No More Gifted in MoCo?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
What is Montgomery County's IQ cut offpoint?

120 = 90th percentile, on at least one (but not all) of the tests they use. Teacher and parent comments also enter into the rubric.

Hi, could you please provide a source for this cutoff and percentile equivalent? I am not aware of any testing that MoCo uses at the elementary level which provides a score of "120" on a scale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I had a somewhat jaundiced view of the MoCo G&T programs because I saw parents scheming and gaming them. Appealing to the head of school can get your kid into a gifted program. Emphasizing that 1/8 part of diversity will do it. Heck, I know a family that appealed a G&T screening test all the way to Rockville (MoCo HQ), with the result that the kid took the G&T test twice within just a few months, something which is discouraged by the testers because, natch, the kid did way better the second time.... To me, a lot of it was gamed anyway, so not very meaningful to begin with.

I do not believe this is accurate -- MoCo is prohibited by law from taking race into account in placement into the GT centers. They can balance the class by sex, but race is not a consideration. Check the case law stemming from the Eisenberg case, I believe. It was also stated at the info night for GT center applications that race can not be a consideration in admission.

There are ways to apply a rejection. There are reasons why testing should/would be re-administered, for example, if the kid should have gotten testing accommodations based on a documented LD.

While heads of school used to have some input into the decision process, these decisions are now made centrally, so principals have less impact (beyond, of course, the teacher recommendation which is part of the process).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
What is Montgomery County's IQ cut offpoint?

120 = 90th percentile, on at least one (but not all) of the tests they use. Teacher and parent comments also enter into the rubric.

Hi, could you please provide a source for this cutoff and percentile equivalent? I am not aware of any testing that MoCo uses at the elementary level which provides a score of "120" on a scale.

I can't find it on the website anymore, but I still have the hardcopy of the handout from when my kids were screened in second grade (now in middle school). MCPS was using two tests: the Raven's Progressive Matrices and the InView (which used to be called something else). The InView has four subtests - all verbal. The criteria for GT identification was given as cutoff scores. I looked those scores up and they were at the 90th percentile. The 90th percentile translates to a standard score of 120. They also looked at teacher and parent recommendations.

[Anonymous]

Oh, geez. I would never use those tests to identify someone as gifted, or to yield something that parents might interpret as an IQ. That's poor practice. Wow.

[Anonymous]

19:20 here. Sorry, I meant to add that the Raven is just not a great instrument for this type of screening. I'm a psychologist who does a fair amount of assessment, and I benefited from gifted programs as a child and teenager. Our school system required two IQ tests, one group and one individual, to identify a child as gifted. The criterion was 130 on both. In addition, a student had to perform above grade level on achievement tests in two or more areas. So the MoCo identification process seems, well, not very rigorous. No wonder they identify so many kids as gifted in certain schools. As several PPs have said, they're really just identifying kids who need more advanced work than what they're providing to the other students. Since NCLB essentially requires lowest-common-denominator teaching now, the process is clearly flawed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
What is Montgomery County's IQ cut offpoint?

120 = 90th percentile, on at least one (but not all) of the tests they use. Teacher and parent comments also enter into the rubric.

Hi, could you please provide a source for this cutoff and percentile equivalent? I am not aware of any testing that MoCo uses at the elementary level which provides a score of "120" on a scale.

I can't find it on the website anymore, but I still have the hardcopy of the handout from when my kids were screened in second grade (now in middle school). MCPS was using two tests: the Raven's Progressive Matrices and the InView (which used to be called something else). The InView has four subtests - all verbal. The criteria for GT identification was given as cutoff scores. I looked those scores up and they were at the 90th percentile. The 90th percentile translates to a standard score of 120. They also looked at teacher and parent recommendations.

I too have the score report from MCPS this year with Raven and InView test results. Can you please provide data or a link to where you found Raven and InView score to percentile conversions? Same for InView scores, if you have any. MCPS does not give this information out with the score report, the homeschool says they don't have it, and I couldn't find it anywhere on the web. The raw score cut offs given in the MCPS document vary by age, and I would like to see the percentile correlations.

