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When Yasmine Smith was in elementary school, her teachers planned to refer her to the special education coordinator. Her mother fought - against much resistance from leaders at the school and at the district - to instead have her tested for gifted and talented services. She suspected the work being presented to her daughter was not too challenging, but rather not challenging enough, leading to Yasmine's boredom and frustration in class.

Yasmine's mother was right. Smith excelled in the gifted and talented program and went on to graduate from UT Law. Had it not been for what she describes as "pure luck," she believes the low expectations projected onto her by educators could have led to a dramatically different outcome.

Chairmain Mackson had to move her family to a different school district altogether to get her child tested for GT services; the principal of his Austin ISD campus declined to test him, citing a prior diagnosis with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. As with Yasmine Smith, Mackson thinks the diagnosis reflected her son's boredom in the classroom. "My son was already labeled a problem child in kindergarten," she said. "They would call me almost every week, like he was a problem child. I said 'He's coming in reading [already]; you can't give him words like cat, rat.'"

The family moved into Manor ISD, where Mackson's son's new teacher called her before she even had a chance to request testing, saying her son exhibited signs of giftedness. He scored off the charts and was immediately moved into the gifted and talented program.

"A Lot of Bias and Racism"

Celeste Sodergren, the coordinator of Continuous Improvement and head of the Gifted and Talented program for Manor ISD, said the signs of giftedness and the signs of a learning disability, particularly ADHD, often look similar to those who aren't trained to recognize the difference. For example, a child who gets really excited - overexcited, in an adult's eyes - to learn in-depth about a particular subject like "history, or even baseball stats," said Sodergren, can be exhibiting gifted behavior.

"A psychomotor overexcitability looks a lot like ADHD," said Sodergren. "While most people expect gifted kids to sit still and make straight A's, sometimes your gifted kids aren't doing that, because they have overexcitability. A lot of our kiddos across the country get overdiagnosed with things they don't have. If you take that kid and put them somewhere else and they thrive, it's not a learning disability."

Decades of research have found that black students in particular are impacted by the tendency to overdiagnose learning disabilities and underestimate the prospect of their being gifted. The data reflects similarly - though not as starkly - for Hispanic students. Some parents question the value of the GT label for students who already know their own capabilities, especially when schools aren't really able to do much more to stimulate them than via the regular curriculum. But evidence shows that students labeled as needing special education services are less likely to go to college - even though that label also reflects adults' expectations as much as young people's actual abilities.

"Race is the greatest predictor of who succeeds and fails in American public education." - Bavu Blakes

"I think there's a lot of bias and racism embedded into the whole framework," said Bavu Blakes, a former teacher and current Cultural Proficiency and Inclusiveness specialist at AISD. He references the Texas Education Agency accountability data - campus and district report cards - that continue to rank schools highly even when they make little or no progress closing achievement gaps between white students and those of color. "Even the state has lower expectations ... Some racial groups are expected to achieve half of what other racial groups are, and that's considered successful."

A recent study out of Vanderbilt University and the University of Florida suggests that socioeconomic status is a primary determinant of who is identified as gifted and talented, finding the greatest disparities not between schools, but within the same school. But many districts fail to disaggregate data on both race and income levels; much of the data available suggests race, and not income, is the single greatest determining factor in which kids in a mixed environment get identified as gifted, and which do not.

"Race is the greatest predictor of who succeeds and fails in American public education," said Blakes. He cites data from the College Board, which administers the SAT, showing that black students whose families make $140K-$160K per year still tend to attain lower scores on that test on average than white students whose families made less than $20K per year.

"Everyone's at the mercy of the test," he said. "There are some students who are clearly advanced, but may not be [identified as gifted] because of the test barrier." And, said Blakes, if students or parents don't have the knowledge or resources to advocate on their own behalf - which could result in disciplinary actions for students whose self-advocacy educators consider disrespectful - the children are still left out.

"Gifted Looks Different"

Research involving the perceptions of teachers has found generally lower expectations of black students than of white students around academic achievement and college degree attainment. In a 2002 study, a group of teachers expected 58% of white students and 37% of black students within the same cohort to obtain a four-year degree. When these results were broken down by the teachers' own race, black teachers were 9% more likely to say a black student would obtain a college degree than did white counterparts evaluating the same student.

Gifted students "will advocate for themselves, and sometimes teachers see that as disrespectful." - Chairmain Mackson

In many cases, "[gifted] students will advocate for themselves, and sometimes teachers see that as disrespectful," Mackson said. Cultural differences in communication and self-expression might lead teachers to overidentify black students as aggressive or detached from the class, rather than eager to learn or advocating for themselves. Research suggests that teacher biases and district hiring practices - in terms of explicit attention to hiring teachers who look like the students they're serving - also play a part in not only student identification but student success.

"One of the things we ask our teachers to look for is ... cultural differences that our students have from you, because what you expect is what you grew up with," Sodergren said. A 25-year-old white woman might expect students to act the way she and the other kids in her neighborhood did growing up, and other students who behave differently are viewed as disrespectful. "But for some students who come from a different culture, they consider respect to be able to speak your mind to an adult. And there are other students who would never look an adult in the eye," she said. "Those kinds of things often get kids on the wrong path to misdiagnosis and not into the gifted classes they should be in."

Some districts are working to help their teachers bridge these cultural competency gaps. "Gifted looks different in different populations - we're trying to make sure our teachers are trained to look for giftedness to manifest in ways that they're not used to," said Raine Maggio, who serves as Round Rock ISD's GT coordinator, and who was recognized as the Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented's "Administrator of the Year" in 2018 for her focus on equity in her program.

Maggio cites an example: "One that always stands out to me is that ... the general consensus is giftedness means 'high vocabulary.' And everybody always looks at that as high academic vocabulary. And in poverty, it might be that [students] are really good storytellers." That ability "might not translate [on] writing or vocabulary [tests], but the words they're choosing and the gestures they're using and the way they tell those stories is an indicator of giftedness." She added that humor, and an ability to grasp irony and sarcasm, are also good indicators of giftedness.

In her district, Maggio has focused on training GT coordinators at each elementary school on some of these differences in the ways giftedness manifests, and then worked to deploy them to educate classroom teachers. The hope is to "get to them earlier to start providing services, because early intervention is important," she said.

Round Rock ISD has removed achievement testing in grades K-2 as a measure of identifying giftedness, because of the biases Maggio said can be built into standardized testing as a whole. "We focus more on aptitude instead of achievement in those early grades, so that you're not penalized for not being exposed to things," she said.

Manor ISD has gone a step even further. The mostly low-income and majority-minority district, with at least 46 languages spoken at home by its students and families, has not only implemented GT screening for all students in second grade, but does so with a nonverbal universal test, to eliminate any vocabulary or language barriers that might prevent children from being diagnosed as gifted.

"This helps us identify kids who maybe don't have the language ability, but certainly have the cognitive ability to achieve," Sodergren said. All of the district's teachers, not just the GT coordinators, undergo 30 hours of training to identify signs of giftedness in all students. Anyone can nominate any student for testing at any time, not just in second grade - and no student is turned away. If a parent or teacher requests it, the student is screened.

Many districts, including Round Rock, have begun to create more latitude for campus-level control of inclusion criteria, which may include interviews or other data to supplement test results. "The state's guidelines are pretty broad. District to district, you have a lot of latitude in how you identify your [GT] kids and how you serve them," Maggio said. "Some might be academic, some might be more creative, some are leadership-based."

Who Succeeds and Who Fails

However, some parents say these attempts to broaden opportunities for gifted students have actually narrowed them further. Students who might be identified as gifted at one school may not qualify at a neighboring school. There are also lingering concerns about who is interviewing the children - whether they are a culturally diverse group trained in recognizing potential biases. "There is no way you can tell me these subjective factors around GT are fair," said Donald Scott, a parent in Pflugerville ISD.

"There is no way you can tell me these subjective factors around GT are fair." - Donald Scott

Parents express concern that, even after being identified as gifted and talented, their children still are not engaged enough by regular classroom content. "Usually the classroom environment is centered around the average child," Blakes said, adding that he and his wife have "had to be very active and advocate" for his son's school to keep its promises to find ways to challenge him in the context of his normal math and reading classes. "Some teachers are great at differentiation, and some see it as more difficult, or kind of a nuisance."

Sodergren said there is still among some educators an idea of "gifted elitism" - thinking, "We don't need to serve these kiddos; they're smart, so they'll be fine." But she said the long-term effects of not serving gifted students will often include increased risk for depression and suicidal thoughts. "They're more sensitive to their environments at large," she said, and "if we don't acknowledge that and serve that, what we do is doom these kids to a miserable school existence."

It's important for parents to advocate for their children, even when school officials are not trained to recognize the kind of advocacy those children need. But it can be difficult, especially for parents who don't know the process or even recognize the signs themselves. Blakes recognizes greatly the privilege he has as an educator and an active member of the local community. The parents interviewed for this article have actively and continuously advocated for their children's inclusion in GT programs; nearly all of them expressed concern for parents who don't know the process or don't have the time.

"What I wonder is, if you don't have a professional advocate in your corner or someone who has the time, how many [kids] never get qualified for the services, how many students sit there being nice and don't learn anything all year? ... It always makes me wonder about the child with my son's ability who doesn't have my son's parents," Blakes said.

Scott, who recently moved his family from Lake Travis ISD to Pflugerville ISD, has been frustrated about the lack of information available to parents about how to nominate for GT services those students who may have missed automatic testing in early grades. Across eight Austin-area districts, nomination and testing procedures vary widely, as does the availability and accessibility of information about the process on the district websites.

"The information is not distributed to everybody; it's only given out to people who know where to look," said Scott. "Once you start talking about extra things a parent has to do [to get their child nominated for testing], you're filtering people out."

Ultimately, said Blakes, there is still much more work to do to ensure that educational systems created to exclude children of color can be engineered to do the reverse. We need to do better, he says, at ensuring "students get what they need, so there's not a predictable model of who succeeds and who fails."

Who's Being Left Behind: GT Equity in Central Texas Schools

Across eight Austin-area school districts, nomination and testing procedures for Gifted and Talented services vary widely, as does the availability and accessibility of information about the process on the district websites. The data shown here - from a dataset administered by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, as analyzed by ProPublica - shows how black and Hispanic students' participation in Gifted and Talented programs lags behind their overall share of a district's population, even in districts where the majority of students are non-white/non-Anglo and/or economically disadvantaged.

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texas association for the gifted and talented

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Gifted and Talented Education Programs Turn the Lights Out on Non-White Students

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When Yasmine Smith was in elementary school, her teachers planned to refer her to the special education coordinator. Her mother fought - against much resistance from leaders at the school and at the district - to instead have her tested for gifted and talented services.

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Editor's note: Amid numerous articles about how Black students lag behind others in educational achievement, occasionally you may hear about a young Black "prodigy" who got accepted into college at an early age. According to Donna Y. Ford, an education professor at The Ohio State University, there could be far more Black prodigies. But it would take the right support from families, who may not be familiar with some of the characteristics of gifted students and the existence of gifted programs, and educators, who often overlook the talents of Black students. Indeed, while Black students represent 15.5% of the student population in the U.S., they represent only 9.9% of all students in gifted and talented programs. In the following Q&A with education editor Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Professor Ford - who has been a consultant for Black families thinking about sending their gifted children to college early - argues that public schools are holding back Black talent rather than cultivating it. The Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Jamaal Abdul-Alim: Why do public schools so often fail to identify gifted Black students?

