NurtureShock (13 page)

He froze. And I could suddenly intuit the debate running through his head: should he lie to his dad, or rat out his friend?
I knew from Talwar’s research that I’d lose that one. Recognizing this, I stopped him and I told him that if he’d learned
the phrase at school, he did not have to tell me
who
had taught him the phrase. Telling me the truth was not going to get his friends in trouble.

“Okay,” he said, relieved. “I learned it at school.” Then he told me he
did
care, and gave me a hug. I haven’t heard that phrase again.

Does how we deal with a child’s lies really matter, down the road in life? The irony of lying is that it’s both normal and
abnormal behavior at the same time. It’s to be expected, and yet it can’t be disregarded.

Dr. Bella DePaulo has devoted much of her career to adult lying. In one study, she had both college students and community
members enter a private room, equipped with an audiotape recorder. Promising them complete confidentiality, DePaulo’s team
instructed the subjects to recall the worst lie they’d ever told—with all the scintillating details.

“I was fully expecting serious lies,” DePaulo remarked. “Stories of affairs kept from spouses, stories of squandering money,
or being a salesperson and screwing money out of car buyers.” And she did hear those kinds of whoppers, including theft and
even one murder. But to her surprise, a lot of the stories told were about situations in which the subject was a mere child—and
they were not, at first glance, lies of any great consequence. “One told of eating the icing off a cake, then telling her
parents the cake came that way. Another told of stealing some coins from a sibling.” As these stories first started trickling
in, DePaulo scoffed, thinking, “
C’mon, that’s the
worst
lie you’ve ever told?”
But the stories of childhood kept coming, and DePaulo had to create a category in her analysis just for them.

“I had to reframe my understanding to consider what it must have been like as a child to have told this lie,” she recalled.
“For young kids, their lie challenged their self-concept that they were a good child, and that they did the right thing.”

Many subjects commented on how that momentous lie early in life established a pattern that affected them thereafter. “We had
some who said, ‘I told this lie, I got caught, and I felt so badly, I vowed to never do it again.’ Others said, ‘Wow, I never
realized I’d be so good at deceiving my father; I can do this all the time.’ The lies they tell early on are meaningful. The
way parents react can really affect lying.”

Talwar says parents often entrap their kids, putting them in positions to lie and testing their honesty unneccessarily. Last
week, I put my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter in that exact situation. I noticed she had scribbled on the dining table
with a washable marker. With disapproval in my voice I asked, “Did you draw on the table, Thia?” In the past, she would have
just answered honestly, but my tone gave away that she’d done something wrong. Immediately, I wished I could retract the question
and do it over. I should have just reminded her not to write on the table, slipped newspaper under her coloring book, and
washed the ink away. Instead, I had done exactly what Talwar had warned against.

“No, I didn’t,” my daughter said, lying to me for the first time.

For that stain, I had only myself to blame.

Millions of kids are competing for seats in gifted programs and private schools. Admissions officers say it’s an art: new
science says they’re wrong, 73% of the time.

P
icture the little child, just turned five, being escorted into a stranger’s office. Her mother helps her get comfortable for
a few minutes, then departs.

Mommy might have told the girl that the stranger will help determine which school she goes to next year. Ideally, the word
“test” will never be spoken; if the girl asks, “Am I going to take a test?” she will be told, “There will be puzzles and drawing
and blocks and some questions to answer. Most kids think these activities are really fun.”

The child is directed to a seat at a table. The test examiner sits across from her. If she grows restless after a while, they
might move to the floor. (If there is a significant problem, some schools may allow a retest, but most won’t allow her to
return for a year or two.)

They begin each test with a series of sample questions, which the examiner demonstrates. Then they start the real test. The
examiner begins with a question appropriate for the child’s age. A five-year-old child might start with question no. 4 of
the testing book. Each question gets a tiny bit harder, and the child keeps receiving questions until she has made several
errors in a row. At this point, the “discontinue rule” is triggered—the little girl has reached the top of her ability, and
they move on to a new section.

Vocabulary is tested two ways; at first, the child merely has to name what’s pictured. When it gets harder, the child will
be told a word, like “confine,” and be asked what it means. Detailed definitions merit a 2; less detail scores a 1.

The little girl will also have to discern a word from just a few clues. “Can you tell me what I’m thinking of?” the examiner
will ask. “This is something you can sit or stand on, and it is something that can be cleaned or made of dirt.”

She has five seconds to answer.

On another section, the child will be shown pictures, then asked to spot what’s missing. “The bear’s leg!” she’ll answer—hopefully
within 20 seconds.

Later, the examiner will set some red and white plastic blocks out on the table. The child will be shown a card with a shape
or pattern on it, and she’ll be asked to assemble four blocks to mirror the shape. Blocks arranged more than one-quarter inch
apart are penalized. The harder questions use blocks with bicolored sides—red and white triangles. Older kids get nine blocks.

