The National Center for Research on Gifted Education found that even when low-income kids score the same as their classmates, "they are 250 percent less likely to be identified for gifted education." In New York City's public school system, where 70 percent of elementary students are black and Hispanic, 70 percent of those in the city's Gifted and Talented programs are white and Asian. For one member of a school board in Seattle's North Shore neighborhood, where only 3.2% of "gifted" students are Latino, "the numbers sent a message she does not accept — that Latino students, as a group, aren’t as intellectually capable. 'How can we sit with that?' she said. 'It upsets me to even talk about.'"

Most districts across the United States have some form of a gifted program, whether called Gifted and Talented (GAT), Talented and Gifted (TAG), or another variation on the acronym. Students are often identified in elementary grades using tests designed to evaluate "potential" and creativity. In my own third grade classroom, we were instructed to draw as many unique pictures as we could from one circle in five minutes. But often what it really came down to was whether your parents knew about the program and whether they were willing to talk to someone at the school about getting their student into TAG. Students in TAG left the classroom mid-morning one day a week and were bused to another school where they would do "enrichment" projects and activities.

Several districts across the country, from Miami to Seattle to New York City, have taken steps to change the overwhelmingly white composition of gifted programming. Whether offering a separate test for ESOL students, providing more challenging coursework within the same classroom instead of removing children from the classroom, or moving away from teacher referrals to universal screening, schools are finding myriad ways to diversify TAG and start to level the playing field. And studies have found that students qualifying through these new avenues performed just as well as their peers and “[i]f anything, the newly identified students benefitted even more from participating in gifted education than did the group of always takers who [would] be identified under a traditional referral system."

Source: Quotes and statistics from articles in this collection.