Both The "More" Child and Loving your gifted child linked to this article, about a growing trend: prepping three and four year old children to take admission tests for gifted programs.
It has taken me a little while to blog about article because, after two years of testing children for GATE admission, it doesn't surprise me at all. As soon as the 'no' letters were mailed each year, our office would start getting calls from parents who wanted their child retested. And, yes, I fielded many, many calls from parents wanting to know how to help their child study for the test we used.
A school director quoted in the article sums up my position on kiddie test prep perfectly:
“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”
Much as all this test preparation is disturbing, I have to wonder whether we, as a community, do it to ourselves. The first problem is the label. Who doesn't want their child to be gifted? I wish that we could find another term, one that emphasizes the special needs of GATE kids. When you couple that with the enrichment-focused nature of many gifted programs, it's no wonder parents want their child to have the advantages being GATE identified seems to bestow.
The problem, of course, is what happens when kids are inappropriately placed. When I taught in a self-contained GATE class, I had a couple of students who clearly did not belong in the class. They did not have the reading skills and analytical ability to keep up... and they knew it. It was a frustrating, draining, demoralizing experience for them. I think the key is putting kids into an environment where they can thrive, and if a GATE program is done well, typical kids will not thrive in it, any more than they would thrive if they were accelerated a year or two.
Gifted is a special education population. If we 'marketed' it that way, would it help the problem? I don't know, but it is one of those questions that keeps me up at night.
Great post and so nice to read about it from a "tester's perspective."
Posted by: Missy | 11/24/2009 at 07:39 AM