Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Desegregation Plan: Eliminate Gifted Programs (NY)

Desegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York
A group appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed seismic changes to the nation’s largest school system.
By Eliza Shapiro
New York Times
Aug. 26, 2019

For years, New York City has essentially maintained two parallel public school systems.

A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is filled mostly with white and Asian children. The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.

Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these selective programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.

Mr. de Blasio, who has staked his mayoralty on reducing inequality, has the power to adopt some or all of the proposals without input from the State Legislature or City Council. If he does, the decision would fundamentally reshape a largely segregated school system and could reverberate in school districts across the country.

The mayor will now be thrust into the center of a sensitive debate about race and class at home, even as he is straining to stand out in a crowded field of Democratic contenders for president.

He risks alienating tens of thousands of mostly white and Asian families whose children are enrolled in the gifted programs and selective schools. If a substantial number of those families leave the system, it would be even more difficult to achieve integration.

The proposals, contained in a report to be released on Tuesday, may also face opposition from some middle-class black and Hispanic families that have called for more gifted programs in mostly minority neighborhoods as a way to offer students of color more access to high-quality schools.

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This is an awful idea. A program for gifted students must screen for giftedness, and racial disparities in the students selected do nor proved that the selection process was unfair. Much research has shown that IQ tests are not racially biased in the sense of making biased predictions of outcomes related to IQ.

It's a shame how often these matters become issues of politics. Egalitarianism and pusillanimous officials who succeed by allowing public opinion to be projected onto them are why we can't have nice things.

The Plan to Scrap New York’s Gifted Programs: 5 Takeaways https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/nyregion/gifted-programs-nyc.html

Desegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/nyregion/gifted-programs-nyc-desegregation.html

I'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 change from a gifted program to a gifted pogrom.

Thank you, thx1138, for speaking up for gifted populations... the gifted are a true minority, and underdogs in our society.


Also see related thread, here, in the forum General Discussion.

Yes, its unfortunate how often cowardly politicians use shaming as their preferred communication style in order to control populations, and maintain power over the masses.

Also see related thread, here, in the forum THINKING BIG about Gifted Education.

I wonder what I'm really going to be able to accomplish, other than possibly starting a small brush fire of discussion here. A problem is that, for all our giftedness, we've never been able to formulate a simple argument for gifted education. The issues become complex... and now having to mix in political positions makes them an order of magnitude more complex. And "democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner." For gifted, its 99 wolves and 1 lamb. For DYS, 999 wolves and 1 lamb. I did find one potential angle though. Avoiding the complexities and simply saying "gifted kids are special needs kids". Which is not only true, and a pragmatic policy that I think 4 of the 50 US states have adopted, but here I go venturing back into the quicksand of politics, a brilliant angle when you have to have some kind of victim status to have a political voice nowadays. In the mean time, either homeschool, or move to another state or country. See https://www.hoagiesgifted.org/mandates.htm

Au contraire, Pierre...!


For continuing growth and development, kids need:
1) appropriate academic challenge
2) true peers
For typical kids, these needs may be met in a general ed classroom, however for children with higher IQ/giftedness, these needs may not be met without intentional effort in providing advanced curriculum, and grouping for instruction with academic/intellectual peers.

Some negatives which may occur when a child is not learning something new every day include these observations or signs that a child is not appropriately challenged.

Yes!

Perhaps what I mean is, we're losing, and well I still feel our explanations are too subtle or complex, to convince much of the other 99%, who default to simple self-interest, or to "gifted myths" https://www.nagc.org/myths-about-gifted-students I wonder if NAGC admits that we're losing, takes some responsibility for that. Or has any statistics or polls to confirm this. For example, in the web page above, well we see "myth" and "truth" but a poll would likely reveal that by and large "truth" is not known, understood, or accepted. And I suggest this boils down to, its hard to feel sorry for gifted, and its hard to see them as victims, and in much of the west's politically correct climate, you have to be a victim to have a voice, and really gifted is associated with white/male/privilege. A lot of moving parts here and I wonder if NAGC is up to the task. They need to hire Frank Luntz to find an effective meme. Best I've found so far is "gifted kids are special needs kids".

Here in California for example "Special education services were provided to 774,665 individuals, newborn through twenty-two years of age, in 2017–18. California provides specially designed instruction, at no cost to parents, to meet the unique needs of children with disabilities."https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/se/sr/cefspeced.asp

Now there are about 6,186,278 school children in California https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp

774665/6,186,278 = .125 So can't we just add the 1% gifted to the special needs program, take it from 12.5% to 13.5% of the students. Plus there's already infrastructure in place.

