As The Gifted And Talented Program Comes To An End, West Harlem And Morningside Heights Residents Remain Divided Over Its Impact

Upper West Side NY

28 October, 2021

1:14 PM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY HANNAH HALBERSTAM OCTOBER 28, 2021 To this day, one of Carmen Keels' biggest regrets is having signed her daughter up to take the screening exam for New York City's gifted and talented program six years ago. "[The exam was something] I didn't really believe in, or think was a good idea, or that I cared about," said Keels, a teacher and Hamilton Heights resident. "But because everyone was like, 'Oh no, this is what you should do,' [I handed] her off to someone she didn't know, completely in tears, to go take a test, as a four-year-old. … I regret that every day." Keels' daughter is now 10 years old and attends the William Lynch School on West 147th Street, which does not offer a gifted and talented program. Now, as of the recent announcement by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, there will be no new cohort of students in gifted and talented programs in New York City's public elementary schools. Before the pandemic, around 15,000 four-year-olds took the New York City gifted and talented screening each year. The roughly 3,600 students who scored within the 90th percentile became eligible for the program, though due to the high level of demand for the program, only 2,500 of these students actually received a seat. The mayor's office has announced that following spring 2021, New York City will no longer offer the gifted and talented screening exam. The city will replace the gifted and talented program, or G&T, with BrilliantNYC, a program that will bring a new "accelerated" model to all public elementary school classrooms. Instead of creating separated, specialized classrooms for a small group of "gifted" children, BrilliantNYC will keep all students together, and provide training programs to prepare teachers to teach students at different levels within one room. While G&T only operates in 80 of the city's approximately 800 elementary schools, BrilliantNYC will operate in all of them. Some residents of West Harlem and Morningside Heights worry about how this will affect their children, while others wonder whether it will help fix the internal segregation they have seen within neighborhood schools. G&T has faced criticism for creating racially and economically segregated classrooms within New York City's public schools. While more than 70 percent of the general body of New York public school students identify as Black or Latinx, only around 25 percent of the students within G&T do. "It divides the school very much by socioeconomic and racial lines. So you'll have a school that may be a predominantly Black school, and then the entire G&T program is a predominantly white group of kids," Keels said. "I'm going to use bad language: That's fucked up." Dennis Morgan, first vice president of Community Education Council 3, said that this is how the gifted and talented program was always meant to work. "From my understanding, [the program] was put in place to maintain a white population in New York City," Morgan said. "It has been about trying to avoid what they call white flight, and I think it's done a good job at that. … More affluent middle class and upper class families, who are able to provide their children a head start, tend to perform well on [the test]. … I think that has a lot to do with, again, the way it's been designed to function." CEC3 covers public elementary and middle schools from West 61st Street on the Upper West Side to 123rd Street in Central Harlem, a region that includes all of Morningside Heights. Council president Lucas Liu noted that gifted and talented programs are not evenly distributed throughout the district, with the Central Harlem portion of CEC3 having no G&T programs. Morningside Heights and West Harlem each have one school with a G&T program. Keels echoed this, noting the segregation present in G&T programs. "New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the country," Keels said. "The biggest issue with the G&T program is that somehow … particularly in District 3 … the white kids are in the G&T program, and then there's everyone else." According to Kent Hansan, a parent whose two children are enrolled in P.S. 185 on 112th Street, the ultimate result of the G&T program is that "we've got kids and families who have some level of privilege who are able to kind of wall themselves off from the rest of the district." While many people acknowledge the racial and socioeconomic disparities that exist within G&T, some still feel the best way to fix this is to expand and alter the program, rather than to do away with it entirely. Jason Yarn, a local parent whose 10-year-old son is enrolled in the gifted and talented program at P.S. 165, describes de Blasio's plan to eliminate G&T as "the worst possible" solution. "At this stage we have [G&T]. A lot of parents are happy with it," Yarn said. "Getting rid of it just flat out, and not talking to the parents or not having a plan of what you're going to do next? … It's like, 'How could we handle this in the worst possible manner? We'll do that.' That seems to be what the mayor has decided to do." Liu, too, is frustrated with the mayor's decision. He believes that gifted and talented programs generally benefit students despite the racial disparities. "What they're saying is, it's not benefiting enough Black and Hispanic students, which I agree with," Liu said. "So if it's not benefiting enough Black and Hispanic students, why don't we expand those programs into the neighborhoods where the Black and Hispanic students are? … Why isn't there a gifted and talented program in Harlem? Why isn't there one? Why aren't there two? Why aren't there three? … It's not a hard question to answer: The DOE refuses to do it." CEC3 suffers not only from an uneven distribution of G&T programs but from a lack of available spots in the program overall. "Five hundred and eleven students qualified in District 3, but there were only 98 seats," Liu said. "So over 80 percent of [those] qualified don't get a seat. … There's no reason why there's only 98 seats. It's [that] the DOE chooses not to add more classrooms." Liu proposes expanding G&T along with free pre-K programs in underserved neighborhoods and changing the test to an opt-out rather than opt-in system, believing that would begin to make a dent in the racial and socioeconomic disparities in the program. Yarn, too, believes G&T should be altered and expanded rather than eliminated and suggested that alternate admissions pathways into the program would be a better solution. Meanwhile, Morgan points to the ways in which the current G&T formulation only offers special programs for children who excel in typical academic settings, leaving out other forms of "gifts" or "talents." He hopes that de Blasio's plan will ultimately result in something similar to the expansion of G&T for which Liu and Yarn advocate. For her part, Keels has much less confidence in the mayor's new plan but still hopes that this new expansion sticks as a means to keep the city from going back to G&T. "Every parent wants what's best for their kids," Hansan said. "And I think the hard part of some of this is that it takes an active choice sometimes to look beyond your kid and your individual classroom and your individual school, and try to take that next step and say, 'Is this going to be good for all of us?'" Staff writer Hannah Halberstam can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.