Scott Peters || Rethinking Gifted Education

the podcast. Doctor Peters is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and the Richard and Veronica Teller Endowed Faculty Fellow of Education at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater, where he teaches courses on Measurements and Assessment, research methodology, and gifted education. His research focuses on educational assessment, gifted talented student identification,

disproportionality within K twelve education, and educational policy. He's the first author of Beyond Gifted Education, Designing and Implementing Advanced Academic Programs and Services from Purpose to Implementation, and the co author, along with Jonathan Pucker, of Excellent Gaps in Education, Expanding Opportunities for Talented Students, published by Harvard Education Press. So great to chat with you today, Scott. It's my pleasure. I didn't know you were going to read all that.

It sounds it sounds a lot fancier when you say it than and in reality, but it's wonderful. It's very Uh, it's rightly fancy. You've done a lot, You've been a lot of this field, and you've an awesome first name. And I look forward to chatting with you today about all that except your first name. Yes, we'll probably restrain ourselves in it. Yeah. So you've been rethinking gifted education, you've been working in the field of gifted education. Did you start out in this field rethinking it? How did

you start off? It's actually funny because I have to answer that question saying no, because there's this kind of fame book chapter by a guy named Jim Borland from Columbia University in New York, and I think the title of the chapter is something along the lines of Gifted education without gifted Children. And I can remember reading that chapter early on in my graduate training and just hating it and just thinking it was a ridiculous proposition and

that it was overly simplistic and all these things. And now I think of Jim Boreland as probably one of the most forward thinking individuals who was unappreciated in his time, and every time I read his work, I'm just it's so in line with my own thinking, and so I have to completely confess that, No, at first, I was very much not of the mind that I am now, And a lot of it just came from trying to have to rationalize some of the things we do to

K twelve practitioners to school district personnel and parents, and that became harder to do onder the typical paradigm. And so that's kind of what led me to thinking, Okay, what makes this more internally defensible, like what makes our field more internally consistent in logical within the goals of education more broadly? And that's kind of what led me to saying, are we really doing this right or really communicating it right or be on the right foundation good?

I really really like that. I like how it kind of emerged this. You didn't like start off with the agenda because a lot of people look but to be honest, a lot of people in this field and have started off with an agenda, and the longer they've been promoting an agenda, the hard it is for them to It's like there're a lot of activists in the field, not

necessary scientists. Is that a fair statement, It's true. Matt Makle, a good colleague of mind from Duke University, describes it as a field that has both research and advocacy goals.

And I think that's a challenge in education or any kind of social field, is you have people that are in it to do advocacy, but then are also kind of doing science sometimes and sometimes those can work together where see can utilize science and you know, scientific foundational knowledge to do advocacy, but they're not necessarily the same thing. When I do a study on gifted education, I'm not doing it to show that gifted education is important and good.

I'm doing it to ask a question. And if that question or the answer tells me that, no, you know, this gifted service is a bad idea, or this is not working or it wasn't effective, I'm fine with that because my goal, first and foremost is science and that has definitely gotten me in trouble with some people in

the field before. Just as an eat real quick example, I did a study on whether or not teacher training and gifted education, something I do in part for a living, has any effect on teacher practices in the classroom, and the answer is basically nu and its self reported practices in the classroom, I should say. And obviously that wasn't popular. You know, people don't want to hear that, But the data kind of just are what they are. So no,

I think you're absolutely right. There are a lot of people that are very much in the field for advocacy because they are true believers. Well, now that is very interesting because the field does need advocates absolutely or else it won't sustain itself. I mean, if the field only consisted of the scientists you're pushing papers, there's not going to be any translation. So there needs to be a

good communication between the scientists and advocates. Maybe a criticism is that there has been a bifurcation between them, and I think that would be a reasonable criticism. Would you have that criticism. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, by the way. No, it's a couple of really good points. First and foremost, that scientists need to be better communicators. I mean, I think this is a big topic in the world of kind of psychology right

now in general. You know, this is something I think you especially have been really effective at, if I can put in a plug, is communicating you know, science to a broader kind of lay audience. I mean, that's not an easy thing to do. You know, hardcore scientists are not always adapt at that. It's not easy. So I

do think it needs advocates. This is kind of maybe a larger broader issue though, of sometimes the desire for advocacy to give the field a reason for being can get in the way of good science and can bias you know, scientific findings, and so I do think there's definitely a relationship between those two, but there does need to be you know, there is also kind of sometimes when they need to be, when they need to be separate.

