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Houston's Gifted Education Program Biased Against Blacks and Latinos
tiberus sends an NPR report investigating the fairness of gifted and talented programs in Houston schools. Analysts believe black and hispanic students are at put at a disadvantage because of the way in which the program is run. Quoting:
Donna Ford, at Vanderbilt University, thinks that put Isaac at a disadvantage. She's been researching gifted education for decades, and when it comes to Houston's program she says, "I think it's a clear case of segregation, gifted education being segregated by race and income." Houston school leaders asked Ford to take a close look at their enrollment in the program, and she gave it a failing grade. "Racial bias has to be operating, inequities are rampant. Discrimination does exist whether intentional or unintentional," she told the school board in May of this year. Ford found that both Hispanic and black students are underrepresented in gifted programs and that black students are missing out the most. She also found that about half the seats in those programs go to higher-income students, even though the majority of the district is poor.
If the tests are too easy, the kids aren't "gifted."
If they don't pass the test, then they aren't "gifted."
If the test uses words they don't understand, then what words would the researcher suggest the tests use that aren't "culturally biased?" Using three letter words well isn't a sign of ability.
In other words she is so full of crap. Maybe the kids that are in the program are better than other kids because of things like their parents care enough to insure the kid is doing their homework, is responsible etc.
This whole institutional racism crap is just that crap. If she had evidence that a school or teacher blatantly excluded kids of a minority group that would be different but what she is spouting is SJW at its finest.
I think all one needs to do is read up on the person quoted in the article. I'm sure she doesn't have an agenda:
http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Donna Ford immediately leaps to the conclusion that the issue is racism. More probing would probably indicate that the majority of the minority households in that area are probably single parent households, possibly with parents working low paying jobs, and\or working more than one job to make ends meet. This means that the parent is not fully invested in the upbringing of their child - probably not for lack of caring, but for lack of time or understanding about what education means to advancing yourself in society. The result is that the kid spends more time with friends and is heavily influenced by the dumb-assed decisions that all kids make.
If the tests are too easy, the kids aren't "gifted."
If they don't pass the test, then they aren't "gifted."
If the test uses words they don't understand, then what words would the researcher suggest the tests use that aren't "culturally biased?" Using three letter words well isn't a sign of ability.
A lot depends on how you're testing for giftedness.
Unfortunately if you don't have money or education yourself, your kids are much less likely to, so someone from a poverty-stricken background or with parents who aren't formally educated are on average going to do much worse on tests. They may also tend to be non-white. That's not racism, but it does create a systemic bias where you place people based on the money and education of their parents.
What we really need is enrichment programs designed to counteract that starting from a young age. A giftedness program isn't that unless we *make* it that.
But if we do use a giftedness program for that, we should be explicit about it--state whether the goal is to be representative of the population or to take the highest-scorers, for example.
You'd simply want to control for those factors, not dismiss them outright. If after controlling for socioeconomic status, family/home situation, etc. you find that there is still a large gap along racial lines, then there is probably some racial bias in existence.
However, in most cases when you do this, the difference comes out to be much smaller. A good example is the supposed wage gap where women only earn ~77% as much as men. It's just a case of bad statistics, and when you control for various factors (occupation, overtime, years working, etc.) you tend to arrive at a much smaller gap (usually 3-7%) that no longer allows for such sensational claims, so people stick to parroting the statistic that makes their cause look best.
Hmmm ... kind of by definition that's not "genetic", but socioeconomic.
Basically it becomes the circular argument of we define "gifted" as the children of parents who can afford to give these children early advantages and exhibit the traits being measured ... and then you can't claim those children who have had additional advantages are "gifted", but "lucky enough to come from privileged backgrounds".
The selection of traits is one thing, the ability to afford to cause the conditions for those traits isn't natural selection.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
One of the biggest issues in education is always going to be how to characterize the educational potential for the children who go into the program. There are challenges for every gifted program:
*Are the tests written in such a way that there is a cultural bias?
*Are parents able to truly critically assess their children's intelligence or learning capacity *relative to the child's peers'?
*Is the program supposed to be about advanced training for children who meet certain standards, or is its supposed to be a program that is supposed to confer equal opportunity by conferring special programs on children.
