14 ms·

Gifted programs are "unacceptably white". WTF does that mean? I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. For me, it made a big diff

by derac 4y ago

Gifted programs are "unacceptably white". WTF does that mean? I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. For me, it made a big difference in being engaged in schoolwork when every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes. Edit: I removed "I don't see what race has to do with it." I do see how race can affect this when the gatekeeper is a teacher with biases choosing who takes the test to be in the program. This does not however make it ok to say "unacceptably white"

jeremyjh 4y ago
Just read what he wrote? > Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program.
- chernevik 4y ago
  How is that an answer? If someone isn't meeting the qualifications they aren't in. What's "unacceptable" about that?
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Are there qualifications other than test scores?
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Apparently race given the assertion of similar test scores
    - wccrawford 4y ago
      There are unwritten ones, at least. As I said in my other post, in my school you were taken out of regularly classes, but still had to learn those things and do that work. That means the student has to agree to work 20% harder, usually at home, where they may not have that luxury. There are probably other considerations that aren't coming to mind at the moment, too, that also affect the number of children in Gifted programs.
    - derac 4y ago
      In my experience you are nominated to take an IQ-ish test and let in based on that score. I assume they mean test scores on regular coursework?
  - orpheansodality 4y ago
    > compared to white students with similar test scores
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    > with similar test scores > with similar test scores > WITH SIMILAR TEST SCORES
    - throwaway81348 4y ago
      Your point?
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        Presumably test scores are a not terrible proxy for qualification. So if black and hispanic students of similar qualification are not being admitted into these programs, then the programs are not actually equitably enrolling people.
    - fein 4y ago
      I had to look around for the source of this, and I can't find the "with similar test scores" part in the Vanderbuilt site article on the Vanderbuilt study this is based on. It says 66% less likely, but the "similar test scores" part isn't in the same paragraph. I really dislike that it is so difficult to find the source of these statements in modern media, as the news articles I read didn't even cite the study, I had to go googling for it. What I found: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects-gifted-program-selections/ https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects... and of course the link to the gov data source in that article is broken: http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/ http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/ Edit: I see where they pulled the line from. Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.
      - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
        If you read three paragraphs of the article you linked you can see the statement written in plain english: > However, controlling for math and reading scores did not have the same effect for black students. In fact, black students continued to be assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical math and reading achievement. If you read to the end, the paper is literally linked: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Grissom_AERAOpen_GiftedStudents1.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Because the systems which identify students and enable them to meet the admissions requirements are massively unequal. I'll give an example. I attended a gifted program starting in 3rd grade. I went to an elementary school for 1st and 2nd grade that was almost entirely white with some asian kids. Part of the mechanism for selecting students for the gifted program was a letter from the student's counselor, teacher, and principal. My mom noticed that some schools were sending way more kids to the GT program than others. Several schools basically never sent any kids. No surprise, there were more black and hispanic kids at the schools. BUT these schools did not have a lack of students with high SOL scores or grades. It turned out that the process of identifying students and writing letters was letting these kids down. A few years of local activism to adjust the process and suddenly a bunch of kids from these other schools were being admitted to the GT program and succeeding. Activists recently tried to adjust the admissions criteria for TJHSST, a magnet school in the area, to be a "merit lottery." This says that you set some minimum qualification (minimum GPA and accelerated math coursework) and then select students at random from that pool. This proposal was called racist against south and east asian students and activists were called enemies of excellence by various people like Scott Aaronson. I was personally identified as having potential for going to TJ at age four. My parents paid a lot of money for me to have tutoring specifically for the admissions test. In the above example, black and hispanic students with similar qualifications (test scores) are not receiving the same access to accelerated programs. The point is that the mechanisms by which we define qualifications and select students really really matters and can encode all sorts of inequities.
    - chernevik 4y ago
      The answer would be to improve the development of those students who are underdeveloped -- not change criteria for the identification of potential. This is, of course, far more complicated, and involves difficult problems. Far easier to sweep it all under the rug by calling attention to qualifications "unacceptable".
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        In my personal experience agitating for change in this space, it is precisely the same people who resist change in admissions criteria and who resist change in grants for equitable early development resources. And in the example I listed for early GT admissions, there was no need for developing "underdeveloped" students. They were already developed. They just had systems that didn't enable them to get through the gate to the GT program.
- derac 4y ago
  Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black? Why don't we remove basketball courts from inner cities and cut off black kid's feet /s eye roll BTW, I realize he is arguing for the opposite of this. edit: If you think I am racist or something let me spell it out as I did in another comment: It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    That is a bad analogy because the NBA is not the only accessible path to a stable middle class life while school, for many people, is.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      Not even close to true. Going into a trade is a great way to get into a comfortable middle class life. And in those trades, you'll commonly find people who did horrible in school, and thought they were idiots because of it.
      - b112 4y ago
