Integration, Diversity and the Future of Schools for the Gifted

“It doesn’t make sense that gifted and talented is so overwhelmingly white and Asian when we know there are black and brown kids who can do this, too,” said Eric Crump, father of a black fourth-grade student, Carter, at TAG.

“I want other kids to have the opportunities that Carter had.”

The future of gifted programs in the largest public school system in the country is one of the most urgent and provocative education issues in New York. A high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio said in August that creating separate classrooms for gifted children is inherently unfair, and it recommended eliminating the current system.

But a group of parents with children at TAG said their school was proof that gifted classes can be racially diverse and that TAG should become a model rather than an exception.

New York’s school system is predominantly black and Hispanic. Last year, however, the city’s gifted offerings — five highly selective gifted schools, and roughly 75 other gifted programs — were nearly 75% white and Asian.

TAG is unique: Its classes were about 36% black and Hispanic last year, and it has the highest rate of students living in poverty of any of the five so-called citywide gifted schools.

Of the 1.1 million students in the city’s public schools, about 16,000 were enrolled in gifted programs last year.

Opening more intentionally integrated gifted schools could be an appealing option for de Blasio. The mayor is facing pressure to diversify the programs, but he has not shown a willingness to take sweeping action to desegregate schools and has already distanced himself from the proposal to scrap gifted programs altogether.

De Blasio has said he will not make final decisions about the panel’s recommendations this school year.

Will Mantell, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, said the review of gifted and talented programs “will include a deep dive into both admissions and instruction at existing programs in New York City and across the nation, which will include looking at schools like TAG Young Scholars.”

After TAG’s black and Hispanic population shrunk from about 80% in 2010 to 36% last year, its leaders searched for a way for the school to maintain its diversity — despite its growing popularity with white and Asian parents.

So last year, the school prioritized about 40% of the spots in its incoming kindergarten class for low-income students. The school has also become a magnet for families across the city looking for a diverse gifted school, and the parent-teacher association encourages local East Harlem parents to apply.

Still, the admissions policy is not a panacea: The Brooklyn School of Inquiry, another citywide gifted school, adopted the same kindergarten priority last year. The school was still nearly 90% white and Asian last year, though more diverse kindergarten classes in future years could eventually change its demographics.

The gifted system shed most of its black and Hispanic students over the last decade, after former Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to diversify the programs by creating a universal threshold for admission based on a single standardized exam.

But gifted schools in mostly black and Hispanic parts of the city closed as fewer students in those neighborhoods met the tougher requirements.

De Blasio’s school diversity panel recommended that the mayor overhaul Bloomberg’s system and replace elementary school gifted programs with nonselective magnet schools and enrichment programs available to all children.

Jaime Chauca, a Hispanic parent of a first grade student at TAG, said that could be damaging for students like his son, Ryan, who Chauca said learned to read so quickly because he was around other advanced students at TAG.

“Why don’t you look at a program that is doing something right, and say, ‘How can we expand it?’” Chauca asked.

Kasha Cacy, who is white and has two children, said her son Teddy, a sixth grader at TAG, needed a different type of educational environment than her other child, who is not in a gifted program. “I do worry that my son would have been bored in a general-education classroom,” she said.

Cacy also said she was concerned that the diversity panel did not clearly outline a plan to provide alternatives for gifted programs for children like Teddy.

“I worry that it will become like the Republicans’ approach to repealing Obamacare,” she said of the recommendations. “It gives me a pit in my stomach that we have this successful school that is doing what we want it to do, and it could cease to exist.”

But some experts and activists said that even diverse gifted schools reinforced the idea that accelerated children need to be separated from other students.

“What it comes down to is: separation versus integration,” said Allison Roda, a professor of education at Molloy College on Long Island who has studied gifted education in New York. “I haven’t heard any strong argument for why they need to have separate classrooms, why they need separate instruction,” she said, referring to gifted students. Proponents of gifted education, including some academics, disagree.

Matt Gonzales, director of an integration initiative at New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and a member of the mayor’s diversity panel, said the group decided that expanding gifted education in its current form would be a “Band-Aid” solution.

“There needs to be an interrogation of what we are doing when we label a student gifted and talented and separate them away,” he said. “Is it about providing enrichment, or giving a title or status that will carry them through their life?”

Some parents and educators at gifted schools said the system was unfair and needed to change, although they did not agree that it needed to be blown up entirely.

Anand Raghunath, an Indian American parent of two TAG students, said parents of gifted students “need to confront the fact that there is privilege” in the system.

“I have to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘I had the money to put him in the course,’” he said, noting that he paid for his son to be tutored for the gifted admissions exam. “I don’t consider myself better. I’m lucky. I’m grateful. Let’s not be jerks about it.”

The city’s five citywide gifted schools typically require students to score in the 99th percentile on the admissions exam, which has given rise to a test preparation industry that caters to 4-year-olds. The dozens of other gifted programs scattered throughout the city generally require students to score in the 90th percentile.

Talie Tebbi, an English teacher at the citywide gifted school NEST+m on the Lower East Side, lamented that school’s lack of diversity. “We are missing something,” she said. The school is mostly white and Asian. The Anderson School, a citywide gifted school a few miles south of TAG on the Upper West Side, was only 3% black last year.

Those numbers have frustrated many elected officials and families in neighborhoods that have lost gifted programs. Rather than calling for an overhaul to the gifted program, however, some prominent politicians in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods have called on the city to create new gifted classes in their districts.

“What they are basically saying is, ‘Oh, not enough black and Latino students are in these programs so let’s just eliminate it,’” said Rubén Díaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, of the diversity panel’s recommendations. “Are they suggesting we can’t make the cut? That I find highly offensive and disrespectful.”

Díaz, who is likely to run for mayor in 2021, attended a gifted program in the South Bronx as a child.

The loss of gifted programs in black and Hispanic neighborhoods has prompted some families to enroll their children in high-performing schools outside of their neighborhoods — decisions that in some places have exacerbated socio-economic segregation.

“We have high achievers that get stagnated and bored and are not challenged, so they leave the district,” said City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, who represents largely black and middle-class southeast Queens.

Creating more gifted programs has been suggested as a potential remedy to the drastic decline in black and Hispanic enrollment in the city’s elite specialized high schools. In recent months, a coalition of black and Hispanic alumni of the schools — along with billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder — have called on the city to reinstate gifted classes in neighborhoods that lack them in order to rebuild a pipeline to the specialized schools.

Still, that faction has not yet called for more schools like TAG, with admissions policies aimed at creating diversity. Critics argue that simply adding additional gifted programs — especially without admissions guardrails — will not automatically integrate the gifted system.

NeQuan McLean, a parent leader in the mostly black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said he learned that lesson firsthand.

A few years ago, after McLean and other parents fought to reinstate a gifted program in the district, which has struggled with performance and enrollment, unexpected problems arose. Principals worried that students entering the gifted program would drain talent from local schools, making it even harder to improve those schools.

Some families asked others, “Why is your kid special?” McLean said. The gifted program used the same curriculum as other schools but simply went through it faster, prompting McLean to wonder whether more students would have been able to keep up with the faster pace.

Bedford-Stuyvesant’s parent council recently asked the mayor to phase out all gifted programs — including a program that recently opened in their neighborhood.

“Solving one equity issue has created another,” McLean said. “We need to figure out a solution where there’s not a loser.”

This article originally appeared in

.

Integration, Diversity and the Future of Schools for the Gifted

Enhance Your Pulse News Experience!

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!