The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

> and their parents should be more likely to be involved financially and in PTA.

And when gifted programs become screeners of affluence then there are going to be financially involved parents in the PTA which benefits the whole school. But if all of those parents end up at the "good" schools then those schools have considerably more funding (on top of the additional funding from the DOE) to allow them to actually educate their students. It is all a self reinforcing cycle that benefits a few and disadvantages many.

OP confirmed in a reply that they meant the authors were doing this intentionally.

>redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present

I am a bit hesitant of this. One valuable thing you get by having geographical schools is the same friends in and out of school. If you have friends at school but they are too far to hang out with or do homework with it can be bad for the kid learning social skills.

Mandating gifted classes as you mentioned seems better.

> As someone who just barely missed the gifted cutoff, my schooling was much too easy and I basically never had to study for tests or exams. I ended up developing poor academic habits that ultimately hurt me when the difficulty got hard enough that intellectual horsepower needed to be combined with hard work.

When you're little, you self-learn that if it's easy, it's not worth doing. If it's hard, it's probably impossible anyway. Your life is good and filled with fun. As you get older, when things get hard in school, you avoid or fail them with no strategies or habits around completing difficult schoolwork (which often feels as rewarding as easy schoolwork). Who would want to stop having fun? This is sometimes referred to as, the curse of the gifted.

I would have loved to continue reading this, but he immediately claimed that "Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores". I clicked the link that supposedly contained the paper to back this up. The link takes you here[0].

That's a bit annoying since it doesn't take me directly to the source, but that's fine. Then I read the article and it says: "...found black students were 66 percent less likely to be assigned to a gifted program as white students. A black student whose test scores were on par with a white peer was still half as likely to be assigned to a gifted classroom." So, immediately the author of this original article saw the statistic 66% and the phrase "on par with test scores", and immediately conflated the two. According to this statement, it sounds like black students are actually 50% less likely to be identified as gifted with similar test scores.

I'm going to assume that's just an artifact of non-diligent research and not a blatant lie. Well, I'm still curious where these stats come from, so let's see where this article in the Tennesseean is sourcing this stuff from. They've got several links on this article and... every single link, with the exception of the link to a randomly named professor at Vanderbilt, lead to other articles on the Tennessean. Let's see if we can find where they obtained these stats from.

Alright, it looks like this is where they got it from[1], but I can't be 100% sure. This actually has a link to the paper as well[2]. It also has a nice disclaimer at the bottom of the article:

> One such additional factor impacting minority assignment to gifted programs is the availability of these programs in schools attended by minority students. Black students are less likely overall to attend schools that provide gifted programs. Ninety percent of white, 93 percent of Hispanic, and 91 percent of Asian elementary students attend schools with gifted programs, while only 83 percent of African American students do.

In other words, when the researchers took test scores into account for Hispanic students vs white students, the differences in the probability of being selected for a gifted program based on race reduced to 0%. With black students, they (seemingly) did not take into account whether a school even offered a gifted program. So they lumped together all the students who may not have had access to a gifted program, and then used that to conclude that teachers are racist and ignoring test scores.

Right off the bat I'm done with this article. If you're going to cite research, then cite the actual paper first of all. Second, look at how they gathered the data. Once you take the anomalies into account, it looks like we may not have racist teachers, but rather incomplete data. I wish we could just have an honest conversation about this stuff instead of all this stupid indirection and trying to hide the actual research being done because it doesn't fully support your claims.

The big issue here is a lot of black students don't have access to gifted programs, but instead we're fighting "racist" teachers that don't exist.

[0]: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2016/01/19/v...

[1]: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...

[2]: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...