the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) submitted an amicus brief to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. School Committee of the City of Boston. In its brief, the Association presented published position statements, articles, and policy positions in support of the Boston School Committee’s efforts to remove barriers of access and ensure greater equity for all students in the admissions process for its three exam schools.
Tag: gifted-and-talented
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NAGC Files Amicus Brief in Support of Equitable Access to Exam Schools in Boston
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Adams & Banks are putting lipstick on a pig: Separate gifted-and-talented classes are bad educational practice that drive segregation
Integration researchers and advocates like us have been recommending for years that all students in all classrooms deserve access to opportunities to challenge and stimulate their learning and creativity. Rather than telling kids that they’re in G&T or they’re out, the city should implement a gifted-for-all approach, shifting to a system focused on differentiation within mixed-ability classrooms, equipping teachers to provide high-quality instruction that includes project-based learning and challenge, and ensuring that there are entry points for all students.
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New York City to Expand Gifted and Talented Program but Scrap Test
In fall 2020, when an admission test was used, just 4 percent of offers went to Black pre-K students, according to data from the Department of Education. That percentage rose to 11 percent when a universal screen was used in fall 2021. Seven percent of offers went to Hispanic students in 2020, compared with 13 percent in 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/nyregion/nyc-gifted-talented.html
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WERE BLACK AND HISPANIC KINDERGARTENERS UNDER-REPRESENTED AND RACIALLY SEGREGATED IN GIFTED & TALENTED PROGRAMS IN 2018-2019?
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Asian and white students comprised more than three-quarters of students across all Gifted & Talented programs in 2018-2019, despite being about a third of the overall kindergarten cohort.
Conversely, Black and Hispanic kindergarteners comprised 63 percent of the kindergarten population but only 16 percent of students in Gifted & Talented programs.
The disparity was particularly acute for Hispanic students. Despite being much more numerous across all kindergarten programs (40.1 percent) than Black students (22.9 percent), Hispanic students were only moderately ahead of Black students with respect to participation in Gifted & Talented programs (9.3 percent versus 6.7 percent).
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Thinking through gifted and talented education in New York City public schools: One parent’s reflection on the system
How does the process work? Four-year-olds take a nationally normed standardized test (actually, two tests, the NNAT and the OLSAT, which are supposed to measure reasoning ability and general intellectual aptitude). No bubble sheets: It’s administered in person by an adult. Those above 90th percentile qualify for district programs. Those above 97th percentile qualify for citywide programs.
Those are the technical qualification thresholds. In practice, you need a 99 to qualify for a citywide school and usually something like a 95 to qualify for a districtwide program, though it depends on the district.
Once you get in the door as a kindergartener, you stay in the school or program through fifth grade (in the case of district programs) or eighth or 12th (in the case of citywide schools).
If this strikes you as kind of nuts, well, that’s because it is: A test taken on one day as a 4-year-old, a test for which your parents can prepare you, can put you on one track, separate and apart from your peers, for your whole K-12 education. -
SHSAT Assembly Testimony: Race, Gifted & Talented, and Tracking in NYC: Dr. Roda, et. al
Dr-Roda-SHS_testimony_20190520_finalBelow are some excerpts from Dr. Roda’s paper on SHSAT, gifted and talented, and tracking in NYC.
In particular, our research-based recommendations, described below, call on the Chancellor and Mayor to phase out G&T programs and replace them with equitable and integrated desegregated schools and classroom settings with culturally responsive and sustaining curriculum. We also strongly recommend that the city eliminate test-based enrollment screens at the elementary, middle, and high schools across the city and replace them with a more holistic approach that includes diversity targets.
Admissions at New York City’s Specialized High Schools (SHS) is fiercely debated. One proposal for addressing the dismal percentage of Black and Latinx students admitted to these schools is to expand the number of G&T programs in elementary and middle schools. Supporters offer this solution in contrast to the mayor’s proposal to diversify the SHS with guaranteed spots for a set percentage of high achieving students from middle schools across the city.1 They hope that expanding the number of G&T seats will help Black and Latinx students compete for admission into selective middle and high schools—essentially diversifying the G&T to SHS pipeline.
What these pro-G&T advocates are overlooking, however, is that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein already tried that approach back in 2008, and their measure failed, largely because in adopting a single test for admissions they traded one inequitable method for another. Research has shown a tight correlation between test scores and socio-economic status (SES). It should come as no surprise, then, that test-based admissions systems achieve segregation, especially in school systems like New York City where race and class are tightly intertwined. Predictably, year after year, the G&T student population is disproportionately White and Asian with approximately 70 percent testing into G&T while only comprising 30 percent of the overall public school population. Meanwhile, 30 percent of Black and Latinx students are enrolled in
the G&T programs, compared to 70 percent of students citywideDiane Ravitch, historian of New York City schools, wrote about the G&T admissions change to a single test score in 2008: “Any education researcher could have predicted this result, because children from advantaged homes are far likelier to know the vocabulary on a standardized test than children who lack the same advantages.” Yet other methods of admissions to G&T programs are equally problematic. Indeed, the Bloomberg/Klein shift to using a standardized test for access to G&T programs was in response to inequalities in G&T admissions that existed at the time, which used a variety of criteria, including teacher recommendations and private (and expensive) psychological valuations. A recent study found that nationally Black students with high standardized test scores are less likely to receive G&T services than White students with similar scores, and suggests that teacher discretion (and teachers’ racial background) explains some of this difference. Ultimately, what seems like a commonsense solution to diversify the G&T to SHS pipeline, by prepping and testing all children, is actually not going to have the desired effect of increased diversity in SHS, because G&T programs suffer from the same segregating forces as the SHS.