The Ohio State University

Donna Ford: The No. 1 reason for the underrepresentation of Black students in gifted education is the lack of teacher referrals, even when Black students are highly gifted. I definitely think stereotypes and biases hinder educators from seeing Black students' gifts and talents. In most schools in the U.S., if you are not referred by an educator, you will not move through the identification pipeline for gifted education programs and services, as well as Advanced Placement. It starts and it stops with teachers.

This is why Black families have reached out to me. They're saying, "This predominantly white-female discipline " - meaning teachers - "is doing my child an injustice."

They're saying, "I'm frustrated, I don't know what to do other than pull my child out and home-school." You don't see a lot of Black home-schooling. If the parents are able to do it, they have the means.

Abdul-Alim: Are these children really prodigies or do they just have parents who are just really actively involved and concerned about their children's education, and recognize the public schools are doing them a disservice?

Ford: There's a lot of controversy in the field about how children become gifted, no less a prodigy. To me, it's not just nature or nurture. It's both. So nature is they have the capacity, the potential. And then nurture is they have the experience, the exposure, the opportunity, access. And that includes the families who have the means and wherewithal to advocate for their children or to nurture whatever potential is there. But personally and professionally, I believe that the most important factor - for students being very gifted and prodigies - is the environment. That means their families, and their cultural, social and economic capital.

Abdul-Alim: But doesn't that kind of point away from the idea of these children being "prodigies"? Because if the thing they have in common is well-educated parents who have high incomes, it seems like almost any child in that situation could achieve similar educational results.

Ford: A prodigy just means that you have children who are performing at the level of an adult; that's the basic definition of a prodigy. So that has nothing to do with their income and families, education, etc. It is about how they are performing. They're playing the piano like an adult who has taken lessons. They picked up on these skills and skill sets very easily. Or they are inventing mathematical formulas that you would only see adults doing. They're in middle school and can do the work of college-level students. You can have this potential, but if you don't have these opportunities at home, at school, even in the community, then the gifts and talents that you have may not come to fruition at the highest level.

Abdul-Alim: When families come to you about whether or not to enroll their young child in college, what do you generally advise them to do or to consider?

Ford: There's a lot of variables to consider. One is the child's emotional and social maturity. I think their size is important. Are they small for their age? That can contribute to some social and emotional issues, in particular bullying or isolation. Do they have siblings who are older who might be intimidated or negatively affected by their younger sibling being accelerated?

[ Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation's email newsletter.]

Abdul-Alim: What is your advice to families who can't afford to home-school, but who have children who could very well be higher-performing if given the opportunity? How does society provide opportunities for children who fall in that category?

Ford: I want the families to become familiar with what the barriers are. So when Black families have contacted me about their child not being identified as gifted or not being challenged like their white classmates, then I point them to the Civil Rights Data Collection website, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education. I have them look specifically at what the data says for representation in gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes. I ask them to look at suspension and expulsion by race and corporal punishment, if that exists in their schools, which it does in some states, and very last, take a hard and critical look at all the data.

You can go straight to data for your child's district or school building. And so, they can come armed with these demographic data showing underrepresentation in gifted and Advanced Placement, but overrepresentation in certain categories of special education as well as discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. And when they come informed, then sometimes - not always - the educators are put on notice. And they do what they're supposed to do anyway, which is share information with families about how to gain the resources and opportunities that their children need.

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How public schools fail to recognize Black prodigies

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Editor's note: Amid numerous articles about how Black students lag behind others in educational achievement, occasionally you may hear about a young Black "prodigy" who got accepted into college at an early age. According to Donna Y. Ford, an education professor at The Ohio State University, there could be far more Black prodigies.

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A teacher's race-and racial biases-can affect how many African American students are assigned to such classes.

It's a reality that's rattled the education world for years: Black and Latino students are far less likely than their white and Asian peers to be assigned to gifted-and-talented programs. The odds of getting assigned to such programs are 66 percent lower for black students and 47 percent lower for Latino students than they are for their white counterparts.

Given the well-known racial disparities in academic test scores that generally determine enrollment in these programs, the gap may seem inevitable. But even among students with high scores on math and reading assessments, black children are severely underrepresented in gifted programs; a high-achieving white student is twice as likely as an equally high-achieving black student to get assigned to such a program. (Interestingly, the gap between Latino and white students virtually disappears when controlling for test scores and other classroom and socioeconomic variables.) According to a new study by Jason Grissom, an education-policy professor at Vanderbilt University, and Chris Redding, a doctoral candidate in educational leadership and policy at Vanderbilt, this suggests that "factors beyond observable student background characteristics are responsible for explaining the Black-White gap in gifted assignment."
Even among students with high test scores, black children are severely underrepresented in gifted programs.
The study, which was published Tuesday in the American Educational Research Association's peer-reviewed journal, looks at a nationally representative group of more than 10,000 students who started kindergarten in 1998, tracking them every few years throughout elementary school. Controlling for a range of variables-from students' academic performance to their socioeconomic status to their age-it aims to provide new insight into why high-performing black students are so underrepresented in gifted-and-talented programs. It turns out that the characteristics and tendencies of teachers, according to the study, could be major factors. Black students are three times less likely to be assigned to gifted-and-talented reading courses when those students are taught by non-black teachers versus black ones, the study finds. The authors argue that preventable practices and implicit biases likely contribute to this discrepancy.

In recent years, teachers have been given greater discretion in whom to refer to gifted-and-talented classes. The researchers have warned against drawing the conclusion that non-black teachers are biased against black students, and their study isn't definitive about what's causing the underrepresentation. They do, however, cite a number of hypotheses, including that "racialized teacher perceptions" may in part explain why educators interpret their students' behaviors and abilities in inconsistent ways. "What a teacher may attribute to precocity for one student may be considered disruptive behavior for another," they write. Conversely, teachers of color may recommend minority students for gifted education at higher rates. Or black teachers may simply be more effective in both motivating black students to improve their own performance and engaging with parents, who are often instrumental in getting their children screened for and enrolled in gifted-and-talented instruction.

The findings are concerning given how few classrooms are staffed with teachers of color, a problem schools have failed to address despite the increasing racial diversity of America's schoolchildren. In fact, as The Atlantic's Adrienne Green reported last September, a study of nine major U.S. cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia found that the disparity between teachers and students of color actually increased in each of the districts between 2002 and 2012. Overall, roughly 80 percent of U.S. public-school teachers are white, and, according to the study, roughly the same percentage of black elementary-school children are taught by teachers of another race. (The vast majority of the teachers studied by the Vanderbilt researchers-91 percent-are white.) "Greater teacher diversity may help ameliorate racial gaps in student assignment to gifted programs," Grissom and Redding write.
"What a teacher may attribute to precocity for one student may be considered disruptive behavior for another."
Still, the researchers, who caution against attributing the gaps strictly to teacher bias, conclude that the gifted-and-talented imbalance can be addressed even without diversifying the teaching force. Schools, they suggest, can improve training for teachers tasked with identifying gifted students, explicitly encourage them to address tacit biases, raise awareness about prejudices or stereotypes that lead to inconsistent practices, or adopt universal screening for gifted children. Or all of the above.

Ultimately, the racial disparities in gifted education can widen longer-term gaps in opportunity. Participation in gifted-and-talented programs has been linked with positive future outcomes, including improved academic performance, motivation, and classroom engagement. "The lower likelihood of assignment for high-achieving Black students in classrooms with non-Black teachers," the researchers write, "diverts gifted services from the very students who may benefit the most from such programs."

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A teacher's race-and racial biases-can affect how many African American students are assigned to such classes. It's a reality that's rattled the education world for years: Black and Latino students are far less likely than their white and Asian peers to be assigned to gifted-and-talented programs. The odds of getting assigned to such programs are 66 percent lower for black students and 47 percent lower for Latino students than they are for their white counterparts.

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It's well known that students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs compared to white and Asian students. Attempting to understand why, a new study from Vanderbilt University investigates how student, teacher, and school characteristics affect pupil assignment to gifted programs in reading and math.

Researchers derived a data sample of approximately 10,640 pupils from the NCES Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K). The ECLS-K data tracks pupils from kindergarten through the eighth grade nationwide, collecting descriptive information on student, family, school, and community factors with questionnaires administered to parents, teachers, and school administrators. The authors used this study to extract information on student demographics and achievement, as well as school environment, classroom environment, and teacher qualifications and demographics during the first, third, and fifth grades-times when most gifted students are identified in elementary school. Finally, researchers measured the probability of gifted assignment based on each characteristic.

Overall, the odds of black and Hispanic children being referred to gifted programs are 66 percent and 47 percent lower than white students, respectively. Moreover, when student, teacher, and school characteristics were averaged, white students had a predicted probability of 6.2 percent of gifted-whereas black students had only a 2.8 percent probability. Although student socioeconomic status, test scores, teachers, and school setting are associated with gifted assignment in reading and math, none of these characteristics could fully account for racial disparities. Tellingly, teacher race was the factor most correlated with gifted assignment for black students only-so much so that black students were three times more likely to be assigned to gifted reading programs when previously taught by black teachers than when taught by non-black teachers. (There was no evidence of significant correlation between teacher/pupil race congruence and gifted reading assignment for white, Hispanic, or Asian students, or gifted math assignment for all subgroups.)

Yet again we are reminded of the deepening disparities pervading public education. But these findings offer a new perspective that warrants further investigation. Perhaps a lack of black teachers causes a greater underrepresentation in gifted programs than previously thought. The authors suggest that their findings allude to the " bureaucratic representation theory ": Citizens are more likely to receive public services and positive treatment when their government officials share the same racial or ethic background.

My own experience as a former teacher and student at predominately black and Hispanic schools supports this explanation. As an educator, my advocacy for high-performing minority students was often met with reluctance-and sometimes flat-out disapproval-from my white and Asian colleagues. When I was a first grader, I vividly remember how students of color were denied acceptance into our school's gifted program, while a select group of classmates-mostly white and Asian pupils-were pulled out of class for enrichment. We wondered what they did during their time away and questioned our own competence. Perhaps policies that better identified talented students of color might have spared us these thoughts.

A century ago, W.E.B. DuBois birthed the "Talented Tenth" concept and expressed the need to invest in the best and brightest from the black community to better promote upward mobility. This is just as necessary today. As much as we tend to focus on pushing our "bubble kids" and those at the bottom toward proficiency, we must also challenge and develop our highest-achieving students, especially those of color. More and better gifted programs for minority students can help narrow the excellence gap, so we should heed the study's recommendations and look further into how screening processes may be racially exclusive and unfair to those kids who possess diverse forms of intelligence. As DuBois argued, our talented tenth ought not be forgotten.

SOURCE: Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding, " Discretion and Disproportionality: Explaining the Underrepresentation of High-Achieving Students of Color in Gifted Programs," AERA (January 2016).

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Underrepresentation of high-achieving students of color in gifted programs

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It's well known that students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs compared to white and Asian students. Attempting to understand why, a new study from Vanderbilt University investigates how student, teacher, and school characteristics affect pupil assignment to gifted programs in reading and math.

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Elementary school students from higher-income families are far more likely to land in gifted programs than their lower-income classmates, even if those students go to the same school and show similar levels of achievement in math and reading, says a new study.

