Every single scholar we spoke to warned of classifying young children on the basis of a single early test result—all advised of the necessity for secondary testing. And this caution didn’t come from those who are just morally against the idea of any intelligence testing. This admonition came most strongly from those actually writing the tests, including: University of Iowa professor Dr. David Lohman, one of the authors of the Cognitive Abilities Test; Dr. Steven Pfeiffer, author of the Gifted Rating Scales; and Dr. Cecil Reynolds, author of the RIAS (the Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales).
Despite the unanimity of this view, because of the cost and time involved, kids are routinely awarded—or denied—entrance on the basis of a single test, and in many schools are never retested.
“Firm number cutoffs are ridiculous,” said Reynolds. “If we were doing the same for identifying special-ed students, it would be against federal law.”
Consider South Carolina.
A few years ago, the state hired the College of William & Mary’s Center for Gifted Education to evaluate its gifted screening. South Carolina was concerned that minorities were underrepresented in the gifted programs, but—along the way—there turned out to be an even more complex problem.
Despite revamping the admissions process to increase minority participation, the program remained disproportionately white (86%). But even more disturbing was the number of kids in the gifted program—regardless their race—who were weren’t functioning as gifted at all.
When William & Mary looked at the gifted kids’ achievement test scores for 2002 in third, fourth, and fifth grade, the results were disastrous. In math, 12% of the gifted kids scored as having only a “basic” ability level. Another 30% were merely “proficient.” In English, the numbers were far worse. You’d expect the researchers would have concluded that those children should be moved into a normal classroom, but instead William & Mary recommended the state come up with gifted interventions—basically, special programs for the kids who were remedial-yet-gifted, an oxymoronic concept if there ever was one.
We called the twenty largest public school districts in America to learn what gifted education programs they offer. Here are those twenty largest:
New York City
Los Angeles Unified
City of Chicago
Dade County (Miami)
Clark County (Las Vegas)
Broward County (Fort Lauderdale)
Houston ISD
Hillsborough County (Tampa)
Philadelphia City
Hawaii Dept. of Education
Palm Beach County
Orange County (Orlando)
Fairfax County (VA)
Dallas ISD
Detroit City
Montgomery County (MD)
Prince George’s County (MD)
Gwinnett County (GA)
San Diego Unified
Duval County (Jacksonville)
All twenty had some sort of gifted program. Twelve of those districts begin their program in kindergarten. Not one district waits until third grade to screen the children—by the end of second grade, all twenty districts have anointed children as exceptional.
On paper, this flies in the face of the developmental science. “I don’t have the perfect answer,” said Dr. Lauri Kirsch, Supervisor of the Gifted Program at Hillsborough County School District in Tampa, Florida. “I just keep my eyes open, looking for kids. We create opportunities for kids to engage and excel. We want to give the children time to develop their giftedness.”
When talking to these schools, I realized it was unfair to judge the programs solely on the basis of what age they tested the kids; it was also important to consider what the stakes were—whether the gifted program was radically better than regular classes, or only a modest supplement to regular classes. Several of those districts, like Dallas, identify the kids as early as kindergarten, but they don’t make a fateful structural decision. The children identified as gifted remain in their classrooms, and once a week get to slip out and attend a two-hour enhanced class just for the gifted. That’s all they get, which is almost surely not enough. It’s hard to argue that Dallas is better than Detroit, which makes a fateful decision prior to kindergarten, but the kids who are identified as gifted get something far better—they’re allowed to attend a full-time special academy.
In applying the science to the reality, the problem doesn’t seem to lie with the age of initial screening. Even in kindergarten, a few children are clearly and indisputably advanced. Instead, what stands out as problems are: the districts who don’t give late-blooming children additional chances to test in, and the lack of objective retesting to ensure the kids who got in young really belong there.
Of the top twenty school districts, not one requires children to score high on an achievement test or IQ test in later years to stay in the program. Children can stay in the gifted class as long as they aren’t falling too far behind. Kicking kids out is not what districts prioritize—it’s getting them in.
Many of the districts are still laboring under the premise that intelligence is innate and stable. By this ancient logic, retesting is not necessary, because an IQ score is presumed valid for life. The lack of reassessment is kindhearted but a double standard: the districts believe firmly in using IQ cutoffs for initial admission, but they think later tests aren’t necessary.
Back in South Carolina, they’ve actually instituted new rules to protect low-performing kids in the gifted classes. First, students cannot be removed from the program only for falling behind in class—something else has to be going on for a kid to get kicked out. Second, if a child is moved into regular classes for the rest of a year, they are automatically allowed back into the gifted program at the beginning of the next year—without any retesting.
The Palmetto State isn’t the only one that believes it is taboo to expect gifted kids to prove their merit. In Florida, a 2007 bill to reform state gifted education couldn’t make it out of committee until a provision demanding retesting every three years was struck from the plan.
