Where Are the Gifted Minorities?

Scientific American:

For more than a quarter century, critics have faulted gifted education programs for catering to kids from advantaged backgrounds. These programs do, after all, typically enroll outsized numbers of European American and Asian American students hailing from relatively well-off homes. Members of other ethnic groups, meanwhile, tend to be underrepresented, as judged by the percentage of these students in a school district relative to that in its gifted program.

In a study based on data from the 2006 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Survey, for example, education researcher Donna Y. Ford at Vanderbilt University and her colleagues found that African American students are underrepresented in gifted programs by about 51 percent and Hispanic students by about 42 percent, relative to their proportion in the nation’s schools.

Read the whole story: Scientific American