[Anonymous]

I have found this post very interesting - it seems that there is a divide between the tester posts and the curriculum posts. If NCLB was revised (or if the way regular classrooms were assigned) do you think there could be an easier solution for reaching bright and motivated kids (gifted or not). This is a heated debate I know - but I'm looking for thoughtful responses - is the one size fits all classroom the way to address subjects such as reading and math? Is it realistic to expect ALL teachers to be able to manage diversification of levels in one classroom? I'm not suggesting tracking by child, I'm suggesting grouping students by subject. It seems to me that parents lobbying to "beat" the test is a worse solution than educators assessing student abilties.....Thoughts?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

“It is true that among the options that will be considered is eliminating labeling in favor of a services-based model. In this model, students are still screened for their readiness for advanced work and parents are provided the recommendations from the screening so that they are fully informed of their children’s readiness to excel at a higher level. Students are then provided advanced work based on the results of the screening process, consultation with parents, and the ongoing assessment of students’ needs.

I wonder if part of the problem is the use of the word "gifted" in identifying children who are ready for advanced work. By using the word "gifted" to describe these children, the implication is that children not so-labeled lack gifts. An administrator at a school for gifted students in another state explained to me that in gifted education, the word "gifted" has a specific meaning, i.e. a child who is able to excel at academic subjects far ahead of his/her grade level. That label usually (but not universally) means that child has scored 130 or above on an IQ test, she said. But outside of education, "gifted" has a much broader application. Children can be "gifted" in a zillion areas: woodworking, making collages, playing the kazoo, building models, etc. By dropping the use of the word "gifted" to label children who are able to do advanced work in academic subjects, the schools can accomplish the same goals, i.e. offering these children challenging coursework without labeling them with a word that implies their abilities are more valuable that those of children who possess gifts of a different sort.

I also wonder if parents who game the system do so more out of a desire to feel their child is gifted in the universal sense, rather than from a need for specific services for that child.

I think getting rid of the "gifted" label is a good idea. But I think replacing it with something less value-laden is essential. Kids who can do work far ahead of grade level must be identified, and must be taught according to their abilities. DCPS has no program for academically advanced children in ES, so labeling them as such would not help parents get more services for them. An IEP is another thing entirely. Federal law requires schools to provide services to children with IEPs. Advanced kids who need more challenges in school have no such law to support them. BTW, I know a MENSA member who was excluded from a gifted program as a child because he didn't score high enough on an IQ test.

[Anonymous]

It seems that schools are currently structured to balk at including both an accerated curriculum and a gifted curriculum that is essential for the few that truly need it. If both were offered, there would be less of a rush to lobby for gifted (a very small percentage of students). Is this a cost issue or something else? It seems to compromise a true gifted program. Why can't the two co-exist?

[Anonymous]

Another part of the conundrum is what to do with children who are identified as gifted but are also delayed in some area. For example, take a child who has a performance IQ test result of 140, but has a verbal IQ component (sorry if those aren't the technical terms) of more like 110. This child might be struggling with reading and writing, but the struggle isn't apparent, because he is using his high intelligence to compensate. So the child is reading "on grade level", just middle of the class, and not keeping up with other peers who have a stronger verbal profile.

OK -- does this child qualify for special services, funded by public tax dollars? If tax dollars are limited, do you take money away from a child who is working below grade level and is in need of basic remediation? Is the goal of public school to educate every child to their intellectual capacity, or just to bring kids up to a basic standard, and let them figure it out from there?

If you have a gifted program, do you let a child like the above in, one who isn't actually reading above grade level, but who "should be"? And if you let that child in and say "We have high expectations for you" then why don't you have high expectations for the other kids, who might have an IQ of 110 across the board?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another part of the conundrum is what to do with children who are identified as gifted but are also delayed in some area. For example, take a child who has a performance IQ test result of 140, but has a verbal IQ component (sorry if those aren't the technical terms) of more like 110. This child might be struggling with reading and writing, but the struggle isn't apparent, because he is using his high intelligence to compensate. So the child is reading "on grade level", just middle of the class, and not keeping up with other peers who have a stronger verbal profile.

