Segregating the "Gifted" in Charlottesville: The Founding of Quest, 1976–1986

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Challenging White Supremacy in Education in Charlottesville Post-2017

Abstract

The implementation of gifted programs in the 1970s provided a way for school divisions to circumvent many of the aims of desegregated schooling as called for in Brown v. Board. This presentation examines the implementation of one such system in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Southern school district that closed schools rather than integrate. In the 1970s, the school board, acting in accordance with national and statewide dicta, created a gifted program known as Quest, which came to be another tool of segregation. Additionally, the presentation situates the founding of this gifted program in a nationwide social and legal context involving fears of educational stagnation, white flight from public school systems, and the rise of “colorblindness” as a tool to overlook racist educational policies and programs Using primary and secondary sources, this presentation highlights the attitudes of national policymakers at work in the 1974 re-authorization of ESEA, which significantly limited school divisions’ abilities to integrate through federally-funded busing while also diverting those funds to gifted classrooms that segregated “exceptional” children using racially- and socioeconomically-biased measures. Primarily focusing on the available sources, this presentation examines the gifted program’s founding from multiple perspectives.
After examining the historical contexts surrounding the founding and first decade of Charlottesville’s gifted program, the presentation then compares these historical antecedents to today’s community-based discussions about race, racism, and gifted education in the context of national attention paid to the city schools after the violent white supremacist gatherings of August 11 and 12, 2017 and subsequent coverage from the New York Times and ProPublica. The presentation discusses overlaps and similarities to conversations regarding racial inequities for students’ of color access to higher-level courses, particularly Black students.
The story of Quest’s founding in Charlottesville is invariably positioned against the backdrop of national trends regarding race, class, Cold War fears, and gifted education. This story explored the relationships between these factors and also considers them against our own moment in Charlottesville. The domestic, white supremacist terrorist attacks of August 11 and August 12, 2017 opened the eyes of many Charlottesville residents and reminded many others of the racial terror, overt and covert, present since the city’s founding. With support from community members, archivists, and the sources discussed above, this project has used the founding of Quest to examine the historical contexts of gifted education in the United States among the intersection of public education and race.
This presentation aims to approach exploring the relationship between the end of Massive Resistance and the beginning of segregated gifted programs such as Quest from as many angles as possible. Triangulation is always a challenge for the historian dealing with multiple perspectives, but with the aid of the resources outlined above, this presentation aims to expand the conversation about segregated schooling in the latter half of the 20th Century and toward the present day. The author does so in the hopes that we might appreciate the myriad reactions to Brown that continue to prevent students from seeking truly integrated education.

Author

• Margaret Thornton, Princeton University