Unlocking Potential

Identifying and Serving Gifted Students From Low-Income Households

Tamra Stambaugh, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781646320806
• eBook ISBN: 9781000490275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Winner of NAGC's 2021 Book of the Year Award

This edited book, written by authors with extensive experience in working with gifted students from low-income households, focuses on ways to translate the latest research and theory into evidence-supported practices that impact how schools identify and serve these students. Readers will:

• Learn about evidence-supported identification systems, tools, and strategies for finding students from low-income households.
• Discover curriculum models, resources, and instructional strategies found effective from projects focused on supporting these students.
• Understand the important role that intra- and interpersonal skills, ethnicity/race, families, school systems, and communities play.
• Consider the perceptions of gifted students who grew up in low-income households.
• Learn how educators can use their experiences to strengthen current services.

Unlocking Potential is the go-to resource for an up-to-date overview of best practices in identification, curriculum, instruction, community support, and program design for gifted learners from low-income households.

CHAPTER 1Poverty, Academic Achievement, and Giftedness: A Literature Review

DOI: 10.4324/9781003239383-1

Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Tamra Stambaugh, and Susan Corwith

Poverty affects educational opportunity, upward mobility, and even basic health and security. It also significantly affects the opportunities for children with talent to develop and manifest their abilities in creative productive achievement in adulthood. In this chapter, we review the demographics of poverty in the U.S. followed by a brief review of the effects of poverty on general educational achievement. We complete this chapter with a review of how poverty affects talent development and what can be done about it, previewing subsequent chapters that explore important aspects of talent development for students from poverty in more depth.

Definitions of Poverty

Poverty is a social construct that is complex and multifaceted. Poverty can be defined in economic terms; for example, student poverty is typically operationalized in educational research within the U.S. as whether or not a student qualifies for free or reduced lunch. In other research, poverty is conceptualized more broadly, encompassing measures of other aspects of potential social and economic disadvantage (Burney & Bielke, 2008; Engle & Black, 2008), including levels of parental education, parental occupation, and learning resources within the home (e.g., number of books) or community. Carnevale et al. (2019) noted that family socioeconomic status (SES) that considers household income, parental education, and parental occupational prestige is a “more accurate reflection than income of the advantages and disadvantages that impact a child’s chances for academic and economic success” (p. 5). For example, some occupations may not have high economic capital but strong social capital (e.g., educators). New immigrants who are well educated and considered professionals within their home countries but cannot work in the fields or at the level for which they are educated and trained may have limited finances for summer programs or private schools; however, they can provide an intellectually rich home and stress higher education. Additionally, among families classified as low income, there are degrees of poverty; poverty that is enduring and generational is much more deleterious in its effects on children than poverty that is episodic, such as the result of a temporary job loss (Michelmore & Dynarski, 2017).

Family income does not tell the whole story; children of mothers who were low income but had higher levels of education had higher levels of math knowledge (numbers and shape, relative size, ordinal sequence, addition, and subtraction) and reading skills (letter and sound recognition) upon entry into kindergarten (U.S. Department of Education, 2000), supporting the important role of early, informal teaching and exposure by parents to school readiness and achievement.

Additionally, Sampson (2002) found that families with lower incomes and levels of education can be diverse in terms of values and expectations for their child’s school achievement. Low-income families of high-achieving Black students had what he called “middle-class values” toward education, including stressing educational achievement, setting times for study and homework at home, and facilitating their child’s participation in extracurricular and outside-of-school activities. These parents communicated a positive view of the future and reinforced an internal locus of control. Families of low-achieving children communicated different beliefs about the future and/or verbally endorsed similar values but did not follow through with consonant supportive actions.

Major predictors of resiliency include connections to caring family members and adults in the community, intelligence and problem-solving skills, hope and optimism, and strong executive skills (Masten, 2001), and these factors can be present in families despite lower family incomes.

The Demographics and Geography of Poverty Among Children in the U.S.

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty (Jiang et ah, 2016), in the U.S. 41% of all children under 18 years of age, 15.4 million children, and 44% of children under the age of 9 live in low-income families (“poor” is defined as below 100% of the federal poverty threshold [FPT], and “near poor” is between 100% and 199% of the FPT). Younger children are more likely to be in low-income families than older children (43% to 44% for children under age 12, and 37% for children ages 12-17). More children live in poverty than adults.

Rates of children from low-income families vary by race and ethnicity, with Hispanic children comprising the largest share of young children living in low-income families (36%; Jiang et al., 2016). In the U.S., African American, Native American, and Hispanic children come from disproportionally poor and low-income households, with 64% of African American children, 65% of Native American children, 61% of Hispanic children, 31% of White children, and 28% of Asian American children living in poverty. However, it is worth noting that there is variability in poverty rates within ethnic/racial groups as well—for example, within and between new immigrants and families who have been in the U.S. for generations (Burney & Cross, 2006; Kitano, 2006). Still, poverty and ethnicty/race are clearly linked in the U.S.