In fact, across America, a student from a family in the top fifth of economic and social status is twice as likely to receive gifted services than an equally achieving peer in the bottom fifth.

And the gap swells to almost seven times more likely when examining all students, say researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Florida.

The findings, published this week in the Harvard Educational Review, aren't a surprise. Previous research using data in multiple states and districts have come to similar conclusions. But it's the first study to use national data and also to factor in achievement results.

The research highlights the challenges of getting gifted services to talented students based on students' personal merits - not on family advantages, biased referral or evaluation processes, or questionable policies.

The issue is important because high-achieving, low-income students who are being overlooked for gifted programs also have the most to gain by participating, according to previous research. Meanwhile, advantaged students are getting outsized access to programs that are linked to important benefits such as greater engagement in school, increased motivation to learn, pathways to improved academic performance, and self-efficacy, or the idea that "I'm good at school."

"There are a lot of districts around the country that are taking this problem very seriously," said Jonathan Plucker, president of the board for the National Association for Gifted Children. "This study doesn't tell us a ton that we didn't already know, but it's another reminder that we've got to stop seeing low-income students as untalented, which is a huge mindset problem."

The data - drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 21,000 students who entered kindergarten in 1998, along with a second group of students who started school in 2011 - allowed researchers to track and compare students across different states as well as those attending the same school. Those same-school comparisons suggest that gaps in service can't be written off as a lack of local access to schools with gifted programs.

"This isn't just a neighborhood problem," said Jason Grissom, one of the authors and an associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of Education and Human Development. "By comparing students within schools, we looked at a high-income kid who's sitting in the same classroom as a kid with similar characteristics but just from a lower income family, and the system was less likely to identify that lower income kid for gifted services."

The study examined access to gifted programs based on students' family income, parental education, and occupational prestige, not just the traditional threshold of eligibility for free and reduced price lunch. That approach provided a deeper and wider look at the role of socioeconomic status and revealed some important divergences.

"There's a real separation when you look at kids in the top 20% of socioeconomic status and everyone else," Grissom said.

In addition, higher socioeconomic status appears to benefit white or Asian students more in the gifted selection process than those who are black or Hispanic.

Federal law acknowledges the unique needs of gifted children but does not require public schools to offer them special services. That's a local responsibility driven by local leadership, who under a 2015 federal education law may choose to use Title I funds to pay for such programs. But with that latitude comes a wide variation from district to district in quality, intensity, and access of gifted programs, making delivery less likely for talented students who live in poverty, are English learners, have disabilities, or are from underserved racial and ethnic groups.

In New York City, for instance, gifted education has been viewed as a magnet for enticing middle-class and white families to enroll in the public school system instead of fleeing for the suburbs or choosing private school. That dynamic recently led one panel to recommend eliminating gifted programs altogether in the nation's largest school district to help integrate New York City schools - a suggestion that bristles groups like the National Association for Gifted Children.

"A very common urban response is to get rid of the whole thing, but I don't think that removing opportunity for students is the best path forward for addressing inequity," said Plucker.

He'd rather see districts turn to universal screening systems that remove teacher bias and parental maneuvering from the referral process by assessing all students for giftedness.

Grissom said districts that have tried universal screenings have vastly increased participation in gifted programs for low-income students and also for students of color. One example is Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, which piloted that approach with second-graders in 2017 but dropped the screenings because it was expensive.

"Testing companies are going to charge you for each kid that's assessed, and there's a cost to that. Districts considering universal screening often have decided that the cost is not worth the benefit," Grissom said.

A less expensive option is to use an existing test to screen students but, for now, most districts are focusing on training teachers on best practices to identify gifted students.

"Districts that recognize these gaps have tried to train teachers better, especially at the elementary level, on what the signs of giftedness are and how that might show up in diverse student populations - to recognize that kids from different socioeconomic groups might express giftedness in different ways," said Grissom, who conducted the most recent study with Christopher Redding at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt's Joshua F. Bleiberg.

"We just don't have good evidence on whether that kind of training is effective or not," he added.

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Money over merit? New study says gifted programs favor students from wealthier families

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Elementary school students from higher-income families are far more likely to land in gifted programs than their lower-income classmates, even if those students go to the same school and show similar levels of achievement in math and reading, says a new study.

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More important, privileged parents contribute to these racial disparities in advanced education, intentionally or not, when they hoard educational opportunities for their already privileged children.
Read: The scandal that reveals the fiction of America's educational meritocracy
Privileged parents have the power, autonomy, time, and resources to, for instance, attend school-district meetings to make sure their neighborhood schools aren't closed or rezoned. They also know how to appeal to principals, making a case for why their child must be placed in their preferred teacher's classroom. They have the money to hire tutors so their children can stay on top of their classwork and score well on standardized tests. Some even do school-related work on their children's behalf. These parents do these things for the good of their children, even though they are not good for other people's children.

Yet privileged parents often feel guilty when they are unable to reconcile being a good parent with being a good socially conscious citizen. The sociologist Margaret Hagerman calls this the " conundrum of privilege." Despite knowing that doing the best for their children often means leaving other children, often low-income students or students of color, with fewer opportunities, the knowledge doesn't change their behavior. As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in her powerful new book, , "They are good people. They want all children in their child's school to thrive, but they want their child to thrive just a bit more than most." When it comes to GATE programs and advanced classes where space is limited, privileged parents hoard the opportunity for their own children, especially in racially integrated schools.

Putting the numbers in context with the sociological explanations reveals that black children aren't included in schools' conception of gifted and advanced precisely because they are not conceived of as "our" children who deserve the best resources and attention.

As a black parent who now carries socioeconomic privilege, given my husband's and my own educational status, I, like other black middle-class mothers, find myself in a unique position: a conundrum of constrained privilege. I want to advocate for my black sons, because I only want the best for them. I also know that advocating for my sons to get into GATE or elite academies could move the needle just a bit to increase black representation. But doing this would mean accepting that my already privileged children would receive additional benefits that other black children might need even more.

Instead of having my son take the GATE entrance exam, I decided to use my social capital to advocate for more holistic changes in our district. I spend about six hours a month either volunteering in a second-grade classroom, or discussing school-assessment measures and budgets with teachers and school administration as a member of the School Site Council, or convening with district personnel about citywide initiatives in my position on the District Accountability Committee. My job status allows me the privilege and flexibility to spend my time doing this extra work. But my racial status means this is a necessity. In every single one of these spaces, I am the only black adult. If I am not there advocating for my son and other black students, the data suggest, no one else will.

The education gap cannot be achieved without closing the racial empathy gap. While my individual actions and choices are important, their impact is limited. Until we can develop better admissions tests, or pass legislation banning these tests altogether, or invest more resources in public schools to incorporate GATE-like curricula in all classes, those of us who are willing and able to do "whatever we can" for our children need to expand our idea of who "our" children really are.

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More important, privileged parents contribute to these racial disparities in advanced education, intentionally or not, when they hoard educational opportunities for their already privileged children. Read: The scandal that reveals the fiction of America's educational meritocracy Privileged parents have the power, autonomy, time, and resources to, for instance, attend school-district meetings to make sure their neighborhood schools aren't closed or rezoned.

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Why aren't enough black students identified for gifted programs? Howard County Library System, CC BY-NC-ND

Nationally, black and Hispanic students are underrepresented in gifted programs, which provide specialized instruction or other services to meet the needs of especially bright or talented students.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education show that black and Hispanic students make up 40 percent of public school students but make up only 26 percent of students enrolled in gifted programs.

So what are the reasons for this underrepresentation?

One possibility is that these disproportionately low rates simply reflect differences in academic achievement across demographic groups. Indeed, a large body of research demonstrates that black and Hispanic students lag behind their white and Asian peers even at kindergarten entry.

However, a recent study I coauthored with Christopher Redding, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, shows that differences in achievement are only part of the story.

The black-white gap in gifted identification

We based our research on an analysis of gifted placements in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracked a nationally representative sample of kindergartners throughout elementary school. A nice feature of these data is that they contain standardized achievement measures in math and reading for every student.

When we took student achievement levels into account, we found different patterns for Hispanic and black students. Essentially all of the gifted assignment gap between Hispanic and white students can be explained by test score differences. In stark contrast, math and reading scores explained only a little of the black-white gap in gifted assignment. In fact, a black student with the same scores as a white student is still only half as likely to be assigned to a gifted program.

In other words, two students - one black and one white - with the same math and reading achievement could have very different likelihoods of being identified as gifted.

This is a startling finding.

And, as additional analysis in our study shows, it cannot be explained by other differences in student background, such as parental education and household income.

Our investigation of school and classroom factors, however, does point toward two contributors to the black-white gap.

The first is that black students are less likely than white students to attend schools that offer gifted programs.

US Department of Education, CC BY

The second is that black students assigned to a white classroom teacher are much less likely to be assigned to gifted programs than those assigned to a black teacher.

The differences are big.

Black students in black teachers' classrooms have almost the same probability of being assigned to gifted services as otherwise similar white students. However, black students in white teachers' classrooms are identified for gifted services only about a third as often.

We find no similar evidence that having a same-race teacher matters for the gifted assignment of white, Hispanic or Asian students.

Black teachers vs. white teachers

Why would the teacher's race matter for whether a black student is identified as gifted?

There are multiple possible explanations.

Perhaps black students respond differently to teachers who look like them in ways that make their giftedness more apparent. Perhaps parents feel more comfortable advocating for their child to be evaluated for giftedness when they share a common background with the child's teacher.

More likely, however, is that black teachers and white teachers perform differently when it comes to identifying giftedness in black students. What a black teacher more attuned to a black child's background, culture and language may recognize as evidence of exceptional aptitude or talent may go undetected by a white teacher.

Research also shows that white teachers tend to express lower expectations for the academic success of black students than do black teachers. Worth noting is that at last count, 83 percent of the teacher workforce is white.

How should students be screened?

To receive gifted services, students must go through an evaluation to be formally designated as gifted.

School districts' gifted evaluation processes vary, but most begin with a referral for gifted evaluation from a classroom teacher. Students who are not referred by a teacher are unlikely to be evaluated. Teachers failing to recognize (or expect) giftedness in some students can be an important barrier to equal access.

One solution to the problem is to reduce the role of teacher discretion in gifted identification. Testing or evaluating all students for giftedness could ensure that high-aptitude students from traditionally disadvantaged groups get access to the services they need.

Indeed, school districts that have implemented so-called "universal screening" policies have seen dramatic increases in the numbers of black, Hispanic and low-income students (another group our analysis shows are underrepresented) identified as gifted.

Studies show that gifted youth benefit from gifted programs on such outcomes as achievement and motivation. And gifted youth from marginalized groups benefit even more than other students.

Gifted black students deserve the same opportunities as gifted white students to reach their academic potential. Whether the strategy is universal screening or better training of teachers to recognize giftedness among all students or another approach, our research suggests that school districts need to get serious about making sure that gifted services are accessible to all students who need them.

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Why do fewer black students get identified as gifted?

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Nationally, black and Hispanic students are underrepresented in gifted programs, which provide specialized instruction or other services to meet the needs of especially bright or talented students. Data from the U.S. Department of Education show that black and Hispanic students make up 40 percent of public school students but make up only 26 percent of students enrolled in gifted programs. So what are the reasons for this underrepresentation?

