Gifted education: How are children selected and is it uniform across Georgia school districts?
Let’s start off this week with a subject that has a lot of interest: Gifted education.
I received a note from a local educator about the question of how students are selected and whether the process is biased. She asked that we discuss it here on the blog. (Here is a longer blog posting that I wrote on gifted education. )
One of the reader’s observations is that students can qualify for gifted in one county and not in another. I had a new gifted teacher tell me once that there were many students in my local system who would have been in the gifted program in her former county of Fulton. This teacher was surprised that my system did not admit more kids to the gifted program.
I had assumed that the criteria was uniform across counties, but that apparently is not the case as this poster notes:
The sub-level representation of ”gifted” minority students in my county is an issue that has bothered me for years. A coworker and good friend of mine completed her Gifted endorsement class and has shared with me the biased discrepancies in the testing and eligibility requirements of students. She shared with me that the testing and screening items lead in favor toward one group of students, and are counteractive toward other groups of students — specifically Hispanic, ELL, and African-American students.
One of the main criteria of being eligible for Gifted participation is having high grades. But is the child whose parents are providing them with private tutors and are pressuring them to excel in school truly “gifted”?
School systems receive a lot of funds for testing and qualifying students in the gifted program. Many people are oblivious to this fact and I think they need to be educated on it. They also need to know that counties in Georgia have different criteria for a student being eligible and qualifying as a gifted student.
A gifted student in one system, is not necessarily gifted in another. I once had a student who qualified for Gifted participation in Fulton, but was not eligible in Cobb. This is another issue that perplexes me, if the Gifted classes are federally funded, then there should be universal requirements across the board.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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127 comments Add your comment
Fed Up
June 26th, 2012
6:49 am
Looks like I’m late to the party …
My kids are in the Advanced Learner Program, but at our school that is mostly a name. They are advanced in the subject matter, but they are not geniuses … and I make sure to let them know that, especially if their heads get too big.
I think the real problem is that until middle school, there is no differentiation in course levels. So that guy who doesn’t know his times table is lumped in with the one who can combine fractions with different denominators. This is not about some “gift” … just meet the child where he currently is.
homeschooler
June 26th, 2012
7:33 am
Thank you for this topic, Maureen. I have often said that it seems Cobb County just takes the kids who perform well and put them in gifted programs. I know that is not entirely true but I have seen many average kids from functional families in poorer performing schools labeled “gifted” just because they out perform the latio or other lower socioeconimic kids around. Doing better in school does not mean “gifted”.
Funny Catlady mentioned Tallahassee because I have a friend whose kids were raised in the early 80’s and one was labeled gifted in kindergarten in Florida. She said he was chosen by a teacher and it had little to do with grades. He was then sent for an IQ test and an interview with a psychologist and entered the “gifted” program. They moved to Cherokee county a few years later and she said she noticed that the “gifted” kids seemed to be the kids who just made better grades.
I hear that there is more to the selection than grades and test scores but I’ve never personally seen it. I have known a lot of kids who don’t “make the grade” but who’s minds are so creative and they think so far outside the box it is obvious they are gifted. I think these are the little Einsteins that are getting left behind. Some of them never even graduate. Sad.
My other concern is that all these kids higher functioning kids from poorer performing schools are in for a huge adjustment when their schools feed into “better” middle and high schools and they will quickly learn they are not all that smart. It’s all relative. So, if you want your kid to be labeled “gifted” just move to South Cobb County.
Too Easy
June 26th, 2012
7:45 am
As a teacher, and Mensa member, I feel it is way too easy to qualify as “gifted” today. I had to take the Otis-Lennon test to gain admittance when I was in school and qualify in the top 2% nationally. That’s the way it should be. The school I teach at has nearly 40% of its students labeled as “gifted”. It’s absurd. While some of them are legitimately gifted, a vast majority are not. They lack simple and basic skills, have no higher order thinking skills and logic, and creativity is minimal at best. It’s all a sham to test in as many as possible so the school looks good and the $$$ rolls in. About 5 – 10% of any population is truly gifted.
