How to find a gifted child without using the tools which actually work.

From How do you find a gifted child? by Jill Barshay.  The subheading is Teacher ratings differ when you cross the hallway, study finds.

This is one of education's third-rails.  Demonstrated capabilities and realized outcomes vary based on race, class, culture, circumstance, sex, behavior (partly genetic), and IQ (partly genetic.)  IQ tests are the single most reliable tools for forecasting future educational outcomes (and to a lesser but still strong extent forecasted life outcomes).  

Because IQ is strongly genetic and heritable, there is great aversion to rely on those tests, useful as they are.  The problem is that no other alternatives are nearly as reliable and useful for identifying high performers.  

At one elementary school in rural Appalachia, most of the children are white and poor; 90 percent qualify for free or reduced priced lunch. Guess how many of the 800 students are gifted? The answer: three. At least, that’s the determination of a widely-used national intelligence test, on which few students living in poverty score highly.

School administrators wanted to boost the number of gifted students and invited a team of researchers to come up with another way to find them. The researchers asked 16 teachers to rate their students to indicate which ones were far above average in their classrooms, if not the nation, and could benefit from advanced instruction. 

When the research team tallied up the teacher ratings for all 282 students in this 2021 experiment, they were startled. Different methods of creaming off the top 10 percent produced entirely different groups of students who would be identified as gifted with almost no overlap. The top 10 percent in each classroom yielded one group of gifted students. The top 10 percent school-wide yielded another. Only six kids were in both groups. 

“It was inconsistent from classroom to classroom,” said Karen Rambo-Hernandez, an associate professor of education at Texas A&M University, who presented her unpublished findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April 2022. “Teachers may be making different judgment calls.” 

Both for the individuals and for the nation as a whole, there is a reasonable real confidence that better and more focused attention on the gifted will lift all boats.

We also have the tools for identifying those gifted students.

The problem is that the gifted students are not randomly distributed based on race, class, culture, circumstance, sex, behavior (partly genetic), and IQ (partly genetic.) 

If we are to identify and cultivate the most gifted, we either have to reconcile ourselves to that absence of randomness or develop non-IQ tests that are equally good or better at reliably identifying the most gifted.  

The problem is that we have been searching for such alternatives since at least 1970.  Those alternatives do not exist and there are grounds to suspect that they will never exist.  

In the meantime, in polite educational circles, we deny the well documented science and turn away from what works because it refuses to accommodate our normative desires.  And in doing so, we compound the tragedy.  The wealthy, the well-educated, the aspirational middle class, etc. will always search diligently for signs of giftedness in their progeny and wherever that evidence can be demonstrated, they will seize on it like a dog with a bone.  

Who loses out?  The gifted among the poor and marginalized.  The tests are withheld from them making it harder to be discovered.  They are made to suffer to accommodate the sensibilities of the educationalists who are affronted that the actual distribution of giftedness does not follow the model they fervently desire.  They are putting their ideology ahead of the actual needs of the poor and marginalized.  

Joni Lakin, an associate professor of educational research at the University of Alabama who has developed tests to identify gifted children, praised the study. “I think we’re too fixated on identification,” Lakin Said. “I’ve lost my faith in fixing gifted’s equity problem by fixing how we identify students.”

Shame on them.