Big Racial Gap Persists in O.C. GATE Programs : Education: Classes for gifted students still disproportionately filled with whites and Asians.

Every day in California’s public schools, some of the state’s best and brightest students are brought together in special classes to tackle advanced problems of mathematics, science, history and language.

But while these classes boast some of the state’s best young minds, they also have drawn fire for what they lack: adequate numbers of black and Latino students.

Of California’s three most populous counties, Orange County shows the deepest inequities. An Asian student here is nearly six times more likely than a Latino to be in a gifted class, and a white has more than three times a black child’s chances. In Los Angeles County, those gaps narrow, and they narrow even more in San Diego County, which has been a leader in pioneering new ways to identify and nurture exceptionally bright minority children.

More than a decade ago, California lawmakers concluded that the old Mentally Gifted Minor, or MGM, program in the state’s public schools had become disproportionately populated--and to unacceptable levels--by white and Asian students.

In one predominantly white, affluent Bay Area suburb, for example, 42% of the students were found to be benefiting from enhanced instruction for the gifted, while in Compton, a largely black, blue-collar suburb of Los Angeles, only 0.8% of the students were enrolled in similar classes.

Persuaded by a Huntington Beach assemblyman that such glaring racial disparities were inherently unfair, the Legislature in 1980 passed a law ordering the state’s educators to undertake a “special effort” to include “pupils from economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds” in what is today’s Gifted and Talented Education, or GATE, program.

After more than a decade of trying, educators can point to sharply increased numbers of Latinos and blacks in GATE programs, but substantial racial imbalances persist, and the gap between whites and blacks has gotten even bigger.

“There definitely has not been as much progress as we would like,” said Barbara Brandes, coordinator of gifted programs at the California Department of Education. “We are still trying to find the best way to identify all gifted students. I’m not sure we’ll ever get there.”

Sharon Vestermark, president of the Orange County Council of Gifted and Talented Education, said Orange County only recently began to experience a major influx of students from poor immigrant families, a change that has been profound in Los Angeles and San Diego counties for many years. Disadvantages of language and poverty can make it tough for teachers to recognize the intellectual promise of these children, she said.

“For many of these kids, their home life revolves around survival, not performance in school,” Vestermark said. “This is not conducive to learning. Maybe we’ve been worrying too much about the physical needs of these children--making sure they get their free lunch--and not enough about their academic needs.”

Bob Reed, who directs the gifted program for the eighth-largest school district in California, Santa Ana Unified, said the shortage of qualified bilingual teachers handicaps the identification of gifted students in a district such as his, where two-thirds of the students have limited English skills.

Ann Beavers, director of pupil services in Anaheim City School District, said she believes that poverty greatly influences admission into gifted programs. In her district, white and Asian children come from families that are generally wealthier, better-educated and have higher expectations for their children than those of Anaheim’s Latino students, she said.

Districts are struggling to find new ways to evaluate students that transcend language, cultural and economic differences, Beavers said.

“We know it’s a problem, we’re not proud of it, and until we get it right, it won’t be fair,” she said.

The size of the gifted program statewide doubled between 1980 and 1991, and the number of blacks and Latinos in it tripled. By expanding the definition of intelligence, using new methods to assess it and retraining teachers to better recognize it, more minorities have been brought into the gifted program.

But a major imbalance persists: The number of whites and Asians in GATE programs soared during that time, too. As of last year, they made up roughly half of the student population in California, but they comprise nearly 80% of the students in GATE classes.

Educators of the gifted say the obstacles to progress are many: not enough money to fundamentally change the programs, a lack of firm guidance by the state, and resistance from parents and teachers to a controversial new trend in defining intelligence.

Following the lead of scholars, schools have begun to use a broader definition, one which would deem gifted not only children with high IQs or top academic records, but those with other kinds of talents, like a flair for creativity, leadership or even athletics.

Brandes says that at times she feels she faces a “mission impossible”: trying to include deserving students of all stripes in the program and still satisfy parents’ demands that it be top-tier.

Every year, districts must report to the state the racial and ethnic distributions in their gifted programs. If any groups are underrepresented, districts must describe their plans to narrow the gap. But Brandes said the state is not legally entitled to withhold funding because a district fails to diversify its program.

She acknowledged that unlike many other state-funded programs, in which officials closely scrutinize a district’s compliance with regulations, there is no compliance review in the gifted program. It was dropped several years ago for lack of funding.

