America's gifted education programs have a race problem. Can it be fixed?

— On a crisp day in early March, two elementary school gifted and talented classes worked on activities in two schools, 3 miles and a world apart.

Unusually for Buffalo’s public schools — where 20 percent of students are white and 46 percent are Black — about half of the fourth grade class was white.

The gifted program at Eve opened two years ago as a way to increase access to Buffalo’s disproportionately white, in-demand gifted and talented programs.

Yet two years in, Eve’s gifted classes are under-enrolled, while Olmsted always runs out of room — last year, more than 400 children applied for 65 gifted spots.

White families flock to Olmsted, and eschew the new program at Eve, while families of color have come up against barriers, including an IQ test children take as young as 4, that experts say keep gifted education out of reach for kids who need it.

Buffalo's struggle to create an integrated, equitable gifted program demonstrates a longtime challenge that has recently gained attention: Gifted education in America has a race problem.

Nearly 60 percent of students in gifted education are white, according to the most recent federal data, compared to 50 percent of public school enrollment overall.

Black students, in contrast, made up 9 percent of students in gifted education, although they were 15 percent of the overall student population.

And admissions for gifted programs tend to favor children with wealthy, educated parents, who are more likely to be white.

In a three-part series, The Hechinger Report and NBC News examined the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools; how some districts are trying to diversify gifted classes or get rid of them altogether; and how scientific progress in gene testing could boost — and complicate — efforts to make gifted programs fairer.

Nationally, 3.3 million public school students were identified as gifted in 2015-16, about 6 percent of the total school population, according to the federal Department of Education.

South Dakota and Alaska, for instance, have a combined 46,000 Native children, fewer than 300 of whom, 0.6 percent, were considered gifted in 2015-16.

Black and Latino children fill 65 percent of New York City classrooms but just 22 percent of gifted seats?

In Cincinnati, for instance, Black students made up 63 percent of the student body but just 16 percent of the small gifted program, according to 2015 data from the Office for Civil Rights.

The National Association for Gifted Children defines its target group as kids whose “ability is significantly above the norm for their age.” Maria Valenti-Barone, a gifted and talented teacher at Olmsted, said that giftedness is “the potential to do great things in society.”.

Nowadays, many states build off the federal government’s kitchen-sink definition: Gifted and talented students are those who “give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”.

But however Buffalo was defining giftedness, advocates for Black children knew that something must be wrong because their city couldn’t possibly have so few gifted Black kids.

Surrounded by portraits of creative thinkers such as Muppets creator Jim Henson, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the anthropologist Jane Goodall, four students in an Olmsted #64 fourth grade gifted class debated an early step of the Arctic shelter challenge: phrasing the problem so that they could come up with a solution.“This is hard,” one muttered, bending over her paper.

The entire school learns about critical thinking and creativity, and gifted kids take most of their classes with their peers, except for the special gifted class, taught by Valenti-Barone, which meets every other day.

Rather than force integration like in Boston, the district came up with an array of magnet programs to encourage white families to enroll their children in predominantly Black public schools.

Without the outreach and prep program, the Olmsted gifted program began to grow whiter — from 55 percent Black and 30 percent white in 2004 to 32 percent Black and 46 percent white in 2013, according to federal data.

“I was stunned,” said Sally Krisel, a former president of the National Association for Gifted Children, who visited Buffalo in the late 1990s to advise on how to identify gifted students.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster.

Sarah Malczewski, who teaches gifted kids like Kaiden for a portion of each day, created her own curriculum for Eve, but she taught a lot of the same techniques as the Olmsted program, including the de Bono hats and other methods to think outside the box.

The 13 students in Kaiden’s gifted class, which meets daily, had started the project the day before, so they colored in their paper airplanes’ wings, practiced their tosses — and searched for even better designs.

McDuffie was living down the street from Olmsted at the time and applied to the school’s neighborhood program, not the gifted class, but Kaiden didn’t get in.

Harvard University researchers found that while white parents supported racially integrated schools in principle, they were uncomfortable with having their children be the minority and less likely to enroll their children in schools with large numbers of Black students.

Howard Thompson II, a Black substitute teacher at Eve whose son passed the gifted test and is in Malczewski’s class, put it plainly: “Racism will always play a factor in most people’s decision-making,” he said.

If the point is to give more Black children in Buffalo the chance to attend gifted programs, maybe Eve’s lack of white students is for the best.

There are many ways to go wrong when identifying gifted children, Ohio State professor Donna Ford said, ways that result in fewer disadvantaged children and more wealthy and white children passing the bar.

And testing only students whose teachers or parents are aware of the program and request it; few teachers get trained in gifted education, so their recommendations are often based on stereotypes (studies find that Black students are more likely to get into gifted programs if they have teachers of the same race).

Though no one has found a way to identify kids with extraordinary potential that doesn’t map closely onto the privileges of birth, tactics districts are already trying include screening all children, not just those whose parents request it; admitting promising students to gifted programs even if they miss the testing cutoff; and expanding the number of gifted seats.

About 250 of Buffalo’s more than 30,000 students are in a gifted program.

But despite the high demand for Olmsted, administrators said that they didn’t need to significantly expand gifted education, beyond adding the program at Eve, because Buffalo has plenty of other academically stimulating options, including STEM and Montessori programs.

This is in line with a new theory that envisions gifted classes as a service, like special education: an array of personalized support for a child with learning needs outside the norm.

The federal government does not supplement local funding for gifted programs as it does for special education.

Buffalo Superintendent Kriner Cash “probably believes philosophically that there should be a gifted and talented program in every school,” said Sam Radford, an African American parent and past president of the District Parent Coordinating Council.

Anne Botticelli, the district’s chief academic officer, said she hopes to be able to offer what she called “enrichment,” though not gifted and talented services, to more students in the future

For fall 2020, the parents of 403 children applied to Olmsted’s elementary gifted program and 39 to Eve’s, according to data the district provided

Only 11 percent of the Black and 10 percent of the Hispanic children got in