It's All in the Label

A friend of mine recently shared some background information about her daughter with me. Her daughter graduated from high school last year and is now venturing out on her own for the first time. She was telling me how proud she is of her and despite how bright she is, that they really struggled to get her throgh school. Then she said something that really made me think. She said that they had her screened for gifted and she "didn't make it by 1 point." Now, this is second-hand information, as I was not present in the meeting she had with the school district staff, but as a parent I would have found that hard to digest. "Sorry, your child is smart, but that 1 point makes a difference in whether or not we can provide her with additional services" ?!

I have pondered this for several days now. Why is it that we must quantify intelligence? I use statistics in my argument for gifted services - usually with other parents - on a regular basis. We think nothing of special services, even intensive intervention, for a child functioning 2 or 3 standard deviations below the mean, but the thought of an equal amount of services for the child the same difference above the mean is questioned. So, I understand the usefulness of quantifying intelligences for practical uses. I don't understand why we would use quantifiable measures to limit a child. The standard practice is to provide gifted services to the top 2-3% of the population. So here is a child who is probably in the top 3.5-4% of the population. Obviously she is not cognitively challenged, yet she barely graduated from high school.

It is instances like this that make me wonder why we really need to pigeon hole children. It shouldn't all be a numbers game. I was asked recently when I will have Daniel tested for gifted. I have thought it about it and I have no idea when I will do that. The term "gifted" to me doesn't mean much. Even within "gifted" there is a whole spectrum of cognitive levels. We view autism as a spectrum, well, giftedness is the same way. A profoundly gifted child processes as differently from a standard gifted child as that child does from an average child. Are services significantly different for the profoundly gifted child? Not in our district. That child gets the same pull-out services. Their answer at the secondary level is to throw the child into accelerated courses. That is just more of the same. And God help the child who is LD gifted! They have no clue how to deal with that. So, is there any point to the testing? I'm not sure. When I look at Daniel, I know that his teachers will recognize he's different whether they have a label next to his name or not. That still won't ensure that they teach him any differently or understand his brain function any better.