I'd actually venture to say that it isn't that many of the kids in these districts are gifted; it's that many of the kids in these districts are high achievers who are wrongly identified as gifted. We, too, live in a district with much higher than state avg test scores where huge numbers of kids are ided as gifted. While my dds are probably more than MG, I'm not ready to say that they are so far out there gifted that they shouldn't be able to work with a classroom where a lot of the kids are MG. That might be a reasonable fit for at least one of them. Even one of the GT coordinators at a school dd12 has attended told me straight up that most of the kids who are in GT programming and ided as gifted aren't actually gifted but rather kids who score around the 95th percentile on grade level reading or math tests.
Seeing how huge the difference btwn these kids and dds is, I'd tend to agree that we don't have some unusual location where a lot of kids are gifted but rather an unusual lot of kids who are called gifted b/c they perform above the minimal grade level expectations. It's kind of a pet peeve of mine b/c it shouldn't be so hard to get the needs of my MG-HG kids met. I don't think that dd12, for instance, would need to be entering high school next year if the schools were better able to serve the needs of low end HG kids without the types of steps we've had to take to keep her learning a little something in at least one or two subjects.
I'm the type to give people the benefit of the doubt... I don't like to jump to conclusions about someone else's child being 'pushed' when I know my DD is probably being classified under that same title ... and if not she certainly will be at some point or other. When I read the first part of your post:
I'd actually venture to say that it isn't that many of the kids in these districts are gifted; it's that many of the kids in these districts are high achievers who are wrongly identified as gifted.
I was a little annoyed. It falls under us too? But then I kept reading and I think you have a valid point and it made me think about the district I live in. I still think we have higher than average gifted rates than most districts but this is also an upper middle class district and these kids usually have a full time parent at home and they are actively involved in many activities from a very early age. Take the sons of all my friends. ALL of them have been in OT at some point or other. I found that strange. All of them? This was to ensure they were writing by the time they were in Kindergarten. Now one of them really needed it and has/had other issues but for the most part I saw typical boy issues that would disappear with maturity but they chose to use OT to get them past that point.
