Sometimes A Headline Says It All…

From the first page of the Metro Section in today’s Washington Post:

Alexandria rethinks gifted education

MORE DIVERSITY SOUGHT IN CLASSES

The headline is so complete that the article hardly needs any text, and the text that follows contains no surprises. It begins:

When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city’s schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he’s watching is gifted.

“Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is” by looking at the colors of the students, he said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

Superintendent Morton’s eyes do not deceive him.

Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled “gifted.” Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.

The explanation for this “disparity” — prepare not to be surprised — is, of course, discrimination.

“Latino and African American students are not having their intellectual gifts nurtured and not being given the same opportunities to excel,” said Arthur Almore, education chairman for the Chesterfield County NAACP.

Now, keeping in mind Superintendent Morton’s ability to spot gifted classes by the color of their students, note the lack of irony in the Post reporter’s explanation of the “disparities” evident in Alexandria’s gifted classes:

Children living in poverty are often at a disadvantage when it comes to traditional measures of intelligence or aptitude. They are less likely to have college-educated parents, books in their bedrooms or dinner table discussions that expand on what they learn at school.

Students learning English, including about one in five Alexandria students, can struggle to articulate higher-order thinking. And educators might have stereotypical ideas about what a gifted child looks like. [Emphasis added]

It’s not as though Alexandria hasn’t been trying mightily to increase the pigmentary diversity of its gifted students.

About 12 percent of children in Alexandria’s schools qualify for gifted services. Students must score a superior rating on four out of five evaluations, including an aptitude test, an achievement test, teachers’ observations of their learning style, samples of class work and grades.

The Alexandria School Board has approved changes to the screening process for gifted services in recent years. In February, all second-graders will sit for an aptitude test that will determine whether they should be screened. In the past, children had to be referred for screening.

Alexandria also rolled out a nonverbal test in 2006 to reach more children who might encounter language barriers or other cultural biases….

If Alexandria really means to include some students in its gifted classes who because of “cultural biases” do not score highly on aptitude and achievement tests but do pass “a nonverbal test,” then I think the city really does need to rethink its gifted education, beginning with the question of whether a program for the academically gifted should be limited to students who are academically gifted.

Finally, in another recent post about another article by this same Washington Post reporter, Michael Allison Chandler, about gifted education in Virginia, Are There Really No Asians In Virginia?, I asked:

Are there no Asian-Americans in Virginia’s gifted programs, or in the alternative are they greatly “over-represented”? Is there any reliable evidence in the scholarly literature that giftedness manifests itself in equal proportions in all racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and cultural groups? In the absence of such evidence does it make any sense at all to be concerned with under- or over-representation?

Are gifted classes, in short, supposed to be representative of anything other than giftedness, some combination of aptitude and attitude?

Gifted (or not) Asians are apparently still invisible to the Post, its reporter, and her editor, even though they make up (or did in 2006) 7% of the students in the Alexandria public schools.

In an article on “diversity” (or not) and gifted education, discriminating readers (or at least DISCRIMINATIONS readers) would like to know what per cent of Alexandria’s gifted students are Asian (there are some, aren’t there?). But that’s not all. We’d also like to know how many of those gifted Asian students are “living in poverty”; how many of them do not have “college educated parents”; for how many of them is English not their native language.

Most mainstream media articles on gifted education, including these two by Chandler, assume that giftedness consists entirely of aptitude, but the scholarly literature (especially the work of Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins, father of the Center for Talented Youth program) emphasizes attitude nearly as much. Data on academic attitude is elusive, but not impossible to find, such as, for example, the demographics of students who enroll in AP classes. In their invaluable No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom cite a wealth of other data (summarized here by Peter Kirsanow):

The Thernstroms note that National Assessment of Educational Progress (“NAEP”) data reveal Asian-American students spend more time on homework than black, Hispanic, or white students. Interestingly, the amount of time spent each day on homework by the latter three groups is roughly the same. But, an NAEP study of TV watching habits shows that almost half of black fourth graders spend five hours or more watching TV on a typical school day. Nearly a third of black twelfth graders watch five hours or more of TV a day. That’s five times the proportion among whites and more than twice that for Hispanics. This vast amount of TV watching by black students might explain another finding noted by the Thernstroms: Harvard economist Ronald F. Ferguson’s survey of students in 15 affluent school districts shows that black students “were 20% less likely to complete their homework each night.” Ferguson also reports that nearly half of all black students state that most of the time they don’t understand their reading assignments very well — nearly twice the rate of non-comprehension for white students.

The Thernstroms also cite Laurence Steinberg’s analysis regarding the “trouble threshold” — the lowest grade students can receive before getting in trouble with their parents. For Asian-American students, that point is an A-; for whites, a B-; and for blacks and Hispanics, a C-. It stands to reason that students who get in trouble for getting a B+ will work a bit harder than students who can skate until they bring home a D+. The former are more likely to turn off the TV and concentrate on their studies. They’ll make sure they not only finish their homework, but understand it.

Until and unless both tangible and intangible aptitude, attitude, and achievement are randomly distributed across all racial, ethnic, cultural groups, there is no reason to expect that gifted classes will be proportionately representative of those groups — at least not gifted classes limited to the academically gifted.

Say What? (1)

  1. meep November 28, 2009 at 11:31 am | | Reply

    It depends on what the gifted classes are for, as to whether this is just a time-waster or harmful to those let in under different criteria.

    When I was in elementary school, it seemed to me that the gifted classes were for those kids who finished all their work in class, much faster than everyone else, and thus were in danger of becoming a distraction to others. So we’d be pulled out to do a bunch of things not strictly academic, but kept us occupied.

    In middle school, the class actually became academic, and then it just went to different levels of classes in high school [AP, etc.]

    Letting in “diverse” kids in who are academically weak isn’t going to help them if they’re being pulled out of classes where they were working on academic skills [reading, writing, math, science, history, etc]. If they’re just being pulled out of PE or some such, who cares.

    If these gifted classes are actually subject classes like math, no one is being done any favors by being let in when they’re well behind everyone else.

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