New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/nyregion/gifted-talented-nyc-schools.html

by jbredeche • 5 years ago

111 254 5 years ago

nytimes.com

dilap• 5 years ago

Smart rich kids can continue to go to academically rigorous private schools. Smart poor kids can go pound sand.

Of course, to really strike a blow for equality, they should also ban the private schools.

Reminds me of the Vonnegut story. "The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal..."

throwaway67343• 5 years ago

Bingo

say_it_as_it_is3• 5 years ago

Take away every opportunity another child has that yours doesn't

refenestrator6• 5 years ago

Brought to you by the people who all parroted "stop Asian hate" for like 3 weeks last March until it fell off their social media feeds.

Kindergarten does seem a bit early to be permanently binning children into "gifted" or "not" but I am so sick of seeing people unhappy with Asians doing well.

civilized3• 5 years ago

“I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.” - Richard Carranza, former NYC school chancellor

The bigotry from certain "progressives" is just staggering.

refenestrator6• 5 years ago

It's a test. The test, as far as I know, doesn't include the question "are you asian".

JoeAltmaier9• 5 years ago

That's about as biased as you can get? It was clearly about providing for all. Nothing said about treating Asians and differently.

refenestrator6• 5 years ago

The current stats include a ridiculously large number of Asians, and the changes are racially motivated according to the proponents' own words.

It doesn't sound like the system was perfect, I'm all for reform that helps everyone. Hurting Asians to create equality isn't it.

tyingq• 5 years ago

Interesting. There was a film in the 80's called "Fame" that was set in a NYC gifted/talented high school. The theme song was fairly popular and one line that stood out was "I'm going to live forever". Guess not.

JoeAltmaier9• 5 years ago

It's long been a fallacy that you can sort young kids into high or low performers. Its a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. By starting so young (kindergarten!) in NYC they were creating the division out of essentially nothing.

Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random lottery. The difference in performance, was entirely based on expectation.

moron4hire5• 5 years ago

Was the study ever replicated?

EForEndeavour• 5 years ago

Could you share a link to that random allocation of students into regular and advanced? Sounds fascinating, though not surprising: imagine the confidence hit of being told by the system you're not advanced.

smrk007• 5 years ago

Why not just tell ALL the students they’re advanced?

jollybean2• 5 years ago

Perhaps more than just 'expectation' i.e. those who feel they are special and talented may actually strive harder. Maybe a bit of pressure as well.

But there's a lot of truth to this I think people should cognize.

That said, I'm wary of NYs move, in the later years of high school, providing programs where kids can be among other kids that really want to learn is powerful.

At my school, they didn't actually 'vet' students in the advanced program. You just did it if you want. I think that's fair.

You can have Algebra 101 and Algebra 101++, which covers more ground, at an accelerated pace, and it's your choice to join. I think that would work.

throwaway67343• 5 years ago

It's long been a fallacy that you can sort young kids into high or low performers.

As someone with teaching experience, I find this incredibly hard to believe if you were sorting by raw talent on not something that can be gamed like basing it on grades/good behavior. Certain students have a better natural aptitude for certain subjects.

arkades4• 5 years ago

Education research is more heavily plagued by poor methodology than even psychology - the only reason it lacks a replication crisis is because it doesn’t have the academic integrity to bother trying to replicate anything.

It is the epitome of shitty studies cherry picked to support the idealology/politics of the day.

dorchadas3• 5 years ago

Thank you! I did a Masters of Arts in Teaching because it was required for me to teach without an education degree (physics) and man were those studies such bullshit, and the generalizations they drew were so bad. Glad I'm not the only one who sees it.

tomp4• 5 years ago

It's possible that the average school provides insufficient challenge & motivation for the average student, so that rising expectations results in a rise of performance. It's also likely that an "advanced" programme was less tolerant to disruptions and required students to focus more.

But regardless, that doesn't change the fact that there are difference between people, and they're shown very early in development. It's things like, a kid not understanding whether a train is alive (it moves!) or not. Later, it's things like a person being able to understand basic math or not (I was the smartest kid in class, and had to tutor one of the worst... it was painful - he simply couldn't understand math! I tried all different ways of explaining, ended up having to teach him a mechanistic formula "write parenthesis this way, then keep trying numbers until the sums match").

JoeAltmaier9• 5 years ago

No program was provided. The kids were just labelled. The label was a placebo, and it worked.

Straw-man examples of differences in kids are cute but not helpful. The issue was the imbalance in NYC advanced programs was clearly racial, which begs some kind of correction. Or do we have to resort to "Black kids aren't ever smart enough?" Is that your argument?

giarc• 5 years ago

I also think at kindergarten age, you are actually just separating by age. A kid with an early birthday could have lived 11 months longer than a kid with a late birthday, and when you are only 4 or 5, that's a good chunk of your life. See Malcolm Gladwell.

Zababa5• 5 years ago

Thinking that someone will perform better can help them perform better, sure. But that doesn't invalidate the whole thing.

By starting so young (kindergarten!) in NYC they were creating the division out of essentially nothing.

I think that by kindergarten you already have lots of factors that will statistically influence school performance. I would argue that some will be environmental, and some will be inherent to the kid.

Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random lottery. The difference in performance, was entirely based on expectation.

I mean, that's obviously going to be true. But how big was the difference? Was it bigger than when students are chosen with another method? Which method? Which one performs the best? What you're describing is basically the placebo effect, but applied to this situation. It's a good control group, and we already know that placebo works. The interesting part is to see if the current programs work better or worse than placebo, and by how much.

wizwit9992• 5 years ago

Bad decision, went to these schools

moneywoes• 5 years ago

More info please, how was your experience

wizwit9992• 5 years ago

Basically, I was poor so I lived in a bad neighborhood, all the schools were bad except for the g&t one, this and the SHSAT are awesome for allowing smart immigrants in poor neighborhoods to get a good education. Now one may ask why not make all the schools good but the issue wasnt in funding, there were deeper societal issues among the students who went there, which isnt an easy problem to fix

goldenkey• 5 years ago

I did too. Though they still had the shitstorm of bullies and race gangs (leader of the black gang threw a padlock at my head at lunch ) (leader of russian gang wanted to have me jumped because they thought I was stealing their lunch money due to my computer hacking skills) I still feel like it was a step above the schools near me where pretty much everyone was a jock. I used to have to take the bus and train to and from the city, and along the way, the bus would pickup the students from James Madison High School. They always threw stuff at me and bullied me although toward my senior years I got large enough where I wasn't as much of a target. Pretty much everyone from that local school was a moronic jock or trophy wife wannabe. I can't imagine having to be surrounded by people like that for 4 years. The type of kids we are talking about would use those motorola walky talky phones on full blast. They'd have headphones, but shitty ones, so loud that everyone could hear their music. Or they'd just be blasting some garbage pop on a portable speaker. Oafs are bad and I can't imagine any of these kids grew up into people who aren't assholes.

Don't get me wrong, assholes still existed at the G&T schools but in far less numbers. The word was that bunch of the assholes actually got in due to affirmative action (like the gang leader who threw a lock at my head.)

Taking away meritocracy is a huge mistake. But that is the essence of the BLM and woke movement. Intelligence measures don't discriminate against anyone except those that aren't intelligent. And yes, it's unfortunate that the conscussions from street brawls or malnutrition might cause a kid from a poor ghetto to be less intelligent. But letting that child into a G&T school, or simply abolishing the schools altogether, it doesn't solve that child's problems. It just makes us all less educated. And if we are all less able, how the hell are we supposed to help that kid?

say_it_as_it_is3• 5 years ago

Violence, racism against whites, drugs, low aspirations

rvba• 5 years ago

I dont think that one can judge if a kod is gifted or not at the age of 4, but stupid people dragging smart people down with "equality" is a big problem with current system.

