Beyond Testing: Social and Psychological Considerations in Recruiting and Retaining Gifted Black Students

Abstract

Gifted education proponents contend that gifted students have exceptional or special needs, as do students receiving special education services. Without appropriate services-services designed to meet needs-gifts and talents may not be nurtured and may, ultimately, be lost. Accordingly, Congress passed legislation (i.e., the Javits Act of 1988, reauthorized in 1994) that recognizes the loss of gifts and talents specifically among low socioeconomic status (SES) students and culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students when not identified as gifted. The overarching goal of the act is to support efforts to identify and serve CLD students and low-SES students.Despite such initiatives as the Javits Act and associated grants, the demographics of gifted education have been resistant to changegifted education is as racially and economically homogeneous today as Journal for the Education of the Gifted • Vol. 34, No. 1 132 it was a half century ago (see Ford, 1998;Ford, Grantham, & Whiting, 2008a). In various reports, the U.S. Department of Education has reported the consistent underidentification of African American, Latino, and American Indian students as gifted and, likewise, they are poorly represented in Advanced Placement (AP) classrooms (College Board, 2008). In both programs, underrepresentation is at least 50%-although they make up 17% of the total population in public schools, African American students are only approximately 8% of the population in gifted education. This underrepresentation is well beyond statistical chance and above the Office for Civil Rights' 20% discrepancy formula stipulation (see Ford & Frazier Trotman, 2001). In this discussion, two caveats are in order: First, it should be noted that underrepresentation is greater for African American 1 students than for other CLD groups; thus, African American students have been discussed and studied more than any other diverse group; and second, it should be noted that Black males are more underrepresented in gifted education than all student groups (U.S. Department of Education, 2006).Borrowing from the literature in higher education, Ford (1994) proposed that the representation of African American (and other CLD) students can only improve when educational professionals focus on the twin and inseparable goals of increasing recruitment and retention. More directly, she urged educators to follow concepts, models, strategies, and efforts that exist in higher education to resolve underrepresentation problems. Recommendations were that educators must: (a) find culturally sensitive instruments, strategies, policies, and procedures to effectively recruit African American students; (b) find more effective and inclusive ways of retaining these students in gifted programs once recruited; and (c) collect data on gatekeeping factors in both the recruitment and retention of Black males and females in gifted education. She argued that underrepresentation must be examined in a comprehensive way so that initiatives could be specific and direct.The majority of ...

Being Black, Male, and Gifted in Miami: Prevalence and Predictors of Placement in Elementary School Gifted Education Programs

“…Black males are underrepresented in gifted and talented educational programs across the US, and once admitted to such programs, they are often underserved, and leave such programs prematurely, compared to other groups (Ford 2011b;Ford and Whiting 2010). Such loss of human resources and potential is saddening and research is clearly needed on the school experiences of gifted Black males to help determine best practices for identification, curriculum, and retention of this vital segment of our population.…”

“…It is well established that Black students (and other ethnic/racial minority groups except for Asian-Americans) and low-income students are underrepresented in gifted educational programs (Ford 2011a;Sharon 2010) and take fewer advanced placement (AP) courses (College Board 2008). Students from low socioeconomic status (SES) and culturally and linguistically diverse groups are often not identified as gifted, and their talents are left untapped (Ford and Whiting 2010). For example, in 2006, children from ethnic/racial minority groups comprised 32 % of the US school population, yet comprised only 25 % of children in gifted and talented programs (NCES 2011).…”

“…One reason is school systems' reliance on standardized intelligence tests for admission that privilege certain experiential/cultural/language backgrounds over others (Ford 2004;Myers et al 2004). Many standardized tests used for gifted identification are inappropriate or suboptimal for use with children from culturally diverse groups, due to cultural/language bias, differential predictive validity for Black students, and stereotype threat and anxiety that are invoked from the tests among Black students (Ford and Whiting 2010;Matthews and Kirsch 2011). Moreover, school teachers often serve as gate-keepers to gifted programs given reliance on teacher recommendations (Ford et al 2008;McBee 2010).…”

Underrepresentation of Ethiopian–Israeli minority students in programmes for the gifted and talented: a policy discourse analysis

“…This bias has been shown to negatively affect the self-image of minority students, the develop ment of their racial identity and their social mobility (Ford and Whiting 2011). Con sequently, the range of future opportunities for these students is reduced, resulting in an unrealized potential of the society's human capital (Ford 2010).…”

“…In addition, educators, support staff and administrators often fail to focus on the strengths and potential of minority students (Lynn et al 2010;Hargrove and Seay 2011;Esquierdo and Arreguin-Anderson 2012) and may sometimes express low expectations, stereotypic attitudes, a colour blind ideology and assumptions of white privilege, which promote deficit thinking (Constantine and Sue 2008;Ford 2010;Gillbom et al 2012). Such attitudes, together with lack of parental encouragement and negative peer pressure (Ford and Grantham 2003;Milner 2007), reduce the rate of minority students targeted for G&T frameworks (Ford 1998;Ford and Whiting 2011). Although several solutions have been proposed to amend this situation (e.g.…”