Once again, the test authors dispute these practices—rooted in a belief that if you’re ever gifted, you’re gifted for life. Explains CogAT co-author Dr. Lohman, “The classic model of giftedness—that it is something fixed—is something we’ve been trying to get over for some time, without much success.”
Of all the districts we surveyed, none flouted the science like New York City. A single test prior to kindergarten determines entrance. Meanwhile, those who are admitted are never retested—children stay through fifth or eighth grade, depending on the school. As of 2008, the New York Department of Education had changed the tests it uses four times in four years, unable to get the results it wanted. In 2007, a Chancellor’s report noted that too few kids qualified at the 90th percentile cutoff, so the classes were filled with regular students—42% of the places for gifted kids were filled by children who tested under the 80th percentile. Many complained the program had been watered down. Meanwhile, the district’s web site warned older applicants that they would be put on wait lists in case spots became available—which the district warned would be very rare—even in fourth and fifth grade.
Private independent schools don’t really have another option—almost by definition, they have to screen kids before kindergarten. But it should be recognized how fallible the screening process is—how many great kids it misses. Admission directors might already warn parents, “The admission process is more of an art than a science,” but the science argues it’s not 60% art, it’s 60% random.
In some cities, elite feeder preschools are now using intelligence testing too. And they’re not ashamed of it either: in the Seattle region, one preschool’s web site boasts of being the only preschool in the state that requires IQ testing for admittance—some kids are tested at 27 months. In Detroit, one preschool waits until the kids are all of 30 months.
Hearing the poor accuracy of intelligence tests, it’s tempting to find some other method of testi
ng for giftedness—say, looking at a child’s emotional intelligence or behavior. Dozens of web sites ask, “Is Your Child Gifted?” and then offer a checklist of behaviors to look for. And this isn’t just for parents—we found schools that had adopted these checklists as part of their screening process. But are these behavioral guidelines any more valid?
Since the 1995 publication of Dr. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, there has been widespread acceptance of the theory that temperament and interpersonal skills might be more important to success than cognitive intellect. In the ten-year anniversary edition of his book, Goleman praised the school districts that now mandate emotional intelligence materials be included in their curricula, and he suggested that for some students, emotional intelligence might be the linchpin to their academic success. Still other schools have incorporated the premise into their admission processes. It’s increasingly popular for private schools to send preschoolers into staged play groups—administrators use checklists to quickly assess children’s behavior, motivation, and personality.
So could the emotional side of children explain what IQ tests are missing?
In the last decade, several leading approaches to measuring emotional intelligence have emerged. One test, the MSCEIT, comes from the team that originally coined the term “emotional intelligence”—including Dr. Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College. The other test, the EQ-i, comes from Dr. Reuven Bar-On, who coined the term “Emotional Quotient.” Researchers around the world have been using these scales, and the results have been a shock.
In a meta-analysis of these studies, scholars concluded that the correlation between emotional intelligence and academic achievement was only 10 percent. Those studies were all done on adolescents and college students—not on kids—but one study of a prison population showed that inmates have high EQ. So much for the theory that emotionally intelligent people make better life choices.
Salovey has repeatedly slammed Goleman for misrepresenting his team’s research and overstating its impact. He considers Goleman’s optimistic promises not just “unrealistic” but “misleading and unsupported by the research.”
In one test of emotional knowledge, kids are asked what someone would feel if his best friend moved away. The more verbal a child is, the more she’s able to score high on these tests—but verbal ability is also what drives early cognitive intelligence. (In a later chapter, we’ll talk about what drives that early language development.) So rather than triumphantly arguing that emotional intelligence supplants cognitive ability, one influential scholar is proving it’s the other way around: higher cognitive ability increases emotional functioning.
There’s also research into how children’s personalities correlate with academic success. But the problem is that, at every age, different personality traits seem to matter. One study determined that in kindergarten, the extraverts are the good students, but by second or third grade, extraversion is only half as important, while other scholars found that by sixth grade, extraversion is no longer an asset. Instead, it has an increasingly negative impact. By eighth grade, the best students are conscientious and often introverted.
In 2007, Dr. Greg Duncan published a massive analysis of 34,000 children, with no less than eleven other prominent co-authors. They combed through the data from six long-term population studies—four of which were from the United States, one from Canada, and one from the United Kingdom. Prior to kindergarten, the children participating all took some variety of intelligence test or achievement test. As well, mothers and teachers rated their social skills, attention skills, and behaviors—sometimes during preschool, sometimes in kindergarten. The scholars sought out data on every aspect of temperament and behavior we recognize can affect performance in school—acting out, anxiety, aggression, lack of interpersonal skills, hyperactivity, lack of focus, et cetera.