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This article about gifted education was produced in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. This is part 1 of the series "Gifted Education's Race Problem."
BUFFALO, N.Y. - On a crisp day in early March, two elementary school gifted and talented classes worked on activities in two schools, 3 miles and a world apart.

In airy PS 64 Frederick Law Olmsted, in affluent, white north Buffalo, 22 would-be Arctic explorers wrestled with how to build a shelter if their team leader had frostbite and snow blindness. Unusually for Buffalo's public schools - where 20 percent of students are white and 46 percent are Black - about half of the fourth grade class was white.

In PS 61 Arthur O. Eve, on the city's majority-Black East Side, 13 first graders, all of them Black, Latino or Asian American, folded paper airplanes in their basement classroom as part of an aerodynamics and problem-solving lesson. Unlike at Olmsted, the highest-scoring elementary school in the city, students at Eve scored around the dismal city average in math and English in 2019, when fewer than a quarter of students passed state tests.

The gifted program at Eve opened two years ago as a way to increase access to Buffalo's disproportionately white, in-demand gifted and talented programs. Buffalo educators hoped Eve's new program would give more children - particularly children of color - a chance at enrichment and advanced learning.

Yet two years in, Eve's gifted classes are under-enrolled, while Olmsted always runs out of room - last year, more than 400 children applied for 65 gifted spots. And even though the district made it easier to apply for gifted classes, Olmsted gifted classrooms still don't look like the rest of the district. White families flock to Olmsted, and eschew the new program at Eve, while families of color have come up against barriers, including an IQ test children take as young as 4, that experts say keep gifted education out of reach for kids who need it.

Buffalo's struggle to create an integrated, equitable gifted program demonstrates a longtime challenge that has recently gained attention: Gifted education in America has a race problem.

Nearly 60 percent of students in gifted education are white, according to the most recent federal data, compared to 50 percent of public school enrollment overall. Black students, in contrast, made up 9 percent of students in gifted education, although they were 15 percent of the overall student population.

Many factors contribute to this disparity. Gifted education has racism in its roots: Lewis Terman, the psychologist who in the 1910s popularized the concept of "IQ" that became the foundation of gifted testing, was a eugenicist. And admissions for gifted programs tend to favor children with wealthy, educated parents, who are more likely to be white.

Though it took several decades for gifted education experts to raise concerns, they have been trying to diminish segregation for a generation. If it were easy, it would be done by now.

In a three-part series, The Hechinger Report and NBC News examined the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools; how some districts are trying to diversify gifted classes or get rid of them altogether; and how scientific progress in gene testing could boost - and complicate - efforts to make gifted programs fairer.

School administrators often see gifted education as a frill. Nationally, 3.3 million public school students were identified as gifted in 2015-16, about 6 percent of the total school population, according to the federal Department of Education. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many districts to cut budgets, pushes gifted education even farther down the priority list. However, addressing its continuing racial inequality could not be more urgent, education advocates say, especially after the summer's civil rights protests.

It's not just Buffalo. Purdue University's Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute found in 2019 that inequity is the norm. Wealthy schools identify more children as gifted than do poor ones. Black, Latino and Indigenous students are often left out.

South Dakota and Alaska, for instance, have a combined 46,000 Native children, fewer than 300 of whom, 0.6 percent, were considered gifted in 2015-16. Black and Latino children fill 65 percent of New York City classrooms but just 22 percent of gifted seats.

The Hechinger Report's analysis of U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights data suggested the problem is acute in some cities that also have high levels of racial segregation by neighborhood. In Cincinnati, for instance, Black students made up 63 percent of the student body but just 16 percent of the small gifted program, according to 2015 data from the Office for Civil Rights.

In Buffalo, administrators say they know that their district's gifted education racial imbalance is a problem: The Office for Civil Rights investigated the district six years ago. In response, the district made it easier to apply for Olmsted's gifted program, created the new program at Eve and began the process of infusing every classroom from pre-K through fourth grade with enriched lessons.

But is it possible to make gifted education representative? Does letting more kids in fix the underlying inequities? Can we even agree on what "giftedness" is at all?

How to define 'gifted'

Despite a century of research, definitions of giftedness are fuzzy. People disagree over whether it should be measured in absolute or relative terms; whether there is a limit to the proportion of humanity that is gifted; whether giftedness can be cultivated; whether it must be backed up by achievement; and whether it should include athletic abilities.

Terman set the stage by writing in the 1910s that giftedness was very high intelligence, which he defined as the top 1 percent of scorers on his IQ exam, researcher Jennifer L. Jolly wrote in 2005. Psychologists later poked holes in that definition. They said that giftedness could also be creativity, and found that a high IQ score did not necessarily correspond with leadership, professional accomplishment or even success in school. There are gifted dropouts.

The National Association for Gifted Children defines its target group as kids whose "ability is significantly above the norm for their age." Maria Valenti-Barone, a gifted and talented teacher at Olmsted, said that giftedness is "the potential to do great things in society."
Related: Up to 3.6 million students should be labeled gifted, but aren't
Psychologist Joseph Renzulli, probably the most influential person in gifted education today, views giftedness as dynamic, not as a fixed quality you either have or don't. He proposed a Venn diagram: Giftedness is where creativity, above-average ability and commitment to completing a task meet. He speaks not of gifted people but of gifted behaviors that can be developed and that show up "in certain people, at certain times, under certain circumstances." Renzulli's summer workshops for educators have trained more than 35,000 teachers over 40 years, including numerous Olmsted staff.
For more of NBC News' in-depth reporting, download the NBC News app
Nowadays, many states build off the federal government's kitchen-sink definition: Gifted and talented students are those who "give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities."

But in practice, districts often still identify gifted children through IQ and other cognitive ability tests.

Gary Orfield, co-director of UCLA's Civil Rights Project, believes schools define giftedness too narrowly. "Every child has gifts," he said. "All kids do have special talents. But we only measure a very few."

A clear definition of giftedness is elitist while a broad definition is useless. But however Buffalo was defining giftedness, advocates for Black children knew that something must be wrong because their city couldn't possibly have so few gifted Black kids.

A 'patently unfair' program

Surrounded by portraits of creative thinkers such as Muppets creator Jim Henson, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the anthropologist Jane Goodall, four students in an Olmsted #64 fourth grade gifted class debated an early step of the Arctic shelter challenge: phrasing the problem so that they could come up with a solution."This is hard," one muttered, bending over her paper.

"Black hat," Valenti-Barone instructed them, "add a few more details."

By that, the students knew, their teacher meant one of the psychologist Dr. Edward de Bono's six "thinking hats," specifically the one that called on thinkers to assess their ideas and look for potential flaws.

Olmsted's program is based on Renzulli's three-tiered whole-school enrichment model. The entire school learns about critical thinking and creativity, and gifted kids take most of their classes with their peers, except for the special gifted class, taught by Valenti-Barone, which meets every other day.

While gifted education generally took off in the U.S. after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it arrived in Buffalo only after a 1976 federal court ordered the highly segregated city to integrate its schools. Rather than force integration like in Boston, the district came up with an array of magnet programs to encourage white families to enroll their children in predominantly Black public schools. That included a gifted track housed at a largely Black campus near the city's Delaware Park, the school that would later be renamed Olmsted.

Buffalo's magnet programs, including Olmsted, integrated schools without Boston's violence. White and middle-class students attracted to the magnets stayed in the school system, and mixed with Black and low-income students in the same schools. Test scores for all students went up across the board. "They were a national model," the UCLA's Orfield said.

To create racial balance, the district conducted outreach, expanded the attendance zone for the seats reserved for nongifted neighborhood kids and had a "prep program" for students who showed potential for giftedness but fell short of the admissions requirements, retired Olmsted middle school principal Michael Gruber said.

But Buffalo's golden age of integration ebbed quickly. Federal court supervision of the city's desegregation plan ended in 1995, and a white family whose child did not get into the academically selective middle-high school City Honors sued the district in 1997, alleging "reverse discrimination." The district ceased efforts to balance race in gifted admissions, according to a report that UCLA's Civil Rights Project produced for the district in 2015.

Without the outreach and prep program, the Olmsted gifted program began to grow whiter - from 55 percent Black and 30 percent white in 2004 to 32 percent Black and 46 percent white in 2013, according to federal data. People began raising concerns that the admissions process was onerous: Parents had to take their 4-year-olds to the school on a Saturday for a one-on-one IQ test with a psychologist. "I was stunned," said Sally Krisel, a former president of the National Association for Gifted Children, who visited Buffalo in the late 1990s to advise on how to identify gifted students. "Low-income families, they are working on Saturday."

The preschoolers also took math and reading readiness tests, and parents had to fill out "inventories" rating their children's academic prowess, creativity and ability to stay on task. At one time, several people said, the district required a recommendation from a preschool teacher. The preschools that served lots of kids who went to Olmsted knew the sort of thing to write.

Many of the parents who applied to Olmsted didn't even necessarily want gifted services, said Kate Steilen, an education doctoral student and blogger who interviewed the families for a research project. They knew not all their children were especially brilliant - they just wanted to get into the best elementary school in the city.
Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster
In 2014, a group of Buffalo parents filed a racial discrimination complaint with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights. They named Olmsted and several other magnet programs. The federal government found that the district discriminated against Black children, citing data that included Olmsted #64's admissions numbers: Close to 1 in 5 white applicants were offered a spot at the school, compared to 1 in 10 Black applicants.

The district acknowledged the shortcomings. "Smart parents were using the system to their advantage," Will Keresztes, the acting superintendent during the investigation, said. The academic screening tools "were patently unfair." The district hired Orfield's UCLA group to recommend changes.

Rather than find a better way to slice the pie, UCLA recommended making the pie bigger. Olmsted should stop cordoning off one-third of its elementary seats for nongifted neighborhood students. And Buffalo should create "a new high standards elementary school," they wrote, with 10 percent of seats reserved for "students who have not been adequately prepared but show signs of strong potential."

Buffalo Public Schools adopted many, though not all, of the recommendations. It streamlined the gifted admissions process, dropping the academic readiness tests and recommendations, but keeping the individually administered IQ test. And while the district did not duplicate Olmsted, it did expand Olmsted's gifted program to a very different school.

Growing Buffalo's gifted programs

At Eve #61, first grader Kaiden walked across the classroom in early March, looking for a buddy with whom to make paper airplanes. It was the second year of the gifted program at Eve. The school used to be racially integrated, but white families left after the federal court order ended. Educators have developed an arts-infused curriculum with full-time dance, theater, art, and violin teachers. The halls are dingy but lined with students' Inuit sculptures and dreamcatchers.

Sarah Malczewski, who teaches gifted kids like Kaiden for a portion of each day, created her own curriculum for Eve, but she taught a lot of the same techniques as the Olmsted program, including the de Bono hats and other methods to think outside the box.

The 13 students in Kaiden's gifted class, which meets daily, had started the project the day before, so they colored in their paper airplanes' wings, practiced their tosses - and searched for even better designs. "My parents made me make five paper airplanes at home so I would win this," Sharmin, browsing videos on an iPad with classmate Mariah, said.

"Lookit lookit lookit! Five hundred feet!" Mariah exclaimed to Sharmin, after finding a promising video. Kaiden sat down next to them and Mariah pushed the iPad closer so he could see. One boy accidentally bonked his classmate with a plane and apologized.

