Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Definitions

Well, our school district has GT (gifted and talented) teachers at every school at least one day per week. Used to be more, went down with budget cuts. Anyway, the GT teachers do enrichment and pullouts with generally the top 10% of kids at every school in our district, as identified by the required testing in 2nd grade.

Our district then has an HGT (highly gifted and talented) program that serves only the children testing top 2%. Those children can go to one of five elementary schools and a single middle school that have a magnet HGT program colocated with a regular school. You cannot attend one of those programs unless you test in the top 2%.

Regarding how narrowly we define giftedness for the sake of explaining to others that gifted kids within whatever range have more severe needs than kids at a slightly lower range, I have a lot of thoughts that I can't put together coherently right now. I agree with ultramarina. I think that HG and PG kids are vastly different from MG kids, based on reading posts on this forum over the past year. In that sense, maybe even the top 2% definition is too generous. My top 2%-er is doing fine in a regular public school classroom with subject acceleration in math and grade level ability grouping in reading; but, we're at an academically rigorous school with bright kids and an administration that embraces subject acceleration and ability grouping; and we're about to screen for dyslexia.

I think everyone falls on a continuum and it's very difficult to draw a line, but I read the posts from those of you with HG and PG children, and you have to deal with a whole host of issues that I don't have to deal with, thus far, with my MG children. In that sense, and to respond to the OP's requests, perhaps the more narrow the definition, the easier it is for parents of very highly gifted children to explain to educators what they're dealing with; but only if educators understand the differences in the first place.

Oh, you mean in real life Cricket

Like Coll (and probably many of us), I think there is a massive difference between MG and HG+. Even within that top 1% I think there is a huge difference. In fact I know kids who have scored the same as dd (>99.99) and she is a couple of years ahead of them without any effort on our behalf.

Given that range of ability all looking fairly similar on paper, I have to be honest in saying I don't know what schools can realistically do or where they draw the line.

But on top of that there is this massive push toward tutoring. In Australia there is no mandated requirement to accommodate gifted kids as far as I am aware (there is reference to meeting all kids needs in state policies, but the ones I have read are very broad), so we don't really have the same issues here in terms of determining who gets access to what beyond what families advocate for themselves (at least in primary school - we have selective high schools).

At dd's school kids are being tutored from K. This skews teacher perception of what gifted looks like. Dd's old teacher constantly told me dd couldn't be gifted in math because she couldn't add quickly in her head like the other kids in her class. Dd's testing shows maths to be her major strength and she was working on maths problems 4 grades ahead by her self at home, but this teacher just couldn't see it. She had a who class of other kids reciting what they had learnt at Kumon.

DD changed teachers mid year and I mentioned to her new teacher that the previous one had said she had problems with her computation. The new teacher got her to solve a range of problems using different approaches and said she had no problems with computation, dd just found it easier using visual cues. The teacher said her concern is for the vast majority of kids in her class who are tutored by rote - she said they can answer lots of sums off the top of their head, but give them a written problem and they have no idea how to apply that to the verbal instructions and so don't really understand how to apply what they have learnt.

So when schools are faced test results that show the same thing for two vastly different kids, when they have tutored kids seemingly out pacing the gifted kids and figure they don't need to delve any deeper, I don't know that the gifted label means anything. What you do about that I have no idea (in real world terms).

If I had to draw a line in the sand I'd say in my very limited experience MG kids can be accommodated in the classroom with a good teacher. For HG, perhaps with acceleration. For PG, I personally have not yet seen it work well in our school system at all (but we have a very different system here and I am only going of the handful of PG kids I know from trying to source them as peers for dd).

Sorry, have to run so have not had time to re-read and see if I have made any sense.

Omg. Ditto. Yeah that. �

I see what you're getting at. �Teachers should have heard about standard deviations of IQ in teacher school so they have some reference when a parent mentions it. �That wouldn't give us easier answers. �My thoughts are I'll let the boy go to school if he behaves. �I'll tell him "they won't let you go to school if you don't behave." I know some teachers like smart kids, some don't. �(here I am calling pglets smart kids). �I've already told the hubby, "I'll let him go as long as he likes it, but if he gets a year with a cruel teacher I'm not sending him." And, "if they ever ask my advice about his placement I'll answer 'put him in the class of whichever teacher wants to teach him." Any grade elementary teacher can teach him. �A good attitude that wants to teach him is my preference.

I can't be the only one cringing at the knowledge that I can only base my decisions on the behaviors of kids and adults and not on the value of the education offered at an educational institution? � �
�Probably with a school motto that reverences Excellence and such.

The only thing I've seen mentioned that would be great is if the school could receive funds to offer private tutoring for some of the subjects for the narrowly defined gifted kids during school time. �That would make the narrow definition become useful.

I guess I'm saying that certain youngsters aren't going to get their needs met by the schools. �Period. �I intend to send him to public school when he's old enough. �There's no policy that would let him get a free appropriate public education. �There only blanket policies about allowing full grade skips on a pre-defined schedule. �How efficient sounding. �Family and friends keep saying either, "He'll be teaching the class by the time he starts school." �or �"He's too smart. �He needs to quit learning stuff or else the school won't want him." �I might have already over-did it. �He's going to have to toe the line to even be welcome at school.

