As Dropout Nation noted in these week’s Podcast, the nation’s special education ghettos are way-stations for kids many adults in schools and districts consider unreachable. At the same time, special ed programs serve as one of the ways American public education rations what traditionalists consider to be quality education. Another form of rationing comes in the form of gifted-and-talented classes which serve those students gatekeepers into those programs (using faulty I.Q. tests such as the Stanford-Ninety, along with their own judgement) consider worthy of what is presumed to be high-quality teaching and comprehensive, college-preparatory instruction. The fact that recent data suggest that those programs rarely do well by these students makes their value seem questionable. More importantly, gifted-and-talented programs are ineffective in reaching and serving those poor and minority kids who may be quite capable of doing the work.

Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Michael Holzman takes a look at federal data and wonders why so few black and Latino children are in gifted-and-talented programs. Read, consider, and offer your own thoughts.

Who is gifted and talented in the Atlanta metro area? This is a more-important question than you may think.

The school systems of Atlanta and the five-county core of the Atlanta metro area (Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett) enroll nearly 400,000 students. Half of the area’s students are black; 21,000 are Asian; just over 90,000 are white, non-Hispanic and just under 90,000 are Hispanic.

A total of 50,000 students in the Atlanta area are enrolled in programs for the gifted and talented according to data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.  The distribution of those students, by race and ethnicity looks like this:

Between a quarter and a third of Asian and white students are placed in gifted and talented programs.  Atlanta area school systems identify just seven percent of black students and just five percent of Hispanic students as gifted and talented.

Students in gifted and talented programs presumably have access to specialized educational resources.  Presumably that is helpful to them.

What can one say?  That the Atlanta metro school systems actually believe that white, non-Hispanic and Asian students are four times as likely to be gifted and talented as black and Hispanic students?  If not, perhaps they should look again.  There might be some more gifted black and Hispanic students around there somewhere.

Unless, of course, gifted education programs in the Atlanta area are a means for school segregation by another name.

There is a large body of research demonstrating the connection between family income and educational achievement.  The connection is strong.  It underlies the transformation of this country into one increasingly characterized by a lack of socioeconomic mobility. But simply pointing to the fact that family income predicts educational achievement does not tell us why this is the case.  More bathrooms at home do not seem to have an obvious connection with learning readiness.  [Insert bathroom joke here.]

But there are some places where the connection between family income and educational achievement seems weak or non-existent.  For example, here are some estimates of 2010 high school graduation rates for male Black and male White students for the state of Maine as compared to those for the nation as a whole:

The gap, nationally, between male black and white graduation rates is about 24 percent.  To put that another way, the white rate is half again as high as the black rate.  But in Maine, the gap is 4 percent. Hardly noticeable.  And the graduation rate for black males in Maine is much higher than the national average for white males.

Here are Census figures comparing family incomes:

Maine is a poor state.  These Census figures show that the white families of Maine are poorer than the national average for white families and that black families are considerably poorer—living right on the poverty line.

And yet the sons of black families do very well in school.  Why is this?  What can we learn from this outlier?

Here’s a theory:  There are too few black students in Maine to concentrate in inferior schools.  They attend the same schools as their white peers, have the same teachers, and must meet the same expectations.  They are not herded into “drop-out factories” and expected to fail.

If that theory is correct, the experience of black students living in poverty in Maine points to a way out of our continuing education — and socioeconomic — crisis.  All students deserve the opportunity to learn in good schools.  Given that opportunity, they do learn and are able to build a foundation for a better life.

Dropout Nation has offered its own reasons for why states should take full control of school funding instead of just funding 48 percent of the spend. The fact that school districts can continue to use their dependence on property tax dollars to oppose reforms — especially school choice and Parent Power — is one reason. But as Contributing Editor Michael Holzman points out, continuing to derive school funding from property tax dollars contributes to the ineffectiveness of American public education.

A good example of American Exceptionalism is the way that schools are funded here.  In most other developed countries, schools are funded from general taxation. Much of the financial support for American schools, in contrast, is derived from local property taxes. This means that the amount of support available per student is not equalized, as in some countries, or “challenged-based,” as in Britain, for example, but is based on the local tax rate and the value of the property subject to school taxes.  This results in wide variations between districts.

Take Connecticut, one of the states with the widest variations in both support for education and educational outcomes.  The Bridgeport school district had approximately $2,500 to spend on each student from local sources.  The Westport school district had $18,500.

Another is Florida. Five districts have local revenue under $2,000 per student.  Five districts have revenue over $10,000 per student.

One way to look at this is that some people pay much higher school taxes than others.  (Although, paradoxically, the actual tax rates in some poorer areas are higher than in wealthier areas near-by.)  Another way to look at it is that some children go to much less well-supported schools than others.

Neither seems either effective or fair, does it?