Schools Ask: Gifted or Just Well-Prepared?
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Natalie Viderman, 4, was tutored at Bright Kids NYC for an assessment test.
By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: February 17, 2013
When the New York City Education Department announced that it was changing part of its admissions exam for its gifted and talented programs
last year, in part to combat the influence of test preparation
companies, one of those companies posted the news with links to guides
and practice tests for the new assessment.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Natalie Viderman, 4, and her mother, Victoria Preys.
Natalie spent months preparing for gifted programs’ admissions tests.
The day that Pearson, a company that designs assessments, announced that
it was changing an exam used by many New York City private schools,
another test prep company attempted to decipher the coming changes on
its blog: word reasoning and picture comprehension were out, bug search
and animal coding were in.
If you did not know what to make of it — and who would? — why not stop by?
Assessing students has always been a fraught process, especially
4-year-olds, a mercurial and unpredictable lot by nature, who are vying
for increasingly precious seats in kindergarten gifted programs.
In New York, it has now become an endless contest in which
administrators seeking authentic measures of intelligence are barely
able to keep ahead of companies whose aim is to bring out the genius in
every young child.
The city’s leading private schools are even considering doing away with
the test they have used for decades, popularly known as the E.R.B., after the Educational Records Bureau, the organization that administers the exam, which is written by Pearson.
“It’s something the schools know has been corrupted,” said Dr. Samuel J. Meisels,
an early-childhood education expert who gave a presentation in the fall
to private school officials, encouraging them to abandon the test.
Excessive test preparation, he said, “invalidates inferences that can be
drawn” about children’s “learning potential and intellect and
achievement.”
Last year, the Education Department said it would change one of the
tests used for admission to public school gifted kindergarten and
first-grade classes in order to focus more on cognitive ability and less
on school readiness, which favors children who have more access to
preschool and tutoring.
Scores had been soaring.
For the 2012-13 school year, nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted
and talented kindergarten seats in New York City public schools. That
was more than double the number five years ago. “We were concerned
enough about our definition of giftedness being affected by test prep —
as we were prior school experience, primary spoken language,
socioeconomic background and culture — that we changed the assessment,”
Adina Lopatin, a deputy chief academic officer in the Education
Department, said.
And yet test prep companies leapt to action, printing new books tailored to the new test and organizing classes.
Natalie Viderman, 4, spent an hour and a half each week for six months at Bright Kids NYC,
a tutoring company, working on skills like spatial visualization and
serial reasoning, which are part of the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test,
or NNAT 2, the new gifted and talented test. She and her mother,
Victoria Preys, also worked every night on general learning, test prep
and workbooks, some provided by Bright Kids.
“It is my philosophy that if you can get more help, why not?” Ms. Preys
said. She prepared her son the same way and he benefited, she said,
scoring in the 98th percentile, qualifying him for a seat. She
interpreted the Education Department’s decision to change the test and
“raise the standards,” she said, as a message that it expected parents
to do more. “We are increasing the standards, so you have to work with
your kids more, to prep more,” she said.
“Every time these tests change, there’s a lot of demand,” Bige Doruk,
founder of Bright Kids, said. She said she did not accept the argument
that admissions tests had been invalidated by test prep. “It is not a
validity issue, it’s a competitive issue,” she said. “Parents will
always do what they can for their children.” And not all children who
take preparation courses do well, she said. The test requires that
4-year-olds sit with a stranger for nearly an hour — skills that extend
beyond the scope of I.Q. or school readiness.
Natalie also applied to Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan;
she missed the cutoff for the second round by a point.