Finally, they lined up in the hallway for the official competition. Jumping up and down quietly in lieu of disruptive whooping, they were so excited to pitch the planes that they barely noticed how far they traveled. Malczewski praised not their airplanes but their attitudes, the way they kept working despite frustrations. "I was very happy with the way you guys handled it," she said. That "is called 'persistence.' "

"Kaiden is - he's something different!" his mom, Shakeirra McDuffie, who is African American, said a couple weeks later, laughing. He used to wear costumes everywhere; he wouldn't listen to the pediatrician until the doctor addressed him as "Batman." For Christmas last year, he asked for a drone and a science kit. His preschool teacher told McDuffie, "You have to try to get him in a program" for advanced students, to ensure he was challenged.

McDuffie was living down the street from Olmsted at the time and applied to the school's neighborhood program, not the gifted class, but Kaiden didn't get in. So she chose Eve, hearing it was a good school, not knowing it was launching a gifted program.
Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms
Malczewski had only three formally gifted kids in kindergarten, two in first grade and four in second in the 2019-20 school year. So Eve has opted to include children such as Kaiden who seemed like they would benefit, not just those who passed the one-on-one IQ test.

Principal Parette Walker, at one time the principal of Olmsted #64, said parents just didn't know about Eve yet. "It's a new program. So we have to advertise it," she said. "I'm sure we'll get the enrollment."

Several parents, however, suggested another reason for the gifted enrollment shortfall at Eve: White parents didn't want to send their kids to a majority-Black school. It wasn't the gifted education they were interested in, but the high-performing, majority-white Olmsted.

Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization co-chair Rachel Fix Dominguez, who is white, said she'd talked to white, middle-class parents who had turned down a spot in the gifted program at Eve. "They don't know anyone whose kid has gone to 61, so they're not going to be the vanguard," she said. "I don't think there are explicit ill intentions, but I think people go with what they're comfortable with."

That's not unique to Buffalo. Harvard University researchers found that while white parents supported racially integrated schools in principle, they were uncomfortable with having their children be the minority and less likely to enroll their children in schools with large numbers of Black students.

Howard Thompson II, a Black substitute teacher at Eve whose son passed the gifted test and is in Malczewski's class, put it plainly: "Racism will always play a factor in most people's decision-making," he said.

If the point is to give more Black children in Buffalo the chance to attend gifted programs, maybe Eve's lack of white students is for the best. "They say some people's loss is another person's gain," Thompson said. When white parents shy away, "more people of color will have the opportunity."

Challenges in reaching equity

There are many ways to go wrong when identifying gifted children, Ohio State professor Donna Ford said, ways that result in fewer disadvantaged children and more wealthy and white children passing the bar.

For instance: Using achievement tests, which better measure a child's schooling and home resources than their potential. Measuring disadvantaged kids against a national norm instead of against other kids like them. Testing too young - a 4-year-old can have a bad day, and the results don't necessarily hold over time. And testing only students whose teachers or parents are aware of the program and request it; few teachers get trained in gifted education, so their recommendations are often based on stereotypes (studies find that Black students are more likely to get into gifted programs if they have teachers of the same race).

Discrimination in gifted education is "intentional and it's unintentional," Ford said. But "if you are aware of reasonable alternatives and don't use them, then it's intentional."

Though no one has found a way to identify kids with extraordinary potential that doesn't map closely onto the privileges of birth, tactics districts are already trying include screening all children, not just those whose parents request it; admitting promising students to gifted programs even if they miss the testing cutoff; and expanding the number of gifted seats.

That last strategy is what UCLA recommended for Buffalo. About 250 of Buffalo's more than 30,000 students are in a gifted program. If Buffalo hewed to the national average, it would have about 2,000 gifted kids. But despite the high demand for Olmsted, administrators said that they didn't need to significantly expand gifted education, beyond adding the program at Eve, because Buffalo has plenty of other academically stimulating options, including STEM and Montessori programs.

Instead, Buffalo got a $1 million grant in 2018 from the Kellogg Foundation to help teachers incorporate bits of gifted education into all pre-K to fourth grade classrooms, an effort that is still being rolled out. (The Kellogg Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) The goal is to offer enrichment to all students, whether or not they've formally tested as "gifted."

This is in line with a new theory that envisions gifted classes as a service, like special education: an array of personalized support for a child with learning needs outside the norm. Gifted students stay in their home schools and get extra activities or support - perhaps through extra components to an assignment, or by attending fifth grade math as third graders.

Orfield supports serving students where they are. "Offering opportunities and challenges is what a school should do. Whether it's necessary to segregate kids to do that is another matter," he said.

But all that enrichment can get expensive. The federal government does not supplement local funding for gifted programs as it does for special education. As of 2015-16, only four states, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Oklahoma, both mandated gifted education and fully funded the service, according to a report from Purdue University's college of education.

New York is one of 20 states that don't require that districts offer gifted education at all, or provide money for it. And Buffalo's schools had no shortage of costly demands, even before the coronavirus created a budget crisis for the district. Attendees at a variety of parent group meetings in March voiced worries about safety, classrooms without books and 4-year-olds throwing desks.

Buffalo Superintendent Kriner Cash "probably believes philosophically that there should be a gifted and talented program in every school," said Sam Radford, an African American parent and past president of the District Parent Coordinating Council. "The question is where the money would come from."

The district did not answer questions about how much the gifted program costs.

Anne Botticelli, the district's chief academic officer, said she hopes to be able to offer what she called "enrichment," though not gifted and talented services, to more students in the future. "We know that we have gems in all of our schools," she said.

'Open up your doors'

Buffalo administrators say they want to improve social and racial justice, especially in the area of discipline. They have an office dedicated to racial equity, hold regular professional development on racial diversity for teachers and infused The New York Times' 1619 Project into the middle and high school curriculum. They were open to talking about their stumbles.

However, the district's efforts in gifted education have not moved the needle. For fall 2020, the parents of 403 children applied to Olmsted's elementary gifted program and 39 to Eve's, according to data the district provided. One quarter of the white students and the multiracial students were assigned seats. Only 11 percent of the Black and 10 percent of the Hispanic children got in.

Last year, parents asked the federal Office for Civil Rights to reopen the 2014 investigation. After they held a press conference, the New York state attorney general's office sent Cash a letter, saying it had opened a separate "inquiry" and requesting information about racially disparate school discipline and admissions.

Nathaniel Kuzma, the Buffalo district's general counsel, wrote in response that the district would cooperate, but added that it "has become a national proof point for district transformation around issues of equity, justice, the mindset of high expectations for all children, and in forthright dialogue about race and discrimination." The state attorney general's investigation is still active; the office declined to comment.

Should Buffalo shutter gifted education because of its racial inequity? McDuffie and Thompson, African American parents of students at Eve, thought the opposite: that the district should expand. "Don't shut it down," said McDuffie, Kaiden's mom. "Open up your doors and be wider."

Thompson's son, Howard III, was offered a gifted seat at Olmsted for third grade, his father said. But he and his wife decided to keep him at Eve. Howard III knew the school and had built good relationships with teachers and friends. The gifted program would expand and improve; anyway, "parental involvement plays a far more pivotal role in a child's growth and development," Thompson said. If anything in the classroom falls short, he will provide it. He and his wife want their child to "enjoy being a kid first, and then a wonderful student, second."

And then attend highly selective City Honors for the rest of his school career, he said.
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How gifted education is driving racial divides in America's public schools

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This article about gifted education was produced in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. This is part 1 of the series "Gifted Education's Race Problem." BUFFALO, N.Y.

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Linnea Van Eman, the gifted education coordinator for the Tulsa school district, sees too many gifted students who simply don't have the language skills to show what they can do.

The 36,000-student Oklahoma district has been pushing hard to bring more students from traditionally underrepresented groups-and English-language learners in particular-into its gifted program. Using a combination of more-diverse testing, greater parent outreach, and closer observation, Van Eman and her teachers are working to fill equity gaps in the district's advanced programs.

"Any child who can translate for their parents and is decoding in two languages all the time, that's huge," Van Eman said. "We need to push back against this perception that giftedness has to look a certain way."

Beginning next school year, the Every Student Succeeds Act, the main federal education law, requires states and districts to report the number of their students performing at the advanced academic level, not just those who are academically proficient and below, and to include advanced-achievement data for specific student groups, including English-language learners.

Oklahoma is one of the most expansive states in the country when it comes to gifted education, with 14 percent of its K-12 students participating in advanced academic programs. Yet federal data suggest that it, like most states, is still behind the curve when it comes to identifying and nurturing diverse students at the highest academic levels, and English-learners are among the groups most frequently overlooked.

An analysis by the Education Week Research Center found that while nearly 1 in 10 U.S. students is learning English as a second language, this group represents less than 3 percent of the students in gifted and talented education nationwide. That's only 101,000 of the more than 3.4 million students in gifted programs.

"A lot of the programs we test for [in gifted education] are language-based," said Dina Brulles, a gifted education coordinator at Paradise Valley, a well-off district outside Phoenix, and a consultant with the National Association for Gifted Children. "We can see they make good connections, have insights, ... but the school is often still looking at them as being not linguistically up to par, and they want to treat them through a deficit model rather than looking at these kids' strengths."

By the Numbers

Gifted education generally includes the 3 percent to 5 percent highest-scoring students on academic tests, as well as those who show significant leadership, creativity, or strengths in particular subjects. But programs vary significantly from state to state. According to a study by the Education Commission of the States conducted last November, 37 states define giftedness, and only 32 require districts to identify and serve gifted students.

Education Week found that 7 percent of K-12 students participate in gifted programs, according to the U.S. Department of Education's most recent federal civil rights data, which were collected in 2014. But individual states differ considerably in how and how many students are identified as intellectually advanced: Kentucky and Maryland lead with 16 percent of their students in gifted programs, while states such as Rhode Island and Vermont reported less than 1 percent. A few states, including Connecticut and Maine, cap the percentage of students who can take part in gifted programs.

Some studies suggest that children who grow up bilingual have greater cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills than monolingual children, but English-learners in the United States often don't get a chance to show their skills. Nationwide in 2014, within schools that have gifted programs, English-learners were underrepresented by more than 5 percent, with gaps between the share of students who are English-learners and the percentage of ELLs in gifted education that were as large as 19 percent in California and 18 percent in Nevada.

ELLs are underrepresented in gifted programs in 49 states and the District of Columbia. While they are not technically underrepresented in West Virginia, only 1 in 100 students in the state had limited English skills, and less than 1 in 100 of those English-learners actually attended a school that offered gifted education in the first place, the Education Week analysis found.

In a University of Connecticut study of gifted identification in three states, researchers found that a student's high achievement on state tests didn't always guarantee them a slot in gifted education.

"As students' achievement increases, their chance of being identified as gifted increases, but much slower if you are an English-language learner, poor or from a underrepresented minority than if you are non-ELL and white or Asian," said D. Betsy McCoach, a co-author of the study and a professor of education measurement and evaluation. "Districts make policies [on gifted education], but those policies don't necessarily translate to equal opportunities across schools in those districts."

In Oklahoma, ELLs made up 7 percent of the population at schools that offered gifted programs in 2014 but only 2 percent of gifted enrollment. Tulsa had double the percentage of English-learners but only 2 percent in gifted programs.