I don't expect this to cut much ice with the politicians, but the debacle in NYC is an example of the Naturalistic Fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy IQ science has the strongest correlations in social science or psychology. Its ridiculous to not conduct and discuss science just because it might lead to conclusions that don't fit in to some pre-ordained political correctness. Might as well mention GMVH here... https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-greater-male-variability-hypothesis/ ...

“Team Carranza doesn’t simply want to level the playing field; they want to dig it up and salt it.” https://nypost.com/2019/08/27/the-c...rograms-like-the-one-that-worked-for-me/

There is a good chance the plan will not be implemented if opposition is mobilized.

How to Destory a School System
The plan to desegregate New York City’s schools is a recipe for disaster.
Bob McManus
City Journal
August 28, 2019

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s task force on school desegregation aims to solve a problem that doesn’t exist by eliminating much of what does work in the city’s troubled public-school system, while failing to address its many shortcomings. The scheme would provoke bitter social discord and further reduce the relatively small number of white students in the system. On the upside, it would undoubtedly accelerate the critical engagement of Gotham’s growing but politically reticent Asian-immigrant community.

The School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), appointed by de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, has called for repopulating each of the city’s 1,800 public schools to mirror the ethnic makeup of the city at large within 10 years. The SDAG report recommends the elimination of ability and performance screening for pupils, and condemns “attendance & punctuality” metrics as “exclusionary” against “Black and Latinx applicants.”

The plan reflects the stated goal of both de Blasio and Carranza: a totally “desegregated” school system. But it is breathtakingly unmindful of the social, cultural, and political complexities of New York. Of course, given de Blasio’s penchant for promising grand slams as he plays small-ball, the scheme could just as easily be sitting in a dust-covered City Hall filing cabinet when the mayor leaves office at the end of 2021. It has already drawn opposition from city council speaker Corey Johnson, a potential 2021 mayoral candidate and, most significantly, from United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. Mulgrew’s stance could be enough to kill the proposal—and it deserves to die.

Conceptually, the report reflects official mayoral school policy since Carranza’s arrival. It condemns what it terms racial imbalances in city schools even as it ignores the system’s myriad classroom failures. Those inadequacies were underscored again last week, when state tests revealed that more than half of the system’s third-graders lack proficiency in either math or reading. Operationally, the report is truly radical. It proposes to “desegregate” the system by dismantling the imperfect yet intricately evolved network of enrichment programs and performance screenings that offer pathways for parents and pupils through otherwise forbidding educational landscapes. And though it does not address the contentious matter of the city’s competitive-entry high schools—that’s a matter for Albany to decide—the effect of its recommendations would be to restrict severely the supply of highly qualified freshmen those schools need to continue in their current role.

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I haven't read everything, but wanted to jump in and say that the racial gap in identifying gifted children is closed by a thrid option I didn't see mentioned yet.

Same-race teacher identifying students. So including equal numbers of Black and Hispanic teachers in the identification process would likely close the gap significantly. Also measures of potential rather than measures of acquired learning would be important for the identifying gifted children in a less-privileged student population.

I don't like how articles above set this up as a false dichotomy. There are other options. The system does not need to stay segregated, nor do they need to dismantle the existing gifted program. The problem is not the program but the current selection. :facepalm:

I can only hope that the highlighted text was a bad joke.

Such a system would be open to almost unimaginable levels of abuse. I agree on teaching those with high potential - an IQ test would do this without any option for abuse.

As it happens, there is already a fair amount of research on this topic for GT programs in general. The simplest and most equitable solutions generally employ multiple standardized data sources, and universal screening. The main points at which inequity enter are in the nomination process, and in environmental differences in opportunities for cognitive, EF, and academic development outside of school. Previous posters have referenced some of the effects, pro and con, of relying on teacher nominations. To clarify, the abuse is already present in systems which rely on any form of teacher nomination as a gating item (and the list of such systems includes a significantly large fraction of those obtaining in our current educational establishments); it is simply a question of the direction and extent to which it occurs.

Of course, there is a limit to the impact the institutional school can have on out-of-school factors, so the factors that can be affected then contract to the design of universal screening. And, of course, any efforts to reduce inequity in instruction from one building to another.

In the case of the programs referenced earlier in the thread, my understanding is that universal screening with multiple standardized data sources has not historically been the practice.

In Debate Over New York’s Gifted-Students Program, an Expert Gets Spotlight
Joseph Renzulli’s method aims to offer students of all abilities hands-on projects that tap into their interests
By Leslie Brody
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 2, 2019 2:20 pm ET

Joseph Renzulli, an 83-year-old pioneer in gifted education, says please don’t label a child “gifted.”

Instead, call her a gifted mathematician, singer or poet. “I talk about the development of gifted behaviors,” he says, “rather than ‘you’re gifted and the kid next to you is not.’ ”

Dr. Renzulli’s work was touted by a diversity panel that surprised many New York City families last week with its call to end the district’s current form of gifted programs, and to scrap the standardized test for 4-year-olds that determines entry.

