![]() A newer HOPE scale of teacher ratings was expressly designed to improve racial equity in the selection of gifted students, and includes questions on social behaviors, such as whether a student shows compassion for others. The advantage of teacher ratings is that they can assess important aspects of giftedness that tests cannot measure. Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster The city is replacing the test with teacher evaluations of students, which will involve judgments of traits, such as perseverance and curiosity. In April 2022, New York City permanently eliminated a gifted test for four-year-olds that resulted in a terribly lopsided allocation of only 16 percent of the gifted and talented seats to Black and Hispanic children, who make up 63 percent of the city’s kindergarten population. The gap is even larger for Hispanic students, who made up only 18 percent of gifted students but over 25 percent of the school population. ![]() Only 10 percent of the nation’s gifted students were Black, far less than their 15 percent share of the school population in the federal government’s most recent data. New momentum is building to lean even more on these teacher ratings as school systems wrestle with how to address the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in gifted education. This experiment is important because many school systems around the country rely on these sorts of teacher checklists, often called “scales” or “instruments” in the field of education, to identify who is gifted. ![]() The definition of who is gifted appeared to change as you walked across the hallway. Related: Gifted programs provide little to no academic boost, new study saysĭespite the training that teachers received on assessing students by answering a list of 37 questions, some teachers were inclined to rate their students more generously than others. “Teachers may be making different judgment calls.” “It was inconsistent from classroom to classroom,” said Karen Rambo-Hernandez, an associate professor of education at Texas A&M University, who presented her unpublished findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 2022. The top 10 percent school-wide yielded another. The top 10 percent in each classroom yielded one group of gifted students. Different methods of creaming off the top 10 percent produced entirely different groups of students who would be identified as gifted with almost no overlap. When the research team tallied up the teacher ratings for all 282 students in this 2021 experiment, they were startled. The researchers asked 16 teachers to rate their students to indicate which ones were far above average in their classrooms, if not the nation, and could benefit from advanced instruction. School administrators wanted to boost the number of gifted students and invited a team of researchers to come up with another way to find them. At least, that’s the determination of a widely-used national intelligence test, on which few students living in poverty score highly. Guess how many of the 800 students are gifted? The answer: three. At one elementary school in rural Appalachia, most of the children are white and poor 90 percent qualify for free or reduced priced lunch. ![]()
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