I was a part of a gifted program and I dont understand why there arent more of them.

JoeAltmaier9• 5 years ago

So its ok to drag down smart kids with "You're not Asian in kindergarten" or some other bias? To provide better-prepared kindergarteners with more public money and better schools, for life, based on a kindergarten test, is what the objection is based on.

jason-phillips2• 5 years ago

I dont understand why there arent more of them.

From my perspective, because they suck. The execution is poor. Your experience may have been better, but mine was one of missed opportunity. The course material was virtually the same, i.e., not challenging and thus insufferably boring. A dozen years wasted, GATE/TAG or not.

lowercased2• 5 years ago

I think you can, in some (many?) cases. Whether you should or not (or... how you do it) is perhaps the deeper question.

My parents were pushed by others around them to get me recognized as gifted/advanced (or whatever the term in the 70s was). Other parents (and my parents' parents) all recognized something different, so my parents went to the school, right before I started kindergarten. They got a reassuring pat on the head by the teacher and principal. "Everyone thinks their child is unique/special/advanced, especially their first, but trust us, everyone needs this..."

School started on Wednesday, and Friday afternoon they got a call saying "lowercased should be accelerated a grade or two - he's too advanced". So I was moved up a grade - that's the only lever the school had for "advanced" and, to my knowledge, I was the only one they'd done that for in the 20+ years the school had been open. I later learned it might have been 2 grades but my dad was concerned about socialization issues. And... 1 grade was bad enough in that respect.

There were multiple programs for "behind" students - kids were taken out of class for directed reading programs, other counseling sessions, etc. But there was nothing for 'advanced' kids in our area for several years. So yeah, I think there should definitely be more recognition and support for 'gifted' students in some capacity, even if it's subtle. Perhaps moreso if it's subtle. Being visibly 'different' is difficult for a lot of kids.

dorchadas3• 5 years ago

I'm glad your school did that. My mom had to fight against my elementary school because they wanted to keep me back a year in kindergarten because I wasn't mature enough. Likely, I was just bored. I went in to school reading and could do basic arithmetic already (even knew some basic multiplication), but they wanted to keep me back. Also happened going into middle school when I tested out of prealgebra (the accelerated math class they offered) but the new principal wanted to keep everyone the same. Thankfully I had good elementary school teachers through 3rd grade who recognized this and gave me challenging stuff instead (never made me read what the other kids read, harder msthh practice sheets, etc).

jason-phillips2• 5 years ago

This is fair. I cannot discern any justifiable reason to arbitrarily exempt a subset of prisoners from general population.

_hilro9• 5 years ago

But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students.

Wow, using a word such as segregation, which has connotations of 'by design' sure lays bare their hand.

Just to be clear, there is no segregation(of any kind) amongst the students in the program.

In fact, there is no segregation at all. There's just not equal representation of the makey-uppy USA racial classifications.

But why let facts and clarity rule over emotional clickbaity sub-headlines?

bitwize4• 5 years ago

If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated.

School antisegregation laws care nothing for intent, only for effect.

_hilro9• 5 years ago

If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated.

No, it is literally not "by definition" segregated. Using the phrase 'by definition' is not that powerful a modifier that every word that surrounds it suddenly becomes true.

That's the most nonsense thing ever. Secondly, read the line I quoted:

highly selective and racially segregated program

The program is not racially segregated. The NYTimes just needed to sneak in the word segregation because it's a very strong explosive word. To do that, it hammered it incorrectly to a place in a sentence which gives the impression the program itself is racially segregated.

barney542• 5 years ago

The problem for NYC apparently is that the largest ethnic group in the program was Asian.

ReptileMan• 5 years ago

A culture that highly values academic excellence for its progeny achieves it at disproportionate rates. I am shocked.

smachiz• 5 years ago

The problem for Bill de Blasio....

superflit24• 5 years ago

Following the IQ distribution by races.

I can scream whatever I want about people being equal and have equal capabilities.

But that is a lie.

Genetics is a huge factor in disease, skills and behavior.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

zentropia• 5 years ago

Some people don't like institutions that will enlarge racial inequality gaps.

agentwiggles• 5 years ago

The problem with this approach at a glance is that it seems to aim to decrease the size of the gap by bringing the top end down, as opposed to bringing the bottom end up. We should be focused on providing more opportunities to the underprivileged, not removing opportunities from the privileged.

This is the whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing, but in reverse. We should raise the tide further rather than draining the water so everyone can be equally stuck in the mud.

There are also problems inherent with breaking this down along racial lines. Removing gifted programs from public schools doesn't affect people who have the means to seek out additional tutoring, private schools, etc. Rich kids will still get extra education. But surely there are plenty of kids in these programs who _aren't_ from a privileged background, who are now having their opportunities to compete with wealthy kids reduced.

This whole idea seems incredibly poorly thought out, and the focus on race as the most important factor seems, to my eye, to be a big part of the issue.

chucksmash3• 5 years ago

Why would it necessarily enlarge racial inequality gaps?

mc325• 5 years ago

People like to blame society or the system.

Some of it is but there is also parental responsibility and small/immediate culture which has greater effect.

If you have parents that come from poor backgrounds and despite that produce kids who overrepresent in achievement, people in some corners like to brush that under a rug and anyone who highlights that is guilty of falling for the "model minority". Problem is, that's a cop-out and veers on crab mentality. Some subpopulations simply push their kids to study more and play less than others. That's just how it is. The parents may have two jobs, but still manage to instill an education mindset into them --a minority of these kids will look back and say that their childhoods were not fun, and that is likely true, but I don't think they'd be have a better life trudging away as a HS dropout or similar. And surely some parents overburden their kids to study "respected" professions. But that's a different problem.

Within a particular ethnicity or "race" some subpopulations have dedicated parents and others don't.

If I were born in the south to "hillbillies" my odds for landing in talented and gifted would go way down, not because of race, or ethnicity but because the culture of the parents and the immediate culture.

But take South Koreans 1st gen and compare them to Philippine 1st gen or Pole and Romanian and that's a no-no.

chucksmash3• 5 years ago

What an egregious choice of wording. I feel like the bystander in this PBF comic[1] when I see things like this.

[1] https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/

bloooop5• 5 years ago

It's important to realize that the program is segregated by intent and by design. The segregation is NOT accidental.

That's true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs in the US. That's not fundamental, and not true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs worldwide. Worldwide, such programs are meritocratic pathways to socioeconomic mobility. In the US, the story is much more complex.

Most such programs were explicitly structured to keep African Americans and immigrants out. This was structured in admissions exams (which were often designed, for example, around mastery of one dialect of English, even in contexts like math, where that's irrelevant), in geographies of such programs, and in many other elements.

That this intent is no longer present today is irrelevant. Those structures remain, perpetuate, and in many ways, become self-reinforcing.

The current politically popular fix? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and nuking the programs from orbit. At that point, no one without wealth can get ahead.

We need something more nuanced, but we're not going to get that if we don't first acknowledge the issue.

Refs: You can look at documents like this one, from over two decades ago, citing references well before then, talking about how to reduce some of the intentionally segeregatory impacts of gifted-and-talented admissions testing: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource... (and it's worth noting how little has happened in the intervening decades)

threatofrain5• 5 years ago

Under your perspective, were NY gifted and talented programs designed to exclude blacks but include Asians (among the poorest demographics in NYC) as the largest plurality? And why?

darthvoldemort11• 5 years ago

This is completely BS. The activists have been trying for decades to bump up the percentage of Blacks and Latinos, and yet it's dominated by Asians. Asians are "stealing" spots from White, Blacks, and Latinos and it makes it hard to justify racism, especially when Asians are not only 40% of the G&T but also the poorest demographic in NYC.

endisneigh9• 5 years ago

Segregated doesn't mean "by design." What definition are you using? Segregation can exist as a manifestation of some process. It doesn't have to be some person manually dividing people.

