A newly released report, Is There a Gifted Gap?, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sheds further light on the many challenges gifted students from underserved populations face in being identified and served.

The report confirms our knowledge that students living in poverty, from racial and ethnic minorities, and who are English learners, are often overlooked for gifted programs.

Data taken from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and the Office of Civil Rights shows that high-poverty schools are just as likely as low poverty schools to have gifted programs available. (See figure 1 from the report.) This key point highlights that the underrepresentation of gifted students from poverty backgrounds is not for lack of programs in high-poverty schools.

Figure 1. High-poverty schools are generally just as likely to have a gifted program as low-poverty schools.

The report should sound an alarm for all advocates for social justice and incite action for changes in policy that create supportive learning environments for all learners, especially for well qualified children from poverty and minority backgrounds who are repeatedly overlooked for gifted programming.

NAGC supports recommendations put forward in Is There a Gifted Gap? and provides model legislation and advocacy resources to advance policies on equitable identification, professional development, acceleration, and monitoring progress through the Giftedness Knows No Boundaries (GKNB) initiative. The GKNB advocacy tools are being used across the nation to improve policies at the state and local levels with leaders in Connecticut, Washington, and Illinois successfully securing changes to monitoring, acceleration, and funding policies.

Is There a Gifted Gap? is another important call to action to create change in policies and practice to ensure that children from all backgrounds can reach for their personal best and contribute to their communities. We know that with increased understanding about their nature and unique needs, we will be able to develop supportive environments for learning and implement research-based practices that help all gifted children flourish.

The implementation of identification policies that support all students, strong professional development, acceleration, and the inclusion of gifted and talented students in state accountability systems will answer the call for greater attention to the excellence gap by shining a light on these children.

M. René Islas is the executive director of the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC).

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The United States wastes an enormous amount of its human capital by failing to cultivate the innate talents of many of its young people, particularly high-ability girls and boys from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. That failure exacts a great cost from the nation’s economy, widens painful gaps in income, frustrates efforts to spur upward mobility, contributes to civic decay and political division, and worsens the inequalities that plague so many elements of our society.

All of this was reinforced in a widely noted recent study by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, and colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project, which highlighted the inexcusable number of “lost Einsteins” among American students, most of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Their team found that, as early as third grade, math scores help to predict who will be awarded patents in later life—that’s the metric they used for “Einsteins”—but also that such scores explain less than one-third of the “innovation gap” between those growing up in high- versus low-income families. Because this gap grows much wider in the later grades, Bell and Chetty suggest that “low-income children start out on relatively even footing with their higher- income peers in terms of innovation ability, but fall behind over time, perhaps because of differences in their childhood environment.”

That “environment” includes many elements, including residential segregation, access to college, and exposure to innovation via family or neighborhood. But it also includes the quality of kids’ schools and the educational opportunities found therein. If the talents of low-income children are not sufficiently cultivated in our K–12 system, we will continue to lose many more potential Einsteins before they even graduate from high school.

A new Fordham study, Is There a Gifted Gap? Gifted Education in High-Poverty Schools, shows some of the ways we lose those future Einsteins due to the education system’s inability or unwillingness to do what it takes to develop the potential of hundreds of thousands of capable young people who hail from modest backgrounds.

Consider how few such youngsters make it into the gifted-and-talented programs that schools and districts offer. While schools attended by low-income children generally report having such programs at the same rate as schools serving more prosperous kids, enrollments in those programs are far smaller in low-income schools. Even within those meager enrollments, black and Hispanic pupils are sorely under-represented.

When high-achieving or high-potential poor and minority students have less access to gifted education than their peers, the existence of such programs may actually worsen inequalities, thus widening what Jonathan Plucker at Johns Hopkins University and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation term “excellence gaps”—the differences between subgroups of students performing at the highest levels of achievement.

For tomorrow’s leaders and innovators to reflect America’s diversity, today’s schools must do far better at cultivating talented children from every kind of background. First-rate gifted programming in high-poverty schools can contribute much toward this goal.

Is There a Gifted Gap?, by Christopher Yaluma of Ohio State and Fordham’s own Adam Tyner, breaks new ground by documenting several worrisome discrepancies. For the longest time, we had scant data on gifted-and-talented programs in U.S. public schools. Beginning in 2011, however, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) began asking schools to provide basic information on enrollment in such programs and to break out that enrollment by racial and ethnic groups. The resulting data are not nearly as comprehensive as we would wish; for example, they include no information on the quality or characteristics of gifted programs, how children are admitted to them, and much else. But they’re still illuminating.

