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GATE Is Opening for More Gifted O.C. Minority Pupils : Education: In a move to diversify classes for talented children, the stakes are high--and controversial.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

For two months, a young Latino girl named Alicia sat in her second-grade classroom, rarely asking questions and dutifully completing her work. Her teacher saw nothing extraordinary about her. But Alicia’s classmates did. They nominated the quiet, dark-eyed girl for her school’s gifted-and-talented program.

Pink questionnaires distributed to the students had asked: Who is the most curious? Who knows a lot? Who has good ideas? Who can always think of more than one way to do things? Again and again, they replied: Alicia (except they used her real name).

Asking children for their opinions of their classmates is one innovative way to identify more minority children for the gifted-and-talented, or GATE, program in Baldwin Park Unified School District, whose 15,000 students come from a low-income, heavily Spanish-speaking community about 18 miles east of Los Angeles.

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Since 1980, California educators have been under legislative pressure to correct the racial inequities in their GATE programs, which remain disproportionately white and Asian despite a state law requiring a “special effort” to include “pupils from economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds.”

Of California’s three most populous counties, the deepest inequities exist in Orange County. An Asian student here is almost 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.

To comply with the 1980 state law, school districts across the state are trying many new tactics.

Some, like San Diego’s, have adopted new intelligence tests, realizing that more traditional ones rely so much on language and cultural cues that minority children, and those not proficient in English, tend not to score high.

Other districts are re-educating their teachers, showing them better ways to recognize giftedness or to expand their concept of what it is.

Still others, like Tustin’s, have abandoned IQ tests altogether, relying instead on other criteria to determine giftedness, such as a student’s academic record, work samples or reports from teachers.

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In the campaign to diversify classes for the gifted, the stakes are high. With black and Latino children sorely underrepresented in such programs, many educators fear that thousands of talented minority students are languishing without the level of stimulation they need.

The challenge of scouting out that undiscovered talent is proving to be far from easy. Nor is it being accomplished without controversy, as has erupted in Tustin, which is undertaking one of the more radical overhauls.

Administrators there have based their reforms on a theory of giftedness propounded by a Harvard education professor named Howard Gardner.

In addition to the two most commonly recognized areas of intelligence, verbal and mathematical, Gardner teaches that there are five others: spatial (as seen in sculptors, engineers); musical; kinesthetic (seen in athletes, surgeons, craftspeople); interpersonal (understanding what makes others tick, as seen in counselors or politicians), and intrapersonal (displaying a strong self-image, or the courage of one’s convictions).

To Gardner, those are not only distinct areas of intellectual strength, but also modes of learning. One child may absorb a lesson in American Colonial history by reading about it; another by acting in a play about the early settlers.

His ideas have influenced many educators to expand their definitions of giftedness, how to look for it, and how to devise programs of instruction to best nurture it.

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In Tustin, the adoption of Gardner’s views has drawn accusations that standards in the gifted program are dropping because the criteria for admission are too subjective.

Julie Hume, Tustin’s director of curriculum and the driving force behind the changes there, said the newly embraced theory respects the full range of talent to be found in people. Labeling as gifted only students with high IQs--or even straight A’s--is deeply unfair to many others, she says.

“What we are trying to do is recognize all the gifts,” Hume said.

The reforms have begun in Tustin’s elementary schools. The district used to group its gifted students together year-round for traditional academic courses geared to brighter students. This year, those classes were eliminated in fourth grade. Next year, similar fifth-grade classes will be axed.

Instead of a special year-round class for a select group of gifted kids, the district is leaving the gifted children in regular classes, but periodically pulling them out for daylong excursions or other activities designed to enrich each of the seven intelligences.

Children who showed superior ability in leadership, for instance, were recently bused to another school, where they each “became” a country, researched its human rights stance and formed a mock United Nations, debating each country’s policy.

Those who excelled in musical ability spent a day at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where they were treated to a demonstration and discussion on ballet by members of the American Ballet Theater.

