Yeah, I think this is what concerns me the most. I hate to judge but I do question the majority of the other students' LOG. I can't see how all 7 out of 50 kids are G&T, and how many of them could be HG like my dd? I think the fact that she has yet to truly connect to any of her classmates tells me that she is not in a group with her peers.
I did talk with a dad of one 1st grader who will be going into the G&T class and he said she was initially not selected for the program. He complained to the district about it and then they let her in. He also told me about how he tried to get his older dd in the G&T 2 years in a row and was denied.
The majority of the kids are screened with the COGAT. The district uses testing, parent reports, and teacher reports to determine eligibility for the program. The district doesn't list any minimum requirement on testing for admission.
Our local districts use the CogAT as well. Kids can be placed in GT programming with any of two of the following: 95th percentile score on any one part of the CogAT or OLSAT, achievement in the 95th percentile in any one subject or in the low advanced range or above an annual state test, high grades, parent or teacher recommendation, behavioral rating scales, and maybe some other things I am forgetting. The reality of it is that it is easier for a straight A student who is well regarded by teachers to get ided as gifted even without the high ability scores (or b/c s/he will be retested by teachers over and over until the group tests scores are there) than it is for a HG+ kid who doesn't fit in the box.
I, too, realize that I am probably coming off as judgmental here and hate to be that. However, the reality of it is that my dd has been deemed to be one of the most gifted kids a number of GT teachers have ever taught not b/c the kid is PG (she really isn't; she's HG+ and very directed), but rather b/c they are mostly teaching bright high achievers and run across gifted or HG so infrequently that it really stands out when they see it.
When I look back @ dd's kindergarten class, a full 20% of the kids in that class were later ided as gifted. It really wasn't that unusual of a class and dd was clearly a bit of an outlier in the class although at the time I didn't realize why she was having such a hard time. IMHO, when schools are iding something like 15% of their students as gifted (that's about avg here as well), you are either living in a planned community of Mensa members or the Silicon Valley or there is a problem with the identification procedures. In the latter instance, it often takes a lot more than GT programming to find a reasonable fit for a HG+ kid. In my older dd's instance, it has taken her bd making her the youngest in grade coupled with a grade skip, further subject acceleration, and the good luck to have a HG-PG girl in her grade who was 18 months older in middle school. In high school, she's wound up finding a good chunk of her friends in higher grades as well.
Thus our heartbreaking experiences with our own (Silicon Forest) district, which identifies fully
30% of its students as GT using a protocol very similar to the one that Cricket discusses. Statistically? Yeah-- NO. Ten percent I
might believe to be MG. After all, it's high tech, medical, and Uni employment for about 85% of this town, but 30% stretches credibility beyond the breaking point. We know a number of kids in the district, and not all of those gifted kids
are gifted. Most of them are bright and highly to moderately motivated. Some of them are genuinely MG.
We've heard the exact same wonderment/shock from educators from day one, which I can only conclude to mean that statistically, there's nothing really wrong with the Bell curve, and that DD really
is that far to the right on it.
The district offers NOTHING more for kids who are what I call "the real deal." Oh, sure, occasionally they'll do a single acceleration, and maybe a subject accel. We know of one of the former (a friend of my DD's in fact), and a handful of the latter.
They simply GAPE at a child like my DD (who is certainly HG+, but only possibly truly PG, in our minds). Maybe she really is. I guess that would explain our sense of disconnect with kids that other people seem to think of as "brilliant" and we think of as "brighter-than-average."
DD has met so few HG/HG+ peers in her life... and largely, she's run into them via hanging out on the fringes of geeky activities, not by socializing with identified "gifted" kids in formal settings. Her virtual charter school draws them in disproportionate numbers-- small wonder, eh?-- and even so, there are only 2-5 of them per grade level, out of 275-400 students per grade.
Brick and mortar schools are horrible places to send HG/HG+ children in this state. There is no authentically differentiated curriculum for those students, and few placement options that are even remotely helpful. Assuming that the district even recognizes what they are seeing, I mean-- and sometimes they don't.
