No Blacks Allowed: Segregated Gifted Education in the Context of <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>

Abstract

When submitting for this special issue on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), these authors were guided by the unwavering belief that discrimination has no place in educational settings and segregation and integration are ideals that have yet to be realized in U.S. schools and gifted programs in particular. Consequently, at the forefront of this submission is the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education in which segregated schools, classrooms, and programs based on race were declared illegal and unconstitutional. The Supreme Court avowed the ending of separate and unequal education in America; and desegregation was to occur with all deliberate speed. That was six decades ago, and this law and associated legal mandates have yet to be fulfilled, particularly in gifted education, Advanced Placement (AP) classes, and other courses for advanced learners (e.g., honors and International Baccalaureate classes).It is unprofessional and unethical to promote and permit the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities to students based on race, which frequently occurs with Black students. Inequitable or unjust resources and opportunities contribute to and promote educational disparities, and create a vicious cycle in which Black students are denied access to school programs that are essential to reaching their academic, intellectual, socio-cultural, and fiscal potential and that can help close achievement gaps. Gifted education has promoted such racial inequities. For decades, educators, policymakers, and legal personnel have failed to recruit and retain an equitable percentage of Black students in gifted education and courses for advanced learners (e.g., Advanced Placement classes). This lack of accountability has resulted in de facto segregation and is witnessed in McFadden v. Board of Education for Illinois School District U-46, settled in 2013. In this unprecedented gifted education case, the court affirmed that, in creating a separate gifted education program for Hispanic students only, this school district violated the United States and Illinois constitutions' equal protection clauses. Rather than developing one gifted education program for elementary school students that provided language support when needed, this district created a separate gifted program for Hispanic students who had exited English Language Learner (ELL) programs. Judge Gettlemen (who presided over McFadderi) noted that establishing a separate gifted education program based on race perpetuates the problems that our nation's civil rights laws were created and authorized to prevent.This court case revives issues of disparate impact, which will be discussed later. This case is a notice to states and other districts to eliminate discrimination (intentional and unintentional) in gifted education practices for identification, programming, and services. With discrimination and under-representation in mind, these authors present trends (2009-2011) regarding the representation of Black students in gifted education using data from the Office for Civil Rights Data Collection (U. S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, 2011; CRDC: These files are state and national estimations. The 2009-10 estimations are based on a rolling stratified sample of approximately 7,000 districts and 72,000 schools and on reported data from those districts that responded to the survey). Under-representation is clearly persistent and nationally pervasive. Next, these data are positioned within the context of Brown where it is argued that gifted education must become desegregated and integrated. De facto and de jure segregation in gifted education must end, with all deliberate speed before another 60 years passes.BRIEF OVERVIEW OF GIFTED EDUCATION DEFINITIONS WITH CULTURAL IMPLICATIONSSimilarly to many terms, 'gifted' eludes consensus. Traditional definitions of giftedness (almost exclusively normed on and conceptualized on middle-class Whites) have been primarily operationalized in two ways: (a) by high scores on IQ tests (130 and higher) and (b) by high scores on achievement tests (often at or above 92nd percentile). …