I would have loved to continue reading this, but he immediately claimed that "Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores". I clicked the link that supposedly contained the paper to back this up. The link takes you here[0].

That's a bit annoying since it doesn't take me directly to the source, but that's fine. Then I read the article and it says: "...found black students were 66 percent less likely to be assigned to a gifted program as white students. A black student whose test scores were on par with a white peer was still half as likely to be assigned to a gifted classroom." So, immediately the author of this original article saw the statistic 66% and the phrase "on par with test scores", and immediately conflated the two. According to this statement, it sounds like black students are actually 50% less likely to be identified as gifted with similar test scores.

I'm going to assume that's just an artifact of non-diligent research and not a blatant lie. Well, I'm still curious where these stats come from, so let's see where this article in the Tennesseean is sourcing this stuff from. They've got several links on this article and... every single link, with the exception of the link to a randomly named professor at Vanderbilt, lead to other articles on the Tennessean. Let's see if we can find where they obtained these stats from.

Alright, it looks like this is where they got it from[1], but I can't be 100% sure. This actually has a link to the paper as well[2]. It also has a nice disclaimer at the bottom of the article:

> One such additional factor impacting minority assignment to gifted programs is the availability of these programs in schools attended by minority students. Black students are less likely overall to attend schools that provide gifted programs. Ninety percent of white, 93 percent of Hispanic, and 91 percent of Asian elementary students attend schools with gifted programs, while only 83 percent of African American students do.

In other words, when the researchers took test scores into account for Hispanic students vs white students, the differences in the probability of being selected for a gifted program based on race reduced to 0%. With black students, they (seemingly) did not take into account whether a school even offered a gifted program. So they lumped together all the students who may not have had access to a gifted program, and then used that to conclude that teachers are racist and ignoring test scores.

Right off the bat I'm done with this article. If you're going to cite research, then cite the actual paper first of all. Second, look at how they gathered the data. Once you take the anomalies into account, it looks like we may not have racist teachers, but rather incomplete data. I wish we could just have an honest conversation about this stuff instead of all this stupid indirection and trying to hide the actual research being done because it doesn't fully support your claims.

The big issue here is a lot of black students don't have access to gifted programs, but instead we're fighting "racist" teachers that don't exist.

[0]: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2016/01/19/v...

[1]: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...

[2]: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...