She may also see some mazes; no lifting of the pencil is allowed, and points are taken off for going down blind alleys.

Discerning patterns is a component of all tests. For instance, the child will need to recognize that a circle is to an oval
as a square is to a rectangle, while a triangle is to a square as a square is to a pentagon. Or, snow is to a snowman as a
bag of flour is to a loaf of bread.

If a child is six years old, she might be read four numbers aloud (such as 9, 4, 7, 1) and asked to repeat them. If she gets
them right, she’ll move up to five numbers. If she can do seven numbers, she’ll score in the 99th percentile. Then she’ll
be asked to repeat a number sequence in reverse order; correctly repeating four numbers backward counts as gifted.

Every winter, tens of thousands of children spend a morning or afternoon this way. Testing sessions like this one are the
keys to admittance to elite private schools and to Gifted and Talented programs in public schools. Kids are scored against
other children born in the same third of the year. Mostly based on these tests, over three million children—almost 7% of the
American public school population—are in a gifted program. Another two million children won entry into private independent
schools.

The tests vary by what exactly they examine. Some are forms of a classic intelligence test—for instance, the Wechsler Preschool
and Primary Scale of Intelligence, known by its acronym, WPPSI. Other schools opt for an exam that doesn’t strictly measure
IQ; they might use a test of reasoning ability, such as the Cognitive Abilities Test, or a hybrid test of intelligence and
learning aptitude, such as the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test.

Regardless of what is being tested, or which test is used, they all have one thing in common.

They’re all astonishingly ineffective predictors of a young child’s academic success.

While it’s no surprise that not all gifted kindergartners end up at Harvard, the operating assumption has been that these
screening tests
do
predict which kids will be the best at reading, writing, and math in the second and third grades. But they turn out to not
even do that.

To give you a hint of the scale of the problem—if you picked 100 kindergartners as the “gifted,” i.e. the smartest, by third
grade only 27 of them would still deserve that categorization. You would have wrongly locked out 73 other deserving students.

Most schools don’t realize how poorly the tests predict a child’s elementary school academics. The few with concerns have
tried to come up with other ways to test for giftedness—everything from asking a kid to draw a picture to rating a child’s
emotional empathy or behavior. However, scholars’ analyses have shown that each of these alternatives turns out to be even
less
effective than the intelligence tests.

The issue isn’t which test is used, or what the test tests. The problem is that young kids’ brains just aren’t done yet.

For decades, intelligence tests have been surrounded by controversy.

Critics have long argued that the tests have cultural or class biases. What’s gone unnoticed is that, stinging from these
allegations, all the testing companies have modified their tests to minimize these effects—to the point where they no longer
really consider bias an issue. (While that would seem a hard pill to swallow, consider that versions of these tests are used
around the world.) On top of those changes, schools with the strictest IQ requirements often make exceptions for children
who come from disadvantaged backgrounds or speak something other than English as their first language.

Meanwhile, shaping the debate along the bias fault line has led us to completely ignore the larger question: how often do
the tests accurately identify any bright young kids—even the mainstream children?

We asked admissions directors and school superintendents, and they all had the impression that the tests were accurate predictors.
The tests come with manuals, and the first chapters of these manuals are dense with research conveying an aura of authentication.
However, the statistics reported are generally not about how accurately the tests predict
future
performance. Instead, the statistics are about the accuracy of the tests at predicting current performance, and how well
these tests stack up against competitors’ tests.

Dr. Lawrence Weiss is the Vice President of Clinical Product Development at Pearson/Harcourt Assessment, which owns the WPPSI
test. When I asked him how well his test predicts school performance just two or three years later, he explained that it’s
not his company’s policy to assemble that data. “We don’t track them down the road. We don’t track predictive validity over
time.”

We were shocked by this, because decisions made on the basis of intelligence test results have enormous consequence. A score
above 120 puts a child in the 90th percentile or higher, the conventional cutoff line for being called “gifted,” and may qualify
her for special classes. A score above 130 puts a child in the 98th percentile, at which point she may be placed in a separate
school for the advanced.

Note, these kids aren’t prodigies—a prodigy is far rarer, more like a one in a half-million phenomenon. To be classified as
gifted by a school district indicates a child is bright, but not necessarily extraordinary. Half of all college graduates
have an IQ of 120 or above; 130 is the average of adults with a Ph.D.

However, earning this classification when young is nothing less than a golden ticket, academically. The rarified learning
environment, filled with quick peers, allows teachers to speed up the curriculum. This can make a huge difference in how much
a child learns. In California, according to a state government study, children in Gifted and Talented programs make 36.7%
more progress every year than the norm. And in many districts, such as New York City and Chicago, students are not retested
and remain in the program until they graduate from their school. Those admitted at kindergarten to private schools will stay
through eighth grade.