State drops race as factor in gifted classes

The Cabinet approves new criteria for identifying gifted children as part of the settlement of a lawsuit.

By STEPHEN HEGARTY and ALISA ULFERTS
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 22, 2002

TALLAHASSEE -- After three lawsuits and more than two years of effort, the state has eliminated race as a factor in picking children for gifted classes.

The Florida Cabinet on Tuesday approved a new procedure for identifying children for gifted classes statewide, eliminating an 11-year-old program designed to get more minority children into the academically challenging classes.

The new procedure relies less on IQ scores. It gives greater weight to low-income students and those with limited English proficiency -- students who traditionally have been underrepresented in gifted classes. There is no mention of race.

"If you have the same high expectations for all students, that gives you a better result for the kids that have lagged behind," said Gov. Jeb Bush. The new gifted rule is similar to Bush's One Florida initiative, which did away with race as an explicit factor in college admissions and in awarding state contracts.

Approval of the new rule enables the state to meet a deadline set in a settlement signed in April. In that agreement with the Houston lawyer who challenged the state's gifted rules, the state agreed to change its policies before May 31. The state also agreed to pay $20,000 to the plaintiffs in Miami-Dade County to cover attorney's fees and testing for the plaintiff's son.

In 2000, the state agreed to pay out $95,000 to settle similar lawsuits involving parents of children in Hillsborough and Pinellas public schools.

The rule was approved unanimously Tuesday with little discussion.

Afterward, Education Commissioner Charlie Crist said he was pleased that the NAACP supports the new rule. "I'm certainly comforted by that support," Crist said.

But that support was hardly enthusiastic.

"This was damage control," said Norman Chachkin, NAACP director of litigation. Chachkin disagreed with the state's decision to settle the case and said he tried to minimize its effects on minority children.

"There's no question that the number of minority kids in gifted programs is going to go down," Chachkin said.

The race-based selection process was designed to increase the number of minority children in gifted classes. Called Plan B, it allowed minority and low-income children to qualify with IQ scores below the standard of 130.

It worked. Before Plan B, for example, about 4 percent of students in Hillsborough County gifted classes were African-American, though 20 percent of students overall are black. This year, 9.4 percent of students in gifted classes are black.

But parents of white children in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Miami-Dade schools filed lawsuits arguing that the program held their children to a higher standard than minority children. "The problem is this was a quick fix," said William Helfand, the Houston lawyer who challenged Plan B. "They said, 'Oh, there aren't enough African-American, Hispanic and Native American kids in gifted, so let's put some in.' The quick fixes generally don't work for anyone."

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