“Talent” and the Misrecognition of Social Advantage in Specialized Arts Education

Abstract

Attention has been drawn to the persistent underrepresentation of underserved populations in gifted education programs. Though a small number of working-class students, students of color, recent immigrants, and students with limited English proficiency attend these programs, access to gifted education remains closely linked to White and upper-middle-class populations. The question remains: how, in a system that claims to be committed to achieving equity, do such disparities come to be and, furthermore, how are they justified? In this article we attempt to make sense of this phenomenon by examining how discourses of talent are mobilized within the context of a particular kind of gifted education program: a specialized arts program within a Canadian public secondary school.

Keywords:

• arts education
• cultural reproduction
• gifted youth
• inequality
• privilege
• talent

Notes

1. CAPA as well as all proper names used throughout the article are pseudonyms. All direct quotations from research participants come from interview and focus group transcripts or participant observation field notes collected between October 2011 and January 2012.

2. As reported in the 2006 Student Census: School Report for the CAPA school.

3. For a detailed description of the methodology, see Gaztambide-Fernández (2010).

4. One anonymous reviewer raised the question of whether there was a historical link between the 1964 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the establishment of specialized arts programs in the United States. We were not able to establish that link, although it seems entirely possible that the provisions of the Act for gifted education may have played a role in specialized arts education, particularly through later iterations of Title V.

5. According to the district school board:

The LOI ranks each school based on measures of external challenges affecting student success. The school with the greatest level of external challenges is ranked number one and is described as highest on the index. [ … ] The LOI measures relative need and compares all schools on exactly the same set of data collected in a consistent, reliable, and objective manner. The LOI removes the subjectivity that may shape perceptions of individual school needs. (source omitted for confidentiality purposes)

6. Auditions at CAPA typically involve some combination of at least one teacher and one or more external guests, who are invited to offer comments to be used in making admissions decisions.

7. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.