A better approach to accelerating education in the early grades
The debate over how New York City schools should implement gifted education — or whether it should exist at all — has resurfaced in the mayor’s race. I have followed this debate for years, starting with the proposed Bloomberg-era reforms two decades ago, and the entire situation frustrates me to no end. We have known for a long time that there are better ways to do advanced education, most of them built on common sense.
An important caveat is that the current brouhaha was spurred by the mayoral candidates’ brief responses to pre-election surveys and subsequent sound bites from campaign spokespeople. We have a general sense of what each candidate would do if elected, but details are few and far between.
The big brushstrokes are that, frustrated that current programs disproportionately serve white and Asian-American students and are a source of de facto student segregation, Zohran Mamdani wants to do away with the gifted program’s kindergarten entry point; what happens next in his vision is unclear. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, pushing back on this proposal as hostile to student excellence and contrary to the best interests of many New York families, say they would expand seats in the program.
First, a quick primer on the system we have and how it came to be. For decades, the city used a test for four-year-olds to determine who would qualify for special gifted and talented classes. Although designed to level the playing field, in fact the test wound up reinforcing existing socioeconomic divides. Parents with money and others with a strong inclination to prepare their kids for the test got their kids to qualify and fill these accelerated classes; the vast majority of the city, predominantly black and Latino kids, wound up on the outside looking in. Mayor Bloomberg proposed changes to the entire system as early as 2005, but the most promising improvements were rolled back in response to strong parent pushback.
In part in reaction to ongoing criticisms and in part because COVID made the entry test difficult to administer, New York City scrapped the exam — and moved to a system built on pre-K teacher recommendations, followed by a lottery in cases where demand outstrips supply. Even with this change, profound inequities in access across the city remain.
The current system isn’t working optimally; to serve its purpose, either more kids need to be enrolled across a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, or it needs to be dialed back, so that general education classrooms do more to challenge kids at all levels.
A major reason for the lack of improvement is that the current system is a hodge-podge of old thinking about academic excellence, back when one-size-fits-all, find-the-gifted-child programs predominated. Within these models, students were identified and labeled as gifted as early as possible, with an emphasis on finding students who were high achievers in most subjects, under the assumption that they were very rare. These students then attended special schools and programs segregated from “less gifted” peers.
We now know better. Children may be highly talented in one area but not another, especially twice-exceptional students that have significant talents while dealing with significant learning challenges. Student interests may also wax and wane regarding certain content and topics, appearing highly motivated to study math or history one year and completely uninterested the next. This is especially true for younger students. Some students may exhibit tremendous talents in preschool, while others are late bloomers whose talents and interests develop years later. Researchers and educators have also developed a range of interventions that don’t require a “special schools” approach to advanced education.
“Advanced learning” vs. “gifted and talented”
If I could wave a magic wand to redesign the system, I’d start with this thought experiment: What if the term “gifted and talented” didn’t exist in education, and we focused more on students capable of advanced learning? The key educational questions would become “How do we meet the academic needs of our advanced students?” and “How can we get more students to perform at advanced levels?”
This isn’t a semantic distinction. I often find myself in conversations where people rail about the evils of “gifted education.” When they finish their speech, I ask if they have similar complaints about AP, high school honors courses, student artistic competitions and varsity sports. The response is almost always, “Um, no?” My follow-up question is, “Do you want to get rid of all advanced programs, or do you want your child to have greater opportunities to receive advanced services?” Or put differently, “Do you want your child to have no playing field, or a level one that has fewer barriers to entry?” The answer is always, “A level one.”
In other words, lots of people have problems with the g-word, but I rarely meet people who have a problem with advanced learning and academic excellence, especially if opportunities for advanced learning are widely available. This observation feels like the foundation of a new conversation, one focused less on ideology and more on meeting the needs of our children.
A system focused on advanced education would include two practical sets of interventions: identifying students who “need more” and providing them with educational experiences that give them the opportunity for more. As described below, “more” is best defined by educators and parents in each school and community. For example, in one school the regular math curriculum may be rather advanced already, but instruction in advanced writing may be needed. Another school that has never offered such opportunities in any subject may need to offer more academic challenge and rigor across the board. But the focus should shift from “find the gifted child” to “figure out who needs more advanced opportunity.”
Fresh thinking on interventions
Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks about what a research-informed talent development system would look like in New York City, and the suggestions are all worth considering. But I’ll point to the change that strikes me as the foundation for everything else: Make advanced learning available in every school, because every school has students who need more or are capable of learning more if given the right opportunities.
Having advanced services in all schools facilitates identification strategies such as universal screening (which helps identify overlooked low-income students) and using local norms (looking at who needs more within each school and community, rather than citywide). Taking things a step further, the push to find students who need more should occur every year (and throughout each year!), not just at a handful of specific grade levels. And having advanced programs in every school would greatly facilitate a critically important change: Identifying students who need or want more in specific subjects and not all subjects. These identification changes alone, though not sufficient, would radically change the city’s approach to talent development.
Once New York has improved its identification strategies and emphasized the need for advanced education in every school, several other, helpful interventions would flow quite naturally: A curriculum designed to help teachers work with students learning both below- and above-grade-level (a “pre-differentiated” curriculum); a mix of acceleration strategies (allowing students to move at a faster pace) and enrichment activities (allowing students to dive deeper into select curriculum); afterschool, weekend and summer experiences that allow students to explore advanced topics with likeminded peers; partnerships with community colleges and universities to provide advanced experiences, perhaps as early as middle school. Perhaps most importantly, schools should implement an automatic enrollment, in which high-performing students are automatically placed in advanced coursework the following year. This policy is being successfully implemented across the country, at the school, district and state levels, and is another necessary condition for a modern advanced learning system.
And here’s the best part: This approach need not cost more money than the current system! We are talking about the same number of students and the same number of teachers. The change comes not from adding new services; it comes from replacing services and being creative in how they are administered. Initial investments may be required, but over the medium- and long-term, costs should remain the same.
My response to well-intentioned people on both sides of the current debate is “yes.” Yes, the current program has created huge inequities that especially disadvantage bright Black, Latino and lower-income students. Yes, advanced education is critically important for the economic and cultural well-being of our students and communities. Yes, advanced education in the city’s public schools is artificially scarce by design and doesn’t reach nearly all of the students who would benefit from it.
And yes, we can replace the city’s antiquated approach to academic excellence with pragmatic, research-based reforms that have the potential to transform the city. But will we have the leadership bold enough to make this happen?