Bright Black Students With Black Teachers More Likely to Get Into Gifted Programs
Researchers call for all students to be screened for gifted programs.
Black students are far less likely than white students to be assigned to gifted classrooms.
In some schools, principals also factor in a student's classroom performance, creativity or demonstrated leadership skills. In these cases, of course, teachers' own racial biases could influence who gets tapped.
But it's not clear that white teachers are biased against black students, Grissom cautioned in an interview. Teachers often have a limited role in deciding who should be in a gifted-and-talented classroom. In many school districts, it's decided entirely by test scores.
Still, even when gifted placements are decided entirely by test scores, teachers often play a big role in identifying which students should take the test in the first place. Perhaps black teachers are more likely to recognize brilliance in a black student and suggest that the student be screened for giftedness.
Parents also play a big role in lobbying for their children to enter these programs. Another possibility is that black parents feel more comfortable advocating for their child with a black teacher, demanding that their child be screened for giftedness.
And finally it's possible that black children perform better for a black teacher, and are more likely to demonstrate how brainy they are in these classrooms.
Grissom's research didn't investigate which of these hypotheses are correct. That's work for future scholars.
Only 22 percent of black students have a black teacher, according to data cited in the paper. Schools could hire more black teachers. But no matter how many they hire, there'd still be white teachers teaching black students.
A better, quicker solution to reducing the racial gap in gifted classrooms, according to Grissom, is to test every child in the school system for giftedness, so that you're not relying on subjective humans to decide whom to test. Education geeks call it "universal screening."
Indeed, after Broward Country, Florida, adopted universal screening in 2005, the number of Hispanic students in gifted programs increased by 130 percent and the number of black students by 80 percent. Low-income students increased by 180 percent. But it proved expensive to test everyone, and the Bright Black Students With Black Teachers More Likely to Get Into Gifted Programs - US News:
