WPost: These kids were geniuses — they were just too poor for anyone to discover them

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