Poverty rates also vary substantially by geographic region, with higher rates of children in low-income households residing in the South (48%) than in the West (43%), and with the Midwest (42%) and Northeast (37%) housing the lowest percentages of low-income families (Jiang et al., 2016). According to testimony by Kneebone (2017) of the Brookings Institute to the House Ways and Means Committee, Subcommittee on Human Resources, the geography of poverty has changed in the United States. Poverty has typically been associated with large urban centers or rural areas, and it has historically been concentrated there. Poverty grew in the 2000s due to the recession, increasing in rural and urban areas by 20%, but also increasing in other regions—specifically small metropolitan areas and the suburbs. Suburbs around all major cities of the U.S. constituted 48% of the increase in families living below the poverty line between 2000 and 2015. The largest demographic group in the suburban poor is non Hispanic Whites. According to research by the Economic Policy Institute using national data sets, the percentage of children in the U.S. on free and reduced lunch has increased rapidly between the mid 1990s and 2013 as well; in 2013, more than half of the eighth graders in U.S. public schools were on free and reduced lunch (Carnoy & Garcia, 2017). These rates of low-income families in the U.S. are only increasing. In a trend analysis study by the Nielsen Company using the U.S. Census Bureau data (Anderson, 2009), it was hypothesized that between the years 2020 and 2050 those living in poverty will increase significantly as those who are considered upper middle class, affluent, or wealthy decrease in numbers, thus predicting that the majority of individuals in the U.S. will be in the lower middle to poor income range. If this trend continues as predicted, it will have a direct impact on the economy, including the job market, spending, and U.S. competitiveness (Anderson, 2009).

Poverty and Its Effects

Research documents the many consequences of poverty, specifically the adverse effects of poverty on learning and achievement outcomes (Ellis et al., 2017; Lacour & Tissington, 2011; Moore et al., 2009). At the most fundamental level, poverty can affect children’s health due to less availability of enough food, nutritious food, and medical care that can impact brain development. According to Hair et al. (2015), students from low-income backgrounds showed more diminished gray matter and scored lower on standardized tests than their wealthier counterparts. In another study, Hanson and colleagues (2015) found that brain development in students from low-income households was not as significant from infancy into primary school when compared to those not in poverty. The amount of time a student lived in poverty also impacted their future trajectories, negatively impacting the level of academic performance and adult productivity over time (Hair et al., 2015). Additionally, children from low-income households had reduced brain surface when compared to students of families that made $150,000 or more (Noble et al., 2015).

Other negative effects of poverty are mediated through family and community dynamics, such as a less enriching home environment, harsh and controlling parenting, a lack of maternal responsiveness, parental stress, and fewer community institutions that provide support (Engle & Black, 2008). It was speculated that “poverty and the conditions that often accompany it— violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution, malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs—can affect the interactions, formation, and pruning of connections in the young brain” (Hayasaki, 2016, para. 13). As such, early opportunities are critical for children who come from low-income families or communities.

Research shows that the effects of poverty on the educational achievement of children begin at birth, and deleterious effects on cognitive growth start in children’s early environments. Differences in exposure to language and vocabulary (Hart & Risley, 2003) and informal exposure to the natural world (Curran & Kellogg, 2016; Morgan et al., 2016) in children’s early environments have been documented. Such disparities significantly impact children’s readiness for school, put them behind at the start of school for their academic growth, and persist and grow as children proceed through school (Fernald et ah, 2013; Morgan et al., 2016).

Family income affects housing options and consequently neighborhood safety and access to community and educational resources that can promote optimal child development (Engle & Black, 2008; Pew Research Center, 2015). Poverty also affects educational opportunity (e.g., school choice, availability of early childhood education) and school quality (e.g., fewer advanced classes, less experienced teachers, higher teacher turnover; Aaronson et al., 2007; Rivkin et al., 2005). Poverty limits the financial and person power resources available within the family to support learning beyond the school day, such as trips to museums, participation in cultural events, and extracurricular or summer programs (Snellman et al., 2015). Poverty can also impact students’ aspirations, including whether or not they view a future for themselves that includes higher education and professional careers, as a result of limited access to peer and/ or adult mentors and professionals who can assist with educational paths and career development (Snellman et al., 2015).

