Forthcoming, The Elementary School Journal *** Students of color are significantly underrepresented in gifted programs relative to their white peers. Drawing on political science research suggesting that public organizations more equitably distribute policy outputs when service providers share characteristics with their client populations, we investigate whether the representation of students of color in gifted programs is higher in schools with racially/ethnically diverse teachers and principals. In a nationally representative sample of elementary schools created by merging two waves of data from the Civil Rights Data Collection and the Schools and Staffing Survey, we find that schools with larger numbers of black teachers or a black principal have greater representation of black students in their gifted programs. We find a similar relationship for Hispanic teachers and representation of Hispanic students. Further evidence suggests that a critical mass of teachers of color is necessary for teacher race/ethnicity to be associated with higher representation of students of color in gifted programs. *** Since at least the late 1960s, research has consistently documented the substantial underrepresentation of students of color in gifted programs (Ford, 1998). Recent data show, for example, that black students are only 59% as likely to receive gifted services as would be predicted if their gifted participation was proportionate to their presence in the broader student population. 1 To receive gifted services, students must go through multiple steps, including identification as potentially gifted, referral for evaluation, and the evaluation itself, and research suggests that students of color are less likely to pass through each of these stages than their white peers (McBee, 2006; National Research Council, 2002). Reasons for these disparities are complex but likely include unequal teacher perceptions of student giftedness across student groups (Ford, Grantham, &

Bureaucratic representation—the idea that a governmental organization is better situated to serve its clients when its employee composition reflects that of its client population—has received considerable scholarly attention in the study of public institutions in the fields of political science and public administration. In a wide variety of settings, this research has demonstrated important connections between the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of the public sector workforce and how different groups—particularly traditionally underserved groups—interact with street-level bureaucrats and benefit from public services. Although scholars in those fields long ago recognized that the public school system is a large bureaucracy with diverse street-level bureaucrats (teachers) and clients (students and parents) and thus began studying bureaucratic representation in the context of schools, the concept and the causal mechanisms it hypothesizes remain largely unfamiliar to education researchers. This article synthesizes the main ideas from the bureaucratic representation literature and demonstrates their applicability to schooling outcomes—including discipline, gifted assignment, special education, and student achievement—with the goal of opening up new avenues for education research into the mechanisms linking demographic similarity among educators and students to schooling outputs and outcomes.