        Yes, some trades pay way more, have more available jobs, and have better working conditions (work hours, etc) than PhDs in a variety of sciences.
      - davewritescode 4y ago
        Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or an electrician. The ultimate goal should be to provide better education for everyone so that all students have as many available options by the time they're ready to pick a career path. Also, I hate these comments from white collar folks about blue collar jobs being the answer to everything. Yes we need them, but we also need to be honest that the average plumber is going to have a harder time working until 65 than an office worker.
        googlryas 4y ago
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Are they less likely to be identified because they they are treated differently or because they go to schools that don’t offer those programs?
- mikece 4y ago
  Sounds like the problem might be with those who are selected to identify the "gifted" students. I am less interested in racial correlations to being identified as "gifted" and more interested in attributes such as whether the student is from a two-parent household, whether they are considered poor, whether they attend a local school or are transported to one outside of their neighborhood, etc. I suspect that we lose out on identifying many gifted children because issues at home and mere survival interfere with their ability to grow and develop academically.
  - harles 4y ago
    This assumes being gifted is something innate and simply needs to be brought out. I don’t think that’s the case.
    - mikece 4y ago
      A person with a latent talent which isn't identified and developed has no advantage over the person who doesn't have the talent at all. If we as a society can't do what it reasonable and prudent to identify and nurture such people then we all lose.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- daenz 4y ago
  I dug up the study, in case anyone is interested https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Grissom_AERAOpen_GiftedStudents1.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris... What's interesting that is not mentioned is page 15: a black student with a black teacher is still much less likely to be identified as gifted. even less than a white student with a non-white teacher. internalized racism?
  - tpoacher 4y ago
    more like different schools, the difference reflecting the sociodemographics of the reflected areas rather than racial IQ differences.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Probably more like black teachers with black students are more likely to exist in poor areas where identifying "giftedness" is lower on the list of priorities.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  How conveniently that the writer omits Asians.
  - baisq 4y ago
    And Jews.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  ppl keep overlooking this part. it shows how important it is to read slowly and carefully.
- TimPC 4y ago
  When I was in grade 3 there was a standardized test for gifted. While standardized tests do have some racial disparity that disparity seems to be far smaller than letting teachers nominate students for a gifted evaluation rather than having it be universal.
- tpoacher 4y ago
  And then also click the provided link, which leads to a summary of the report, claiming that "this is unlikely to reflect teacher prejudice, but availability of 'gifted programs' in predominantly black schools". In which case, the solution is "fund more gifted programs in schools that lack them", not "defund existing gifted programs". Which is kinda what the article's author started to argue but never quite got there in the end.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    No fair actually reading the source material, we're just here to yell at each other fruitlessly and solely on the basis of our preexisting ideas.
- mmmpop 4y ago
  So you're implying that the conclusion of "unacceptable whiteness" is self-evident by simple examination of these two points... or what? Perhaps "unacceptably lacking in Black students" is a less divisive way to say this, unless the decisiveness were intended and surely that's not the case.
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  Forgive me if this seems all too simple to me. The solution is very clearly stop doing that then. There's a lot of value in having a gifted track in schooling. Throwing that away because it is currently inaccurate at identifying students that are best suited to it is a stupid idea. Make it accurate at identifying the students that are best suited to it instead.
  - bena 4y ago
    The problem, as always, is people. You can't self-select to be evaluated. Your parents can advocate, but they ultimately don't decide either. Although I think they can turn down the evaluation, I'm unclear on that though. The first hurdle is getting the teacher to not only recognize that the child may be gifted, but to make the recommendation to administration. Then it is administration who ultimately makes the call on whether or not to evaluate the kid. And teachers are more likely to recommend white students than black students. And this may not even be something they're consciously aware of doing. Because a lot of this is based on the teachers' perceptions of students. If you have a good rapport with a student, you're more likely to recommend them to be evaluated. If you are constantly butting heads with a kid, or if the kid is just quietly doing their work, you're not going to be inclined to recommend them. Regardless of how well they are doing in class. I was not evaluated until partway through my freshman year of high school and the only reason I was was because the teacher who ran the Quiz Bowl team got everyone who made it on the team who wasn't already in the gifted program evaluated. Otherwise, I probably would not have been evaluated at all.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    That is exactly what the article says...
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Yes, that is why the SP was written.
- adolph 4y ago
  That is not the quote from tfa. The quote is "The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be." The author's focus on a particular racial classification seems incongruent with facts, given that students with another racial group are also over-represented in "Gifted Programs."
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
  I have a very simple solution for LatinX group and it's also about equity. Like ALL other immigrants groups LatinX group should have to go through proper immigration process. Then we will see equity in immigration and equity in education.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Got a link to the specific paper and description of how it was done? Trying to chase it down just got me to this: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Grissom_AERAOpen_GiftedStudents1.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris... Which seems like it just is saying that the proportion assigned to gifted programs was lower than what the average test score would suggest (notable when compared to hispanics), but hispanics could have a wider distribution (or a bimodal one), so this seems like a shoddy test. The correct check of the hypothesis would be to find the test score threshhold above which 50% of students get into the gifted program and see if this threshhold varies by race... but I can't find anywhere this is done.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mistrial9 4y ago