Five years ago, Tulsa, like most districts, relied on teacher or parent referrals, confirmed by an IQ test, to identify academically gifted students. In the city's mostly Hispanic Mitchell Elementary School, Principal Lyda Wilbur said that meant only 4 students were identified as gifted that year-none of them English-learners.

"Intuitively, it feels like having teachers and other stakeholders provide nominations is a way of broadening the pool, but that's not what it does at all; it narrows the pool tremendously," said Matthew McBee, a gifted education researcher and an assistant professor of experimental psychology at East Tennessee State University.

In 2016, McBee and Michael Matthews, the program director for the academically and intellectually gifted graduate program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, co-authored a study that found school systems that relied on teachers and parents to nominate students to be tested for giftedness missed more than 60 percent of gifted students, compared with systems that screened all students at least once.

"We know we have gifted students in our building-it's a matter of finding them," Wilbur said.

That frustration drove the district to overhaul its gifted education from top to bottom. Tulsa now requires every 2nd grader to take the CogAT, a four-part test of verbal and nonverbal ability; and in schools like Mitchell, gifted and ELL teachers have partnered to translate the test for students who do not speak English well enough to read it. The district also added other tests, including the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, which was developed specifically to identify potentially talented children with lower-level English-language skills.

Starting next year, Tulsa will also target English-learners who show faster-than-average growth on the state English-language-proficiency test. According to Matthews, that's a strategy that shows strong potential as a way of identifying gifted students, as they often learn languages more quickly than other students.

The district still asks teachers and parents to recommend students with potential, but they have become more systematic. For example, twice a year Mitchell asks all parents to fill out behavioral checklists in English or Spanish on their child, which are used to scout potentially talented students who hadn't shown up on the screening tests.

"We triangulate all our tests and data and say, 'Who is not being recommended? Why is this child not on our radar?' " Wilbur said.

Seeing Past Language

At McClure Elementary, where today 1 in 4 students is an English-learner, and at Marshall Elementary, where the English-learner ratio is 1-to-5, gifted facilitator Patrice O'Dea has been working with ELL teachers to start identifying gifted English-learners even earlier than 2nd grade. First graders who show promise but do not necessarily have perfect grades join an "explorers club" that works on science- and technology-related group projects in school for a few hours a week during the year, while O'Dea observes.

"In math and science, they catch on to the concepts really fast," she said. "I might explain something four or six times for a regular kid. For gifted, I explain once, and they get it."

That's common, according to Rachael Mun, a gifted-education researcher at the University of North Texas. "If you look at individual domains [to identify gifted students], you would capture a lot more [English-learner] students, particularly if you could bypass some of the language barriers we put up," Mun said. "If you have students who are gifted in math or science, ... you should really be working to serve them in that area, while still working on the areas where they aren't as advanced."

O'Dea recalled one 1st grade English-learner from a high-poverty, Hispanic and Native American background.

"She was one I did not identify right away; she just was quiet, very reserved, so she didn't stand out," O'Dea recalled. After two years in the explorers club, the girl regularly led her classmates in projects and eventually tested into the gifted program.

"Her ability to articulate thoughts and ideas to others her age, is just going gangbusters," O'Dea said.

The increased outreach has infused more life into the district's gifted program overall. After Tulsa's gifted enrollment fell from more than 5,400 in 2014 to 4,100 in 2016, in keeping with falling overall enrollment, it had risen again to 4,500 by this spring. For the first time this year, every elementary and middle school had at least a part-time gifted education instructor, Van Eman said.

In Mitchell, the program has grown from fewer than 20 students in 2014 to more than 50 today, with a majority of them English-learners.

The future of gifted education in general is uncertain, though. Most states are still in the early stages of reaching for equity in gifted education. President Donald Trump rolled back Obama administration regulations fleshing out how states should implement the federal education law's accountability changes, and his fiscal 2018 budget proposal would eliminate $12 million in federal gifted education grants.

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Too Few ELL Students Land in Gifted Classes

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Linnea Van Eman, the gifted education coordinator for the Tulsa school district, sees too many gifted students who simply don't have the language skills to show what they can do. The 36,000-student Oklahoma district has been pushing hard to bring more students from traditionally underrepresented groups-and English-language learners in particular-into its gifted program.

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UConn gifted education specialists have published the first study to demonstrate a link between student poverty, institutional poverty, and the lower identification rate of gifted low-income students.

The study, "Disentangling the Roles of Institutional and Individual Poverty in the Identification of Gifted Students," was published in the journal Gifted Child Quarterly. Researchers found that students eligible for free or reduced lunch programs are less likely to be identified for gifted education services even after controlling for prior math and reading achievement scores. In addition, the findings indicated that students in low-income schools have a further reduced possibility of being identified for gifted services.

"This is the first look at this issue in a significant way," says Rashea Hamilton, a research associate in the National Center for Research on Gifted Education (NCRGE), part of UConn's Neag School of Education. "We were able to make connections between higher proportions of free or reduced lunch students and availability of gifted programs and percentage of gifted students."

"There should be a certain percentage of students at each school who are identified as gifted, because no matter how low-achieving your school is, there are going to be children in that school that need more academic challenge."
- D. Betsy McCoach, Professor

The study reviewed data of 330,531 students in three unidentified states who entered third grade in 2011 and finished fifth grade in 2014, the grade levels where standardized testing typically begins and initial identification of gifted students often occurs. Students in the sample attended 4,546 schools covering 367 school districts in three states with mandates for gifted education.

The study found that poverty measured by the percentage of students in free or reduced lunch programs related to the school's gifted identification rate. In two of the three states evaluated in the study, the percentage of students in the lunch program negatively predicted the proportion of gifted students in the school, even after controlling for school and district reading and math achievement.

In the third state, although a school's percentage of free or reduced lunch student population did not predict the percentage of gifted students after controlling for school reading and math achievement, the proportion of students in the lunch program throughout a district did predict a lower proportion of gifted students in the school. "These findings suggest that both institutional poverty and individual poverty help to explain elements of underrepresentation of students in programs for the gifted," the researchers wrote.

"The implications of this research are clear: Students who live in poverty are likely to be overlooked during the gifted identification process," the researchers said. "Furthermore, within-district inequities appear to contribute to the under-identification of students of poverty as gifted. High-potential students in poverty are less likely to be recognized and served in programs for the gifted. Such practices have the potential to increase, rather than decrease, social inequities."

"Even within the same district, we were noticing the percentages of gifted students were very different across schools within the district, and the percent of free lunch students were different across schools within a district," says D. Betsy McCoach, professor of measurement, evaluation, and assessment. "You'd think polices are being set at district level, but there's a lot of variability within the same district in terms of how students who receive free lunch and students who are identified as gifted are distributed across the district."

The researchers suggest that identification of gifted low-income students could improve with the following measures:

A resource allocation formula that ensures all high-potential students regardless of their school context can access gifted programming.

Utilization of school-based norms to guide identification decisions by school districts rather than district-based standards.

Implementation of universal screening programs.
Adoption of state policies that would help equitably distribute resources, especially to low-income schools to ensure that schools and districts can comply with gifted-related mandates.

McCoach says the findings suggest that school districts may identify specific schools that usually have gifted students, and focus gifted education resources only on the highest-achieving or wealthiest schools. Instead, districts should focus on developing the talents of the highest-achieving students within each of its schools.

"There should be a certain percentage of students at each school who are identified as gifted, because no matter how low-achieving your school is, there are going to be children in that school that need more academic challenge," she says. "In gifted education, traditionally, the 'gifted' label is placed on the student, and it sort of never goes away. The talent development perspective is to identify students not being adequately served in their regular learning environment and provide what they need to more fully develop their potential. It should be about finding students who can do more than they are being asked to do, and helping them to develop their talents. When you start talking in that way, then it becomes clear that in every school and neighborhood, there will be children who can do more than they are being asked."

NCRGE was launched in 2014 with funding authorized through the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act administered by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. Center staff who were authors of this study include UConn researchers Hamilton; McCoach; Del Siegle, professor in gifted and talented education and associate dean for research and faculty affairs in the Neag School; and E. Jean Gubbins, professor of educational psychology. The research team on the study also included M. Shane Tutwiler, assistant professor of educational foundations at the University of Rhode Island; Carolyn M. Callahan, professor of education, and Annalissa Brodersen, research associate, both from the University of Virginia; and Rachel U. Mun, assistant professor of educational psychology at University of North Texas.
Access the original UConn Today story here.

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Students in Poverty Less Likely to Be Identified as Gifted

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UConn gifted education specialists have published the first study to demonstrate a link between student poverty, institutional poverty, and the lower identification rate of gifted low-income students. The study, "Disentangling the Roles of Institutional and Individual Poverty in the Identification of Gifted Students," was published in the journal Gifted Child Quarterly .

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Universal screening, some school districts say, makes access to gifted education more fair-but costs can be high.

Otto Dettmer / Ikon Images

New data from Memphis, Tennessee, confirms that when schools use traditional teacher-referral models to identify gifted kids, a lot of gifted children who are poor or of color slip below the radar and never reap the program's benefits, writes Laura Faith Kebede for Chalkbeat.

But Shelby County Schools, the district that includes Memphis, is taking direct aim at the old model's inequities-the "secret handshake" that allows rich, and predominantly white, parents to navigate the system and place their kids in advanced programs-by switching to a universal screening process that attempts to level the playing field. The results have been impressive, more than doubling the number of students identified as gifted last year: 600 kindergarten through second-grade students are now entering the district's gifted program, known as CLUE-an acronym for Creative Learning in a Unique Environment-and another 600 third- through eighth-grade students are in line to test into the program.

As a result of the switch to universal screening, "more black students are represented in the program's newest K-2 cohort," Kebede writes. "About 60 percent of newly identified elementary CLUE students are black, compared with last year's 44 percent. Officials hope eventually the CLUE program can be more representative of the district's racial makeup-nearly three-fourths of its students are black."
Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee, Chalkbeat
Nationwide, approximately 13 percent of elementary students from high-income families are enrolled in gifted programs, compared to just 2 percent of students from low-income families, according to a recent study from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College and the University of Florida's College of Education. "In other words, the most affluent students are six times more likely than the least affluent to be identified as gifted," the study's authors write in a blog for Harvard Education Publishing. These and other findings underscore that unequal access to gifted programs among low-income students is not solely due to school policies or whether a school offers a gifted program. Instead, the authors conclude, "We suspect that access differences arise from whether low- and high-[socioeconomic status] students are referred for evaluation by their teachers or parents, or perhaps from biases in gifted-evaluation instruments."

Gifted education comes in many forms across the United States. This is because federal law, while acknowledging that gifted students have unique learning needs that local schools aren't usually equipped to address, doesn't otherwise offer specific provisions or defined requirements for meeting these needs. Especially for low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, that translates to a great variation in the quality of and access to gifted programs.

New York City, for example, which has 1.1 million students enrolled in its public schools, is grappling with how to create a more equitable school system, and part of this effort concerns the city's gifted and talented program. While 66 percent of students enrolled in public schools citywide are black or Hispanic and mostly low-income, only 21 percent of students in the city's gifted program are students of color. Last year, a panel appointed by the mayor recommended doing away with the program entirely, a contentious proposal that set off a prolonged and still unresolved battle among the many stakeholders in the city's school system.

