A not-so-bright idea

Parents of New York City kids born in 2012 are now signing up their tots to enter public school kindergarten classrooms next fall. It can be a confusing process, and Chancellor Carmen Fariña deserves credit for making it easier, with crystal-clear information sessions all over the city.

But for 4-year-olds applying to gifted-and-talented programs, Fariña has refused an obvious solution to inequities that plague the system.

City G&T classes offer youngsters with an extra academic spark the chance to learn at an accelerated pace. Admission starts for pre-K-age kids and continues through third grade. Take a test, score in the 90th percentile, and you qualify. Sounds simple and fair. It’s not. In the wealthier, whiter sections of the city, kids line up for the exam by the thousands — and many pass. In the poorer, predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, far fewer kids take the test in the first place, and still fewer pass.

As a result, even as there are far more G&Tqualifying kids than slots on the Upper West Side and in Park Slope, in the Bronx’s impoverished Districts 7 and 12 and Brooklyn’s Districts 16 and 23, there no G&T classes at all because there aren’t enough qualifying kids to fill a class.

This is not meritocracy. These are 4-year-olds, for whom demography must not be destiny.

There’s an obvious fix, as proposed by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and backed by a majority of the City Council: Get every 4-year-old in the city to take the test, so that any qualifying kid gets a fair shot at special classes.

At the November Panel for Educational Policy meeting, Bronx representative Geneal Chacon put the question to Fariña: “Why isn’t this administration developing policies to test every student in a public universal pre-K program for a gifted class?”

Fariña didn’t answer, stating instead that in those four districts, she is having children enter G&T programs in third grade — so that they can be assessed using not just the score on a single test, but on a range of measures seen up close and personal in their first few years of schooling.

Very nice, but it does nothing for the bright kids who are meeting the bar for kindergarten and will have to wait four years for a spot to open up.

And if assessing children in third grade is the best way, then how come there are kindergarten G&T classes in the city’s 28 other districts?

Sounds like a tale of two cities.