Gifted education advances school integration and equity

Challenge as an equity issue

Historically, “giftedness” was seen as something that a student possessed across all domains and content areas and across all time and contexts. Contemporary approaches are much more local. Students need gifted services when they are underchallenged in a particular domain, in a particular school, at a particular time (Dixson et al., 2020; Peters & Borland, 2020). Contemporary approaches to gifted and talented education focus on making sure the highest-achieving students in every school are appropriately challenged, regardless of how “high” or “low” those students are scoring. Because of this philosophical change, we can safely say there are gifted students in all schools, and services should be available in all schools. In this way, gifted services share similarities with multilevel systems of supports (MLSS; Bianco, 2010) and approaches to personalized learning.

Not only can contemporary approaches help make gifted populations more equitable, but they can also help keep public schools more integrated by retaining more-affluent families (Davis et al., 2013). To be abundantly clear, gifted and talented services should not exist to please higher-SES families; they should exist to make sure all students are appropriately challenged regardless of their ZIP code. But in achieving this primary goal, it might also be possible to keep families with the resources to do so from leaving the local public school because the availability of these services makes the schools more appealing. In this way, more fully integrated schools could be a secondary effect of ensuring more students in more schools have access to gifted services.

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Make services available

Currently, gifted education is only available in about 65% of traditional American schools (Peters & Carter, 2022). The programs that exist often do not consider all students for eligibility and use national normative criteria to determine who qualifies for the program. The result is segregated gifted and talented services. All of this can be ameliorated with changes to typical policy and practice.

One of the strongest predictors of access to gifted services is the percentage of adults in the community with a college degree (Peters & Carter, 2022). Making gifted services available in all schools would eliminate this relationship. Further, some of the states with the largest numbers of students of color also have the lowest rates of access. Although at first it might seem impressive that 63% of California schools provide access, only 13% of New York and 21% of Illinois schools do so. None of these states have legal mandates for schools to offer gifted services, which means some schools do so on their own initiative. The result is a national “gifted” population that is not demographically representative of the country, and this will never change as long as some schools can decide that gifted services are optional.

Making gifted services available in every school would improve the diversity of the aggregate population of students identified as gifted within a district, state, and the nation. It also carries a powerful message: There are kids in every school who could be learning more. The average American classroom includes students at five to seven grade levels of proficiency (Rambo-Hernandez, Makel, Peters & Worley, 2021). As a result, even schools where achievement is lower than average include advanced learners who are ready to do more. This repudiates any claim that some schools simply do not have gifted students who need services.

Universally screen all students

In schools that do offer gifted services, most do not screen all students for participation. Instead, students are considered for enrollment following a teacher or parent request for assessment. Because not all students are equally likely to be referred, even the best eligibility criteria will result in inequitable gifted populations. In Georgia, Matthew T. McBee (2006) found that students who were not eligible for free or reduced-price meals were more than three times as likely to be referred as their lower-income peers. Similarly, 10% of Asian students were referred by their teacher compared to 2% of Black and 1.4% of Hispanic students. Right out of the gate, the system is only considering students whose teachers are willing to nominate them for consideration or whose families know about the services, believe they are valuable and culturally inclusive, or have the time and bureaucratic savvy to apply for them. This is a recipe for unequal representation.

Instead of a referral- or application-based system, schools should screen all students for gifted service eligibility, in many cases using assessments they already have on hand. In September 2022, New York City announced students would be admitted to selective high schools if they scored in the top 15% of the city or their individual school (New York City Public Schools, 2022). This move eliminates the need for parent or teacher advocacy as a condition of eligibility.

We can see the benefits of this type of change at work in a large Florida school district, whose referral-based system had an inequitable outcome (Card & Giuliano, 2016). When the district moved to a universal screener, identification rates for Black and Latinx students jumped by 74% and 118%, respectively. Because the increase for white students was much smaller (12%), the universal screen resulted in a more equitable and integrated gifted population.

