Reply to APS: gifted identification

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I hate that parents can refer their kids.  [/quote]

Me too.  And as early as kindergarten. Tracking that early is dumb.  Also- APS fills spots young so when the truly gifted emerge late in elementary- spots are already filled with those that lobbied.

Our kid tests in the top 1% and we got the notice he was gifted in everything at end of 8th.  Yeah, no sh@t.  His Cogats, 600 SOLs, Nnats, etc all showed this.

He’s now thriving and currently in #1 in his class at a top private HS.  [/quote]

OMG-- YES!  I thought this was just happening in our North Arlington ES. So many parents "self-referred" in K and 1st, before the NNAT is even offered. Their kids got spots and other kids then did not, even when scoring high enough on the NNAT in 2nd to be formally referred for services in 3rd grade. I've got one kid tagged in all four subjects, and the other kid tagged in nothing, and I can tell you as their parent that there is not a lot of difference in their raw intelligence. I think there are secret quotas at play here, and a higher # of parents who self-referred in K and 1 in my non-tagged child's class. I'm glad they are moving the NNAT down to 1st grade post-pandemic, because maybe that will stop the self-referral madness.[/quote]

I wonder if this is at our ES where there are 50-60%+ (not kidding) kids identified as gifted.[/quote]

Here's the reality, especially in the North Arlington elementary schools-- almost all the kids come from upper middle class homes with college educated parents. Most of these kids would be considered "gifted" if you dropped them into schools in less affluent/well-educated areas of the country. So some ES just tag all the kids (resulting in the 50-60% rate) and other principals are uncomfortable with numbers that high so they aim for a lower percentage tagged. That's what I mean by quotas. They aren't fixed standards, but informal targets. The principals have a lot of discretion in how kids get tagged and clustered at their school. So you can have a kid who scores over 120 on the NNAT and is referred, but is determined to be "not gifted" because the child is more laid back/doesn't gun to answer questions in class/doesn't do extra work. The joke on everyone though is that the label means nothing in the end, because by 6th grade, there really isn't any gifted program. Except for an advanced math track, APS gifted education is totally absent in middle school. And by high school, your kids can take whatever classes they want, regardless of how they were labeled in ES.

[/quote]

Actually, it’s not totally absent in middle school. Services are still required and given. Some kids are doing reading projects based on book excerpts while others in the same class are required to read the entire book and submit a more complex final product, for example. [/quote]

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