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Eliminating Exams to Enter Gifted Programs?
The pandemic, inequities, and zip codes
I went to a high school that was 98 percent black. I had black classmates that were in a predominately black gifted program. Naturally, the gifted students were a tiny percentage out of the entire student body. However, no black parent, local black politician, or black community spokesperson complained about the disparity between the average black students and the gifted black students.
No one said, since the majority of the school’s black students maintained a C-average it was unfair that C-average students had no representation in the gifted program. No one suggested eliminating the criteria to enter the gifted program in order to include C-average students. And no one requested to set aside 2 percent of the gifted program’s seats for the minority white students so that the gifted program could match the racial make-up of the school.
No one complained.
It was simply accepted that a tiny portion of the student population possessed abilities above their peers. More importantly, since the school was 98 percent black, no one presupposed the disparities were caused by an injustice.
It only becomes a matter of injustice when different racial or ethnic groups are compared and disparities are found. For years statistics revealed that…