> every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes literally the same experience for me; many people in urban school never became literate in their entire adult lives, let alone math.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  So just schools in general, because the teacher has to take care for the whole class and can’t cater to every student.
908B64B197 4y ago
> Gifted programs are "unacceptably white". You are only scratching the surface here. Some places had a hard time "proving" their gifted programs were "too white" so they started using the term "white and white-adjacent" to include Asian kids as well (often from impoverished background but that's another issue) in these stats [0]. > I don't see why race has anything to do with it. Buckle up. The SF school district is trying to include a lot more racial content at school [1]. Now even math is considered racist [2]. I wish I was making this up. [0] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-categorizes-asians-as-white-adjacent/ https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego... [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/San-Francisco-school-board-s-antics-would-be-15948058.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa... [2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
- jl6 4y ago
  “Math is racist” is not what is being claimed in link #2. It’s math instruction that they claim to be racist. I have no idea if this is true but it’s at least plausible.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    The veneer is quite thin. There are even more radical proposals [0] they are trying to introduce in High School classes. It's hard not to see the real agenda past the shallow arguments against gifted programs [1]. This was an enlightening read to say the least. [0] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/ https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/ [1] https://unherd.com/2022/02/anti-racism-betrays-asian-students/ https://unherd.com/2022/02/anti-racism-betrays-asian-student...
    - jl6 4y ago
      What do you mean by the veneer being quite thin? You mean that the surface-level claim that math instruction is racist is actually cover for a deeper claim that math itself is racist? Where do they come close to making that deeper claim?
llbeansandrice 4y ago
> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. IQ tests are notoriously and historically pretty racist. They can be useful in certain contexts but they aren't very good as an academic gatekeeper or a measure of individual intelligence.
- victor9000 4y ago
  Ok, I'll bite, how are IQ tests racist?
  - anthonypasq 4y ago
    you could theoretically have questions that rely on cultural background info to understand it. i imagine there are questions that a chinese student would understand and an american would not, but IQ tests and most other standardized test are rigorously tested to avoid this stuff. they look for this and throw out offending questions on the SAT all the time
  - com2kid 4y ago
    Let's take a math story problem. Give an upper class white kid a problem involving tennis scores, no problem. The kid will be able to easily understand what is being talked about, there isn't anything mentally jarring going on. Give a poor black kid a problem involving tennis scores, boom, problem. Odds of a poor black kid knowing how tennis scoring works, much less likely. My, largely well to do, neighborhood has tennis courts. The more diverse, and poorer, neighborhood I grew up in, didn't. I am still not sure how tennis is scored, but I am pretty sure the kids in the house next to me understand it. Repeat this idea a few times with some of the other tests. Give some word recall lists using words poor/minority kids aren't accustom to. It is harder to recall words that you have never heard before, they are basically nonsense syllables, which is a very different test. If you had thrown "quiche" in the middle of a word list 8 year old me would have had no idea what you were talking about. Modern day IQ tests have tried to correct for these biases, but school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results.
    - 4y ago
mpalmer 4y ago
There is no intelligence test I know of that can perfectly control for advantages and disadvantages in education / home life. Not everyone is as well-positioned as you might have been to excel at an IQ test. And to the extent that someone is disadvantaged, their race may indeed be an indirect cause.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> Gifted programs are "unacceptably white" Curious if they're also "unacceptably asian" - the author doesn't seem to think so, or at least didn't feel the need to say so.
- chipsa 4y ago
  Asians are white when it's unhelpful to the narrative for them to be a minority. See also "underrepresented minority", which translates to: non-Asian minority.
  - ge96 4y ago
    Hate to suggest this but I was wondering if I was diversity hire lol, since my skills are definitely subpar but I still got in somehow. I can do soft skills but yeah. -- anyway I'll take it, I need it.
mnw21cam 4y ago
In my opinion the worst enemy of an intelligent student is boredom. Boredom causes underachievement and disillusionment. One reason to keep a gifted programme at school is to give intelligent students something to do that is actually interesting.
mcculley 4y ago
I was in one of these programs in middle and high school (1985-1990). My experience was that only a very small subset were selected to be tested. Most of the "gifted" students were born to parents who knew how to advocate for them and get them tested. (Mostly white, mostly upper middle class, many children of teachers.) I am certain that if every student had been tested, the composition of the gifted classes would have been very different. Many students who fell through the cracks would have been put in the higher level classes and many at the lower end of the gifted program would not have made the cut (given fixed class sizes for the gifted program). We should test every student.
- mmmpop 4y ago
  Well, I was a dirt poor child of a single Puerto Rican mom in eastern Kentucky and I was accepted in gifted education the first year I went to public schools (which was the first year it was offered--the reason I went.) But to your point, I was not able to take algebra until 9th grade due to reasons that felt a bit discriminatory as you'd described, but my mother was a maniac and no one liked her, so hard to say if that didn't add weight.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    There are always individual cases that work out. Even in systems with extreme oppression, members of oppressed groups succeed. But it is still a problem if there is a large and observable statistical disparity between groups for no compelling reason. Consider a toy admissions criteria where students go through the same process as today but students with black hair have to also win a game of rock paper scissors. There will surely be a large number of kids with black hair who are admitted and succeed. But the system would be plainly unfair and deserve to be fixed, despite many individual students with black hair being able to say "well I was admitted."
