Schoolhouse Slur

By Kirsten Olson Lanier

In an affluent, well-educated, profoundly aspiring suburb of a major American city, teachers meet to select children from their school for a districtwide gifted program. Sorting “exemplary” students from the merely “commendable”—the former designated by blue folders, the latter by mere manila—in such a set-ting is no easy task. The educators in this meeting, however, shoulder their burden with stalwart energy, revealing considerable confidence in their ability to make life- shaping decisions based on the perceived intellectual lives of 8-year-olds. If schools are designed as sorting machines—organized to pick out the able from the less able—then this school is working at the top of its game.

During the long, tiring morning, I sit in the back of the room wondering about the many children— the 90 percent of the 7- and 8-year-olds excluded from consideration—whose work does not appear “exemplary,” whose folders are not blue. These not-gifted children, for me, are the interesting ones: The ones who won’t reap the advantages of the “Challenge Program,” who don’t catch the fancy of the assembled team, who aren’t labeled “bright.”

What if—I sit in this meeting silently keening—what if the assumptions about aptitude underlying the talk in this room are simply wrong? What if our ability to identify giftedness in 8-year-olds is shadowy at best? What if gifted programs themselves are primarily a way to deliver highly desirable academic services to students who are already advantaged? And what if the criteria we use to sort children is based on the same caste-creating ignorance that gives words like “nigger”...