“GATE is an extremely permissive system,” she said.

The challenge of diversifying gifted classes is politically and emotionally flammable, coming at a time when California is undergoing profound demographic shifts and racial tensions are high.

As educators try to find ways to identify the brightest students from all groups, some parents fear that using more inclusive criteria will “water down” the academic program for the gifted. Others worry that an influx of children would dilute funding that is already less than generous--$32 million last year, or about $107 per GATE student in addition to the schools’ basic per-pupil allotment.

But in a state where monumental budget battles have forced widespread teacher layoffs in recent years, some ask how much money should be devoted to gifted children expected to succeed anyway, and how much reserved for the masses of pupils struggling to master the basics.

Advocates for the gifted reject the idea that giving special attention to exceptional children heaps gold upon the rich. They cite research showing that gifted students run a high risk of dropping out due to boredom and feelings of psychic isolation. Providing extra challenges for gifted children, they say, can mean the difference between productive lives and wasted ones, between engaging them or losing them.

Lauren’s life was that kind of question mark. When she entered Mission Viejo High School five years ago, she was a well-known discipline problem with a failing grade-point average. She chatted almost constantly in class, hogged every discussion and demanded to be the leader of every project.

“We recognized it immediately,” said Patsy Barry, who runs the school’s program for students at risk of failing. “She was very bright and she had a gift for leadership, but she wasn’t channeling it properly. She was using it to go against the classroom rules.”

With special coaching, Lauren--not her real name--learned to use her talents. She organized an awards ceremony for 300 people. Her behavior improved. By her junior year, her grade-point average rose to 3.8. Now attending a community college, she hopes to become a psychologist.

California school districts are not required to provide programs for gifted students, and last year only two-thirds chose to do so. In those districts, about 298,000 students--about 6%--were identified as gifted.

Gifted classes vary widely. A gifted fourth-grader in Anaheim, for instance, is assigned to a classroom where every child is gifted, and the studies are accelerated. A fourth-grader in Baldwin Park in Los Angeles County is pulled out of her regular classroom once a week and bused to another school, where she and other gifted students study forms of architecture around the world, then build models of Mayan homes or Greek temples.

In some middle schools, gifted students are grouped together for two or three hours a day for advanced studies in English and social studies, then mix with other students for the remaining subjects. In other middle schools and most high schools, gifted programs consist of honors classes, in which any student may enroll if qualified.

America has long had--in the words of one expert--a “love-hate relationship” with the best and brightest, torn between the belief that intellectual and creative stars need special opportunities and the feeling that catering to them is elitist, unfair and undemocratic.

Current trends in education lean toward the latter view. They emphasize mixing children of varying abilities together in a classroom and organizing them into cooperative learning groups, where they help each other study and even take tests. Those who advocate grouping gifted children together for even part of the day for accelerated opportunities often find themselves attacked as elitist and politically incorrect.

The effort to make California’s gifted program better reflect its population gained steam in the late 1970s. A growing number of researchers had begun to condemn IQ tests, saying they were inherently biased against racial minorities and the poor. They also were criticized for producing too narrow a definition of intelligence, one which overlooked talents other than high verbal or math ability, the two areas that have traditionally formed the focus of programs for the gifted.

A 1972 report by the U.S. Department of Education encouraged school districts to downplay intelligence tests when assessing giftedness, and consider other types of talent, such as exceptional skill in logic or the arts or strong leadership ability.

Nevertheless, in California, IQ tests remained the sole criteria for admittance into the state’s gifted programs. Students who scored among the top 2% on IQ tests--usually a score of 130 or higher--were admitted.

Then came Dennis Mangers, a Democratic assemblyman from Huntington Beach, who worked to overhaul the state’s approach to gifted education.

A bill he shepherded through the Legislature in 1979 said that schools should consider including students gifted not only intellectually, but those who show outstanding leadership or creativity, talent in one or more academic subjects, or in the visual or performing arts.

Fourteen years later, teachers, administrators, parents and politicians offer a laundry list of explanations for why gifted programs have made only modest gains toward parity.

Many scholars say a deeply ingrained cultural bias in society results in lowered expectations for minority and poor children.

“It’s the idea that blacks, Latinos, Native Americans can’t aspire to higher levels of intelligence because they are culturally deprived, culturally deficient,” said Mary Frasier, a University of Georgia professor of educational psychology, who has spent three years studying new ways to identify gifted minority children.