    - mmmpop 4y ago
      I think what I'm getting at is that the "rich White affluent people gave me a chance" and I "didn't behave" according to their standards, so they pushed me out. I was too young to understand, but perhaps they had a fair point? I was well-behaved and bright, but coarse I suppose. I was too poor to participate in the fancy science trips, couldn't afford class materials, constantly late, and homework never got done due to what I remember as "family issues". I was bright and gifted, but a high achiever I was not. I don't blame them for pushing me out of the system, I didn't play by the rules. But from what you're saying, that's part of the problem and I don't disagree... but allowing me to persist and annoy those gifted kids with resources, encouraging families, and ambition wasn't really fair now was it?
lmkg 4y ago
> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. I don't see why race has anything to do with it. Simply put, we don't know how to make objective IQ tests yet. The questions in IQ tests tend to bake in a bunch of cultural assumptions, often in ways you don't expect. So the test measures a combination of IQ, and affinity with a specific cultural background. First, let me be clear about this: The issue is friction. Even at the same difficulty, a question that's more accessible is less stressful and less mentally taxing. Especially when you're dealing with kids. This matters more at the cut-off than the extremes of the bell-curve, but has statistical impacts. I just searched for "Fourth Grade IQ Test" and clicked a random link. Four of the ten questions are about sharing cookies. Baking cookies and sharing cookies are typical middle-class-white activity, but I don't know how that shakes out in other cultures. Maybe they share other foods? Maybe sharing food is offensive because it implies the other kids' parents can't provide for themselves? Maybe the kids aren't in charge of food division? The underlying math is, of course, objective. But the math is being framed through a perspective which is more or less familiar to different backgrounds.
- dpbriggs 4y ago
  Any further reading recommendations? It's unclear why the cultural example of baking and sharing food would cause significant differences in test results but that's picking at an example. Were the six other questions also stereotypical of white middle class families? I imagine they were more abstract (lacking cultural context?). Would the solution here be to remove cultural context, or have culturally tailored exams? It would be interesting to take IQ tests from other countries and compare results. I imagine other factors such as home life, economic status, and cultural emphasis on education would be much, much stronger predictors on IQ test performance.
  - lmkg 4y ago
    A few straight arithmetic questions, one about the alphabet, a few about parts of speech. These don't immediately jump out to me as cultured, although anything involving letters or grammar will be sensitive to the linguistic background of the students. Certainly home life, economic background, etc have an impact on educational outcomes. But I'm making a narrower claim here. A student with a poor home life is likely to test poorly regardless, although the difference might be larger in some tests than others. But a student with the same educational aptitude may test better or worse depending on if they're being tested on topics that are familiar or unfamiliar to them. Removing cultural context is certainly a solution. I'm not sure it's the best solution. Excessively-abstract problems are only one aspect of intelligence. Anything involving reading comprehension is going to have some linguistic or cultural elements, but I'm not sure it's valid to just remove reading comprehension altogether. If you want to see a standardized test from a different culture, here's one that's made the rounds a few times. This is for eight-graders in Kentucky in 1912. The sections on Geography & Physiology certainly stand out, but even the math section has a notably different emphasis than modern education. https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...
xwdv 4y ago
You know what it means. It has become acceptable in society these days for people to bring down the white race any way they can through these sort of micro aggressions. As a white person any success or benefit you enjoy can never be truly legitimate, it will always be stained by the original sin of your white ancestors. And if you happen to be straight, or male, or both you are even more guilty. The message is that the white race must not be allowed to progress any further than it has until all other races have caught up or even surpassed it. In the mean time, individuals suffer. The only time you can be truly understood and seen as a unique individual and not a stereotype is amongst other whites.
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dilatedmind 4y ago
philly school district schools are 14% white. the school district i went to in the philly burbs is 79% white. philly school district is in a bad place financially. https://www.inquirer.com/news/pa-school-funding-trial-philadelphia-school-district-monson-20220124.html https://www.inquirer.com/news/pa-school-funding-trial-philad.... A district with more money will have more resources for gifted programs. I imagine this has it's roots in the demographic and population shift the city has seen starting in the 50s. Philly's population in 1990 was 75% of what it was in the 50s. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm sure there was overhead in maintaining infrastructure, paying pensions, etc as the population shrunk. At this point, maybe the federal government should just bail out city school districts in this situation. Why should an underfunded school district be paying a chunk of its budget on debts?
deleted 4y ago
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dang 4y ago
That's just one two-word phrase, and putting torque on it that distorts the gist of the whole article is not a good direction for threads. That's why we have this guideline: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- derac 4y ago
  I appreciate the rule and that is fair. I do think putting extremely inflammatory racial language front and center is notable. Particularly when it is so casual and so many people feel like it is unobjectionable as can be seen in the replies. I will refrain from this sort of comment in the future though. Sorry dang!
  - pvg 4y ago
    It's only 'extremely inflammatory racial language' if you pluck it out of its context and misquote it. The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be. This is pretty vanilla, nearly tautological stuff unless you believe academic talent is some sort of inherent property of wealth or whiteness.
    - derac 4y ago
      Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I was being overly sensitive.
AMerePotato 4y ago
At my school, everyone was tested... but you needed a recommendation along with a high score to get in. I scored highly on the test year after year but was never given the recommendation necessary. I can't for sure say it was because I am a minority, but it definitely disenfranchised me

