Has anybody read this book? I’ve just finished it. It’s set in my town (thinly disguised) . A school for gifted kids is about to open and causes a heated competition among kids and parents to get in which draws out the worst in people. The events are purely fictional but some of the satire is right on target.
I read it. It made for a good story, although none of the main characters (including the kids!) were likable.
It was a fun and interesting read. I think there was a lot of satire as most parents are not this extreme.
Yeah, generally we are more relaxed about everything than people on the coasts 
I do think the book could use a few Asian tiger parents for a more realistic picture of the community
I read and enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Little Fires Everywhere, although it was not as deep or masterful. I’d call it an entertaining read.
Interesting to read that it was based on an actual suburb!
I have this on my library’s hold list for my Kindle. The estimated wait time is 20 weeks!
While I get the point of this take, my friends and I felt the bit of Schadenfreude one could feel reading this book was tempered by our experience about a decade ago when our school district hired an expert group to come up with standards for our gifted program. The school was tired of so many privileged parents complaining about their precious kid being excluded from the program. When they hired the consultant the superintendent explained that the purpose was to help parents accept that this wasn’t Lake Woebegone ( where all the children are above average)”.
Sooooo, the official report comes out and the takeaways were 1) in this town of doctors , nuclear physicists and top tier consulting firm employees a huge percentage of the children were indeed well above average and 2) Way too many kids were being excluded from the gifted program. The head of a parent group joking suggested that a stuffed animal crow be given to the superintendent with a note saying “ we aren’t going to make you eat it…”
I loved it. Great read!
Interesting that the report in #6 found that kids were being excluded. In our town, maybe not quite as highly educated, the answer was to recognize that the schools were already doing a good job for most of the kids, gifted or not. And to raise the bar on the gifted program to find the much smaller percentage of highly gifted kids. The goal was to accept kids that scored over 145 on an IQ test, which is two standard deviations above the mean. Even in this highly educated system, this was about 3% of the students.
I just got this from our interlibrary loan after waiting 6 weeks.
An IQ score of 145 (or 148 depending on the test) is actually 3 standard deviations above the mean, assuming a normal distribution and the usual IQ standard deviation of 15 or 16. (iq standard deviation from Wikipedia)
The expected per cent of students who would be at or above 145 (148) is 0.15%. So 3% of the students is indeed high. There is some evidence that IQ at the high end follows a log-normal distribution rather than a strictly normal distribution. The log-normal distribution predicts a greater percentage of very high scorers. It may be more accurate.
But probably the student population in mom2and’s area is pretty gifted overall. Perhaps the students are averaging 115, so that 145 is 2 standard deviations above the mean relative to the local group (but not relative to the national group).
There is also the Flynn effect–performance on IQ tests keeps rising over time (for students of the same age–so different cohorts at different times). The IQ tests are usually renormed so that the standard deviation remains at 15, and the giftedness of a student is evaluated relative to those in the same age cohort. However, if an old test is given and the old norms are used, there will appear to be many more gifted students.
Ugh! Yes, three is what I was thinking but somehow typed two. But you are also correct that the average here, while perhaps not 115, is higher than 100. The other reason for 3% is that they took students that fell into a confidence interval below 145. Not sure the Flynn effect is meaningful as the WISC keeps getting re-normed about every 10 years to account for this.
My library copy just arrived - looking forward to reading it!