For instance, she reminds Hudson of the conversation she had with the woman who administered his initial IQ test about the cultural bias embedded in standardized testing. There was one question that asked kids to identify a picture of a rooster. It’s the sort of question that trips up more poor, urban kids, the administrator told her, because they’d misidentify it as a chicken.
“That,” she pointed out, “was not an example of intelligence but of exposure. Yet questions like that are being used to determine if kids should be in gifted programming.”
Potential testing flaws aside, a new report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank headed up by Michael Petrilli, a former Bush administration aide, shows that Minnesota may not be doing enough to tap into the potential of students like Hudson. And the holdup may be something much more obvious: a lack of gifted programs.
Its researchers examined the so-called “gifted gap” and found that Minnesota schools are less likely to offer gifted programming, on the whole, than schools in other states. Here, only 51.5 percent of schools have gifted programs, compared to 68 percent nationally.
Further breakdown of these numbers shows that more affluent Minnesota schools are actually at the national average, with 64.5 percent offering gifted programming. That means the disparity between Minnesota and the national average is driven by a lack of offerings at middle- and high-poverty schools.
And here is where the need for reforms in the way students are flagged and tested for gifted programming may come into play: Even in high-poverty schools that do offer gifted programming, black students are less likely to actually be enrolled in them than their white and Asian peers.