Achievement, Excellence, and Opportunity Gaps

Educational achievement gaps between groups of children in the U.S. have been a major focus of policy and reform efforts (e.g., No Child Left Behind Act). Reardon (2011), using data from 19 nationally represen tative studies, examined the history of achievement gaps in the U.S. and concluded that the income gap in educational achievement, defined as the difference between children whose families were at the 90th versus the 10th percentile of family income, has widened and is now twice as large as the Black-White achievement gap. Although this chapter focuses on the impact of low income on educational achievement for gifted children, racial disparities in educational achievement exist above and beyond the impact of income (Levy et al., 2016), and implicit bias and stereotypes impact educational opportunity and achievement (Carnevale et al., 2019). For example, some of the largest ethnic/racial minority achievement gaps exist at the highest socioeconomic levels (Miller, 2004). Racism negatively and independently affects identification and educational opportunities and outcomes for children from ethnic/racial minority groups, including gifted children (see Ford, 2011; McBee, 2010). Therefore, similar effects can exist regardless of income if access and opportunity are not provided.

The achievement gap between lower and higher income children is present at school entry and persists as children progress through school (Carnevale et al., 2019). In a 2009 policy brief, researchers from the College Board (Barton & Coley, 2009) identified the following factors contributing to achievement and, ultimately, opportunity gaps: the rigor of the school curriculum, the quality of training and the experience levels of teachers, class size, teacher absence and turnover, access to instructional technologies within and outside of school, parental participation in school events, parental reading to children, excessive television viewing, and summer achievement losses. Their research showed that the disparities on these factors between children from higher income backgrounds and those from lower income backgrounds had not changed since an earlier study in 2003 (Barton & Coley, 2009).

Growing income disparities within the U.S. likely contribute to widening opportunity gaps and are reflected in another significant factor affecting achievement gaps—the differential investments of families from higher and lower income levels in educational opportunities for their children. Kornrich and Furstenberg (2013) studied data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and found that families in the top two deciles of income spend 5 to 7 times more on their children’s education than families in the lowest two deciles. High-quality day care and early education were among the most prominent family investments. There were also wide differences in family expenditures on enrichment activities. In 2005-2006, 20% of parents from the highest income categories spent $7,500 more than families in the bottom 20% on enrichment activities such as music lessons (Duncan & Murnane, 2011).

Lack of both formal and informal learning opportunities in the summer is cited as a major contributor to achievement gaps; research shows that two thirds of the achievement gap between lower and higher income students in grade 9 can be attributed to disparities in summer learning opportunities (i.e., access beyond the school day to enriched opportunities) that accumulate over time (McCombs et al., 2017).

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the nation’s report card, has documented the achievement of different groups of students in the U.S. since 1990. This research has shown large and persistent achievement gaps between students who do and do not qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.) since its inception. Recent NAEP data showed that the gaps in test performance in mathematics and reading at grades 4 and 8 between students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch and students who are not eligible remained relatively stable from 2013 to 2017.

Moreover, higher achieving, lower income students lose ground in school. Feinstein (2003) conducted a longitudinal study tracking academic achievement from preschool to age 10 and found that students from low-income backgrounds who were in the top quartiles of achievement initially declined over time, while the wealthier participants maintained their high achievement. Similarly, children from wealthier families who were in the lowest quartiles of achievement evidenced greater gains and ended up outperforming the students from low-income families who started out in the highest quartiles.

These early and persistent achievement disparities have significant consequences for adulthood. A kindergartner who comes from a high-SES family and with test scores in the bottom 50% has a 7 in 10 chance of reaching high SES in adulthood, while a kindergartner from a low-SES family with test scores in the top 50% has only a 3 in 10 chance of being high SES by the age of 25 (Carnevale et al., 2019).

Degree of poverty affects the size of achievement gaps, with wider gaps for children who have experienced persistent economic disadvantage as evidenced by eligibility for free and reduced lunch for multiple years, compared to students who are occasionally or intermittently eligible (Mich...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Poverty, Academic Achievement, and Giftedness: A Literature Review
• Chapter 2 Intersections of Culture, Context, and Race With Poverty: Implications for Services for Gifted Learners From Low-Income Backgrounds
• Chapter 3 Macro-Identification Approaches and Systems for Students From Low-Income Backgrounds
• Chapter 4 Micro-Identification Processes Joni Lakin
• Chapter 5 A Curriculum Design Model for Students From Low-Income Households
• Chapter 6 Instructional Strategies to Support Learners From Low-Income Backgrounds: The Humanities
• Chapter 7 Instructional Strategies to Support Talented Students From Low-Income Households: The STEM Fields
• Chapter 8 Effective Intervention Models to Support the Talent Development of Students From Low-Income Households Beyond the School Day
• Chapter 9 Effective Strategies for Career Counseling of Gifted Learners From Low-Income Backgrounds
• Chapter 10 Teaching Psychosocial Skills and Modeling Habits of Achievement
• Chapter 11 Tapping Into Family Resources to Support Gifted Learners From Low-Income Backgrounds
• Chapter 12 A Systems Approach to Identifying and Serving Gifted Learners From Low-Income Backgrounds
• Chapter 13 Voices and Reflections
• About the Editors
• About the Authors