Parents Say Standardized Tests No Way to Pick Kids for Advanced Classes

This from the Village Voice; Graphic by Rufus Harvey:

Looking a Gifted Horse in the Mouth

Brooklyn mom Natalie Barratt had a bad feeling when her four-year-old son Luke Serrano emerged from his February testing session for admittance to the city schools' gifted and talented programs. "The teacher who had administered the test wasn't clear if he'd finished the test," she recalls.

After weeks of phone calls with the Department of Education, she had Luke retested. His score this time: an 89, one point too low for acceptance into a G&T kindergarten class. For want of a single correct answer, Luke was officially non-gifted.

In past years, this would have been just one setback in the tangled swirl of bureaucracy and arm-twisting that is commonplace in navigating the city's Department of Education. This year, however, is different. Last fall, the city announced that in place of the patchwork that had been G&T admissions—where some districts offered gifted classrooms at all their schools and others at none, and each school decided on which kids to accept by its own selection process—beginning in 2008 there would be only one way into city-approved G&T classes: by scoring high enough on standardized tests. The goal, says Department of Education spokesperson Andy Jacob, was to "set a single, rigorous standard" that would level the playing field among all parents—and stop the perception of G&T as a haven for wealthier, whiter kids.

But as schools prepare to welcome the first classes of the new G&T regime this fall, it hasn't quite worked out that way. Some parents are angry at what they see as inequities in the tests themselves; others, that contrary to Department of Education promises, not every kindergartner with a high enough test score has been guaranteed a gifted classroom. (As in past years, most of the Bronx and Queens G&T classes will begin in first grade, not kindergarten.)

Meanwhile, The New York Times revealed that fewer children from poor districts were getting into gifted programs than under the old, un-level playing field...

Fighting Over When Public Should Pay Private Tuition for Disabled

The New York Times reports:
Paying for private school is no hardship for Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, the company that runs MTV and Comedy Central. He left with a golden parachute worth $85 million. But he says New York City should reimburse him for educating his son in a private school for children with learning disabilities, where the tuition is $37,900 a year.

In 1997, his son, then 8, was found to be lagging in reading, though not in math. The city offered
the child a coveted spot in the Lower Laboratory School for Gifted Education, a competitive school on the Upper East Side that also has classes for students with moderate disabilities. He would have been placed in a classroom with 15 students, and given speech and language therapy.

Mr. Freston, though, wanted a class of only eight students for his son, in a smaller setting. Without trying Lab, he put his child in the Stephen Gaynor School on the Upper West Side, where students, in Gaynor’s language, display “learning differences.” While the city is required by federal law to pay for private programs for disabled children when it cannot provide appropriate programs, city officials said the Lab program was suitable for Mr. Freston’s son and wanted him to try it. After two years of reimbursing the Frestons for a large part of the private school tuition, the city stopped.

The result has been a seesawing lawsuit that the United States Supreme Court recently took for review. The question: Do school districts have to pay for private school for disabled children if the families refuse to try out public programs?

School systems around the country are closely watching the case. Almost seven million students nationwide receive special-education services, with 71,000 educated in private schools at public
expense, according to the United States Department of Education. Usually school districts agree to pay for these services after conceding they cannot provide suitable ones.