Gifted Education: A Broken Ladder

What do L.A. City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, entrepreneur Ron Unz and writer Erin Aubry Kaplan have in common? They were all born into poor families or lived in inner-city neighborhoods, and they were all identified as gifted during their elementary school years in the Los Angeles Unified School District. For generations, superior education has provided a ladder out of poverty--and often into greatness--for boys and girls who began life with nothing but their intellects. L.A. kids desperately need that ladder.

But today, the district’s gifted education program is a shambles. Giftedness, as LAUSD defines it, means showing markedly advanced general intellectual ability, ability in one academic area, high achievement or talent in the visual or performing arts. Theoretically, identifying students who meet the criteria is simple: School personnel note a child’s abilities and request that he or she be tested by a district psychologist. A school also may request that students be classified as gifted based on their Stanford 9 test scores. Those who score above the 70th percentile for two years can be considered gifted without additional testing.

Reality is more complicated. A look at district records reveals that its approximately 43,000 identified gifted children have been classified in a staggeringly unequal fashion. There’s no mechanism to automatically classify as gifted a student with qualifying Stanford 9 scores. And the discrepancy between affluent and poor areas is beyond any justification. In 1999, for instance, Warner Elementary in Holmby Hills had 217 kids identified as gifted, Marquez and Palisades in Pacific Palisades had 155 and 135; Westwood had 190, and Third Street in Hancock Park had 210. Palms Elementary by contrast had four. Parthenia Street, in Sepulveda, had one, and Coliseum Street and Angeles Mesa, both in South Central, had seven and two respectively. These patterns repeat throughout the district.

Despite the fact that the tests used to identify gifted children include one designed for “Able Underachieving Students from Diverse Backgrounds,” numbers are equally skewed when it comes to ethnicity. Whites, who comprise only 9.9% of LAUSD’s enrollment, make up about 28% of its gifted, and Asians, who represent 4.1% of enrollment, 15%. Seventy-one percent of LAUSD’s students are Latino, but only 41% of its gifted are. African Americans, who make up 12.8% of the population, represent just 9% of the gifted.

Sheila H. Smith, who for 15 years has been LAUSD’s coordinator for Gifted and Talented programs, explains the disparity as stemming in part from the fact that “whites who want public school education also want gifted education.” Also, she adds, “if you look at the private school directories, you find increasing numbers of private schools in minority areas. Minority parents, middle class parents, or anyone who can, tend to send their children to private schools, and that’s where the gifted are.”

It’s a peculiar explanation that ignores many more plausible reasons for the disparity. The most benign is that educated middle-class parents are most likely to know how to work the system. Only a fairly sophisticated parent will discover, for instance, that parents can request that a child be given a private, rather than a group test for giftedness (many children do better when tested singly), or that they can request their child be classified as gifted based on the recommendation of a private kindergarten teacher. The latter is essential for dealing with one of the current system’s built-in contradictions: Many magnet schools for the gifted begin in first grade, but district policy has been to test in third.

Other factors are uglier. Schools depend on teachers to recognize kids with superior intellectual abilities, but many simply don’t--perhaps because they’re among the hundreds of inexperienced instructors who don’t have teaching credentials (and are found in much greater numbers at inner-city schools). Some teachers hesitate to identify a child out of fear that the child will then transfer out and lower the school’s all-important test scores. Racism also plays a part. “There are all kinds of preconceived notions out there about who’s gifted and who isn’t,” says a source with intimate knowledge of the way gifted programs are administered in one sub-district. “People don’t believe that kids who come from deprived backgrounds can be gifted. People don’t believe that kids who speak poor or no English can be gifted.”

Finally, priorities matter. Even schools with similar demographics and enrollment numbers differ hugely in how many kids are identified as gifted. In South Central, for instance, in 1999 Ascot Avenue Elementary and Hooper Elementary each reported seven gifted kids. Nearby Forty-Ninth Street had 42. “We actively try to find those students and to set up enrichment programs for them,” says assistant principal Patricia Staten. “Children learn at different rates, and we want them all to maximize their learning potential.”