Middle school parent
June 26th, 2012
8:43 am
Can someone tell me the difference between “gifted” and “high-achiever?”
Martin
June 26th, 2012
8:44 am
The U.S. Department of Education asked the state of Georgia to revise its gifted criteria in order to include more students of color. Before the current criteria was adopted, it was a straight IQ test. In addition to an IQ test done by the school district psychologist, parents could submit IQ tests administered by their own private psychologist. As it stands now, a child can be admitted into the gifted program without even the IQ component. It has led to the Lake Wobegone syndrome at certain schools where nearly half the students are in the gifted program.
another aps teacher
June 26th, 2012
9:34 am
In Georgia we use multiple measures to determine gifted eligibility. These measures are Ability, Creativity, Motivation, and Achievement. If a student scores at 90% or above on the ability test (usually the Cognitive Ability Test) or at the 90 percentile on each of the other three, then that student is recommended for placement into the program. We used to use the Renzulli checklists for Creativity, a gpa of 3.5 for motivation, and a score in the 90th percentile or above in either math or reading on the ITBS for achievement. In order to be referred to the program, the student has to demonstrate a number of characteristics that may or may not have anything to do with grades or classroom performance (in terms of the amount of work completed). That’s where things tend to get sticky. Many teachers have no clue what to look for when assessing gifted characteristics. They want to focus on little Suzie Sit Still and Finish all of My Work. Suzie might be a high achiever and a teacher pleaser but that does not mean she is gifted! Tenquarious the Terror who seldom turns in homework, is generally not paying attention, cracks jokes all of the time (and has a bitingly insightful sense of humor), can give you the entire history and all of the facts about his latest obsession (dinosaurs, space exploration, cars, insects, music theory, architecture, geography, ancient civilizations,you name it), and maintains a high B average despite the fact that his homework grades are zeros and his classwork grades not too far above that is much more likely to be gifted. Most of my colleagues don’t know that, and will resist accepting it.
Another problem we have with students not being identified is that the teachers don’t refer them for fear of losing that student. The teachers hide the kids until the end of the year so that they (the teachers) can keep the student all school year.
Whether we want to accept it or not, a student who is gifted is more intelligent than 90% of the population, and may be more intelligent than the teacher. That doesn’t mean that the child knows more than the teacher, because the teacher has been educated and the child has not yet been educated. that’s why they are still in elementary school, middle school, or high school. But the child has a greater ability to learn, and to learn at a faster rate requiring fewer repetitions of the material. Many people want to say that “everyone is gifted”. Yeah, uh huh, most of us are gifted at something. Some sing, some run and throw and catch, some dance. Some are more intelligent. I am certified to recognize and teach gifted students in grades 4-8, and I am pretty good at it. Every child I identify does not get placed into the program though. Several years ago I had a 7th grade student who was easily one of the most brilliant students I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach. He was also one of the most difficult. He’d been staffed out of a behavior disorder class a couple of years prior and he still had some serious behavior issues. He was oppositional. He did not accept correction very well. He had a tendency to use a lot of profanity. He liked to fight, and did so frequently. I couldn’t get him tested for the gifted program because his grades were so poor, even my classes because he didn’t do work that was “boring” or “stupid”. So he did no homework and very little classwork. His papers and projects were phenomenal, though, as were his class discussions. If I’d thought that he had help at home on his papers and projects, his class discussion contributions cleared up that confusion. Whenever we had a discussion in class about something we’d read (he read on a 10th grade level in the 7th grade) in class, all I had to do was wait until Joseph (not his real name) raised his hand and was ready to speak. His answers were always 150% correct, and his contributions were often so profound that I’d have to spend some more time getting him to explain his insights to his classmates. He traveled with the gifted class while he was in middle school, but we were never able to even get him tested.
At our school we’ve identified, tested, and placed a number of Latino children. Several of these students did not start speaking English until they came to this country or until they started school in this country and we get them the year they test out of ESOL. One young man scored 140 on the IQ test. That was in 6th grade. By the time he hit seventh grade and my class he’d gone into puberty and did just enough classwork to get a B.
