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Gifted and talented programs have been the target of criticism ever since the concept took hold in the 1970s, as huge demographic changes were transforming urban school districts and white, middle-class families were fleeing to the suburbs.
Today, gifted programs still tend to separate students by race. New York City is a case in point. There, the education department has been struggling for years to change the demographic makeup of its gifted program — which is disproportionately white and Asian — and spread access to a more representative group of students. There are a handful of open-enrollment gifted schools in the city, but the district’s efforts at increasing diversity in the bulk of gifted and talented classrooms have largely backfired.
In 2006, a quarter of students in New York City’s gifted classrooms were white, although white students made up only 15 percent of the student population. The district attempted to level the playing field by eliminating a subjective system in which teachers and preschools played a major role in deciding which students were identified as gifted. From then on, students across the city would have to take the same two tests. Decisions about who made it in would be centralized. The hope was that using more objective measures would expand access and prevent in-the-know parents from gaming the system.
But relying on tests produced the opposite effect. Middle-class parents frantically prepped their 4-year-olds for testing. This year, 70 percent of students identified as gifted in the city are white or Asian, up from 68 percent last year, while just over a quarter are black or Hispanic.
In 2006, before it changed the admissions system, New York City opened 15 new gifted and talented programs to serve more minority children, bringing the number of schools with the programs to more than 200, according to officials at the time. By 2009, many of those programs had been shuttered. There were only about 140 schools with gifted classrooms that year. This year, there are just 88. The neighborhoods that lost gifted and talented programs tended to be those with high concentrations of blacks and Hispanics: Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Flatbush, Washington Heights.
The racial disparities are “a great shame, of course,” wrote Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in a recent blog post, “but it’s not exactly a surprise that more affluent kids are likelier to end up in gifted programs. Their families don’t face the stress of poverty, and they tend to have two parents who read to their children, send them to preschool, etc.”
Determining whether a child is actually more intelligent than her peers or just the product of more affluent, ambitious parents is a difficult task for school systems interested in breaking the cycle of privilege that gifted education tends to fuel. Experts caution against relying heavily on tests, as New York does, but there are no national or even state standards defining giftedness, according to the National Society for the Gifted and Talented, an advocacy group.
The society suggests that parents and teachers check a list of traits, including whether children are “perfectionist and idealistic,” “asynchronous,” or “problem solvers.” Joan Franklin Smutny, director of Chicago’s Center for Gifted, says teachers should be trained to look for a different set of characteristics, such as creativity, well-developed imaginations, and curiosity, which she says are correlated with above-average intelligence. They must also be trained to “cut through” stereotypes, she says, so that talented children who are also poor or from a racial minority are not overlooked.
Is there a better way to provide education for gifted children without exacerbating racial inequities? Officials in Washington, DC, public schools believe they’ve found a possible answer. This year, for the first time in more than a decade, the DC schools have reintroduced gifted education.
Unlike traditional gifted programs, which usually require a test to get in, the DC programs are open to any student who wants to enroll. DC is aiming the program both at students who are book smart and at those who may struggle on traditional measures of achievement but have other extraordinary talents that are harder to measure with a test. The plan is to “build up the gifts they have rather than just focus on their weaknesses,” said Mathew Reif, the district’s director of advanced and enriched instruction.
The open-door policy DC has embraced may offer a way around the dilemma of identifying gifted children. “The bias should be to let students who want to try these classes try them,” says Gary Orfield, a political scientist at UCLA who has advocated for more racial integration in schools. “There should be a very explicit commitment to race and class diversity and targeted recruitment to make it happen.”
From Slate. This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.