All across New York City, kids are waiting to hear about how they did on a test that may determine the path of the rest of their childhood.
They’re 4 years old.
In New York City, being declared a member of the Gifted and Talented elite upon entering kindergarten is much like a ticket to the toddler Ivy League, minus the tuition bill.
How we got to such a crazy system of sorting our children by ability is a focus of NYU psychology professor Scott Barry Kaufman’s book “Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined” (Basic Books).
For a start, just because Emily does well on today’s test doesn’t mean she would ace it tomorrow. A study of more than 6,000 students that tested them annually from third grade to eighth found that only half the students who scored in the top 3% on their first try passed again their second year. Yet once a child is given the G&T blessing, he tends to be wafted away to a higher learning plane and all the privilege that goes with it.
The standardized tests they passed can be surprisingly easy to game, meanwhile. A study involving the preliminary SAT measured students who had been primed with “hope” against those who weren’t. The hopers answered more than 60% more questions. Another study found that hope — but not optimism! — was a better predictor of law-school GPA than the LSAT admissions test. Hope, in the book, means vividly imagining a goal and possible obstacles, then mentally mapping out a detailed plan for success — not simply expecting everything to turn out well. So, I take back all those jokes I made about “The Secret.”
Even if you score poorly on intelligence tests, it may be the tests that are failing you rather than the reverse. Kaufman raises the question: What is the point of testing? Shouldn’t the results inform a strategy for how to help each child instead of merely weeding out most and discarding them?
Consider dyslexia. “In my day dyslexia didn’t exist, merely stupid students,” sci-fi writer Piers Anthony told the author. Now we’ve been enlightened by the success of dyslexics — among them billionaire Richard Branson, Cisco CEO John Chambers, designer Tommy Hilfiger and novelists Richard Ford and John Irving.
What do all these people have in common? They work for themselves. While some 15% of Americans have dyslexia, 35% of the entrepreneurs studied in one sample have it. Among corporate managers for whom following orders is critical, though, that figure is 1%.
“Dyslexic entrepreneurs may be more comfortable in a start-up or a serial entrepreneurial role so that they are able to do things in their own way,” wrote business-school professor Julie Logan, who did the study.
Cognitive-science studies have revealed that “if you tend to have a narrower focus of attention, like many typical readers, you will be better at noticing small, isolated features near the center,” writes Kaufman. “In contrast, if you focus on the periphery, like some dyslexics, you will be more likely to notice the holistic patterns.”
Apart from being entrepreneurs, dyslexics might be especially adept at fields like radiology, astronomy and cellular microscopy, studies suggest. So teachers should probably use spatial learning techniques with dyslexics.
Kaufman himself was diagnosed as a slow learner as a child, and he brandishes his Yale Ph.D. as evidence that everyone can make it to the top. This is fantasy; only in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon can all of the children be above average.
Nor is it practical to re-engineer schools so that every kid undergoes an extravagant battery of tests to work out a strategy for educating him with his own personal tutor. Even if it were possible, Kaufman notes the danger of sticking to one’s strengths. “Telling people that ‘It’s OK if you’re not good at <insert intelligence here>, you can still be good at <insert different intelligence here>,’ ” he writes, “causes people to give up on cultivating key skills that can be developed to a large extent, in everyone.”
Yet the technology revolution, and its intriguing possibilities for large-scale teaching, has almost completely bypassed the classroom.
Kaufman suggests that, for instance, the educational videos produced by TED-Ed, a spinoff of the popular TED lecture series (see ed.ted.com), are a glimpse at a future in which unlimited numbers of kids can be exposed to the very best teachers, move along at their own individual speed and learn in terms that suit their mental makeup — more verbally oriented for some, more spatial for others. If everyone can have his own Twitter feed, why not his own individualized education?