Statistical Errors Keep 4700 K-3rd Students From NYC 'Gifted' Programs

alostpacket writes "The New York times reports that statistical scoring by the standardized testing company Pearson incorrectly disqualified over 4700 students from a chance to enter gifted / advanced programs in New York City schools. Only students who score in the 90th percentile or above are eligible for these programs. Those in the 97th or above are eligible for 5 of the best programs. 'According to Pearson, three mistakes were made. Students' ages, which are used to calculate their percentile ranking against students of similar age, were recorded in years and months, but should also have counted days to be precise. Incorrect scoring tables were used. And the formula used to combine the two test parts into one percentile ranking contained an error.' No mention of enlisting the help of the gifted children was made in the Times article, but it also contained a now-corrected error. This submission likely also contains an erro"

Comments

Totally arbitrary anyway

[MightyYar]

All this "precision" to test against an arbitrary "90th" and "97th" percentile.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[dwhitaker]

It may be arbitrary, but it is still a somewhat socially-accepted metric. I suspect that many people would agree that the top 10% (or 3%) of students by whatever accepted measure qualify for "gifted".

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

-see life of Linus Pauling, Einstein. etc ...

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[firex726]

While I agree with your premise, I can't say I agree on the examples.
The education has undergone a lot of changes since 1910, when Linus was in it.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Charliemopps]

No, it's fucking retarded at its face. So we find the children that need the LEAST amount of help, and give them the most help. Then we take the kids in the most trouble and flunk them out, punish them, hold them back a grade. The entire premise is idiotic. In this country we have trouble getting normal children the basic skills they need. Last I checked, our gifted students were doing ok. So lets start focusing on the kids that need it, and let the ones that gifted ones be gifted on their own.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Aranykai]

You have it backwards. You find the kids with the most amount of potential and give them a greater opportunity. That being said, I was a 'gifted student' throughout school(class of 04 for what its worth) and I don't recall any 'help' or special tutoring. Most of the time that status simply granted us access to advanced placement courses, taking higher math or english studies than you would normally have access to or sometimes special after-school opportunities.

I hate to sound crass, but the problem with students that 'need help' in our education system is 80% the result of inept parenting at home(or lack there of) and has nothing to do with the schools. The other 20%? Well, not everyone excels at every task.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[pla]

It may be arbitrary, but it is still a somewhat socially-accepted metric. I suspect that many people would agree that the top 10% (or 3%) of students by whatever accepted measure qualify for "gifted".

Socially accepted or not, it still counts as completely arbitrary to say that 33000 kids get in to the "good" schools, but #33001 (NYC has 1.1M public school students) gets to attend one of the standard prison-camp style facilities.

Now, for the kids right at the edge, of course they care - But on a larger scale, it makes absolutely no difference to society as a whole whether Dashiell (age 6Y10M4D) or Phineus (age 6Y10M3D) make the cut.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Slyfox696]

No, it's fucking retarded at its face. So we find the children that need the LEAST amount of help, and give them the most help. Then we take the kids in the most trouble and flunk them out, punish them, hold them back a grade. The entire premise is idiotic. In this country we have trouble getting normal children the basic skills they need. Last I checked, our gifted students were doing ok. So lets start focusing on the kids that need it, and let the ones that gifted ones be gifted on their own.

I'm sorry, but your opinion is silly. Why are you interested in making everyone mediocre? How about we push ALL kids, not just the ones at the bottom? Whether it's publicly acceptable to say or not, the fact is most of the kids at the bottom will never advance past subpar. They'll be the manual labor, the janitors, the cooks, etc. And there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, any person providing for their family is okay in my book.

But the gifted children, they are the thinkers, they are the ones who will change the world. We need to be giving them every opportunity to succeed we can, and to hold them back simply because there are some kids who are not intelligent seems a completely backwards outlook on life. You're saying we should not provide assistance to the children who will change the world so we can instead focus on those who will work fairly unintellectual jobs. That makes no sense.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Prof.Phreak]

All this implies that there are 4700 empty seats in those gifted schools. There aren't. Very likely other folks with 96.98 percentile got in due to their b-days falling out onto the same month as someone a week younger and same exact grade on the same exact exam. In other words, by most measures, the folks in these schools are "just as" gifted as the folks who missed out due to the error (bad luck).

