Jordin, who has not started preschool, still has two years before she takes the admissions test, but already her mother has noticed growth.
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She was teaching the child how to classify objects or determine the relationship between things. She then asked the toddler to pick out whether a peach or a green pepper would fit into a group of plastic fruits. She was teaching visual sequencing, the ability to reason and solve problems using pictures, diagrams and geometric shapes. On a recent day, Erinkitola played with 3-year-old Jordin Offei, building a small tower with blue, white and red blocks and then asking the toddler to make exactly the same pattern with another set of blocks. They were more transparent in terms of what they wanted kids to be prepared for, and I deduced that Illinois can't be that different." "I looked outside of Illinois and looked at other gifted programs. "I'm just one mother who wanted to do something because there was nothing out there," Erinkitola said.
She said that when she went through the process with her own three children, she found few resources. Tutor Lemi Erinkitola started a tutoring company for kids as young as 3, preparing children, mostly on the South Side, for CPS' admissions tests. On our newsroom blog Trib Nation, how a conversation with parents became a sidebar on how to prepare kids for these tests. This year she hired a former Montessori teacher to tutor her preschooler on everything from learning continents to sounding out words. Even though with no special preparation her daughter made it into Decatur Classical Elementary, a top-scoring school, "we realized we couldn't do that for our second child and just hope to be lucky," she said. "I was blissfully naive about how this all worked when my older daughter tested for first grade," said Shannan Bunting.
As kindergarten is an entry year for most of those programs, many parents are hiring private tutors, researching tests used in other large urban school systems, finding age-appropriate questions online and doing whatever else it takes to get their kids on the right track early. We're not letting kids be kids, and we're making them into little Einsteins." But with low-performing neighborhood schools an unattractive option and the cost of some private schools out of reach, many parents see CPS' selective enrollment programs as the best public education option in the city. "This sort of insanity testing produces test coaching for little kids and gaming of the system by parents and others to figure out what's on the test and get their kid a leg up. "It's just yet another example that the country has gone test crazy," said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a national nonprofit that advocates for other methods of assessing young children. You can probably predict what comes next yourself: With 3,337 applications filed for about 500 seats in Chicago Public Schools' classical and gifted kindergarten programs next fall, parents are helping their preschoolers cram for the tests. They could be asked to identify trapezoids, figure out how many cookies they'd have if Mom put two more on their plate, demonstrate advanced literacy skills and, for gifted programs, be able to infer relationships, recognize patterns and predict what comes next.
To test into some of Chicago's top schools, incoming kindergartners must be able to do more than just count to 10 or rattle off the alphabet.
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