Your entire comment rests on a false premise.

_hilro9• 5 years ago

word such as segregation, which has connotations of 'by design'

My entire comment does not rest on a false premise.

1) My comment commented on the use of the word segregation and it's implications. *

and

2) the fact that the program is not racially segregated using any dictionary definition of the word.

Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a (natural or legal) person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination

This program is not that, no matter how hard you try and squint to make it seem so.

pacbard2• 5 years ago

The context for the use of "racially segregated" is probably within the current anti-racist movement (see, for example, Kendi's work). This movement has moved away from labeling racist a policy that was implemented with racist intent (like segregated schools during Jim Crow) towards labeling racist a policy that has unequal outcomes based on race, regardless of policymakers' intent.

If you start from that perspective, it naturally follows to label G&T education as segregated if we observe that one group being overrepresented in it and another group being underrepresented.

Of note here, it's the assumption that the distribution of gifted and talented eligibility attributes is uniformly distributed among different groups of students and that somehow the system is not picking up eligibility signals for specific students. There is some emerging evidence that this is the case for Black students, as the identification gap between Black and White students closes when the G&T assessor is Black (I think that Grissom has a recent paper on this). If we reject the uniform distribution assumption, we end up assuming that the G&T eligibility traits are unevenly distributed among students, which I believe is one of the longest lasting beliefs of racist thought in education.

mc325• 5 years ago

Among humans it's likely evenly distributed, but... the blame for unevenness should fall more on the parents who rear their kids to fail rather than on the system who fails to find those rough diamonds. The parents should suffer most of the culpability. They are the ones steering their kids to poor outcomes via parenting styles.

Zababa5• 5 years ago

I'll preface this by saying that I don't live in the USA, so some of these things are a bit alien to me. I'm sorry if the way I word things here is not the best, the goal here is not to attack or even label something as good or bad, but only understanding.

This movement has moved away from labeling racist a policy that was implemented with racist intent (like segregated schools during Jim Crow) towards labeling racist a policy that has unequal outcomes based on race, regardless of policymakers' intent.
If you start from that perspective, it naturally follows to label G&T education as segregated if we observe that one group being overrepresented in it and another group being underrepresented.
If we reject the uniform distribution assumption, we end up assuming that the G&T eligibility traits are unevenly distributed among students, which I believe is one of the longest lasting beliefs of racist thought in education.

Would that reasoning hold when applied to spaces where black people tend to be more successful than whites? Sports being a big one here. Would you call sports racist? Would you argue that the equivalent of G&T eligibility traits for sports are evenly distributed among students, regardless of their race? I can see how racist people would push the idea that these traits are unevenly distributed, but when I put things in another context, all of that doesn't make any sense. We don't have a problem accepting as a society that some people are really ahead of the pack when it comes to sports, but when it comes to intelligence (whatever that means, you could probably separate it in academic and work success but most of these are not as clear cut as "who was the fastest to run 100 meters?") we have a hard time talking about it.

I guess my question behind this is: what is the aim of the current anti-racist movement? Is it equality in a "colorblind" way, as in the ultimate goal is that race is never a factor in the success and failures that people achieve? Or is it a movement trying to replace negative discrimination with positive discrimination? Is it a movement that's interested in scientific truth, whatever the outcomes may be? Or it is a movement that would hide inconvenient truths if this would help the "cause"?

threatofrain5• 5 years ago

Why would structural racism within NY's G&T programs include Asians as the largest plurality?

isolli• 5 years ago

Similarly, I consider that the vaccine passport in NYC is racist (in effect if not in intent). By not recognizing infection-acquired immunity, it disproportionately forces Black people to take a vaccine that they do not need. This is because Black people have suffered higher rates of infection (partly due to the fact that they were more likely to work in person during the pandemic). Moreover, for historical reasons (see [0], [1]), Black people have lower rates of vaccine uptake, so the vaccine passport mechanically excludes a higher proportion of them from public spaces.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_health_in_the_United_...

padastra3• 5 years ago

There's some conclusions that I disagree with here assuming the same starting facts. Also, I think calling things "racist" or "segregated" usually ends critical thinking because they have the same emotional label as the initial definition (systematic differences in treatment due to skin color) even as the definitions have expanded (systematic differences in outcomes, independent of cause).

Let's presume that intelligence is heritable. Given the difference between humans and other species I do not see how this can be argued.

Let's also presume that intelligence varies between humans. If there is no variation across a population, then it cannot be selected for, unless you argue a stepwise change that's completely uniform, for which I don't see any other evolutionary proxy.

Let's NOT presume that intelligence varies between races.

My question to you is this:

Can the children of a group of humans selected for intelligence (e.g. completed enough education despite a cultural revolution, had enough finances, etc. -- Asians; escaped systematic genocide, etc. -- Jews) be, on average and not uniformly and with lots of overlap, smarter than the children of a group of humans not selected for intelligence (e.g. sold by other Africans into slavery, so presumably disadvantaged in the original African society, lower-educational-barrier illegal immigration as with many Central and South Americans)?

Note for the purposes of this question that reproduction within each group (Asian immigrants : Asian immigrants; Jews : Jews; African-Americans : African-Americans; Hispanics : Hispanics) is much larger than reproduction between groups, preventing admixing over time.

nobody99997• 5 years ago

Of note here, it's the assumption that the distribution of gifted and talented eligibility attributes is uniformly distributed among different groups of students and that somehow the system is not picking up eligibility signals for specific students. There is some emerging evidence that this is the case for Black students, as the identification gap between Black and White students closes when the G&T assessor is Black (I think that Grissom has a recent paper on this).

Absolutely. I don't have any reference right now, but numerous studies have shown that schools in poor, minority neighborhoods are significantly worse than other schools.

What can make a big difference is having higher levels of expectation for student performance and backing that up with tools to increase it. But it's pretty clear that many teachers and school administrators in those poorly performing schools don't have those high expectations, nor do they make the effort to encourage those who would benefit from G/T programs and get them into those programs.

When the people who are charged with educating you don't make the effort, then why should the students?

The solution is to make the bad schools better, not destroy the programs that could benefit those students just as much as those from other schools.

ravel-bar-foo• 5 years ago

There is some emerging evidence that this is the case for Black students, as the identification gap between Black and White students closes when the G&T assessor is Black

Could you provide details on this? My impression had been that for magnet high schools the only admissions evaluation was made on the basis of test scores, but you make it sound like admissions are more subjective, with an "assessor".

flexie2• 5 years ago

Even if it's not intended by design to segregate based on color, but just an unfortunate effect, when that effect is known for years and nothing is done, then I think it's OK to call it segregation.

Many of the parents I know who has kids that were accepted in the gifted and talented program had very expensive tutoring in order to be accepted. We are talking thousands of dollars for toddlers. That's tutoring that most Black and Latino New Yorkers simply cannot afford. And their parents paid these obscene amounts in order to avoid that their kids were stuck at the mostly Black ordinary public schools with kids from the projects.

I don't think NY Times claims that the parents are racist. But the fact remains that they try to get their kids from mostly Black schools into mostly white schools.

darthvoldemort11• 5 years ago

The G&T program in NYC is mostly ASIAN not white. This is the problem for activists. Also, Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC so activists can't blame systemic racism or economic disadvantages. So better to just destroy the program than explain why Asians who are non-white and poor are able to succeed when other minorities can't.