by derac 4y ago

jeremyjh 4y ago

Just read what he wrote? > Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program.

chernevik 4y ago
How is that an answer? If someone isn't meeting the qualifications they aren't in. What's "unacceptable" about that?
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Are there qualifications other than test scores?
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Apparently race given the assertion of similar test scores
  - wccrawford 4y ago
    There are unwritten ones, at least. As I said in my other post, in my school you were taken out of regularly classes, but still had to learn those things and do that work. That means the student has to agree to work 20% harder, usually at home, where they may not have that luxury. There are probably other considerations that aren't coming to mind at the moment, too, that also affect the number of children in Gifted programs.
  - derac 4y ago
    In my experience you are nominated to take an IQ-ish test and let in based on that score. I assume they mean test scores on regular coursework?
- orpheansodality 4y ago
  > compared to white students with similar test scores
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  > with similar test scores > with similar test scores > WITH SIMILAR TEST SCORES
  - throwaway81348 4y ago
    Your point?
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Presumably test scores are a not terrible proxy for qualification. So if black and hispanic students of similar qualification are not being admitted into these programs, then the programs are not actually equitably enrolling people.
  - fein 4y ago
    I had to look around for the source of this, and I can't find the "with similar test scores" part in the Vanderbuilt site article on the Vanderbuilt study this is based on. It says 66% less likely, but the "similar test scores" part isn't in the same paragraph. I really dislike that it is so difficult to find the source of these statements in modern media, as the news articles I read didn't even cite the study, I had to go googling for it. What I found: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects-gifted-program-selections/ https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects... and of course the link to the gov data source in that article is broken: http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/ http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/ Edit: I see where they pulled the line from. Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.
    - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
      If you read three paragraphs of the article you linked you can see the statement written in plain english: > However, controlling for math and reading scores did not have the same effect for black students. In fact, black students continued to be assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical math and reading achievement. If you read to the end, the paper is literally linked: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Grissom_AERAOpen_GiftedStudents1.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Because the systems which identify students and enable them to meet the admissions requirements are massively unequal. I'll give an example. I attended a gifted program starting in 3rd grade. I went to an elementary school for 1st and 2nd grade that was almost entirely white with some asian kids. Part of the mechanism for selecting students for the gifted program was a letter from the student's counselor, teacher, and principal. My mom noticed that some schools were sending way more kids to the GT program than others. Several schools basically never sent any kids. No surprise, there were more black and hispanic kids at the schools. BUT these schools did not have a lack of students with high SOL scores or grades. It turned out that the process of identifying students and writing letters was letting these kids down. A few years of local activism to adjust the process and suddenly a bunch of kids from these other schools were being admitted to the GT program and succeeding. Activists recently tried to adjust the admissions criteria for TJHSST, a magnet school in the area, to be a "merit lottery." This says that you set some minimum qualification (minimum GPA and accelerated math coursework) and then select students at random from that pool. This proposal was called racist against south and east asian students and activists were called enemies of excellence by various people like Scott Aaronson. I was personally identified as having potential for going to TJ at age four. My parents paid a lot of money for me to have tutoring specifically for the admissions test. In the above example, black and hispanic students with similar qualifications (test scores) are not receiving the same access to accelerated programs. The point is that the mechanisms by which we define qualifications and select students really really matters and can encode all sorts of inequities.
  - chernevik 4y ago
    The answer would be to improve the development of those students who are underdeveloped -- not change criteria for the identification of potential. This is, of course, far more complicated, and involves difficult problems. Far easier to sweep it all under the rug by calling attention to qualifications "unacceptable".
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      In my personal experience agitating for change in this space, it is precisely the same people who resist change in admissions criteria and who resist change in grants for equitable early development resources. And in the example I listed for early GT admissions, there was no need for developing "underdeveloped" students. They were already developed. They just had systems that didn't enable them to get through the gate to the GT program.
derac 4y ago
Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black? Why don't we remove basketball courts from inner cities and cut off black kid's feet /s eye roll BTW, I realize he is arguing for the opposite of this. edit: If you think I am racist or something let me spell it out as I did in another comment: It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  That is a bad analogy because the NBA is not the only accessible path to a stable middle class life while school, for many people, is.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Not even close to true. Going into a trade is a great way to get into a comfortable middle class life. And in those trades, you'll commonly find people who did horrible in school, and thought they were idiots because of it.
    - b112 4y ago
      Yes, some trades pay way more, have more available jobs, and have better working conditions (work hours, etc) than PhDs in a variety of sciences.
    - davewritescode 4y ago
      Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or an electrician. The ultimate goal should be to provide better education for everyone so that all students have as many available options by the time they're ready to pick a career path. Also, I hate these comments from white collar folks about blue collar jobs being the answer to everything. Yes we need them, but we also need to be honest that the average plumber is going to have a harder time working until 65 than an office worker.
      - googlryas 4y ago
colechristensen 4y ago
Are they less likely to be identified because they they are treated differently or because they go to schools that don’t offer those programs?
mikece 4y ago
Sounds like the problem might be with those who are selected to identify the "gifted" students. I am less interested in racial correlations to being identified as "gifted" and more interested in attributes such as whether the student is from a two-parent household, whether they are considered poor, whether they attend a local school or are transported to one outside of their neighborhood, etc. I suspect that we lose out on identifying many gifted children because issues at home and mere survival interfere with their ability to grow and develop academically.
- harles 4y ago
  This assumes being gifted is something innate and simply needs to be brought out. I don’t think that’s the case.
  - mikece 4y ago
    A person with a latent talent which isn't identified and developed has no advantage over the person who doesn't have the talent at all. If we as a society can't do what it reasonable and prudent to identify and nurture such people then we all lose.
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daenz 4y ago
I dug up the study, in case anyone is interested https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Grissom_AERAOpen_GiftedStudents1.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris... What's interesting that is not mentioned is page 15: a black student with a black teacher is still much less likely to be identified as gifted. even less than a white student with a non-white teacher. internalized racism?
- tpoacher 4y ago
  more like different schools, the difference reflecting the sociodemographics of the reflected areas rather than racial IQ differences.
- toyg 4y ago
  Probably more like black teachers with black students are more likely to exist in poor areas where identifying "giftedness" is lower on the list of priorities.
charlieyu1 4y ago
How conveniently that the writer omits Asians.
- baisq 4y ago
  And Jews.
paulpauper 4y ago
ppl keep overlooking this part. it shows how important it is to read slowly and carefully.
TimPC 4y ago
When I was in grade 3 there was a standardized test for gifted. While standardized tests do have some racial disparity that disparity seems to be far smaller than letting teachers nominate students for a gifted evaluation rather than having it be universal.
tpoacher 4y ago
And then also click the provided link, which leads to a summary of the report, claiming that "this is unlikely to reflect teacher prejudice, but availability of 'gifted programs' in predominantly black schools". In which case, the solution is "fund more gifted programs in schools that lack them", not "defund existing gifted programs". Which is kinda what the article's author started to argue but never quite got there in the end.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  No fair actually reading the source material, we're just here to yell at each other fruitlessly and solely on the basis of our preexisting ideas.
mmmpop 4y ago
So you're implying that the conclusion of "unacceptable whiteness" is self-evident by simple examination of these two points... or what? Perhaps "unacceptably lacking in Black students" is a less divisive way to say this, unless the decisiveness were intended and surely that's not the case.
mnw21cam 4y ago
Forgive me if this seems all too simple to me. The solution is very clearly stop doing that then. There's a lot of value in having a gifted track in schooling. Throwing that away because it is currently inaccurate at identifying students that are best suited to it is a stupid idea. Make it accurate at identifying the students that are best suited to it instead.
- bena 4y ago
  The problem, as always, is people. You can't self-select to be evaluated. Your parents can advocate, but they ultimately don't decide either. Although I think they can turn down the evaluation, I'm unclear on that though. The first hurdle is getting the teacher to not only recognize that the child may be gifted, but to make the recommendation to administration. Then it is administration who ultimately makes the call on whether or not to evaluate the kid. And teachers are more likely to recommend white students than black students. And this may not even be something they're consciously aware of doing. Because a lot of this is based on the teachers' perceptions of students. If you have a good rapport with a student, you're more likely to recommend them to be evaluated. If you are constantly butting heads with a kid, or if the kid is just quietly doing their work, you're not going to be inclined to recommend them. Regardless of how well they are doing in class. I was not evaluated until partway through my freshman year of high school and the only reason I was was because the teacher who ran the Quiz Bowl team got everyone who made it on the team who wasn't already in the gifted program evaluated. Otherwise, I probably would not have been evaluated at all.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  That is exactly what the article says...
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Yes, that is why the SP was written.
adolph 4y ago
That is not the quote from tfa. The quote is "The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be." The author's focus on a particular racial classification seems incongruent with facts, given that students with another racial group are also over-represented in "Gifted Programs."
johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
I have a very simple solution for LatinX group and it's also about equity. Like ALL other immigrants groups LatinX group should have to go through proper immigration process. Then we will see equity in immigration and equity in education.
concordDance 4y ago
Got a link to the specific paper and description of how it was done? Trying to chase it down just got me to this: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Grissom_AERAOpen_GiftedStudents1.pdf https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris... Which seems like it just is saying that the proportion assigned to gifted programs was lower than what the average test score would suggest (notable when compared to hispanics), but hispanics could have a wider distribution (or a bimodal one), so this seems like a shoddy test. The correct check of the hypothesis would be to find the test score threshhold above which 50% of students get into the gifted program and see if this threshhold varies by race... but I can't find anywhere this is done.

