West Orange Op-Ed: School Gifted and Talented Policy Is ‘Unfair’

WEST ORANGE, NJ — The following letter to the editor comes courtesy of West Orange resident Brent Draper Scott, a member of the public school district's 2017 Gifted and Talented Reform Committee. Send local news tips, letters and correction requests to eric.kiefer@patch.com.

On June 26, three members of the West Orange Board of Education (Sandra Mordecai, Laura Lab and Ronald Charles) voted to ignore public dissent, mandating a discredited IQ exam and enacting a highly subjective analytical criteria for students seeking entry into the district’s Gifted and Talented program. The newly enacted policy will continue use of the InView IQ test to evaluate current 2016-2017 K-2nd graders. However, at the June 12 board meeting West Orange Assistant Superintendent Mrs. Enevy de Mendez informed the BOE that the InView “is a biased exam.”

The Superintendent, Jeff Rutzky, contends that he must continue use of the InView because the City of New York is “allegedly,” temporarily blocking other school districts from using the NNAT/Naglieri aptitude test for K-2nd. However, there are other IQ test that can be employed. It must also be noted that the New Jersey State requirement(s) for establishing a Gifted and Talented program does not require use of an IQ or aptitude test at all. As stated on the New Jersey Department of Education’s website, “New Jersey does not have state-level criteria such as mandated tests or assessments, grade point averages, or IQ scores… Specific tests are not required to be used to identify gifted and talented students.”

New research from Yale confirms that hidden bias in educators is prevalent and detrimental to minority and female students. Superintendent Rutzky has stated that training in hidden bias will be available and/or required, however he has yet to mention either a timeframe or offer a specific training agent. This is all the more concerning given that the West Orange HAP/(G&T) program, as has been pointed out by board member Mark Robertson, currently lacks diversity and inclusion and has been the subject of racism and discrimination complaints by parents, including recently. Mr. Robertson was the lone member to vote against the new policy. Continued use of an admittedly biased (and non-required) exam, coupled with a subjective review process, can only serve to perpetuate the discriminatory exclusion of a significant percentage of West Orange students.

New & Transfer Students

Under the new policy, new and transfer students to West Orange (who were identified as Gifted and Talented by their former district) will be forced to go through a pitiable and complicated set of measurements before being admitted into the Gifted and Talented program. “A family of a student new to the district may request a nomination be completed for the Gifted Program by asking the student’s current/previous classroom teacher to complete a Teacher Referral. The student’s most recent performance data will be collected and reviewed by the school’s Gifted Program Committee. If a student needs further evaluation the Committee will administer the assessments in less than 30 days.”

Yet, here again the State of New Jersey neither mandates nor forbids accepting the established Gifted and Talented status of new and transferring students. The guidelines do state that “new students, particularly those that have been identified as gifted in another setting, should be evaluated by the district in a timely manner.” Speaking from personal experience, this was not done for my son. The time consumed spanned months trying to reach a former teacher for comment. The new “nomination and teacher referral” process is time consuming, manifestly subjective and humiliating to parents and their children.

The United States is a highly mobile society. According to the US Census, “35.7 million people age 1 year and over” relocated within the United States between 2013-2014. According to an article in The Gifted Child quarterly, studies show that “While academic performance was not hindered by moving, parents and students reported that organizational inconsistencies among schools (e.g., widely varying criteria for admittance to gifted programs) were a frequent cause of frustration.”

The West Orange school district should not devote resources trying to ascertain to Gifted and Talented equivalency of other school districts, visit fresh frustration upon new resident parents, cause emotional and psychological stress to new students by failing to provide them appropriate academic challenge and still worse, humiliate children by subjecting them to plead their academic ability before a committee via a “nominating” process. New/transferring students who were previously identified as Gifted and Talented by their former school district should correspondingly be included in the West Orange Gifted and Talented program just as they are correspondingly accepting into the grade level attributed by their former school district.

The Gifted and Talented policy that Sandra Mordecai, Laura Lab and Ronald Charles voted into policy represent an unfair set of measures that does not serve the children of this community with and is a maleficent slight to new and minority students.

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