Education Week - October 28, 2015 - 13

successful, rather than kids who were
ready but not accepting that challenge," said Alicia Canning, the giftedprograms coordinator for Elk Grove.
"So we've had to think about, how
do you provide tutoring for kids
who went from an A in the general
[education] class to a C in the honors
class, and supporting them so they
can be successful and not want to
leave?" she said. "That's something
our schools have been thinking about
systemwide."
Sandi Peterson, a Harriet Eddy
counselor, has a personal stake
in getting more low-income and
minority students into honors
courses.
Peterson was told her best bet after
high school was "to marry a nice man
and get a part-time job," she said. "I
had teachers who told me that, and
that's what has stuck with me."

It's been about
changing the mindset
about who is a gifted
student, knowing who
has the potential but
needs a little more
support going into it."
LIZ PERRY
Gifted Education Coordinator
Case Elementary School

Instead, Peterson became the only
one of her six siblings to graduate
from college, and she now seeks out
low-income and minority students
who showed promise in elementary
grades but who are performing at the
average or poorly in middle school.
"I run data reports each year on
all the student subgroups coming in,
and start finding who has a 2.5 GPA
that I can work on," Peterson said. "I
take a look at their history, find who
might have had a move, or their parents divorced-I could name a hundred reasons they fell off course, but
that helped me find and capture a lot
of these students."
In the past three years, the honors society in Peterson's school has
grown from 37 to 230 students.

Broader Measures of Giftedness
Elk Grove is also working to temper
the potential for implicit bias in referrals for gifted education at all levels.
Research has found that teachers
are less likely to recommend students
for gifted programs when their names
have nonstandard spellings or are associated with low-income or specific
ethnic groups. A 2015 study in the
Journal of Educational Psychology
even found that teachers rated students' academic abilities higher when
the students had similar personality
traits to the teachers themselves.
These biases hold even when
teachers consciously believe they
are recommending students equitably. (To test your own im-

plicit bias in recommending students for a gifted program, check
out our ongoing study online, at
www.edweek.org/go/bias-quiz.)
Without changing the eligibility criteria for its gifted program, the Broward County, Fla., district more than
doubled the number of low-income
students and students of color who
were identified after 2005. The district simply supplemented its identification system, based on teacher
or parent referrals, with a universal
screening for all 2nd graders.
The newly identified students
"included many students with IQs
significantly above the minimum
eligibility threshold, implying that
even relatively high-ability students from disadvantaged backgrounds were being overlooked
under the traditional referral system," according to economists David
Card of the University of California,
Berkeley, and Laura Giuliano of the
University of Miami, who studied
Broward's initiative.
Last spring, Elk Grove administered
the same nonverbal cognitive test to
all of its 3rd graders. This fall, the
total number of gifted students rose by
nearly 100, with higher proportions of
low-income, black, and Hispanic students identified as gifted.
The district's Elitha Donner Elementary School, for example, identified 12 low-income students as gifted
this year, up from only three last
year, and narrowed the white-black
gap in gifted education from 4-to-1
in favor of whites to 2.5-to-1 in the
last year alone.
Liz Perry, the coordinator of gifted
education at Case Elementary, another Elk Grove district school, said
teachers balked when they first saw
the students identified by the universal gifted screening.
"Many of the students [identified
this year] would never have received
an invitation under the old system,"
Perry said. "Teachers were like,
'There's no way it's this kid.' They just
weren't seeing it in the classroom.
"It's been about changing the mindset about who is a gifted student,"
she said, and "knowing who has the
potential but needs a little more support going into it."
Next year, the district will roll out
the rest of the changes to the identification system, with teachers and
principals developing new rubrics
for identifying exceptional creativity
and leadership, both in class and in
outside activities, such as community volunteering and church youth
groups.
In the process, said Michelle Jenkins, Donner Elementary's principal,
teachers are rethinking how they
view a student's potential. "We're
looking at our students differently,"
she said. "It's training your brain
that 'gifted' is not always your top
academic students."
Coverage of the experiences of low-income,
high-achieving students is supported in
part by a grant from the Jack Kent Cooke
Foundation, at www.jkcf.org. Education
Week retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.
Visit the INSIDE SCHOOL RESEARCH blog,
which tracks news and trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/blogs

'Microaggressions':
Slights That Wound

BEYOND BIAS
Countering
Stereotypes
In School
--------------------------------ABOUT THIS SERIES:

This package is the
second installment in a
yearlong series on efforts
to recognize and overcome
discrimination in schools.
THIS WEEK

Articles this week explore
strategies for expanding
students' access to advanced
coursework, initiatives to buffer
students from the harmful
effects of implicit and explicit
biases, and programs aimed at
bridging cultural divides between
educators and the families of
minority students.
VIDEO: Author Alexandra
Zapruder discusses how
children's accounts of genocide
offer a counterweight to the
dehumanizing effects of bias
and prejudice.

www.edweek.org/go/zapruder

-------------------------------FIRST INSTALLMENT

Stories in the September
package focus on schools'
efforts to root out discriminatory
practices and revisit Ferguson,
Mo., a year after the shooting
death of a black teenager by a
white policeman sparked days of
riots and protests there.
Multimedia: Try an online quiz to
test your own biases and watch
middle school students
in a district neighboring
Ferguson discuss what bias
means to them.
To see all of the articles and
features in the series, go to
www.edweek.org/go/bias

We'll be doing frog
anatomy today. Ben, why don't
you do the dissection, and
Amy, you can take notes."
Assumes a female student can't or
won't want to do hands-on work.

