A dunce cap for Billy
It takes a hell of a lot of concentration to look past the craven, sanctimonious, buck-passing way Mayor de Blasio often tries to make change happen, but for a few paragraphs, we’ll try — and discuss his 11th-hour proposed changes to gifted-and-talented education. Having written many times about the importance of better integrating the city’s racially and ethnically siloed schools, we do not defend the current system, which sorts children into different classrooms as early as kindergarten on the basis of a test they take at age 4, to which families must opt in and for which some pay up to $400 an hour to prep. The result is a higher percentage of white and Asian-American children enrolled in gifted-and-talented (there are about 16,000 kids in G&T out of more than 400,000 elementary kids citywide), learning apart from their Black and Hispanic neighbors, who often didn’t even take the test.
De Blasio would replace those separate classes with accelerated, in-class, small-group learning in different subjects beginning in third grade. We like that he calls for pushing back screening a few years; age 4, when many kids can’t sit still, is far too early to assess. And we like that under his proposal, the city would identify kids with a knack for different subjects, rather than making a binary gifted-or-not judgment. Good: An excelling writer may have no special math aptitude, and vice versa.
But now we must address how de Blasio came around, in the 10th month of his eighth year, to passive-aggressively ending G&T after zero consultation with families — suddenly foisting on his successor, who has his own carefully considered ideas about education, a plan without doing any of the hard work necessary to implement it. (Disclosure: Members of this board have enrolled and still enroll their children in G&T classes.)
The new mayor takes charge in 85 days. He’s likely to be Eric Adams, who has supported a different way forward — not eliminating G&T, but giving more children of all races and in all neighborhoods a pathway in. The way to do that is by eliminating test-only admission; genuinely democratizing preparation; screening youngsters universally, and creating accelerated classes in every one of the city’s 32 community districts. Those are steps that de Blasio, for nearly eight years in charge and claiming all the while to care about repairing glaring inequities, has shamefully failed to attempt.