Gifted kids or just well-prepared?

The arms race

When New York City's Education Department changed part of its gifted and talented admissions exam — partly to blunt the influence of test-preparation companies — one of those companies promptly posted the news along with guides and practice tests for the new assessment. When Pearson announced changes to the ERB exam used by the city's private schools (word reasoning and picture comprehension out; bug search and animal coding in), another prep firm was already blogging its deciphering of the coming format.

That was the state of play in early 2013, captured by The New York Times in a dispatch from the front lines of an endless contest: administrators hunting for authentic measures of intelligence in four-year-olds, versus an industry devoted to bringing out the genius in every young child — for a fee.

Why the tests keep changing

The public-school gifted program had already moved once, swapping a school-readiness-heavy test for one focused on cognitive ability, which favors children with less preschool and tutoring access. The reason was visible in the numbers: for the 2012–13 school year, nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted kindergarten seats — more than double five years earlier. "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," said Adina Lopatin, a deputy chief academic officer.

The private schools were contemplating a more radical move: abandoning the ERB test entirely. Dr. Samuel J. Meisels, president of Chicago's Erikson Institute, told private-school admissions officials that excessive preparation "invalidates inferences that can be drawn" about children's "learning potential and intellect and achievement." The test was built to identify cognitive delays and measure IQ — using it for admissions, he argued, was "an off-label use."

The industry's answer

Natalie Viderman, 4, was the industry's model pupil. For six months she spent ninety minutes a week at Bright Kids NYC working on spatial visualization and serial reasoning — skills on the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, or NNAT 2, the new public-school assessment — plus nightly workbooks at home with her mother, Victoria Preys. Her mother saw the department's "raised standards" as a message: work more, prep more. She had prepared her son the same way; he scored in the 98th percentile.

Bige Doruk, Bright Kids' founder, rejected the idea that prep had broken the tests. "It is not a validity issue, it's a competitive issue," she said. "Parents will always do what they can for their children." She had a point about what the tests actually measure: they require four-year-olds to sit with a stranger for nearly an hour — a skill beyond IQ or school readiness.

Even Hunter couldn't escape it

Hunter College Elementary School, Manhattan's famed public school for gifted children (part of CUNY), required the Stanford-Binet V — and parents had turned choosing among 16 approved psychologists into a parlor game of finding the "easy" tester. For that year's admissions, the school cut the list to four. Principal Randy Collins insisted the change was about scheduling, not easy testers — "we have seen no evidence that some are easy and some are tough" — but noted that after years of rising scores, scores did not go up that year. Every year, he said, a few children were dropped because it was obvious they'd been prepped: they knew the answers before the tester finished asking.

George P. Davison of Grace Church School had his own evidence of prep's effect: siblings of current students, whose parents bothered less with tutors since siblings got admissions preference, tended to score a few points lower. The private-school association was set to vote on dropping the ERB; a revised version was due April 1, which school officials privately attributed to excessive prep. Davison suggested schools build their own test, administered by schools rather than psychologists — widely suspected of leaking material to the prep industry.

The verdict, in one small voice

The day before Natalie took her test, her tutor handed her a packet of pattern-completion problems and started explaining the directions. Natalie cut her off. "I know what to do," she said — and answered every question correctly.

Gifted, or just well-prepared? By then, nobody in New York could tell the difference.

Archive summary, February 2013, of the New York Times report "New York City Schools Struggle to Separate the Gifted From the Just Well Prepared."