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Your kind of thinking is what's holding our students back. Letting the slowest kid in the class dictate the pace for everyone else only kills any kind of interest in education that the advanced student would have. Meanwhile the kid who isn't doing as well may be special needs and that should be determined. If the child isn't special needs you have to stop and wonder if they're simply lazy or if there is a deeper problem. In any case, what do we do with the lazy student who thinks that learning is for fools because he has no desires in life aside from becoming a gang banger or the next goof on The Deadliest Catch? If your going to use his performance to determine the pace of the class then you're doing a great disservice to those who are willing to work for better.
 
Your way of handling things would only lead to mediocrity and stagnation.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[mwvdlee]

Great idea; we should also implement this system for school sports programs.
Kick all the talented kids out of the teams and replace them by the kids that perform worst.
Last I checked, our talented athletes were doing ok, so lets start focussing on the kids that need it.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[drinkypoo]

You have it backwards. You find the kids with the most amount of potential and give them a greater opportunity. That being said, I was a 'gifted student' throughout school(class of 04 for what its worth) and I don't recall any 'help' or special tutoring.

I was considered gifted in elementary school and they taught me speed-reading and we played logic games. Pretty useful, I guess. They wouldn't let me do any of the cool stuff though and since I was a problem child they stopped involving me (though I was always well-behaved when associating with the GATE class) so it was in the end a fuckoff waste of time and money, to me. That's OK; the whole system is hypocritical. Public school is part of the lie that you can excel through hard work in today's system, and GATE is part of making that lie convincing.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[bbelt16ag]

i think that's utter bull shit. given enough time and effort, even your own effort all knowledge comes. There is no reason to not teach these kids the fundamentals of how to learn and grow in this society. They do not have to be janitors or cooks unless they want to be. We can make freaking robots for that crap. They must have the basics so that they can learn on their own after school or their world will be very bleak indeed. I watched my own parents work day in and day out trying to make ends meat. By the time i graduated from highschool their bodies were wrecked, and aliments of other kinds were coming as well. this is not how we should be treating people in this society. At some point those jobs won't be there anyways like i said above, the time is coming where we are going to have machines doing most of the manual labor, and perhaps most of the lower thinking jobs as well.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[anagama]

His opinion may be silly, but he isn't alone. I overheard two teachers saying the same thing, that the gifted kids take care of themselves and don't need any help.

Of course that's often false. It is a common enough occurrence for some gifted kids to get really lazy because early on, they find it is easy to skate with minimal effort. Later in their education careers however, when subjects become inherently tougher, those skating work habits turn to failure. I have personal experience here.

Secondly, relying on smart kids to take care of themselves is not a recipe for a well rounded education, it's a recipe for hyper focus on a single area that may or may not prove valuable to the student. In the college context, the point of a liberal arts education is to expose students to a wide range subjects because sometimes, very interesting things can happen when knowledge in different subject areas intersects. Ignoring smart kids might make sense for a diploma mill, but it doesn't make sense if the actual goal is help kids succeed by showing them where interesting (and potentially lucrative) intersections can be found.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[ShanghaiBill]

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

-see life of Linus Pauling, Einstein. etc ...

The "truly gifted" are also wasting a lot of time in "normal" classrooms. This is the 21st century. We should be using technology to customize education for each child, and let them learn at an optimal pace. This is easiest for subjects like math, and my son's school uses Khan Academy and IXL to make much of the math self-paced. They also let the kids pick their own books to read using AR Bookfind. My son has read over a hundred books this year, and has yet to find a book that isn't in their system.

Both of my kids qualified for California's GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) Program. But it seems to me that it could be expanded to include a lot more kids, because the parents do a lot of the grunt work. So if you double the number of kids, you are also doubling the number of parents. The school just needs to provide a framework. I take an afternoon off work each week to work with these kids and I love every minute of it. Some of these kids are amazingly bright. Last week I showed a fourth grader how to do a cross product of two vectors, and she "got it" in less than a minute. I walked away thinking "this kid is going to change the world someday." She also laughed when I told her a "math joke":

Q: What do you get when you cross a tsetse fly with a mountain climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector with a scaler.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

FWIW, I was a "gifted" student in the 1950s (IQ 160). They brought me up to believe that I was part of an elite and everybody else was stupid. I now know that I was wrong. It's a fundamental mistake to write off the other 80% as being too stupid for a good education.

We read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and obviously we were the alphas. The other kids are betas and gammas who just aren't as smart as us and a good education would be wasted on them. (This was a mirror of the British class structure, of course.)