But no, I think in part of the topic I think of today is the need to advocate for students who are not average or whatever you want to call them, typical, who are appropriately challenged by grade level content. Those students very much do need to be advocated for kind of all science aside. Yeah, so there is this advocate part of you as well, then, oh absolutely, I mean that's kind of how to get back to your original question,

how I got interested in the field. I got interested in it because of the absurdity of the idea of just teaching people based on how old they are. Like, okay, so it's you are seven, welcome to third grade. You must need to learn multiplication. That's so arbitrary, Like to this day, it frustrates me the idea that I don't know anything about you, but because you are in third grade,

I'm going to teach you this on Tuesday. Like the disconnect between student readiness, between disconnect of interest and what we actually teach them. That disconnect bothers me for all kids, not just above average kids or advanced kids. It bothers me for everybody. You know. That's my interest is how to align those things better. And that absolutely that argument is not a you know, I guess it's a scientific argument, but it's very much an advocacy belief. So I do

kind of wear that hat as well. Yeah, it sounds like you're trying to think how to phrase this. You'd probably be happy with an education system and this might be going too far ahead, but an education system where we didn't need the phrase gifted children, but that simply like, well, there's nothing simple about it, but that took that goal that you just set, Like you just said, you just gave a very worthy goal. And you say, well, the

problem is and you pinpointed it. You pinpointed precisely the problem. It seems like you're saying, maybe that's the problem. The problem isn't that we aren't finding more quote gifted show necessarily, but the problem is what you've just stated, which didn't need the word You didn't say the word gifted at all, really in that that whole right problem. Yeah, No, I think you hit the nail and head exactly. Which is and I've said this before, which is in the world

of you know, perfectly differentiated educational experiences. You know, now we tend to call that the term is personalized learning. In that world, we wouldn't need to have all these labels to then, you know, confer or just act as

catalysts for specialized services. So if every single kid had to some degree a differentiated and inherently and automatically imperfectly differentiated learning experience, we wouldn't need to label kids as learning disabled or as gifted or whatever, because the service that they are provided would be targeted to them already, like we could bypass the step of identification and go straight to meeting the kids where they are. That's the ideal,

you know, unrealistic perhaps, but that's the ideal world. And that's a lot of times what I argue for in the field of gifted ed is to get past this idea of gifted and to even suggest that maybe the idea of gifted is a barrier to the goal of challenging more kids. And that's not necessarily a view that

is widely shared in the field. Why do you think it's not Why do you think that some people have certain agendas that go beyond or No, I shouldn't say agenda because I kind of prints them in a nefarious light and I don't mean to do that, but they have a different assessment of the need. I guess is what I'm trying to say that is in conflict with what you see as the fundamental need. I think that is a good way of putting it. The way some colleagues and I tried to articulate it was that there's

kind of two wings to the field. There's probably more than two, but we just kind of articulated this way. There's this group that is interested in high ability psychology. You know, they're interested in the brains of you know, Nobel Peace or not Noble Peace Prize, but like you know, huge award winners, you know, people that find cures for cancer and famous artists. They want to know what makes them tick and how they see the world differently in

their motivational trajectories. You know, the psychology of really you know, profound brilliance. And that's a very interesting field. Then there's this wing of the field that I'm more in, which is more interested in and how do we challenge everybody tomorrow, Like how do we make sure everybody is in their zone of proximal development as often as possible while in school?

And there is some overlap, like there are some kids who perceive the world differently who also need more math on Thursday morning, But those aren't the same group of kids. There are kids that are truly brilliant, you know, they can almost see numbers, like they just think differently. And some of those kids and need more language arts class and some of them need you know, mediation. It's I just don't see them as the same group of people.

And I think the field has for a very long time tried to pretend that they are the same, and so some of the people really disagree with my perspective. Are more of the high ability psychology folks, you know, they're much more interested in, you know, again, the over excitabilities, the unique social emotional needs of certain kids. And I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying it's not as

much my focus. Gotcha. Do you think that there's a place room at the table for people with all these different focuses to come together and have their own advocacy for it. I think there is. I think in all honesty, I think the important thing is just to be honest. When we're talking about school based services or out of non school based services. Yeah, if we're talking about identifying gifted kids for the purpose of receiving some kind of

advanced intervention in school, that's one purpose. If we're talking about identifying gifted people so that we can, you know, better understand how they came up with all these patents and maybe these incredible inventions, it's just a different purpose. So I think we can have the conversation together. It's just and I say, whenever I work with teachers or anybody else that I am interested in identifying kids for gifted services in school. I'm not interested in gifted adults.

