Todd Stanley 
Table of Contents
There is a big ol’ elephant in the room in education, one that is so painfully obvious it nearly takes up the entire space, and yet one we don’t acknowledge very much. That elephant is the correlation between socioeconomic status and test scores. If you look at the highest-performing districts on standardized tests in your state, you will most likely find many challenges to identifying gifted children. There are a few outliers here or there, but for the most part, the ranking of achievement scores mirrors the ranking of affluent schools.
This carries over into gifted identification as well. In a perfect world, the gifted program would mirror the district’s wealth distribution. If 20% of the student population is considered economically disadvantaged, 20% of your identified gifted should also reflect this.
However, there always seems to be an over-identification of white and Asian students and an under-identification of Black and Latino students. Why is this? Why do gifted not identify gifted kids, no matter their economic background?
Major Entry Points for Identifying Gifted Children
Three significant factors cause this:
- The entry point
- The outside learning opportunities
- The language of the test
The entry point is how does a student even get to be identified as gifted? Some districts conduct whole grade screening, which means every student in a particular grade will be tested. There are others, though, that have an entry point students must go through even to be considered for testing. Some of these entry points might be a teacher recommendation or a parent request. The problem with these particular entry points is that there is an advocate other than the child herself.
The Parent Trap of Identifying Gifted Children
If the entry point has to be a parent request, the parent has to be knowledgeable of the process and even aware of it. That means they need to be pretty involved in the educational system. Those parents who go to parent/teacher conferences are a member of the PTO, or volunteer at the school will have a better chance to know about this identification and to get that for their child.
Parents who may not be as involved in the school either because they are working night shifts or had a poor experience with the schools when they were younger and thus do not trust the institution, their child does not stand as good a chance to have a parent request testing.
Teacher’s Identifying Gifted Children
If the entry point is a teacher recommendation, the issue becomes there is very little training for your regular education teacher regarding gifted. Because of this, many teachers think that the talented kid is the one who gets his work done, volunteers to speak in class, behaves in class, and gets good grades. This is not the gifted kid; this is the compliant kid. Some talented students might be respectful and thus have the opportunity to be tested, but for that kid who is not, the teacher will allow these issues to mask the child’s giftedness.
The second factor is the outside learning experiences afforded to some children but not others. There is much more that factors into a child’s education than schooling. Taking a child to the art museum, the zoo, the science center, a concert or play, family game night, art or music classes, the list goes on and on. Suppose student A comes from a household with many opportunities but is compared with student B who has limited resources. In that case, it is like comparing apples to oranges in the identification process.
Example of Hurdles
Student A has an advantage from the education he has received by doing these outside activities that the school cannot help student B catch up to. That means there are staggered starting lines when both students sit down to take the test, and student A begins the race 100 yards from the finish line in a 200-yard race.
Student B might be starting 250 yards back. How can student B possibly hope to catch student A unless they are so swift and student B is also slow? Student A does not have to run that hard because it is an unfair race and is far more likely to be identified.
How Assessment Fails Students
The third factor is the tests themselves. These are usually content-based or cognitive, but these tests have an inherent bias because there are assumptions about what a gifted child should know. Also, the language the test is written in can play a huge factor, and there are registers of language that various economic classes use.
In the middle class, the formal register of language is used, which is the standard sentence structure and using specific word choice. Those who are from poverty typically use the casual record. This is a language between friends where the word choice is very general. A lot of times, this register is dependent on nonverbal assistance. How can a student who primarily uses this casual register going to be able to take a test written formally successfully? Those nonverbal assists will not be, so they are at a disadvantage. These tests are written by middle-class participants using formal language.
I’ll give you an example. When I worked with rural schools, we analyzed a test. The question was, “What is your favorite season, and explain why?” The student had answered “Hunting season” and then had gone on with much detail about why he enjoyed hunting season so much.
How Are We Properly Identifying Gifted Children
According to the assessment rubric, this student was to receive 0 points for this response because he did not identify a season of fall, spring, winter, or summer. In my opinion, this student answered the question within the environment he knew. Hunting was tremendous in this district, so when deer season began, the school closed for three days because no one would be there. It was a part of their environment, but because the language is different, they are being penalized.
These three factors significantly inhibit children’s ability from poverty to being identified as gifted correctly. As a result, much of the gifted programming consists of white, middle-class students. What we need to be doing as educators is remove some of these barriers and trying to level the playing field. There is no way we will be able to make it entirely even but are there things we could be doing to allow a child to show that they are capable of being free of any roadblocks or obstacles?
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