Giftedness, Fairness and Kindergarten
Schools in New York City are trying to figure out the best way to determine which kids should be eligible for the city’s gifted and talented kindergarten program. Education chancellor Joel Klein favors using a score on a standardized test –the cutoff for admission is the 90th percentile–because it’s not subjective. This is the process that’s been in place city-wide since 2008.
But as Michael Winerip reports in the NYT, lots of folks are complaining that while the test might be less subjective, it isn’t fair.
Kids whose parents can afford tutoring, test booklets, test prep and weekend boot camps, they say, have an advantage that poorer kids do not. And all of this test prep– which includes getting little kids used to the test format– seems to work against the idea of measuring giftedness.
And a test-prep industry for 4-year-olds has burgeoned. Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009, and there is so much demand that she says she’s opening a second site this month. She runs a two-month “boot camp” for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.
It’s already half-booked, Ms. Doruk said, “and I haven’t even publicly announced it.”
Last year, of 120 children she prepared for the city test, she says 80 percent scored at least 90. “Prepping makes a difference,” she said. “Prep brings anxiety down; children get used to an adult giving them the test and the format.
“A lot of middle- and upper-middle-class families rely on this,” she added.
Another effect of the change in admission policy has been a drop of minority kids in the program.
“We are every bit as committed as we have been, if not more so, in trying to find a way that there is proper representation among students,” Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor, said at a City Council meeting last month.
However, the Council said in a June report that despite the yearlong push, “six districts in central Brooklyn and the South Bronx still don’t have enough qualifying kids to open gifted kindergartens next fall.”
Mr. Sternberg said the city would soon request proposals for “a different kind of test” for 2012 “that would be harder to game in the way that so many families do, so as a result to be more likely to result in a level playing field.”
All this leads back to the idea that admission to a gifted program should be based on more than a standardized tests– tests that some argue can always be gamed– and that it should include interviews and teacher recommendations. But then we’re back to the problem of subjectivity and, according to Klein, a “process [that] was fractured and inconsistent, and programs [that] were too often gifted in name only.”
Missing from this discussion is whether a gifted and talented program for five-year-olds is a good idea in the first place. It seems to me that whatever nifty stuff is offered in such a program would be good for all kids.
