Gifted? Or just lucky?

The playgrounds buzzed last week with chatter about New York magazine’s article “The Myth of the Gifted Child,” which hit news stands just as families all over the city are gearing up to have their four-year-olds tested for admission into the so-called “gifted and talented programs” – the public schools with special "smart kid" programs of study.

The article claims that testing such young children doesn’t make sense for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that “the minds of nursery-school age children are far too raw to be judged.” But in New York, if you want a spot in those gifted programs, you test your kid at four, get a school placement at five, and that’s that. Sure, there’s some mobility here and there—kids who don’t start in “gifted” programs can test in at 6th or 7th grade—and sometimes families decide that the programs are too intense and opt out. But given the expense of private schools and the inconsistent quality of “regular” public schools, getting a spot in one of these gifted programs is…well, a gift.

Almost exactly a year ago, my four-year-old took The Test. We went to a school and he spent an hour in a room with some strange woman (she mentioned “Star Wars” to him, which made her okay) doing god-knows-what: filled in circles, pointed at triangles, stood on his head, paraded around in a swimsuit and heels, who knows.

He couldn’t remember exactly what was on the test, afterwards, but he seems to have done Very Well. So well that we got one of those spots in one of the city-wide gifted programs.

Could he have just as easily tanked the test, refused the swimsuit competition, told the examiner that she was stupid,or refused to talk altogether? You betcha. He was, after all, four. A four-year-old boy, not a species known for sitting still and cooperating. I mean, of course he’s a genius (and yes, your kids are too) but we were still pleasantly surprised that he’d done so well—surprised and relieved, because if he hadn’t done well, we weren’t sure where he was going to go to kindergarten.

We live in Manhattan, you see, and thus are subject to the whims of the Department of Education. We got a variance for our older son to go to a neighborhood school that’s out of our district, but that was five years ago and the rules have changed. So we didn’t know if his brother would be able to go to the same school. Yes, that’s right. According to the wisdom of the DOE, siblings cannot automatically be given a variance if the family lives out of district. And unfortunately, our “zoned” school is a non-starter, one of the many public schools in the city that has fallen between the cracks (I wrote about applying to kindergarten here and here and here). Thus “TAG,” (talented and gifted) became our fallback—a desperate fallback, because we knew the odds: only kids who score in the tippy-top percentile were going to get seats in the gifted kindergarten programs.

But now we’re in this tippy-top kindergarten, with all these other tippy-top kids. I ask myself almost every day if this kindergarten is so much better than the “regular” kindergarten…and I don’t know. Gifted, in NYC, seems to mean fast—the kindergartners have been doing first-grade work since late September—and I’m not sure that faster is better. The teachers and students sometimes seem almost breathless as they race through What Must Be Covered, without much time for reflection and without much time for play. I could rant for pages about the state of public education, about the inequities of the system, and the flaws in curriculum, but I will refrain and talk only about my kindergartner. 

Pobably it's good for my son to have to stretch himself to keep up with his peers; he loves the number games and word puzzles; he goes off to school pretty happily in the morning; he likes his teacher and he’s even made some friends.

Made friends, that is, with some of the fourteen girls in his class of twenty. (We started with 24; I’m not sure what happened to those other four kids.) The other five K classes have an equally lopsided girl-to-boy ratio. Maybe as a result of all those eager-to-please girls, the classrooms seem relatively free of discipline problems—or maybe that’s because all the kids are, you know, gifted.

Is my kid smart? Sure. Are there some kids who might not be able to handle the pace of his classroom? Probably. Does that mean those kids aren’t one day going to win Nobel prizes, play concert piano, write amazing novels, be productive citizens? No way. Do we need a better method for finding and teaching our strongest students? You bet your sweet bippy. 

Is my kid "gifted?" Only time will tell. Were we lucky that day last February? Absolutely.

This is an original NYC Moms Blog post. Deborah Quinn also frets about the state of public school education and parenting at mannahattamamma.com