The Plan to Scrap New York’s Gifted Programs: 5 Takeaways
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/nyregion/gifted-programs-nyc.htmlDesegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/nyregion/gifted-programs-nyc-desegregation.htmlI've seen this coming for some time. Now they've thrown down the gauntlet, and we can't tiptoe around the politics of gifted any longer. I'm having trouble knowing where to start with my disgust at this. IQ tests are solid science. But science has many inconvenient facts for the authoritarian left. Do we have a meritocracy, or do we give everyone a medal for participation.
Gifted programs and screened schools have “become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together"You can get accepted into NYC's gifted schools by doing well on their test. You can do well on the test through native ability (IQ) and/or studying hard. I'm sorry people don't like the result, but I don't see how the test is unfair. I'm sorry the result is separating students, but its unfair to argue backwards from the demographic result, to throw the gifted kids back into a classroom that's taught to the 40th percentile and slows them down.
The panel’s report, obtained by The New York Times, amounts to a repudiation of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda, which reoriented the system toward school choice for families, including more gifted and screened schools, to combat decades of low performance. Some of those policies deepened inequality even as student achievement rose. So the schools and students achievement will certainly regress if NYC implements the report. I'll stop here and ask you to ponder why you never hear Asians complaining about white privilege. Except for Ivy League admission.
It would be a good time to start a private gifted school in NYC. Those who can afford it will flee in droves. Those who can arrange their lives around it would do well to move to Singapore, Israel, or Reno, or some of the few US states who know better than to damage gifted children with a misguided, anti-scientific "gifted pogrom".
