[Ohiogift] New High Ability Halloween blog post

[Rosado Feger, Ana]

“Preparing” 4-yr-olds for tests to determine “giftedness”?   Does this set off alarm buzzers for anyone else???


--Ana L. Rosado Feger, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Operations
Ohio University College of Business
336 Copeland Hall
Athens, OH 45701
740-593-0119
rosadof at ohio.edu

From: ohiogift-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [mailto:ohiogift-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] On Behalf Of Art Snyder
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2012 2:06 PM
To: Ohiogift at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: [Ohiogift] New High Ability Halloween blog post

Friends:

Ohio is not alone, unfortunately, with increased and increasing restrictions on service to gifted students. Yesterday's New York Times carried a similar article about new hurdles for families and students in the community of gifted education. Since the article now has limits on public access to it, I have copied and pasted it below, FYI.

Art Snyder

===========================================================================
October 29, 2012
City Ends Sibling-Preference Rule in Gifted Admissions
By AL BAKER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/al_baker/index.html>
New York City education officials are rolling out several changes to the admissions process for gifted programs as they confront an explosion in the number of children qualifying for seats.

But none have [has] created quite as much furor as the new policy that could send Rachel Fremmer’s daughters to different schools.

“How does it benefit the schools to have parents’ time and money split between different schools?” said Ms. Fremmer, who has a 7-year-old daughter in the second-grade gifted program at P. S. 163, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and a 4-year-old daughter in preschool hoping to enroll there next year.

The policy ends the sibling preference for gifted and talented programs<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/gifted_students/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> that have more eligible students than seats, a situation that has become common as more 4-year-olds have scored high on the admissions tests in recent years. Last year, almost 5,000 qualified for kindergarten seats<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/as-ranks-of-gifted-soar-in-ny-fight-brews-for-kindergarten-slots.html>, more than double the number from just four years earlier.

Under the old rule, if Ms. Fremmer’s younger daughter had scored highly enough on the tests to qualify for a seat — in the 90th
percentile — she would have been automatically accepted into the same gifted program her sister attends, a policy intended to keep families together and to keep parents from having to drop off and pick up at different schools. But now, if that program has more qualifying applicants than seats, Ms. Fremmer’s other daughter will have to enter a lottery like everyone else.

Simply put, the shift reflects the Education Department<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/education_department_nyc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s effort “to make it fairer and more equitable for students scoring most high on these exams,” said Robert Sanft, the chief executive of the department’s Office of Student Enrollment.

For years, sibling preferences had been a sacrosanct element of the admissions process for popular public and private school programs, but increasing demand for seats has already led some private schools to do away with the policy<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/nyregion/at-elite-new-york-schools-admissions-policies-are-evolving.html>. Parents upset at the

Education Department’s decision have been writing letters to city officials, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

The old policy, however, was not universally admired. Parents who did not already have a child in a gifted program complained that it was unfair, and in a petition backing the shift<http://www.change.org/petitions/new-york-city-department-of-education-abolish-sibling-priority-for-gifted-and-talented> said it was “crucial to maintain the high quality of the programs and serve a child’s best interests.”

The sibling preference was particularly criticized by parents of children who scored at the 99th percentile, the highest level, but still could not win a seat in one of the five so-called citywide programs, including the Anderson School<http://www.ps334school.org/> on the Upper West Side and the Brooklyn School of Inquiry<http://brooklynschoolofinquiry.org/>, which are reserved for the highest scorers. Students with a sibling already in those schools could get in, under the old rules, by scoring in the 97th percentile, allowing them to vault past students who scored higher but had no brother or sister in the school.

“Why should a child who scored a 99 on the test be deprived of an earned seat because another child has a sibling?” wrote one parent on the petition. “This isn’t how life works and it isn’t how the N.Y.C. public school system should work either.”

The change is one of several intended to manage the ever-growing demand for the city’s gifted programs, and the ever-improving performance of students on the admissions exams, a phenomenon that has coincided with the rise of a local tutoring and test-preparation industry.

Several years ago, the city instituted the test-based admissions process, which involves two exams given in one sitting, replacing a system that had largely left each district to set its own criteria, which could include tests, grades and teacher recommendations. The change has led to a drop in the number of black and Hispanic students qualifying for the programs. This year, the city has thrown out one of the two exams, the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, and replaced it with a new 48-question test known as the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test — Second Edition, or NNAT2. It has also reduced the weight given the other test, known as the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, in the student’s final score.

The NNAT2, said Adina Lopatin, deputy chief academic officer in the Education Department, is “less impacted by things like spoken language, socioeconomic background, culture and school experience,” and should increase diversity and “improve the accuracy of our identification of gifted children.”

In another change, those students entering kindergarten or first grade who score highly enough for a gifted program will no longer be guaranteed a seat in one. The city said this would not curtail students’ options because roughly half of parents in those cases rejected their offered seats, choosing instead to send their children to neighborhood elementary schools or private schools.

Dozens of parents came to an information session in a Chelsea high school on Wednesday evening to hear what several Education Department officials had to say about the process, which some parents called overwhelming and daunting. But many said the presentation did little to relieve their sense of confusion.

“It is insanity,” said Jennifer Perrine, who attended the meeting to explore all the schooling options for her 4-year-old daughter but left the presentation “pulling my hair out.”

She added, “The average parent is left with the impression that you can’t get in anywhere, even if you’re Albert Einstein.”

Representatives of several tutoring companies, which are already trying to adapt to the NNAT2, were also there to greet the parents, and seek their business. One of them, Bige Z. Doruk, also happened to be personally affected by the new sibling policy, because she has two children in a city gifted program and a 4-year-old preparing for the coming tests. But she said education officials were doing the right thing to abolish the sibling preference.

“This is not about accommodating families,” said Ms. Doruk, the owner of Bright Kids NYC. “It is about creating a fair gifted and talented system for all families, giving every family a fair shot at being in a gifted and talented program.”
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