs the way kids at the tails of the distribution do.

Our local district's answer to this is to suggest that "ALL of our coursework is directed at the gifted population" and note how many AP courses they offer. Well, of course. When you've identified 30% of the students as GT, then it makes sense to make it part of the regular curriculum. The problem is that if you don't set the bar any higher than 90th percentile (and, as noted by cricket, there are very definitely ways around even THAT cutoff if you happen to be an insider), the kids who are another couple of standard deviations out from the mean still don't have their needs met, and administrators can pat themselves on the back all they like... but it doesn't change the fact that much of what is happening under the guise of "gifted" instruction.... isn't. Because that would be mean, wouldn't it? To offer instruction to kids at the 80th-95th percentiles as though they were as able as the kid in that room who is 99.9th.

I realize that I'm on my soapbox about this... but I truly just wish that "gifted" programs would quit calling themselves that and start calling it something more stigmatizing/less desirable somehow. The kids that actually need the differentiation might actually get some that way.

This kind of arms race of helicopter parenting has pretty deleterious effects on HG+ students, after all. It leads to policies that reward parents with the greatest persistence and resources, not students with greatest ability.

Actually, I wish that gifted programs would just go away and be replaced with teaching aimed at an appropriate level. Note: this would require transparent standards so that teacher can't say, "Well, your five-year-old only got 93% on our end-of-first-grade math test and therefore she clearly isn't ready for second grade math."

How many gifted programs are even worthwhile? Last year, DS was in the gifted math program (15% of the class) and they spent a lot of time painting the basketball court. How many people here complain that the gifted "program" is a two-hour weekly pullout that's not available until fourth grade and that involves stuff that's relatively pointless compared to meaningful learning?

My DD's school offered two hours a day, and the result was a slapdash, haphazard approach to learning that was beginning to open some serious gaps in her education. We know a fifth grader who has been in this system for a few years, and her gaps are shocking.

Which is ironic when you consider one of the school's main arguments against acceleration was gaps.

It isn't just appropriate level, it is appropriate method and rate of instruction, too.

I wish the word pedagogical term acceleration actually meant acceleration. If a car is travelling a constant 100mph to a destination city 1200mph away and teleports instantaneously 200 miles towards the destination. Even though it's average rate of travel has increased, it has never accelerated. Even compacting misses the point. Though it seems like grade skipping and compacting can help.

Sometimes I think what my kids (ALL kids!) really need is a modernized one-room schoolhouse....

However, there are some real benefits to DD to being in the full-day gifted program. She's very happy socially, and has lost the unattractive vibe of "Why is everyone else so...slow?" that she was developing. I sometimes wonder about the long-term consequences of being segregated in this way, though.

Intelligence is considered so important that any term designating people as more or less intelligent will become controversial. Quoting the Wikipedia article on "imbecile":

Our district offers a self-contained gifted program to students scoring 99% on one or more of three general areas in their screening test (a matrix of the CogAT/ITBS) and outside testing is also accepted. The program is space limited, test scores are only a pre-req and a written application is required as part of the process. Our DS6 was tested in K last year, scored 99% in all three areas and was wait-listed for the program.

In district information, parent forum discussions and other info I have gathered, the program is characterized in descriptions and in name as an alternative program. An alternative for those students for whom the neighborhood school is not working. The program retention rate is extremely high and some parents comment that there is simply no other option, public or private, save homeschooling that is an option for their student. I do not have direct knowledge of the application review criteria and can only guess at this point. However, difficulty making age peer friends, behavioral and emotional issues, high asynchrony - the frustrations and challenges that many of the parents on this board face on a daily basis - very likely make up many of the reasons for interest in the program and are reflected in the applications that are accepted.

We are thankful that our DS is happy and doing well in our neighborhood school and, for now, it is our least worse option. We also are supporters of the self-contained program and hope that it can grow beyond it's current constraints so that it can serve a greater number of students.

(As an aside, this topic prompted me to post for the first time. The discussions on this board have been of great help to us -- Thank you!)

You mean as opposed to the recognition that you stand astride the world like a colossus and a supreme confidence in your own opinion to the exclusion of all those opinions outside of your own?

(I'm betting that I'm the only person who's ever yelled out in their sleep "The only opinion I care about is my own!" I woke up everybody in the house that time, too. Fortunately, I'm always able to go right back to sleep.)

*Claps*

That image was priceless. Thanks JonLaw.

Hmm. My ten-year-old used to yell "I am Batman!!" in his sleep when he was four.

But I think Batman cared about Robin's opinion occasionally.

Yes! They just want to stamp them "PASSED." When I taught honors/AP English I was on my own for actually teaching the gifted kids something new.