OK -- does this child qualify for special services, funded by public tax dollars? If tax dollars are limited, do you take money away from a child who is working below grade level and is in need of basic remediation? Is the goal of public school to educate every child to their intellectual capacity, or just to bring kids up to a basic standard, and let them figure it out from there?

If you have a gifted program, do you let a child like the above in, one who isn't actually reading above grade level, but who "should be"? And if you let that child in and say "We have high expectations for you" then why don't you have high expectations for the other kids, who might have an IQ of 110 across the board?

19:20 psychologist here. It doesn't really work like that. At least not on actual IQ tests, which is not what the county is using anyway. A discrepancy between, say, verbal and performance scores can help point out a learning disability but 110 would still be slightly above average. You'd need quite a bit of additional assessment to determine that the child has a learning disability. As for entitlement to gifted services, sounds like MoCo (1) doesn't use IQ scores anyway, (2) doesn't want to label kids as gifted anyway, and (3) supposedly offers gifted education to everyone anyway! What a mess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How could 2/5 of the children of any county be gifted? The bar should be raised.

Same way 4/5ths of the children of basketball players are significantly taller than average.

Parents in this area imagine they're raising geniuses. Most of this "giftedness" is the fruit of privilege. I am a granddaughter of sharecroppers whose parents were the only ones in their large families to graduate from college. My mother picked cotton in Mississippi and attended a segregated school but obtained an advanced degree at a top school. Two fifths of these coddled children are not gifted; they are just lucky.

Everyone on this board wants their child labeled gifted. It means your kid is super special, smarter than all those average kids. Lose the label and you lose bragging rights. (Like ripping the label off your designer jeans.) All this emphasis on IQ scores and cutoffs is idiotic. Why not just write our kids' IQ scores on their foreheads for all to see? MoCo does not want to take away all those special programs for super smart kids. They want to take the label away.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Everyone on this board wants their child labeled gifted. It means your kid is super special, smarter than all those average kids. Lose the label and you lose bragging rights. (Like ripping the label off your designer jeans.) All this emphasis on IQ scores and cutoffs is idiotic. Why not just write our kids' IQ scores on their foreheads for all to see? MoCo does not want to take away all those special programs for super smart kids. They want to take the label away.

Sorry, but many of us who are in the MoCo system have had the experience that even with the GT label it can be hard to fight for appropriate levels of teaching. I myself had this experience just last week. So, perhaps it's understandable that some parents fear that getting rid of the GT label is the first step towards getting rid of the services. This is not just paranoia. Right now, the Global GT screening is done in 2nd grade and one can publicly see how many kids are being identified GT at which schools. When one is a parent, and the administration doesn't want to provide services, they try to convince you that your kid is the only one who needs a higher academic level of teaching and so of course, you as the parent are being unreasonable to ask for any services because MoCo can't teach every kid separately. BUT, having # of GT kids identified by school, gives a much better weapon to those who want GT services. No GT kids, no GT services. Significant numbers of GT kids identified in the system means significant numbers of parents who wonder what their child should be learning....

Right now, it is very unclear what GT testing will continue, whether parents and the community at large will have access to the results and how the delivery of GT services will be done transparently to parents -- i.e. what info will parents receive that will clue them in to the fact that their child is ready for GT services and what services are available and which will be appropriate for their situation. rankly, IMO, even the current GT testing doesn't provide very good data on WHAT exactly a GT child should get in terms of services, although it a helpful flag.

And, please, no posts on how "every child is gifted and shouldn't every child have access to these services...."

My child is in 3rd grade and reads at an eighth grade level. There is little benefit to her in the 3rd grade reading curriculum. It is clear that there are a small number of other kids that read at a similar level. And it is also clear that there are many 3rd graders who read at a 3rd grade level and giving them 8th grade texts wouldn't be one bit helpful.

IMO, every child deserves to learn as fast and as much as they can beyond the skill level they enter with at the beginning of each year, whether they start as 3rd graders reading at a 3rd grade level and can progress only to 3rd, or to 5th, or they start at 8th and go from there.

