NYC Gifted and Talented Program and Testing

Well, we knew this one was coming. The new Chancellor for NYC schools says that only the privileged are in the gifted and talented program across the city. Let’s tell that to the first generation American-Chinese parent who is living on a measly salary she gets while working at the fish market in China town. No, it’s not about privileged, it’s about priorities for parenting! Time and time again studies have shown that regardless of race or socio-economic status if the parent is involved in their child’s education that child will be successful in school.  The top high schools in the city, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, both have 30% of their student populations qualify for free lunch (translation: they are poor). The sad fact is that the vast majority of those students are Asian descent. This doesn’t fit the narrative for the new Chancellor so therefore he conveniently leaves that fact out of anything he says that doesn’t support his political agenda. The easiest solution to this issue is to have all universal pre-K students take the G&T test unless the parent opts-out of the test. This way parents who don’t know about the program don’t have to worry about not being included in the testing. It’s about educating the parents about the program and sometimes the best thing is to just do the testing.  There should also be the ranking within each district for entry into the program. For example, if the highest score in a district is 94 percentile than use that score as the ceiling for the qualification point for the program and work your way down from there. This type of attribution could entice parents to move to certain districts that in the past they would have never considered.

And what if the G&T test went away? What about the tens of thousands of kids already in the program? How is the DOE going to cope with that madness? And also the sibling preference when parents would then send their child to their local school, which is most likely already overcrowded. There are too many foreseen and unforeseen consequences of yanking this program and the Chancellor should really think through these scenarios before mouthing off saying that it has to do with privilege when in actuality it has to do with parent involvement.

The Chancellor also never speaks a word about the contract the DOE has with Pearson, the publisher of the NYC G&T test for the OLSAT and NNAT-2.  That’s a multi-year and multi-million dollar contract the test-prep empire has with the DOE and not one I’d suspect they’d want to give up so easily.