I mean again, it's not that it's a bad thing to study. I'm just not interested in that. I'm not focused on that. I'm not interested in, you know, gifted musicians. It's just not my focus area. So it's worth it's worthy of study. I'm just kind of like a subset, I guess you might say, of a larger field. Yeah, and so let's talk about some of these these ideas

you put forward in your Rethinking Gift Education book. You do ask the question identification for what, So it sounds like this does dovetail with what we're talking about, you know, in the sense that like we should be explicit about the for what part? Right, Yes, And that's one of the things that is amazing to me is how rarely people that run gifted programs can articulate why those programs exist.

You know, I'll ask a gifted coordinator or an advocate or even a GT parent say, well, why does you know the Madison School District have a gifted ED program? And their answer will usually be, oh, well, it's to serve the gifted or to meet the needs of the gifted, And I say, well, I don't know what that means,

Like what does that mean? And so I like to see a much more explicit purpose to the services to say, you know, we have program X, Y or Z to provide for kids for whom existing services are not enough. So we've got this program in place for those kids who, for whatever reason, have already exhausted other services. So it's very much a kind of response to intervention or levels

of service kind of a model. But I do think that's been a problem, like for advocates in gifted ED is the inability to articulate why the services are important. Just saying because there are gifted people is not a very convincing argument for a congressman or a school board member. Does that mean there are unngifted people? See, that's another problem with the term. Isn't there a book with that type? I know, but I try to keep myself out of the podcast when I tell you, no, I think that

hits on one of the problems with the term. Yeah, And some people claim, well, no matter what you call it, it's gonna take on a bad label. And I disagree with that. I think the fact that it's called gifted, like the term was something else, you know, high ability, in need of acceleration people, right, I mean, if you called it that, that does not have It's not even an issue of denotation, it's connotation. It's a literal denotative

meeting of the term gifted. Right. It makes it seem like it's been you know, bestowed, that it's permanent, that it's a trait of your being, and that you have it and somebody else doesn't. And that's just that entire denotation is such a barrier to what the advocates of the field are trying to accomplish because it turns people off. I have to have like a thirty minute conversation with someone about what I mean by gifted before I can get to the actual work of the field. That's like

the definition of a barrier. Like I don't want to spend my time on that. So I agree. I think the term is bad and it makes it seem like there are the special people and then there's everyone else, and I don't think that's correct or helpful. Yeah, I have yet to quite honestly, I've yet to hear one convincing logical argument for why that label is good, and almost every argument I've seen it seems to be like there's this group of gift education educators that follow the

termin kind of spirit of gifted education. Turman was very much about there are these special children that where that's the only line that genius is recruited, and a lot of the termin kind of in my reading of his work, it has a very eugenics feel to it. It has this like this kind of it's hard to like articulate, but it's like I get a certain spidey sense when I listen to like certain people talk that I don't get here or get without other people talk, and I

just don't know what it is. I've been trying to articulate what that spidey sense is. But there's some people who talk about quote their gifted educators in a way that it's like goes way way beyond it does it go like far far beyond just like you know, I have students who aren't that are ready for grade level. No, it's like something completely different, different plane of existence. It's like they're like the spiritual angels that God put on earth. So they really do believe that in a sense, and

so yes, yes, do you see something similar? I very much see something similar. And again, I think that's what makes it so hard for kind of advocacy within the field, because you can't go in front of a congressman or in front of a school board and say, well, there are these special people that are more special than the other students, and they've been endowed with some kind of special talents and therefore regular school is bad for them

and they deserve more. That's just such a non convincing argument. But instead, if you can argue, well, Bobby has mastered pre algebra, so we think he should get algebra. Like that's such a no one would disagree with that. Like this the kind of much more you know what I've describe as kind of the advanced academics framework of these kids need X because they've mastered Why is a very

simple and compelling and unobjectionable argument. If you say these kids need X because they are gifted, then first of all, you have to explain what that means all the and you also have all the baggage comes with it. You have these people that have these preconceived notions of what it means. They might no termin work and they've got a bad association with that. It just doesn't Not only do I argue the term doesn't facilitate the goals of the field, I actually think it is an active barrier

