Hispanic and Latinx Youth with Gifts and Talents: Access, Representation, and Missingness in Gifted Education Across the United States

ABSTRACT

To what extent are Hispanic and Latinx students with gifts and talents proportionally identified? To what extent are they missing from identification (ID) due to lack of access or underidentification? This study used the Office of Civil Rights data for the years 2000, 2011–2012, 2013–2014, and 2015–2016 to investigate national and state underrepresentation of Latinx youth with gifts and talents. Schools were examined separately by Title I and non-Title I status and by locale (city, suburb, town, rural) to determine whether poverty concentration and/or school locale matter in the ID of Latinx youth. Lack of access to ID was not a major contributing factor to the underrepresentation of these students. Rather, it was the chronic underidentification of Latinx students, regardless of school Title I status or school locale. In 2015–2016 there were 588,891 Latinx students identified with gifts and talents, with between 658,544 (52.79%) and 1,164,363 (66.41%) gifted Latinx youth missing from ID. Across the United States, students with gifts and talents who are Latinx are experiencing discriminatory gifted education policies and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Hispanic
• Latino
• gifted education
• identification
• equity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Hispanic and Latinx youth with gifts and talents, both identified and unidentified. These data represent individual students whose identities include and extend beyond those qualities investigated here.

Disclosure statement

The authors of this manuscript have no known conflicts of interests in any of the work related to this paper.

Notes

¹ “Scholars have used the term panethnicity to describe when different ethnic or tribal groups cooperate, organize, and build institutions and identities across ethnic boundaries” (Okamoto & Mora, 2014, p. 220).

² Students who should be but are not identified with gifts and talents due to lack of identification or disproportionate identification.

³ As measured by eligibility for the federal free and reduced-price meal program.

⁴ Locale codes are the geographic indicator of the type of area a school is located in. City, suburb, town, and rural are the four primary classifications of locale codes.