Gifted and talented programs racist how to#

By the district's account, fewer than 20% of the fourth graders invited to participate in advanced work classes were Latino, while 43% of those invited were white. Latino students account for roughly 42% of Boston's 53,000 public school students-about twice the number as whites-but are vastly underrepresented in advanced courses. In Boston, the school committee voted this summer to expand eligibility to its exclusive exam schools and guarantee spots to high-achieving students from poor and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The Highly Capable Cohort program is fundamentally flawed, and it's inherently racist, Green said.ĭebates over the criteria for admission to advanced courses and elite schools predate the latest national discussion about racial inequities, but have intensified since the killing of George Floyd. She has called for more work to build environments that nurture the intellectual development of all the district's 50,000 schoolchildren. The changes don't go far enough for critics like Rita Green, the education chair of the Seattle Chapter of the NAACP. In addition to grades, the selection committee will consider testimonials from teachers, family and community members.

The school board has approved changes that will do away with eligibility testing and make all grade-schoolers automatically eligible for consideration for advanced instruction. In its own recent analysis, Seattle public schools found only 0.9% of Black children had been identified as gifted, compared with 12.6% of its white students. In Seattle, a schools superintendent who left her job in May sought to do away with the district's Highly Capable Cohort programme, as the district's gifted and talented programme is called, blaming it for causing de facto segregation. Critics of the push to eliminate them say it punishes high achievers and cuts off a prized opportunity for advancement, particularly for low-income families without access to private enrichment programmes. Gifted and talented programmes aim to provide outlets for students who feel intellectually constrained by the instruction offered to their peers. Nationwide, 8.1% of white children in public schools are considered gifted, compared with 4.5% of Black students, according to an Associated Press analysis of the most recent federal data. The additional students missing from those rolls, her study said, were disproportionately Black, Latino, and Indigenous students. It noted that US schools identified 3.3 million students as gifted and talented but that an additional 3.6 million should have been similarly designated. Gentry coauthored a study two years ago that used federal data to catalogue the stark racial disparities in gifted and talented programmes. I get the burn-it-down and tear-it-down mentality, but what do we replace it with? asked Marcia Gentry, a professor of education and the director of the Gifted Education Research and Resource Institute at Purdue University. It's a quandary that is driving the debate over whether to expand gifted and talented programs or abolish them altogether.

Gifted and talented programs racist how to#

Increasingly, parents and school boards are grappling with difficult questions over equity, as they discuss how to accommodate the educational aspirations of advanced learners while nurturing other students so they can equally thrive. Many of the exclusive programmes trace their origins to efforts to stanch white flight from public schools, particularly in diversifying urban areas, by providing high-caliber educational programmes that could compete with private or parochial schools. Communities across the United States are reconsidering their approach to gifted and talented programmes in schools as vocal parents blame such elite programmes for worsening racial segregation and inequities in the country's education system.Ī plan announced by New York City's mayor to phase out elementary school gifted and talented programmes in the country's largest school district if it proceeds would be among the most significant developments yet in a push that extends from Boston to Seattle and that has stoked passions and pain over race, inequality, and access to a decent education.įrom the start, gifted and talented school programmes drew worries they would produce an educational caste system in US public schools.