Experts: Giftedness harder to identify in kids from low-income families

from The Asbury Park Press

By ERICA HARBATKIN

Identifying giftedness in children who have grown up in low-income neighborhoods is more difficult than identifying giftedness in their middle-income peers, experts say.

New Jersey law attempts to offset that disparity by requiring school districts to compare children to others in their own district, rather than comparing them to children throughout the state. But setting rules for identification often isn't enough to counterbalance the roadblocks born out of poverty.

"All of our evidence seems to indicate that when you take a child and put him in a poverty environment the result is to rob the child of his potential giftedness," said Dr. Michael Lewis, director of the Gifted Child Clinic at Robert Wood Johnson University Medical School.

State law requires that all school districts implement a board-approved gifted and talented program, but leaves the specifics of the program to the district administration.

"When we were writing the definition for gifted in New Jersey we were very cognizant of the fact that there are 600 school districts and they're doing 600 different things," said Roberta Braverman, vice president of the New Jersey Association of Gifted Children, and who helped write New Jersey's law for gifted education.

But children in low-income districts do not exhibit giftedness as readily as their middle- and upper-income counterparts. So giftedness is easy to miss, even when they are being compared to their neighborhood peers.

That's why children who grow up in poverty cannot be identified through the same tests as their middle-income peers, Lewis said.

"So we decided we would have to identify them by looking at different skills and capacity," Lewis said, citing reasoning, auditory memory, vocabulary and special ability. "If the child shows giftedness in any one of those areas we would consider the child gifted."

The Gifted Child Clinic developed screening techniques for low-income children and taught them to preschool teachers in Newark, who were then able to successfully identify their gifted pupils. The clinic then helped to develop a gifted program in Newark, but it lapsed after about 15 years due to lack of funding, Lewis said.

"I think we could have been prepared to actually do it if funding wasn't such a problem," he said.