New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program - The New York Times

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The highly selective program, which has become a glaring symbol of segregation in New York City public schools, will be replaced for incoming students.

Mayor Bill de Blasio will overhaul New York City’s highly selective, racially segregated gifted and talented education classes, a sea change for the nation’s largest public school system that may amount to the mayor’s most significant act in the waning months of his tenure.

The elementary school gifted and talented program that New York has known for the last several decades will no longer exist for incoming kindergarten students next fall, and within a few years, it will be eliminated completely, city officials told The New York Times.

Students who are currently enrolled in gifted classes will become the final cohort in the existing system, which will be replaced by a program that offers accelerated learning to all students in the later years of elementary school.

The gradual elimination of the existing program will remove a major component of what many consider to be the city’s two-tiered education system, in which one relatively small, largely white and Asian American group of students gain access to the highest-performing schools, while many Black and Latino children remain in schools that are struggling.

Gifted and talented programs are in high demand, largely because they help propel students into selective middle and high schools, effectively putting children on a parallel track from their general education peers. But some parents and researchers argue that the programs worsen segregation and weaken instruction for children who are not in the gifted track.

New York, which is more reliant on selective admissions than any other large system in America, is home to one of the most racially segregated school systems in the country.

The move represents one of Mr. de Blasio’s most dramatic actions to address that, though it also puts New York more in line with how other cities are approaching their own segregated gifted classes.

About 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes in New York are white or Asian American. Those groups make up about 25 percent of the overall school system, which serves roughly 1 million students. For years, those students got into kindergarten gifted programs by taking a standardized test.

“The era of judging 4-year-olds based on a single test is over,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement about the replacement program, known as Brilliant NYC.

“Brilliant NYC will deliver accelerated instruction for tens of thousands of children, as opposed to a select few,” he said. “Every New York City child deserves to reach their full potential, and this new, equitable model gives them that chance.”

Though the mayor has long promised to tackle inequality in city schools, he has faced criticism for not taking more forceful action on desegregation until the end of his mayoralty. His schools chancellor, Meisha Porter, who was appointed this year, has been instrumental in pushing him to fundamentally alter the gifted and talented program, according to people with knowledge of the last several months of intensive negotiations on the issue.

The change presents an unwelcome challenge for Mr. de Blasio’s almost certain successor, Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, who would have to implement an entirely new gifted education system during his first year in office.

“Eric will assess the plan and reserves his right to implement policies based on the needs of students and parents, should he become mayor,” said Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams’ campaign. “Clearly the Department of Education must improve outcomes for children from lower-income areas.”

Mr. Adams has endorsed a very different approach to gifted and talented: keep the classes, but increase them in low-income neighborhoods. Though that idea has been questioned by researchers, who have said it would do little to integrate the programs, it is popular with some parents, including Black and Latino families who want more gifted options.

The next mayor could technically reverse Mr. de Blasio’s plan next year, but doing so will be difficult. Because the high-stakes admissions exam for young children was unpopular and criticized by experts, Mr. Adams would have to come up with an alternative admissions system within the first few months of his tenure, a complex and politically fraught task.

It’s likely Mr. Adams will make some changes to the plan, but barring any major reversal, New York City will no longer admit rising kindergarten students into separate gifted classes or schools starting next fall. Instead, the city will train all its kindergarten teachers — roughly 4,000 educators — to accommodate students who need accelerated learning within their general education classrooms. The city does not yet have an estimate for how much the training will cost, though it is expected to be tens of millions of dollars.

The final group of students who are labeled gifted and talented will progress through the system over the next five years without any major changes, a significant concession on Mr. de Blasio’s part to the many parents who have expressed concern that their children’s education would be upended midway through elementary school.

But almost every other aspect of the current gifted system will change. The city will permanently eliminate the much-criticized admissions exam that sorted 4-year-olds into gifted classes. Some parents paid for test preparation in the hopes that their children would ace the exam. Mr. de Blasio kept that test in place for most of his tenure, despite a nearly universal push from researchers who study gifted education to remove it.

The city will instead evaluate all rising third graders, using past work and input from their teachers, to determine whether they need higher-level instruction in specific subject areas.

Those children will no longer be separated from their peers and placed into classrooms or schools with other students who are considered gifted. At most, they will spend a period or two of the day in small groups focusing on one subject area with specialized teachers, which is already common in many schools.