Yes, it's true that 80% of kids can't do well in the educational system, and yes, it's true that a problem is the parents. I draw 2 conclusions:

(1) If you have a bad family background, school gives you a second chance. Not a school dedicated to getting high scores on machine-graded multiple-choice questions, but a school in which teachers act like human beings with feelings, and can relate to kids and support them, the way surrogate parents do.

(2) Every study says that the main factor that correlates with school achievement is family income. Adequate housing, health care, and employment is necessary (if not sufficient) for raising kids. You can't read to your kids if you're working 2 low-paid jobs, morning to night. The U.S. has about the greatest inequality, and the most widespread poverty, of any developed country. We didn't use that science education to eliminate poverty, we used it to make millionaires into billionaires. The upper 1% owns 75% of the wealth. Let's distribute that wealth a little bit and eliminate the poverty.

If you take those 80% and give them the advantages I had (father with a secure, well-paying union job, mother who didn't have to work), I think most of them would learn a lot. I think it would turn out that the percent of kids who can't learn wasn't 80% but much lower -- maybe 40%. Maybe 20%. Maybe less.

We can look at countries like Finland, which has eliminated inequality and poverty as much as possible, to see what an egalitarian society is like. They seem to be doing pretty well.

How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.

And you can get that return from kids in the top 20% and the bottom 80%.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

It's difficult or impossible to identify the kids who will make major contributions to society in middle school, for God's sake. Read the biographies of Nobel laureates. Many of them were fuck-ups in high school (and beyond).

Assuming that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates contributed to society (or at least made a lot of money), neither of them showed much promise in high school.

Most of the people who made significant contributions came from financially comfortable, and often wealthy, families. Try eliminating poverty and inequality, to the extent that most other developed countries have.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Sarius64]

I find this repeated constantly throughout society. I was in a similar situation and kicked out of GATE for completing all of the modules available and then bouncing off the ceiling because I was unbearably bored. Instead of helping me, I was told to be quiet and just do my work, which I had already done. My reflection on this now makes me think that there were fundamental conflicts having women teachers that expected boys to simply accept social norms that women desire. The system is hypocritical. Improvement of our children is the last goal on the list of any teacher union, in my opinion.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[phantomfive]

That's kind of a good idea, actually......

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[drinkypoo]

I don't think it has anything to do with gender. The teacher who really put my off education was Mr. Knudsen in third grade. I spent a lot of time writing lines, or with my head down on my desk in that class. And I was big then, so it was uncomfortable then. I don't think whether a teacher is an asshole is at all related to their gender.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[nbauman]

I should have said public higher education. In the 1960s, the New York City University system was free (and it turned out many Nobel laureates and industry leaders like Andrew Grove), and the New York and California state university systems were practically free.

The big increases in higher education spending seem to be in the private schools. New York University used to be a third-rate school for frat guys. Now it pulled up its standards and is one of the most expensive schools in the country. They spent a lot on educational improvements, but they also have dorms like 4-star hotels and Olympic gyms.

K-12 is a different story. IN the 1960s, schools were segregated in most of the country, they didn't accept handicapped kids, and they expelled kids who didn't fit in. Now they have to teach them all. As a result, the NAEP scores for black students have risen dramatically to almost while levels since NAEP started keeping track in the 1970s.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[Zak3056]

Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.

Complete bullshit. Just to pick a name that everybody knows, Bronx High School of Science is as good as, and maybe better than, any suburban schools, by any standard. There are some very good high schools in New York City, and every upscale parent knows which ones they are.

You're ignoring the fact that suburbs are expensive, and they self-select for wealthy families. That's often the reason people move to the suburbs.

Speaking as someone who went to Brooklyn Tech, I have a high respect for Bronx Science and find your description of it as "as good as, maybe better than any suburban school," to border on insulting. The specialized schools in NYC are some of the best in the country, hands down. That said, this in no way invalidates the point the GP was making--that suburban schools are, typically, of higher quality than large city schools. Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant are places where the entire school is in the "gifted program" and do not reflect the quality of city schools overall.

Re:Totally arbitrary anyway

[MikeBabcock]

With a 160 IQ you are elite. Go use your brain and enjoy that it works so well. The vast majority of people have a hard time processing raw data at the speed that you can.

