This perfectly captures what happened for DS' entire first grade year. In addition, these mistakes and non-compliance were held up as evidence that DS was unlikely to be gifted, since "we've had gifted children and they are always the ones finding something productive to do." (DS was finding his version of productivity, entertaining his classmates with his comedic routines. The teachers were not amused.) He later tested at the PG level.
And also something I fought against for years when I was on the gifted screening committee in my old district; teachers consistently referred kids with IQs in the 110s who were personable, compliant, and worked quickly, and routinely overlooked a few kids with CogAT and ITBS scores in the 130s across the board. Oh, and they underreferred students of color and linguistic minorities, too.
I think one of the problems is that a lot of teachers refer children who are like themselves, or an idealized picture of themselves at that age.
ConnectingDots could have been describing my DD's year with her math teacher (her Language Arts teacher seems to understand her, at least). The math teacher actually wanted to put her in the slow-moving group because she didn't comply with a lot of this teacher's requirements about type of paper, position of name, date, and staple, and so on. Refused to believe me when I tried to explain that DD is gifted.
Aeh, what you wrote is interesting. I stumbled across and old article in the NY Times about gifted programs in New York, and one of the commenters said the basically same thing: that gifted minority students get overlooked (have just tried and failed to find that comment in a field of 176 of them
). That's very disturbing.