to the goals of the field. Yeah, so I think that is what you describe is very much something I experience, and I think it gets a little bit a trait versus state kind of distinction. Yeah. For those that are more like essentialism, I think yep. Absolutely. Yeah. So you know, well, we definitely bonded over that. I mean, you reached out to me after my book came out, and then I read your book and I was like, wow, we're independently

on somewhere whatever the wavelength is. Is it not the exact same way when there's a genus of wave length at least that we're on together. So I definitely appreciate some of your arguments and the phrase the idea of gifted children, and I I'm belaboring this point because I do think it's important. There's been something about it that has bothered me at another level that I don't think I've ever been able to fully articulate, and I didn't do so in un Gifted, But maybe I'll be able

to at some point in this conversation today. Sure, I understand, I've been there. Yeah, it's tough. There's like something else, There's something It's like, it's a tautology in a sense, and let me try to understand I put that out there, and then let me try to see if I can explain what I mean by that at all. It's like, you know, there is no ten commandments. There's God never gave Moses a tablet that said these are the characteristics of the gifted children. So what I'm saying is there's

no objective. Sometimes it's treated as though that is some sort of like ordained thing that like, you know, oh, but that's not a gifted child. But then isn't it possible to say, well, you're the one that defined that what gifted I'll gifted child means. So okay, help me with this point, because I do you see what I'm trying to get it. It It feels like a tautology in a sense, like you're gifted because you're gifted. It seems

like a logical fallacy to me. There is a lot of that, and there's you know, if you were to bring an alien to the planet and that person, you know, that alien were to ask this question, you know, like, well, talk to me about what it means to be gifted. You know, they get a lot of typical responses like okay, you know, is high achieving or as high ability of some kind. And so an alien might say, okay, so so i'll gifted kids are high achieving, Like well, no, no,

not necessarily. It's like okay, well, so what are they all? It's like, well, some are this but not all, and some are this but not all. And eventually the definition

becomes so vague and abstract. Again I'll drop Matt Makle's name again, because he and my colleague Matt McBee to the study where they took the National Association for Gifted Children's definition, like what they say is giftedness, and they tried to operationalize it so they actually put it into what criteria might look like, and when they apply that, you start ending up with the majority of humans being gifted in some way or another, and which is somewhat

strange given kind of just about any gifted at advocate would say, well, of course, not everybody's gifted. At the same time, their definition says that the majority of people are gifted. It's a really problematic area for services because the definition is so vague. It's different across state lines. There's no mandated services. The terms are implemented differently, and again that's why I prefer a much more concrete term, you know, like a kid who needs X, Y or z,

rather than a gifted kit. I just don't think it's very instructionally helpful. Or in the assessment world, we use the term diagnostic efficacy, So how effective is an assessment or a data point in telling me what you need today in my class as? And if I walk up to a teacher and say, this kid is gifted, so go forth and take care of that, the teacher is gonna have no idea what to do because the term

just doesn't carry any information. Special education terms are a little bit better, but they're still a little problematic, But gifted is really problematic. It is problematic. So well, it seems like the negc the spirit of it, and your point is very well taken, But it seems like everyone's talking about inclusivity these days. You know, that's at least on the Lefty's that's a very left, but a very

left buzzword. Now there is a large part of your work that does involve inclusivity, because we can, let's like merge your excellent Gaps and Education book with the discussion we're having already, because it seems so part and parcel

of this conversation. So you do want to include groups that have perhaps been left out of the table, like minority groups, those who are traditionally underrepresented in gifted education and preaps have been not perhaps but I think historically have been over represented in special education the other side.

So there's this big part of you that once inclusivity in that direction, how do you reconcile that form of inclusivity from your criticism of the ability form of inclusivity that it seems like, you know, like letting everyone in that shows above average ability in anything in the world. It's a tough question I'm asking you, I know, but it is. It's a high level question. Yeah, a question. It's you know, it's also something I wrote this article.