The mayor has not yet solicited feedback from parent groups or elected officials on his gifted and talented plan, which was kept under wraps for months as it was finalized. Officials said that he planned to consult with families and educators on the plan throughout October and November, and that aspects of the proposal could shift before he leaves office.

It is not yet clear, for example, what will happen to the five schools across the city that exclusively serve children who are considered gifted. Officials said parental input will inform their decisions on how to reshape those schools.

A well-organized group of parents who support keeping gifted classes in some form, with support from elected officials like State Senator John C. Liu, a Democrat from Queens, have criticized the mayor in recent months for preparing a new system without getting input from parents. Many of those families have children who attend school in Manhattan’s District 2, one of the city’s whitest and wealthiest school districts.

The mayor’s earlier push to eliminate the admissions exam for the city’s most elite high schools, including Stuyvesant High School, failed after he announced the plan without first seeking feedback from the many thousands of Asian American parents whose children would be most affected. Those families spent months forcefully pushing back against the plan, and their opposition ultimately helped defeat it in the State Legislature.

The mayor’s other significant action on integration, a plan announced late last year to remove some admissions requirements at competitive middle and high schools, was rolled out without significant public comment.

While changes to admissions to the city’s specialized high schools are subject to legislative approval, Mr. de Blasio has full power over all other schools, including gifted programs.

The announcement by Mr. de Blasio, who is term-limited and is actively considering running for governor next year, comes just three months before he leaves City Hall.

A growing group of school integration activists, including many current public school students, has ramped up pressure on Mr. de Blasio to take forceful action on desegregation.Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times

In recent years, a growing number of activists pushing for integration measures have focused on the city’s gifted program, which provides a particularly stark example of how children are often separated by race and class within a diverse school system.

The mayor’s plan for the future of gifted education is similar to a proposal made in 2019 by a task force he convened on school integration measures — a plan that he had, until now, mostly ignored. Friday’s announcement will be welcome news to many activists who have said the current gifted system is outdated and unfair.

Though public outcry from those advocates no doubt played some role in the mayor’s decision, more meaningful still has been nearly eight years of private pressure from the mayor’s three schools chancellors, all of whom have been skeptical of, if not completely opposed to, separate gifted classes.

The mayor’s first chancellor, Carmen Fariña, got rid of gifted classes in the Manhattan elementary school she ran for many years as a principal. The second chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, resigned earlier this year, in part because he was frustrated by what he considered the mayor’s reluctance to take bold action on gifted and talented education.

While Mr. de Blasio’s announcement represents a major shift for New York, it is hardly pioneering. Only about 10 percent of districts nationwide have entirely separate gifted classrooms and schools, according to Halley Potter, a fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank. And there is wide agreement among educational experts that New York’s practice of sorting 4-year-olds into gifted classes was not supported by research.

Some experts believe that labeling students as gifted and plucking them out of general education classrooms altogether often exacerbates segregation by removing resources from regular public schools, and siphons the strongest students and teachers into different classrooms and schools. Researchers have argued that children who need special support in certain subject areas can still receive proper attention within normal classrooms.

But that requires many thousands of city educators to pull off some of the hardest work in public education: teaching children with a large range of abilities in one classroom, a practice known as differentiation. Much of the success of the plan will depend on the city’s approach to training educators, though some experts believe it’s simply not possible to make accelerated education for all students work at scale.

Jonathan Plucker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and a proponent of accelerated education, said the elimination of the exam for young children and the new approach to screening was welcome and overdue news. But he said research did not support the idea that children with different abilities could all be equally accommodated in one classroom.

“Differentiation is a fuzzy blue unicorn, it would be great if everyone had one, I’m just not sure it’s possible,” said Mr. Plucker, whom the city consulted on its plan. “There’s no shame in saying differentiation is really, really hard. We have decades of studies saying it is not easy. It takes years to master.”

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said he believed crucial details of the plan would be worked out by the next administration. Mr. Mulgrew, who has consistently called for the elimination of separate gifted classes for children in kindergarten through second grade, said he thought that some children in upper elementary school would still end up sorted by ability, despite the mayor’s new plan.

“The plan isn’t baked yet,” he said.

Mr. Mulgrew also criticized the timing of the mayor’s announcement. “It’s a little late in the game,” he said.

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New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program - The New York Times
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