Reply to Did the Takoma MS magnet got MORE white this year?

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Reply to "Did the Takoma MS magnet got MORE white this year?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think people want easy answers, and there aren't any.

It would be EASY to just use CogAT or a similar test to "fine tune" peer groups, but that assumes CoGAT is the right tool for identifying gifted kids, and/or kids with a large amount of potential.

We all know that the smartest kids we went to school with are not necessarily the most successful today, and, as young people get older, working hard and staying focused becomes almost as important as having "gifts."

Additionally, there are multiple ways to be "gifted" and giftedness is often present in some areas and not others. This means that tests like the CogAT will be "spiky" for some kids, which makes an easy solution hard.

If you take the kid who has a 99% across the board but leave behind the kid who has a 99.99999% on one subtest but a 75% in another, does that serve the second kid?

These are HARD questions, and we haven't even touched the ways in which the tests themselves are culturally biased.

I know we all want a hard and fast rule, but that's not how life works.

[/quote]
I agree with a lot of what you say.  I think that for the CES programs it definitely makes sense to include as many children who show "promise" even if it is just in one area.  The middle and high school programs are really programs for kids who are not just gifted but also high achieving.  They are very challenging academic programs with a heavy work load and high teacher expectations.  A "spiky" kid or a kid who is really into one subject but is not otherwise engaged in school would have a tough time.  There are some kids like this who are so exceptional that there is no other place in the school system for them and they should be in the magnet programs but this is a relatively small group of kids.
[b]I am not sure that is what happened this year.  It sounds like a lot of 99+ kids were passed over not because there were spiky kids in other schools who deserved those spots but simply because of where they lived.  [/b]  [/quote]

Great question. But didn't the county do the same with the magnet acceptance process?

Took a lot of kids who they single-handedly defined as "strong potential" based on inconsistent test scores and home schools without peer cohort. [/quote]

Do you know they used inconsistent test scores or is this just an assumption?[/quote]

This data hasn't been released so this is purely speculation and unfounded.[/quote]

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