I think it came out in twenty sixteen, you know, one of those like excellence and equity kind of articles and gift the John quarterly talking about how do you

have both? You know, how do you have excellence which I was kind of thinking of as services that challenge the kids who need something more, you know, kind of the traditional purpose of gifted end to challenge the underchallenged while at the same time having greater equity, which is really kind of what you're asking is, how do you challenge advanced kids who are already advanced, while at the same time not just having a service population that's we'll

just call them very traditionally high income, very privileged kind of kids. They tend to be caucation, tend to be certain NASIA groups, right right, it's you know, this is I've written a paper on this where I analyzed Office Civil Rights data, you know, and show the most recent data about how underrepresented certain groups are and how overrepresented

others are compared to the population. We're doing a study right now to look at if you were to change the norm group, you know, look at school norms versus national norms, how would that change who gets identified as gifted? So it really is a it's it's a hard thing. It's a great question. The way I've and I don't have a singular answer, but the way I've been thinking about it lately is that the field really does need

to have kind of two parallel goals. There really does need to be kind of a talent development goal, and there also needs to be kind of a I guess I would call it more of an advanced academic goal. And so the talent development goal is really about providing advanced learning opportunities to kids that couldn't access them via

their own resources. So, you know, a simple example is, you know, I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and high quality early childhood education experiences here in Madison cost sixteen thousand dollars a year. So if you want your kid to be in high quality three year old pre kindergarten, it's going to cost you, on average, sixteen thousand dollars a year. There's no way a low income family can afford that.

So if we want to actually put a dent in the gap between the population serveding gifted programs or the excellence gap, if we actually want to mitigate that, we have to start by backfilling some of those missed opportunities, some of those opportunity gaps, So things like very early on, you know, providing greater access to early childhood education as a program out of Northwestern called Project Excite, where a colleague of mine went into third grade classrooms to identify

students for a kind of a gifted education boot camp to prepare them for high school ap classes. So they were starting in third grade, Like you really do have to go way back and start providing those advanced opportunities early if you want to close those gaps in the long term. That's kind of the talent development side. But then there also needs to be the services in place

for the kids who just need something right now. So regardless of why a kid needs it, whether it's because you know, both her parents were physics professors or whatever, the kid needs more math right now, let's not debate why. Let's just focus on what the kids needs right here

and right now. And those are different, Those are very different programs, those are very different services, They have different service populations, but they're both necessary if we care about both goals, if we care about challenging everyone who's underchallenged and about mitigating those disparities, because otherwise you can't. There's no way to kind of fix the disparity argument and gifted ed by just like getting a different test or something.

I mean, that's not It exists because of larger societal and equality, not because of you know, solely we're always using the wrong test or something. So I think it's kind of a two pronged approach that follows along with two parallel goals that the field should have. But again I'm not speaking for like the field. This is just kind of how I've started to think about it. Well, that's very interesting. I mean, this is there's an angel

dilemma between equity versus excellence. And I don't know if that's exactly exactly what you're talking about, but this is really really interesting, Scott. So you're saying, perhaps we could have one form of like, let's not called gift education right now, it's called enriched how about we call it enrichment education. Sure, one aspect where everyone in that school gets enriched beyond, you know, according to their readiness. And

then there that seems like the equity. And then there could be another of education, talent development, whatever, where the explicit goal is like if someone wants to be eminent or great at something someday, you know, like because that would require a whole different set of things like coaches and sure, I mean if we're telling music or whatever, I mean, it's not going to serve them to just stick them in a gift education class and do math

problems that's told be highly custom tailored. Right, Yes, And the question of what domains should we serve in terms of talent in schools is kind of one that I always just run from and claim total ignorance and say that's outside of my control. Like, you know, I believe we should have music in schools. I believe we should have art in schools. But I'm also not going to go there and say, like, you know, we should have gifted welding programs in schools. Like that's just a whole

different conversation. But no, I think I agree with you completely that there should really like, let's presume for a second that a school district wants to close excellence gaps. They want to close the disparities in what students' access ap classes, what students go to college, and all those things. If they really want to do that, you know, in a place like Madison where I live, you know, they

have like thirty four elementary schools. Some of those elementary schools are almost one hundred percent low income kids, one hundred percent minority kids. If the district really wants to put a dent in excellence gaps. They should be citing extra gifted programs in those schools, you know, programs to help those kids develop the kinds of critical thinking skills that a lot more privileged kids have been able fortunate

enough to develop because of outside opportunities. So Jonathan and I call it front loading, where we're kind of front loading those skills early times in plucker for our listeners, Yes, yes, my apologies, not I get them confused because I have two Jonathan's and I work. We describe it as front loading opportunities early on in school so that come the