Yaluma and Tyner investigate whether high-poverty schools offer gifted-and-talented programs; the proportion of students in such schools that participates in those programs; and how that participation varies by race within schools, particularly high-poverty ones.

They unearth more bad news than good. Although most schools at every poverty level—and with every level of minority enrollment—report having gifted programs of some kind, students in affluent schools are more than twice as likely to participate in such programs, and minority youngsters, regardless of the school’s poverty level, are much less likely to participate. While 12.4 percent of students in low-poverty schools with gifted programs take part in those programs, that’s true of less than half as many (6.1 percent) in high-poverty schools. And although black and Hispanic students constitute 15 and 28 percent, respectively, of the student population, they comprise just 10 and 21 percent of those enrolled in gifted programs.

Obviously not good! But not immutable either. States, districts, and schools can change how they do this, can develop more young students into Einsteins—and can do so across more segments of the population.

They can start by improving schooling itself—a benefit to all students. That includes harnessing today’s enthusiasm for personalized learning and the technologies that facilitate it, not only to customize children’s education experiences but also to allow able students to move ahead when they’re ready. To the extent that personalized learning is well designed, tailored to students’ needs, and good at demonstrating what one has learned, acceleration of strong students should be more widely practiced than it is now.

Schools also need to identify more high-potential youngsters for inclusion in gifted education, and equip all them, especially children of color, to succeed in these challenging academic opportunities.

Thus we heartily endorse two recommendations made by the authors. First, schools should screen all of their pupils to determine which ones may benefit from gifted services. Such universal-screening practices have been shown to boost participation of minority students and can be implemented at low cost, especially since students already take multiple federal, state, and local assessments, one or more of which can serve this purpose.

Second, school systems should consider identifying the high achievers at each school, not district-wide. Although this means differing standards for inclusion in gifted programs, it will also yield greater socioeconomic and ethnic diversity in those programs.

For the K–12 system to do its part in equalizing opportunities for poor and minority youngsters in the United States, clearly much is needed in addition to gifted education. But too often reform efforts intended to boost the prospects of such children focus entirely on those who, for a hundred reasons, are struggling to achieve academically. As a result, we tend to neglect the kids who are academically able and doing well—yet whose schools do not challenge them to achieve all that they’re capable of. For schools to offer gifted education is an important start. But it isn’t enough unless they also encourage and assist students to participate in such programs—and unless those programs have both the capacity to serve them and the quality to serve them well.

The Archdiocese of Memphis, Tennessee, announced last week that it intends to close ten schools, all of them part of the “Jubilee Catholic Schools” consortium. Hailed as the “Memphis Miracle” twenty years ago when previously-shuttered inner-city Catholic schools were resurrected to provide a preferential option for the poor in a city with too few good education options, they’ve now fallen victim to the systemic problems that plague so many other Catholic schools, above all an obsolete funding model. In the past, highly educated, truly caring, and strongly motivated religious sisters, brothers, and priests staffed these schools for little or no pay, making it possible to offer an almost free and generally excellent education to many of our nation’s most underserved children, as well as many middle class youngsters from Catholic families. But declines in Catholic religious vocations, anachronistic Blaine amendment obstacles to state funding, and strong public school lobbies render this model unworkable today in many places. In just a few decades, Catholic schools have gone from serving five million students annually to half that number.

This is heartbreaking for myriad reasons. Research, for example, has found that similar closings in Chicago were associated with more crime and disorder. And although charter schools often replace defunct Catholic schools, that same research found that charters “do not yet appear to generate the same positive community benefits.”

My theory, grounded in both personal and professional experience, is that these valuable communal benefits emanate from Catholic schools being schools of virtue. Places that educate the whole child—mind, body, and soul. Such models are increasingly rare, however, and will become extinct if we aren’t careful.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope. It’s possible for charter schools to be similarly virtuous. And the story of how I came to open some is illustrative of why we need to—and can—open more of them.

I am one of six children born to an immigrant Iraqi Catholic family. Our parents taught us that, while we are on this earth, we are called to use the gifts God gave us to serve others. That message is why my older brother is a priest, why I joined Teach For America eighteen years ago, and what motivates my work today.

