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Gifted testing colorado1/19/2024 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 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. 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. Black and Latino children fill 65 percent of New York City classrooms but just 22 percent of gifted seats. 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, Latino and Indigenous students are often left out. Wealthy schools identify more children as gifted than do poor ones. Purdue University’s Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute found in 2019 that inequity is the norm. 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. If it were easy, it would be done by now. Though it took several decades for gifted education experts to raise concerns, they have been trying to diminish segregation for a generation. And admissions for gifted programs tend to favor children with wealthy, educated parents, who are more likely to be white. 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. Many factors contribute to this disparity. Black students, in contrast, made up 9 percent of students in gifted education, although they were 15 percent of the overall student population. 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. Danielle Dreilinger for The Hechinger Reportīuffalo'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. Eve on Buffalo's East Side, Sarah Malczewski's first grade gifted class prepares to launch the paper airplanes they designed to fly as far as possible. 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. 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. 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. Buffalo educators hoped Eve’s new program would give more children - particularly children of color - a chance at enrichment and advanced learning. 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. 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. 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. 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 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.
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