When former mayor Bill de Blasio promised to dismantle New York City’s gifted education programs, then-candidate Eric Adams laudably promised to save, reform and expand them. Since taking the helm, however, his actual policies and actions deserve scant praise—middling improvements paired with major regressions.
Earlier this year, for example, the Adams team expanded the number of sites for gifted education at the elementary level but scrapped the use of tests as a screening component—despite ample research supporting their use—and made school grades the sole determinant for inclusion. It then set the standards so low that two-thirds of students qualify for services, making the eligible range of achievement levels so wide that the programs are now “gifted” in name only: They can no longer feature the increased pacing and rigor that makes gifted education worthwhile.
Taken together, hizzoner’s changes have transformed gifted education in the lower grades into a glorified lottery based on the wrong measures, with students earning the best grades no likelier to win seats as those who barely make the cutoff.
As for high schools, the mayor did great work by creating three new selective schools that will open this fall—reducing needless scarcity. But that work is incomplete, as demand still far exceeds supply, forcing lotteries to operate here, as well.
To Adams’s credit, he clearly recognizes how much we risk if we’re cavalier with the education of America’s top-performing students. He understands that we need advanced learners to be highly educated to ensure our long-term competitiveness, security, and innovation. He also inherited a situation that was confusing, contentious, and headed towards abolition. Resurrecting it alone warrants applause—and may reverberate elsewhere.
Because of its size and cultural footprint, New York City models policy for countless other school systems, directs curriculum and textbook sellers, and influences education debates around the country.
And our country is in need of a stellar model in the realm of advanced learning. Years ago—immediately following Sputnik, for example—the U.S. took it seriously. But half a century of education policies have shoved it to the side, even to a place of skepticism and derision. Only two-thirds of districts offer any such programming, for instance, and in many places that do offer it, services are nothing more than meager supplements that are unlikely to make much of a difference in their students’ achievement, and are staffed with teachers who have not been trained to educate bright students.
In pursuit of a roadmap for districts across the land to do a better job of educating their advanced learners, a working group of diverse education experts—including one of us—convened last year to develop a report that summarizes the research on gifted education and recommends best practices. Its analysis suggests that New York City faces three big but solvable problems in this realm: the process for screening students is prone to bias and error, the programming in the city is needlessly all or nothing, and gifted services are far too scarce.
To solve problem one, the city should screen every single student in its schools using not only teacher-conferred grades, but also data from state standardized tests. Doing this in every grade for every child, instead of relying on a single age-based screening point that students must opt into, is an empirically-grounded method to identify intellectually gifted children from all strata of society.
For problems two and three, Adams should expand the number of seats at the elementary level, open more selective high schools, and mandate that every middle-school pupil in the city has access to advanced learning opportunities. In place of the city’s current dichotomous, you’re-in-or-you’re-out system where selective schools serve only a selective few, offer a “continuum of services”: separate schools or classrooms will be best for certain students, for example; in-class achievement grouping will suffice for others; and some should skip entire grades.
Mayor Adams is on the right track and deserves praise for rescuing advanced education from the abyss. They no doubt hope to eventually construct a gifted education system that serves every advanced student. But in its current form, the system falls short.