Elementary school teachers usually require a General Studies degree and Education classes, which presumably does not include Statistics, so when you start talking about standard deviations, their eyes glaze over. Maybe it helps by explaining that the PG kid is as different from the MG kid as the MG kid is from the norm.

I'd say that if a school wants to identify the top 10-15% as "gifted," for special services, as long as they're going to ability-group within that, and/or allow for self-pacing, I'm cool with that. But if they're going to just call it all one group and offer them the same curriculum, I'd say they need to get a clue.

My DS's school last year identified 20 GT kids in a class of slightly less than 100. Then they take 6 or 7 of them and put them in each into 3 GT cluster rooms. I asked, can't you just put them all in one room since you have so many. Our cutoff is supposed to be 98th percentile. No one seems to see the statistical anomaly in that.

I find it important too, Cricket2, first because it would be impossible to get my 99.9%+ kid's needs met in that environment but also because I feel that the district does a disservice to kids/parents when it does this. These kids are bright, but to id some of them as gifted is a stretch and I wonder what it does down the road to those kids who were "gifted" as children but are not really gifted. Plus, there are a whole lot of social emotional issues that come along with being gifted that a program that lumps the top 20% together cannot begin to address.

I'm a lawyer-engineer. I still might go to med school.

Then I would be a doctor, lawyer, and engineer.

I've noticed that it doesn't take that much effort to simply *be* an engineer or a lawyer. And lawyers and engineers don't make that much money, on average. I suspect I would be making more as an engineer that a lawyer, though. Although I would have to work around dangerous chemicals.

Thus ends my career and economic commentary for today.

I'm pretty sure that we had a 135 cutoff for the gifted program in my school growing up. I think there were about 10-15 kids from a class of 250. Middle class area.

I agree with this. I think--well, don't we KNOW?--that the tests get more than a little useless when we try to use them to distinguish top 1% from top .5%, or whatever. You can hope it's accurate, but I really just get the sense that these fine gradations are hard to figure out from a couple of hours of testing. It seems to me you learn a lot more through hands-on time with the kid and watching how they do on the ground when given multiple kinds of opportunities. I know--it's a dream world I'm living in.

I do have a child who looks "more gifted" in real life than she did on a test, but I don't even know what I attribute this to and I'm not sure it should matter. Her needs outpace the scores she got. Let's see where she can go with it, is my feeling. Now, I haven't yet had a kid who is the other way around (scores outpace what we see in real life), so I don't know how that would change my opinion. But it seems to me that if we drew a general net and got the top, say, 10%, we could then do beautifully if we gave all those kids a lot of different opportunities and saw how they did.

I also approach this from the POV of coming from a family with two kids IDed gifted and one who did not quite make it to the program. The sib who was not IDed is actually the most professionally successful, the most intellectual, and I would venture the "smartest" in many ways. The one with the highest IQ score is perhaps the most clever problem-solver, but well...that is what it is.

I guess I should add that whatever DD is or is not, she is not profoundly gifted in the "calculus and Goethe at 6" sense, so that probably also influences my opinion. I don't know what that is like, so I can't quite get what those kids woudl actually need.

I have one of each. I get frequent comments about dd13 -- how out different she is, how she seems so much older than she is, etc. On paper she straddles the bar on IQ right btwn MG and HG. She's easily HG+ in my mind and has performed academically as such but she's not DYS level gifted.

Dd11, on the other hand, does have DYS level IQ scores but doesn't look like it often and her achievement scores are all over the place. Then again, she is 2e...

I guess that what I don't see happening in practice is what a lot of you mention here: varied services w/in the GT programming we have. At best, some areas (not mine) in bigger cities have HG programs like Denver or Seattle and those take kids who are at a 98th percentile composite point. There is still a lot of variation there in LOG when you are looking @ 98th+.

Locally, they don't even go that far. Kids with 95th percentile achievement in any one area are lumped in with globally gifted PG kids. The only differentiation we've seen is the ability to subject accelerate two years in math for kids who are really quite gifted in that one area. And then, of course, grade skips. Dd13 wound up going the grade skip route b/c the general GT lumping really wasn't a fit for her.

I would expect that these "gifted" not quite gifted kids do just fine as adults.

I'm not exactly seeing any kind of downside to being more intelligent than "only" 90% of the population.

In fact, the program probably does just fine for almost everyone in the "best 20%" group thanks to the magic of statistics.

That is what the parents of the two PG kids I met here said. They home-school and send them to community college and keep them in public for social reasons.

I know of two other PG kids from friend's kids at local privates as well. They are subject accelerated 4+ years. The latter seem to be found in 1 out of every four grades. The privates seem to be very attuned to what these kids look like.

As for tutoring. That is going on here in some communities and skews the results on many standardized tests. A psych friend has seen kids showing up 100% prepped for some IQ tests. A lot of privates now have their own tests they give as well. It screens out most of the tutored kids.

Your comment about changing the problem to a verbal one requiring coding and problem set up is astute.

As for teachers. Here is what I have found.

Most have teaching degrees and are not equipped to deal with a PG kid once the kids start getting into HS or college level math/science. If the best math teacher at the school does not have a math degree then they will not be able to teach much beyond Algebra I at the level a PG kid needs. From there, they need a teacher with a hard degree and graduate level experience.