About 7 percent of American children, or 3 million kids, are in some sort of gifted program. Nearly as many children are admitted into elite private schools. And while those programs and schools vary in quality and intensity, one thing is sure: They give those kids attention and opportunities that their peers may never have.

The authors of “NurtureShock” don’t argue against the worth of special programs for intelligent children. But they do make a convincing case against how children are selected for such opportunities:

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.

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

Most schools depend on intelligence tests to select gifted children; others will use tests that also score a child’s reasoning ability and learning aptitude. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with the tests, the authors say.

It’s when the children are being tested—while their brains are still rapidly developing—that’s the issue.

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Many children are tested for gifted-program placement as young as 4 or 5, when they enter kindergarten. One researcher, Dr. Hoi Suen of Penn State, performed a meta-analysis of 44 studies that examined whether pre-K or kindergarten testing would correlate with achievement test scores two years later. He found only a 0.40 correlation–and it was no better when he looked only at studies of gifted program or private school tests.

Essentially, this means “you’re getting kids with good backgrounds,” said Dr. Ronald Rock of the Educational Testing Service. So kids who wouldn’t retest at an appropriate level in a couple years’ time are being plunked into gifted programs and special schools, while kids who didn’t test well at 4 or 5 but would test well when they’re older, at 11 or 12, are left behind:

Earning this classification when young is nothing less than a golden ticket, academically. The rarefied learning environment, filled with quick peers, allows teachers to speed up the curriculum. This can make a huge difference in how a child learns.

Scientifically, research has found a link between intelligence and the thickness of a child’s cerebral cortex. But new studies have found that in many kids, that part of the brain keeps thickening far past 7, when it was originally thought to have peaked, to around age 11 or 12. Moreover, IQ scores at a young age are highly variable, especially for the smartest kids.

The obvious solution—retest students, or hold off on initial testing until later—hasn’t gained much traction in schools because of time and money. The authors of “NurtureShock” called the 20 largest school districts in the country, and found two unsurprising things: (1) the latest any of those districts test children for gifted programs is second grade, and (2) none of them require children to be retested at a later date.

A couple of other underlying factors dissuade schools from retesting students. Many seem to be unaware of research showing IQ scores in flux until children are older, while others seem to think it’s unkind to yank a child out from such a program once he or she is admitted. In South Carolina, for instance, a student who doesn’t perform well can only be kicked out of a gifted program if there’s an issue beyond poor scores, and that child is always allowed back in the next year, no test needed.

Ultimately, the biggest program here isn’t children who had the opportunity to enter a special program or school. It’s the ones who never get that chance, the authors argue:

The late-blooming child lives with the mistaken fact that she is not gifted—she’s bright enough to understand that the Powers That Be have decreed that it would be a waste of time and resources to develop her potential. The gifted rolls have already been filled.

Do you have a child in a gifted program or elite school, or were you in one yourself as a kid? When were you tested for admittance? Do you think kids should be retested as they age?