Reply to Does G&T or advanced classes still exist at public elementary schools?

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[quote=Anonymous]I live in the South and we have a weird system here. Our district is large, and has a magnet lottery, except it's not really magnet, more like school choice. There are essentially no barriers to these programs.

For "gifted" there is Talent Development/Learning Immersion. As I said, absolutely no barriers at all, so anyone can submit a lottery application starting in Kindergarten through second.

Students who are not in a TD/LI school yet achieve a certain score on the CogAT in second grade can apply via lottery for a third grade seat at those schools. But there are never enough seats, and students who entered TD/LI schools prior to third grade can remain at the school regardless of how they did on CogAT. These TD/LI schools, except for one, are only partial magnets--these programs are placed there in hopes of attracting high-performing kids that will boost overall test scores.

In some neighborhood schools (and possibly non TD/LI magnet, but I have no experience with those), students are identified for in-house TD/LI supplementation. K-2 this is done by the teachers, 3rd grade and up is by CogAT. Our experience in K-2 was this happens once a week for 30 minutes for reading/ELA and 30 minutes for math, and your child might only be identified for one of those. I have heard some schools offer no TD/LI supplements and don't have a TD/LI coordinator--typically those are schools with very low test scores.

Even if you get a lottery seat in TD/LI it's not really accelerated. Deeper rather than faster, and not all that deep at the end of the day. I was not impressed, and wasn't thrilled with having to play the lottery, so that combined with some other things we were not happy about meant we decided to go the private route for DC starting in 3rd.

There really isn't a gifted program in middle. TD/LI students are supposed to have automatic rights to their closest International Baccalaureate middle school. But once again, there's not barrier to entry, so anyone can try to lottery into IB for middle school. And there are more IB middle school 6th grade seats than there are TD/IB 5th graders, so you absolutely get lots of kids that are in IB and not able to work at that level (the test scores make this really clear).[/quote]

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