Pedro Noguera, a renowned professor of education at UCLA's Graduate School of Education weighed in on the matter via Twitter: "Instead of eliminating gifted programs, New York City should expand them," he wrote, expressing a widely held belief among the dissenters. "All kids deserve access to a challenging education. Too often we confuse privilege with giftedness. New York has a chance to change this."

In Shelby County, district leaders are hoping that by implementing universal screening and investing in the expansion of its gifted program, the CLUE program will create a more diverse group of students "ready to take high school courses that award college credit, which would better prepare students for college-level work."

So far, the district pays for the CLUE program for kindergarten through second grade and the state pays for the third- through ninth-grade program. "The switch did not cost the district anything this year because officials used tests they already had access to, but the district plans to hire more CLUE teachers next year," Kebede writes. But the cost can be prohibitive. In nearby Nashville, for example, the district "piloted a universal screening for second graders in 2017, but dropped it because it was too expensive."

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A Strategy for Overcoming Equity Issues in Gifted Programs

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Universal screening, some school districts say, makes access to gifted education more fair-but costs can be high. Otto Dettmer / Ikon Images New data from Memphis, Tennessee, confirms that when schools use traditional teacher-referral models to identify gifted kids, a lot of gifted children who are poor or of color slip below the radar and never reap the program's benefits, writes Laura Faith Kebede for Chalkbeat.

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NEW YORK - To Eva Santiago, her son's education has always felt like an impossible dilemma.

Before elementary school, the boy was diagnosed with autism, ADHD and anxiety, and in kindergarten he was placed in a small, self-contained class for kids with disabilities.

But he was articulate and curious, so when he was 6, Santiago took him to be tested for the city's exclusive gifted-and-talented program. She was pleased when his score earned him one of the coveted spots.

But in his larger gifted-and-talented class, he became anxious and easily upset. He fought with students and teachers and spent most of the school day roaming the halls. After he kicked a security guard and the school called the police, Santiago said, she begged administrators to return him to a self-contained class. There, at least, his teachers could manage his behavioral challenges - even if it meant he breezed through his school work and learned little.

"Other kids would still be doing the assignments and he would be done," recalled Santiago. "He just didn't know what to do with himself."

The boy's experience is typical for a category of students known as "twice exceptional," or 2e. These kids - believed to make up at least 6 percent of all students who have a disability - possess high academic aptitude but struggle with ADHD, mild autism, dyslexia or other learning and behavioral challenges.* They are notoriously difficult for schools to serve effectively for two reasons, say advocates, parents and some educators. Often, their intelligence masks their disability, so they are never assessed for special education or don't receive the services best suited for them. In other cases, they're placed in special education classes tailored to their disability but grade levels behind the school work they're capable of.

"We see kids whose challenges don't show up on their report card, so they aren't getting services," said Jennifer Choi, a parent and founder of the advocacy group 2eNYC and a trustee of the nonprofit Twice Exceptional Children's Advocacy. "And we see kids who are gifted, but they also have a disability, who lose the ability to participate in any sort of accelerated program because those programs often decline to provide special education services."

But a handful of school systems across the country are searching for better ways to accommodate bright students with disabilities. Colorado trains teachers across the state in twice exceptionality, for example, while Montgomery County, Maryland, is perhaps the only school district to offer self-contained classes for students in elementary school who need both an accelerated curriculum and more support than they would receive in a mainstream classroom.

Now parent activists in New York City are fighting to get the country's largest school system to be more responsive to 2e students. Last fall, after Choi's group presented the New York City Department of Education with a survey of more than 500 parents that described the challenges facing 2e students, the agency began to offer training to staff in gifted-and-talented programs on how to work more effectively with students who have ADHD. In the last few years, three of the city's most selective public high schools - Brooklyn Technical, Bard College and Townshend Harris - have sent teachers to learn about twice exceptionality from employees of the Quad Preparatory School, a six-year-old private school that focuses on educating these students. And in New York state, lawmakers introduced bills in 2017 that would require teacher training about twice exceptionality and programming for twice exceptional students.

"We're committed to meeting the unique needs of our students with disabilities, including those pursuing accelerated programs," the city Department of Education said in a statement. "We hold trainings for school staff and parents on personalized learning strategies that can be used in the classroom or at home, and will continue to work with communities on innovative ways to serve all students."

But parents say there's a long way to go.
Related: The vast majority of students with disabilities don't get a college degree
One of the biggest barriers to educating 2e students, advocates say, is simply proving they exist. Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, all students are entitled to the special services and accommodations necessary to enable them to learn. But to qualify for those services under the law, a student's disability must "adversely affect educational performance."

"Teachers need to be trained to recognize and understand children who are 2e. They need to try to remove the stigma that kids who have a disability cannot be smart."

Schools and courts are left to determine what that means. If students are passing their classes and advancing from grade to grade, they're more likely to be denied costly accommodations and services, which can include everything from a smaller student-teacher ratio to tutoring, to speech and occupational therapy. In the 2eNYC survey, more than a quarter of parents said they'd been told, "Your child is too smart for [special education services]."

That's essentially what happened to Choi. Her son struggled in preschool, bouncing from school to school to school. At 5, he was diagnosed with ADHD. Under special education law, ADHD is considered a disability under the "Other Health Impairment" category, and can contribute to a determination that a child is eligible for special education services if it interferes with learning. Choi brought both her son's diagnosis and his preschool teachers with her to the meeting that would decide what special education accommodations and services he'd receive in elementary school. She was sure that with his teachers present to testify to the constant oversight he needed to stay on task, he would either be placed in a mainstream class with a special education co-teacher or in a self-contained classroom for students with greater disabilities.

She was shocked, she said, when the disabilities evaluator at her son's public elementary school noted that he was performing at grade level and determined that he didn't qualify for any special education accommodations or services. After that, Choi enrolled her son in private school and successfully sued the Department of Education to have his tuition reimbursed.

On the flip side, the academic pace of small, self-contained classes designed for children with severe disabilities is often too slow for kids with pronounced academic strengths, say parents and advocates. That was the case with Santiago's son. He worked far faster than the other students in his self-contained classes, she said, and there was little of the in-depth learning that he thrived on.

In 2017, the New York City Department of Education spent $375 million for tuition to private schools for students with disabilities.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster
After three years, Santiago decided her son needed a setting that better fit his academic abilities. The vice principal at her son's school, a guidance counselor, a psychologist and lawyers from Advocates for Children, which provides educational legal advocacy for low-income families, all wrote letters in support of her claim that her son's educational needs were not being met. With those letters, she was able to convince the Department of Education to pay upfront for her son to attend the Child's School, a private school for students with disabilities.

Like Santiago, some frustrated parents are turning to private schools to serve their kids. In 2013, Kim Busi, a former professor of psychiatry whose son is on the autism spectrum, started the Quad Preparatory School with the goal of serving high-achieving kids with learning and emotional disabilities. The school opened in the basement of a synagogue with three students; today, it serves 113.

At the school, everything from curriculum to classroom design is tailored to students' individual needs. On a recent weekday, two students were huddled with a teacher in a hallway strewn with orange and green bean bags, learning to code on a computer. In a nearby classroom, five students on striped beach chairs listened attentively to their teacher. The walls behind them were covered with colorful signs; the classroom was set up explicitly for kids who need stimulation, Busi said. In the room next door, the walls were bare and white - an educational setting meant to accommodate students who are easily distracted.

Class size never exceeds ten, and students spend a third of their day working individually with a teacher. The goal, Busi explained, is personalized learning that fully accommodates students' abilities and disabilities. Two fourth graders, for example, are already studying with the school's advanced high school math teacher, according to Busi. Students are also assigned a mental health counselor who works with them on developing goals for their social and emotional growth.

But this individualized education is expensive; Quad tuition is nearly $75,000 a year. And, because most parents have, like Choi, successfully sued the Department of Education for tuition reimbursement, it's a cost that's largely borne by taxpayers. In 2017, the agency spent $375 million for tuition to private schools for students with disabilities.

On their end, parents say that suing the DOE is a costly and exhausting process. They add that if the money were invested in public schools, some of those dollars would benefit other public school students as well.

Even without the resources of a place like the Quad, public schools could do a better job accommodating 2e kids, say some education experts.
Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here's why they're not.
The first step, according to Debbie Carroll, a private educational consultant in Connecticut and a co-chair of the subcommittee on Twice Exceptional Advocacy of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, is for schools to educate their staff about 2e students. Teachers need to be able to recognize when students aren't reaching their potential even though they may be passing their classes, she said, and they need to understand that smart kids with behavioral problems may not just be willful or lazy, but may in fact need support. She also points to strategies that teachers in general education and accelerated classes can use to support kids with disabilities to keep them in mainstream classes, like giving autistic students more opportunities for breaks if they're feeling overwhelmed.

Sarah Jackson, an instructional specialist who oversees programming for 2e kids in Montgomery County, Maryland, said she trains hundreds of teachers and administrators each year on twice exceptionality. Most of the district's roughly 2,000 students designated 2e are served in general education classroom with an additional special education teacher. But roughly 40 elementary school students who need more individualized attention are taught in self-contained classes in grades three through five. District administrators believe that with the assistance of in-class supports and a special daily class focusing on self-advocacy and executive functioning, all 2e students should be mainstreamed into general education classes or into advanced programs by the time they reach sixth grade.

But given concerns over the use of scarce education dollars, some educators are skeptical about the 2e movement. While they acknowledge that children can be academically advanced yet struggle with disabilities, they worry that the 2e movement disproportionately benefits middle-class and affluent families. Well-off parents are the ones who typically agitate for special services and accommodations for their kids, even in cases where the child's disabilities are not pronounced, these educators say. In New York City, affluent parents are also more likely to prepare their children for the admissions test to gifted-and-talented programs, which are under scrutiny for a lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity.

Some parents arrive at school with neuropsychological evaluations showing that their children are slightly above average in some academic areas while exhibiting minor behavioral or learning challenges, said one New York City school social worker. Then these parents insist that their children's schoolwork and grades should mirror the capabilities indicated by the assessment.

"We see kids whose challenges don't show up on their report card, so they aren't getting services. And we see kids who are gifted, but they also have a disability, who lose the ability to participate in any sort of accelerated program because those programs often decline to provide special education services."

"We all have strengths and weaknesses," said the social worker, who declined to provide her name in order to protect her relationship with parents. "And it's not always clear what's a disability that the law requires us to address, and what's just an area where a student struggles and could use a little more help."

Wealthy parents are also more able to afford private neuropsychological evaluations, which tend to be more comprehensive than those conducted by education departments and can cost several thousand dollars. Often, assessments for children's disabilities performed by public schools don't cover areas such as attention, memory, language skills and social and emotional functioning, said Matthew Pagirsky, a neuropsychologist with the Child Mind Institute, which provides services to kids with mental health and learning challenges.

Some groups are trying to spread access to private evaluations to low-income families. The Robin Hood Foundation, a philanthropy in New York that supports anti-poverty programs, funds free neuropsychological assessments for poor children at Lenox Hill Hospital and Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report is based at the Teachers College at Columbia University.) Despite these efforts, some low-income parents are resistant to having their children evaluated, fearing their kids will face stigma.

That's how Veronica Rodriguez felt when teachers first started telling her that her youngest son might need special help. At 2, the boy was speaking in full sentences and, early on, he seemed to learn new concepts with little effort. But when he enrolled in public elementary school, she received daily calls from teachers complaining that he would get upset easily and leave class, or start crying or screaming.