William J. Saunders, executive director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators, says American culture undermines the self-esteem of blacks, and that lowered self-image can influence the attitudes of blacks who become teachers.

Sandra Kaplan, a USC education professor who helps districts across the country set up programs for the gifted, got the troubling impression when she addressed teachers in Compton in the early 1970s that they thought their students couldn’t achieve. Looking out into a room filled mostly with black faces, Kaplan posed a question.

“I asked, ‘How many of you think you have gifted kids in your class?’ Not one person raised their hand,” Kaplan recalls.

Frasier and other scholars say that most teachers still think of a gifted child as one who has strong verbal or math skills, an obedient child who turns his work in on time and is eager to ask or answer questions in class.

That portrait describes a high-achieving child, but not necessarily one with creative or intellectual gifts. Many teachers do not know how to identify a child with such talents.

Janet Ward, coordinator for gifted programs in Covina Valley Unified School District, remembers a black second-grader whose teacher complained that she spent all her time in class drawing, never doing her schoolwork. Ward looked at a sample of what the girl had been doing: drawings accompanied by a 40-page story with elaborate and articulate detail. In an IQ test, the child scored above 140. She was placed in the gifted program.

One of the most potent forms of opposition GATE reformers find is in the parents of children currently in the program. They tend to be white or Asian, upper-middle-class and outspoken about their expectations for their children’s education.

“The people most interested in gifted education have been most interested in preserving it for their own kids,” said Barbara Abbott, director of Open GATE, a federally funded program to diversify California’s gifted programs. “They fear there would be less funding to go around and that the quality of the program would be watered down if you let all those other kids in.”

Asa Hilliard, a professor of educational psychology at Georgia State, goes a step further.

“For many parents, the gifted program is a way to get their kids away from poor kids,” he said.

Mangers, the author of the 1979 law, blames districts and the state for failing to adequately train teachers about how to recognize new forms of giftedness.

Ward said that even if a district requested the state’s help in developing new ways to identify gifted minority children, there was little to be had.

“If you went up there on bended knee and said, ‘How do I do it?’ they couldn’t help you,” Ward said.

Brandes, the state’s coordinator for gifted programs, said she believes teachers and administrators have gotten the word that programs should be diversified, but the trouble is that there is little consensus on how to do it.

“It’s an issue of the state-of-the-art not being there yet,” Brandes said. “We have discounted the old IQ-testing method as one that didn’t serve all kids well. But we don’t have a new method yet.”

Many who study gifted education feel that the best assessment of talent and ability comes not from a test but from a challenging curriculum that allows students to demonstrate--over time--what they can do. The real goal, they believe, is to improve course work in American schools. That would excite more students and spark spontaneous demonstrations of talent.

“If you had a kid with great athletic prowess and there were no basketball courts for him to demonstrate that on, and no balls for him to use, how would you identify him as an outstanding athlete?” Kaplan asks.

But Kaplan and other scholars believe that even a good curriculum will not be enough for some children. “If you’re in an environment (at home) that doesn’t support an intellectually vital way of life, I don’t give a damn what they do in school. It won’t be enough,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan said some families can exert subtle undermining pressures on a child. It can be threatening to parents, especially those with little education, to have a child excel, she said. Parents might also unwittingly discourage a gifted child to protect the self-esteem of another sibling who isn’t as talented, Kaplan said.

One answer to that problem lies in parent education, says A. Harry Passow, who has studied the gifted for nearly four decades and is now a professor emeritus at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York.

“The schools have to support the family, teach families how to help their kids,” Passow said. “We need to give these parents the same insights into how to enrich their children’s lives that more affluent parents have. Every parent values education, but some parents know how to use it better than others.”

Ranks of the Gifted

Whites and Asians comprise a larger share of Orange County’s Gifted and Talented Education classes than overall enrollment. The same pattern is seen in Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

ORANGE COUNTY

Overall GATE Enrollment composition White 50.7% 68.9% Latino 33.1 8.2 Black 2.1 0.8 Asian 13.6 21.5 American Indian 0.5 0.6 SAN DIEGO COUNTY White 51.0% 69.3% Latino 29.2 11.3 Black 8.1 4.3 Asian 10.8 14.4 American Indian 0.9 0.7 LOS ANGELES COUNTY White 24.1% 38.6% Latino 52.7 28.4 Black 12.1 8.2 Asian 10.8 24.2 American Indian 0.3 0.6

Note: All figures are for 1991-92

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Changes in a Decade

Statewide, much of the same pattern holds true. During the ‘80s, however, the demographics of the state’s public schools changed radically, and with them the composition of the GATE program.

