S4.8.9 Dreams Deferred: Access, Equity, and Missing Children in Gifted Education Across the United States

The US has a legacy of underserved populations that has not changed since the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) began collecting data on race and gifted identification more than 40 years ago. With funding from the Jack Kent Cook Foundation, we obtained secure OCR data from the 2000, 2012, 2014, and 2016 data collections—all census years. For the last three data collections we merged Title 1 variables and Locale variables to enable a finer interpretation of these data. The result is a national report and a report card grading each state on their access and equity as described below and in the abstract.

In this interactive session panelists will engage with the audience and 1. address access to identification, nationally and by state, in Title 1 and Non-Title 1 schools and by race; 2. examine equity, using representation indices, by Title school status, Race, Locale (i.e., city, suburb, town, rural) LEP, and IDEA groups; 3. show upper and lower boundaries of children missing from gifted education that result from schools that do not identify any students and from schools that underidentify some groups of students; 4. make some suggestions for sweeping reforms to address the longstanding and current problem of underserved youth in the United States, highlighting some states that seem to be making progress on this otherwise bleak front; 5. highlight top and bottom states in access, equity, and missingness 6. explain methods for grading states in these areas and discuss policy implications of the findings; and 7. demonstrate to participants how to access and interpret their own district data.

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