Well, I think there are two separate but related issues here. First, testing before around age 9 tends to yield variable results for at least a significant subset of children. Second, children actually have varying growth trajectories with the early bloomer and the late bloomer as extreme cases in point.
Absolutely!
I think the tougher issue for parents of a young child who seems quite clearly gifted is what to do with them in the meantime when the school has no services or very limited services in grades K-2.
Exactly! I think we're essentially unanimous about that around here. Above I said
As gifted advocates, we have to concede that early testing is unreliable, and misidentification (in either direction) at young ages will inevitably be common. So instead, the focus needs to be on how can schools provide all students the opportunity to learn at their own pace, no matter how fast or slow, without needing to identify them in advance. Schools have to embrace the idea that large differences in ability are very real, and that they will translate into large differences in achievement, if they are willing to allow that to happen.
But generally schools won't. We need to understand all the reasons why. There are some relatively "innocent" reasons such as ignorance, apathy, incompetence. (There may also be budgetary arguments, though we shouldn't find them particularly convincing. Does it really cost much more to merely let children learn at there own pace?)
But there are also some quite "sinister" reasons, megaphoned by the likes of Gladwell and his ilk, which is essentially an extremist nurture-and-not-nature ideology. These people
believe assert that children arriving in Kindergarten with more advanced skills are doing so as a consequence (exclusively, in the most extreme forms of this ideology) of their more privileged position in society. Essentialy these children are said to be ahead because they've been riding on a faster moving conveyor belt, before school age, and that once school has started, it is time to let the less privileged kids catch up. In this ideology it is unthinkable that kids who are ahead (due to unfair privilege) could be given even more privilege by continuing to be placed on a faster moving conveyor belt. Instead, the advanced children need to be slowed down or stopped. (To be clear, this not really about socioeconomic privilege. In the nurture-extremist position, the mere fact that one child is more intellectually advanced than another is, in and of itself, proof that the first child has been the undeserving recipient of unfair advantage, and this unfairness must be rectified.) What I'm describing might sounds like a caricature, but one should not underestimate the strength of the faction within education that acts with all its might, motivated by views like this.