My time as a TFA corps member was pivotal. I had exited from Berkeley with a degree in rhetoric. My mother would often ask me, “What the heck is ‘rhetoric’?” “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m going to law school,” I’d say. But I never did. TFA assigned me to teach English in the second toughest high school in Oakland, California, and it changed everything.

Teaching consumed me. And so did my anger. I was angry that some of my tenth graders had never been taught to read; that forty-five classes had no regular teacher for the first three months of school; that having the S.W.A.T. team outside my classroom door was taken for granted. I was angry at the state, the district, and my principal. I was angry with myself for every child I failed. I had no idea what it would be like to fight and fight and fight and only sometimes win.

Something else happened during those two years of teaching: I returned to my faith, which I had largely lost during college. Student after student came to me with problems that no teenager should have to face and that no twenty-two-year-old should need to solve. So I turned to God. I prayed for my students and their families when I learned of their troubles. I prayed when I couldn’t make them better. I prayed for guidance. I prayed for forgiveness. But, always, those prayers were in private. I wanted to talk with my kids about God, to tell them that, even if their father on earth abandoned them, they had a Father in heaven who loved them completely and was always with them. But I had no idea how to navigate such a conversation in the context of a secular public school. Not being able to talk with my students about Christ was like teaching with one hand tied behind my back.

I decided that I needed to learn more if I were to help fix our broken education system. So when I finished my commitment to TFA, I went to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to study public policy to better understand how this amazing country of ours could possibly allow children to attend the school where I taught, and to learn what I could do about it.

Upon graduation, I accepted a job at the Philanthropy Roundtable, which was much friendlier to my faith than Berkeley, Harvard, and TFA. My colleagues and I believed that America’s underserved children needed more great schools of all kinds—be they district, charter, or private, including those that are faith-based. We believed, like the Catholic Church, that parents should have the right to decide how to educate their own children. In this country, if you have money, you can move to a neighborhood with good public schools or send your child to a private school. But if you don't have money, you don't have this freedom. The Church tells us, as a matter of justice, that this is wrong.

At the Roundtable, I learned about the legacy of Catholic schools serving the poor. For two hundred years, they were the opportunity-equalizing force in America for underserved children—Catholic and non-Catholic alike. You could even say the original Teach For America was an army of nuns who founded and built and taught in schools that gave disadvantaged children—especially new immigrants—a decent shot at success. And they accomplished this by respecting the inherent dignity of all children, by holding them all to high academic expectations, by providing them a strong foundation in core subjects, and, vitally, by nurturing in them a deep sense of something greater than themselves.

During my five years at the Roundtable, I regularly spoke with Michelle Rhee about joining her team. And when she agreed to serve as D.C. Schools Chancellor in 2007, I thought I might be able to help her. But then I spoke with my older brother, who said something that stayed with me: “Stephanie, if you can’t help children to know God, you’ll only ever get so far with them.” So in 2009 I left the Roundtable, but not to work with Rhee. Instead, feeling called to help in that way, I co-founded—with KIPP pioneer Scott Hamilton—a national non-profit that we named Seton Education Partners.

Our goal was—and still is—to expand opportunities for underserved children in America to receive an academically excellent and vibrantly Catholic education. Seton partners with (arch)dioceses and others across the country to implement innovative and sustainable new models that bridge the best of Catholic education's rich tradition with new possibilities.

Part of our work is operating sixteen blended-learning urban schools in eight cities. Thirteen of these are Catholic schools; the other three are charter schools in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, one of the nation’s poorest communities. That latter effort began in 2011 when the Archdiocese of New York made the heartbreaking decision to close almost sixty schools due to declining enrollment and financial instability—the very same trouble that’s forced similar decisions in so many other cities, including last week in Memphis.

Most of the recently shuttered New York schools served mostly low-income and minority children in grades K–8. They provided these boys and girls a safe haven and a holistic education that nurtured theirs heads, hearts, and spirits. In response to these closings, and at the Church’s request, Seton Education Partners set out to pioneer a new charter school model that, when paired with a vibrant after-school faith-formation program, which is voluntary for children and that does not use government funds, would achieve the goals of Catholic education for the poor—and would do so in a financially sustainable way that complies with charter school laws in both word and spirit.

