More Minorities Entering Program for Gifted Students : Education: Project Open GATE aims to identify youths who may miss opportunities because of their socioeconomic background.

Eight years ago, Ventura’s De Anza Middle School had only three students identified as gifted or talented--and all three were Anglo, although the school is heavily Latino.

To Margaret Gosfield, coordinator of the Gifted and Talented Education program for the Ventura Unified School District, the numbers were troubling. Some bright students were falling through the cracks, she feared.

But at a Gifted and Talented Education meeting, she said, a top administrator at De Anza brushed off his school’s low showing.

“He laughed at me,” she said.

This past school year, De Anza had 42 GATE students who were eligible for the more challenging curriculum. Of those, 18 were minorities.

“We’re not just skimming the top any more,” Gosfield said of the selection process. “We’re getting them across the board.”

The state Department of Education is in the middle of a three-year federally funded program, Project Open GATE, that is aimed at improving minority representation in GATE programs statewide.

“It’s one of our gravest concerns. It’s very troubling to us,” said Fred Tempes, associate superintendent for the state Department of Education. Also troubling, to Tempes and others, is the state’s budget crisis. Although GATE programs aren’t on the budgetary chopping block, educators fear they eventually will be.

Ventura Unified, like other school districts in the county and state, has pushed in recent years to identify more bright minority children for GATE programs at the schools.

In the past, these children were overlooked partly because the intelligence test used to identify eligible students did not take language and cultural differences into account.

But now, GATE educators are revamping and expanding their testing methods to detect more minorities as well as children from deprived backgrounds.

They are using several kinds of tests, some that rely less on verbal skills than others. Many districts are testing children in their primary language.

In addition, teachers are encouraged to refer more students for testing, and parents can request that their child be assessed. Samples of the child’s work might be reviewed, along with academic records. And in some districts, potential GATE students are tested by the school psychologist.

“I just gave a test to a kid today that was totally nonverbal,” Gosfield said. The girl, a sixth-grader, looked at a series of patterns for similarities.

The girl’s teacher had insisted that she had special abilities despite the results of previous tests. She did well on the test, Gosfield said, and has been admitted to the program. The test is one she frequently gives minorities.

In Gosfield’s district, 791 students out of 15,348 have been identified as GATE students--100 more than last year. Of those 791 students, 17% are minorities.

“It’s less than what I would like,” she said. “We’re getting better, though, and that’s typical throughout the state.”

To make changes, some educators had to change their thinking. “Some teachers just didn’t look at (minority) kids in the same way,” said Barbara Abbott, a GATE consultant for the Department of Education in Sacramento. Some thought, “Oh, he can’t be gifted, he’s Hispanic,” she said.

For those children tapped for GATE, the advanced programs generally begin at the third- or fourth-grade level and continue through high school. The state requires at least 200 minutes a week of advanced instruction.

Some districts, like Ventura, pull gifted children out of their regular elementary classrooms and bus them one day a week to another site, where they receive more challenging work.

Others, like the Conejo Valley Unified School District, cluster gifted children in their elementary classrooms, where the teacher assigns them advanced work.

At the junior high and high school levels, GATE students generally take accelerated or honors classes.

Of all the county’s GATE programs, the one in the Oxnard Elementary School District is probably the most innovative. GATE students in the primary grades attend one school, Rose Avenue School in the Colonia section of the city.

The district’s student population is more than 70% Latino, and 50% of those students speak limited or no English.

In 1988, the district opened its first bilingual GATE class--an obvious necessity to GATE coordinator Anne Bensen. “That’s when we had our growth spurt” in GATE, she said.

Now there are three bilingual GATE classes there that include 95 students.

The district’s most recent numbers show 416 GATE students among the 12,400 student population. Of those, 257 were minorities.

Bensen is pleased with the numbers, but like other GATE coordinators, she would like to see them correlate even more closely with the minority representation in the district.

Not all minorities are underrepresented in GATE. In every school district in the county, a greater percentage of Asian students are in GATE than is reflected in the district’s overall percentage of Asian students.

For Ann Eklund, curriculum coordinator for the Simi Valley Unified School District, it is a continual search for the best testing methods to identify not only gifted minorities but those students who are disadvantaged because of their socioeconomic background.

“Assessment is a wide-open field,” she said.

She recalled one bilingual boy at the elementary level who had not scored high enough in initial tests to be considered for the GATE program. But his parents had come in with examples of his work.

“There was no doubt in our minds that he should go into the program,” she said.

GATE coordinators in the county insist that the push to identify more students through broader testing methods has not watered down the high standards of the GATE curriculum.

“We didn’t want a different program--we didn’t want lower standards,” Bensen said. Informal tracking of the bilingual students shows they do as well as others in the program, she said.

Some districts, like the Santa Paula Elementary School District, give a slight edge in the testing phase to students who are minorities or economically disadvantaged. It is a safeguard against any cultural bias the tests might show.

“It’s not that crucial either way,” said district psychologist Darrel Priebe. The tests are among eight or nine pieces of criteria that go into assessing children, he said.

His district is two-thirds Latino, and in the six years he has been there he has seen the GATE program go from two-thirds Anglo students to nearly half Latino students.

But in Ventura, one African-American parent complained strongly that the GATE program still was not identifying all the gifted minority children.

“I had to fight like I don’t know what to get my daughter into GATE,” said Linda Vivian, whose 14-year-old daughter, Christal, attended De Anza Middle School.

Christal’s test scores were slightly below the level needed for admission to GATE, her mother said. She was permitted to participate in the program even though she was not identified as gifted. Even so, her mother was irked.

“The potential was there,” Vivian said. Her daughter had been a straight-A student before coming to De Anza, she said.

“I’m not saying there should be special treatment, but if they see someone with potential, why not give them a chance?” she said.

In Gosfield’s view, there is no favoritism either way. “We tried real hard to identify her (as gifted). We gave her every test we could think of. The scores didn’t quite make it. You have to draw the line somewhere.” Yet Christal has done well in the program, she said.

Gosfield insists standards for entrance into GATE have not changed with the influx of minority students. Nor has the curriculum been watered down.

“We didn’t lower anything,” she said. “That protects us from being accused of reverse discrimination. Occasionally we have to dispel the rumor that it’s easier (for minorities) to get identified (as gifted). It’s simply not true.”

Minorities in Gifted Programs

Minority Student percent Percent School District population in district in GATE Briggs Elementary 317 73.5% 16.7% Hueneme Elementary 7,417 72.8% 42.4% Mesa Union 350 46.6% 17.3% Ocean View 2,350 82.5% 59.2% Oxnard Elementary 12,397 82.7% 58.7% Pleasant Valley 6,703 24.5% 8.8% Rio Elementary 2,707 77.9% 46.9% Santa Paula Elementary 3,231 75.6% 42.2% Somis Union Elementary 330 47.8% 28.0% Oxnard Union High 11,695 68.1% 39.1% Santa Paula Union High 1,340 73.1% 44.0% Conejo Valley Unified 17,582 18.6% 13.3% Fillmore Unified 3,463 73.1% 54.6% Moorpark Unified 5,607 36.5% 22.3% Ojai Unified 3,685 19.0% 4.2% Oak Park Unified 1,984 11.6% 22.0% Simi Valley Unified 18,634 23.4% 14.5% Ventura Unified 15,348 31.4% 16.9%

Data supplied by the California Department of Education for the 1991-1992 school year.