Dive Brief:
- Last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights questioned students in Mississippi's Vicksburg-Warren School District about their opportunities to enroll in gifted classes.
- The Vicksburg Post reported that white students were four times as likely to be enrolled in the programs as their non-white counterparts.
- Complicating the investigation is the fact that the feds interviewed some students whose parents did not sign the permission slip.
Dive Insight:
Thus far, no specific complaints by parents have been made over the interviews — which is good, since the investigation should not get bogged down in the nuances of how the questioning was conducted, but rather why these disparities exist.
"There was an underrepresentation of African-Americans in the programs,” Terri Russo, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Education told the Associated Press.
In 2011, when the most recent data was available, less than 4% of the districts black students were enrolled in gifted classes, even though they made up 65.2% of the district. On the other hand, white students made up 32% of the district, and of that number, 16.2% were enrolled in gifted classes.