One of the more interesting ideas I've heard suggests looking at "x" percentage of each demographic tested. That makes sense to me, although the follow up would have to be differentiated with current achievement levels in mind. In my fantasy approach, schools identify and form several types of gifted clusters (each in a different classroom).
In reality, your approach can become a racial quota system for admission to gifted programs (which I oppose), as described by Laura Vanderkam in the Gifted Exchange blog:
I can see how it could become that. I think the key is to cluster kids appropriately, not to take the top whatever percent in each group and jam them all together. In a good "program", not all identified students are grouped together recieving the same things anyway, because as we know, not all gifted children are the same.
I find the idea interesting because I'm operating under the assumption that the highly race/class skewed scores we typically see do not represent a natural distribution of intelligence. Poverty, discrimination, language...these are all factors that can mask intelligence and talent. I think by looking at outliers within groups, we can better separate circumstance from intrinsic factors, and develop talent that would otherwise be overlooked. The programming itself will probably look different, at least initially. However, if identification of talent happens early on, there is opportunity to provide interventions that might overcome some of the factors that depress the test scores in underrepresented populations.
I'm also operating under the assumption that the kids we are talking about range from mildly to highly gifted (based on what I've read, group ability tests like CogAT aren't likely to capture profoundly gifted students accurately), so all identified kids shouldn't be recieving the same follow up services/instruction/intervention anyway. Part of the reason I would like more context with the scores (prepped,not prepped, etc) is to make more appropriate clustering decisions within the wider swath of kids who are on the gifted continuum. I recognize that there are brain development factors related to pre-natal care and birth to three brain development that are likely to create some skewing of intelligence. I simply don't accept that it skews it to the degree that our school based identification patterns suggest. I don't see entry into a gifted program as a prize, and I don't particularly like the concept of "program" to begin with. Rather, I see a need to make sure that all gifted kids have access to
programming that meets their specific needs.
