We need less focus on political battles and more reporting on schools’ experiences with mixed-ability classrooms, eliminating gifted programs, and “expanded” G&T, says a longtime New York City education journalist.
By Clara Hemphill
The press has done of a good job explaining what’s wrong with New York City’s gifted and talented programs. But the news coverage of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to eliminate “G&T” programs in the city’s elementary schools has been short on solutions.
News outlets should do more to help move the public debate from its current deadlock in which one side says, in essence, “gifted education is racially discriminatory” and the other says “bright kids need to be challenged.”
Criticizing the current system is easy to do because almost no one defends testing 4-year-olds in order to track them into separate classes or separate schools, as New York City has done for years. (This past year, the test was suspended during the pandemic.)
Nor do people speak up – not publicly, anyway – for the vast over-representation of white and Asian children in “gifted” classes.
However, both de Blasio and his successor, Eric Adams, have punted on what should replace the status quo. De Blasio’s plan calls for phasing out separate gifted classes and training 4,000 kindergarten teachers to offer more demanding instruction for all children within general education classes. Of course, de Blasio leaves office in January and won’t be around to implement the plan which, to put it mildly, seems vague. Adams says he plans to offer more gifted classes, particularly in Black and Latino neighborhoods. His plan, too, is short on details.
And that’s where education reporters should come in, providing deeper coverage of real-world experiences with mixed-level classrooms and abandoning — or expanding — gifted programs.
The press has done of a good job explaining what’s wrong with New York City’s gifted and talented programs. But the news coverage has been short on solutions.
Previously from The Grade: Covering gifted and talented education with an equity lens
News outlets could provide an important public service by writing about schools that have successfully identified gifted children of all races and found ways to challenge them without them putting them in separate classrooms at a very young age. They also should look for schools that have used Adams’ approach successfully.
There have been some notable attempts in this regard.
Chalkbeat’s Christina Veiga made a good start by interviewing experts around the country about different models of gifted education.
A few years ago, The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein wrote about efforts to make gifted programs in Montgomery County, Md., more racially diverse.
And the Solutions Journalism Network offers other examples of ways to revamp gifted and talented programs from around the country. Miami has two-tier admissions, with lower cutoffs for low-income children and children learning English. BELL Academy in Queens has “schoolwide enrichment,” which offers challenging opportunities to all.
Though New York City represented an extreme in early tracking, the education of gifted students has been a hot topic around the nation. Reporters covering any of the school districts where this is under debate can use the following suggestions to bring helpful light to the topic.
Needed: More reporting on mixed-ability classrooms
De Blasio’s plan to train kindergarten teachers over the summer to “differentiate instruction” — education jargon for tailoring instruction to children of different skills within the same class — is laughably vague. It’s not impossible to mix children of different abilities, but it does take lots of thought and care. I’d like to see more stories about schools that do it well.
A few years ago, I visited Louis Armstrong Middle School in Queens, founded in 1979 as a court-ordered experiment in integration.
In these classrooms, children are not separated by ability, and teachers know how adapt lessons to challenge top students while giving support to those who need it. Sometimes that means having two teachers in one class, offering different approaches to the same problem. For example, in a math class with two teachers, some students used paper cutouts to measure angles while those with a more abstract understanding calculated the angles using an approach called transformational geometry.
Louis Armstrong demonstrates that different children excel in different ways. On my visit, I learned that a girl with developmental delays was recognized for her leadership skills — and elected vice president of the student government. A child who reads below grade level might be a star musician or computer programmer, while a child who reads very well might need help in math. Tracking children into “gifted” classes assumes that all children are equally good at all subjects. Louis Armstrong recognizes that’s not the case.
But we need much more reporting on how mixed-ability classrooms have been implemented and their results.
Needed: More coverage of schools that have eliminated G&T
News stories tend to quote alarmed parents whose children are in gifted programs. These parents fear that their children will not be challenged if the programs are eliminated, and perhaps also that their children will lose status and future prospects. But how about stories interviewing parents in schools that have eliminated gifted programs?
PS 9 in Brooklyn, at parents’ request, began phasing out its gifted program in 2020.
PS 163 in Manhattan began phasing out its gifted program just this year.
Maybe those have worked brilliantly, maybe not. Follow-up stories are needed.
Needed: More coverage of districts that have expanded G&T
Mayor-elect Adams says the solution to the racial disparities is to add more gifted programs in Black neighborhoods — apparently restoring the situation that existed until Mayor Mike Bloomberg put in place a single, citywide test for G&T.
Before Bloomberg, each of the gifted programs in NYC’s 32 elementary school districts had its own admissions method. Under Bloomberg’s citywide test, a child in the Bronx essentially had to compete with a child in the Upper East Side. G&T programs in Black and Latino neighborhoods were closed because not enough children met the citywide standard, while those in white and racially mixed neighborhoods stayed open.
But Adams’ solution creates problems as well. District 16, a mostly Black and Latino district in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, asked the city to add a gifted program in 2015, only to change course and ask the city to eliminate it in 2019 out of fears that it might drain top students from other schools.
More stories about District 16’s experience or about other places that have expanded (or eliminated) gifted and talented could help inform discussions of Adams’ proposal.
Stories about what works — and what doesn’t — would provide a break from the seemingly endless news in which there are two diametrically opposed positions and too few facts.
Clara Hemphill is a visiting journalist at the Russell Sage Foundation and the founding editor of InsideSchools.org. She is writing a book about the prospects for school integration in gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn. You can follow her at @clarahemphill.
Previously from The Grade:
Covering gifted education through an equity lens
Reflections on 8 years covering NYC schools
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The Grade
Launched in 2015, The Grade is a journalist-run effort to encourage high-quality coverage of K-12 education issues.