The first school to operate under this model was Brilla College Preparatory Charter School, which opened in the South Bronx in August 2013. Starting with two hundred kindergarten and first grade students, today it serves 650 children in grades K–5 across three campuses. Brilla students are primarily minority (roughly two-thirds Latino, one third African American), and more than 90 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The network has achieved academic growth results that parallel the nation’s strongest charter schools. And, more importantly, it’s pioneered a unique way to help children and staff grow virtuously by using a secular approach to character education that is rooted in Catholic tradition.

Alongside the Brilla network, Seton also launched El Camino, a daily, optional after-school faith-formation program that helps children know, love, and serve Christ and His Church. In just four years, more than seventy children have been baptized, and parents have said that El Camino has transformed their entire family.

Today, Brilla has a waiting list of over 1,600 children, and El Camino is at capacity. Even as we watch more Catholic schools get shuttered, we’re working to grow this pioneering, sustainable model to serve many more underserved children who no longer have access to a full-on Catholic education. But we’re doing something even more important. We are helping children to grow in virtue and to know, love, and serve Christ. We want our children to make it to college and heaven. That is the full package.

My friend Chester Finn recently penned an article titled “Truth decay,” which highlights the difference between critical thinking and knowledge in the pursuit of truth. Having attended the University of California as an undergrad, I saw relativism and post-modernism ravage every cranny of the campus—whether in the classes taught by misguided professors, the halls where I was a Resident Assistant, and even the Catholic Newman Center, where a Paulist priest once made fun of the Blessed Pope John Paul II in a homily, to cackles from parishioners. Taking their cues from these bad college-level examples, too many of today’s K–12 educators instill students with a universal skepticism that prevents them from determining and accepting facts where they exist. This is a dangerous distortion of critical thinking that harms our children.

Our schools, on the contrary, are rooted in truth—the kind that the ancient Greeks described, the kind that teaches right from wrong and reality from fiction. Our charter schools are not Catholic—institutions that cannot be explicit about Christ throughout the day cannot be considered religious. But like Catholic schools they take seriously the desperate need to educate children in virtues like courage, justice, wisdom, and self-control. Though not explicitly religious, these are transcendental values.

We need more schools of virtue, and not just of the Catholic variety. We need more Jewish schools, more Mormon schools, more Lutheran schools, more Baptist schools—more schools that are not only academically strong but that also give kids a solid moral foundation that aligns with their families’ traditions and values. We need more schools that respect what it truly means to be human and that educate the whole child, mind, body, and soul. We need schools that help provide an authentic understanding of true human fulfillment and flourishing, especially for children that may be living in abject poverty. And the thing is, if you ask black and Latino families, by and large, they want to see more of these schools too.

For the caring educators whose hearts break for their students but who are constrained by rigid bureaucracies or mentalities, we need to experiment and pilot new ways of teaching timeless truths and values. It may be a little messy, but doing the same thing while passively watching urban Catholic schools close does not seem right. I wish and pray for Memphis’s Jubilee schools to transition successfully into charters. Launching ten charter schools at once is not for the faint of heart, and is even harder when the charters are charged with imparting virtue, as well as knowledge and skills. But the city’s children are counting on leaders to get it right. All of us who care about the future of Catholic education in this country are.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Charter schools have long been criticized for enrolling lower percentages of students with special needs than traditional public schools. However, recent evidence suggests that this gap is narrowing. And a new study from the Institute of Education Sciences examines such changes in Louisiana.

Patrick Wolf, of the University of Arkansas, and Shannon Lasserre-Cortez, from the American Institutes for Research, use data from the Louisiana Department of Education to determine gaps in special education enrollment—defined as the percentage of students who have individualized education plans—in charters and traditional public schools from 2010–14. They look at the four educational regions of Louisiana that have three or more charter schools: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Jefferson and five nearby parishes, and Ouachita and five surrounding parishes. They examine overall enrollment differences and differences based on school level and disability category.

Wolf and Lasserre-Cortez find that, overall, the gap in special education enrollment between charter and district schools narrowed steadily from 2.5 percentage in 2010 points to 0.5 percentage points in 2014, but also that the results were more mixed when broken down by region. The gaps in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans regions both dropped between 2010 and 2014, from 2.8 to 1.2 percentage points and 5.8 to 2.9 percentage points, respectively. Yet it held steady at 3.0 percentage points in the more suburban Jefferson region, and widened by 5.3 percentage points in the predominantly rural Ouachita region.

School-level data tell a different story. The special education enrollment gap in elementary grades narrowed but remained moderately wide at 2.3 percentage points in 2014. But the middle school gap disappeared, and the high school gap actually reversed from 0.4 percentage points in 2010 to -1.7 percentage points in 2014.

