More City Preschoolers Are Perfect, Test Scores Show


The number of prekindergarten students acing the city’s gifted and talented test spiked this year, with 1,000 4- and 5-year-olds reaching the 99th percentile, the highest possible, on the nationally scaled exam, the Department of Education said on Tuesday.

That’s a 34 percent jump from last year, when 745 students scored in the 99th percentile. Fewer students over all took the test this year than last year — 12,400 in 2009-10, compared with 14,800 in 2008-9. The data was first reported by the Web site Insideschools.

Officially, preschoolers have to score at least in the 97th percentile to be admitted into one of five citywide programs for gifted students. But with only about 300 kindergarten seats in those programs, it has become nearly impossible to get into the majority of them without a perfect 99 score.

A district-by-district breakdown shows that District 2, which includes the Upper East Side and much of Lower Manhattan, led the city in top-scoring students, followed by District 3, which includes the Upper West Side. More students also took the exam in District 2 than in any other district. Outside of Manhattan, Districts 20, 21 and 22 in southern Brooklyn had the most top scorers.

Parents and teachers have said that one reason for the higher scores is the rise of professional test preparation for preschoolers, particularly in wealthier districts. Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor whose portfolio includes programs for gifted and talented students, recently expressed concern that the test was being “gamed” through professional test prep.

There were only a handful of 99th-percentile scores in some of the city’s poorest districts, like District 4, which includes East Harlem, and Districts 9 and 12 in the South Bronx.

The city is now in the process of evaluating its testing system, and will be putting out a request for bids on a new five-year testing contract in the fall. The test now being used is a mixture of the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, a reasoning test, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test.

Here is the breakdown showing the number of children scoring in the 99th percentile in each district:

1. 16
2. 193
3. 144
4. 2
5. 17
6. 39
8. 7
9. 4
10. 20
11. 16
12. 3
13. 46
14. 11
15. 43
16. 7
17. 13
18. 9
19. 6
20. 81
21. 67
22. 91
23. 4
24. 11
25. 41
26. 25
27. 11
28. 24
29. 6
30. 22
31. 19
32. 2

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Prepping pre-schoolers? To what end? Is there ANY proof that high-scoring 4 year-olds make better students, or more importantly, people/citizens? Do those babies who don’t score well doomed to a life of flipping flapjacks at the Cracker Barrel? The parents who subject these children to rigorous preparation for a test that bears no actual (positive) impact on their life should be tarred and feathered. The only reason to test a 4 year old is so you can brag to your equally vapid friends that “My baby is considered gifted! Therefore, we are good parents!”

Something doesn’t add up, literally. The 99th percentile means the top 1% of scores. 745 is 6% of 12,400, not 1%. Also, it’s not possible that fewer kids took the test this year, yet more of them scored in the 99th percentile. By definition, the 99th percentile of a smaller population is a smaller number. The real story here has to be that G&T acceptance is in fact not based on placing within a certain percentile (despite rumor and DOE statements) of the test population. I can see two possiblities. Either there must be an absolute score on the test(s) that is being used as a cutoff that at some point corresponded to the 99th percentile, but clearly does not anymore; or they’re ranking kids taking the G&T test in NY based on some other population of kids (e.g., a score of XX correct answers is in the 99th percentile for all testees nationwide) .

The story as reported simply can’t be correct. I keep seeing news reports about G&T testing that have these basic logical and factual flaws in them.

If it is too good to be true…

This is beyond ridiculous. And what should we think about the thousands of young children not in public school PreK and the PreKs operated by CBOs ?

12,400 preschoolers out of a total population of over 50,000 or more who attend some time of organized Early Childhood program — Head Start, child care, nursery schools, playgroups, EC Special Education preschools — what about those children, many of whom are having a very good PreK experience and will hopefully enter Kindergarten just as ready as those 12,400.

The DOE EC folks, and their counterparts at ACS and the independents ought to be focusing on expanding programs for 3 and 4 year olds so every child has an opportunity to be successful.

Less testing — more early childhood programs and services.

From the City Room

@John A – Your hypothesis about it being more NYC kids scoring in the NATIONAL 99th percentile is the correct one. The post says this right in the first sentence (“nationally scaled exam”) but maybe it should have explained it more fully.

Neither pre-school or kindergarten are required school years. Given the budget issues, why are we so keen on subjecting our apparently bright children to these years of classroom confinement? Not only is there more for them outside the classroom, but they can also spend more time under the sun collecting vitamin D and avoiding long-term health problems.

What is even more interesting is seeing how the numbers have changed from year to year. in the wealthier districts you see a huge increase in kids scoring 97+

District (2008, 2009, 2010)

District 2 (16%, 16%, 23%)
District 3 (18%, 21%, 26%)

In the poorer districts very little movement, only gains of 1-2% or no gain over the past three years.