Use building norms for identification

Making sure every student has gifted services available at their school and that all students are screened for eligibility would make gifted populations more diverse and would make advanced learning opportunities more equitable. However, because of large within-district, between-school segregation levels and preexisting achievement gaps, schools vary widely in the percentage of students they identify as gifted. Just as colleges and universities have implemented percent plans as a way to diversify the students they serve (i.e., students receive automatic admission if they score in in a top percentage of their high school class), gifted services should similarly identify students based on school norms (either alone or in addition to national norms).

This is what New York City is doing. Instead of identifying students based on whether they score within some top national percentile, students are identified if they are top performers in their school. This makes conceptual sense if gifted services exist to challenge the most-underchallenged students in the school (Dixson et al., 2020).

Such a practice would also serve to diversify and integrate gifted services overall. These building-based identification systems would triple Black student representation in reading and quadruple it in math while representation would more than double for Latinx students in reading and math (Peters et al., 2019).

Marla S. Hartman (2019) studied the effect of building norms but framed the results differently. She found that moving from state norms (e.g., students were identified if they scored in the top 5% of the state in math or reading) to school norms (e.g., students were identified if they scored in the top 5% in their school) reduced the correlation between students who were eligible for free or reduced-price meals and students eligible for gifted services. Using building norms halved (in math) or eliminated (in reading) the correlation between eligibility for free or reduced-price meals and eligibility for gifted services.

From a legal and political implementation perspective, the use of building norms is attractive because the practice doesn’t face the same barriers or political blowback as race-conscious policies. Building norms can be made even more popular by including them as a second pathway to identification, in addition to national norms. This prevents different student groups from being in conflict over a fixed number of spaces.

The effect on higher-SES families

Thus far, we have focused on how certain practices can result in more students of color or students from low-income families being identified for gifted services, yielding more-integrated gifted populations and more equitable educational experiences. But there is one additional way gifted services could help integrate schools: by retaining higher-SES and/or white and Asian families.

We want to make it clear that retaining otherwise privileged families is not the main reason any school should offer gifted services. Gifted services should be made available to help ensure all students are appropriately challenged. But a side effect may be fewer families leaving a school or district in search of a more-challenging learning environment. In fact, the current chancellor of New York City Public Schools has presented an expansion of gifted services as a way to keep parents from leaving the district (Veiga, 2022). Seattle Public Schools has seen high-income families, particularly Asian families, leaving the district at the highest rate, with some citing a desire for more acceleration as a factor in their decision (Westneat, 2022). A 2013 paper studied this exact hypothesis in a large, urban school district (Davis et al.). This district had an enrollment of approximately 47,000 students; 56% were Black and 77% were eligible for free or reduced-price meals. The authors found that for a higher-income student (i.e., not qualified for subsidized meals) in this district, being identified as gifted increased the two-year retention rate by approximately 25 percentage points.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that there are gifted students in all schools. Those students deserve to be challenged, and that should be the main driver behind offering gifted services. At the same time, gifted services can help retain families that might otherwise leave the district, thus helping reduce segregation.

Gifted and talented services can be used to specifically and proactively advance greater school integration, greater equity within gifted services themselves, and greater levels of talent development for students of color and those from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds.

Greater equity and integration

Schools can make changes to their gifted and talented services that would make them more equitable and ensure that the most-advanced students in every school would be appropriately challenged. But, to make the greatest impact, change is needed at the state level. See page 54 for our recommendations for how states can reform gifted education to better meet all students’ needs.

For too long, gifted and talented education practices have not promoted — or have outright impeded — educational equity. Similarly, for too long, advanced learning opportunities have not been seen as ways to facilitate greater educational equity. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The policies we propose can make gifted services better and more defensible, as well as a tool for greater equity and integration. Helping schools recover from the pandemic and reinvigorating a commitment to educational equity requires innovative thinking, including how and where gifted and talented services fit into this broader conversation.

Schools can make changes to their gifted and talented services that would make them more equitable and ensure that the most-advanced students in every school would be appropriately challenged.

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