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

The article states that the GATE program featured a high-stakes entry exam which could place incoming students in a 5-years long separate "track". While "segregated" is a harsh term to describe this, it does seem like something which would introduce high disparity in outcomes due to what's essentially random luck/noise.

It looks like they'll be replacing this with a more finely-designed system featuring "accelerated" learning for those students who are doing well at any given time in some specific subjects, which seems more appropriate to current needs.

mrblampo• 5 years ago

Look up segregation in the dictionary, it does not have to imply intent.

_hilro9• 5 years ago

Spend any amount of time greater than 0 reading books and articles which use the word segregate.

Segregation/segregate is defacto used as a noun/verb with intent behind it.

excalibur• 5 years ago

Yes! Now they can fail all of the kids equally instead of possibly helping a small subset who did well on a test once.

jshaqaw2• 5 years ago

I am all for supportive programs for really smart kids. FWIW my kids go to NYC public schools. We did not go with gifted and talented because we didn't really like the structure of the program. If the city ends up providing REAL enrichment for gifted kids past 3rd grade it will be a net gain for everyone.

It is pretty ridiculous how pervasive test prep is for pre-school age kids to get them into the G&T program.

prepend2• 5 years ago

I know lots of parents who “chose not to go with it” when their kids aren’t selected for gifted and talented.

There are many flaws in gifted programs and they aren’t perfect. But they do have advantages like more child autonomy, more allowances for child-directed study, and more encouragement of curiosity.

Not all children have academic curiosity and so gifted isn’t a good fit for everyone.

But for parents who want their kids to achieve academically, I can’t imagine turning down gifted for “regular.”

And not saying this is you, but when I lived in Manhattan I would hear arguments about improving all classes instead of just gifted and the parents were sending their kids to private school.

Public school is rough, but taking away paths out for kids who want to be in school, but whose parents can’t afford private school seems like punishing those gifted students.

jshaqaw2• 5 years ago

Let's be clear about what G&T programs mean in NYC. There is a heavier workload and more intensive academic focus but not really so much in terms of constructivist learning, child autonomy etc... That why we skipped it. To be blunt, I wanted my kids to have a more interesting classroom experience and not waste evenings stuck doing homework when they were little. My bet/assessment was that they would be smart enough to more than catch up later on when the workload ramps in a challenging middle school. So far it looks like I was right.

BTW - not all public school in NYC is tough. You have to remember the scale of NYC. Within it are insanely great schools, a lot of mediocre schools, and too many horror shows - much like the public school system in any US state.

0xB31B1B• 5 years ago

I am generally quite liberal but I strongly disagree with he current strain of progressive education reform. There are inherent differences within the capabilities of students, we can detect these early, and we should use them to provide students with appropriate challenges. Our education system should provide avenues for top students to excel, ad hopefully these top students become the people who create businesses or invention that improve the world.

throwaway67343• 5 years ago

The current progressive movement is highly illiberal

gorwell• 5 years ago

The twitter mob doesn't like to hear that but it's absolutely true. It's illiberal, intolerant and regressive. Actual progressives and liberals see this clear as day. Most of us are just too afraid of the mob to say it.

raxxorrax4• 5 years ago

This seems to be a "present" of an older generation that fundamentally didn't put in any effort to understand their successors. With exception to the newest generation that now believes that racism is everywhere.

That said, I think logistics of education today can supply almost everyone with a high quality education anyway and the role to connect people moves from universities to other places. So less elite and more broad high quality education wouldn't hold anyone back and is a better approach.

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

Or this is the inevitable end of leftist thinking every single time. Sounds good on paper, fairness and all that, but totally ignores reality and ends up requiring large amounts of violence to enforce its idea of equal outcomes for all, where that equal outcome is always poverty and starvation.

endisneigh9• 5 years ago

inherent differences within the capabilities of students

citation needed. I agree students definition differ in abilities, but by and large you don't have to be super-smart to succeed in K-12.

evanpw• 5 years ago

The difficulty is set so that almost all students can succeed, so this doesn't contradict anything the parent post said.

unyttigfjelltol• 5 years ago

you don't have to be super-smart to succeed in K-12.

Yeah, you don't have to be super smart to succeed in a warehouse-mentality K-12 system. In fact, it helps not to be. Wait, I think you just proved the benefit of advanced classes in K-12.

linuxftw• 5 years ago

Public school should provide a basic education to all students, not a better education to some students. Resources that were used for a 'gifted and talented' track should be allocated to help the more needy.

Especially in later years, segregating the 'smarter' students is a net loss for the under achievers. How could those 'smarter' students be helping tutor the under achievers?

Public school was about helping those in poverty get an education. The middle and upper class has infiltrated the school system for their own purposes. Personally, I'm against public schools in any form, but if they are to exist, we should be trying to ensure all kids have access to the same basic education, not rewarding the ones that already have a higher chance of success.

InitialLastName2• 5 years ago

The problem with the G&T program was that it did a better job of selecting for parental affluence (the ability to pay 4-5 figures for test prep for your toddler, and the time to navigate a byzantine system) than for inherent differences in student capabilities.

Strangely enough, there were also a very limited number of G&T programs, including none in many of the poorer areas of the city, so if you lived in, say, the west side of the Bronx (as a friend of mine did) and wanted to send your kids to a G&T school, your best case was a 1.5 hour transit commute to East Harlem. My friend and his spouse could do that because they had work flexibility (including the flexibility for one of them not to work), but poor people don't usually have that either.

Effectively, this works out to socio-economic desegregation masquerading as racial desegregation (because, for various historical and structural reasons, race in NYC is correlated to affluence).

padastra3• 5 years ago

There are numerous sources in this thread that show that the Asian group, highly selected for here, are predominantly poor. Just parroting a talking point without looking at the data is as idiotic as what we all accuse Trump supporters of.

_hilro9• 5 years ago

The problem with the G&T program was that it did a better job of selecting for parental affluence (the ability to pay 4-5 figures for test prep for your toddler, and the time to navigate a byzantine system) than for inherent differences in student capabilities.

Spoken so authoritatively that I'm sure you have a source?

mcculley4• 5 years ago

Yes, kids are different. That does not mean that existing systems do a good or fair job of determining which kids would benefit from special programs.

My experience being in a "gifted" program in middle and high school in Florida was that the students in the program had parents who knew enough to get them tested. That alone marks a privileged class. I sincerely believe that if every student had been tested, the makeup of the gifted, honors, and standard classes would have been much different.

(I graduated high school in 1990. Maybe things are much different now. I would have no way to know.)

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf2• 5 years ago

The difference is what you describe, every kid takes the tests now because they are standardized.

dvdhnt• 5 years ago

Totally based on my experiences and opinion, this is because our society has very little appetite for prioritizing education and children over economics.

In reality, we should have more programs like this and investing more resources in developing alternative, public paths for educating children. Public education itself is relatively young in human history. Invest in R&D.

But that money would need to come from coffers already being drained for the sake of short term profits.

Pay the teachers.

barney542• 5 years ago

Spending on schools in the US has dramatically increased in recent decades and that money isn’t going to for-profit schools but public schools. The US is investing in child R&D with more money. There is a good argument that the money is not well spent, but the reality is that spending is way up.

Bostonian• 5 years ago

Subtitle: "Students who are currently enrolled in gifted and talented classes will not be affected. But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students."

The reasons can be debated, but it's a fact that on IQ tests, American blacks score about 1 standard deviation (15 points) below whites. A common threshold for a gifted program is an IQ of 130, 2SD above average. If you demand that all racial groups be proportionally represented, you cannot have a gifted program. You will not get proportional representation among FAANG programmers either. In general, America needs to make a choice between non-discrimination and government-enforced equal outcomes. Charles Murray's book "Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America" (2021) discusses this. He co-authored "The Bell Curve" (1994).

endisneigh9• 5 years ago

It's also a fact that American blacks have several standard deviations less wealth than whites.

