| This article originally appeared in The Washington
Post on August 29, 2002, under the title "Understanding Screening
of Gifted Is Test in Itself."
Cannot be Determined from the Information Given
By Jill Hacker
There I was, parent of a second grader, looking at test scores
used by Fairfax County Public Schools to evaluate pupils for
selection to the Gifted and Talented program in third grade. The
more I stared at the scores-–and at FCPS's explanation--the more
questions I had. What did the numbers mean? What part would they
play in the GT selection process? What else would the selection
process involve?
This is the story of my effort to find enough dots to form a
coherent picture of how FCPS selects students for the GT program.
The first piece of information a parent sees in the GT selection
process is a set of scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test. CogAT
results are shown as percentiles and as standard age scores. The
cover letter with the scores explains that "a percentile of 45 would
mean that the student performed as well as or better than 45 percent
of the students in the national sample." But what is an SAS? The
letter tells only the range and midpoint of SAS's. What information
does the SAS offer that the percentile score does not?
I found the answer at the Web site of Riverside Publishing
Company, which publishes the CogAT. A document on the site explains
that percentile and SAS scores are just two different measures of
the same thing, with the SAS allowing finer distinctions at the
extremes.
But how are the scores used?
At a meeting in February, FCPS representatives talked to parents
about tentative plans to include in their "initial screening pool,"
from which GT students are selected, the top ten percent of scorers
on each of the three tests considered. But the percentile scores
reported to parents, an FCPS representative explained, show only how
children score relative to the rest of the nation; Fairfax County
children score higher on average. She warned me that my daughter's
97th percentile score might not make the ten percent cut; to be
safe, she said, I needed to go through the alternative procedure, in
which parents refer their children.
No one at FCPS could tell me how to relate national percentiles
to Fairfax County percentiles--they didn't have the score data
broken out that way. Wondering how hard that analysis could be, I
tried it myself. Using the Microsoft Works database software that
came with my computer, I needed only a few seconds to sort a
database of ten thousand records, representing FCPS's ten thousand
or so second graders, into numerical order. From there, it was easy
to find the top ten percent: it's just the top thousand records. Why
couldn't FCPS come up with that kind of breakdown?
Parents of the children selected to the initial screening pool
were notified. Parents of the children whose scores didn't make the
cut were not notified. They had to learn through the grapevine that
they didn't make it.
For those children selected to the screening pool, files were
forwarded to the Central Selection Committee. According to FCPS's
"GT Center Screening Procedures," the CSC "looks for compelling
evidence that a child's needs cannot be met in a general education
classroom." Beyond a list of documents the CSC reviews and FCPS's
statement that the CSC uses "a holistic, case study approach," I
could not find an explanation of just how they make that
determination.
Although the people at FCPS seem to be trying hard to respond to
parents–-they certainly answered my endless questions with great
patience, for instance--parents need and deserve access to better
information at every step in the GT selection process. One idea
might be to show test scores in all formats–SAS, national
percentile, and countywide percentile-–on one graph so that parents
can see how the three relate. For interested parents, FCPS could add
to its Web site a brief statistical explanation of the scoring–-or a
link to Riverside's plain English explanation of test scores. And
FCPS could use its Web site to keep parents better informed of things
like evaluation criteria: by what standard does FCPS decide who is
selected for the screening pool and, finally, for the program?
As parents and as taxpayers, we have a right to know how our
children are being evaluated and classified.
Why can't FCPS just tell us?
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