The study doesn’t get at why there is such a correlation, but it adds another layer to a long-simmering debate about why black and Latino children are less likely to be called “gifted” than their white and Asian peers.
The connection between teachers’ race and students’ likelihood of being called gifted “should give us pause,” said Jason A. Grissom, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the study’s lead author. “That does speak to something that fundamentally doesn’t feel right.”
“Really, a kid’s probability of being assigned to gifted services should not be a function of the characteristics of the teachers in the school,” Grissom said.
Black and Latino students are underrepresented in gifted programs. Graphic courtesy Jason A. Grissom.
Black and Latino students are underrepresented in gifted programs. From recent AERA paper by Jason A. Grissom, Luis A. Rodriguez and Emily C. Kern.
He and his colleagues presented their research over the weekend at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago.
They examined data from more than 2,000 schools in the 2003-4 and 2011-12 school years, and they determined that on average, 6 percent of all students in a school are identified for gifted programs. Nearly 8 percent of white students are called gifted, compared with just 3-4 percent of black and Latino students, according to their work.
But a 10 percent increase in black teachers was associated with a 3.2 percent increase in the proportion of black students identified as gifted. Nearly the same pattern held true for Latino teachers and students.