The kerfuffle of the morning in my social media feeds is around Bill de Blasio announcing the phase-out of New York City’s gifted and talented program in the public schools. This was, in classic NYC/BdB fashion done in the most dickish and unhelpful way possible: decided with limited input from the public and delayed until the very end of de Blasio’s term, and thus basically dumped on whoever the next Mayor ends up being.
The NYC program revolves are specialized schools with admission determined by tests administered ridiculously early—including to pre-schoolers— and as such they’ve long been a target for activists who see them as a modern-day system of segregation, favoring white and Asian kids over Black and Hispanic ones. On the other side, there are a lot of supporters outside the obvious rich-white-people demographic who point to these schools as a huge boon for poor Asian families. And, of course, there’s the usual collection of folks on the political right decrying this as yet one more step in the Harrison Bergeron-ization of modern society. There’s also a fair bit of discussion about how much difference these programs even make; one of the main ways this impinged on my awareness this morning was a Matt Yglesias thread that gives a good sense of the back-and-forth research on the question of the effectiveness of gifted programs:
I don’t have strong feelings on the New York City program per se, not being a resident of The City, nor having any interest in being one. From the outside, it seems kind of crazy— rigid tracking based on tests given to four-year-olds seems a bit much— and thus perhaps less generalizable than a lot of the arguments want you to think. It’s entirely conceivable, for example, that you could dismantle the existing NYC system and put something more localized in place that serves the kids who benefit from the current programs just as well while also being more equitable overall. I don’t think it’s a clearly good or clearly bad decision; a lot will depend on what comes next. (Another reason to wish it were being done by someone other than de Blasio…)
A huge part of what makes this such a spectacular source for hot-takery is that these programs are a perpetual topic of discussion online. Not just in an educational-results context, either— there’s a “Gifted programs ruined my life” theme that comes around Twitter at regular intervals. The core idea is that being identified as “special” in elementary or middle school and then turning out to be less exceptional in high school or college is a traumatic experience that some people never recover from. On the flip side, there’s sometimes a “Gifted programs saved my life” counter, from people who were bullied in regular classes, but found their place once moved to a different track. (That tends to be somewhat muted, though, thanks to the toxic dynamics of Twitter, but that’s a past rant…)
I find myself sort of conflicted on this question, in large part because I was never really in a formal “gifted” program in school, so don’t really have direct knowledge of them. I grew up in a rural area of not-The-City New York, and when I went through, the district didn’t really have a gifted program (they set one up for a while a few years after me, but eventually eliminated it for budget reasons). There was a significant amount of “tracking” in the school system—grades 4-6 spent half the day in “Language Arts” classes that were sorted by reading level, and there was a formal accelerated math system where selected students basically skipped seventh-grade math and started the Regents sequence a year early. I was also the beneficiary of a kind of informal tracking, in that I was part of a large-ish cohort of (mostly) teacher’s kids who the district tried to keep together in particular sections of whatever grade-level classes (sometimes designated as “honors” sections, sometimes just pushed together by parents and guidance counselors).
I was also lucky in that my father was a sixth-grade teacher in the district, and thus knew which teachers to steer me toward, and who to talk to (and sometimes badger or threaten) to get things done. After a long process of negotiation, I skipped eighth-grade English entirely, and when we started language classes in ninth grade, they arranged to let me do both French and Latin in parallel.
That led to a few experiences that were sort of weird and alienating— my ninth-grade year, I was taking tenth-grade English in a different building, so one of the teachers who moved between buildings would drive me back between classes, and to make the scheduling work I ended up taking the science sequence out of order (taking Physics as a junior and Chemistry as a senior). As a result, I spent several years in classes with kids from a different class year, who I otherwise wouldn’t’ve had much to do with, and my senior year I had two classes (AP English and AP Latin) in which I was the only student.
On the other hand, the accelerated classes were genuinely a much better experience for me, and the extra language saved me from spending an hour a day bored out of my mind in study hall. Even the awkward off-grade-level bits helped some, because they meant I spent less time around some particular kids who made seventh and eighth grade really unpleasant.
At the same time, I’m not sure I would’ve been well served by being completely removed from the “regular” school setting. While at the time I largely bought into the “they’re afraid of you because you’re smarter than them” narrative often adopted by smart kids facing social problems (I would’ve been all over Ender’s Game had I read it in that period), on looking back I can see that a good chunk of it was self-inflicted. The problem wasn’t really that I had more elevated tastes than other kids my age, it was that I had genuinely lousy social skills, and was bad at interacting with people my age who didn’t share my particular interests. To be honest, I’m still kind of bad at calibrating how much other people want to hear about whatever thing I’m on about at the moment (glances awkwardly up the page of this Substack…).
What fixed that, to the extent that it was actually fixed, was basketball. That is, my school experience didn’t get better because I got moved to a different setting or situation, but because I found some common interests with other kids that let me learn to talk with them on a better footing. The awkwardness never entirely went away, but I started to fit in a little better, and consequently am a little more comfortable dealing with a wide range of people than I might be had I been pulled completely out of the regular school.
So that’s a (maybe excessive) bit of context for my exceedingly lukewarm Take on gifted programs as a general matter. Having had the experience of being bored silly in regular classes, I am absolutely in favor of some form of accelerated education for kids who are interested and able to do it. At the same time, the NYC approach of entirely separate schools from kindergarten on seems a bit excessive, and could probably stand to be pulled back a bit.
I suspect this matters a good bit less than either side of the argument would have you believe. Kids are highly resilient, and schools today are vastly less Lord of the Flies than they were back in my day, so I think the kids losing out on special gifted schools will end up doing just fine. At the same time, I suspect the effects on inequality will, in the end, be pretty small, and we’ll have depressingly similar arguments about some other set of programs aimed at improving the lives of kids who are good at school eight or ten years from now.
That’s kind of rambling and inconclusive, but then it’s been quite the week, so… Anyway, here are the traditional buttons:
And if you have strong feelings about this that you want to share here, the comments will be open.
What irks me most is that nobody bats an eye when we devote resources to let the most promising athletes and musicians develop their skills in specialized, exclusive settings, but a promising mathematician?
In my elementary school there was a one-morning-a-week enrichment program for GATE kids, but some of my classmates left for a dedicated GATE school. When I met them again in middle school--which was my normal in-bound school but also had a GATE track and might have been the GATE destination--it seemed to me that the kids who went to the GATE elementary school didn't have any advantage. That is, those of us who were the best students came from regular elementary schools.