Many people are confused about giftedness is and is not.
HoneyFern School
June 26th, 2012
9:42 am
@Middle School Parent – a high achiever can be gifted or not; achievement is related to hard work in some cases, more so than giftedness. Motivated average kids often do better than their gifted peers b/c they go over and above what is required; whereas gifted kids may just phone it in (depending on the assignment). These motivated average kids are often who are added to “gifted” classes to bump up numbers; although this helps the motivated average kid, the gifted kids, once again, suffer at the watered-down curriculum.
“Good at something” or “showing aptitude” is NOT gifted. We are not all gifted. Those who use the label of “gifted” as a status symbol are ridiculous, but the fact of the matter is that giftedness can be measured and is something definite, whether it is linguistic, mathematical or artistic (and I am not talking about the Torrance here).
I
another aps teacher
June 26th, 2012
10:49 am
Dear MOK, if your child has IQ scores that place him in the profoundly gifted category he should need nothing else. My son just graduated from high school, is very (extremely) gifted, but has scored low to low average on IQ tests both times he was tested. The first time he was three. He hadn’t spoken in sentences for 18 months and when he started speaking again no one could understand anything he said (I did better than most, but then I was his mother). We were living in Dekalb county at the time and I was teaching in Fulton so I knew that I could him evaluated for speech services for free. I took him to be evaluated for speech in DeKalb. After administering an IQ test, I was informed that my child had an IQ of 75. Really???? At 38 months old he could read, add, subtract, multiply, and divide on a second grade level, but he had an IQ of 75??. That placed him firmly in the below average/borderline category, but he had the school readiness skills of a second grader? Something was wrong with that analysis. He also knew all of the streets and roads we travelled on frequently and identified them by the exit numbers on the signs. He could identify any number you gave him between 1-999. Nobody taught him all of this. He picked it up on his own.
During the test when he was shown drawings of various sized circles and told to pick the largest ball he didn’t answer the question because he knew that those were circles and balls were spherical. When shown various size rectangles and told to choose the smallest stick, again he did not answer the question because he wasn’t looking at sticks, he was looking at rectangles. I mentioned to the examiner during the test that he could answer the question if she used the name of the shape, and she told me that she could not deviate from the script. Ha! Baloney!
He was tested again in the second grade when he entered APS schools. He scored at 113, which is slightly above average. He would not have been placed if Georgia did not use multiple measures, and anyone who talks with him can easily see that he is undeniably gifted. The projects that he gave himself to do at home showed that, although those he’s done at school haven’t always been high in the type of creativity many teachers like to see. He completed the IB program at North Atlanta with honors, is a member of the National Honor Society, and will be off to an Ivy League university come autumn.
If you have test scores for your child, take them to the school and push. Here is a great resource and a cute and informative video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDJst-y_ptI&feature=related
http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/
NTLB
June 26th, 2012
11:21 am
I have my reservations about the authencity of teacher recommendations:
If teachers are mainly responsible in recommending students for Gifted testing, then does the element of biasedness towards minority students influence who gets recommended and who doesn’t? ( If you beleive that teachers don’t have their stereotypes about certains groups of students, then you are in denial.)
I have my reservations about the general quality of Gifted classes:
2) I wholly agree that the quality and rigor of instruction that the Gifted teachers provide is crucial–however, I have observed more than one Gifted classes (at my own school) in which the students were doing absolutely minimum work. A good amount of students are exited from the programs due to lack of participation.
One of my brightest students blatantly told me: ” We don’t do anything in the TAG classes, so I am not going anymore.”
..And yes, there are truly gifted and talented students out there, but if only a selected few are being subjectively recommended for testing, then we are doing a great disservice to ALL.
APS thumbs down
June 26th, 2012
12:17 pm
For those who teach gifted children in APS: On Infinite Campus, why is a separate gradebook created to cater to the gifted students in the same class. This creates double work for the teachers setting up the assignments. It does nothing for the gifted kids and makes my gradebook look like a mess. For example, my 6 sections last year were split up into 12 sections. Please someone justify this to me because I think it is a way to protect APS liability(to show outsiders we acknowledge the gifted). APS loves to pretend and document that they are doing wonders for the gifted but very little happens at the high school level. Gifted needs to be funded with just the truly gifted in smaller classes.
