Use a Universal Screening ProcessĪll students must be given the opportunity to demonstrate their talents through equality in screening and assessment. For rural districts wanting to make this investment, here are four strategies to get started. In particular, we encouraged educators to do away with the belief that levels of intelligence in the rural population are lower than those of suburban or urban populations, and therefore that students from those communities are less likely to succeed academically or in other areas of talent. We can disrupt myths about rural students when we dispel the notion of fixed intelligence and the accompanying beliefs about self that emanate from negative stereotypes. It also upends the dominant and pervasively negative narrative about rural people and places. We believe investing in talent development is an investment in a community’s viability. For one, belief in the school’s responsibility to encourage development of all forms of talent is a way to make a deep investment in bright young minds. We started with introducing educators to the basic philosophy that talent development is critical in rural communities like their own. In our work, however, we found that focused efforts to broaden educators’ conceptions of giftedness, to disrupt myths about rural gifted students, to identify place-conscious identification methods, and to leverage an appropriate place-based curriculum could ameliorate the issues that contribute to inequity in identification and gifted programming in rural schools and for students experiencing poverty. We learned in that work that despite the commitment and hard work of advocates and educators whom we called our champions for rural gifted education, there were often structural conditions that created barriers to identifying students to receive gifted services and made efforts to provide gifted rural students with enriched and challenging curricula a persistently difficult task. Department of Education project, Promoting PLACE in Rural Schools, designed to support gifted education in rural districts situated in areas of extreme poverty. We were recipients of such a grant, a $2 million U.S. In fact, federally funded Javits grants for gifted-student programs have been awarded with this priority since the early 2000s. Recognizing the systemic nature of these challenges, the field of gifted education has been committed for the past several decades to closing opportunity gaps through gifted programs that do more to include students of color and students in high-poverty areas. This is true at every level of education, including students admitted to academically prestigious colleges and universities. In fact, a recent study found that students from high socio-economic status backgrounds (top fifth) were seven times more likely to receive gifted services than those from low socio-economic backgrounds (bottom fifth). Gifted education programs have historically been associated with white privilege, and numerous studies have pointed to racial and socioeconomic disparities. And dismantling programs due to an unwillingness to address systemic failures that further marginalize students of color and students from economically distressed areas also doesn’t advance equity. Shutting down gifted education so that no one benefits from the opportunities it affords does nothing to ensure that all students have equitable opportunities. Removing these programs doesn’t make the underlying reasons for inequity simply go away. As the issue becomes more politically polarizing in communities across the country, the flawed notion that getting rid of gifted programs equals a solution to inequity is gaining traction. The future of New York City’s gifted education program is in question. This piece originally ran in The Daily Yonder on November 17, 2021 Border of the County Kid: External Influences in Rural Schoolsīy Amy Price Azano and Carolyn M.Ending Programs for Gifted Students Won’t Create Equity for Rural Youth.Introducing Our Site: A Rural Teacher Collaboratory.Recognizing My Rural Community Wealth and Place in Academia.Virginia’s Silent Crisis: Student Mental Health.When Chocolate Bread Pudding Tastes Like Home.What Do Google Images Tell Us About Rural Places?.More than Corn: Preparing Teachers for Iowa’s Rural Schools.Announcing the Winners of the Inaugural Literacy In Place Rural Teen Writing Contest.Representation Matters: The Rural Literature Library.Barbara Lockee Honored for Her Efforts in Support of Indigenous Students What “Being from the Country” Taught Me: Reflections on the Phenomenon of My Rural Education.
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