The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs

Abstract

K–12 gifted and talented programs have struggled with racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, native language, and disability inequity since their inception. This inequity has been well documented in public schools since at least the 1970s and has been stubbornly persistent despite receiving substantial attention at conferences, in scholarly journals, and in K–12 schools. The purpose of this article is to outline why such inequity exists and why common efforts to combat it have been unsuccessful. In the end, poorly designed identification systems combined with larger issues of societal inequality and systemic, institutionalized racism are the most likely culprits. I end the article with a hierarchy of actions that could be taken—from low-hanging fruit to major societal changes—in order to combat inequity in gifted education and move the field forward.

Equity Gaps in Education: Nine Points toward More Transparency

“…A major criticism of the original concept of equity gaps was that it was narrowed to differences between groups while it overlooked the considerable variance within groups [75,76]. For example, Peters [77] points out that within ethnic/racial disparities there is a great diversity of experience. 'Black', for example, can refer to voluntary immigrants from the Caribbean as well as to refugees from Somalia.…”

Improving Gifted Talent Development Can Help Solve Multiple Consequential Real-World Problems

“…In a broad sense, talent development is the essence of all education (e.g., Subotnik et al 2011 ). However, there remain many students with high potential who simply were not born into circumstances with sufficient opportunities, and whose talent is often overlooked and underdeveloped ( Hair et al 2015 ; Peters 2021 ).…”

“…The federal K-12 investment in gifted and talented education in the US has remained at roughly 0.0002% for decades, which amounts to 1 dollar for every $500,000 spent ( Wai and Worrell 2016 ). This lack of investment in gifted education primarily impacts public school gifted programming, which is what most talented students from poor backgrounds rely on ( Peters 2021 ). At the same time, talented students with parents with greater resources have not been set back by this lack of funding since their parents can find ways to provide a sufficient educational dosage for them outside traditional public schools ( Berner 2017 ).…”

“…This is the intellectually gifted population, which we operationalize as roughly the top 5% of achievers globally. Systemic and structural barriers reducing the likelihood that many talented but disadvantaged students from low-income and minority backgrounds can ultimately develop their talents and eventual expertise to the fullest is a crucial ongoing challenge ( Peters 2021 ). When many children come from poverty, they will not only fail to be recognized as gifted, they might not even develop to be gifted (e.g., Hair et al 2015 ).…”

Peter Parker Principle: From White Privilege to Gifted Critical Discourse

“…Those with privilege maintain the status quo, because this is how the system was built; it "works according to design" (Oluo, 2021, p. 4). Peters (2021) remarked, "I try and remember that with privilege comes the responsibility to help those who are less privileged" (p. 2). As the Peter Parker Principle proverbializes, with great power comes great responsibility.…”