Attempting to expand and diversify G&T programs also does not address the core problem of separating students into ‘dual school systems’ operating at the curricular level within public school settings.7 Instead of public schools becoming the ‘great equalizer’ in society, through
G&T tracking, city schools are labeling some students as more likely to succeed than others, and that label is disproportionately being given to White and Asian students coming from families with advantaged backgrounds. Critics of G&T tracking bring attention to the academic and
social harms of segregation, including achievement and opportunity gaps and negative stereotypes.Another proposal put forth to diversify G&T programs, and SHS, is to prep and test more students. However, during Chancellor Carranza’s testimony on the SHS admissions he reported that even as more Black and Latinx students were prepped for the test, and a higher number of
students took the test last year, the number of Black and Latinx students who qualified for SHS did not increase. This is because prepping and testing more students does not mean more students will pass the cutoff score. In fact the cut-off score needed for admissions to the SHS is a
moving target based on who else took the test and how they scored. The SHSAT is norm-referenced; it compares test-taking students to each other, not to some set of curricular standards, and because there are a discrete number of seats available, increasing the number of students who take the test merely drives acceptance rates down -
Chancellor Carranza’s Gifted & Talented Remarks at the CEC4 Townhall
Recently at the district 4 education townhall, Chancellor Carranza was asked a fairly complex question on Gifted and Talented programs.
Parents wanted to know what your vision for G&T education is? Can you commit that G&T education will always be a part of the DOE? What are your positions in terms of access to G&T education both at the kindergarten level, changing the entry points for that, and also possibly changing the SHSAT and the access to the specialized high schools?
How do we get and replicate the diversity that exists at this G&T school [ i.e., TAG citywide gifted and talented school] that does amazing work for an incredibly diverse population of learners? How do we replicate that in other schools and get more schools like TAG?
The Chancellor gave an amazing impromptu answer. Which I believe does a superb job of collecting the main arguments against New York’s Gifted and Talented and SHSAT practices.
I transcribed the following from an impromptu speech. There may be grammatical errors.
That’s a whole lot of topics right there. So let me try to be succinct. When we talk about differentiating instruction for different learners most people ( and I’m guilty since I just said here in this public meeting ) think about students that have to have curriculum differentiated because they have learning disabilities. But it’s the same concept for differentiating learning for gifted students.
You can’t put a gifted student in the traditional classroom with a traditional curriculum and expect them not to be bored or expect them not to be less than motivated. So you have to differentiate along the entire curriculum. [But] here’s the challenge that I have with gifted and talented programs as I see them right now in New York City. And I’ve visited a lot of gifted and talented programs.
When you have over 35% of your students being designated as gifted and talented, we need to bottle the water that we’re drinking and ship it all over the place because that is so far beyond the percentage of gifted and talented that, from a statistical perspective, should be found in the population. I’m just being honest with you. So what it tells me is the mechanisms that we’re using to identify true “gifted and talentedness” is perhaps are not the most robust and truly [accurate way to] identify gifted and talented students.
Think about “How do we currently identify admitting programs for a student that is gifted and talented?”
Well, you have to sign up for a test, and then you take the test…
I just read in the Wall Street Journal that parents are paying $400 an hour to tutor their four-year-olds for this gifted and talented test. Then, you look at who is being identified for gifted and talented. Think about the 1.1 million students in the New York City Department of Education, 70% of whom are black and Latino students, yet don’t even come close to representing the gifted and talented pool of students in our system. I am no detective but somethings not right. The exclusive process of using a test, at four years old, to identify a student for gifted and talented measures their privilege. And I’m not talking about wealth. I’m talking about the privilege in the home of a student rather than the true giftedness or talentedness of a student.
We need to make sure that the processes that we’re using to identify students for gifted and talented are truly research-based, evidence-based, and not skewed against any one particular group of students. That being said, I think it’s important to have gifted and talented programs in a school system. I’m not against gifted and talented, but we’ve got some work to do around, not only how we identify students, but also where those programs are across our entire program.
Now elevate that conversation. Part of the way we’re doing that is that we’re spending time going to programs across the system and identifying programs that have great practices. So I can tell you people have already visited this program here [ i.e., TAG ] and have taken some really good notes about what are the best practices. We’re working with our superintendents and our principals and our executive superintendents. So we’re gathering from the field what is happening.