It's OK you got the
problem wrong. A lot of
girls have trouble with
linear equations."
Assumes the student missed a
problem because girls are bad at math.

Kaito, can you teach
the class how to say 'Happy
Holidays' in Japanese?"
Assumes the student speaks
another language based on
his name.

MULTIMEDIA: Look for an interactive
graphic later this week showing
common microaggressions.
www.edweek.org/go/bias

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

program in Buffalo, N.Y. When her
mother, Debby Bennett, who is
white, asked to enroll her biracial
daughter in the gifted program, Ellie's teacher waffled. "She asked if I
was in gifted [education] in a predominantly black school before,"
Ellie said. "She assumed I couldn't
read and wouldn't know the difference between a triangle and a
square. She assumed I wasn't up to
her standard."
Ellie persisted, getting separately
tested to prove her IQ, but said she
knows other bright students who
disengage. "You deal with these assumptions and racism even when
you are 7," she said. "If people already have expectations of you from
when you are a little kid-and kids
are aware of what teachers expect-
by the time you get through all those
years of school with those assumptions piling up, it's like, what's the
point of taking an honors class?"
While Ellie, now a junior at Eureka High School, takes several
Advanced Placement courses, she
said she still "is a little jaded when
it comes to new teachers. Whenever
there is a substitute, even if other
kids are talking, I'm always not
talking and doing my work because
I don't want to feed into any misconceptions about me."

Tracking 'Microaggressions'
Classroom interactions that
teachers intend to be inclusive can
instead make students feel vulnerable if they are singled out based on
race, disability, or income level.
For example, in a 2010 study,
Georgia Southern University researcher Mary Anne Meeks tracked
microaggressions experienced by

Oh, Caroline,
you're from Carver High?
You should probably sign up for our
afterschool tutoring program."
Assumes a student coming from
a high-poverty high school will be
academically behind.

I don't
see race when
I look at you."

Factually untrue for
many students, and
ignores the student's
experience of race.

342 students in a large, diverse high
school over four years. Students
reported they had experienced a
majority of 21 types of microaggressions at least once during their high
school careers, such as teachers assuming a black student was poor
without asking, or acting surprised
or giving outsize praise for being articulate.
Students of color were called on
to speak on behalf of their race during class discussions, while white
students were the least likely to fill

that role. Hispanic and Asian students said they were asked to teach
words in their "native" language,
even if they spoke only English.
Interactions like these have been
shown in hundreds of studies to
trigger what's known as stereotype
threat, the fear that one's actions
could confirm a negative stereotype
held about his or her group. Ironically, top-performing students can be
particularly vulnerable to performing worse under stereotype threat.

Learning Under Threat
Under normal, nonthreatening
circumstances, a student learning to
solve a linear equation gets a little
jolt of dopamine, a "good feeling"
chemical, when he or she answers a
problem correctly. It helps the new
method stick in the brain. Learners
generally "forget" wrong answers
quickly.
Stereotype threat can make that
system misfire, studies have found.
Say that same student is a girl in
a mostly male calculus class, and
her teacher seems surprised when
she answers a difficult question correctly. The student fears that the
teacher or other students believe
women are not good at math, and
any mistake she makes will confirm
that stereotype. This fear takes up
mental energy-making it harder to
think on the spot-and emotionally
charges her reaction to errors, making her remember the wrong answer
as strongly as she would the right
answer, found a 2014 study. Students under stereotype threat can
end up brooding, not reflecting, on
mistakes.
In a school with academic tracking, taking honors classes can come
to seem risky for low-income and
minority students, particularly
those who already have top grades
in standard classes, said Alycia
Sato, a counselor at Laguna Creek
High School in Elk Grove, Calif. "It's
the fear factor," Sato said. "They are
scared of the B."
Tracy Oliver-Gary, a 10-year veteran Advanced Placement teacher
and current content specialist in the
Montgomery County, Md., district,
said her approach to teaching AP
changed after a conversation with
one Black History class about why AP
classes were disproportionately white.
"They began to talk about, 'Oh,
I was in another AP class and I
dropped it. I was the only black student and I felt dumb,' " Oliver-Gary
said. "Those conversations shocked
me; I started to really think about
... the role of the class environment,
what does it feel like to know you
belong and are not isolated?"
Educators in the nearly 1,700-student Laguna Creek High found they
needed to boost social and emotional,
not just academic, supports for students when the school changed its
entry requirements for honors and
International Baccalaureate classes
PAGE 14 >

EDUCATION WEEK | October 28, 2015 | www.edweek.org | 13

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Education Week - October 28, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 28, 2015