Why Talented Black and Hispanic Students Can Go Undiscovered (African-American group)
(This is posted in the AA group, also posted in "Good Reads".)
Public schools are increasingly filled with black and Hispanic students, but the children identified as “gifted” in those schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian.
The numbers are startling. Black third graders are half as likely as whites to be included in programs for the gifted, and the deficit is nearly as large for Hispanics, according to work by two Vanderbilt researchers, Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding.
New evidence indicates that schools have contributed to these disparities by underestimating the potential of black and Hispanic children. But that can change: When one large school district in Florida altered how it screened children, the number of black and Hispanic children identified as gifted doubled.
That district is Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale and has one of the largest and most diverse student populations in the country. More than half of its students are black or Hispanic, and a similar proportion are from low-income families. Yet, as of 10 years ago, just 28 percent of the third graders who were identified as gifted were black or Hispanic.
In 2005, in an effort to reduce that disparity, Broward County introduced a universal screening program, requiring that all second graders take a short nonverbal test, with high scorers referred for I.Q. testing. Under the previous system, the district had relied on teachers and parents to make those referrals.
NY Times
= new reply since forum marked as read
and one I have researched a fair amount in the past. So I am going to make a LOOONG post 
One of the problems with both the article AND the programs is that they are not attempting to delineate between high achieving and intellectually gifted students. Most high achieving students are not gifted and some (more than you would think) gifted students are not high achieving.
In my children's school district, 10% of students are in the "gifted" program. Traditionally, only people who score in the top 2% of an IQ test are considered "gifted". So clearly, there is a disconnect here.
I believe that flexible ability groupings are, in theory, great way for high achieving students to get great service without taking away from lower achieving students. In that system, students are tested regularly, probably using the MAP test, then grouped by subject according to ability. Ideally, students in the lower 50% have better teacher to student ratios, giving them more chance to move up, while higher kids can move quickly and avoid boredom. My youngest went to an elementary school that did this and it was GREAT!
So how does this affect poor and/or minority students? I read somewhere that kids in segregated and/or high poverty schools start with the same percentage of highly motivated students, but that is lost starting about 2nd or 3rd grade. This article makes it very clear that tracking the high ability students into separate classes is EXTREMELY beneficial, and also does not hurt the kids in the lower tracks. The downside, based on experience at my son's school, the tracking is difficult to execute and demands highly skilled teachers to make it successful. Also, the "main" teacher was held accountable for test scores, even of the kid was taught math or reading by another teacher, so they HATED it when ALL the teachers were not great, because their own performance ratings were dinged.
Now for the truly gifted kids (meaning >98th percentile IQ score). First, how do we define gifted? No one completely agrees. IQ tests are more arbitrary than most people realize. Modern tests are scored on a bell curve and re-normed periodically. Because of something called the Flynn Effect, scores rise over time, so people who test right before re-norming score significantly higher than those who take it immediately after, even if they are getting an identical raw score. A kid who is experiencing high stress levels will test 10-20 points lower than the SAME kid who is not stressed. And IQ tests are not designed to measure outliers (top or bottom 2%), yet the score are often used to determine acceptance into gifted programs.
And another point I want to make about gifted children, many of the personality traits of the highly gifted can be interpreted as misbehavior. Many gifted children are emotionally intense and hyper-verbal, but have average social and emotional skills, which leads to misunderstandings (been there, done that). They talk too much, and in a way that confuses their peers. They have the ability to pull huge amounts of info from the world very quickly but also get overwhelmed by the sensory feedback and have emotional meltdowns. They demand honesty and fairness at a much higher level than most, can see inconsistencies and hypocrisy in adults, and will call it out.
These traits can be misinterpreted as ADHD, autism, and just general brattiness in white middle class kids. Because of systemic racism, in minority youth, really high IQs are often perceived as serious behavioral problems. So I think it is VERY important that parents and teachers understand these traits and also understand that many of these kids are underachieving at school due to extreme frustration and boredom. According to stats I have read, a high percentage of these kids end up in the juvenile justice program instead of the GT program and a higher than average percentage drop out. Some abuse substances to blunt the boredom (been there, done that). What a waste. And important to note, because of their emotional and intellectual intensity, these kids are NOT served by regular ability grouping programs. I want to reiterate, they NEED an advocate, either parent or teacher, to run interference for them.
A final personal observation..... I have experienced the belly of the GT educational beast with my own kids, and it is pretty racist and classist. In this specialized, selective program, average family incomes in the six figures, despite being a public program, and white and asian demographics are waaaay over-represented. There was a BUNCH of gaming the system going on too. I tried not to know the details, but apparently, some parents cheated to beat the entrance cut scores. The level of academic competitiveness made me vaguely sick.
This is pretty common in GT programs, from what I have read. They start as a well meaning effort to meet the needs of HG students, but quickly devolve into another gold star for affluent, hyper-competitive helicopter parents to add to their kid's collection. It requires so much money and effort to keep up, that, IMO, the really smart kids are getting run over because they are poor or don't have an advocate or don't fit the stereotype of what a gifted kid looks like. How do you compete with wealthy parents willing to drop thousands on testing until they get the "right" score, and then sign the kids up for after school tutoring that costs thousands more? Personally, I was naive when I enrolled my daughter. Not sure I would have bothered if I knew the real deal.
So my feeling is that ability grouping is great for ALL students, including high achievers, but mostly "real" GT programs (for students >98th percentile IQ score) don't work. There is no way to make entrance requirements fair or keep the affluent parents from gaming the system. I think screening the entire population for highly gifted students, educating teachers about the quirks of that group and best practices for teaching them might be more helpful than self contained programs.
