A New Way to Identify Gifted Inner-City Kids

The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth has had trouble bringing inner-city kids into its programs. African-American kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds haven’t done well on the standardized tests the center typically uses. So the Center is looking for new ways to identify bright kids from underserved neighborhoods. The result is the Baltimore Emerging Scholars Program. Program manager Andrew Moss and Amy Lynne Shelton, director of research at the Center and a professor and associate dean for research in the Johns Hopkins School of Education, both join us. We also hear the impressions of 4th-grader Santino Vaughan, who seemed impressed with an astronomy lesson involving a grapefruit and a flashlight. “We saw the phases of the moon," he says. "We saw the crescent moon, we saw the half moon, we saw the gibbous moon, and then we saw the full moon.”