Just to take that one step further, ask the question about specialized high schools and specialized high school admissions. It’s the same thing. A lot of people have made a lot a lot a lot a lot of an issue about the specialized high school admissions testing. They’ve said, “chancellor why in the world are you spending all this time around eight particular schools?”
I don’t call them elite schools. They’re not elite schools. They are specialized schools. I could take you to schools that have no screens. I could take you to schools that take whoever comes and registers in their school that are doing phenomenal things for kids and graduated great students.
What do great schools do? Let me tell you where I stand on the specialized school because everybody’s read about it. The notion that you can test a four-year-old and tutor him to be successful on a test. I saw a lot of people say yeah that’s not okay. But think about what we do to our students that desire to go to a specialized school? They may desire to go to a specialized school; God bless America, more power to them. I’m all for it. My oldest daughter who just graduated from college, but my oldest daughter when I lived in San Francisco went to a specialized school. She did — total transparency.
Now, why do I tell you this? Because in our system when we tell students in middle school, “we want you to go to school every single day.” Don’t miss school. Sound right? We want you to do well in your school. We want you to do well in English and Math and Social Studies and Science. We want you to get involved in a sport. We want you to play an instrument. We want you to dance. We want you to paint. We want you to volunteer. None of that matters if you want to go to a specialized school because all the matters is that you take one test on one Saturday for a few hours and get a certain cut score and guess what? You get the opportunity. “Opportunity,” make sure we’re clear on that, an opportunity to go to a specialized school. It doesn’t matter what your grades are. It doesn’t matter what your attendance is. It doesn’t matter what your community involvement is. And we know for a fact that there are families, God bless them, and some that can’t afford it and go without to pay lots of money for many years to tutor their children for the specialized admissions test.
By the way, that test is not aligned to state standards. When we’re telling students to do well in school, and do well in their classes, what they’re doing is doing well in the state standards and the curriculum. A curriculum that gets them to master what the state of New York has said to do. But that doesn’t matter because if you want to go to specialized school, we want you to study and get tutoring for another test that’s not aligned to state standards! It doesn’t matter if you go to school to give it all your all. Because if you do well on this test, you get the opportunity.
I don’t know about you, but we’re selling our families a bill of goods and there is not one psychometrician. Not one that has validated that specialized high school admissions test as valid or reliable for identifying the gifted and talented-ness of students to go to a specialized school. So we have a flawed test that has now been memorialized into state law.
Remember I told you I lived all over the United States. I’ve never seen a state legislature codify for local control a single process for admitting to a certain sect of schools. I said that to the lawmakers in Albany as well. I’ve never seen this! Talk about local control.
So what I’m saying is there are other ways. When my daughter went to a specialized school, she had to take an admissions test that was aligned to the state standards in California. Because we lived in California at the time. On top of that, she had to write an essay. On top of that, she had to get teacher recommendations. On top of that, all of her grades from middle school counted to composite that gave a different picture on what it was that she was. Her extracurricular activities all counted and it wasn’t just one way of getting into a specialized school. It was multiple ways of getting into a specialized school which gave more opportunity to more kids.
Now if you don’t believe me just on those things that the system is flawed? Consider this. There are 165 specialized schools in the United States of America. 165. Of the 165 specialized schools in the United States of America, there are only eight that use a single test as a sole criteria for admissions to a specialized school. And guess where all eight of those are? New York City. So either we’ve got it all figured out or perhaps oh and by the way that specialized admissions test the analysis has shown that it is also flawed against girls, women. There are less females that are able to show admittance to specialized schools based on that test.
So it’s not only flawed. Stuyvesant High School this past year of the hundreds of students admitted to the freshman class, but there were ten black students admitted to Stuyvesant. Yet the percentage of students but there were less than 30 black and brown kids that got into Stuyvesant this past year based on that test. But 70% of the students in the New York City Department of Education are black and Latino.
You show me show me a test, show me a psychometrician that has validated that test, show me the data that shows we are giving the opportunity to all students in the New York City Department of Education and I’m listening. Nobody’s been able to do that. It has to change. And when we have that kind of a disparity in our admissions process to a public school. We have to have that conversation. And I’m going to be doing that.
CEC District 4 Townhall February 12th, 2019
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SHSAT History: New York Specialized High School Admission Policies Have Changed Over the Years
A new reform movement was launched in 1996 when a report issued by the community-activist organization ACORN branded the high-stake one-shot admissions test a form of educational apartheid. They were supported by Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, but once again the campaign failed because of deeply entrenched political opposition.
In 1995 the city opened a Specialized High Schools Institute (SHSI), city-run preparatory program that was supposed to even out performance on the SHSAT and make admissions to the specialized high schools fairer, however with the plethora of private tutoring agencies it failed to improve ethnic balance at the schools.
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To integrate specialized high schools, are gifted programs part of the problem or the solution?
“We’re working to raise the bar for all kids,” Carranza said in a statement to Chalkbeat. “We also have to think about access and barriers to entry, and that includes whether we’re creating unnecessary barriers by tracking students at the age of 4 or 5 years old based on a single test.”