NYC's DOE wants to make some major changes to the city's gifted and talented program, and the skeptics are coming out of the woodwork:
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced last Wednesday that the Department of Education will make sweeping changes to gifted and talented programs for elementary school students beginning in September. In addition to adding several new programs, the DOE will develop a standardized admissions test for kindergarten and first grade students by September 2007 and improve professional development for teachers...
... a number of concerns were raised by parents and teachers in response to the announcement. Foremost were questions about the proposed standardized tests for kindergarten and first grade students. “Any standardized test for a four- or five-year-old is an accident waiting to happen,” said J.R. Nocerino, a Forest Hills parent who has two children in public elementary school. “At four or five, a test can show that a child is gifted and a few years down the road that can change, or vice versa.”
According to the DOE, the admissions test will be developed with the help of experts outside the education department and will measure verbal, nonverbal and spatial skills. Until the test is ready, programs will continue to use existing criteria, which vary from school to school.
I'll be very interested to see what happens with this. The city's planned exam sounds like it could be very similar to one IQ test for young children, the WPPSI-III, which I don't believe is "an accident waiting to happen." These tests can, however, be confusing; this guide is extremely informative and helpful (it's written for parents with learning-disabled kids, but the same material would be helpful for parents of gifted youngsters).
We see again the old argument about how the kids who pull ahead are disadvantaging those left behind:
While many parents are supportive of the gifted and talented concept and want programs to be expanded, others wonder if the term is applied too freely. Because of such programs, they say, a large number of above-average students have been pulled out of neighborhood schools. “If you take all the children who are on the upper end of the spectrum out of their zoned schools, it just makes the zoned schools worse,” said one Flushing parent, who declined to give her name.
A number of teachers also expressed reservations about expanding the programs, if it means that other students will be left behind. “When classes are heterogeneous, it can bring the lower-level students up,” said Lucy Evans, a music teacher at PS 164 in Flushing. “What about the other children? I don’t think the others should be left behind.”
It depends on whether you think the gifted children should be in school for the express purpose of helping the less-gifted. If you don't think that - and you should be entirely free to think that, even in public education - then it's not fair to the gifted students to keep them in a slower classroom.
Posted by kswygert at February 24, 2005 02:34 PM