Given that range of ability all looking fairly similar on paper, I have to be honest in saying I don't know what schools can realistically do or where they draw the line.
I agree with this. I think--well, don't we KNOW?--that the tests get more than a little useless when we try to use them to distinguish top 1% from top .5%, or whatever. You can hope it's accurate, but I really just get the sense that these fine gradations are hard to figure out from a couple of hours of testing. It seems to me you learn a lot more through hands-on time with the kid and watching how they do on the ground when given multiple kinds of opportunities. I know--it's a dream world I'm living in.
I do have a child who looks "more gifted" in real life than she did on a test, but I don't even know what I attribute this to and I'm not sure it should matter. Her needs outpace the scores she got. Let's see where she can go with it, is my feeling. Now, I haven't yet had a kid who is the other way around (scores outpace what we see in real life), so I don't know how that would change my opinion. But it seems to me that if we drew a general net and got the top, say, 10%, we could then do beautifully if we gave all those kids a lot of different opportunities and saw how they did.
I also approach this from the POV of coming from a family with two kids IDed gifted and one who did not quite make it to the program. The sib who was not IDed is actually the most professionally successful, the most intellectual, and I would venture the "smartest" in many ways. The one with the highest IQ score is perhaps the most clever problem-solver, but well...that is what it is.
I guess I should add that whatever DD is or is not, she is not profoundly gifted in the "calculus and Goethe at 6" sense, so that probably also influences my opinion. I don't know what that is like, so I can't quite get what those kids woudl actually need.
