Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Lottery to gain entrance

I think though there is a big difference between a gifted school or program than a magnet school or program. IMO a gifted one would be open to more kids and a lottery makes sense . To a magnet program should be more by the numbers.

I can see how the system of public schooling generally can arrive at a lottery system for gifted education. But it horrifies me. It plainly gives the lie to the idea of providing a free and appropriate public education for every kid. Giftedness indicates a different set of needs. Those needs don't go away when a child loses the lottery.

In its favor, I can see that a lottery system is probably better than no gifted education, which was the case in my own school years. And it is more fair than providing a decent education for the kids in prosperous districts, and providing warehousing for the kids in poor districts, which was and remains the norm in many places.

It continues to trouble me when gifted education is equated to a good education--the kind many private schools offer. That good education ought to be a priority everywhere. And as good as it can be, it's not the same thing as gifted education.

Agree 100%. If the norm in public education was to challenge each child according to her or his needs, with the right tools and resources, we might not see this mania.

We are not in a lottery system (there are no gifted schools, although there are programs, required by law). Whenever I hear about them, I think, doesn't the very need for a lottery say that the system needs to rebalance things in order to have the right number of slots?

Agree 100%. The so-called shortage of gifted seats is a falsely created shortage of opportunity. Rather than the current "divide and conquer" strategy of having families with gifted pupils compete for seats, public schools could repurpose a number of existing general education seats as gifted seats, providing the appropriate number of gifted seats to match the number of pupils needing an advanced, gifted education.

Matching the program to the child, rather than matching the child to the program.

I wasn't talking about gifted education. None of the schools that use lottery for entrance in our area offers gifted education, they are simply "non-traditional" high school education, including IB program, early college, art focus, etc. The original post in this thread was asking about a high-ranking school, which may not be a gifted school.

Ideally all H.S. would be excellent and we wouldn't need a lottery system to get into schools.

But given that this isn't currently true and parents at least perceive one school as better than another for one reason or another school district need ways to seem fair. A lottery is one way to make it at least seems that way. It's hard to make everyone happy. I know some of the larger school districts have complicated applications processes for their magnet H.S. I know both LA school district and NYC are very complicated.

My kids attended a 'alternative' public K-8 that used a lottery system for admittance. Siblings did have priority. This lottery was started after the lines for registration to the school got so long that parents were lining up for days. Having spots going to parents who had the time to stand in line for days certainly wasn't very fair & and a lottery cut through a perception of favoritism.

Sounds like lotteries actually are confined to magnet schools, at least for purposes of this discussion. Thanks for the clarification, bluemagic.

It wasn't listed as having gifted.And gifted ends here after the 8th grade.

Both my 7th graders applied to magnet middle schools two years ago and will be applying to magnet high schools next year. All theses magnet schools are on a lottery system and the seats to applicants ratios can vary significantly from one school to another and sometimes also vary somewhat from year to year. I have been able to access some data online and have also spoken directly to the head of magnet programs in our district for other information.

A couple of things to consider or inquire. In our district, there is a minimum assessment score, which weeds out a subset of applicants. There is also priority seating allowed (not really advertised) up to 10% of the seats that is at the discretion of each school/program. These seats are reserved for kids who scored exceptionally on the assessment. There have been times when the assessment for a particular school/program has not been difficult enough to yield a convenient number of superior applicants so that no one got in on priority. For example, if there were 30 seats for a program but 8 kids scored 99 percent on the assessment and many more kids scored 97-98 percent, then the school may choose not to set aside 6 seats for priority students. The interesting thing is that each school and often different programs within each school have varying levels of difficulty as far as their assessments standards. In the program/school that my kids ultimately chose, about 1/3 got in by lottery but less than 10 kids got in off the waiting list so there were several hundred kids who were disappointed.

Yes, it is so in many places. You run off the end of the IEP years, you run off the end of gifted.