Eden, Janine and Jim
The process of “screened admissions” filters elite students into the crown jewel of New York City’s school system—eight ultra-selective schools that include Stuyvesant High School, known to be a springboard to even more elite colleges. Many qualified students are left out.
As New York City launches a new school year, many parents are sending off their children hoping they’ll get the best grades, score highest on their exams, and win a coveted slot in the city’s exclusive programs for “gifted and talented” students. But most kids will never be “top performing” students, and never set foot in a gifted and talented classroom. The widening gap between aspiration and reality is spurring the city to overhaul how it defines “the best.”
An expert panel commissioned by the city urges policymakers to dismantle the academic hierarchy altogether, arguing that that the most selective schools are no longer about cultivating children’s talents, but about reproducing entrenched privilege.
But, in New York City and elsewhere, any move to disrupt the vaunted gifted and talented programs will run into resistance. Parents, city officials, and even some educators want to preserve selective programs in the name of “meritocracy.” According to the School Diversity Advisory Group—a commission comprised of educators, students and community representatives—that selectivity translates into segregation.
Currently, New York City’s schools are among the nation’s most racially segregated. More than eight in ten students would have to change schools in order to achieve a racial balance that reflects the city’s overall population.
Gifted and talented programs are a distillation of the city's demographic divides. As of last year, in a school system of about 1.1 million kids, just 16,000 New York City elementary school students are enrolled in gifted and talented classes.
Even at the kindergarten level, competition is fierce: Out of more than 5,000 kindergartners who qualify based on test scores, fewer than half will be offered a spot, and that decision is decided by lottery.
The admissions game seems rigged against the underprivileged. Three-quarters of gifted and talented students are white and Asian; less than a quarter are black and Latino. Yet black and Latino kids make up more than 70 percent of students citywide. About a third of gifted and talented students come from low-income families, although they make up nearly three-quarters of the citywide school population. These mirror-opposite demographics reflect the starkly divergent paths into which kids are slotted from their first day at kindergarten.
School Diversity Advisory Group member Richard Kahlenberg noted that the test for four year-olds—a pre-literate assessment that test kids’ understanding of shapes and numbers—symbolizes the absurd competitiveness that colors so many children’s school experience.
“It’s very hard to defend New York City’s unusual system of testing four-year olds and creating a separate system of education that is highly segregated by race and economic status,” Kahlenberg tells The Progressive via email. In his view, reforming the school admissions process to be more equitable need not be as disruptive as critics fear. “There is a lot of room for political compromise over what new system ensures that all students are academically challenged,” he says.
The School Diversity Advisory Group report concludes that in order to truly integrate schools and broaden educational opportunity for all, gifted and talented classes should be eliminated; enriched coursework currently offered in these programs should not be reserved only for the “best” students, it says.
The report also recommends scrapping “screened admissions,” which place children in selective middle schools on the basis of grades, test scores, an interview, and records like school attendance. The process operates as a tight sieve, filtering students into the crown jewel of the city’s school system—eight ultra-selective schools that include the nationally renowned Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School, known to be springboards to even more elite colleges.
When Mayor Bill de Blasio floated a proposal in 2018 to overhaul the high-stakes test that currently governs admission to the elite high schools, it stoked panic among white and Asian parents who didn’t want to see their children’s hard-won academic credentials disappear.
Education activists say the goal isn’t to take programs away, but to offer more to all kids, especially those who have been denied opportunity by the rigid testing system.
So far, the Advisory Group’s reform proposals have not become policy. The de Blasio administration has been broadly supportive of reforming to help diversify the school system, but the backlash from parents in defense of gifted and talented programs has stirred up latent tensions over race and meritocracy. Moreover, the diversity goals seem to chafe against one of the traditional rationales behind selective and tracked programs: giving affluent families an incentive to stay in the public education system rather than move away or opt for private school, by enticing them with elite programs for their kids.
Education activists say the goal isn’t to take programs away, but to offer more to all kids, especially those who have been denied opportunity by the rigid testing system. The School Diversity Advisory Group’s shorter-term recommendations focus on replacing exclusionary enrollment procedures with “inclusionary” admissions.
For example, nonselective magnet schools can draw students of more diverse backgrounds. At the high school level, some academic grouping might be necessary, but the group suggests taking into account social and economic backgrounds of students to draw in underrepresented groups.
Some school districts have voluntarily started to reform their programs to be more inclusionary, for example extending enrichment coursework for all students, and broadening the local middle school admissions process to be more inclusive of poorer kids.
Chicago’s public school district, which faces similar challenges with selective programming, is exploring a more holistic admissions process that takes a child’s socioeconomic background into account.
Yet the deep reform that’s needed involves a shift in community attitudes, says Bronx high school senior Leanne Nunes. As executive high school director of the youth-led advocacy group IntegrateNYC, she issued a message for parents after the release of the diversity advisory group’s report.
“Historically,” she tells The Progressive, “segregation has been a way to protect yourself or your child from someone else’s children, but the idea that your child is in imminent danger because of other children and their families is harmful to everyone.”
Meanwhile, even supporters of gifted and talented programs admit the admissions system is prone to bias and that the programs are not reaching many qualified students. The recommendations to scrap them altogether have prompted city officials and educators to reconsider what exactly the purpose of a gifted and talented program should be.
The point of the city’s desegregation agenda is to decouple the notion of merit from exclusivity, and begin to disentangle race from academic selection. When opportunity becomes conflated with exclusion, the classroom becomes an engine for reproducing inequality rather than overcoming it. New York City has to decide whether it wants a school system designed merely to select the best and brightest, or to give the entire next generation a better and brighter future.
As Nunes explained, “Maybe with these screens and tests, you feel like your child is doing well, but the system as it is doesn’t allow all students to thrive and succeed.”