Serve gifted kids in integrated classrooms
or more than a decade, every January, tens of thousands New Yorkers have taken a high-stakes test, meeting oneon-one with a proctor for roughly an hour. These aren’t medical students or even high schoolers. They are 4-year-olds, taking a test that will be the sole determinant of whether or not they are deemed “gifted and talented” and granted entry into one of the city’s exclusive G&T programs.
No one with any knowledge of educational best practices or child development can truthfully defend this practice. These children are so young that their experiences thus far are almost entirely shaped by their family, and screening at this age ends up measuring economic and social advantage rather than innate aptitude. Basing entry into gifted programs on a single test also creates a system where any number of factors — from the amount of test prep that parents have paid for, to proctor biases, to whether or not a preschooler is having a good day — can skew results. Even leading researchers who advocate for expanding gifted-and-talented programming have called NYC’s testing protocol “inexcusable.” The DOE admitted this much in an internal memo last summer.
Despite this, the mayor announced two weeks ago that the city would plow forward with in-person testing one last year, pandemic be damned, promising to develop a new protocol in conversation with the community to be implemented starting in 2022.
But this week, NYC’s Panel for Educational Policy, normally a rubber-stamping body, voted down the city’s contract with the testing company Pearson for gifted-and-talented screening this year. This has effectively ended G&T testing in a surprising rebuke of the mayor’s plan and a big step forward for equity.
The central question facing NYC’s leaders now is what comes next. While the conversation thus far has focused on who gets access to gifted services, reimagining G&T should begin with thinking first about
gifted services are delivered, moving to a model where the best types of gifted teaching are used to serve students in integrated settings.
Up until now, students identified as gifted have been separated from their “non-gifted” peers in separate classrooms and schools, and there is no particular training or curriculum required in these gifted classrooms. This practice is uncommon outside New York City. Nationwide, fewer than 10% of elementary gifted programs rely on separate classrooms or schools, and research shows that this type of separation is neither necessary nor particularly helpful for supporting gifted students.
What having separate classrooms has resulted in, however, is stark racial and socioeconomic segregation. Black and Hispanic students make up 65% of the city’s kindergartners but only 18% of students admitted to G&T. In elementary schools with gifted-and-talented programs, you can usually tell which classroom is the G&T class just by looking at the color of the students’ skin in the room.
There is a better way. Schools can meet the needs of advanced learners without siloing them. Gifted education coordinators can offer push-in services for students or resources to help classroom teachers adapt assignments to challenge and enrich students who will benefit. Small groups of students can participate in pull-out sessions during the school day or after school. Teachers can send individual students to a higher grade-level classroom for a particular subject, such as math or reading.
Better yet, principals may implement a schoolwide program to offer all students access to enrichment, as some NYC schools have done already. The principles of gifted education — a focus on students’ talents and interests, individualized opportunities for advanced instruction, expanded curricula, rigor and an encouragement of creativity — can also be excellent tools for tailoring
Regarding your editorial (“The limits of Landmarks,” Jan. 25): It is cold comfort to 80,000 homeless and destitute New Yorkers that 100 apartments, costing somewhat less than the market rate, might be built at 250 Water St. under the city’s affordable housing program. Beloved by the real estate industry, that simplistic solution has been on the books for decades while the housing crisis only grows worse. Trashing a Landmarks Law that has delayed the Water St. project is no solution either. “Parking lot preservation” is a nice slogan cooked up by high-net-worth individuals, but they are either out of touch with reality or can’t count.
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