The panel, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, cited Dr. Renzulli’s “schoolwide enrichment model” as an alternative.

Rather than separating young children deemed gifted into their own classrooms, Dr. Renzulli promotes a broader effort to offer students of all abilities hands-on projects that tap into their interests. When all children get such opportunities, he says, those who show strong motivation, creativity and leadership can dive into deeper work but don’t need to be siloed.

“Give more kids the chance to throw the ball around and we’ll find out which should be quarterback,” says Dr. Renzulli, a professor at the University of Connecticut.

He has a minority stake in a company, Renzulli Learning, offering a database that lets students and teachers find projects online that appeal to their particular interests, skill levels and learning styles, whether dissecting a virtual mummy, designing a playground or inventing a board game.

Some parents don’t believe such an approach can nurture academic excellence. And some education experts caution the model is extremely hard for teachers to execute when facing classes of 30-plus students with wide ranges of ability and preferences.

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There is a "g" factor, and academic abilities in math and language are positively correlated. So "gifted" or high-iQ can be useful labels.

The Renzulli approach, as described here (enrichment), has been big in our area. Thinking it was better than nothing, and created a generally positive vibe, I went along with it to a degree.

This article changed my mind, and showed me the absurdity of how much we were shortchanging kids who needed more.
A brief extract follows, of the article as found posted on the NAGC website:
Home » Information & Publications » Gifted Education Strategies » What it Means to Teach Gifted Learners Well
This article also appears on the Way Back Machine, internet archive; Saved 95 times between Sept 3, 2014 and Sept 4, 2019.

Fabulous quote Indigo, thank you

Having gone through the process, I have a few comments. The OLSAT, which was used when DD was entering school has a problem since you don't know who is giving the test. Sometimes it is someone with a heavy accent. Since we had DD tested for a gifted preschool, we knew her IQ was around 150. When she took the OLSAT at 4 yo she tested around 60th percentile. The next year took it with someone else and was 99th percentile. There were 3 accelerated elementary schools for gifted kids. One was located in an area many affluent people didn't want to go, hence the school was about 95% AA with a scores lower on the OLSAT than the Upper West side school that had 99th percentile only. There were also some other popular gifted programs that were not technically accelerated but were great programs, great parental involvement -- parents generally raised about 1 MM per annum to support schools in computer labs and instructors, spanish programs etc. Obviously these schools were in certain demographic areas. You did not have this kind of parental involvement in some pockets of Harlem. Even if you get rid of the testing and gifted, you still would have parental involvement in schools supplementing. And I do not know how they would change the high school system that has been established for almost a century. Where you test to get into the top high schools in the country. Sty, Bronix Sci. And Hunter is underwritten by city university. What happens to Hunter? That is over 100 years old and is for HG kids. Free.

Over the years, parental involvement has been correlated with student success. Parental involvement can mean many different things, from traditional parenting including character development (morals & ethics, sense of right and wrong, well-formed conscience, golden rule, work ethic, motivation, responsibility, self-discipline, etc), to being a coach, mentor, and sounding board for the child, or being an advocate for the child to the system, or volunteering in classrooms and on field trips, or providing fundraising for programs.

A few old posts that mention parental involvement:
1) who gets into gifted programs (2015)
2) parenting arms race (2014)
3) Common Core movie (2014)
4) parents not allowed to see test results (2013)

Thanks, MumOfThree.

It is mind-boggling that the article has been around since 1997 (more than two decades), exists on the NAGC website, and yet its wisdom is not being leveraged on a broad scale.

While universal screening tests have been found to be more accurate and equitable than teacher recommendation, there are some students who may not quite meet the identification criteria. Additionally, there has been criticism of parity on IQ test questions, over the years. Taking these two factors into account, the recommendation to have teachers of diverse racial, ethic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds help identify students who were not identified by tests has been suggested by several sources. I think it is great that sanne reminded us of this.

I believe the important distinction is the order of implementing the identification criteria:
1) universal screening
2) IQ test(s)
3) teacher recommendation
Where teacher recommendation is not a preliminary filter, but rather another potential step utilized to identify students as gifted (high potential) and add them to the pool.


For clarity, in this context, when I say "gifted (high potential)" I am thinking more of Gf, fluid intelligence (innate intelligence, as seen in pattern recognition, abstract reasoning, problem solving, puzzles)... not Gc, crystallized intelligence (acquired knowledge and experience, as seen in vocabulary, general information, analogies)... or G, general intelligence.

In an opinion published by Education Week on November 6, 2019, James R. DeLisle suggests that the US public education system Stop Scapegoating Gifted Students for Inequality.