“The existence of disproportionality does not make gifted services inherently racist,” writes Peters (2021) in the conclusion of his article, “The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs,” and with that statement so highlights the logical flaw that runs unchecked through his article. Although his statement is justified in the sense that the mere existence of disproportionality does not condemn gifted services as inherently unequitable—correlation, after all, does not beget causation—it does not exonerate the educational system from such charges either. The problem, then, lies less with what points Peters does make than the ones which are all the more glaring for their absence: namely, the role of school systems in perpetuating systemic racism and inequity. Per Peters’ bold concluding statement, schools and their accelerated programs do not inherently bear responsibility for the inequity that they display due to the existence of the larger context in which such programs exist, but rather exist as largely neutral entities that merely reflect the biased world that they are mired in. It is curious, then, that Peters opens his article by highlighting this result from a 2013 meta-analysis: “Petersen found that boys were more likely to be identified as gifted than girls, particularly during preadolescence, and that these findings held regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.” The very finding he highlights—indicating a notable inequity in gifted services across gender, even when results are standardized across traditional indicators of opportunity availability such as socioeconomic status—suggests that problems in GT identification run far deeper than just external problems, particularly given studies that indicate girls and boys start school on equal footing even by traditional academic measures (e.g., test scores). Peters, despite ostensibly (per the title of the paper) focusing on improving equity across all dimensions— not just race—and leading his discussion with this finding, conveniently fails to revisit it or the topic of gender inequity across the remaining nine pages of text. The astute reader may wonder how, precisely, a purportedly neutral system can take two populations that exhibit equal performance and obtain unequal results without being deemed biased. Certainly, one can ascribe at least some of the variation to outside factors—for instance, girls being discouraged from pursuing academics due to gender bias—but the fact that girls perform as well as or better than boys in school and show equal rates of academic progress (see, for instance, the work of Ding et al. [2006]), means that the effect of such biases is clearly insufficient, in and of itself, to cause the significant disparity in identification rates that is observed during the selection process for accelerated programs. Peters argues that this phenomenon may be due to “differences in true scores due to some children not having had the opportunity to develop their talents” and is not, inherently, an indicator of a flawed selection system. However, meta-analyses in the literature state that girls generally outperform boys in terms of grade point average and classroom performance (Voyer & Voyer, 2014)—even given the systematic biases they face in society and both inside and outside the classroom—which is inconsistent with Peters’ perspective on the matter. Thus, having eliminated the impossible, à la Sherlock Holmes, we must face the—perhaps not improbable, but certainly inconvenient—truth: that the screening process for gifted education is, in fact, biased. This conclusion is well supported by the literature (Bianco et al., 2011; Powell & Siegle, 2000), which time and time again has indicated that school systems are not, in fact, as innocent in the matter of inequity as Peters’ apologia would have them seem. Societal inequality certainly forms the foundation for the disproportionality seen in accelerated educational services, but for all the exhortation Peters gives initiatives that “help[ . . . ] teachers reflect on their own implicit biases,” schools still bear culpability for actively promulgating the festering growth of societal flaws— increasing the disparity in opportunities that already exist outside the classroom, all while attributing the effects of their actions as the doing of an equally culpable, but conveniently unimpeachable, collective. In light of this revelation, this commentary highlights the need for concrete change: specifically, for transparent, equitable, and scientifically defensible gifted identification systems and a greater quantitative analysis of gifted education in general. Grade-skipping, early entrance to kindergarten or first grade, and early entrance to college, for example, can be 1040527 GCQXXX10.1177/00169862211040527Gifted Child QuarterlySingam research-article2021

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在公立学校的天才项目中实现公平：需要透明、科学的方法论

彼得斯（2021 年）在他的文章“在公立学校天才和天才计划中实现公平的挑战”的结尾写道：“不成比例的存在并不会使天才服务天生具有种族主义色彩，”并且该声明突出了逻辑缺陷在他的文章中未经检查。尽管他的陈述在某种意义上是合理的，即仅存在不成比例并不会谴责有天赋的服务本质上是不公平的——毕竟相关性不会产生因果关系——但它也不能免除教育系统的此类指控。因此，问题不在于彼得斯确实提出了什么观点，而在于那些因缺席而更加明显的观点：即学校系统在延续系统性种族主义和不平等方面的作用。根据彼得斯大胆的结论性声明，学校及其加速项目本身并不对由于此类项目存在的更大背景而表现出的不公平承担责任，而是作为基本上中立的实体而存在，这些实体仅反映了他们所陷入的有偏见的世界。它好奇的是，彼得斯在开始他的文章时强调了 2013 年荟萃分析的这一结果：“彼得森发现男孩比女孩更有可能被认为是有天赋的，尤其是在青春期前，而且这些发现与种族无关，种族或社会经济地位。” 他强调的这一发现——表明不同性别的天才服务存在显着的不平等，即使结果在传统的机会可用性指标（如社会经济地位）上标准化——这表明 GT 识别问题比外部问题更深层次，特别是考虑到研究表明即使通过传统的学术衡量标准，女孩和男孩也可以平等地开始上学（例如， 考试分数）。彼得斯，尽管表面上（根据论文的标题）专注于提高所有方面的公平——而不仅仅是种族——并领导了他对这一发现的讨论，但很容易没有重新审视它或在剩下的 9 页文本中的性别不平等主题. 精明的读者可能想知道，一个据称是中立的系统如何准确地接受两个表现出相同表现并获得不同结果的群体而不会被认为有偏见。当然，人们可以将至少部分差异归因于外部因素——例如，由于性别偏见，不鼓励女孩继续求学——但事实上女孩在学校的表现与男孩一样好或更好，并且表现出同等的学业进步率（例如，参见 Ding et al. [2006] 的工作，这意味着这种偏差的影响本身显然不足以导致在加速选择过程中观察到的识别率的显着差异程式。彼得斯认为，这种现象可能是由于“由于一些孩子没有机会发展自己的才能而导致的真实分数差异”，并且本质上并不是一个有缺陷的选拔系统的指标。然而，文献中的元分析表明，女孩在平均成绩和课堂表现方面普遍优于男孩（Voyer 和 Voyer，2014 年）——即使考虑到她们在社会以及课堂内外面临的系统性偏见——这与彼得斯对此事的看法。因此，在消除了不可能的事情之后，就像夏洛克·福尔摩斯一样，我们必须面对——也许并非不可能，但肯定是不方便的——真相：天才教育的筛选过程实际上是有偏见的。这一结论得到了文献的充分支持（Bianco et al., 2011; Powell & Siegle, 2000），这些文献一次又一次地表明，事实上，学校系统在不平等问题上并不像彼得斯的道歉那样无辜会让他们看起来。社会不平等当然构成了加速教育服务中不成比例的基础，但尽管彼得斯提出了“帮助[. . . ] 教师反思他们自己的隐性偏见，“学校仍然要为积极宣传日益恶化的社会缺陷负有责任——扩大课堂外已经存在的机会差距，同时将他们行为的影响归咎于平等的行为。有罪，但方便无懈可击，集体。鉴于这一启示，本评论强调了具体变革的必要性：具体而言，需要透明、公平和有科学依据的资优鉴定系统，以及对资优教育进行更广泛的定量分析。跳级，