Reply to s/o - DC privates are not filled with gifted kids

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Well, for starters, I don't buy OP's underlying premise: "[i]I've also heard that ERBs in top DC privates in lower grades usually rank the top performers around the 80th percentile which equates to an IQ around 115 to 120 tops.[/i]"

1.  OP's statement that some school admin told her in a dinner party conversation that his school's top students are in the 80th percentile doesn't strike me as a particularly rigorous basis for this thread.

2. When OP somehow translates that dinner party comment into a calculation that the top students have IQs of about "115 to 120 tops," that starts to sound fishy to me. First, how do you make this conversion from ERB to IQ? Is there a conversion table you used?  And second, are you really telling me that the "top performers" at local private schools generally miss the base level for giftedness (130 IQ) by at least 10 points?  That does not strike me as likely.

3. And [i]even if you accept OP's premise as true[/i], I still think the overall range of abilities from the top of the class to the bottom is a lot smaller at a typical DC private school than at a typical public school.  Indeed, if the top performers are really only "80th percentile" students, as OP claims, then that suggests the range to the bottom of the class might even be smaller than what I'd guess.  As a result of the smaller range, the private school teachers should have less trouble offering differentiated instruction tailored to each child.[/quote]

Re. 1: Agree that dinner party chat is not hard data, but her chat "data" squares with the hard data I have from admins at my school and one other

Re. 2: She (I assume she is a woman, but who knows) is extrapolating from 80th percentile ERBs to 80th percentile IQ, which is about 113-120.  This is roughly correct.

Re. 3: She is not is saying that the "top performers" are the 80th percentile.  Rather, she is saying that these schools cluster around the 80th percentile and therefore teach to it.  Her point - one with which I strongly agree - is that the kids who are in the 98+ percentile are largely ignored in area Lower Schools.  These kids are way ahead of the 80th percentile in their abilities (take a look at a bell curve and you'll see what I mean, or read about the differences in Level 1 and Level 3 gifted kids).  Given DCs demographics, you wouldn't be surprised to find 3-5 of these kids (or more!) in every grade in the private schools here.   So you might expect schools to differentiate appropriately to them. But they don't.  Which is bizarre.  [/quote]

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