If wealth ultimately is the driver for such a disparity, and education is the gateway to said wealth, you're effectively trapping people.

tomp4• 5 years ago

If wealth ultimately is the driver for such a disparity

Fortunately, we know it's not. Black Nigerian immigrants slightly outperform whites in many careers, and very likely start with substantially less wealth (because they're immigrants).

So one variable is constant (skin color), a few are "worse" (wealth, knowledge of English), a few might be better (motivation, IQ, work ethics, cultural expectations, ...).

Chris20482• 5 years ago

If wealth ultimately is the driver for such a disparity

My understanding of "IQ" (although there seem to be multiple definitions) is that is it supposed to be the purely physical (mental?) trait i.e. unaffected by environmental factors.

Although I suppose whether that is the case is an open question (for me at least, unless anyone familiar with the topic can comment?).

superflit24• 5 years ago

This is a hard fact that people ignore.

People are different and they have different skills.

but but "social economic" factors? Very little compared to genetics factors. One of the studies with adopted twins ->

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

I can train all I want . I will never be as good as Neymar on Soccer.

jollybean2• 5 years ago

'A common threshold' - this is false. There's no such 'common threshold'.

There's far far too much ambiguity and selection issues in IQ for us to use it reliably for that much in the real world.

Kids from poorer area have much less good parenting, their vocabulary is as small as 1/3 of those of richer kids entering Kindergarten.

From K-10 at least, it's probably a good idea to just teach kids, at the later high school grades, offer accelerated learning classes to whoever wants to enrol.

prepend2• 5 years ago

My school system works around this my having four different testing methods: 1) iq/gma test 2) school standardized tests, same across state 3) school creativity tests, same across state 4) teacher recommendation

I think there are still racial and income disparities but these methods somewhat reduce the penalty suffered as measured on these tests.

I think the intent is to find truly smart kids and give them additional tools to develop their intelligence and potential.

If a kid is smart, but doesn’t know vocabulary because their parents both work and can’t afford tutors, then the gifted program is an opportunity to detect and help those kids.

This, of course, assumes that not all kids have equal ability. And I think there is some truth that intelligence is inherited.

attemptone• 5 years ago

The Bell Curve

I see this book (un-)ironically mentioned on /lit/ from time to time. How boring is it for a 600-pages tome?

tapoxi• 5 years ago

My brother teaches at an exam school in Boston which similarly had its requirements dropped recently, and it seems like a lot of these changes are poorly thought out and done for optics. Sure, some of the exam schools in BPS are overwhelmingly White/Asian, but the school he teaches at is mostly Black/Asian/Hispanic.

While he was previously able to teach classes of bright, focused students, now they need to break up fights of unruly students and divert their attention to the ones that are struggling. I imagine the parents that can afford it will likely remove their kids from the public school system if quality continues to drop, which will only hurt funding.

The real issue is a much more complex socioeconomic problem, but that's hard to solve, so it's easier to point the finger at schools.

arkades4• 5 years ago

This has already happened in NY.

What the NYT article omits is that the elimination of advanced classes has been preceded by a couple of decades of highly restricted availability. 15 years ago (shit I’ve gotten old), when I lived in nyc_borough, there was precisely one elementary school honors class for the entire borough. 30 spots for the entire borough. I didn’t bother to wait and see if my kid managed to get a spot, we pulled her out and stuck her in private school.

seibelj• 5 years ago

Boston has one of the highest per-pupil funding in the US. Yet excluding the exam schools, the majority of the schools are awful.

Here is the school my kids would have to go to if I wasn’t rich enough to go private: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/the-english-high-school-p...

Ranked 1644 out of 1667 in Massachusetts.

In 2018, the vice principal of anti gang violence was convicted of recruiting students there to deal drugs for him, then attempting to execute one of them with a gunshot to the head for withholding drug profits https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/05/31/shaun-harrison-guilty-b...

There is no talk on the left of how to fix these schools, other than giving them more money, which they are already the highest funded in the country. The progressives need to rethink their school reform plan otherwise society will continue to exit the public schools and go private or home school.

dorchadas3• 5 years ago

This is the issue at the school I taught at. Our guidance officers and previous admin have actively been working to gut accelerated and honors classes. All this does is harm those kids (I was one myself at the same school; I took more AP classes my junior year than they even offer now), as well as the lower level kids who you have to try to balance out the others for.

Hell, I've had collab classes where half the students have an IEP and the other half are in whatever honors classes are left (not science sadly!) because our guidance doesn't care. They also actively tell kids not to challenge themselves and do whatever's easiest. Actively ruining the school because they don't give a shit about education. Hopefully the new admin changes that

say_it_as_it_is3• 5 years ago

Public schools in NYC rush to the lowest common denominator to address cries of racial inequity. This only takes away futures for children who would have had any future because they weren't among the general population of future convicts or minimum wage earners. No one is better for policies focused on racial parity when the bar is vastly lower because of it.

mgamache• 5 years ago

The answer is probably "more gifted programs in low-income neighborhoods". This is of course racist against Asians (they are lumped in with white when it's convenient). They make up 43% of these schools, so whites, and POCs are underrepresented. Why are Asians doing better? Are they more intelligent, work harder, value education? Let's pretend there is no problem by just eliminating the schools. Of course, there are problems with gifted programs, but assuming that factory education will maximize all the students potential is obviously wrong. This is a pollical maneuver designed t placate a segment of voters. We need every smart mind being educated properly regardless of the circumstances of birth.

xyzzy21• 5 years ago

Epic Fail. But predictable from people who wrongly believe Bell curves don't exist and that everyone is the same and capable of achieving ANYTHING.

motohagiography3• 5 years ago

Mixed feelings about moves like this. Am a product of a related system in another city some decades ago. The pressure to "de-stream" students in education in general has been an ongoing controversy for decades.

What bothers me about gifted programs is that they isolate the smartest kids from everyone else, and one can't help but think it's more to protect the system and everyone else from bored intelligent kids than to enrich their individual educations. IQ isn't a great proxy for much, but two or three standard deviations from the mean in populations of millions, you are likely dealing with different kinds of thinkers.

The skills the programs emphasized are focused on abstraction and complex problem solving - and not leadership where they could scale to benefit everyone. This turns kids into talent who will ultimately work for and be managed by more average peers, which makes it a remedial program for socializing exceptional kids into functioning cogs. It's like inventing fusion reactor to plow fields, or an F1 car to sit in traffic. I get that enrichment in education is something they might not be able to get at home and the schools are providing it, but they're providing what the average of the education bureaucracy can be persuaded is right for smart people to do based on cliches about scientists and professions.

There are good reasons to change how gifted programs operate, even putting phasing them out on the table, though the reasons in the article are ideological, which is practically the definition of what you have when you don't have experience - just the logic of an idea. NYC may do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and the benefits will be an unintentional side effect.

BeFlatXIII3• 5 years ago

How many of those leadership exercises would realistically carry over into IRL benefit after the students graduate? For that matter, how many G&T students would check out because they're focused on leadership rather than abstract problem solving?

motohagiography3• 5 years ago

Leadership and management are like riding a bike in that you can teach children to do it, but if you never learned, it's likely you never will. Management training programs for regular teenagers are common in the fast food industry, and it's a differentiating life skill. I think giving that to exceptional 8-12yr olds is more valuable than exploring their creativity in an isolated class away from their peers. Few people ever get bored of leadership. The net return on teaching advanced individual problem solving compared to teaching smart kids to scale their skills with leadership has a massive delta.

