The gifted program for fourth and fifth grade students in the District provides a unique
opportunity to address these issues, since the program serves some students who are selected on IQ
scores and others who are selected on past achievement in the same classrooms. The program creates a
separate gifted classroom whenever there is at least one gifted child (meeting an absolute IQ standard)
in the school. As a result, most schools ‐‐ even those with very high fractions of free‐lunch and minority
students ‐‐ have separate gifted classrooms. The majority of seats in these classes are filled by nongifted
students who scored highest on state‐wide achievement tests in the past year. For poorer
schools with only a handful of gifted students in any grade the program is similar to a tracking program
that sets aside a separate class for the 20 or so top performing students in the grade/cohort.