nevermind

Our state is a joke when it comes to G/T identification and education. In our district, the cut off is 98% on Cogat/Iowa for a half day pull out session once a week. 99% is cut off for full time if there is room. Our district is made up of many families that work at tech companies like Microsoft, Google, etc. so lots of highly educated people. If I go 1 mile to the east, that school district has a 90% cut off and offers a much more robust program but the district is also smaller and there is less competition. Attending there would mean having to move into that district zone. I gave up on our district when the director of the program spoke at a conference and said that in order to comply with state mandated gifted education, he was going to have a teacher drive to a different school each day and provide 30min of enrichment education to the kindergartners each week.

I'm in Canada and we don't have a provincial standard. Our system is a bit different in that most cities are served by at least two public school boards - public and Catholic (there's a whole lot of history and politics behind that). In my city we actually have 4 publicly funded school boards (English, English Catholic, French and French Catholic).

This results in kids being id'ed gifted in one school but not in the one across the street or the other two down the road that your next door neighbor attends. Or maybe 3 out of the 4 of them while another kid qualifies for a different 3 out of the 4 or only 1 of the 4.

None of these are transferable though so each board labels their own. That part seems kind of nuts - there is a bit of a difference between 90 and 97 or whatever other arbitrary cut off there is.

I don't even know what our state standards are FWIW, there are different id levels and different services provided in our school district.

From my perspective, it's a hugely complicated issue, defining what is and isn't gifted. While guidelines/criteria may very from district to district, programming varies also, as well as student population. It's quite possible that the classroom experience of a student who's in a Silicon-Valley-esque neighborhood with most students having highly educated parents might not need to be id'd as "gifted" because the peer group and resources available in the classroom drives a high-enough level of learning. OTOH, a child who is "only" at 90th percentile in a classroom in a poverty-challenged neighborhood may very well need to be id'd as gifted to get an appropriate education. At the end of the day, I feel like the gifted label is nothing more than that - a label. The issue is being sure students are able to access an appropriate level of educational challenge, and how that happens is going to vary between (and sometimes within) school districts.

polarbear

You may wish to invite her to join the forum?

This forum is public, unlike the private forum for DYS families, so anyone can join. Posters don't need to have kids, gifted or otherwise, much less DYS level gifted kids.

I think that state statutes are intentionally very general and somewhat vague on the specfics for good reasons, including the programming and funding pieces. I kind of look at this situation a bit differently. It isn't an issue of a specific IQ number per se, but an issue of how extreme the child's cognitive ability and achievements are compared to his local peers. In the matter of portability of GT identification, including among states, I have seen situations where kids are simply removed from the GT programs when the new districts have evidence that the kids do not actually fit in with their own GT standards; conversely, kids who come in to another district/state without the GT label can either test in immediately or upon teacher recommendation after some time in the classroom. We still live in an era when localized control of education (curriculum, assessment, etc.) is idealized.

Our state has a pretty good ID program. If you hit the right scores on the assessments, you're in, end of story. If you just miss the cut-off, there are human factors (teacher recommendation, etc) that come into play, which can serve to benefit 2e, gifted underachievers, etc. Of course, this also opens the door to hothouse flowers, but no system is perfect.

Content delivery and implementation/following of formal policies are areas where we could use significant improvement.