This is probably something you couldn't do in the public system, and you would need separate schools, and arguably this is what private schools already do. Policy wise, this is equivalent to vouchers, which are immensely controversial for the same reasons gifted education is, because they stream people into opportunity - or lack thereof, when they are still just kids. You're never going to teach kids enough to overthrow you, but if you don't, what are you really educating them to become?

moron4hire5• 5 years ago

Our oldest just started kindergarten and he is bored out of his mind. He can already read a little, he does basic addition, he even has a really good handle on some basic science facts (ask him about earthquakes and volcanoes some time) and they are spending time on learning shapes. His homework last night was "count to 20". Seriously, his preschool was more rigorous than this, yet somehow they also played a lot more. It's had a huge impact on his mood and energy levels, for no other reason than he doesn't have anything to look forward to when he gets there.

He doesn't need a gifted program to "maximize his potential". What he needs is an adaptable program that can meet him on his level to "minimize learning to hate school".

gfodor2• 5 years ago

This just means the gifted and talented programs are now only available to the children of gifted and talented parents. Great job everyone.

Get your kids out of the public schools in blue states.

asoneth2• 5 years ago

Related, I'm absolutely in favor of everyone moving to a state that matches their priorities, but if someone prioritizes "highly-ranked public schools" then you might want to look closely before moving to a generic "red" state. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho...

There are absolutely "red" states like Nebraska with good public schools, and "blue" states like New Mexico with poor public schools. But there does seem to be some kind of positive correlation between how "blue" a state is and how highly their public schools are ranked.

So if your "blue" state has you itching to pull your kids out of public school, a "red" state may not be significantly better.

gfodor2• 5 years ago

The gap between public and private schools is going to widen significantly - the point isn't to switch to a different public school district, but to exit the public school system given the conflict of interests they have against students.

civilized3• 5 years ago

But teaching children with a large range of abilities in one classroom is difficult, meaning much of the success of the plan will depend on the city’s approach to training educators.

In other words, talented students will be ignored or told to "tutor other students" (with no actual support or structure to do so), and will waste most of their time in school. As they always have under such systems.

Honestly, I don't even care anymore. My expectations are so low. The best thing any teacher ever did for me was let me read, or work through an advanced math textbook supplied by my parents, in the back of the class, without interference.

Just tell every teacher to do that with their kids who they don't want to deal with because they already know everything being taught. That's the closest this country will get to "socially acceptable" G&T education.

WhompingWindows• 5 years ago

Why can't we acknowledge the simple fact: some kids are smarter, they learn faster, they remember better?

I went to gifted and talented programs, and even there I felt like the pace was slow and easy for the top kids. If you put those kids into classes with even less academically apt, less focused children, those top kids are going to be bored out of their mind and wasting their time.

Do we truly want to waste the time of our most bright young minds? Do we want to squander their potential when they pick up 1+1=2 in 10 seconds, but it takes other kids 10 minutes? Do we have to force our teachers to make 4-5 different lesson plans, 1 for the lowest, 1 for the highest, and a couple others for the mid-tiers? We're already asking too much of teachers, give them smaller classes with less of a range of aptitude.

raxxorrax4• 5 years ago

bored out of their mind and wasting their time.

Wasting their time wouldn't even be much of a problem. Many become really destructive and it can result in them dropping out. A bored kid will not have iron discipline, maybe especially not the smart ones.

peter_retief3• 5 years ago

I didnt get to read it because of the paywall, can somebody please post an archived link please.

haunter2• 5 years ago

https://archive.vn/AnC9m/

peter_retief3• 5 years ago

Thanks.

xvilka• 5 years ago

Slowly progressing towards Idiocracy [1].

[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

SamoyedFurFluff• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if there are any real serious studies about the effectiveness of gifted programs in children to actually identify gifted kids and provide them with appropriate tools that justify giving them to gifted children only and not to disseminate to the entire population of children? Despite this discussion having >70 comments in it a lot of it seems to be intuition, anecdotes and gut feel without actual data behind them.

fmajid• 5 years ago

In other words, gifted and talented is not enough. You need to be gifted, talented and rich to get an education suited to your needs (often gifted kids are bored at school and get into trouble).

darthvoldemort11• 5 years ago

The inconvenient truth about NYC G&T program is that it is 40% Asian. Asians have dominated the G&T program, even "stealing" spots from white kids where 43% of NYC is white, but only 35% of spots taken by white kids.

And Asians are dominating the NYC G&T program NOT because of hundreds of years of systemic racism, NOT because Asians wrote the admissions tests an inbueing cultural bias, and NOT by cheating or bribing admissions. And in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin. This makes the entire story extremely inconvenient for activists who want to say that the program is racist and discriminates against the economically disadvantaged. And yet, they somehow are able to get the entire program trashed because of racism against Asians is perfectly accepted in 2021.

Activists have no problems openly discriminating against Asians because whites, blacks and Latinos think of "Americans" as whites, blacks and Latinos. Asians are considered foreigners. So when a prestigious program is dominated by Asians, something must obviously wrong, right?

Activists have gutted admissions at Thomas Jefferson high school in Fairfax, VA, arguably the top public high school in the US because it had a high percentage of Asians. Lowell High school admissions in SF, a top 100 high school, underwent the exact same thing because of its high percentage of Asians. Now NYC is doing the same thing. At Harvard, the admissions department openly discriminates against Asians by saying they lack "courage" or less "likeable". Imagine the outrage if this happened to Blacks, but because it happened to Asians it's considered okay because Asians are unAmerican.

christophilus• 5 years ago

One of the first openly racist interactions I ever witnessed in the US was a white guy hurling slurs at a Vietnamese friend of mine. Asians are definitely in a strange predicament here.

swiley2• 5 years ago

It's almost like you can be racist to anyone.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin.

Do you have evidence for this? Asians are by far the richest minority in the US so I was surprised by this statement.

Activists have no problems openly discriminating against Asians because whites, blacks and Latinos think of "Americans" as whites, blacks and Latinos. Asians are considered foreigners. So when a prestigious program is dominated by Asians, something must obviously wrong, right?

Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

darthvoldemort11• 5 years ago

http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/?forum-post=resear...

seneca2• 5 years ago

Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

This is the natural result of equality of outcomes, which is achieved by dragging down the top to meet those who can't excel. That is not at all what most people mean by equality, and is frankly a perversion of the word.

nobody99997• 5 years ago

Diversity means increasing representation. In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

Except the problem isn't with the gifted/talented programs in NYC. And it isn't with the SHSAT[0] either.

The problem is that public elementary and middle schools in majority black/hispanic neighborhoods have measurably much worse educational results.

What's more, those schools don't even consider preparing their students for G/T programs or the specialized high schools.

There are many reasons for this and fixing it is hard. As such, instead of giving minority students a better education, some activists are calling for (and succeeding) removal of gifted/talented programs and getting rid of the SHSAT.

As a product of the NYC public school system, I have no illusions that fixing these problems will be easy.

But removing the G/T programs instead of directing poorly performing schools to bring all their students up to educational levels which allow the best of them (as in every other school) to participate in G/T programs and increase their numbers in the specialized high schools.

IMHO, this is completely ass backwards.

And De Blasio is gone in January, leaving this mess to his successor.

As a NYC resident, I'm glad I don't have kids here.[1]

[0] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/testing/specialized-hig...

[1] I could go on and on about how ridiculous this is, but I am so disgusted with De Blasio and the NYC Department of Education about this stuff that I'll just stop now before this becomes an all out rant.

ohCh6zos• 5 years ago

In a situation with limited resources, increasing representation for all means decreasing representation for some. This is the natural conclusion to pushing for equality/representation.

