Promoting Privilege: Selecting Students for a Public Gifted School

Point of view: I am a cisgender, White male in my sixties. I retired recently after working with children in a professional capacity since the mid-1970s. During my education career, I was an elementary school teacher, gifted teacher, research specialist, and director of research and evaluation in a historically White school district that became majority African American during my tenure. Value of submission: Numerous educational policies and procedures in the United States benefit children from privileged families over their traditionally underserved counterparts, which include students of color and low-income students. This piece describes a public school district’s inequitable practices related to its program for gifted students, practices that are not uncommon in many American school districts. “Education is one of the best ways to address systemic inequities, but education systems in the US seem to be increasingly subject to criticism that they are unable to change and promote equity” (Cheville, 2018, p. 1). Despite their inherent resistance to change, educational agencies must be made aware of discriminatory policies and procedures. Stakeholders must then hold policy makers and educational leaders to account. As James Baldwin wrote nearly 60 years ago, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced” (Baldwin, 1968, p. 38). Summary: Gifted education programs in public schools comprise mainly middle-class and upper-middle-class students of European and Asian descent. Students from low socioeconomic groups, African American students, Latinx students, and Indigenous American students continue to be underrepresented in gifted programs, despite the fact that this inequity was brought to light many years ago (Ford, 1998). Given our nation’s long history of overt and covert racism, it is not surprising that the manner by which students are identified for gifted services is systemically entrenched. Most states have mandates or provide guidance to local school districts regarding identification criteria; however, very few of the measurement instruments or methods used to evaluate children for gifted services are effective at facilitating equitable representation of all groups in gifted education programs. This piece examines one school district’s guidelines used to identify students for gifted services, including admittance to its prestigious school for gifted children. Because the guidelines are typical of practices employed by many school districts across the US, the information contained herein is generalizable to a larger audience

Charitable Remainder Trusts: Some Considerations To Draftsmanship

The Tax Reform Act of 1969 limited the charitable deduction for remainder interests for the purposes of income, estate and gift taxes to three specific forms: the annuity trust, the unitrust, or a gift to a pooled-income fund. This article will not deal with the details of a pooled-income fund, commonly established by a public charity to make it possible for a donor of a relatively small gift to do what we shall discover the wealthy donor can do by way of a charitable remainder trust. Since estate planners are primarily concerned with the drafting of trusts for donors of larger gifts, it is to charitable remainder trusts that I shall direct my attention. They are known in the statute as annuity trusts and unitrusts

Determining the Difficulty and Discrimination Parameters of a Mathematics Performance-Based Assessment

Performance-based assessment (PBA) is different from traditional testing methods in that PBA presents real-life problems for students to solve by integrating critical thinking with their content knowledge and skills. Implementing PBA regularly in mathematics classes is associated with improved student achievement and motivation to learn; however, there are concerns about the general lack of psychometric data to support the use of performance assessments. To address such concerns, this study applied item response theory to estimate the difficulty and discrimination indices of items that comprised a newly developed mathematics PBA. Data were collected by administering the PBA to 750 senior high school students in the Western Region of Ghana. The results indicated that the difficulty and discrimination levels of each item were satisfactory, which suggests that well-designed and properly vetted math PBA items would improve classroom assessments as well as high-stakes tests administered on a large scale. Additional recommendations are included at the end of this paper