SES does play a big role in the number of gifted kids, but 27.7% still seems high. Our district is pretty average for Texas, and likely a bit below average for country as Texas is not a high achieving state. Our district identifies about 10% of kids as gifted eventually, and number of kids id'd varies quite a bit by school in the district depending mainly on how wealthy the area is. The higher SES schools identify ~16% of kids. I know this from looking at our state testing data, one of the groups they stratify by is gifted and talented. I've also noticed that the gifted kids at the higher SES schools tend to score higher on average than gifted kids at lower SES schools on the state tests too. Very interesting.
They use a cut score of 130 on any section of the cogat or nnat, but kids in the 120's can be accepted too if they do well in other parts of the evaluation. The form also states that they take into account the educational background that the child comes from, which to me means SES. So really not very stringent standards and still only 10% are accepted overall.