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Hume has come under intense attack from a group of parents whose children had been identified as gifted under the old, more traditional norms. Some of these parents are sharply critical of the dismantling of the gifted-only classes, saying the brightest children cannot be sufficiently challenged in a class with 32 students.

Other parents have complained that, without standardized testing to determine giftedness, the program will be “watered down.”

“I really couldn’t figure out what could be observed from some of these tests . . . that they are giving,” said one parent, who asked not to be named. “If they wrongly identify some kids as gifted, the risk is that any program constructed for those kids will not in practice be able to operate at the level the (academically gifted) kids truly need.”

Another parent was more blunt: “The standards aren’t high enough. What the (gifted) program is going to be is a joke, because it’s going to include everyone. If you can kick a kickball, you can make it on kinesthetic. If you draw a nice picture, you make it in art, even if your reading and math skills are low.”

Hume and others who subscribe to Gardner’s theory say this is the aspect that is most often misunderstood.

The idea, they say, is not to spot an amazing musician and stick her in an old-fashioned gifted class offering accelerated math, English and history. Indeed, a child with musical talent, for instance, might--or might not--have a terrific academic record. The goal is to radically overhaul a school’s curriculum so that it responds not only to the academic talents of its students, but to a rainbow of others as well.

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Gardner himself said “the onus on . . . (educators) is to give the children the enrichments they want and merit,” which he acknowledges takes “a lot of work.”

If schools are restructured to cater to the different needs of gifted children, those with a flair for leadership can receive special opportunities to exercise and refine it, and those who soar in math can jump into calculus as soon as they are ready. And so on.

“The real power of multiple-intelligence theory is that it gets you to look very carefully at students and their work, and gets you to look through a lot of different lenses and figure out how to mobilize the intelligences the child has,” Gardner said.

He hastens to add, however, that academic standards should not be eased. The one “potential mischief” he foresees in schools trying to revamp themselves on the multiple-intelligence theory is “if it becomes a license for ‘anything goes,’ or an absence of standards or rigor.”

In Baldwin Park’s quest to discover additional gifted children, one of the things it elected to do was recruit more lookouts. Instead of relying exclusively on teachers to notice gifted students--a method that might overlook quiet, non-traditional or underachieving pupils--the district began seeking the views of other students and parents, too.

Carol Kaylor, the district’s coordinator of curriculum, says that if it hadn’t been for her peers, Alicia might have gone unnoticed for years. Instead, she was placed in the gifted program and is now a straight-A student in sixth grade, despite the extra challenges.

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Alicia’s teacher at DeAnza Elementary School had been asked to nominate the students she thought gifted, but hadn’t chosen Alicia for special instruction. After she learned that her students had, she began to scrutinize Alicia’s work more closely.

Little by little, she noticed things: Alicia was successfully teaching herself handwriting, a skill not usually taught until third grade. A native Spanish-speaker, her English language skills weren’t good. But she often got perfect scores in math. She stayed inside at recess, drawing and writing long poems. One of her pictures showed a rabbit from three angles in great detail--a remarkable feat for a 7-year-old.

Gradually, the teacher’s outlook changed. The school psychologist administered an IQ test. When he was done, he sent a wry note to Kaylor: “Will 175 do?”

“We were floored,” Kaylor said.

Baldwin Park also adopted an IQ test called the Leiter International Performance Scale, which explores the way children’s minds work regardless of their language skills. Originally designed for the deaf, the test requires children to solve visual problems, such as discerning patterns in colored blocks or in a series of numbers.

In three years of using these new methods of finding talent, Baldwin Park--which has an 80% Latino population--increased the Latino share of its gifted students from 32% to 46%.

Using a new IQ test has also been pivotal in the San Diego City Unified School District’s program to bring more minority children into its gifted program. After years scrutinizing a host of tests, the district settled on one called the Raven Progressive Matrices.

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Directions can be given orally in any language, and it poses problems that can be solved visually. A student might, for instance, be shown a complex pattern with a piece missing, and be asked to choose from among several pieces the one that would complete the pattern.