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mistrial9 4y ago

> every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes literally the same experience for me; many people in urban school never became literate in their entire adult lives, let alone math.

charlieyu1 4y ago
So just schools in general, because the teacher has to take care for the whole class and can’t cater to every student.

908B64B197 4y ago

> Gifted programs are "unacceptably white". You are only scratching the surface here. Some places had a hard time "proving" their gifted programs were "too white" so they started using the term "white and white-adjacent" to include Asian kids as well (often from impoverished background but that's another issue) in these stats [0]. > I don't see why race has anything to do with it. Buckle up. The SF school district is trying to include a lot more racial content at school [1]. Now even math is considered racist [2]. I wish I was making this up. [0] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-categorizes-asians-as-white-adjacent/ https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego... [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/San-Francisco-school-board-s-antics-would-be-15948058.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa... [2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

jl6 4y ago
“Math is racist” is not what is being claimed in link #2. It’s math instruction that they claim to be racist. I have no idea if this is true but it’s at least plausible.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  The veneer is quite thin. There are even more radical proposals [0] they are trying to introduce in High School classes. It's hard not to see the real agenda past the shallow arguments against gifted programs [1]. This was an enlightening read to say the least. [0] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/ https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/ [1] https://unherd.com/2022/02/anti-racism-betrays-asian-students/ https://unherd.com/2022/02/anti-racism-betrays-asian-student...
  - jl6 4y ago
    What do you mean by the veneer being quite thin? You mean that the surface-level claim that math instruction is racist is actually cover for a deeper claim that math itself is racist? Where do they come close to making that deeper claim?

llbeansandrice 4y ago

> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. IQ tests are notoriously and historically pretty racist. They can be useful in certain contexts but they aren't very good as an academic gatekeeper or a measure of individual intelligence.

victor9000 4y ago
Ok, I'll bite, how are IQ tests racist?
- anthonypasq 4y ago
  you could theoretically have questions that rely on cultural background info to understand it. i imagine there are questions that a chinese student would understand and an american would not, but IQ tests and most other standardized test are rigorously tested to avoid this stuff. they look for this and throw out offending questions on the SAT all the time
- com2kid 4y ago
  Let's take a math story problem. Give an upper class white kid a problem involving tennis scores, no problem. The kid will be able to easily understand what is being talked about, there isn't anything mentally jarring going on. Give a poor black kid a problem involving tennis scores, boom, problem. Odds of a poor black kid knowing how tennis scoring works, much less likely. My, largely well to do, neighborhood has tennis courts. The more diverse, and poorer, neighborhood I grew up in, didn't. I am still not sure how tennis is scored, but I am pretty sure the kids in the house next to me understand it. Repeat this idea a few times with some of the other tests. Give some word recall lists using words poor/minority kids aren't accustom to. It is harder to recall words that you have never heard before, they are basically nonsense syllables, which is a very different test. If you had thrown "quiche" in the middle of a word list 8 year old me would have had no idea what you were talking about. Modern day IQ tests have tried to correct for these biases, but school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results.
  - 4y ago

mpalmer 4y ago

There is no intelligence test I know of that can perfectly control for advantages and disadvantages in education / home life. Not everyone is as well-positioned as you might have been to excel at an IQ test. And to the extent that someone is disadvantaged, their race may indeed be an indirect cause.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> Gifted programs are "unacceptably white" Curious if they're also "unacceptably asian" - the author doesn't seem to think so, or at least didn't feel the need to say so.

chipsa 4y ago
Asians are white when it's unhelpful to the narrative for them to be a minority. See also "underrepresented minority", which translates to: non-Asian minority.
- ge96 4y ago
  Hate to suggest this but I was wondering if I was diversity hire lol, since my skills are definitely subpar but I still got in somehow. I can do soft skills but yeah. -- anyway I'll take it, I need it.

mnw21cam 4y ago

In my opinion the worst enemy of an intelligent student is boredom. Boredom causes underachievement and disillusionment. One reason to keep a gifted programme at school is to give intelligent students something to do that is actually interesting.

mcculley 4y ago

I was in one of these programs in middle and high school (1985-1990). My experience was that only a very small subset were selected to be tested. Most of the "gifted" students were born to parents who knew how to advocate for them and get them tested. (Mostly white, mostly upper middle class, many children of teachers.) I am certain that if every student had been tested, the composition of the gifted classes would have been very different. Many students who fell through the cracks would have been put in the higher level classes and many at the lower end of the gifted program would not have made the cut (given fixed class sizes for the gifted program). We should test every student.

mmmpop 4y ago
Well, I was a dirt poor child of a single Puerto Rican mom in eastern Kentucky and I was accepted in gifted education the first year I went to public schools (which was the first year it was offered--the reason I went.) But to your point, I was not able to take algebra until 9th grade due to reasons that felt a bit discriminatory as you'd described, but my mother was a maniac and no one liked her, so hard to say if that didn't add weight.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  There are always individual cases that work out. Even in systems with extreme oppression, members of oppressed groups succeed. But it is still a problem if there is a large and observable statistical disparity between groups for no compelling reason. Consider a toy admissions criteria where students go through the same process as today but students with black hair have to also win a game of rock paper scissors. There will surely be a large number of kids with black hair who are admitted and succeed. But the system would be plainly unfair and deserve to be fixed, despite many individual students with black hair being able to say "well I was admitted."
  - mmmpop 4y ago
    I think what I'm getting at is that the "rich White affluent people gave me a chance" and I "didn't behave" according to their standards, so they pushed me out. I was too young to understand, but perhaps they had a fair point? I was well-behaved and bright, but coarse I suppose. I was too poor to participate in the fancy science trips, couldn't afford class materials, constantly late, and homework never got done due to what I remember as "family issues". I was bright and gifted, but a high achiever I was not. I don't blame them for pushing me out of the system, I didn't play by the rules. But from what you're saying, that's part of the problem and I don't disagree... but allowing me to persist and annoy those gifted kids with resources, encouraging families, and ambition wasn't really fair now was it?