Parents gaming the system by prepping their kids.
Probably very few real geniuses in the so called top districts just a bunch of kids who can only answer test questions.

Sarcasm101, Your comment that “The only reason to test a 4 year old is so you can brag to your equally vapid friends that “My baby is considered gifted! Therefore, we are good parents!” is ill-informed and couldn’t be more wrong.

It is absolute TORTURE for a precocious four year old (say, one who is capable of reading the Harry Potter series) to be made to sit in a classroom banally “learning” how to count to ten and identify primary colors. For the sake of these children (and the benefit of future society), there needs to be an objective mechanism to identify truly gifted children and place them in an environment that is conducive to their intellectual needs.

It sounds like NYC has become a Lake Woebegon: “Where all the children are above-average….”

@andy newman — that does make it a bit clearer, but the article is still problematic. For instance, it describes the 99th percentile as “the highest possible”. No, the 99th percentile score is the score at or below which 99 percent of the scores fall. The one percent of kids scoring above this might actually represent a range of scores, and it’s possible that none of them achieved the “highest possible” score. If the reporter can’t get this basic fact right, what are we to make of the rest? It seems to me that there’s one (and only one) hypothesis in this story that deserves examination — namely that the implementation of a standard test protocol has resulted in the skewing of access to enriched programs toward relatively wealthy families. The article touches on this with a vague sentence about what teachers and parents think, but without any analysis or investigation, and devotes too much space to statistics the reporter clearly does understand.

This headline for this article, “More City Preschoolers Are Perfect, Test Scores Show,” is ridiculous. As everybody knows, the only perfect kids are mine.

I’m not from NY, so I’m a bit confused on this system. Does the motivation to do well on this exam stem from the fact it opens up an exemplary form of free (public) education? Will it save parents from having to shell out thousands for private education instead of non-gifted (perhaps sub-par) public schools?

@carolyn — that’s basically the idea.

I would be curious to know how many kids actually scored “perfect” on the exam. A nationally scaled exam means that these kids are compared merely to their current peers — it says nothing about the actual abilities of these children compared to last years batch or the year before that. How does this exam compare to the exams given in Asian nations (for example)?

As a parent of a G&T child, I was surprised about the prep classes. My child scored in the 99 level last year and the only prep he got was the sample exam in the application that NYC gives to each child taking the exam. Talking to other parents in his class, most of them didn’t know or didn’t think it made sense.

Even if he/she scores well, they aren’t guaranteed a spot in the G&T school that they want. There aren’t that many seats as the article mentions. You get placed into a lottery for a specific G&T school.

For those outside of NYC, the G&T class is supposed to be more rigourous. While his class was writing book reports, reading out loud and doing homework every night, the other K classes were still learning to write the alphabet. So there is a benefit to the G&T program as these kids are given work at their “level”. If a child is unable to keep up, some have moved to the “regular” program so prepping may not help in the end.

Well, with over 1 million children in NYC, the program and exam will never be satisfactory to everyone. Maybe we should drop the “Gifted & Talented” part and just say Accelerated Classrooms.

These test are just a means to keep preschool classes segregated.

Of course the tests are being gamed! Any test designed will be gamed by the families that can afford the tutors and test prep classes. The city-wide gifted and talented schools are not any more diverse today than they were 5 years ago. So much for a meritocracy!

Three separate points:

1) What does it mean to be 4 years old and gifted (are they really reading at the level of Harry Potter as suggested above?)

2) What happens to these gifted children once they reach middle school? Do they shun the internet and video games and continue their gifted path?

3) Please give your readers examples of this test so that we can judge for ourselves.

It’s obvious why so many kids did well–the test was dumbed-down to avoid a) outraged rich parents bringing lawsuits and b) a rush of kids being brought to child behavioral specialists to demand Ritalin, special educational exemptions, and whatnot to make sure that the kid looks like a future Einstein on paper while being drugged into submission.

Makes me glad I don’t have kids.

All this shows is how invalid these tests have become. Apart from the fact that testing four-year old children is simply gross, how can we ensure the quality of tests when they are given so often? It’s a canard to say that those who oppose the incessant testing of school children are against testing and measuring performance. I have no problem with a couple of tests (fourth and eighth grade) and the SAT, all of which can be designed to be rigorous, valid, and useful for class placements and college entrance requirements. (Oddly, many of the “data-driven” reformers would like to do away with these meritocratic tests.) We have seen, unequivocally, that all the other tests are merely used for political purposes. I seriously doubt teachers who are busy lesson-planning, interacting with colleagues, parents, and students, and, of course, teaching the subject matter have time to pour over statistical data about their students’ interim test performance. It’s all a sham AND THE PUBLIC KNOWS IT!