Minorities, Poor Get “Highly Gifted” Lift
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Jeremy P. Meyer, Denver Post, March 4, 2008
More minority and poor students in Denver are being classified as highly gifted under a new system that gives extra credit to children who are economically disadvantaged or nonnative English speakers.
Denver Public Schools is trying to fix a disparity in the program that serves its smartest and most talented students—which up until now has drawn mostly white students in a district that is mostly Latino.
“It’s a much more holistic look at the kid,” said Diana Howard, principal at Polaris at Ebert, the district’s sole elementary school for the highly gifted and talented. “I wanted this system to look at much more than test scores. This is going to have a huge impact.”
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Denver is the only district in the metro area that has a program specifically for “highly gifted and talented students.”
To determine who gets into the program, the district previously relied on oral tests that measure a student’s reasoning and IQ.
But some educators and social scientists believe those tests are biased against students learning English and poorer students who may not have had the same life experiences as their richer peers.
“They may be bright children but may not know what plaid is,” Howard said. “Or their concept may not have involved a vacation. Or they may have never been on an escalator.”
To make things more equitable, the district now relies on a sum of measures to determine eligibility into the highly gifted program—cognitive tests, annual assessments, reading tests and teacher nominations. Next year, the district will consider artwork and writings.
Also, students get extra points toward entry into the program if English is their second language or if they receive federal meal benefits—a measure of poverty.
For example, a student who scores as low as the 75th percentile on cognitive tests could be considered, Howard said. Previously, that child would not have been admitted.
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Experts in the gifted field say DPS’s change follows a national trend.
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The American Civil Liberties Union in California last year threatened to sue the Tustin Unified School District over low numbers of Latinos and African-Americans in the district’s gifted programs.
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“If what we are trying to do is measure not accomplishment but giftedness and talent, then putting your thumb on the scale or adding points for kids from low-income backgrounds re-equalizes things,” he said. “The question is how heavy should that thumb be?”
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More students are applying
DPS’s student population is 57 percent Latino, 20 percent white and 19 percent black. But the highly gifted and talented program serves only 25 percent ethnic minorities, Howard said.
After this year’s screening, a third of the newly identified highly gifted students are ethnic minorities, Howard said.
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(Posted on March 6, 2008)