Then reject diversity.

threatofrain5• 5 years ago

Activists have gutted admissions at Thomas Jefferson high school in Fairfax, VA, arguably the top public high school in the US because it had a high percentage of Asians. Lowell High school admissions in SF, a top 100 high school, underwent the exact same thing because of its high percentage of Asians. Now NYC is doing the same thing. At Harvard, the admissions department openly discriminates against Asians by saying they lack "courage" or less "likeable". Imagine the outrage if this happened to Blacks, but because it happened to Asians it's considered okay because Asians are unAmerican.

Also notable is that California is finalizing a proposal to eliminate faster tracking in mathematics, arguing that it is a promotion of white nationalist ideology. Calculus may only be taken in the senior year under these proposals, and Algebra is to be de-emphasized as the primary math target of middle school.¹

I found it quite striking that in a long proposal focused on racial justice in math, there is plenty of mention of white nationalism but exactly zero mention of the word "Asian".

[1] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

FooBarBizBazz• 5 years ago

I would have been diagnosed with ADD and medicated if I hadn't been put on a faster track. Luckily the teacher correctly observed to my parents that I was just bored. I don't know what would have happened to me in a system without that track. I probably would have been a much less happy child.

swiley2• 5 years ago

Math promotes white nationalism

Jesus they've completely lost their minds!

superflit24• 5 years ago

The real thing about the asians is:

There is a whole narrative that people are equal and have same capabilities.

Anyone can be a sport start if trains enough or a super scientist if study enough.

Then looking at statistics it is not true.

The same people with cognitive dissonance claim that because social factors, etc. Usually whites get a better treatment thus because and only because of that they have better representation in certain areas (only certain).

Then a lot of money is poured in programs to fix that. Because the narrative says all people are equal.

The opposing narrative says that IQ is genetic and it reflects on career that needs IQ so it really does not matter it will always reflect that.

The two narratives are fighting: social-economics vs genetics and if its a fair fight.

Came the asians.

Poor, non-english skills, living in bad neighborhoods.

They start getting advanced classes more than white. They advance more.

Then looking at statistics we can see Asians have higher IQ and looking on Advanced programs we have Asian as the largest, Whites as second and others as third.

Bang one narrative suffers a blow. Then they start changing rules. "Asians are White". "We need to make it more equal" meaning removing asians from programs.

While these boths narrative fight we as whole suffer.

As I want the best players on Soccer I want the best players on Medical field or Math.

I really don't care if the whole Math department is Asian. I care about the results to the society.

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

It's not I.Q., it's culture. Asians have a significant cultural focus on education. But then again so do a number of Black African minorities like the Igbo, Ashanti and Yoruba. So even "race" is a complete red herring.

darthvoldemort11• 5 years ago

Asians are not genetically more intelligent than other races. If this were the case, Asia would be more of a powerhouse than just the "factory workers of the world". Only a small amount of innovation is coming out of Asia compared to the US.

Asians in the US are more motivated to study, it's the culture. It doesn't take a lot of dedication to studying to get a major advantage over those that don't study as hard.

peter_retief3• 5 years ago

It seems outrageously unfair.

seneca2• 5 years ago

Activists have no problems openly discriminating against Asians because whites, blacks and Latinos think of "Americans" as whites, blacks and Latinos. Asians are considered foreigners.

I don't think this is true. Asians are being punished because they're successful, and their existence bucks the narrative the blank-slate activists want to push.

Sure, as a group they're being punished, but it's not because anyone sees them as exceptionally foreign. It's just because the top has to be brought down in order to achieve equality of outcomes and the fanatics pushing these things don't care who they harm to achieve their goals.

nobody99997• 5 years ago

I don't think this is true. Asians are being punished because they're successful, and their existence bucks the narrative the blank-slate activists want to push.

No. Everyone is being punished, not just Asians.

Ditching G/T programs is going about this completely backwards, and hurts all students regardless of ethnicity or melanin content.

The problem is that schools in poor and minority neighborhoods suck.

Let's fix that problem and the rest will take care of itself.

moron4hire5• 5 years ago

I don't know what you're reading, but Thomas Jefferson High School is not in Fairfax. It's here in Alexandria. Fairfax would be half an hour drive for me and I live on the extreme, western edge of Alexandria. There's a whole, other city in between (Annandale). It'd be like saying something was in Brooklyn when it's actually in Queens.

Virginia is a weird state. Fairfax and Alexandria are classified as "independent cities", which exist in parallel to and outside of counties. There are only 41 independent cities in the US: Baltimore, MD; St. Louis, MO; Carson City, NV, and then 38 more in Virginia.

The signficance is that independent cities can't levy income tax, but have to pay for their own schools and roads. We make revenue through property taxes (not just land/houses, but also cars! That's a whole other story) and business licenses. The state then calculates how much it will contribute to our school funding based on our supposed "ability to pay".

Between property values and transit issues here, there are a likely more "property owners" in Fairfax than here in Alexandria. Alexandria is much more of a bedroom community for DC, whereas people in Fairfax spread more across NoVA for work. The state sees the higher property values in Alexandria, and our higher population, and thinks "oh, they are loaded, they don't need so much". But we're not. We're a town of renters. All the property is owned by DC and NYC property developers, which got sweetheart tax break incentives to build here.

You can readily see it when visiting. Fairfax's roads are nicer. Their public buildings are newer and larger. They have several, gorgeous, gigantic public parks with stuff like kiddie train rides around the perimeter. Fairfax is apparently rolling in cash. And Alexandria can't even fix a foot bridge across a 20-foot wide creek bed.

So we just don't have the money to fund our schools anymore. Hell, my own kid's school is one of the better ones in town and they can't even afford to have enough bus drivers and substitute teachers for the year. It's garden variety bad administration over the last 15 years, not anti-Asian sentiment.

darthvoldemort11• 5 years ago

My friend lives in Fairfax and her school district feeds into TJ, so I assumed it was in Fairfax. This is a front-and-center issue for her.

TheCoelacanth2• 5 years ago

No, it's in Fairfax County. Its address is Alexandria, but it's not inside the City of Alexandria[1].

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Thomas+Jefferson+High+Scho...

chuckee• 5 years ago

43% of NYC is white, but only 35% of spots taken by white kids.

The NYT deftly avoids mentioning this by stating it as

Though about 70 percent of the roughly 1 million public school students in New York are Black and Latino, about 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes are white or Asian American.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

So they are robbing 4000 Black and Latino kids of the opportunity to participate in a program specifically tailored for overachievers like them?

vmception3• 5 years ago

I don't really get that undercurrent to the decision making processes here.

Yes, NYC's specialized public schools have become heavily disproportionately filled by its Asian and Asian-American population.

The competitive forces and consolidation does a disservice to them and the rest of the admitted population as well.

When a 4.2 GPA overachieving student can't get selected to good universities or other opportunities because of all the 4.5 GPA students at the same school, that undermines the point of the system. And that system also has the side effect of exacerbating segregation?

And you want to defend it by making it about other Americans focusing specifically on disrupting Asian achievement? I understand your sentiment is and has been shared and represents a collective assumption with some groups in NYC, but its a huge stretch! The other perspective is that it just doesn't accomplish externalities well. Mix the schools up, let cultural overachievers be dispersed instead of consolidated, the mindshare will help the overall local population better.

