Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs: The Need for Transparent, Scientific Methodology

Abstract

“The existence of disproportionality does not make gifted services inherently racist,” writes Peters (2021) in the conclusion of his article, “The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs,” and with that statement so highlights the logical flaw that runs unchecked through his article. Although his statement is justified in the sense that the mere existence of disproportionality does not condemn gifted services as inherently unequitable—correlation, after all, does not beget causation—it does not exonerate the educational system from such charges either. The problem, then, lies less with what points Peters does make than the ones which are all the more glaring for their absence: namely, the role of school systems in perpetuating systemic racism and inequity. Per Peters’ bold concluding statement, schools and their accelerated programs do not inherently bear responsibility for the inequity that they display due to the existence of the larger context in which such programs exist, but rather exist as largely neutral entities that merely reflect the biased world that they are mired in. It is curious, then, that Peters opens his article by highlighting this result from a 2013 meta-analysis: “Petersen found that boys were more likely to be identified as gifted than girls, particularly during preadolescence, and that these findings held regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.” The very finding he highlights—indicating a notable inequity in gifted services across gender, even when results are standardized across traditional indicators of opportunity availability such as socioeconomic status—suggests that problems in GT identification run far deeper than just external problems, particularly given studies that indicate girls and boys start school on equal footing even by traditional academic measures (e.g., test scores). Peters, despite ostensibly (per the title of the paper) focusing on improving equity across all dimensions— not just race—and leading his discussion with this finding, conveniently fails to revisit it or the topic of gender inequity across the remaining nine pages of text. The astute reader may wonder how, precisely, a purportedly neutral system can take two populations that exhibit equal performance and obtain unequal results without being deemed biased. Certainly, one can ascribe at least some of the variation to outside factors—for instance, girls being discouraged from pursuing academics due to gender bias—but the fact that girls perform as well as or better than boys in school and show equal rates of academic progress (see, for instance, the work of Ding et al. [2006]), means that the effect of such biases is clearly insufficient, in and of itself, to cause the significant disparity in identification rates that is observed during the selection process for accelerated programs. Peters argues that this phenomenon may be due to “differences in true scores due to some children not having had the opportunity to develop their talents” and is not, inherently, an indicator of a flawed selection system. However, meta-analyses in the literature state that girls generally outperform boys in terms of grade point average and classroom performance (Voyer & Voyer, 2014)—even given the systematic biases they face in society and both inside and outside the classroom—which is inconsistent with Peters’ perspective on the matter. Thus, having eliminated the impossible, à la Sherlock Holmes, we must face the—perhaps not improbable, but certainly inconvenient—truth: that the screening process for gifted education is, in fact, biased. This conclusion is well supported by the literature (Bianco et al., 2011; Powell & Siegle, 2000), which time and time again has indicated that school systems are not, in fact, as innocent in the matter of inequity as Peters’ apologia would have them seem. Societal inequality certainly forms the foundation for the disproportionality seen in accelerated educational services, but for all the exhortation Peters gives initiatives that “help[ . . . ] teachers reflect on their own implicit biases,” schools still bear culpability for actively promulgating the festering growth of societal flaws— increasing the disparity in opportunities that already exist outside the classroom, all while attributing the effects of their actions as the doing of an equally culpable, but conveniently unimpeachable, collective. In light of this revelation, this commentary highlights the need for concrete change: specifically, for transparent, equitable, and scientifically defensible gifted identification systems and a greater quantitative analysis of gifted education in general. Grade-skipping, early entrance to kindergarten or first grade, and early entrance to college, for example, can be 1040527 GCQXXX10.1177/00169862211040527Gifted Child QuarterlySingam research-article2021