I was one of the dumbest kids in my gifted class with an IQ in the mid 130's and the one girl who's IQ was over 160 made me look as stupid as my regular classmates felt around me (in those situations that benefit from data processing and absorption rates). ... once upon a time, when my professor said he thought I was wrong about something, half the class stood and cheered. One of those leading the applause apologized at break and explained they were glad I finally made a mistake for once. Didn't bother me, but sometimes its good to understand exactly how different you are when you think that quickly compared to the average person.

They're Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

They might as well file for bankruptcy. Their is no wrath like the wrath of a parent who thinks their child is gifted and talented.

Re:They're Screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

Different ac here, but what I think they mean is that they read using only sight words. Basically, there are three levels of reading. The first is the sight word level. Kids at that level read by knowing that "cat" is pronounced in a certain way and is the fuzzy animal. The next level is the decoding level. This is where you can take words and break them down into their component sounds, so you see "dog" and break it down into d-o-g and know it is the fuzzy animal because that is in the audio memory, which is much larger. The third level is the fluency level, where the process becomes almost automatic and paring rules for irregular situations develop. Another interesting part of fluency is that you don't need to have the "voice" in your head read along with you, but rather can read without translating it to audio first. According to the info I found online for our state, you should start to be able to decode in first grade and competent at it by second. Full fluency should be present by fifth or sixth grade.

Standardized Assessments

[dwhitaker]

I'm sure that a debate will emerge in the ensuing contents about the pros and cons of relying on standardized assessments as heavily as we do. From the summary, though, it seems as if the problem was not with the assessment, but rather the ancillary aspects of assessing. This doesn't excuse the mistakes, but it also isn't a compelling argument for abolishing standardized tests.

For what it's worth, Pearson is a for-profit educational publisher and assessment creator, but there are other assessment creators out there that are non-profit (e.g. ETS, the makers of the GRE). The entire assessment process is hard, and maintaining high-quality throughout is even harder.

Age

[hedwards]

Why are we measuring age with regards to giftedness? The age at which students are permitted to enroll in classes does not permit students born in September to enroll early, but if you are born in August you get to enroll, then when it comes to the standardized tests students who were permitted early entry get a lower bar with regards to entrance.

Since things are in flux to the point where a few days make a difference, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until there's some validity to the testing being done? As far as I know there's no validity to the notion that early testing leads to the right decisions being made. Some folks just develop early, but don't hit a particularly high mark, and some take longer to develop and ultimately to a higher level.

I remember when I was a kid getting screwed over because of my age, if a couple of months are that significant, then the testing shouldn't be done.

Re:Age

[nblender]

A prognosis of 'gifted' is not to be confused with 'developing early'... Sure, my 'gifted' son appeared to develop early but his brain works differently and that is what is being assessed... His reading/writing/arithmetic was tested for sure, but those results are only a small part of the overall scoring... He was 99th percentile for reading/writing/comprehension but tested low for working memory and processing speed... A non-gifted individual will do better than my son at discovering a pattern in a long sequence of symbols, for example... Or will do better at word problems.. Even though my son could read and divine symbolic meaning from adult novels when he was 6, he still has trouble with word problems in math because as he's reading them, his brain explodes with the many possibilities that are emerging as each sentence progresses and has trouble sorting out the important parts of the problem... This is what is measured when they test for giftedness...Gifted children each have different strengths and weaknesses; they're not to be confused with the pop culture vision of a child prodigy... I actually with there were a different word other than 'gifted' because that word carries a lot of misconception...

I'm not a psychologist, just a parent who's been submerged in this...

Re:Age

[hedwards]

I don't buy that. The problem is that you don't receive additional instruction for being a couple months older and this isn't supposed to be a test of how well you were prepared by your parents prior to going to school. What's more, at that age it's difficult to differentiate between being developmentally advanced for the age and having a more durable level of talent.

Bottom line the decisions should be put off a few years until the difference of a few days or a few months is a bit less meaningful. Choosing winners and losers in elementary school ultimately affects a student's academic performance for years to come. Seems to me that there should be a lot more concern paid to the scientific aspect of the evaluations seeing as it has life long consequences for those that are miscategorized.

Irony

[phoomp]

Anyone else find some irony in the fact that the people deciding which kids qualify for advanced education programs couldn't get their math right?

Re:Irony

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Even before the error, theÂnumber of students qualifying
>Âfor gifted seats â" 9,020 â" was far higher than the number
> of seats.

It doesn't make a difference -- this is the real stupidity. It's long since been shown society would get much more bang for its buck devoting just a fraction of the money it spends making sure every last yokel can count to ten to accelerated education for people who actually invent stuff.

