Education Week - October 28, 2015 - 12

BEYOND BIAS

Countering Stereotypes in School

Districts Look for Ways to Diversify Honors, Gifted Classes
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

preconceived ideas about kids' desire to learn or families' capacity
to be involved," he said. "Part of the
challenge is helping people see how
their practices can exacerbate disparities."

Access to advance courses remains a pressing issue too.
From 2003 to 2011, the portion
of low-income white 4th graders
who scored at the advanced level
in mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress
rose from 2 percent to 3 percent.
Low-income black and Hispanic
students showed no gains during
that time, with 1 percent of Hispanics and, statistically speaking, zero
percent of black 4th graders reaching advanced scores on the math
NAEP.
By contrast, 12 percent of highincome white students scored at the
advanced level in 4th grade math in
2011, up 5 percentage points from
2003, but only 3 percent of black
and 5 percent of Hispanic highincome 4th graders reached that
level, up 2 percentage points and
3 percentage points, respectively,
from 2003.
"Racialized" academic-tracking outcomes are not confined to schools in
the South, as some might think, said
Karolyn Tyson, a sociology professor
sociology professor at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Even when schools are giving
kids the choice [to take advanced
courses], they don't want to do it,
because they don't feel prepared,
and they don't want to fail," said
Tyson, who studies honors access.
A series of analyses by the Education Trust found that more than 9
in 10 high school students nationwide attend a school with at least
one Advanced Placement class, but
poor students are nearly twice as
likely to attend a school that offers
only a few such classes, rather than
a "full complement" of at least one
AP class each in English, math, science, and social studies.
Five years ago, the 62,500-student Elk Grove system was one of
hundreds of districts nationwide
that were censured by the U.S. Department of Education's office for
civil rights for not providing equal
access to gifted education at the elementary level and to honors courses
in high school.
Investigators found the generally
high-performing Elk Grove had serious achievement gaps, but unlike
districts such as Adams County 14
in Colorado, it had no history of intentional bias against its students.
(See Education Week, Sept. 16, 2015.)
Rather, in practice, the programs
and policies in place on paper to
boost achievement for all students
unintentionally put poor or black,
Hispanic, and Native American students at a disadvantage.
At the time, Elk Grove students
who performed in the top 2 percent

Hector Amezcua for Education Week

Falling Off Track

Kaianna Kelley, an 8th grader
at Harriet G. Eddy Middle
School, in Elk Grove, Calif.,
gets a hug from counselor
Sandi Peterson after turning
in her application to the
school's honors program.
Peterson says she has made
it her mission to reach out to
underrepresented students
for honors and gifted classes.

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 28, 2015 | www.edweek.org

on the California Standards Test
automatically qualified for gifted
and talented education, or GATE.
In theory, students also could be
recommended by teachers or earn
points in a "gifted matrix" for a high
grade point average, creative ability,
and classroom leadership, or a high
score on a nonverbal-ability test designed to identify gifted students.
In practice, though, schools relied
overwhelmingly on state test scores.
Teachers didn't know how to gauge
unusual creativity or leadership in
the classroom. From 2009 to 2011,
no black student was referred for
gifted screening based on leadership or creativity, federal investigators found, and many teachers
at low-income and high-minority
schools did not even know it was an
option.
In some of the district's schools,
even black students who were doing
advanced coursework within their
classes were not recommended for
gifted identification.
As a result, in 2013-14, Elk Grove
had about 3,200 gifted students,
but black, Hispanic, and Englishlearner students, as well as those
in the foster-care system, were all
underrepresented.
While low-income students made
up nearly 60 percent of the district,
only 3.5 percent of the district's lowincome students were identified as
gifted. By contrast, more than 11
percent of students not in poverty
were considered gifted.
"We have nearly 1,000 kids; it's
hard for me to believe that only 10
of our kids could qualify [as gifted],"
said John Mifsud, the coordinator of

gifted and talented education at Isabelle Jackson Elementary School,
a Title I school in Elk Grove. "Having a parent who can lobby for you
to get into GATE shouldn't be a prerequisite," he added.

Systemic Approach
Instead of trying to fix achievement gaps school by school, Elk
Grove brought all its schools and
grade levels together to understand
the systemic problems.
Administrators found students
who had been identified for gifted
programs or participated in accelerated coursework in elementary
school often lost their momentum
in middle school, particularly if they
were from low-income or minority
families.
That's not uncommon. Achievement gaps between high-performing black and white students actually grew faster than the gaps
between low-achieving black and
white students. A study from the
University of California, Los Angeles, for example, examined how
gaps in math and reading performance changed from kindergarten
to 5th grade. The gaps between
black and white students who performed well at an early age grew
twice as fast as the gaps between
their low-performing peers.
"What we see, being immersed in
this work, is that there are a lot of
great things happening in schools,
but unless the district allows for
that to become systemic, then that
equity won't be there for everyone,"
said Sonjhia Lowery, the director

of Elk Grove's learning-support
services.
If the elementary level provides a
variety of classes and programs for
gifted students, she said, "and then
they get to middle school and they
can take nothing, what good is all
that work?"
The district streamlined its enrollment process and removed course
requirements for joining Advanced
Placement and International Baccalaureate, which previously had
varied from school to school and had
more prerequisites than national
programs.
"We tried to encourage kids to join
[IB], but there have always been
these barriers to participation-applications, prerequisites, meetings
with parents-and those things
had sorted kids," said Doug Craig,
the principal of Elk Grove's Laguna
Creek High School.
Laguna Creek is now working
with its feeder schools Elitha Donner Elementary and Harriet Eddy
Middle to build a "pre-IB" program
with project-based courses, in both
the middle and elementary grades.
The district also is experimenting
with ways to identify capable but
underperforming students and to ensure they are prepared both academically and psychologically to tackle
challenging high school courses.
Harriet Eddy Middle, for example,
provides 30 minutes of individual
tutoring for every student each day,
plus a half-hour of social-emotional
skills and stress-management lessons each Friday.
"The idea of support for a long time
was around kids who weren't being

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Education Week - October 28, 2015

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