Georgia spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on special educational services for a small but elite percentage of students deemed “gifted.” And those students are disproportionately white and Asian.
Despite aggressive efforts to erase the gap between the races, white students in Georgia are roughly three times more likely than their black counterparts to be enrolled in gifted programs — and roughly two-and-a-half times more likely to be in those classrooms than minority students, including Hispanics and Asians.
That’s according to an analysis of recent state education data by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The gifted program was started in 1958, when Georgians were openly resisting the desegregation mandate in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. It’s been six decades since that ground-breaking case, and the inequity in the gifted program has narrowed some in recent decades.
But why does it endure?
Read more about the issue in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday and on MyAJC.com.
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