advanced opportunities later those kids are actually ready. And so if we actually want to put a dent in the disparities and gifted at enrollment or in AP enrollment or college attendance or whatever, we need to be putting more kind of talent development programs in low income, lower performing schools. Not less. I mean, it's the opposite of what people

tend to think about gift today. And then yes, we should also have those other things you talked about with regard to eminence, and yes, that's certainly true, but I also just think of it in terms of, well, look, we got a. You know, roughly two percent of the America's fifth graders are four or more years advanced in math. So that's fifth graders that need high school material in terms of math. I'm just talking about those kids too, Like they might not go on to be a theoretical physicist,

but they just need geometry. Now, sure, that's the other side of the equation. We got the talent development on one side, and then kind of the advanced services to meet that kids need. Right now, that's kind of the too pronged approach that is at least currently knocking around

my brain. Accelerate because you do in your Gift Education book talk about acceleration versus enrichment, right, you kind of make that distinction a little bit, yes, as two potential you know, programming tools and so yeah, when you said let's not call it gifted, you know, I agree. We're talking about just different levels and types of services for all students. Yeah, I mean, every student is somewhere on

this continuum in terms of what they're receiving. So you might have some kids who are just you know, just you know, they're just kind of receiving enriched learning experience right now, whereas some kids what they need is to be accelerated three years. You know, it depends on where they are and what they need. But yes, there's a that kind of goes back to what we talked about at the beginning. In the ideal world, everybody has some

kind of personalized learning experience. What we're talking about now is just kind of a midway point on that continuum. Cool. And there's one particular question that you ask in your Rethinking Gift Education book that provides a really nice segue to your excellent CAPS book, and that is what happens when addressing under representation is the goal of gift educating. This is a very thorny question, potentially very contras as well,

right it is. You know, I tell people all the time I work in the fields of assessment and gifted ED and disproportionality in gifted ED. So literally every part of my field is a thorny issue or a controversial topic, which is delightful for me since I never have the answers.

You know, there's no clear answers it is. I mean, we have decided that disproportionality is bad, and I guess for your listeners, you know, disproportionality is kind of the unequal rates at which different student groups participate in Gifted ED or AP or whatever. Right now, we're talking about Gifted ED. So just as a background, African American and Hispanic students participate in gifted programs at only about sixty percent, as is their participation in the general school population, So

they're underrepresented by about forty percent. And then White students are just slightly overrepresented about fifteen percent, and Asian students are almost twice as represented. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about underrepresentation. And if mitigating that is the goal or is a goal, then that kind of authorizes us to take more proactive steps. I mean, as you said, there's no eleventh Commandment that says equity

shall be within gifted education. I mean, that's just a choice. I'm not saying it's a good choice or a bad choice. I'm just saying it's a choice. And if it is a choice, then I really spent a lot of time decided or working on methods to kind of accomplish that. So if you want better representation of African Americans and gifted programs, what are the levers you could push in terms of policy and well, oh, I mean the lowest

hanging fruit. I suppose there's too low hanging fruit. The first one is to get rid of what Matt McBee and I called two phase identification systems. And so you know, you and I work in university, so we're probably pretty familiar with this, but applying to a university is basically a two phase placement system, because the first phase is you being encouraged to apply and then seeking out and taking the ACT or the SAT or something like that.

For the most part, we don't universally screen the entire American high school population for college eligibility, and because of that, we miss people typically in gifted at in K twelve, the number one time that kids are evaluated for gifted services is following a teacher or parent referral. And just

think about which students are going to be referred. It's going to be students who are of the dominant cultural group, Students who are like me, They're loud, white Caucasian males that have a certain personality type, that are individually driven, that kind of stuff, and that's going to exacerbate this proportionality. So the simplest thing that could be done is instead of having kind of that two phase system where you've got to jump over one hurdle before you get evaluated

with the next is to just evaluate everybody. So take all all your second graders and put them through the process. That's going to miss the fewest amount of students. There's no offens or lots of If you evaluate everyone, you're going to miss the fewest amounts of students. And this is exactly why a lot of states have gone to universal Act administration for college because you missed the fewest students. It's the exact same concept for K twelve gifted head.

