From the New York Times news section:
Desegregation Plan: Eliminate All Gifted Programs in New York
A group appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed seismic changes to the nation’s largest school system.
By Eliza Shapiro, Aug. 26, 2019
For years, New York City has essentially maintained two parallel public school systems.
A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is filled mostly with white and Asian children. The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.
The New York City public schools as a whole are 15.1% white, 16.2% Asian, 25.5% black, 40.2% Hispanic, and 2.7% multiple or miscellaneous. 72.8% of students are said to be in poverty (presumably: qualifying for a subsidized lunch program).
At only 31% Asian and white, NYC public schools are still doing relatively well compared to other big city school districts, where 15% white and Asian is a common figure. NYC’s test scores are above average for big city school districts both overall and by race. NYC public schools after 20 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg as mayors are not disasters like, say, San Francisco’s.
In fact, Manhattan and Brooklyn have had a bit of a white baby boom in this decade as white parents have grown optimistic that can send their kids to public schools at least for a few years.
Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these selective programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.
Mr. de Blasio, who has staked his mayoralty on reducing inequality, has the power to adopt some or all of the proposals without input from the State Legislature or City Council. If he does, the decision would fundamentally reshape a largely segregated school system and could reverberate in school districts across the country.
The mayor will now be thrust into the center of a sensitive debate about race and class at home, even as he is straining to stand out in a crowded field of Democratic contenders for president.
He risks alienating tens of thousands of mostly white and Asian families whose children are enrolled in the gifted programs and selective schools. If a substantial number of those families leave the system, it would be even more difficult to achieve integration.
Ya think?
About a quarter of the city’s middle and high schools require that students be screened — through exams, attendance rates and grades — for admission. New York screens more students for its schools than any other city in the country, and those screened schools tend to have a disproportionately white and Asian enrollment….
But Richard A. Carranza, the schools chancellor, made desegregation his signature issue when he took the job in 2018, denouncing racial inequality and promising sweeping action. He has specifically questioned whether too many students were being labeled “gifted.”
Carranza is the mariachi musician from the Southwest (really) who looks like he played bass for Los Lobos. While his career flourished in imposing additional leftist bad ideas on already disastrous school districts like San Francisco, I’ve been predicting he may not have what it takes to survive in the NYC snakepit.
… The panel’s report, obtained by The New York Times, amounts to a repudiation of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda, which reoriented the system toward school choice for families, including more gifted and screened schools, to combat decades of low performance.
Some of those policies deepened inequality even as student achievement rose.
… The panel recommended that the city replace gifted and screened schools with new magnet schools — which have been used in other cities to attract a diverse group of students interested in a particular subject matter — along with enrichment programs that are open to students with varying academic abilities.
If the mayor adopts the recommendations, elementary and middle schools would no longer be able to admit students based solely or largely on standardized exams or other academic prerequisites, and high schools would have diversity requirements.
… Though it may be months before the mayor issues a decision, the release of the recommendations is likely to set off an intracity battle in a public school system that is nearly 70 percent black and Hispanic and mostly low-income.
It’s almost as if the problem is we are running out of white children to exploit to solve the problems of everybody else.
… Last year, New York’s elementary school gifted classes enrolled about 16,000 students and were nearly 75 percent white and Asian. Black and Hispanic enrollment in the programs has plummeted over the last decade, after Mr. Bloomberg’s attempt to diversify them by creating a test-based threshold for admission backfired.
My vague recollection is that Bloomberg thought that the problem was bias in admissions procedures, so he determined to use a completely unbiased system, at which, of course, it turned out that Asians and whites did much better than blacks and Latinos.
Still, the so-called School Diversity Advisory Group acknowledged that the city would have to take pains to prevent middle-class families from fleeing the system.
If those students decamp to private schools or to the suburbs, “it will become even more difficult to create high-quality integrated schools,” in New York, the report said. The panel wrote that “high-achievement students deserve to be challenged,” but in different ways. …
The city should get rid of the standardized admissions exam for elementary school gifted programs, which is offered to prospective Kindergarten students and has sparked a cottage industry of expensive test preparation for toddlers, the panel said.
New York liberals are hilariously notorious for paying through the nose to test prep their 4-year-olds for the private kindergarten admissions test.
Mr. de Blasio should also place a moratorium on new gifted programs, stop most grouping by academic ability and phase out existing gifted classes by not admitting new students, the panel said. If the recommendations are accepted, New York would shed its current gifted offerings within about five years.
In order to integrate high schools, the panel recommended that the city not open any new screened high schools, eliminate geographic zones as a criteria [sic] for admission and should not consider lateness or attendance in evaluating prospective students.
Also, don’t worry about who punches whom in the boys’ room.
As the city has tried for decades to improve its underperforming schools, it has long relied on accelerated academic offerings and screened schools, including the specialized high schools, to entice white families to stay in public schools.
But at the same time, white, Asian and middle-class families have sometimes exacerbated segregation by avoiding neighborhood schools, and instead choosing gifted programs or other selective schools. In gentrifying neighborhoods, some white parents have rallied for more gifted classes, which has in some cases led to segregated classrooms within diverse schools.
Here’s how the Circle of Life works in public school systems that aren’t completely doomed:
- Dumb administrators ban some word they’ve decided is racist such as “tracking.”
- Smart parents and teachers come up with some other word that isn’t yet considered racist like “gifted.” After all, it couldn’t possibly be that Asians and whites are more likely to be “gifted” than blacks and Hispanics. Science has proven that racist idea wrong!
- Eventually, the dumb administrators and politicians figure out that gifted programs work much like tracking programs, so they ban gifted programs. Instead, we’ll have magnet schools.
- The smart parents and teachers figure out how to manipulate the magnet schools so that the good students cluster in some magnet schools and not in others.
- The dumb admins eventually figure this out, and around and around we go.
Of course, sometimes the dumb admins win a permanent victory and destroy the public schools for everyone, like in San Francisco.
