Inequity in equity: How "equity" can lead to inequity for high-potential students.

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the achievement of waves of American students with high intellectual potential has declined as a result of inequity in educational treatment. This inequity is the result of an extreme form of egalitarianism within American society and schools, which involves the pitting of equity against excellence rather than promoting both equity and excellence, anti-intellectualism, the "dumbingdown" of the curriculum, equating aptitude and achievement testing with elitism, the attraction to fads by schools, and the insistence of schools to teach all students from the same curriculum at the same level. In this article we provide recommendations for creating positive change-recommendations that emphasize excellence for all, that call for responsiveness to individual differences, and that suggest basing educational policies on well-grounded research findings in psychology and education. Educational policies that fail to take into account the vast range of individual differences among students-as do many that are currently in use-are doomed to be ineffective.Much has been said about the relative standing of American students in international comparisons of mathematical and scientific achievement. Such comparisons-regardless of who conducted the survey, the instruments used, and the age of individuals studied-repeatedly have shown that students in the United States typically rank toward the bottom of industrialized nations 1 in the range of achievement reported We would like to thank Melissa Holden and Daniel Shea for their assistance with the preparation of this article and Miraca U. M. Gross for her insightful comments. The detailed comments of reviewers James J. Gallagher, Arthur R. Jensen, and Richard E. Snow were extremely helpful. We also greatly appreciate the financial support of an anonymous service agency that made this work possible.

Spatial ability: A neglected dimension in talent searches for intellectually precocious youth.

“…Although these findings are informative, to our knowledge a longitudinal study involving all three specific abilities (mathematical, spatial, and verbal abilities) teamed with a comprehensive preference inventory has not appeared in the scientific literature. This leaves a gap in our knowledge and contributes to a gap in practice (Benbow & Stanley, 1996;Colangelo et al, 2004).…”

“…it is incredible that there has been so little programmatic research on admissions testing in this domain. (p. 136) That talent search programs, which involve more than 300,000 students annually (Lupkowski-Shoplik, Benbow, Assouline, & Brody, 2003), have neglected this intellective dimension is especially curious, given their philosophy to develop intellectual talent across multiple dimensions, using many different kinds of learning opportunities, based on the idea that one size will never fit all (Benbow & Stanley, 1996;Colangelo et al, 2004;Gallagher & Gallagher, 1994;Heller, Monks, Sternberg, & Subotnik, 2000;Stanley, 2000;VanTassel-Baska, 1998).…”

“…These innovations not only enabled talent searches to identify efficiently large numbers of intellectually precocious youth in two critical areas, they simultaneously afforded a better understanding of the breadth of psychological diversity within intellectually gifted populations. The pattern and level of these abilities have been used by program developers to structure the nature and pace of the educational curriculum for mathematically and verbally precocious youth (Benbow & Stanley, 1996;Colangelo, Assouline, & Gross, 2004;Colangelo & Davis, 2003;VanTassel-Baska, 1998).…”

Worklife Across the Lifespan

“…Several clear predictors within the child (i.e., person predictors) have emerged in this literature. Cognitive ability appears to be a potent predictor of educational achievement (Benbow & Stanley, 1996;Snow, 1996). A recent meta-analysis examined graduate business students' academic success.…”

“…Cognitive ability, measured most commonly by the g factor, is a major attribute in educational achievement (Benbow & Stanley, 1996;Snow, 1996). Cognitive ability is also a potent attribute in job performance and job training (e.g., Hunter & Hunter, 1984;Judge et al, 2007;Levine et al, 1996;Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).…”