[Anonymous]

Actually the MoC system works pretty well in the hands of administrators who care about teaching kids to their abilities.. They have a bunch of different tests (which are not IQ tests, and parents are not given the percentile rankings) which are designed to pick up kids strengths in different ways. Those tests are used to help principals and teachers figure out what gifted programing to offer which kids--so a kid who is strong on non-verbal (Raven matrices) but weak on verbal might be offered higher math but on level language arts.
Entrance to the elementary gifted magnet programs is based on kids who meet these criteria OR are recommended by parents or teachers (that's not "gaming the system"--any parent can ask to have their kid tested) taking the SCAT, a test designed by Johns Hopkins Center for the Highly Gifted to determine above grade level performance. Kids who need a second round of testing (mine did because after the first round we got back results showing she had LDs) are given an alternate version of the SCAT so they do not benefit from remembering the first questions. (And for the record, she got into a magnet but we chose not to send her.)
There is fresh testing for the middle school and HS magnets, so kids who didn't get in at one point still can--and kids who did get in are not automatically in at teh next level.

The whole thing works well if the administrators get it and care. So that at Burning Tree Elementary, which was one of the two tests for removing the "gifted' label, they still get the test results and still program for kids based on their strengths and weaknesses--or at least did under the old principal, I don't know how its working under the new one this year. But if the administration doesn't care, I don't know how it would work. The test results probablyu would still give parents the abililty to argue for higher level programming with or without the GT label.

As I understand it, in VA they don't use the label but still offer something they consider to be GT programming. I have no idea how well it works. If the goal is to figure out kids strengths and weaknesses and teach according to that level, but remove the label so that kids don't t hink they either are or are not smart, I think that's laudable. The question, as it is with almost any school initiative, is whether it will be implemented that way.

FWIW, the likely reason so many kids in MoCo are labeled GT is that we have a lot of highly educated parents. Its not a randomly selected population so you wouldn't expect a normal IQ or any other test distribution. That's true whether scholastic ability is based on genetics, environment, or some combination of the two. And since there is a pretty wide variation in what kinds of parents live in what parts of the county, that also helps explain the variation in results by schools. I doubt that is the only explanation, and it leaves unresolved how to get enough challenging curriculum into schools to ensure that kids who could benefit from stronger academic enviroments do. But there is a perfectly reasonable statistically sound explanation.

[Anonymous]

In Fairfax County, central headquarters decided to gradually phase out the old program that worked well for the top 5%, and replace it with a new structure that is more inclusive but no longer challenges many of the kids in the top 5%. Basically, the old GT Centers that drew students from many neighborhood schools are being replaced with "Level 4" classes in neighborhood elementary and middle schools.

The new structure is still being phased in, but in 5 years most FCPS students will be lucky if their "Level 4" class in their neighborhood school has half a dozen highly gifted kids. More generally, the old GT Centers are losing highly gifted students to neighborhood Level 4 classes, so they increasingly lack a critical mass of highly gifted students. Middle school GT Centers have been watered down, and FCPS tells parents that neighborhood school "honors classes" are the same as middle school GT Center classes.

All that's really left in FCPS for highly gifted students is TJ, the math/science magnet school. And while TJ is wonderful in many respects, it's not a great fit for highly gifted kids who don't like math and science. Unlike Montgomery County, FCPS refuses to start a humanities or IB magnet program.

Anonymous wrote:

As I understand it, in VA they don't use the label but still offer something they consider to be GT programming. I have no idea how well it works. If the goal is to figure out kids strengths and weaknesses and teach according to that level, but remove the label so that kids don't t hink they either are or are not smart, I think that's laudable. The question, as it is with almost any school initiative, is whether it will be implemented that way.

FWIW, the likely reason so many kids in MoCo are labeled GT is that we have a lot of highly educated parents. Its not a randomly selected population so you wouldn't expect a normal IQ or any other test distribution. That's true whether scholastic ability is based on genetics, environment, or some combination of the two. And since there is a pretty wide variation in what kinds of parents live in what parts of the county, that also helps explain the variation in results by schools. I doubt that is the only explanation, and it leaves unresolved how to get enough challenging curriculum into schools to ensure that kids who could benefit from stronger academic enviroments do. But there is a perfectly reasonable statistically sound explanation.