Exam kindergartens?

OMG so if your kid does not somehow excel in exam taking by the age of 4 they are off the gifted program charts for the rest of their lives. How could they ever get back on track if other kids are already on this accelerated track? Also is it a good thing we are seperating the "gifted" kids before they can touch ground with the common children? Has the latest financial meltdown and the massive cluster#$%^ leading up to it taught us nothing? I think certain people already spend way too much segregated from the rest of the population, and honestly have no clue how the rest of the world lives. There is a line due to class, but their is also an "IQ" line where the very smart are all shuttled off to Harvard and Yale, and before that Andover and Exeter. Ever notice how it is these children that become the "masters of the universe" who have no concept how the world really works. Who do not understand how someone making 20,000 a year can not afford 400,000 house. So we want to make this worse, by marking the line at around the age of 4. Does that seem like a smart thing to do? These kids will grow up their whole lives not understanding that their are people who are not as smart as they are in this world, is that a good thing?

A good teacher can provide enrichment for the kids who move through the curriculum faster than other kids, while still working closely with those who lag and keeping the mid range busy. My kids had kindergarten teachers who were great at this in their own style ... my older boy's teacher even stopped by when the younger one had his pre-K evaluation just to watch the fun (he knew that my younger guy was already reading when my older guy finished kindergarten ...). While the district made noises about putting younger guy up a grade (he missed the age deadline by three weeks)in order to deal with an unexpectedly large number of kindergarten students, he has done just fine in classrooms of kids of mixed ability because the teachers have been able to accommodate the range.

If they spent more time with the teachers and supported them in learning to handle a range of abilities, they wouldn't need special schools for young kids. Ditto for flexible curricula. Separating them out is plain lazy - worse yet, it doesn't serve the kids who catch on later because of ESL issues and the like. Keeping class sizes down helps, but a combination of teacher support and accountability is more appropriate than early tracking.

In Kindergarten, my principal didn't feel that I was able to move to the first grade early based on some sort of preliminary screening observation/testing. My parents had him test me for the grade advancement anyways. I passed. He then put me in the lowest level of education for the first grade. My teacher told my parents I was wasting my time. They had the principal on the phone again and I was moved into the grade 1-2 split class (honors first grade, lower second grade).

For the remainder of my education (in public schools), I excelled in each grade (ok, my handwriting grades perpetually sucked). I graduated with the highest certificate the school system offered on top of my diploma and #9 in a class of 444 (my 4th year of Band didn't allow me to take as many AP classes as the top 8 and the level of class weighted the GPA).

So, I was very lucky that at such an early point in my education, my teachers and parents recognized something that the principal and the earliest testing did not. Any testing at ages 4-6 has to be taken with a grain of salt. I believe it would be one more example of "teaching to the test" that would occur, further reducing our educational system to a series of codified answer sheets and lacking the problem solving and logical thinking aptitudes that these tests often ignore.