New Test a Boost for Minorities : Education: Less biased test measures intelligence, not just verbal ability. The aim is to give minorities a better chance at getting in gifted-school programs.

A decade ago, the San Diego city schools gifted program was akin to a white preserve.

In the typical classroom of gifted youngsters, almost 82% of the students were white, even though 50% of the students districtwide were nonwhite.

Today, after almost 10 years of various programs to boost the number of nonwhite students, the program is still almost two-thirds white while total white enrollment has dropped to 35%.

But last September, administrators of the gifted program took an unprecedented step to answer critics who lambaste gifted programs everywhere for racially skewed enrollments in the face of accepted theories of giftedness--which say the phenomenon should occur across all ethnic groups and races in similar proportions.

After four years of research in conjunction with UC San Diego and San Diego State University, administrators began using a different test to certify students for the gifted program. They discarded a longstanding intelligence test after concluding it was biased in favor of children with already-strong verbal abilities--abilities most often found among whites with privileged socioeconomic backgrounds.

In the half-year using the different test--which has no verbal questions--about 45% of new students certified as gifted have been white, about 20% Latino, about 10% black, 14% Filipino, 7% Indochinese and 3.5% Asian.

For the first time, administrators believe they are closer to meeting both their ethical responsibility--and a new state educational requirement--to show a more ethnically and racially balanced gifted program.

“This test is as culture-free (of bias) as we have find,” said David Hermanson, director of the gifted and talented (GATE) program. “We are much nearer to achieving a level playing field for finding a more diverse group of students.”

Supt. Tom Payzant believes the effort puts San Diego alone among the nation’s major urban districts in redefining giftedness in a much broader sense than traditionally viewed. The district’s program began in 1960 as part of a nationwide move to nurture exceptionally bright students whose need for special teaching materials and techniques had gone unrecognized in educational circles.

“We know a lot more about intelligence and talent than 10 or 20 years ago and we no longer look upon them as being measured by a single indicator of linguistic ability,” Payzant said. “This new test more broadly defines intelligence and takes a broader view in understanding that children’s learning is expressed in a variety of ways.”

But as news of the test spreads through the district’s parent grapevine, there is concern among many white parents that the consequences will be a quota system that means fewer white students as well as a dilution of quality in GATE classes.

Numerous parents--white and nonwhite--have long believed that GATE classes provide the district’s only quality instruction, in large part because there is extra money for enrichment--$48 per student--and because all of the almost 900 certified GATE teachers have been trained in cutting-edge methodology.

“People feel we’re watering down the standards if more minority children are qualified,” Payzant said. “And they fear that access will be less because of greater competition, and that there won’t be as clear a guarantee as in the past to get their children into GATE.”

Most district administrators admit that, without the GATE curriculum, many white families with money would move their children into suburban public districts or private schools.

“In some ways we have the gifted curriculum because we can’t assure parents that we have a critical mass of good teaching and high student expectations in regular classes similar to what we do in GATE,” said Shirley Weber, a black member of the school board whose daughter is GATE-certified.

This year, the GATE program has 12,672 students, about 10% of the district’s total enrollment. Gifted classes run from grades 3 through 12.

About 1,400 are so-called “highly gifted,” who score in the 99.9th percentile, and they are grouped in “seminar” classes of no more than 18 students each, spread among 30 elementary and secondary schools.

The remaining gifted students are identified according to various intellectual abilities as determined through testing. They attend “cluster” classes, under which one-third of students are gifted, while up to two-thirds of remaining students--some 30,000--are high-achievers or otherwise selected by teachers in the belief that they could benefit from the different, more high-powered curriculum.

District psychologists test students in the 2nd, 5th and 7th grades who are recommended by parents, teachers or the GATE office. Until budget cutbacks last year, the district tested at all grades 2 through 10.

When San Diego State psychology Prof. Dennis Saccuzzo last week presented details of the new test to the GATE parent advisory committee, he was peppered with questions about whether it would hurt the program.

“There’s a lot of concern among GATE parents,” said Kim Jessop, a parent who represents Silver Gate Elementary School on the predominantly white advisory committee. “With a brand-new test, people are worried about who you are going to mix with my students. But I think that most parents will come to understand that equity should cross ethnic lines.”

Saccuzzo, director of the UCSD-San Diego State doctoral program in psychology, found the different test--known as Raven--after studying certification results of more than 25,000 students in the GATE program over the years.

“The Raven is a better predictor of what we can call mental energy or fluid intelligence--what is raw, untransformed intelligence,” Saccuzzo said. “It taps a broader range of abilities, where the previous test measured a narrower band of academics, and tapped some students who were verbally gifted at an early age, whom we would call high achievers, but not necessarily gifted.”

Saccuzzo said that perhaps 25% of the students who tested gifted in the second grade under the more traditional test turned out not to be gifted when tested again in the 7th grade because their verbal ability was less of an advantage later on.

“This new test is nonverbal and can be given anywhere in the world,” Saccuzzo said. “It’s by no means the final answer, but it is much fairer than anything we now have. It can work until we know more about giftedness and how to nurture it” by learning more about how it is expressed in different ethnic groups.

The Raven test uses pictures and patterns to measure the student’s ability to recognize visual details, categorize, concentrate and solve problems, among other talents.

Both Saccuzzo and Hermanson are at pains to point out that the new test has nothing to do with quotas. The number of white students certified under the Raven is still higher than their percentages in the district, Saccuzzo said. And Hermanson said that there is no cap on the number of GATE students; the program is expected to grow by 2,500 students next year.

“But it’s clearly shaken things up,” Saccuzzo said, “because it raises the question of how to handle diversity.”

As Hermanson points out, students identified as gifted might not started out as high achievers. That bothers some parents, who spoke out at the advisory committee about what might happen “when a disadvantaged kid who is not as compliant, not as motivated, not up to grade level” is placed in a gifted class with their children who do meet those criteria.

GATE teacher Wanda Fast, named gifted teacher of the year for San Diego and Imperial counties, countered that an underachieving gifted student comes in all ethnic and racial stripes. She points out that what makes students gifted is the intellectual oddities they bring to learning.

“You must consider each student individually,” Fast said.

The district has several programs at the elementary level to improve the skills of non-GATE teachers to identify minority students who should be tested but traditionally have been left out of the pool out because they are not particularly verbal.

Other programs encourage poorer, less educated parents to look for signs of intellectual acumen in their children and work to develop them.

But Payzant and others say that the district also needs to infuse more regular grade-level classes with the individual instruction and higher expectations common in GATE classes. Only then will many parents, whether white or minority, believe that their children will not suffer if they do not qualify for the gifted program.

At O’Farrell Middle School in Paradise Hills, that idea is being taken to its ultimate test. There are no separate gifted classes. Instead, the school’s entire curriculum is built around GATE material for all students, 92% of whom are nonwhite.

Gifted Students

Percent Qualified Percent in District Hispanic 12.14% 28.8% Caucasian 58.06% 35.4% Afro-American 8.95% 16.3% Asian 4.61% 2.3% American Indian 0.68% 0.6% Pacific Islander 0.43% 0.8% Filipino 9.95% 8.1% Indochinese 4.84% 7.7%

Source: San Diego Unified School District