Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from the Hechinger Report, author Jill Barshay discusses a solution that has been proposed for increasing racial diversity in gifted classrooms across the U.S.

• Selecting the students who score highest from each school would increase racial diversity, but Prof. Scott Peters says that this will lead to some students in these gifted classrooms being less well prepared. How can we better prepare minority students for gifted classrooms before they get to them?

• To learn about how New York City has made progress toward diversity goals in their gifted programs, click here.

The most troubling aspect of gifted classrooms is that they tend to be disproportionately filled with white and Asian students while bright black and Hispanic students often get overlooked. Indeed, gifted and talented programs can sometimes look like a clever tool to separate children by race or ethnicity in school. In New York City, for example, white and Asian parents who have the resources and/or inclination to prepare their four-year-olds to excel on standardized tests snag almost three quarters of the coveted seats. Meanwhile, black and Hispanic students make up more than 65 percent of the public school system.

Nationally, more than 13 percent of all Asian students are enrolled in gifted programs compared with just 4 percent of black students, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Among whites, 8 percent get tapped for gifted classrooms. Among Hispanics, it’s 5 percent. That mirrors long-standing achievement differences on standardized tests.

Some policymakers are floating this remedy: Pick the top students in each school instead of those students who score among the top in the nation. Research scholars are now studying exactly what would happen to the racial and demographic composition of gifted classrooms if school districts were to switch their selection criteria this way.

Read the full article about racial diversity in gifted classrooms by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report