Additional Challenges to Achieving Equity in Gifted and Talented Education

Societal Inequity Is Worse Than It Appears

The causes of inequity outlined by Peters (i.e., disparity in both positive and negative life experiences) likely account for much of the observed inequity. However, Peters overlooked an important metric that reveals larger disparity than the listed life experiences: wealth. Wealth captures a holistic picture of economic (in)stability and available resources. The United States has extremely large racial wealth gaps.

Importantly, wealth gaps show that controlling for parent education and parent income does not equate to controlling for wealth. For example, White families living near the poverty level have a median wealth of about $18,000, whereas Black families near the poverty line have a median wealth near zero (meaning that many Black families have negative net worth; Darity et al., 2018). Racial wealth gaps are not limited to those in poverty; they also exist among the highly educated. The median household net worth of college-educated White families is more than 3.6 times larger than college-educated Black families (Darity et al., 2018).

Darity et al. (2018) showed how differences in employment, education, valuing education, savings rates, and personal responsibility do not account for racial wealth gaps. Rather, there are large structural and systemic conditions in place. As long as resource access is connected to learning opportunities, wealth inequity will matter for learning. Moreover, just as access to healthful foods does not lead to instant perfect health, education gap closure will likely lag wealth equity. As such, the road to equity is even longer than many realize.

Americans believe wealth equity has improved and is approaching parity despite remaining large and having barely changed in the past 50 years (Kraus et al., 2019). Kraus et al. (2019) contended that Americans engage in motivated cognition out of a desire to have a racial progress narrative.

As with wealth, data on gifted identification rates do not support a narrative of plentiful progress (Peters, Gentry, et al., 2019). Whether misperceptions about wealth equity drive misperceptions about educational opportunity or whether both beliefs are symptoms of a larger motivated cognition is unknown. Either way, misbeliefs that wealth gaps are shrinking perpetuate existing problems and serve as their own challenge in reducing educational inequity. Correcting misbeliefs about wealth gaps—much less correcting actual wealth gaps—needs to play a role in increasing equity in gifted education.

Focus on Returns, Not Just Problems

Peters listed many pragmatic efforts to improve equity based on their difficulty of implementation. He encouraged a focus on actual problems and accumulating (small) victories. As Peters rightly notes, any small step forward should be considered progress toward the ultimate goal of providing appropriately challenging learning experiences to students with equity.

However, to maximize effectiveness, the field must avoid the law of triviality (giving disproportionate attention to minor issues while overlooking more important issues). Thus, another useful framing of solutions could revolve around actions that yield the biggest equity returns rather than those that are the biggest challenges. Every ounce of effort spent fixing superficial problems is an ounce of underleveraged effort. Concentrating on where the field can make the biggest gains—regardless of difficulty—may help focus resources and increase long-term returns. Uncovering the root causes of inequity and closing wealth gaps are two such challenges (although the latter may be a major cause of the former).

As Peters notes, many previous efforts have focused on solving the wrong problem (e.g., finding the “right” test or avoiding testing), leading to little return. Changing testing policy is easier than reducing wealth gaps and adverse childhood experiences. But changing testing policy yields far smaller equity returns. Peters is right that the field has never been more focused on equity. Placing greater focus on equity returns would facilitate reducing inequity in gifted education.

Disentangling Underrepresentation From Disproportionality

The final issue focuses on linguistic precision. Linguistic imprecision can obscure distinctions that reveal root causes of inequity and frustrate future action. Like many in the field, Peters (2021) states, “the terms equity (or more correctly inequity), disproportionality, and underrepresentation all to refer to the same observation—that student subgroups are disproportionally represented in K–12 gifted and talented programs” (p. 1). However, using these terms synonymously is a jingle fallacy (inappropriately using one term to describe two separate concepts).

Underrepresentation and disproportionality are distinct concepts. As Peters has written elsewhere (Peters, Rambo-Hernandez, et al., 2019), disproportionality can be defined in many ways, but the most common framing in gifted education is enrollment compared with base rate in the population (e.g., 5% of the gifted population but 10% of the overall student population). Disproportionality does not necessarily reveal biases in the gifted identification process. It might. Disproportionality might reflect the consequences of differential access to opportunities prior to the gifted identification process (as Peters demonstrates via his example of a student spending the summer with her retired engineer grandfather).

Underrepresentation occurs when the gifted identification process favors one group over another when all else is equal. Underrepresentation does not occur every time there is disproportionality. Although acknowledging the distinction later in the paper, Peters missed an opportunity to articulate this oft-overlooked distinction when defining the terms. Conflating the terms constrains research and policy tools from distinguishing which actions introduce inequity and which reflect existing inequities. In turn, this makes focusing on equity returns more difficult.

It is clear that inequity in gifted education is real, urgent, and large. How much of this is underrepresentation caused by the gifted identification process is less clear. It is important to discern how much disproportionality stems from larger societal inequity (which needs fixing) and how much comes from gifted identification practices. Failing to distinguish disproportionality and underrepresentation may distract from urgent efforts that could yield needed benefits toward achieving equity in gifted and talented education programs.