And then the other low hanging fruit is to use building norms. So traditionally in gifted d you know, there's giftedness criteria of a one point thirty IQ or the top two percent or the top five percent, and that's compared to a national norm, and that gives us this

hugely unequal demographic. If instead we went to building norms where gifted is not operationalized as the top five percent of the country, but is instead operationalized as the top five percent in every school building, you would see a roughly two hundred to three hundred percent increase in the number of African American or Hispanic students identified. Wow, that's thing I could talk all day about. But it has to do with enrollment. Well, I get it, but I

mean you have a whole chapter in your book about it. Yeah, that is great, and for the listener, I mean, it's the simple principle that taking account local norms, taking account, you know, who are the people around you in your school system as opposed to the national averages. And you know, you make that very convincing point in your book. So that that was one thing that really stuck out to

me when I read it. Another thing that really stuck out to me when I read your book was in the some states, the drastic disconnect between the identification and the actual intervention or what happens after in the end of dedication. I keep saying the statistic, and I maybe my memory might be bad from your book, but I recall you saying that in Connecticut or somewhere like almost

one hundred percent of the money goes towards identification. There was some state, I think it was Connecticut or something with it, but like, but hardly any money goes towards actual programming. What was it? Yes, well, we do cite. Well, the one state that's jumping out in my head is Minnesota because they because Minnesota mandates identification, but they don't mandate services. Yeah, and there are other states that do that as well. There's only a couple I can't think

of them off the top of my head. So there are states that mandate identification but not services. So of course, what do the districts do when they spend the money identification? And maybe if they just happen to have lots of money laying around, they have services. But then I also know of districts here in Wisconsin that once spent all the money they had for gifted AD on a single

test and then didn't have anything left the door. So the sole point of identification was to identify there was no service, which is which is ludicrous from my perspective, But yeah, I mean, the nice thing about local norms is that a lot of the as I said earlier, the levers to address disproportionality can also harm the other goal.

Like I mentioned those two goals like challenging the underchallenge and also better equity, a lot of the levers that address equity can actually harm the other goal because think a good if we wanted perfectly equitable gifted populations, we could just let kids at random, you know, just randomly choose kids from the school population, and you're going to have a gifted population that's perfectly representative of the school. But that's silly, like that wouldn't make it. We're not

doing a psychology experiment, yea, right right. We wouldn't be identifying the kids that need a service, right, just identifying kids for I don't know, some purpose. But the nice part about local norms is it satisfies both goals. It would get us better equity, and we'd be identifying the kids who are the most likely to be under challenged

in their particular educational setting. So the kids who are the most advanced in their building are the ones who are most likely under challenged in their particular We don't care how you compare, you know, if you're in Boston to how you know, it doesn't matter how you compare to kids in New Mexico. What matters is how you are compared to, like your local curriculum to what's being provided in school. And that's why the local comparison is just much more intelligent. I mean, I am so over

the whole concept of national norms. As I was talking about earlier about diagnostic efficacy, a national norm just tells me so little in terms of what you need as a student, Like, great, you're at the ninety seventh and a half percentile, you know, what should I teach you tomorrow? It just tells me nothing. Whereas if I know you're in the top two percent of fifth graders at my middle school, like, okay, at least now I know that you're probably, you know, one of the students that's most

likely under challenge compared to the regular curriculum. It's not a slam dunk, we don't know that for sure, but it's like a decent indicator. Yeah, So, I mean you sold me on that already. I'm sold. So you know, you and Jonathan put forward a plan for addressing excellence gaps in your more recent book, which is a little bit of a different than the plan of Beyond Gift Education.

So could you please as this specific plan that you think is the most reasonable way of addressing this, And also I want you to address like do you envision a realistic goal someday of like one hundred percent complete excellent gap production? Oh gosh, that's a great question. I mean, it's a similar question when people ask me about the whole equity and gifted populations, like do I expect perfect equity?

Like should that be the goal? And I always try to be clear when I'm answering and say there's a difference between should it be the goal and is it like a reasonable expectation, like yes, I would love it. My you know, view of the world is a place where whether or not you know you live below the poverty line or are from an African American family or an English language learner, is not relevant to your educational opportunities, to your rate of achievement. That is my preferred world.

