Public Pre-K and Test Taking for the NYC Gifted-and-Talented Programs

Abstract

The New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) gifted-and-talented programs aim to support all students of exceptional learning potential within the public school system. Using proprietary data made available to us by the NYC DOE, we show, however, that substantial disparities exist in the rates of gifted-and-talented admission test taking, the first step in the process of accessing these more challenging educational opportunities. While Black and Latino/a students take the test for gifted-and-talented admission at substantially lower rates than their White and Asian counterparts, we find the disparity to be significantly less for those enrolled in public prekindergarten programs. We likewise find similar results when comparing other subgroups defined by students' family, borough, and neighborhood characteristics. These results suggest that public prekindergarten gifted-and-talented attendance could have played a role in ameliorating the gaps in test taking by providing greater access to information about the gifted-and-talented programs across subgroups of students.Keywords: early childhood; educational policy; equity; gifted and talented education; gifted education; hierarchical linear modeling; preschool equity research; public pre-K; regression analyses; social stratification; urban education FEATURE ARTICLES JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 37 subject matter knowledge, and challenging coursework, which are known to be related to student learning (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1997;Meyer, 1999;Phillips, 1997;Phillips & Chin, 2004;Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 1998;Tach & Farkas, 2006). In the interest of equity, these findings point to the importance of designing challenging educational opportunities and academic programs within the public school sector that are designed for students from all population subgroups. One answer to fostering academic equity among high achievers is the public availability of challenging educational programs for students with exceptional ability across all ethnic and social class backgrounds.Gifted-and-talented education programs emphasize identifying students as gifted and talented based on their learning potential through a psychometric assessment of the students' cognitive ability and school readiness at a young age and provide such students with specialized instruction so as to enable them to be educated to their full potential (Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, & Worrell, 2011). Compared to programs that select students at later grades based on their achievement to date, by identifying students early on in elementary school, gifted-and-talented programs may hold even greater promise for promoting children from all backgrounds to reach their full academic potential and for shrinking the reported disparities that exist with respect to college application, enrollment, and graduation.As we show in this article, however, there is an equally compelling need to create a public awareness of such educational opportunities to ensure that students from all population subgroups have equitable access to them. Us...

Blazing New Trails: Strengthening Policy Research in Gifted Education

“…Other good examples of how research can influence the policy cycle are universal screening for gifted education programming and the use of growth models in state accountability systems. Regarding universal screening, despite abundant research on the problems of relying on teacher nominations for identification (e.g., Card & Guiliano, 2015; Grissom & Redding, 2016; Lu & Weinberg, 2016; McBee, Peters, & Miller, 2016), universal testing has generally not yet been adopted. Efforts are underway in states such as Illinois to use this research to establish state-level policies that encourage or even require universal screening in high-poverty districts.…”

What Proportion of People are Gifted? Assessing the Implications of Conceptions of Giftedness

“…Second, knowing "how many" gifted students there are helps serve as a benchmarking assessment of how well identification practices are (or are not) working. Several recent studies (e.g., Card & Guiliano, 2015;Grissom & Redding, 2016;Lu & Weinberg, 2016) have described differences in rates of gifted identification for different demographic groups. The identification of "excellence gaps" of high performance on standardized tests (Plucker, Hardesty, & Burroughs, 2013;Plucker & Peters, 2016) has also garnered substantial attention.…”

Test-Taking for Gifted and Talented Kindergarten: Underscoring the Importance of Outreach

“…Notably, the authors showed that disparities in G & T test-taking were one of the greatest contributors to differential access to G & T programs. Using a logistic regression framework, Lu and Weinberg (2016) also showed that participation in a New York City public pre-K program, including full-time and part-time pre-K classrooms within district schools, and other publicly funded community-based pre-K centers, was significantly correlated with higher G & T test-taking. Additionally, racial, socioeconomic, and language-based gaps in G & T test-taking were further mitigated among those who attended public pre-K programs compared with those who did not.…”

“…Many researchers have found that socioeconomic and racial/ethnic achievement gaps are large at school entry and remain consistent across schooling (Reardon & Portilla, 2016; von Hippel et al, 2018). There are also significant disparities in access to G & T programs among students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Card & Giuliano, 2016; Ford, 1996, 1998; Ford et al, 2008; Ford & Harmon, 2001; Lu & Weinberg, 2016). Extant work has shown that earlier identification of giftedness may hold greater promise for enabling children from all backgrounds to fulfill their academic potential in the longer term (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1997; Meyer, 1999; Phillips, 1997; Phillips, 2013; Phillips & Chin, 2004; Raudenbush & Eschmann, 2015; Rivkin et al, 1998; Tach & Farkas, 2006).…”

“…In their examination of the 2009 cohort of New York City kindergarten students, Lu and Weinberg (2016) found significant disparities in every stage of the G & T identification process. Notably, the authors showed that disparities in G & T test-taking were one of the greatest contributors to differential access to G & T programs.…”