- #Eliminate school gifted and talented programs how to#
- #Eliminate school gifted and talented programs skin#
Critics say private tutoring and other factors, like a priority boost for students who have older siblings in one of the programs, allow affluent parents to gamify their children’s futures.ĭe Blasio has proposed replacing the programs with one called Brilliant NYC, which would screen students entering third grade for more accelerated learning, a move that could help mitigate the wide racial disparities in test results, said Columbia’s Borland. Maxine Jing, program director at Talent Prep in Manhattan, said that parents generally enroll their 3-year-olds for her company’s 15-class package at a cost of about $1,000. The test begot a prep industry that catered to parents eager to give their toddlers a booster seat at the table. “And how absurd it was to make decisions based on it.”
#Eliminate school gifted and talented programs how to#
“Watching the testing company contort itself to try and figure out how to tend to that issue by creating a scale that differentiated scoring by month, from age 4 to 5, it became clear what a joke this test was,” said Polakow-Suranksy, who is now the president of Bank Street College of Education. It didn’t take long for Polakow-Suranksy to realize that building such a test was impossible - 4-year-olds’ development happens at such a rapid pace and in such a nonlinear fashion that kids born months apart can be miles apart cognitively, he said. ) As the city’s chief academic officer under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Shael Polakow-Suranksy worked with a testing company to ensure the quality of the Gifted programs’ application test. (Some children, such as Fraser’s daughter, may be transferred into the program later. The programs rely on a single standardized test administered to 4-year-olds, which even defenders of the programs say is problematic. You would see advantaged parents use the system to their advantage, knowing if they could get their kids into a Gifted and Talented program, it would set them up for better middle schools and high schools.” It really had a cumulative effect too as students went into middle schools and high schools. “But this is a good first step because of the segregation it was causing within schools. I think that the Department of Education has a lot of work to do to create a more equitable system, that’s for sure,” said Allison Roda, an assistant professor of education at Molloy College who has studied inequality in New York City’s Gifted programs. “The schools are very segregated, and there are a lot of schools that are underenrolled or underresourced. Even those who cheered the mayor’s decision have been left to wonder what will replace the programs and whether it will do anything to desegregate the largest and perhaps most racially inequitable school system in the country. Many saw de Blasio’s announcement, made ahead of his possible run for governor, as a way to make good on his promise to reform the school system while leaving the next mayor to figure out the messy details. So there is no choice other than to pull the plug on the whole thing.” It’s been that way for a number of years, and the department hasn’t really done anything that I’m aware of to remedy the situation. It was a really disturbing difference between the makeup of regular classrooms and the Gifted and Talented classrooms. “For years they were bordering on disgrace. “Even though Gifted and Talented education is my field of study, I can’t really bring myself to shed a tear over their demise,” said James Borland of Teachers College at Columbia University, who studies the effects of these programs on economically disadvantaged students. About 75 percent of the seats go to Asian American and white students, who represent only 25 percent of the citywide population. The numbers are stark: While Black and Latino students make up nearly 60 percent of the city’s 65,000 kindergarteners, they fill just 14 percent of the 2,500 Gifted and Talented seats. Which is why Fraser cheered Mayor Bill de Blasio’s announcement last week that New York City would be ending its Gifted and Talented programs, acknowledging that they had exacerbated racial segregation in the city’s school system.
#Eliminate school gifted and talented programs skin#
“My daughter hasn’t mentioned it to me - we haven’t talked about skin color - but she’s pretty intuitive. Fraser’s daughter had been one of many Black students in a diverse classroom, but when she started in the Gifted and Talented program in September, she was one of only a few Black students in a predominantly white classroom. 282 in Park Slope had recognized her fourth-grade daughter’s academic potential and transferred her into the school’s Gifted and Talented program. Idesha Fraser was proud to hear that a teacher at P.S. 5 Port Morris, an elementary school in the Bronx.
Students write and draw on poster board at P.S.
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