NYC Should End Gifted Programs To Integrate Schools, Panel Says

NEW YORK — New York City's public education system should eliminate special programs for "gifted and talented" students to address racial segregation in schools, a city task force said Monday.

The idea from the School Diversity Advisory Group is likely to stoke further controversy over how to integrate the city's public schools and their 1.1 million students.

In its second report on the persistent problem of school segregation, the panel said the Department of Education should phase out gifted and talented programs in elementary schools and eliminate the use of "screens" such as grades, test scores and behavior in middle school admissions.

While they are meant to nourish the five boroughs' brightest young minds, the task force's leaders say these programs are at odds with the goal of aligning the city's public schools with its demographic makeup.

Members of the panel said they do not want to eliminate enrichment programs for especially bright kids. They rather want schools to use a more holistic method of assessing students' interests and abilities instead of the exclusive standards in place now.

"We are not taking away," said Maya Wiley, a co-chair of the School Diversity Advisory Group's executive committee. "We are expanding and adding based on what works rather than what excludes."

It's uncertain to what extent Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza will adopt the proposals, which come amid a heated debate over how to integrate the city's elite specialized high schools.

Carranza did not opine on the recommendations Tuesday, but broadly praised the vision they put forward for a more equitable school system. He said he would review the proposals and respond to them "as soon as humanly possible."

"This is not about lowering the bar," Carranza said Tuesday at a news conference outside Tweed Courthouse, which he left without taking questions. "It’s about giving all of our students what they need to meet the bar that we set, regardless of language, nationality, disability, gender, family income, race or any other dimension of who they are."

The de Blasio administration did adopt 62 of the 67 recommendations from the School Diversity Advisory Group's initial February report on aligning school populations with city demographics.

But the new recommendations quickly drew fire from some of the Democratic mayor's critics who said gifted-and-talented programs should stay intact.

"When kids fight over a ball, sometimes my best dad solution is to take it away," City Council Member Joe Borelli, also a Republican candidate for public advocate, said on Twitter. "But when the ball is an education that develops the brightest #nyc minds, lifts 1000s of families out of poverty & set in motion a million new ideas, dad’s a dope for taking it."

Michael Mulgrew, the head of the city's major teachers union, said he supports eliminating the test used to admit young kids to gifted-and-talented programs but not the elimination of those programs altogether.

"Every community has children who could thrive in a gifted and talented program, and it is our responsibility to help our children reach their full potential," Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. "... We believe the programs need to be revamped and access to them expanded.

Roughly 16,000 kids participate in elementary gifted-and-talented programs, which use test scores to determine admissions. And about 18 percent of all middle school students reportedly attend a screened school where admission is based on criteria such as test scores, attendance and behavior.

The current system advantages white and Asian kids while shutting out black and Hispanic students who comprise the majority of the city's student body, the School Diversity Advisory Group argues.

Only a quarter of black and Latino students meet the attendance requirements for screened schools, compared with 61 percent of Asian students and 37 percent of whites, the panel's report says. And nearly three quarters of students enrolled in elementary gifted-and-talented programs last year were white and Asian, according to The New York Times, which first reported on the recommendations.

The report does not offer strict prescriptions for what should replace gifted-and-talented programs and middle school screening. The panel also does not want to entirely get rid of screened high schools.

The city's community school districts should be given the resources to establish new admissions policies and "enrichment alternatives" to gifted-and-talented programs, according to the report. The Department of Education, meanwhile, should forbid policies that have been shown not to work, panel members said.

"The Department of Education needs to set those guardrails and say we are not going to condone or resource or support practices that facilitate and maintain segregation," said Matt Gonzales, a panel member and director of New York Appleseed's School Diversity Project. "So we need to kind of lay out those guardrails. What you replace those segregative tools with, we do want the community to have a say."