By disability category, Wolf and Lasserre-Cortez find that traditional public schools continued to serve higher proportions of students with severe and low-incidence disabilities, but also that gaps for high-incidence disabilities—emotional disturbance, specific learning disability, speech/language impairment, and other health impairments—largely disappeared, with charter schools enrolling higher proportions of students with emotional disturbance than their district counterparts.

These results are, however, limited by the study’s timeframe and location. New Orleans’s disproportionately high charter enrollment rates skew statewide findings. The analysis omits as much as 35 percent of Louisiana’s charter populations because sparse charter offerings in much of the state made charter-district comparisons infeasible. And the rates may be significantly different today than in 2014 due in part to funding changes in 2015 that gave New Orleans’s charter schools more money to serve students with severe disabilities. These caveats necessitate further research if we’re to have a complete and current understanding of these enrollments trends and how policies affect them.

Nevertheless, Wolf and Lasserre-Cortez’s study contributes to a growing body of evidence that many charter schools are working to serve special needs students at similar rates as nearby traditional public schools, particularly in urban areas.  

SOURCE: Patrick J. Wolf and Shannon Lasserre-Cortez, “Special education enrollment and classification in Louisiana charter schools and traditional schools,” Institute of Education Sciences. (January 2018).

1. Editors in Toledo this week offered their opinion on the closure of ECOT. It’s generally what you’d expect, but it curiously includes something of a warning that might seem a little odd at first blush, but will not be that big of a surprise for all of my loyal Gadfly Bites subscribers. Thanks for sticking with me, y’all. (Toledo Blade, 1/29/18) I have asked myself numerous times during this debacle why we are here now. Why did this moment out of all the other possible “turning points” over the last 18 years finally stick? I know yesterday’s PD article on ECOT is not supposed to be about that question, but I think the answer to it may be in there anyway. (Cleveland Plain Ealer, 1/30/18)
    
2. I know we’ve covered this before, but the state body tasked with reviewing proposed program rules this week approved changes to the College Credit Plus program, as expected. These cover limitations on available courses and setting up some new guardrails around student participation. Yeah, I know this is boring, but there’s a dearth of clips today and sometimes it’s refreshing to bask in the pure glow of bureaucratic pragmatism. (Gongwer Ohio, 1/29/18)
    
3. I guess that pragmatism is the main thrust of this story too—Dayton’s school board is paying big to end the tenure of its suspended superintendent without further fuss—but I’m not sure how “pure” it is at this point. (Dayton Daily News, 1/30/18)
    
4. It’s probably too soon (or possibly too late, who can tell?) for pragmatism to be guiding the Columbus school board in dealing with the district’s projected budget deficit. First-round efforts, as detailed here, are inconclusive. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/30/18)

Schools have long failed to cultivate the innate talents of many of their young people, particularly high-ability girls and boys from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. This failure harms the economy, widens income gaps, arrests upward mobility, and exacerbates civic decay and political division.

A new Fordham study, Is There a Gifted Gap?: Gifted Education in High-Poverty Schools, addresses these issues. Researchers Christopher Yaluma and Adam Tyner examined the extent to which access to and participation in gifted programs vary for different groups of students, particularly in high-poverty schools. Here’s what they found:

• More than two-thirds of elementary and middle schools have gifted programs.
• Overall, high-poverty schools are just as likely as low-poverty schools to have them.
• Yet students in low-poverty schools are more than twice as likely to participate in such programs.
• Even when black and Hispanic students have gifted programs in their elementary and middle schools, they participate at much lower rates than their peers. 
• In schools with gifted programs, only Maryland, Kentucky, and New Hampshire enroll more than 10 percent of the state’s black and Hispanic students in those programs; in twenty-two states it’s less than 5 percent.

Increasing the participation of qualified yet underrepresented students in gifted programming in elementary and middle schools would change the trajectories of these children and gradually lessen social and economic inequality. We offer three recommendations to help on this front:

1. Consider universal screening and other ways to streamline identification processes and make them more equitable.
2. Identify students for gifted programs using local norms.
3. Counter bias in identifying and serving minority gifted students.

For tomorrow’s leaders to reflect America’s diversity, today’s schools must cultivate able kids from every kind of background. Toward that end, first-rate gifted programming in high-poverty schools can contribute a great deal.