Potential Options for Mitigating Inequality in Advanced Education and Their Implications for the Field of Gifted Education

• In Event: Are Excellence Gaps the Unavoidable Consequence of Expanded Opportunity for High-Performing Students?

Abstract

The field of gifted education has an identify problem. On one hand, its first goal is to develop manifest talent as well as seek out potential. At the same time, its second goal is to have relative demographic proportionality in the populations that it serves. Absent perfect and universal educational and opportunistic equality, these two goals are incompatible. This paper presents ideas that have been proposed for the mitigation of underrepresentation and excellence gaps before discussing how their implementation would change the underlying purpose of the field of gifted education and its affiliated K-12 services.

Traditionally, gifted education has been focused on the most extreme students, best exemplified by the common identification criteria of an IQ two standard deviations above the mean. This translates to a highly exclusive service population overall, and one that is very likely to mostly, if not completely, be made up of children of high opportunities to learn (OTLs). Although, in theory, this might satisfy goal one of gifted education, for at least the last 40 years it has lead to abject failure to achieve goal two. Even as gifted education has embraced increasingly liberal definitions, to the point of making almost everyone gifted at something and likely compromising goal one, underrepresentation has not improved.

The struggle between these two goals can best be thought of balancing goals of excellence and equity. Providing services to develop excellence will inherently exacerbate inequity. Alternatively, focusing heavily on closing gaps, exemplified by No Child Left Behind, will mitigate inequity, but at the cost of talent going underdeveloped and some students being ignored by K-12 curriculum. In order for gifted education as a field and as part of K-12 education to move forward, it needs to embrace these dueling identities. Much of this paper will address how, specially focused on how to better achieve goal two.

The interventions proposed to address underrepresentation include the following: universal screening, local and group specific norms for student identification, nonverbal ability tests for identification, and structured observation protocols such as TOPS and Young Scholars. Interventions proposed to address excellence gaps include: the front loading of opportunity, universal access to advanced programing in K-12 schools, educator training, ability grouping, and population-specific interventions.

Following the presentation of these options, I will share the implications their use would have on both of the major goals of gifted education, that of talent development and the mitigation of underrepresentation, followed by recommendations on what it would take for the field to actually accomplish both.

Author

• Scott Joseph Peters, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater