New York Magazine has a cover story entitled ???The Junior Meritocracy.??? The crux of the article is that administering standardized admissions and IQ tests to 4-year-olds???a common practice for entry into top public and private NYC kindergartens???is pointless. It's impossible to practically predict at age 4, the article argues, which students will be deserving of a spot in gifted and talented (G&T) programs when they're 7, 10, or even 17.
Among the elementary schools cited in the article is Hunter College Elementary, a publicly funded elementary school for ???gifted and talented??? students that uses such a test to help make kindergarten admissions decisions.
While I think using a rigid cut score from an IQ test to make these admissions decisions about 4-year-olds is a questionable move for any school, I'm particularly distressed by the thought of a publicly-funded school engaging in such nonsense for two reasons.
First, tracking students by IQ at such a young age is a questionable decision. Many people argue, particularly at that age, that IQ is more reflective of environment than it is of innate ability, particularly for children born to poor families. (One study found that ???in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse. ??? In other words, that for impoverished families, environment has much more to do with IQ than genes.)
Add to that the fact that, upon entering kindergarten, the average poor student has been exposed to only an average of 25 hours of one-on-one reading, compared to his middle class peers who have been exposed to 1,000-1,700 hours, and you can see how difficult it can be to effectively assess the innate ability of a 4-year-old who hasn't been exposed to the educationally-rich environment that most middle class and affluent children have seen since birth.
Second, once students have been singled out for gifted and talented (G&T) programs, there is a snowball effect that perpetuates the gap between the students in that track and those who aren't. According to two researchers, James Flynn and William Dickens, who have spent a ton of time studying the impact of genes and environment on IQ, this snowball effect can mean that a small genetic difference between two people can have a huge impact on their life paths. ???A small initial advantage in something like IQ leads to an environment that benefits that trait, which leads to a better IQ, which leads to a better environment and so on,??? explains Dickens.
I am unabashedly in favor of spending public dollars to push our G&T students to reach their intellectual potential. I just seriously worry about a practice that uses public money to effectively perpetuate the achievement gap rather than to close it.
--Kathleen Porter-Magee