El
June 26th, 2012
4:38 pm
Enter your comments here
"Gifted" Mother
June 26th, 2012
4:38 pm
At my child’s middle school every student is required to do a project for the science fair. I learned that gifted students get automatic acceptance in the fair no matter how good or bad their project is. The rest of the students get acceptance if their work is selected by their teachers. I asked why this is the case and I was told that one year a non-gifted student won the science fair and the gifted teachers got angry about it. So they changed the rules to ensure that one of their students would win each year. Crazy!
I too am frustrated as to what constitutes “gifted.” In the 80’s, I was selected for a gifted program based on my IQ. After a year I asked to be taken out of the program. Although I was a good student, I would not describe myself as gifted and I didn’t like being treated differently than my peers. Having worked with today’s gifted students I have found that the only thing that seems inflated is their egos. Educators are doing them a disservice by giving them more privileges and telling them that they are special. Every child is special.
@APS thumbs down
June 26th, 2012
4:40 pm
The dual grade book is split for FTE purposes. The gifted students have to reported with a different course number in order to get funding.
A Teacher
June 26th, 2012
7:28 pm
Students with ‘gifted’ intellects are different in important ways from those with ‘ordinary’ intellects, and they are as deserving of programs tailored to meet their educational needs every bit as much as special education students are deserving of programs tailored to meet THEIR needs. The requirements for qualifying for the gifted program are uniform in the state of Georgia – the same for all public schools. Those requirements (meeting 3 out of 4 criteria) can be found on the Georgia DOE website along with other information about gifted programs. People who oppose funding for gifted education need to remember that gifted individuals drive our economy, our culture, and our destiny. It’s best not to be penny wise and pound foolish.
The nurture and care we give to gifted students
Anonmom
June 26th, 2012
9:26 pm
I have a friend in NJ who has done a lot of gifted research. She discovered that GA has one of the “best” programs for gifted ed in the country (yes, really) — at least GA classifies and gives extra funding for gifted services as a special classification for needs for kids (this is not federal money — it’s state money and there are a number of different ways the systems can “service” the gifted kids — it’s not mandated to be done a particular way and I’ve had a problem with some of the “gaming” that has gone on). That being said, as the 2 of us have compared notes over the years (her oldest just finished her first year at Penn, my oldest is my out of state engineering kid, our 2nds both scored 800s in math on the SAT and are about to go through the college process — our 3rds are a year apart and are not so far behind) — the conclusion is that maybe GA does better with gifted ed and services but her kids were receiving a much stronger curriculum in smaller classrooms across the board as we progressed over the past dozen years — so what’s better? There’s an in-between here. There should be a standard way to qualify for gifted. My middle son was tested into Mensa on IQ before the testing cmae back “good enough” on a few of the “murky” areas for creativity and motivation and allowed him into Discovery at the beginning of 1st grade — I was envisioning headlines: test qualified child for Mensa but not quite good enough for DCSS Discovery program” (the county decided it didn’t really want to go there).
Anonmom
June 26th, 2012
9:28 pm
ps — the pshych. who tested said middle child when he was 6 and “uncovered” his IQ for us told us that she would feel really guilty putting him in public school…. at the time we really loved our elementary school and could not fully appreciate what she was trying to tell us. Now that we’ve experienced a few yeas of private school, we “get” it — I still really love our elementary school but I do get it.
Truth in Moderation
June 27th, 2012
12:55 am
Quite often, a child is “gifted” in a narrow area, and might be “special ed” in another. This is true for many children with Asperger’s Syndrome (high functioning autism). I think they need a new category called “special and gifted”. Many people may not know this, but a photographic memory (often associated with high IQ) is considered a learning disability. My brother has a photographic memory and a “Mensa” level IQ. He never finished college, and has had many personal struggles because of his unique brain. Unfortunately, they did not have gifted or special ed programs when he was in school, and he never got appropriate help. I feel much of his talent was wasted. Sad.
