GIFTED TALENTED TEST HOW TO

Under his plan, the city would have trained roughly 4,000 educators to accommodate students with different learning abilities in their general education classes.īut Mr. The test became so controversial that an advisory board that helps the city administer it rejected the most recent test last year.īefore he left office, former Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to eliminate the gifted program and replace it with a program that offered accelerated learning to students later in elementary school. Yet Manhattan’s District 2 - one of the whitest, wealthiest districts in the city - in 2021 had nearly twice as many gifted programs as there are in all of the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. In the years after the test was introduced, gifted programs in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods all but disappeared in many parts of the city. Bloomberg more than a decade ago - puts lower-income families, many of them Black and Latino, at a disadvantage, because many live in districts that don’t have gifted and talented programs or cannot afford test preparation for their children.

The citywide test - first instituted under Mayor Michael R.

GIFTED TALENTED TEST HOW TO

Potter said city officials have spent too much time focusing on how to allot a very small number of seats to a very small percentage of the student population, and would be better off figuring out how “to make it possible to have enrichment and acceleration options that exist in mixed-ability classrooms across the city.” Merely expanding the program is unlikely to increase diversity, “especially when there haven’t been any details and guarantees that those 1,000 seats are going to reach a more diverse group of students than we’ve seen in the past,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank.

Under the existing program, rising kindergarten students who pass the citywide exam enter a lottery to either enroll in the accelerated program at their school or, if their school doesn’t have a program, they try to enroll in a school that does have one.Ĭritics of the existing program - where admission has normally hinged on a test - say it has kept out too many Black and Latino children and has weakened some regular schools by sometimes moving the strongest students and teachers into gifted and talented programs outside their districts. And immigrant families would still like to see a “more standardized and less subjective” way to evaluate children, she said. Not nearly enough seats were added, she said. Chu, who has a fifth grader who is not in the gifted and talented program, said the plan had faults. “Overall, we’re keeping the program, we’re expanding it to where there are no programs, I think that is wonderful news,” said Yiatin Chu, the co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, a group founded by white and Asian parents that supports gifted and talented schools.īut Ms. “Scaling up a program which separates students, often along lines of class and race, is a retrograde approach that does nothing to improve quality education for the overwhelming majority of our students,” said the New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, in a statement.ĭefenders of gifted and talented programs also had some concerns. There were about 1,900 kindergarten children and about 90 third graders accepted into this year’s gifted program, according to Nathaniel Steyer, a spokesman for the Department of Education, in a school system that serves more than a million students.Īnd some officials questioned the value of the gifted program itself. “Expanded access to the city’s gifted and talented programs is long overdue,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement.īut there are concerns that the plan doesn’t go far enough to address the program’s flaws, such as the small number of seats for the city’s more than 70,000 kindergartners and the few entry points into the program.

Though 70 percent of the students in the city’s school system are Black and Latino, around 75 percent of the students enrolled in gifted classes are white or Asian American. By expanding the program and permanently eliminating the admissions tests, the mayor and his schools chancellor, David Banks, are hoping to address what city officials have acknowledged for years: The gifted and talented program has contributed to racially segregated classrooms.

Gifted talented test