Boosting Minorities In Gifted Programs Poses Dilemmas discusses affirmative action for elementary-school “gifted” programs:
Gifted programs emerged nationwide in the 1970s to give talented elementary-school students extra challenges. In some areas, the programs were promoted by white parents trying to circumvent court-ordered racial desegregation. Districts typically identified students as gifted who scored in the top 5% — 130 or above — on traditional intelligence tests measuring verbal and math skills. Whites tend to outscore minorities on these tests, which made gifted programs overwhelmingly white.Gifted students typically are excused from regular classes for part or all of the day for accelerated instruction, sometimes including museum trips and other enrichment activities. They often have a leg up on entry into honors and advanced-placement tracks in middle and high school.
In California, we were all bused to one school, so there would be enough “gifted” students in one place for two normal-size classes (per grade). I don’t remember many extra enrichment activities.
Anyway, that was decades ago. “In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration began pushing to desegregate gifted education, particularly in the South,” and states like South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee started allowing students to take an alternative test, rather than the standard IQ test, to qualify for their “gifted” programs:
The newer tests are designed to identify gifted minority and low-income white children whose language skills lag because of deficiencies in early schooling or home environment.Some of the alternative tests don’t use words at all. Elementary-school students, for instance, might be required to detect patterns of geometric shapes. Others let students manipulate tangible objects, such as letter tiles. Research shows minority children tend to score higher on these tests than on traditional ones.
I can’t imagine what the consequences were…
Prof. Joyce VanTassel-Baska of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who co-developed South Carolina’s new test, found in a recent follow-up study that a “significant minority” of students identified as gifted by that test are soon placed on academic probation from the gifted program — with the threat of removal if their regular grades don’t improve.