1991-1992

Overall GATE Enrollment composition White 44.5% 61.6% Latino 35.3 14.8 Black 8.6 5.1 Asian 10.8 17.8 American Indian 0.8 0.7 1980-1981 White 59.9% 74.0% Latino 23.4 8.5 Black 10.0 6.3 Asian 5.7 10.7 American Indian 1.0 0.5

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Odds on Selection

White and Asian children also are more likely to be identified as gifted and placed in a special program for top students. The percentages of each ethnic group in GATE programs in California’s three most populous counties are as follows:

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District Comparison

Here’s how Orange County’s individual districts compared for the school year 1991-92. Total enrollment percentages do not add to 100% because Pacific Islanders and American Indians are not included.

Asian* Latino District Enrollment GATE Enrollment GATE Anaheim City 6.6% 14.8% 61.1% 30.5% Centralia 17.7 35.6 24.2 5.2 Cypress 13.8 23.7 16.7 6.9 Fountain Valley 17.6 29.0 7.9 2.5 Fullerton 16.8 31.5 30.6 3.2 Huntington Beach 7.9 16.2 10.3 1.5 La Habra 2.6 8.2 54.7 15.9 Magnolia 12.2 22.9 38.4 6.2 Ocean View 12.8 17.9 17.5 3.5 Savanna 12.5 19.1 27.1 9.5 Westminster 27.0 24.5 28.4 4.6 Anaheim Union 14.8 33.8 40.5 7.1 Fullerton Union 13.4 29.2 42.8 16.9 Hunt. Beach Union 20.7 32.3 14.1 2.8 Brea-Olinda 7.6 17.3 18.7 3.2 Capistrano 5.0 7.8 13.2 2.4 Garden Grove 27.8 27.0 36.3 6.9 Irvine 19.9 25.5 5.8 2.2 Laguna Beach 2.9 1.2 9.5 2.0 Los Alamitos 8.5 15.3 9.2 2.0 Newport-Mesa 8.2 8.0 24.9 3.6 Orange 12.2 23.9 28.3 6.2 Placentia-Yorba Linda 9.5 10.8 20.2 4.3 Saddleback Valley 9.6 12.4 10.0 2.3 Santa Ana 7.0 28.4 84.9 44.1 Tustin 12.2 10.4 25.6 3.2

Black White District Enrollment GATE Enrollment GATE Anaheim City 3.4% 0.7% 28.2% 53.5% Centralia 4.6 1.5 52.2 56.7 Cypress 3.4 0.0 64.4 68.2 Fountain Valley 1.2 0.8 72.8 67.7 Fullerton 2.6 0.4 49.5 64.6 Huntington Beach 1.3 0.4 80.6 81.9 La Habra 1.3 0.9 41.1 73.8 Magnolia 4.3 2.1 43.5 68.8 Ocean View 1.4 0.5 66.8 77.8 Savanna 4.9 2.4 53.6 69.0 Westminster 1.1 0.0 39.2 70.9 Anaheim Union 3.0 1.1 41.0 57.6 Fullerton Union 1.6 0.9 41.7 52.9 Hunt. Beach Union 1.1 0.3 56.8 58.0 Brea-Olinda 1.8 0.9 71.4 78.7 Capistrano 1.1 0.4 80.3 89.3 Garden Grove 1.4 0.1 33.0 64.8 Irvine 3.3 0.6 70.7 71.4 Laguna Beach 1.1 0.0 85.6 96.7 Los Alamitos 3.4 1.2 78.4 80.6 Newport-Mesa 0.9 0.4 65.8 87.9 Orange 1.8 0.8 57.2 68.5 Placentia-Yorba Linda 1.9 0.1 68.0 84.8 Saddleback Valley 1.9 0.7 78.1 84.4 Santa Ana 1.6 2.9 06.2 24.3 Tustin 5.7 1.4 55.8 84.9

* Includes Filipinos

Note: Buena Park elementary school district does not have a state-funded GATE program.

Source: State Department of Education

Researched by CATHERINE GEWERTZ / Los Angeles Times