So yes, in a preferred world, we wouldn't see things like excellence gaps or disparities and gifted enrollment or the like in the US especially and in most kind of industrialized countries. But the US has the dubious honor being really bad in this regard. Income and family education is very closely tied to access, and in the US you

get more access if you can afford it. You get more opportunities if you can afford it, and because of that, you know, eliminating excellence gaps eliminating gifted ed disproportionality is not going to happen anytime soon. It's easier to eliminate the gifted identification disparity than it is to limitate excellence gaps. Excellent s gaps are getting worse. Well it Excellence gaps define it sure. So the excellence gaps are just the

disparities and rates of advanced achievement on any metric. So most typically, you know, Jonathan Plucker and I look at NAPE scores, so the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and you can look at the rates at which students on free reduced lunch score advanced and say fourth grade science, eighth grade math, if they're low income or now low

incomeing is you know, is a gap. And you know, the rates of advanced achievement have been going up, you know since the nineties, but also in the nineties the rates were zero for some groups. Even right now they're still zero for some groups. So I think the you know,

a good example is the science area. You know, science gets kind of short shrift a lot of the time, but you know, only something like one percent of eighth graders score advanced in science total, So it's hard to have a gap, but the gaps have been closing for things like for sorry have like achievement gaps have been narrowing a little bit over the over time, excellence gaps

have not. So the visual I can paint you, and you know, I can send you pictures of this or graphs of this, but the visual I can paint you is picture. From like, say, nineteen nineties through now through twenty seventeen was the most recent NAVE data point. The rate of advanced achievement and reading and in math for low income students, for African Americans, for Hispanic students has been growing. It's been get you know, slowly a couple points over that time, but that's been vastly outpaced by

the growth among higher income widen Asian students. So just a huge differential in terms of the gap. So whereas before maybe the gap was only a couple percentage points because there were zero low income students scoring advance compared to three percent of hire income students, now it might be two percent versus fifteen percent. So that gap is widening mostly because the growth among privileged groups is outpacing

the growth among less privileged groups. What's a privileged group what do you mean by well, you know, I hate these terminology because you have to use shorthand, but it's bad. Usually when we're talking about excellent gaps or disproportionality, the underrepresented or underprivileged group or the groups that have fewer

educational opportunities are low income students, so students from experiencing poverty. Okay, so you mean educational opportunities, yes, Like, are you privileged just by definition by the fact that you're like overrepresented in gifted education? You know what I'm saying, Does that make you privileged? Nor? What I would No, not at all.

What I would also actually challenge something I just said as well, which is we in the field of you know, equity, kind of people that are just in equity tend to refer to Caucasian Asian and non free and reduced lunch kids as if they are privileged in some way, which reality is not fair. I mean, there's lots of underprivileged

white kids. Is in Wisconsin where I'm from, there's lots of first generation immigrant Asian students who are not at all advantaged, you know, so it's very much advantage you mean advantaged? Yeah? Good, No, I think it's really good to define terms when we talk about this stuff. Okay, cool, Yeah, absolutely these are really problematic, you know, ordinal categories. These

are not discrete groups. But of course we treat because if they're discreet, as if you know, all African Americans are the same, we're all low income kids are the same. And of course that's not true. I mean, there's a lot of research about how bad of a proxy forree introduce, lunch status is for you know, access and income. But it's basically all we have, so we end up relying

on it a lot. But yeah, there's a couple of great reports about excellence gaps and people want to see these charts about how about how worse they've gotten over time? Thank you? So just let's conclude. Can you just give me your just simply your plan for addressing it, just my simple five point plan guaranteed to solve all problems? And can you summarize the basic gist? Gosh, not really? Yeah, I know, I mean, how can we direct the reader

leave the listener with something? You know? I think the biggest thing is that we need to start thinking about actually mitigating advanced performance disparities as as important of a goal as mitigating minimal proficiency. So, you know, for for fifty years, the US has been concerned about mitigating minimal achievement gaps, and we devote all these resources to it, but we always seem to forget about the kids that are already yet proficiency, you know, Like why aren't we

concerned about low income kids scoring advanced? Why do we only have minimal expectations for them? Like that's a pretty very you know, one ethical thing. So policies and after school enrichment programs in low you know, overall quote low performing schools where there's you know, lots of minority students, like those kids need to have advanced services too, And both from a policy standpoint for like accountability, and also the from the standpoint of where do we cite programs

that needs to become more of a priority. And that's a lot of what we talk about in the book. As our model addresses sounds like you, guys, I've got to catch a train. So I just want to say, Scott, I want to say thank you so much for cheying with me today and raising so many important issues and kind of being at the forefront of these issues as well. Yeah, it was a fun conversation. I appreciate you having me. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you

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