MOK
June 27th, 2012
3:07 pm
@another aps teacher Thanks for the advice. I spent a year ‘pushing’ at my local APS elementary school. I took my son’s WISC scores and Stanford scores and they still wouldn’t put him in the program. He is already a Davidson Young Scholar and can’t even get into the APS gifted program! That certainly tells me that APS is not concerned about the needs of the truly gifted.
Leigh
June 27th, 2012
4:17 pm
Truth in Moderation = this is called twice exceptional. There are more of these children than you might think! I am currently in classes to receive my gifted endorsement and we have had several discussion about these types of children. We need to do a better job of identifying and serving them.
Truth in Moderation
June 27th, 2012
6:07 pm
@Leigh
Thanks for the label clarification. Here are some related reading materials:
http://www.ageofautism.com/2012/03/new-cdc-autism-numbers-coming-soon-rate-increase-to-over-1-in-100-expected.html
Ivy league school, with top endowment in the country, can’t keep a freezer running…..yeah, right.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/health/autism-research-hindered-by-scarcity-of-brain-samples.html?_r=2&src=dayp
“This June, a freezer malfunction at a Harvard-affiliated hospital severely damaged one-third of the world’s largest collection of autism brain samples, which were owned by Autism Speaks. (1) Other brains in the collection were from patients with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or schizophrenia. Somehow, the high-tech security system designed to protect this precious collection failed in the most perfect way. Neither of the two alarms in the security system sounded as the temperature rose by nearly 90 degrees from a polar freeze to a chill you can find in your refrigerator. Meanwhile, the external thermostat checked daily by staff inaccurately reported the expected, not the actual, temperature.”
http://tacanowblog.com/2012/06/22/a-huge-loss-in-the-scientific-community-looking-into-autism/
“March 29, 2012 — One in every 88 U.S. children — and one in 54 boys — has autism, the CDC now estimates.The latest analysis, from a 2008 survey, shows autism is up 23% since 2006 and 78% since 2002. “This is a large number of children and families affected by autism,” study leader Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, MD, chief of the CDC’s developmental disabilities branch, tells WebMD.
“With nearly a doubling of prevalence since CDC started tracking in 1992, autism is officially becoming an epidemic in the U.S. We are dealing with a national emergency that is in need of a national plan,” Mark Roithmayr, president of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said at a CDC teleconference held to announce the findings.”
http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20120329/autism-rates-cdc-2012
dekalbite@catlady
June 27th, 2012
8:51 pm
Under the old rules the mental ability test was calculated on your age – years and months. If you were born in January, 1996 for example, you were expected to have more correct answers than if you were born in September, 1996.
The old test was definitely skewed to white middle class children, and the replacement assessment is as well. Many of the people who campaigned the hardest for changing the criteria were white parents who used the reason of more inclusiveness to make their case. In fact, they were really interested in getting their own children labeled gifted.
Gifted children are found in all races, economic levels and cultures. They spring up in the most unlikely places. Gifted services are most important in low income schools because the gifted children in those schools are the ones who are the most likely to sit in classes where remediation takes precedence over acceleration or enrichment. Gifted children are the most under served population in our schools.
Cheese
June 28th, 2012
10:58 am
1. Gifted classes are SPECIAL ED.
2. In order to qualify of SPECIAL ED a student must meet certain criteria.
3. Just as you can’t drive alone until you are 16, not 15, you cannot qualify for SPECIAL ED and the funds needed to support the program unless you have the scores. 21 to vote, grocery bill $20 but you only have 19…
4. As a teacher of gifted, I understand that your child is one point away, but a point is anpoint and
teachers have no control over the LAW for gifted placement.
5. As for “kow-towing” to parents, what if parents would stop bullying teachers about their “brilliant” children and how they should be in gifted? Non- educators have NO idea what it is like to have a parent screaming at you or crying or threatening a teacher for the satisfaction of their own ego.
