I do suspect that the Title Nine list came from the place you mention -- higher income white families where all kids who perform above grade level are called gifted.
Although most such children will be gifted, a much higher fraction of them will be "gifted" -- have IQ above 130 -- than will children from the inner cities.
I can give the benefit of the doubt to that, but I suspect that the person who wrote that list lives somewhere where it isn't just a higher than avg proportion of kids being called "gifted." I'm not even in NYC and we're still looking at 25% of our kids being called gifted with parents with whom I've spoken all quite certain that this means that their kids are in the tail end of a bell curve. I can see that creating some degree of irritation or "how do you know?"
Like others have said, you know when you meet a kid who is truly on the tail end of the bell curve. Maybe the T9 lady has met a lot of kids who aren't there but who are portrayed as being there. Who knows!
