Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Too many kids in GT programs?

Nutmeg,

Sometimes they include high achievers in the gifted class to have similar teacher student ratio with other class. But beileve it or not, there will be discrepant concentration of gifies. In our districts, some schools have less than 5% but some have about 18% (in better SE neighborhoods). BTW, it is published in the distict website.

And one HS has about 8% of seniors are NMS finalists or National Hispanic Scholars (48/586) and one HS has only 1 NHS out of >600 seniors.

This is the issue in my area. At the end of 2nd grade, about 20% of my DS's grade was IDed as gifted (there were about 20 kids total) for the 3rd grade. I don't live in an affluent, well educated area, but many of the kids who statistically would not be considered gifted - (ie would not be 130 or more (our state says top 98th percentile)are identified for the gifted program because they see putting them with the other 80% as a diservice to them. The interesting thing about the situation was they did a cluster grouping model for the gifted program but they took those 20 kids that they had over identified and put them in 3 different classrooms. We left that school before 3rd grade.

Our district seems pretty tough. DD has about 80 kids in her grade and 4 are identified as gifted and put into the "cluster group" (which probably isn't an appropriate name for what it is). For the special magent school kids have to have a composite score on an ability test of 132 PLUS score 98th-99th percentile on both reading AND math achievement tests. If a kid has math and not reading (or vice versa), chances are low they would be accepted. If their composite on the ability test is 139+ they are not as strict about the achievement tests.

DD does have other kids in her class who are not "identified" who do the enriched work if they are able. I doubt any kind of enrichment happens in the classes that do not have the gifted clusters. So there could be high-ability kids in the two other classes who do not get any differentiated work, simply because they missed the cut-offs by a couple points.

Our district is pretty tough as well. To qualify for testing for gifted program, kids need to be at 95th percentile in reading and math on fall MAP. They then take the wonderful CoGat. They must score in the 95th percentile. testing is in 2nd grade for services in 3rd. For our magnet (school within a school self contained classrooms), the child needs to score in the 98th percentile on fall MAP in both reading and math. They then take CoGat and must score in the 98th percentile. They then take the WISC and must be in the 97th percentile.

Here you need to be 130 or above on an IQ test (no achievement test), but there is another option for low-income/minority kids with slightly lower scores. I think the second option is not well known. You have to pass a pretest to take the IQ test.

I do not know of ANY kids who got around these rules, but I do know of some who tested several times.

Despite the fairly high bar, I think about 10-15% of the district is IDed. But there are demographic reasons for that.

Many of the children in DD's magnet would not qualify under these rules that require very high scores in both reading and math. I see how that makes the teachers' jobs easier, but it seems sad to me. Some kids' abilities are uneven, but it doesn't make them average.

My 6-year-old DS has a 141 WISC score for non-verbal and 114 for verbal. He is brilliant in math and visual-spatial ability but I doubt he will be able to get into the magnet when the time comes, unless that WISC verbal score doesn't really correlate with reading ability (or it was an erroneous score). His GAI is currently above the cut-off but he will need the reading and math scores over the 98th percentile. So far he has advanced reading ability and was reading well before Kindergarten but I don't know if it will last. So here is a kid who will probably need to be subject accelerated a few years for math, and will be ahead of some of the kids in the magnet for math, but won't qualify. Who knows if he'll even qualify for the cluster group!
The other thing that really irks me is that i think it is possible for parents to prep a kid for the CogAT and it's a bad test anyway, esp. for 2e kids. So are the kids who are scoring 139+ really gifted or were they prepped? Who knows! And how many 2e kids are being left out?

Totally agree.

I know! Poor 2e kids and kids of people who didn't prep! My ds was given a GAI of 142, but the tester said after VT, that score should increase 10-15 pts.

It just makes no sense. They know or have a good idea who needs extension. Instead of putting them together to make it easier they put one in each class! Surely putting them at least in pairs wouldn't upset anyone.