Let's take Johnny. He's a smart kid, probably has the neurochemical make-up to be some sort of a genius. The problem is, he's retained less knowledge that can be used to adequately assess his raw intelligence through a common battery of questions. Why? He has no books or educational material. His parents aren't home enough to read to him or attend to his learning. They don't have money to ensure that he attends schools. How does someone test him fairly?
Let's take Suzie, she's not necessarily at the same level as Johnny, but her parents have been able to ensure that she has obtained skills and knowledge that are considered to be desirable. It is not a requirement for Suzie's parent's to be rich or white or asian, but those backgrounds make it a lot easier for Suzie to be exposed to knowledge that will be on that test because there is a higher overall income for those families. The parents have better jobs, they can spend money and time on their kids, on average. In some cases, there is also a huge cultural value placed on education.
The reality is: poor kids are not always going to fail to be seen as gifted, but there are huge challenges. Kids are tested young for their intelligence, and so parental involvement is huge at that point. It doesn't matter if I have Einstein's brain if that brain potential is underdeveloped. Brains aren't CPUs that you can hook up a hard drive to and then they produce at their capability.
In other words, if you want to run a program for children seen as gifted, you have to define what gifted *is*, and then test for that. If you're testing children who are more advanced in their skills at a certain point, the fact is, you're going to have more rich and racial privileged kids in there. And you're *not* going to be able to change that by simply being more "inclusive". You need to raise the level of skills of the less skilled kids. And the only way to do that is extra work.
On the other hand, if you want to find people who have pure, raw potential, irrespective of background, you're probably going to have to start testing brain chemistry, even looking at DNA. That may work, insofar as ensuring that there is a purely "potential" based criteria. But even then, if you want those children to actually retain skills and knowledge, you're going to need to make up for their lack of opportunity in the home for extra learning and discipline.
Look up Donna Ford's bio at Vanderbilt and you get this as her "Research Area":
Gifted with emphasis on minority children and youth; recruitment and retention of diverse students in gifted education; underachievement among diverse students; equity issues in testing and assessment; multicultural education; issues in urban education.
So basically Ford's entire area of expertise depends on FINDING bias in these programs. Perhaps she should acquaint herself with Confirmation Bias. If you look hard enough for anything, you'll find it whether it's there or not.
Further, the bias is explained by Ford as a fault of the gifted program, but she completely neglects CULTURAL FACTORS that also bias gifted involvement. There is, generally speaking, a cultural bias in the black community AGAINST academic excellence. It even has a name: "acting white." Blacks who use proper spelling and grammar are called "Oreo's," a derogatory term indicating they're "black on the outside but white on the inside." This is especially bad in poorer neighborhoods where "leaving the hood" is considered akin to being a racial traitor. Act like a thug, dress like a thug, eschew education in favor of "hanging out" and you're accepted. Anything else and you're ostracized.
Don't believe it? Ask around. It's common knowledge. Nobody wants to say it but everyone knows it's going on.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you're not asking the "Why" question, you're only creating more bias.
I'll tell you the "why" part of that question. Asians, who have been slaved in America, had intern camps etc etc have had biases against them, and overcame those biases. WHY? Because they applied themselves and did well in society, becoming a value.
The counterpoint to this is watch what happens when a Black person becomes successful, how their own community shuns them (Uncle Tom, "acting white" etc). The reality is, that blacks are still slaves, to their own cultural biases. And they won't succeed until they leave the plantation and masters that continue to tell them they are still slaves.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
While what you say is quite nice in the abstract, the nurture aspect is very strong in this concrete case.
If kids go hungry, if shots are fired next door each day, if they have to travel hours to get to a school that can only hire teachers that have failed to get jobs elsewhere, then "nature" doesn't even have a chance of entering the door, it's all nurture. You have to be extremely motivated and disciplined in such an environment to even stand a chance of gaining a normal education, let alone enroll in a gifted program.
Another point I'd like to make is that the tests aren't all that capable of predicting success.
In The Netherlands, the disparity in living conditions is much lower - our "slums" are suburbs compared to a lot of other countries. The tests correlate much better with real ability - and even there we see a rather unnerving percentage of kids where the tests actually go off by a wide margin, so much so that it is now the law (new since last year) that the advice from the kids teachers is the one that has to be followed, and tests can only cause a lower advice to be changed to a higher one, not a high advice to be lowered. The main reason for this was that the teachers advice was correlating much better with academic success than the IQ tests.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)