But those yokels, as adults, are amenable to claims that that is elitist, by other yokels seeking their support in power grabs.

I'd have been pissed.

[nblender]

My son was having trouble in his neighborhood school. The teachers/principal told us there was something wrong, likely ADHD or Aspergers... Broke our heart to be told this in a 5 minute 'parent teacher interview'... Anyway, after a psych-ed assessment, it turned out he just needed a gifted program possibly with some mild ADHD... The neighborhood school told us "Great! We'll just give him harder work. That'll keep him busy." but they already weren't dealing with his bullies, just brushing it off, and as we learned more about the gifted affliction, we understood that 'more and harder work' is not what he needed. He needed to be taught how his brain worked, how his brain was wired to learn in order to be successful as an adult... This is something that neither I nor his mother had when we were kids...

Anyway, the school board has a gifted program but they want _only_ gifted children and since his psych-ed report used the evil "ADHD" term, they rejected him... We found another school here (a Charter school, not private, still publicly funded, but more like an R&D sort of school) that catered to kids with multiple issues, including giftedness... Unfortunately, there were only 2 spots in his grade and more than 50 applicants... Coupled with a move to a new campus, an extra 25 spots opened up so my son got in. He's now in his second year there and this program has made a huge difference in his life... His first day at his new school, he came home and said "Mom! I've met my people!" ... He has a ton of friends at school, and is beginning to understand how his brain is wired... His teachers are giving him very successful coping strategies, and have imparted terrific insights to us about how to help him be successful... This has changed the trajectory of his life...

I can't imagine where we'd be were it not for this school... If we had been denied entrance, I dread think what state he'd be in...

I feel for the parents of these 4700 children, many of whom will not get the help they need...

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[nedlohs]

I feel for the parents of these 4700 children, many of whom will not get the help they need...

Sorry, if a 15 days birth date error on your birth certificate would change you from "gifted" to "not gifted" then clearly it's a complete farce and there's no "help they need".

Re:I'd have been pissed.

[LongearedBat]

But perhaps another 5000+ places for gifted kids wouldn't be a bad idea. (Though it might be somewhat expensive.)

Reinhart, Rogoff, and Excel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they should have used Excel and asked Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff for some assistance.

Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[tepples]

In the meantime, the truly gifted are hitting the library, doing their own thing, and pretty much don't need no stinking program.

In the pre-World War II era when Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein grew up, it was believed acceptably safe for a child to walk the streets unaccompanied. Nowadays kids are kept indoors over public hysteria over "stranger danger" and over poorly laid out, cul-de-sac-heavy street hierarchies that discourage getting from one place to another in anything but a passenger vehicle.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[__aaltlg1547]

When I was growing up, a long generation after Einstein and Pauling, it was still considered safe, but it was objectively much LESS SAFE than it is now.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[davester666]

But subjectively, the media have blown everything completely out of proportion.

Somewhere, a child was abducted by a person.

But the media reports it as everyones child everywhere is minutes away from to be taken next.

Re:Stranger danger hysteria and cul-de-sacs

[__aaltlg1547]

But subjectively, the media have blown everything completely out of proportion.

Somewhere, a child was abducted by a person.

But the media reports it as everyones child everywhere is minutes away from to be taken next.

Nothing sells like hysteria.

How Gifted?

[Flozzin]

I find it hard to believe that a few days in the year change a child from gifted to ungifted. If it does, then these kids are on the extremely low end of gifted, and after a year they will even out with the rest of the kids their age. There was an /. article a while ago discussing how the gifted kids, that you see go to college at the age of 14 generally even out when they hit their twenties. Super geniuses are extremely rare. What normally happens is these kids are smarter than their peers, but not any smarter than your average adult. So they fly through highschool and college and end up at the same place everyone else does, just sooner.

Re:How Gifted?

[MaWeiTao]

It's not that the program itself creates gifted children. It's that it separate those kids from the under-performing ones and puts them in an environment where everyone is more invested in education. I'm convinced that the most critical component are the parents. If they care enough to push their students then the kids are more likely to perform well. A gift program that specifically requires an application process is the ideal arrangement because only parents who are invested are going to invest the effort. Everywhere else the under-performing kids, and especially troublemakers end up being a drag on everybody.

Re:The ones who caught the error

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The folks who made the error . . . didn't get into the gifted program . . . obviously . . .

Re:Need statisticians

[Richy_T]

about 13.6% of the Slashdot readership.