Elinor Ruth Smith, a consultant hired by San Diego to overhaul the way gifted children are identified, said the test is valuable, not only because it transcends language and cultural differences, but also because it measures a child’s learning potential, rather than what that child has already achieved. This way, a school can discover a child with extraordinary abilities, even if the pupil hasn’t performed well in school.

Yet that is precisely what has triggered controversy, as some districts diversified their gifted programs by including some children without hard evidence that “proves” they are gifted.

Educators such as Baldwin Park’s Kaylor recognize that by abandoning test scores and numbers--which reassure many parents and teachers that the “real” gifted students have been found--they are relying on subjective evaluations that make many people uneasy.

“I am convinced we have found kids like Alicia, but I also know that we probably have identified students who may not be considered gifted in other districts with other kinds of criteria,” she said. “It’s a trade-off. I guess we have ventured into an area that is more of an accordion, more flexible. You get into a huge argument about what is gifted and nobody has an absolute answer.”

In addition to using a new IQ test, San Diego decided that teachers had to be retrained to recognize gifts in their students. Smith felt that the old skill-and-drill techniques did not force students to use their best thinking skills. How, then, could teachers see what the children really were capable of?

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So the district set out on a time-consuming, labor-intensive re-education of its teachers.

In hundreds of classroom demonstrations, teachers learned new strategies to elicit more creative, higher-order thinking. They learned, for instance, how to ask open-ended questions instead of queries that bring one-word, right-or-wrong answers.

“In a social studies unit on the family, for instance, instead of asking, ‘OK, what are the three things that define a family?,’ you could ask, ‘What comes to mind when you think about family?” Smith said. “You make kids elaborate, explain, think. You learn a lot more about what they know that way.”

The motive behind this method is twofold: Lessons become more engaging and interesting, and students can demonstrate their strengths five days a week, not just in a one-shot, standardized test. For a properly trained teacher, that creates many more opportunities to recognize a child’s unique abilities.

San Diego also set out to retrain its teachers about new concepts of giftedness. With grant money, the district conducted training among bilingual teachers and even those in the state-funded preschool, hoping promising children could be spotted while young and nurtured.

Smith tried to let teachers know that a brilliant child isn’t always the one who is obedient and aces his homework. Sometimes the most amazing mind, she said, is locked inside a child who misbehaves or hardly ever speaks. You need to look closely, she told them, for signs of something special.

“We had a notion about how giftedness expressed itself: high verbal or high math ability,” Smith said. “It was a way of speaking, a way of using standardized English. A lot of our children never even got to (take) the (IQ) test because in order to be tested, you have to have someone think you’re gifted and refer you. We tried to open our teachers’ eyes a little bit.”

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That’s how they found Roberto. In kindergarten, he was headed in the opposite direction, having been referred for a special-education evaluation. He couldn’t seem to sit still, and his teacher thought he suffered from attention-deficit disorder.

In second grade, Roberto (not his real name) had a teacher who had undergone the new training program; she recognized that his intense interest in science might signal a strong intellect. His IQ tested at over 160. He is now in the district’s “highly gifted” program.

“This was a child who was truly misunderstood,” said Rosa I. Perez, director of Project Excel, the program that retrained the bilingual teachers.

Like many districts that change the way they find gifted children, San Diego encountered some resistance from parents of students already in the program, whose giftedness could be measured by more traditional norms. “There was concern about the quality of the program changing,” Smith said.

Pat O’Connell Ross, who directs a grant program at the U.S. Department of Education that seeks to find new ways to recruit gifted minority children, said that such misgivings are not without foundation.

“The great fear one has in all of this is that it’s going to end up mush, that people will be so focused on finding someone who does rope-dancing that we lose sight of the fact that there is a set of skills and knowledge that we need,” she said.

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But educators such as Tustin’s Hume suggest that the pendulum has swung in the other direction for too long. Schools, she says, have labeled too few as gifted and paid too little heed to the others.

“We’re trying to bridge the gap between excellence and equity,” she said. “If the standards are high enough, it’s by nature exclusive. That’s excellence of one sort. But that denies equity--the same chance--to many students. And is that our role in public education?

“I want everybody to be as good as they can be.”

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