(no subject)

[conuly]

New York City to eliminate gifted and talented school program after years of opponents saying that it segregated students

This isn't surprising. NYC has been doing its darndest to de-emphasize selective admission programs for middle and high schools over the past decade, so it's not a shock that they'd head towards elementary as soon as possible.

And while this decision is sure to be unpopular among all the usual suspects, it's the right call. G&T screening in kindy is ridiculous, and that's not helped by the fact that it's a 100% opt-in program - don't have the time to take off of work to take your kid to the test? No G&T for you! Don't have the time, money, and know-how to have your kid do test prep? Probably no G&T for you, because surprisingly, that test prep actually works to get a kid over the edge... especially a kid who already has all the advantages because they're growing up in a moderately well-off home with educated, literate parents who can afford to have a full-time one-on-one caretaker and/or the best kind of group daycare.

The downside is that I don't think the DoE is really going to adequately "enrich" the curriculum for these and other students. That would require funding.

Comments

[dewline]

There are things I want to say about such decisions as these that will not be in any way polite or kind to supporters of those decisions.

I will settle for this: I could have escaped a kind of hell had I gotten into such a program at the right age. I could have been mentally healthier if I'd gotten into such a program at the right age. I might have been a more productive person...IF.

And instead I am what I am now. Whatever that is.

How many kids in NYC are going to be made to know that pain now and in the years to come?

How many?

[conuly]

As a graduate of NYC's G&T programs, I can definitively say that you are not speaking from experience.

[dewline]

I am not speaking from your experience, true as it also is, but from mine alone.

I'll leave it at that.

[marahmarie]

Does it (or did it in your case specifically) seem to confer any advantages academically or otherwise?

[sabotabby]

Not in NYC, but I went through one of those programs from Grade 4 to 8. (Where I grew up, the screening happens in third grade.)

It was utter hell. There was no understanding that a better working definition of gifted (currently favoured by special education teachers) isn't "super intelligent and great at everything" but "unevenly distributed intelligence, frequently coupled with learning disabilities, autism, and ADHD." So basically the teachers had high expectations for academic performance coupled with low expectations for socialization, empathy, and generalized acting like a human.

The result was a Petri dish for bullying. The regular kids wanted nothing to do with us, we were constantly being told that we were better than them, and you were stuck in the same classes, with the same people, for 4 years (longer if you did high school, but art school was my salvation). Some kids really absorbed the superiority messaging and lorded it over everyone else. I was not one of those kids. There was a pecking order and I was almost at the bottom, jockeying for lowest in social status with two others. One of whom repeatedly sexually assaulted me for those four years, and it was ignored by everyone because think of his bright future.

As far as I know, even with a better understanding of what gifted entails, there are still huge problems with these programs. I work with kids who were traumatized by schooling in general, and a significant percentage of them come to us from gifted every year. They're anxious, depressed, and directionless. It's especially bad for those with marginalized and especially racialized identities.

Almost everyone I know who went through one of these programs is an anxious, depressed adult now. They seem to harm children in two ways—first, by pulling funding and resources out of regular programs, and second, by traumatizing the kids that do go through them.

The problem is getting rid of them means that it's going to divert funding and parental advocacy from public schools into private, because they're not going to now redirect the funding to enrich public schools, they'll just pull it altogether. And privileged parents, who tend to be the loudest advocates for schools, will pull their kids out of mainstream public schools for private.

My solution, of course, is 1) fund public schools properly to allow enrichment for all students, and supports for the weaker ones so that the more academic kids aren't just stuck tutoring for "enrichment" and 2) fund it enough that you can have smaller schools, like mine, which are publicly funded but address the social-emotional needs and intellectual curiosity of kids who struggle in a large school environment. But that would be putting student needs above bean quantification requirements, so it'll never happen.

[conuly]

And privileged parents, who tend to be the loudest advocates for schools, will pull their kids out of mainstream public schools for private.

NYC private schools already have far too many applicants per seat, so unless the parents intend to move (which they might do) it's not that likely.

Also, everything you said here is familiar to me, but add in the extra fact that if you screen before kindy you're getting a really mixed bag because you cannot reliably test for IQ or learning disabilities at that age.

[flamingsword]

I have so many mixed feelings about gifted and talented classes. I would literally not have stuck it through high school if it were not for GT English’s less structured environment, but I was in AP History and that sucked exactly the way y’all are describing.

[silveradept]

I hear you about how funding is so curiously absent for schools to enrich all their students, and I wouldn't be surprised if the amount missing from proper funding matches the amount of non-White students enrolled in the schools.

What would have been good for me would have been an environment where I could be challenged in the learning and that provided good scaffolding for me to develop resilience and persistence in terms of failure, rather than an environment where I felt I had to be ready to defend myself against people looking to pounce on a weakness. Building that kind of environment for everyone would absolutely take lots of funding to achieve. And, quite possibly, even more funding outside the school realm to make someone's home life and neighborhood life come up to a standard where a student can actually believe they're going to be safe enough to learn.