Dr. Kristen N. Lamb, 2024 Early Career Mini-Grant winner

Dr. Kristen N. Lamb begins the abstract of her proposed project with a forthright indictment: “Educational stakeholders have increasingly scrutinized gifted education, naming it a modern-day form of racial segregation (Barnes, 2022; Whiting et al., 2017).”

Lamb, an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama’s College of Education, focuses much of her research on equity issues in advanced academics. Alabama’s history of segregation and efforts at desegregation make the state ripe for such study. Lamb will use this project to examine desegregation orders, consent decrees, and related progress outcomes for gifted education in the state. “Approximately 89% of school districts in Alabama had or have consent decrees, often dating back to the original order issued in the 1970s, and 37% of those districts continue to struggle to meet unitary status (NCES,, n.d.; ProPublica, 2014),” Lamb wrote.

She will research the characteristics of these court orders and how they affect representational disparities in gifted education and student outcomes in the state. According to Lamb, “As the first case study to investigate the impacts of class action lawsuits in the context of gifted education, the findings from this study will shape a better understanding of characteristics and approaches that have yielded positive district and student outcomes.”

Lamb hopes to use the study’s findings to identify action steps of consent decrees that have led to successful and unsuccessful change and help bridge the gap that often exists between research, policy, and practice.

The Foundation’s Early Career Mini-Grant was created to assist post-doctoral researchers or early career faculty for research related to intelligence, creativity, or gifted education.