6. APS had no leadership for gifted education until last year. The process has been refined as it is up to local systems to implement testing. Currently, the rigor has increased and we longer place students because of a parent threatening or trying to bribe a school for their child’s placement in gifted education.
Cheese
June 28th, 2012
11:25 am
Contrary to some attitudes and misinformation throughout this forum, teachers DO care about the children, gifted or not.
southside teacher
June 28th, 2012
5:06 pm
@Sisypus:
I don’t know Pierce county, so I can’t say if they are the best, or even average.
But, I can tell you that it is legal under DOE regs for them to call a teacher “highly qualified” (that’s a term from NCLB, by the way) once they have begun the gifted endorsement classes. It’s a sequence of 4 classes, which may be completed in a year.
As to policy, it really doesn’t matter, if they are following the state regs, which are hotlinked all over this discussion. There is no true need to create a new document that repeats the regs and call it a new ‘policy’. I can easily imagine your supt not knowing much about it, they usually delegate that stuff, and in a small district, one person likely wears many hats. I worked in a metro disctrict that had one person in charge of math, gifted, and esl for the county.
On the money, the same regs mentioned elsewhere also describe multiple models for providing service to gifted students. A pull-out or ‘resource’ program is only one option of many.
None of this means that Pierce County is automatically doing it right, but just to show that they aren’t necessarily breaking the rules either.
Ree-Tired Teacher
June 30th, 2012
9:39 am
Gifted education in Georgia has become so watered down that it’s now taking the place of what we called “higher level” or “college prep” classes about 20 years ago. In other words, since leveling went away in schools, Gifted became the new way to level.
This last year (my last and worst year in my career), I had class sizes ranging from 28 to 35 students in my 7th grade Language Arts classes. The “gifted” teacher down the hall had 16. I had kids in my class with all types of ability levels, from those who could barely read to regular kids to kids who were obviously gifted but didn’t pass the test due to “motivation” issues.
About 4 weeks before the end of school, I ended up getting 6 extra students because the gifted teacher threw them out for not performing.
Awesome. While I did not mind those extra students as they were good kids, it irritated the snot out of me that the gifted teacher actually had a class with 11 students in it.
long time educator
June 30th, 2012
8:27 pm
I taught gifted students in Georgia under the old regs and admission standards, IQ and ITBS. My county had an Honor Roll requirement for retention, so achievement was necessary to stay in. I could live with an eligibilty based on ITBS alone, if folks think IQ tests are skewed, but, if you don’t leave an achievement component as part of eligibility, you waste the time of students who are interested in learning. The whole point of being labeled “gifted” is to give the child a more challenging learning environment. If the child is not interested in that more challenging learning environment, he is taking away from the students who are interested. I agree that extremely gifted children often have behavoral or social problems, but these are best handled by a counselor and not in a classroom setting. These same children sometimes have a gifted antisocial parent who is unable to hold down a job, or get along with others, but has plenty of time to hang out in the principal’s office to discuss how unfair life has been to him and his child, as misunderstood geniuses.
MB
June 30th, 2012
9:10 pm
Ree-Tired Teacher: Interesting how each school varied their approach to gifted classes, especially since the class size restrictions were waived. At my middle school, many gifted classes were larger than the regular ed classes the past couple of years. (The gifted kids’ CRCT scores were not in doubt, for one thing…)
The high school at which I formerly worked kept most AP classes below the 23-student limit (most under 20 as it just worked out that way), but at my sons’ school, the AP history classes often had 32 or more students per class. (Same district, less than 10 miles apart.) Indeed some honors classes were “watered down,” but even with 32 students per class, my boys’ AP US History teacher instructed such that many students (including those in Ivies and near-Ivies) say he was the best teacher they have had, Period. AP Calc, Bio, Chem, and Government were near 100% pass, with very high average scores. (They were taught above the level of the same courses at many colleges, it seems, from feedback…)
So once again, local school decisions over-ride what might be seen as county policies… BTW, someone mentioned the south Fulton gifted classes, I believe that was a mixed-model (gifted and high-achieving students in the same class) so schools would “earn” a gifted teacher.