Duncan’s team had expected social skills to be a strong predictor of academic success, but, Duncan recalled, “It took us three years to do this analysis, as the pattern slowly emerged.” On the whole the IQ tests showed the degree of correlations as in Suen’s meta-analysis: combining math and reading together, early IQ had at best a 40% correlation with later achievement. The attention ratings, at best, showed a 20% correlation with later achievement, while the behavior ratings topped out at an 8% correlation. What this means is that many kids who turned out to be very good students were still fidgety and misbehaving at age five, while many of the kids who were well-behaved at age five didn’t turn into such good students. That social skills were such poor predictors was completely unexpected: “That is what surprised me the most,” confirmed Duncan.
It’s tempting to imagine one could start with the 40% correlation of IQ tests, add the 20% correlation of attention skill ratings, and top it off with a social skills measure to jack the total up to a 70% correlation. But that’s not how it works. The various measures end up identifying the same well-behaved, precocious children, missing the children who blossom a year or two later. For instance, motivation correlates with academic success almost as well as intelligence does. But it turns out that kids with higher IQs are more motivated, academically, so every analysis that controls for IQ shows that motivation can add only a few percentage points to the overall accuracy.
Almost every scholar has their own pet concoction of tests, like bartenders at a mixology competition. At best, these hybrids seem to be maxing out at around a 50% correlation when applied to young children.
In a later chapter of this book, we’ll discuss measures that get at the skill of concentrating amid distraction—how this may be the elusive additive factor scientists are looking for. And it could be that in a few years, a scholar will emerge with a hybrid test of IQ and impulsivity that will predict a five-year-old’s future performance. Until then, it needs to be recognized that no current test or teacher ratings system, whether used alone or in combination on such young kids, meets a reasonable standard of confidence to justify a long-term decision. Huge numbers of great kids simply can’t be “discovered” so young.
With IQ test authors warning that kids’ intelligence scores aren’t really reliable until a child is around 11 or 12, that raises a fascinating question. What’s going on in the brain that makes one person more intelligent than another? And are those mechanisms substantially in place at a young age—or do they come later?
Back in the 1990s, scientists were seeing a correlation between intelligence and the thickness of the cerebral cortex—the craterlike structure enveloping the interior of the brain. In every cubic millimeter of an adult brain, there’s an estimated 35 to 70 million neurons, and as many as 500 billion synapses. If the nerve fibers in a single cubic millimeter were stretched end to end, they would run for 20 miles. So even a slightly thicker cortex meant trillions more synapses and many additional miles of nerve fibers. Thicker was better.
In addition, the average child’s cortex peaked in thickness before the age of seven; the raw material of intelligence appeared to be already in place. (The entire brain at that age is over 95% of its final size.) On that basis, it could seem reasonable to make key decisions about a child’s future at that stage of development.
But this basic formula, thicker is better, was exploded by Drs. Jay Giedd and Philip Shaw of the National Institutes of Health in 2006. The average smart kid does have a bit thicker cortex at that age than the ordinary child; however, the very smartest kids, who proved to have superior intelligence, actually had much thinner cortices early on. From the age of 5 to 11 they added another half-millimeter of gray matter, and their cortices did not peak in thickness until the age of 11 or 12, about four years later than normal kids.
“If you get whisked off to a gifted class at an early age, that might not be the right thing,” Giedd commented. “It’s missing the late developers.”
Within the brain, neurons compete. Unused neurons are eliminated; the winners survive, and if used often, eventually get insulated with a layer of white fatty tissue, which exponentially
increases the speed of transmission. In this way, gray matter gets upgraded to white matter. This doesn’t happen throughout the brain all at once; rather, some parts of the brain can still be adding gray matter while other regions are already converting it to white matter. However, when it occurs, this upgrade can be rapid—in some areas, 50% of nerve tissue gets converted in a single year.
The result can be leaps in intellectual progress, much like a dramatic growth spurt in height. During middle childhood, faster upgrading of left hemisphere regions leads to larger gains in verbal knowledge. The area of the prefrontal cortex considered necessary for high-level reasoning doesn’t even begin upgrading until preadolescence—it’s one of the last to mature.
In those same years, the brain is also increasing the organization of the large nerve capsules that connect one lobe to another. Within those cerebral superhighways, nerves that run parallel are selected over ones that connect at an angle. Slight alterations here have whopping effects—a 10% improvement in organization is the difference between an IQ below 80 and an IQ above 130. Such 10% gains in organization aren’t rare; on the contrary, that’s normal development from age 5 to 18.
With all this construction going on, it’s not surprising that IQ scores show some variability in the early years. From age 3 to age 10, two-thirds of children’s IQ scores will improve, or drop, more than 15 points. This is especially true among bright kids—their intelligence is more variable than among slower children.
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