New York Magazine has a cover story entitled “The Junior Meritocracy.” The crux of the article is that administering standardized admissions and IQ tests to 4-year-olds—a common practice for entry into top public and private NYC kindergartens—is pointless. It’s impossible to practically predict at age 4, the article argues, which students will be deserving of a spot in gifted and talented (G&T) programs when they’re 7, 10, or even 17.

Among the elementary schools cited in the article is Hunter College Elementary, a publicly funded elementary school for “gifted and talented” students that uses such a test to help make kindergarten admissions decisions.

While I think using a rigid cut score from an IQ test to make these admissions decisions about 4-year-olds is a questionable move for any school, I’m particularly distressed by the thought of a publicly-funded school engaging in such nonsense for two reasons.

First, tracking students by IQ at such a young age is a questionable decision. Many people argue, particularly at that age, that IQ is more reflective of environment than it is of innate ability, particularly for children born to poor families. (One study found that “in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse. “ In other words, that for impoverished families, environment has much more to do with IQ than genes.) Read the rest of this post >>>