[ExI] Gifted children

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 11:32 AM, PJ Manney <pjmanney at gmail.com> wrote:
> So don't say the gifted kids are left behind, unrecognized or not
> tracked.  There has never been more identification, opportunities or
> assets available to gifted children than there are now.  The fact that
> Mensa doesn't recognize them simply baffles me...

Neither I, nor any other gifted kid I personally know (and I
know and knew quite a few), was tracked in the manner
you claim.  I, too, was the test case for grade skipping at
my school.

That said, from the dates given in the article, they might
have reached the district I went to school in (Palo Alto
Unified) after I was mostly through school.  The gifted
children I know today - children of friends - go to private
schools, which could be (intentionally or not) shielding
from this tracking.  So...this does not necessarily
conflict with my personal experience, though it
intuitively feels unlikely that this has such a universal
reach as you claim.

That said...the article says that "over 80000" children are
tested each year.  There are 76.1 million children ages
0-17 in the US in 2012, according to
http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables.asp
.  Even cutting down to 5% of that is still about 3.8 million;
if, say, only the 10 year olds out of that were tested (so
as to test each child exactly once - but as you note, any
child of interest would be tested multiple times), that's still
about 200,000 children.  The numbers just don't seem to
add up to tracking *all* children, like you say.