The fact is, schools have little incentive to test children. Administrators don’t care, asserts board of education member David Tokofsky, because the district doesn’t encourage them to care. “Principals know what they’ll get their butts kicked for,” Tokofsky says. “And it’s not this.” The office Smith runs is overburdened and, by all accounts, has been severely under-funded. Nor does the state provide incentives to make gifted education a priority. It gives gifted money according to a formula: budgeted funds--in 2000-2001, $51.9 million--are divided among 801 participating school districts based on their average daily attendance figures. It’s a system that actually penalizes districts for finding more able kids: the more students there are, the less money a district has to spend on each.

With no incentive for expansion, no one comparing individual schools, and no central system looking for Stanford 9 stars, L.A.’s elementary school identification process becomes, in the blunt words of the source well acquainted with gifted programs, “frighteningly random.” And since elementary school is when kids have the most prolonged contact with one teacher, chances are good that gifted students who don’t get spotted then will never be identified at all. “We’ve erected a mythology around our most capable learners,” says Barbara Clark, professor emeritus in the division of education at Cal State L.A., and author of the classic “Growing Up Gifted.” “Its core is that no matter what happens, these kids will make it.”

They don’t. A 1995 study done for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut compared a group of high ability urban Puerto Rican and African American students who’d done well in high school to a similarly capable group who hadn’t. “High ability students who underachieved in high school,” they noted, “acknowledged that their underachievement began in elementary school when they were not provided with appropriate levels of challenge.”

Kids who do manage to get identified as gifted face the current setup’s second failure: the district’s special programs and schools can’t come close to accommodating them all. The stellar Individualized Honors Program at Walter Reed Middle School turned down many more kids than it could accept last year. Over 4,000 of the approximately 6,700 kids who apply to gifted magnets each year don’t get in. Gifted magnet slots also shrink drastically the older a child gets, from 3,637 in the middle school years to only 1,420 in high school. Magnets offer whites an advantage, since the schools, designed as integration tools, must maintain racially “balanced” campuses that are no more than 70% minority. And because “minority” just means “noon-Anglo,” a “balanced” campus may have few African Americans or Latinos or both.

In the end, the vast majority of L.A.’s brightest kids end up going to their neighborhood schools. Schools that receive gifted education money from the state must create special programs under the auspices of a “gifted coordinator.” But that important title is misleading. Coordination duties usually are handled by a teacher who typically gets a minimal stipend or some time off for doing a huge amount of extra work. As a result, turnover--and inexperience--are extremely high. Further, the state only requires the district to provide 200 minutes of specialized curriculum each week: 40 minutes a day.

This doesn’t matter, Sheila Smith says, for “it’s the responsibility of every school to provide for high level students. A good teacher moves students across a continuum.” But, in general, teachers don’t do that. A 1993 national survey, also done by the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, found that most teachers gave similar or identical assignments to both gifted and average students. Individualization is even less likely on a campus where fewer than 15 of 1,000 students have even been classified as gifted.

Partly in response to the demands of some parents, two years ago LAUSD launched a new gifted program, Schools for Advanced Studies (SAS), which separates groups of gifted kids at neighborhood schools into their own classes. The hope, says Carol Knee, an SAS parent liaison in the Valley, is to one day have enough participating schools that gifted kids will no longer need to seek out magnets, but “move from the local elementary to middle to high school, the way they used to.”

It’s too early to tell how SAS is working, though a troubling old pattern has already emerged: Subdistricts A and D, in the northwest Valley and Westside, have three times as many participating schools as F, I and J, in the poor, minority communities of East L.A., Cudahy-Huntington Park-Maywood, and South Central.

The stakes are high. Without solid, well-administered and above all, fair, gifted education programs, bright boys and girls who don’t speak English, who don’t have parents who can work the system, who don’t have the option of private school when they get bored, will continue to fall through the cracks. The Latino kids who might have become spectacular scientists, the African-Americans who would have made brilliant physicians, will never know their own talents--nor will we.