The Debate Over Gifted Programs for Children

One of the issues where Zohran Mamdani has backed away from his own extreme views has to do with education. Mamdani made news a few weeks ago when he announced he planned to do away with the city's gifted program for Kindergarten students. That decision was immediately controversial.

Children are selected during pre-K by their teachers; a previous system that tested 4-year-olds was abandoned four years ago.

But it can play an outsize role in directing students’ educational paths and regularly emerges as among the most provocative education issues in the nation’s largest school system.

The highly selective program is often viewed as a steppingstone to the city’s competitive middle and high schools. Many families clamor for access to gifted classes as a way of ensuring that high-achieving children can be challenged and receive prime educational opportunities in later grades.

But critics say the gifted program exacerbates inequality in a school system deeply divided along lines of race and income. Black and Latino students are enrolled in gifted classes at far lower levels than their overall presence in the public school system.

Being against gifted programs for Kindergarteners may sound pretty niche but it's actually part of a whole approach to education championed by woke academics and politicians. Those who are against gifted programs are also usually against tracking in junior high and high school and against standardized testing for high school and for college admissions. The reasons for these views all boil down to the same thing. The current system results in a big achievement gap where Asian and white kids do well and Hispanic and Black kids do less well (roughly in that order). 

I've written about California's race-based fight against tracking here, here and here. I've also written against efforts in other states to do away with gifted programs (always for the same reason). And I've written about the push against standardized testing here. All of this relies on the same type of analysis. If there are differences in outcome then the tests/tracking/gifted programs are racist.

Today the NY Times (in fact the same author) has a story up going into detail about the differing views over gifted programs.

In New York City, families sparred over whether a few thousand 4-year-olds should be funneled into gifted education programs.

In Seattle, teachers disagreed on how to improve the dismal enrollment rates of Black and Latino students in schools for gifted pupils, a problem decades in the making.

And in Fairfax County, Va., school leaders wrestled with a thorny question: Should we still label children “gifted”?

As always, the underlying issue is race.

More than three million U.S. public school students are estimated to be enrolled in gifted programs. But those programs are a lightning rod, because the divide between who gets in and who is left out often falls along lines of race, income and disability status.

Imagine two students: one from an especially affluent household and another whose family lives well below the poverty line. Both perform at the same level in their core classes. Yet the child from the affluent family will be twice as likely to receive gifted services, research shows...

“It’s a real pipeline problem,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “If you care about getting more kids of color and low-income kids into college, if you care about diversifying professions, all of that has got to start early.”

It's true that this issue starts early but the fact is that for many kids, being gifted stars even before they reach 1st grade. Removing the gifted intake program for kindergarteners is intended to give more Black and Hispanic kids time to catch up before the gifted program begins in 3rd grade. But inevitably this also means the gifted kids are being allowed to languish a bit while those other kids catch up. Equity always involves kicking the gifted kids in the kneecaps. This has to be done to erase the advantage some kids have when they start school.

Significant differences in vocabulary and language development skills between students from affluent families and those from disadvantaged households can manifest before children ever step foot in a classroom.

If districts are to tackle those gaps, many will need more time. “That’s not going to happen in one or two years,” said Sneha Shah-Coltrane, who leads advanced learning and gifted education at the state education agency in North Carolina, which automatically enrolls high achievers in advanced math starting in third grade.

If you follow the link above it goes to a story which concludes big differences in English facility can be present as soon as 2-years old and those differences often correlate with socio-economic status (SES).

English-learning infants (n = 48) were followed longitudinally from 18 to 24 months, using real-time measures of spoken language processing...The most important findings were that significant disparities in vocabulary and language processing efficiency were already evident at 18 months between infants from higher- and lower-SES families, and by 24 months there was a six-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development.

And these advantages keep multiplying before a child ever enters school.

The finding that children from disadvantaged families start kindergarten with lower language and cognitive skills than those from more advantaged families is old news, emerging repeatedly in studies since the 1950's (e.g., Bereiter & Englemann, 1966; Deutsch, Katz, & Jensen, 1968). The robustness of such differences is confirmed in more recent research such as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), a comprehensive analysis of young children's achievement scores in literacy and mathematics based on a large and nationally representative sample (Lee & Burkam, 2002). Even before they entered kindergarten, children in the highest SES-quintile group had scores that were 60% above those in the lowest group.

So, again, doing away with a gifted program in Kindergarten is designed to give some of these kids a chance to catch up. Whether it will work is open to question but the goal is clearly about equity. So it's a bit surprising that so many of the comments seem dubious that Mamdani's approach will help (this is still the NY Times after all). Here's the top comment:

I can tell you what the solution isn’t; eliminating gifted education

The number two comment is really blunt. If the equity problem seen in schools is the result of things happening in the home before school even starts, what are we supposed to do about that exactly?

Fix the elementary schools.

Fix the parents who have babies but don't read to them or even speak with them. Their children are at a terrible disadvantage when they reach kindergarten, and they do not know how to work hard enough to catch up. Their behavioral issues make it difficult for teachers to teach and other students to concentrate in class and learn. 

There's the real problem. Progressive ideologues cannot admit it.  

It's not poverty. Asians, our poorest demographic here, do just fine in school. And no, it's not because their parents buy them expensive tutors. It's because they model the virtues of hard work and respect for education.

Equity is a buzzword:

Equity as a buzzword and fad in education needs to end. Gifted students will become bored and misbehave if their needs aren't met. As a former teacher, what I saw were time and resources devoted to the special education students, to the detriment of general education and gifted students.

I'm not cherry-picking here. These are the top comments. We keep making school easier for everyone at the same time the left wants to take away the fast lane for kids who can excel.

This debate becomes ever fiercer as we continue to lower standards for "normal" students.

In my school district, they've banned homework until High School, because not all students have the support at home.  How do you assign, say, a novel to read, or a science fair project, if you can't assign homework.

My school also is very big on maintreaming special needs students, but unfortunately without the appropriate support they need.  

Expectations for behavior and discipline have also been lowered.  Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism and chronic tardiness is  a real thing (and not the school's fault, that's on parents!).

Talented and Gifted programs are a ticket to a more rigorous curriculum.  If normal curriculum was more rigorous, I doubt you'd see as much hysteria around the T&G programs.

I've had kids in the gifted program and kids in the honors program at public schools here in California so I can tell you that gifted kids don't automatically succeed and kids who don't get put in those programs can still outperform the kids who do. A lot of these outcomes have to do with the parents and what they value and whether they make education a focus from a young age. There's no substitute for that parental commitment.

And on that note, I'm just going to point out that about 42% of Black kids in the US live in a two-parent household. For Hispanic kids that percentage is 55%, for white kids it's 76% and for Asian kids it's 81%. That also happens to be the exact order in which those groups succeed in school up through college admissions and beyond. If you're looking for an explanation for why some kids excel at school and how that correlates with race and socio-economic status, I think that's a good place to start.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.