lmkg 4y ago

> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. I don't see why race has anything to do with it. Simply put, we don't know how to make objective IQ tests yet. The questions in IQ tests tend to bake in a bunch of cultural assumptions, often in ways you don't expect. So the test measures a combination of IQ, and affinity with a specific cultural background. First, let me be clear about this: The issue is friction. Even at the same difficulty, a question that's more accessible is less stressful and less mentally taxing. Especially when you're dealing with kids. This matters more at the cut-off than the extremes of the bell-curve, but has statistical impacts. I just searched for "Fourth Grade IQ Test" and clicked a random link. Four of the ten questions are about sharing cookies. Baking cookies and sharing cookies are typical middle-class-white activity, but I don't know how that shakes out in other cultures. Maybe they share other foods? Maybe sharing food is offensive because it implies the other kids' parents can't provide for themselves? Maybe the kids aren't in charge of food division? The underlying math is, of course, objective. But the math is being framed through a perspective which is more or less familiar to different backgrounds.

dpbriggs 4y ago
Any further reading recommendations? It's unclear why the cultural example of baking and sharing food would cause significant differences in test results but that's picking at an example. Were the six other questions also stereotypical of white middle class families? I imagine they were more abstract (lacking cultural context?). Would the solution here be to remove cultural context, or have culturally tailored exams? It would be interesting to take IQ tests from other countries and compare results. I imagine other factors such as home life, economic status, and cultural emphasis on education would be much, much stronger predictors on IQ test performance.
- lmkg 4y ago
  A few straight arithmetic questions, one about the alphabet, a few about parts of speech. These don't immediately jump out to me as cultured, although anything involving letters or grammar will be sensitive to the linguistic background of the students. Certainly home life, economic background, etc have an impact on educational outcomes. But I'm making a narrower claim here. A student with a poor home life is likely to test poorly regardless, although the difference might be larger in some tests than others. But a student with the same educational aptitude may test better or worse depending on if they're being tested on topics that are familiar or unfamiliar to them. Removing cultural context is certainly a solution. I'm not sure it's the best solution. Excessively-abstract problems are only one aspect of intelligence. Anything involving reading comprehension is going to have some linguistic or cultural elements, but I'm not sure it's valid to just remove reading comprehension altogether. If you want to see a standardized test from a different culture, here's one that's made the rounds a few times. This is for eight-graders in Kentucky in 1912. The sections on Geography & Physiology certainly stand out, but even the math section has a notably different emphasis than modern education. https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...

xwdv 4y ago

You know what it means. It has become acceptable in society these days for people to bring down the white race any way they can through these sort of micro aggressions. As a white person any success or benefit you enjoy can never be truly legitimate, it will always be stained by the original sin of your white ancestors. And if you happen to be straight, or male, or both you are even more guilty. The message is that the white race must not be allowed to progress any further than it has until all other races have caught up or even surpassed it. In the mean time, individuals suffer. The only time you can be truly understood and seen as a unique individual and not a stereotype is amongst other whites.

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dilatedmind 4y ago

philly school district schools are 14% white. the school district i went to in the philly burbs is 79% white. philly school district is in a bad place financially. https://www.inquirer.com/news/pa-school-funding-trial-philadelphia-school-district-monson-20220124.html https://www.inquirer.com/news/pa-school-funding-trial-philad.... A district with more money will have more resources for gifted programs. I imagine this has it's roots in the demographic and population shift the city has seen starting in the 50s. Philly's population in 1990 was 75% of what it was in the 50s. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm sure there was overhead in maintaining infrastructure, paying pensions, etc as the population shrunk. At this point, maybe the federal government should just bail out city school districts in this situation. Why should an underfunded school district be paying a chunk of its budget on debts?

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dang 4y ago

That's just one two-word phrase, and putting torque on it that distorts the gist of the whole article is not a good direction for threads. That's why we have this guideline: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

derac 4y ago
I appreciate the rule and that is fair. I do think putting extremely inflammatory racial language front and center is notable. Particularly when it is so casual and so many people feel like it is unobjectionable as can be seen in the replies. I will refrain from this sort of comment in the future though. Sorry dang!
- pvg 4y ago
  It's only 'extremely inflammatory racial language' if you pluck it out of its context and misquote it. The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be. This is pretty vanilla, nearly tautological stuff unless you believe academic talent is some sort of inherent property of wealth or whiteness.
  - derac 4y ago
    Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I was being overly sensitive.

AMerePotato 4y ago

At my school, everyone was tested... but you needed a recommendation along with a high score to get in. I scored highly on the test year after year but was never given the recommendation necessary. I can't for sure say it was because I am a minority, but it definitely disenfranchised me