Adams & Banks put lipstick on a pig
Thursday, Mayor Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks announced that they will “end the scarcity mindset” of admissions into New York City’s exclusively segregated gifted-and-talented (G&T) programs — by adding 100 seats in Kindergarten and 1,000 seats in third grade, in a school system that serves more than 900,000 youngsters.
If that sounds nonsensical, it’s because it is.
These changes are minor tinkering around the edges of a broken system. As long as New York City is invested in a model rooted in separating students from their peers, G&T is likely to be a driver of racial and socioeconomic segregation and inequity.
Less than 10% of districts nationwide use separate schools or classrooms for elementary school G&T programs — and there’s a good reason that this approach is unpopular. It goes against the research on best practices for accelerating teaching and learning. Young children’s brains are developing rapidly in individual ways, and they are not well served by screening, sorting and labeling into homogeneous settings that set them on rigid academic pathways that impact future opportunities.
Adding 1,100 gifted seats to the 2,400 that already exist won’t change the fundamental scarcity mindset or the fact that less than 5% of elementary school students overall will get access to this program. If past levels of demand hold, the vast majority of families that apply for the program still won’t get seats for their children. Without clear diversity goals, there’s also no reassurance that these additional seats will reach a more diverse set of students than the current program, which has demographics that are roughly the flip of the city’s K population — only 14% of current G&T students are Black and Hispanic, compared to 60% of kindergartners.
The city is missing a huge opportunity to rethink how gifted education is delivered, not just who is identified or how many seats exist in separate, and segregated, programs.
Integration researchers and advocates like us have been recommending for years that all students in all classrooms deserve access to opportunities to challenge and stimulate their learning and creativity. Rather than telling kids that they’re in G&T or they’re out, the city should implement a gifted-forall approach, shifting to a system focused on differentiation within mixed-ability classrooms, equipping teachers to provide high-quality instruction that includes project-based learning and challenge, and ensuring that there are entry points for all students.
We already have strong examples of what this looks like in practice. For example, Washington, D.C. moved away from labeling students as “gifted-and-talented” and instead implements schoolwide enrichment models, as do several New York City elementary, middle and high schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Gifted-for-all approaches also have support from parents. Indeed, as part of the community outreach process for Mayor de Blasio’s “Brilliant NYC” plan (which one of us, Allison, helped to develop); it proposed to replace separate G&T classes with enrichment for all, families were reportedly excited about the prospect of schools “seeing children for their strengths.”
The current chancellor has said that one of the goals of this announcement is to stop the uptick of families leaving the district for private and parochial schools during the pandemic. But if the goal is to get families excited about the city’s public schools and keep them in the district, then the chancellor should pay more attention to the families that apply to G&T but don’t get seats — which under the new plan will still likely be most parents. We know these families are ripe to be engaged in a new vision of gifted education, one that doesn’t leave their child with the implied label of “not gifted-and-talented” simply because they didn’t make the cutoff, but that offers the promise of enrichment and challenge for all students.
The pandemic has created a host of challenges for students, families and educators across the city. But we know that one of the best ways to educate students is by viewing students for their assets, not their deficits. This means that students succeed when they are presented with challenging material that taps into their interests and are given the chance and the support to go deep in their learning. Enrichment opportunities and accelerated learning are more important now than ever — but they should not, and need not, be scarce resources for a select few.
This announcement is a missed opportunity for educational justice. It moves us back to the Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein era of “expanding” separate and unequal programs, instead of moving the nation’s largest public school system towards a re-envisioned future that is inclusive and equitable for all.