"His teacher would tell me, 'He doesn't know his name,' when he had been writing his name from age 2," Rodriguez said. School officials asked if there was something wrong at home. "They thought I was an ignorant mom with issues herself," she said.

School staff encouraged her to have the boy evaluated, but she refused: "I felt like they were saying my kid was slow and I wasn't having it."

But after a teacher at a school her son started attending in second grade explained to Rodriguez that the boy could be both bright and have a disability, she took her son for an assessment at Lenox Hill Hospital. There she was told what she already knew: Her son had many areas of above-average academic strengths. He also had ADHD and was at risk for a mood disorder.
This story about twice exceptional students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
While she continues to have trouble finding appropriate services for her son, Rodriguez said that learning about 2e children has been an awakening. She would like to see schools get the same kind of education in twice exceptionality that she received.

"Teachers need to be trained to recognize and understand children who are 2e," she said. "They need to try to remove the stigma that kids who have a disability cannot be smart."

* Correction: This story has been updated with the correct estimate for the share of children who may be twice exceptional. It's estimated that 6 percent of children in special education are 2e.

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How schools struggle to serve gifted students with disabilities

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox NEW YORK - To Eva Santiago, her son's education has always felt like an impossible dilemma. Before elementary school, the boy was diagnosed with autism, ADHD and anxiety, and in kindergarten he was placed in a small, self-contained class for kids with disabilities.

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Black students are far less likely to be placed in gifted programs, even if they have the same test scores as their white peers and especially if their teacher is white, according to a new study by researchers at Vanderbilt University.

And at least partly to blame may be a teaching force that is mainly white, and the level of subjectivity that still goes into decisions about which students make the cut in gifted programs, the researchers say.

"It is startling that two elementary school students, one black and the other white with identical math and reading achievement, will have substantially different probabilities of assignment to gifted services," said Jason Grissom, the lead author.

The study was based on data from more than 10,000 elementary school students across the nation.

The data showed that black students were 66 percent less likely and Hispanic students were 47 percent less likely than white students to be assigned to gifted programs.

While the white-Hispanic assignment gap could be attributed entirely to a difference in achievement test scores, black students were assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical test scores. But researchers found that black students with black teachers were three times more likely to be granted access to gifted programs.

Grissom said the findings don't suggest white teachers tend to be racist. Other factors may come into play.

"Maybe students respond differently to teachers with backgrounds similar to their own," he said, or maybe a parent is more likely to approach a teacher about opportunities in a gifted program if the teacher is the same race.

"The implication of all three of those is that you're relying on discretion to start the process," he said. "One implication of this study is that we need to reduce the amount of discretion."

The Catch-22 is that other studies show that achievement tests don't always do a good job of identifying gifted students of color.

"It's an interesting problem," Grissom said. "You have to be really thoughtful. One kind of policy change can create opportunities for disproportionalities to slip in somewhere else."

The study's findings could assist districts that are seeking to make their gifted programs more fair and inclusive.

In Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, for instance, the district nearly doubled the percentage of newly identified gifted black students during the last year, from 12 percent last spring to 22 percent this year.

Schunn Turner, director of the district's gifted program known as Encore, attributes the increase to increased efforts to make parents aware of the opportunity - but there's more work to be done.

"MNPS must still improve the overall representation of these groups in our total enrollment numbers," Turner said in an email, bolding the text for emphasis.

In Memphis, district leaders have tried to identify gifted students of color and in poverty as early as pre-kindergarten for inclusion in its program called Creative Learning in a Unique Environment, or CLUE.

When the district first started the program during the 1970s, leader Jo Patterson noticed that students with less resources at home were being left out, no matter how smart they were. So leaders began identifying younger students for enrichment programs such as trips to museums and other cultural activities in an effort to correct the disparity, a practice that continues today.

CLUE director Tommie Yelvington said she tries to ensure that students at all schools have access to gifted programs, and has upped the level of outreach to needier neighborhoods. Shelby County Schools also screens all of its students for gifted programs in the third grade, which Grissom said could help circumvent the problems of biases that arise when individual discretion plays too big a role.

"One of the most important things we do is to provide opportunities for all of our children," Yelvington said.

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Study finds racial discrimination in school gifted programs

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Black students are far less likely to be placed in gifted programs, even if they have the same test scores as their white peers and especially if their teacher is white, according to a new study by researchers at Vanderbilt University.

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University of Washington College of Education

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🔴 Live conversation with professor Nancy Hertzog- equity in gifted education

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Building Diversity in Gifted Programs | Amanda Champany | TEDxABQED

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The Search for Equity: The Role of Universal Screening in Identifying Gifted Students of Color

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Michael Mason: "Young, Gifted, and @ Risk" Symposium

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A recent proposal to eliminate New York City's selective education system in the name of increasing ... [+]
Getty

New York City has an extensive network of programs for "gifted and talented" students, most of whom turn out to be white or Asian. A new report aims to make the system more equitable by getting rid of the programs, but it overlooks a root cause of the imbalance in academic achievement.

Earlier this year, there was a wave of outrage over New York's system of selective schools when its crown jewel, Stuyvesant High School, admitted only seven black students into a freshman class of 895. (Black and Hispanic students make up nearly 70% of the city's school system but just 10% of those admitted to any of its selective schools.) But criticism of both the selective schools and the gifted-and-talented programs that feed them had been brewing for a while. By late 2017, it was strong enough that Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed a task force-the School Diversity Advisory Group-to figure out what could be done.

This week, the SDAG released a report that is creating a fresh wave of outrage-but from a different constituency. The panel recommended that the city get rid of its screening and tracking systems, stop using the term "gifted and talented," and create "equitable enrichment alternatives"-because, the members explained, "we believe all students deserve to be challenged."

No one will disagree that our education system should be equitable and that all students should be challenged. But the panel's proposed solution will inevitably enrage the students and families-admittedly, most of them white or Asian-who have counted on being able to escape the city's many struggling public schools by winning admission to its relatively few selective ones. In the case of low-income Asian families, that escape valve has come at a high cost: parents scrimp to pay for academic afterschool programs, where their kids spend many hours each week, year after year.

Aside from the political obstacles, the SDAG's well-intentioned prescriptions for reform are no more likely to work than another recent attempt to create educational equity by fiat. In a mirror image of the panel's recommendation to ban gifted-and-talented programs, several high schools in the largest school district in Maryland have decided to eliminate standard courses and put all students in honors classes. The reason: the standard classes were filled with black and Hispanic students, and the honors classes with white and Asian ones. Similar imbalances are evident in school systems across the country.

In New York, gifted and talented programs begin in kindergarten, which has led to test prep for four-year-olds. The SDAG panel is right that-with the possible exception of true prodigies-young children should not be labeled and tracked in this way. But the SDAG report only denounces elementary-level tracking that "separates students by 'academic ability' into different classrooms (i.e., an elementary school honors program)." It overlooks a far more pervasive problem: the tracking that goes on within virtually every elementary classroom in the country. It's particularly entrenched in New York City, home to some of its leading advocates.

This widespread system of tracking is known as leveled reading. The theory is that each child has an individual "reading level" that can be determined by testing and could be years below her grade level. Children spend hours every week reading a random variety of books at their own levels-basically, easy enough to read on their own-supposedly practicing comprehension "skills" that are largely meaningless. Sometimes children read at a low level because they haven't been taught to decode words in a way that is likely to work; sometimes they can decode but lack the background knowledge and vocabulary that would enable them to understand what they're reading. Often, it's a combination of both.

Whatever the reason, the children who start out at low reading levels are generally condemned to stay there. In most elementary schools-and especially those where test scores are low-the curriculum has been narrowed to math and reading. The result is that children who are the most dependent on school to build the knowledge that is crucial to reading comprehension-children from less educated families, who are unlikely to acquire that kind of knowledge at home-are the least likely to get it there. Without an opportunity to gain knowledge, the low readers continue reading simple books, with low-level vocabulary and concepts, while the higher readers enjoy access to increasingly more sophisticated texts. In effect, the system maintains and reinforces existing inequities.

The SDAG panel dismisses the exams that determine admission to gifted and talented programs and selective high schools as though they were nothing more than arbitrary barriers erected to keep out deserving low-income children of color. Repeatedly, the report attributes the higher test scores of whites and Asians (including many from low-income families) to "test prep," as though the tests had nothing to do with predicting students' academic performance.

The tests may not be perfect-I haven't seen them-and using a single test to determine admission sounds unwise (although the switch to that criterion was intended to advance equity by eliminating possible bias in teachers' recommendations). But the reading tests presumably assess what virtually all standardized reading tests primarily measure: not general comprehension or "test prep" skills, but general knowledge and vocabulary. If students lack the knowledge to understand the passages on the tests, they can't demonstrate their "skills." And broad knowledge and vocabulary are crucial not only to doing well on tests but to doing well in school and, in most cases, in life.

That's not to say that New York's education system is fine the way it is. The SDAG panel is undoubtedly right that there are many African-American and Hispanic students in the system who would benefit from greater academic challenges and whose potential is being wasted. But the report has nothing more specific to propose than "creative, equitable enrichment alternatives" that the city's community school districts should be encouraged to "develop" and "implement."

"This is not about lowering the bar," city schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza said when announcing the report on Tuesday, "it's about giving all of our students what they need to meet the bar." But what is that? You wouldn't know it from the report, but the answer is pretty clear.

Despite many months of study by the panel's 40 members and repeated claims that its recommendations are based in research, the report fails to mention the scientific evidence that reading comprehension-and, by extension, much of academic success-is largely dependent on knowledge. And the report skirts the question of why low-income Asian students often do so well on tests; if the SDAG members had looked into the afterschool programs so many of those students attend, they might have found they don't just do test prep-they build knowledge.

While encouraging districts to create new approaches and calling for research on "enrichment curricula," the report also fails to note that several such curricula already exist. Instead of the standard approach of focusing on largely illusory comprehension skills, these newly developed elementary literacy curricula aim to build children's knowledge. They guide teachers to spend a couple of weeks or more on a particular topic-rather than choosing books on random topics because they lend themselves to demonstrating "skills"-giving kids a chance to absorb information and vocabulary.

Schools that have adopted such curricula have found that virtually all children-including those of color, those from low-income families, and those diagnosed with learning disabilities- blossom and thrive. Those classrooms are the very ones the report seems to be calling for, where children at a range of ability levels join in rich discussions of complex, challenging material.

There may always be a place for selective schools or accelerated programs at the high school level. Students inevitably develop different interests and abilities, and those who are ready to zoom ahead may at some point need a particular environment to allow them to do so. But if we provide all students with a solid foundation of both knowledge and skills in elementary and middle school, those from less educated families-who, in our society, are often those from black and Hispanic families-will have a fighting chance of demonstrating they would benefit from a rarefied environment in high school. And those who don't make it into that group, or simply choose not to apply, would still be equipped to get a solid secondary education and lead fulfilling and productive lives.

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To Address Inequity, Let's Do More Than Eliminate 'Gifted And Talented' Programs

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New York City has an extensive network of programs for "gifted and talented" students, most of whom turn out to be white or Asian. A new report aims to make the system more equitable by getting rid of the programs, but it overlooks a root cause of the imbalance in academic achievement.