The testing process in itself sets up a pretty high bar of knowledge and time and availability for a family to navigate the system to actually bring their child for in-person testing. There are a lot of reasons why that’s the case. There was already some overrepresentation of white and Asian students in gifted and talented programs, but after the move to using this single test score measure, representation of Black and Latinx students plummeted. The framing sounded promising, but what happened in practice with the test is that the racial diversity in gifted and talented programs in New York City decreased. The Bloomberg administration framed as a way to expand access and make it fairer so that there weren’t biased judgment calls involved. Before that, there was a mix of different ways that students could get into the programs, like teacher and parent recommendations or other qualitative observations. Next, ostensibly in a bid to make things fairer, the Bloomberg administration started using a single standardized test with a citywide cut score to determine eligibility for gifted and talented programs. So when we look at places across the city that don’t have gifted and talented programs, that’s part of why those places were overlooked. This was a specific strategy to try and keep white, affluent, and more privileged families in the district. ![]() First, they expanded gifted and talented programs in a number of schools. When the Bloomberg administration took office, they made an effort to do a few things. Many people talk about “defending New York City’s great gifted and talented program,” but it actually hadn’t been in place for all that long. It’s important to go back far enough to understand how we got to the system that the de Blasio administration inherited. Fabiola Cineasīefore we get into this in more detail, can you first walk me through how we got here? How did this debate get so heated and become so central to NYC’s public education system? Halley Potter Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Potter, whose public policy research focuses on addressing educational inequality, talked to Vox about how New York City’s debate about gifted education became so heated and why it remains this way. I think we’ve already seen that just trying to expand the gifted program, as it has been, hasn’t worked as a lever to advance equity.” “It’s really striking to be in a school building where if you peer into a classroom, you can guess whether it’s the gifted and talented classroom just by looking at the faces of the kids in the room. “New York City’s approach to gifted and talented is unusual and the segregation is particularly egregious,” Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank the Century Foundation, told Vox. White and Asian kindergartners made up about a third of enrollment citywide but had more than 70 percent of gifted seats in the 2018-2019 school year. Students from poor families, students with disabilities, homeless students, and English language learners are underrepresented. There are only about 2,500 seats in the city’s gifted program available for about 65,000 kindergarteners in city schools each year, and Black or Hispanic students, who make up the majority of the public school system’s enrollment, made up only 16 percent of the kindergarten gifted program for the 2018-2019 school year. But the dispute is also part of a broader debate over equity in education. Students are typically tested once, at age 4, and divided from their classmates into a separate room or school for the rest of their elementary years. ![]() New York City’s gifted and talented program is unusual. Adams said before the election that he will do the opposite. In October, de Blasio announced, to praise and much criticism, that his administration would eliminate gifted and talented programs in an effort to promote racial and class equity. One of the different approaches between outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his successor Eric Adams, who took office on January 1, is the fate of the city’s gifted and talented programs in schools.
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