New Tactics Tried in Gifted Student Programs : Schools: Realizing that districts were failing to identify minority youngsters who excel, educators are using innovative ways to ease the inequities.

For two months, a young Latina 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 that 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 Education program, or GATE, in the Baldwin Park Unified School District, whose 15,000 students come from a low-income, heavily Spanish-speaking community about 25 miles east of Los Angeles.

School districts around the state are trying new tactics in response to legislative pressure to correct the racial inequities in GATE programs, which have enrollments that are disproportionately white and Asian-American despite a 1980 state law requiring a “special effort” to include “pupils from economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds.”

Of California’s three most populous counties, Orange County has the largest inequities. An Asian-American student there is almost six times more likely than a Latino to be in a gifted class, and an Anglo has more than three times the chances of an African-American child. The county’s rates of enrollment in gifted programs are 11.7% for Asian-Americans, 9.5% for Anglos, 2.6% for African-Americans and 1.9% for Latinos.

The disparities in Los Angeles and San Diego counties are somewhat smaller. In Los Angeles, 7.9% of Anglo students and 12% of Asian-American students have been identified as gifted, compared to 2.7% of Latinos and 3.4% of African-Americans. In San Diego, the gifted enrollment rates are 12.7% for Anglos, 13.8% for Asian-Americans, 4.9% for African-Americans and 3.6% for Latinos.

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

In addition, teachers were trained to recognize gifted students. The old skill-and-drill techniques did not force students to use their best thinking skills, said Elinor Ruth Smith, a consultant who helped San Diego Unified overhaul the way it identified gifted children. In hundreds of classroom demonstrations, teachers learned new strategies to elicit more creative, higher-order thinking. They learned how to ask open-ended questions instead of queries that bring one-word, right-or-wrong answers.

With grant money, the district conducted training among bilingual teachers and those in the state-funded preschool, hoping that gifted children could be spotted young and nurtured.

“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.”

Other districts, such as Tustin, have abandoned IQ tests, relying on other criteria such as a student’s academic record, work samples or reports from teachers.

In Tustin, which is attempting one of the more radical overhauls in gifted education, school administrators have based their reforms on a theory of giftedness propounded by Howard Gardner, a Harvard education professor.

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 (as 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 they look for it and how they devise instruction programs to best nurture it.

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

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

Tustin parents whose children had been identified as gifted under the traditional norms have attacked the new approach. Some are sharply critical of the dismantling of the gifted-only classes, saying that the brightest children cannot be sufficiently challenged in a class with 32 students. Others complain that the academic standards are not high enough.

Those who subscribe to Gardner’s theory, including Julie Hume, Tustin’s director of curriculum, say academic standards are the aspect most often misunderstood.

Hume, the driving force behind Tustin’s changes, said the theory respects the full range of talent found in people. Labeling as “gifted” only students with high IQs--or even straight A’s--is unfair to many others, she said.

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

In Baldwin Park’s quest to discover additional gifted children, one of the tactics the district elected to try was recruiting 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.

Carol Kaylor, the district’s coordinator of curriculum, said that if it had not been for her peers, Alicia might have gone unnoticed for years.

Alicia’s teacher at DeAnza Elementary School had been asked to nominate the students she believed were gifted but had not chosen Alicia. After she learned that her students considered their classmate exceptional, she began to scrutinize Alicia’s work.

Little by little, the teacher noticed things. Alicia was teaching herself handwriting, a skill not usually taught until third grade. A native Spanish speaker, Alicia’s language skills were not good, but she often made perfect scores on math. She stayed inside at recess, drawing and writing long poems. One picture 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 gave Alicia 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 that 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 exceptionally talented students, Baldwin Park--which has an 80% Latino population--increased the proportion of Latino gifted students from 32% to 46%.