In 2003, Cynthia Park asked her staff to make a map showing where every gifted student lived in Broward County, Fla.
The result was an atlas of inequality.
“All
of them were scattered in the suburbs and in the wealthier communities,
where parents were more involved in education,” recalls Park, who
oversaw the county’s gifted students program. “The map was virtually
void in other areas."
Park's map helped convince board members
for the school district, which serves over a quarter-million children in
and around Fort Lauderdale, that it needed to work much harder at
identifying precocious children from all neighborhoods. In 2005, Broward
began giving a short test to all students in the second grade. Those
who scored well were sent off for further evaluation to determine their
aptitude for the system's gifted program.
Now, newly released
research by economists David Card, of the University of California at
Berkeley, and Laura Giuliano, of the University of Miami, shows that
Broward's initiative was, at least in its initial years, a huge success
at identifying poor, minority students qualified for gifted programs.
Crucially, the process laid bare the surprising — and disturbing
— reasons that the school district hadn't been finding these kids in the
first place...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/09/22/these-kids-were-geniuses-they-were-just-too-poor-for-anyone-to-discover-them/?tid=sm_fb
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