I agree that public schools should be about education, so focus on fixing where the education occurs. Try to get better teachers and materials to other parts of the city! Yes, if your child is trying to go through school before any of this better infrastructure is set up, I can see how defensive one would be about it, I can see why the low hanging fruit of "they dont want us/my race to win" is the goto argument, but all I can say is.. welcome to the rest of the country? Shitty public schools is the most American thing ever!

btheshoe• 5 years ago

That's not how cultural overachievers work though. Group overachievers together and they form a stronger culture of achievement. Split them up and they stop achieving.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

Yes, NYC's specialized public schools have become heavily disproportionately filled by its Asian and Asian-American population.

Have they? The admission criteria is based on scores. The school is disproportionately filled with over-achievers who happen to be Asian.

When a 4.2 GPA overachieving student can't get selected to good universities or other opportunities because of all the 4.5 GPA students at the same school

How is that so?

Mix the schools up, let cultural overachievers be dispersed instead of consolidated

How is that supposed to help anyone?

all I can say is.. welcome to the rest of the country? Shitty public schools is the most American thing ever!

Because someone eats junk food I should have to eat it too?

carabiner• 5 years ago

And in NYC, Asians are the poorest demographic by a large margin.

False. Asians are the second highest income demographic, second only to whites: https://wherewelive.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019...

So you can still make a case that the tests for G&T measure the wealth available for test preparation.

ng122• 5 years ago

In NYC Asians have the second-highest rate of poverty behind Hispanics.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/opportunity/poverty-in-nyc/data-to...

otoburb2• 5 years ago

Another inconvenient truth is that there is a great example of an integrated G&T school student body in East Harlem whose racial profile [1] closely matches the racial distribution of applicants for the G&T kindergarden test[2].

Two problems arise when trying to raise the profile of the school:

1) This is one of the only good examples of integration, but nobody seems to be interested in learning how to replicate this model high performance and integration across the rest of NYC's schools.

2) Draws unwelcome attention to the pipeline problem whereby some ethnic groups are underrepresented compared to the city's ethnic makeup when applying for the test.

[1] https://www.publicschoolreview.com/tag-young-scholars-profil... (scroll down to "All Ethnic Groups")

[2] https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_f14e1d13df45444c883bbf... (page 26)

dayvid• 5 years ago

I'm black and I was in a gifted program in elementary school on through honors college at university. I was surprised when I first heard someone say gifted is racist about a year ago.

At the same time, though, I feel like I was raised in a time where not as many parents are actively trying to game the education system. It seems to ruin the spirit of the gifted program if parents are looking up tricks and tactics to get their kids to ace exams in Kindergarten.

MyHypatia• 5 years ago

When I read the headline I was upset, why get rid of a program that challenges eager young minds? Then I read that the current system tests 4 year olds, and puts these kids on separate tracks. 4 year olds! I'm all for challenging different kids with different levels of material, but the current system of testing and separating kids out starting at 4 years old is absurd. That being said, I think by age 8 (3rd grade) it makes sense to give kids different levels of material so they don't either get bored (because it's too easy) or give up (because it's too hard).

otoburb2• 5 years ago

An oft-missed option that NYC offers is that children can continue testing for the G&T programs up to Grade 3. So parents can enter when the child is 7 years old to enter into grade 3 (when they usually are 8 years old).

haunter2• 5 years ago

https://archive.vn/AnC9m/

foxhop• 5 years ago

Gifted & Talented program isn't racist, critical race theory & social marxism redefines the term racism so they may point at any program and call it racist. My son qualifies and it costs the school system nothing. It's mostly about transport to middle school for higher math for him.

Reference:

    "New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program.  Students who are currently enrolled in gifted and talented classes will not be affected. But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students."

disambiguation3• 5 years ago

kind of tangential.. but i'm constantly baffled by how antiquated our K-12 education system is.

8am - 2pm, a few dozen kids in 1 class room, 1 teacher, 1 white board, shuffled from one class to the next, school bells, homework, midterms, final exam.

compare this side by side with schooling 200 years ago, and not much has changed.

i can't understand why education hasn't been open sourced and unified.. an why there isn't even a concerted effort to do so?

why are 1000s of teachers nation-wide working in silos and reinventing algebra lesson plans every year?

why are kids arbitrarily locked in to schedules that don't consider their individual needs and level?

resourcing is definitely a problem, and poor teacher salaries are criminal, but the whole thing is designed poorly.

further the institution has doubled down on this method .. more testing, more metrics, more pedigrees. This incentivizes gaming the system.

to come full circle, these G&T programs are a symptom of the core problems leading parents to desperate fight for alternative teaching because they have correctly assessed the public programs are not sufficient if you really want a shot at academic success.

astkaasa• 5 years ago

8am - 2pm, a few dozen kids in 1 class room, 1 teacher, 1 white board, shuffled from one class to the next, school bells, homework, midterms, final exam.

It's more or less the same pattern in universities. Why do you consider it outdated?

disambiguation3• 5 years ago

true, i excluded universities because there's slightly more innovation at that level .. more ways to mix and match your education. K-12 on the other hand is very rigid.

i guess "outdated" is a bad measure, because being old doesn't make it bad. just the fact that todays model hasnt updated much to 200 years is striking. things i'd like to see done differently:

- abolish the linear locked in scheduling. advanced kids can move ahead, but also move in different directions. we should allow kids to pursue classes they enjoy while encouraging them to explore different specializations.

- allow adults to come back to school at night. we have a significant population that doesn't have a high school diploma. they are paying the taxes after all, they should have access. https://www.censusscope.org/us/rank_education_withouths_2000...

- teachers should collaborate instead of working in silos. we should have a singular unified model of education ex. khan academy does a great job of this. open source, always accessible, clear progression, emphasis on collaboration and support among teachers. teacherspayteachers is also good at addressing this.

- students should collaborate instead of working in silos. both as peers and across grades. speaking anecdotally, i used to tutor math long ago and felt that through teaching i also improved my own fundamentals.

- homework needs to be overhauled. homework is largely just busy work at the moment. it should be treated as a continuous self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses.

- testing needs to be overhauled. the incentives for high scores are misaligned for both teachers and students. as a result we often see teachers teaching to the test and students/parents gaming the system. when i got in to college, i took a 2 hour math assessment that got gradually harder over the course of the session (algebra -> multi-var calculus). this was used to decide what math level i should be placed at. tests should be used as assessments that determine your level and curriculum.

and these are all just high-level ideas that don't speak to specifics of curriculum. in general, we need to redesign education in the following terms: over a decade, how do we best prepare our kids for the real world.

timnetworks• 5 years ago

That's a terrible shame, G&T was the last reprieve from the mediocre school environment created by children whose parents don't own any books. If they did any reading they wouldn't vote for Deblasio, though..

ng122• 5 years ago

Hah, good thought. DeBlasio is quite popular among the woke bourgeoisie. Most complaints I hear are about him not being radical enough.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

The segregated G&T model has been shown to make education worse for both students tracked into G&T and those not compared doing same classroom, student-adapted assignments universally—aside from the problems in identification that provide lots of opportunity for subtle and not-so-subtle social factors other than merit to play a role, so if this is executed well, it's good. And there outline I've seen in other articles (not bothering to try to bypass the Times paywall) looks good:

* Eliminate the high stakes test for four-year olds that controls the entrance gate to accelerated programs.

* Expand accelerated programs to all 800 schools instead of 80.

* Train all kindergarten (initially) teachers in student-specific accelerated teaching.

* Hire additional experienced teachers in areas where acclerated programs will be new.

* Screen all students at third-grade for additional subject-area-specific accelerated programs, still to be delivered in mixed classrooms.

Obviously, the details of execution beyond high-level bullet points matter a lot, but this sounds quite good. And even if the plan was excellent, starting a controversial thing on the way out without institutional and leadership continuity of vision to carry it through is very much not ideal.

New York City to Phase Out Its Gifted and Talented Program

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