giftedcypher, we I think are in a similar district. A lot of educated smart parents with probably smart kids. Everyone thinks their kid is gifted and who am I to say, maybe they are right. What I have pieced together about our district is that about 5 yrs ago, they got dinged by the state for having too many children in the GT program so they changed the criteria to have a hard cutoff on testing of two scores above 97 %tile (ie not just full scale or verbal or perf but 2/3) in order to reduce the size of the program. They also looked at portfolio, teacher rec, grades but nothing could get past the testing. I have heard of kids being 99%tile in one or the other and not making it. They don't communicate well about private testing and the parent really has to work to find out information about appeals of the screening test providing portfolios, etc.
I could write a long extended story but I guess my main complaint in districts like this is if the kids are so smart why do they not group the kids to allow teachers to accelerate those that can handle it? Teach more in the regular classroom. Maybe this is too complicated or not PC. I know that classrooms are supposed to have a mix so that the lower kids want to achieve. At work one of my co-workers called it "No Child Gets Ahead" vs NCLB.
But really when I took DD8 to public school amid claims that they could "differentiate" for her, I got 1.5 yrs of single digit addition that she knew 3 yrs prior. Since I didn't know any better it took me a while to come to the conclusion that it was ridiculous that she couldn't start doing more she already knew the basics of mult/div/fractions so we started Aleks. All of this in a district where I would guess greater than 70% of the kids have at least one parent who is an engineer, Dr or lawyer.
Last edited by mschaff; 03/19/09 09:46 AM.
