Recent History

Yesterday, one of my children was late coming to school because he was taking a kindergarten entrance exam. I don't think it's a coincidence that this article about kindergarten testing was the most recent cover story of New York Magazine. It speaks very directly to the issue of testing children at the age of 4 to determine their cognitive abilities. The focus is on testing for gifted & talented (G&T) programs and high-end private schools in the city.

In short, says the article, the testing is worthless.

More specifically, the test isn't totally worthless, but the way the information is used and never revisited makes it so. A child is tested once, at age 4, and never again; though children grow and their minds aren't static, the testing system treats them as if they are. From New York:
Those who are bullish on intelligence tests argue they’re “pure” gauges of a child’s mental agility—immune to shifts in circumstance, immutable over the course of a lifetime. Yet everything we know about this subject suggests that there are considerable fluctuations in children’s IQs. In 1989, the psychologist Lloyd Humphreys, a pioneer in the field of psychometrics, came out with an analysis based on a longitudinal twin study in Louisville, Kentucky, whose subjects were regularly IQ-tested between ages 4 and 15. By the end of those eleven years, the average change in their IQs was ten points. That’s a spread with significant educational consequences. A 4-year-old with an IQ of 85 would likely qualify for remedial education. But that same child would no longer require it if, later on, his IQ shoots up to 95. A 4-year-old with an IQ of 125 would fall below the 130 cutoff for the G&T programs in most cities. Yet if, at some point after that, she scores a 135, it will have been too late. She’ll already have missed the benefit of an enhanced curriculum.

I would broaden this to any childhood testing: a child's mind is not a static thing, and yet children are 'tracked' as if this were the case. The whole premise of education - the tacit thing we all agree to but never seem to articulate aloud - is that one's behavior can change, one's actions and abilities influenced, through instruction. So, if we believe that children's minds can change, why do we use a test, a small sampling of ability at a particular moment in time, to define their capacity, instead of treating them like the dynamic entities they are?

The short (and cynical) answer is because it's easier to measure a static moment than dynamic movement. And, I do strongly believe there are ways to gauge children more holistically. But, since I feel this is more than enough to chew on for now, my next post will touch more on what, exactly, that might look like. For now, all I know is that the boy who came to school late yesterday - I sent the link for the New York article to his mom. It's small, but it's something; maybe she will feel less alone, less anxious, when her child does not want to sit and be asked random questions by a stranger, as happened yesterday. Who knows.

It's a start.